Vulnerable
I sat waiting for my lunch to be ready. Closing my eyes, the sun warming me, honing in on nearby conversations.
“It was just awful!”
“Do you want to meet later?”
“We have to get back soon.”
“What are you hungry for?”
And then, “Think of a Chinese word you’d like to see written.”
Two young women, students conducting a written language experiment, held a small, dry-erase board and the woman in the steel-grey wool skirt looked sheepishly to the man-in-tow standing next to her, scanning his face for a word, for approval.
“Tomato,” she smiled and shrugged.
“What an uninteresting word,” I thought to myself. Clearly, hunger and condiments dominated her thoughts to choose such an oddly simple thing.
The student began to draw the two characters, then handed the board to steel-grey skirt and asked her to draw it, to copy the lines in her own hand.
“Like this?” She fumbled through and the student asked to take a picture of steel-grey skirt holding up the sign, which she obliged after being assured it wouldn’t end up on the web or Facebook.
Steel-grey skirt and man-in-tow collected their lunches and wandered off back to their meetings and spreadsheets and before the students could walk away, I volunteered, “I have a word I’d like to see.”
“Great! What’s the word?”
“Vulnerable.”
“Oh—I’ll have to look that one up, it might be kind of difficult, the Chinese don’t really have an expression for that. Well, depending on the context I guess.”
“I suppose weakness is not a good emotional or political stance,” I mused.
She typed it into her phone where there must’ve been a pinyin and symbology translator of sorts and she mumbled, “Ah, hmm, that’s really pretty.”
She sketched out what looked like two number 5s, curved, bent and spooning, little animals with two quick hatchmarks in the coils and crooks, something warm in their bellies perhaps. The second symbol, like a little house on stick legs, or a bird laying in a field of short reeds or soft, matted grass, or a boat on uneven waves jutting a mast with no sail attached.
She handed me the board and it was my turn to draw.
“Very good!” She encouraged. “You could do calligraphy.”
And I suddenly thought of my high school art class, how I attended my prom for free because I volunteered to hand write every student’s name in my graduating class and their respective date’s name on folded white cardstock for all the seating arrangements at the dinner tables. How I painstakingly wrote every letter with a copper pen tip, sinking the nib into a bottle of crow-black ink, scratching out letters and then with a glue gun, affixing a black bow-tied ribbon and burgundy rose in the corner of every one.
She took my picture holding up the board with “vulnerable” written twice and asked, “Why are you so interested in this word?”
I considered the tomato. Heart-shaped, red, plump, viscous inside, thin-skinned, vulnerable and thought perhaps, it wasn’t such a bad word after all and I said, “I think objects are fine, but I am more curious about concepts, especially emotional ones that are difficult to describe with one word. Like love or home or wonder.” I thought about how big ideas cannot easily be boiled down or condensed and compartmentalized into a single word or worse, an acronym as we are wont to do in order to make it pneumonic, memorable, and easier to digest. When really, what must be done, is some digging, some spelunking, some serious unpacking followed by a gentle examination of all the parts.
I remembered one of Joe’s stories. He recalled when he was learning Russian, one way of responding to the everyday greeting of “How are you?” was to say ” I am not unwell.” As if, already expressing in the negative was a way of conveying strength. Things could be worse. I’m not dead yet. Or another instance where a Russian exchange student was being chastised for taking her host family’s son out and dirtying his school clothes in the mud and muck on a rainy day. His mother wasn’t happy that they had returned so filthy but she sweetly explained to the mother, “he is not unwashable.”
What does it mean to be vulnerable? To be “accessible, assailable, defenseless, exposed, liable, naked, on the line, on the spot, out on a limb, ready, sensitive, sitting duck, sucker, susceptible, tender, thin-skinned, unguarded, unprotected, unsafe, weak, wide open, open to attack.” Why is there no strength in vulnerability when it takes all the courage in the world to allow yourself to let something, some ideas, someone in? To yield with grace to the often terrifying, ever-shifting locus of love, of home, and of wonder.
All three of these ideas have changed greatly for me in the last year. Most poignantly in the last 9 months. Just enough time for a new life to come into being, or more clearly, for me to come back into my life.
No, I didn’t have a child. In fact, it was more like death than birth. I lost two lives that were entwined with my own—a marriage and a beloved pet; all the love and home and wonder I fed and fostered evaporated out from under me. There has been a serious unpacking. There has been a gentle examination of all my parts. Especially the ones that went missing. Some pieces were carried off by unwilling wolves and buried where old, abandoned traps had closed upon them and I had to recollect them very carefully to not lose more pieces still. I had to dig deep to unearth those. I came out licking my wounds, scathed and dirty.
Turns out, I am not unwahsable. I am not unwell. I am still hungry and I am getting reacquainted with wonder. I am redefining home. I still don’t fully understand the nature of love, but I am very much an eager student and believer of it in all of its necessary function and beautiful, new forms.
And I am still quite vulnerable.
Tags: accessible, acronym, Andrea E. Janda, art class, assailable, beloved, bird, boat, buried, calligraphy, Chinese, courage, defenseless, dry-erase board, elfSPEAK, emotional, experiment, exposed, expression, Facebook, grace, grass, high school, home, House, hungry, liable, life, littleREDelf, locus, love, lunch, marriage, memorable, naked, on the line, on the spot, open to attack, Oregon, out on a limb, pet, pinyin, pneumonic, Portland, prom, ready, reeds, Russian, sail, sensitive, sitting duck, spelunking, strength, sucker, susceptible, symbology, tender, thin-skinned, tomato, translator, traps, unguarded, unpacking, unprotected, unsafe, unwashable, vulnerable, waves, weak, weakness, wide open, wolves, wonder, written language, yield
