The Spaces In Between

In September 2024 I was given the honor of presenting the Message at the Poplar Ridge Quaker Meeting. I was grateful for the opportunity to reflect on my time at Wells, and to pass on what I have learned about grief over the years. For the full Teaching, with different parts of the service outlined, go here.

Welcome: Hello everyone, both here in Poplar Ridge and online. My name is River Vooris. I have lived in Poplar Ridge for two years–my spouse Indigo and I moved here when I started teaching at Wells College, as the professor of Women’s, Transgender, and Queer Studies. We have been coming to this meeting for two years now, since the first week we moved into our house (as FB memories just reminded me a few days ago). Today, we are joined by Claire Howard at the piano, Rob Howard on tech, and John Reed hosting our Zoom meeting.

I want to start with a short piece from Octavia Butler’s book “Parable of the Sower”

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
is Change.

God
is Change.

― from Earthseed: Book of the Living

First hymn: Turn by Peter Seeger (Blue Hymnal 28)

Our first reading is a poem by Bianca Lynne Spriggs, published on the Split This Rock website.

To the woman I saw today who wept in her car
Woman,
I get it.
We are strangers,
but I know the heart is a hive
and someone has knocked yours
from its high branch in your chest
and it lays cracked and splayed,
spilling honey all over
the ground floor of your gut
and the bees inside
that you’ve trained
over the days and years
to stay put, swarm
the terrain of your organs,
yes,
right here in traffic,
while we wait for the light to change.

I get it.
How this array of metal and plastic
tends to go womb room
once the door shuts,
and maybe you were singing
only moments before
you got the call,
or remembered that thing
you had tucked back and built
such sturdy scaffolding all around,
and now here it comes to knock
you adrift with only your steering
wheel to hold you up.

Or, maybe today
was just a tough day
and the sunlight
and warm weather
and blossoming limbs
and smiling pedestrians
waiting for their turn to cross
are much too much to take
when you think of all that’s left
to do, and here you are,
a reed stuck in the mud
of a rush hour intersection,
with so very many hours left to go.

Woman,
I know you.
I know how that thing
when left unattended
will show up as a typhoon
at your front door
demanding to be let in
or it will take
the whole damn house with it.

I know this place too.
I get it.

But because we are strangers,
because you did not see me see you,
my gaze has no more effect
than a phantom that stares at the living.
And yet, I want you to know that
today, in the hive of my heart,
there is room enough
for you.

Our second reading is the poem “Heavy” by Mary Oliver

That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying
I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had his hand in this,
as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,
was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel,
(brave even among lions),
“It’s not the weight you carry
but how you carry it–
books, bricks, grief–
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it
when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?
Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?
How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe
also troubled –
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?

Joys and Concerns and Musical Interlude

Message: My office at Wells was in Zabriskie Hall, and overlooked Pettibone (the house with the ornately trimmed roof) and the lake. I loved watching the sunsets over the lake in winter, the brilliant reds and oranges signaling the work day was coming to an end.

My window sill was covered with lake glass, heart-shaped rocks, and weathered sticks, found during weekly gatherings of my rock-skipping club with colleagues. On my desk, art by Frida Kahlo, a photo of Pippin, and Indigo, smooth lake stones for students to hold when they were stressed, and a tissue box, along with various stacks of student projects, feminist books, trans and queer zines, and to-do lists on scraps of paper.

On the wall–artwork from students from all the different places that I have taught, Amherst College, Dickinson College, DePauw University, and Wells. Some of that artwork had only just been brought to campus from home in April, and then had to be packed up again just a few weeks later.

Everyone who knows Wells, knows that she was small, and quirky. I was a department of 1, and I had little guidance and mentorship, which made my first year difficult. But in year 2, that lack of guidance became a source of joy–it meant I had a lot of freedom to determine my own curriculum and explore collaborative projects with other colleagues! Alongside my Feminist Research Methods class, and LGBTQ Histories and Communities, I taught the cooking and gardening class, went kayaking with students out on the lake, and organized fieldtrips to Montezuma Wildlife Refuge and the Harriet Tubman museum. My students created historical zines (DIY magazines) based on research in the college archives, and oracle deck cards addressing issues of reproductive justice. I had students visiting my office, talking for hours.

There was concern on campus about Wells’ stability, but there were also many signs that things were improving, including excitement about students enrolling for Fall 2024, and the design of new courses for first-year students.

One of the things I was excited about for Fall 2024 was a new feminist science-fiction and fantasy course that I was going to teach as part of that new first-year curriculum. I was considering teaching Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, one of my favorite books. It was published in 1993, but is set in 2024, and offers an apocalyptic vision of the United States that unfortunately is not far from some of the political and environmental crises that we are currently dealing with. While it is a dark, and difficult book to read, to me it is ultimately a book about hope, about building community, and the need to adapt to change. I thought it would be a useful text for students to explore in their first semester, as they adapted to college, we approached the November 2024 election, and we grappled with different social justice issues that are a key part of Women and Gender Studies courses.

Little did I know how much I would depend on the lessons of this book myself this year! While I knew that the college was financially unstable when I took the job, it was a job with the potential of tenure, and I hoped that it would give me a few more years of stability than the 1-2 year visiting positions I had been bouncing between for the previous 5 years.

Alas, it was not to be, and this time, the ending of my job came with the crumbling of an entire institution with 156 years of history. The loss of this community, the campus, and her future, is one grieved by many.

Sometimes I have felt like the universe wants me to experience all the flavors of grief, asking me have you tasted this kind of loss yet? I have experienced a lot of loss, more than the average person my age, and while this has brought me a lot of pain, it has also provided me with a deep insight into what it means to love, and to mourn, what it means to hold on, while also letting go.

Here are some of the lessons about grief that I have learned over the last two decades of my life.

Lesson 1: The amount of pain we feel from loss is a testament to how much we loved someone or something.

For several years, I have been involved with LGBTQ summer camps–in NH and MD. I met my friend Cedar (she/they) through that work–she directed an LGBTQ summer camp in Texas, and volunteered at one in Washington State, and we connected through a network of LGBTQ camp folks. We would sometimes go months without talking, and then would text for days, or have a three hour phone conversation catching up on everything going on in our lives. We both hoped that we would be able to run an LGBTQ camp together one day. In January, I reached out to them, and didn’t hear back. I figured they were busy, by March, after several unanswered messages, I got worried, and started searching more in depth. Unfortunately, I learned that Cedar had died several months earlier, driving home from camp, and I hadn’t known, because we didn’t have mutual friends. (Obituary Linked here).

It has been a hard loss, and I thought about her every day this summer while working at Camp Gregory. Every day when I drove back from camp to walk Pippin during my break in the afternoon, I would sing the camp songs they had taught me, and cry.

She had the biggest heart of anyone I have ever known, and changed the world in the short time that she was here. My pain is a reminder of how much I loved her.

Lesson 2: The only way through grief is through it. There is no going around grief, or avoiding it. We have to sit with the sadness, the loss, and the pain, in order to process it and learn how to carry it with us. This is hard, because it hurts, because it is hard to be vulnerable, and because our pain can make others uncomfortable.

Yet, I think the greatest gift we can give to ourselves, and to others who are mourning, is space to grieve, without rushing to fix feelings or urging someone to move on, or expecting them to get over it. I urge us to consider this in regard to larger societal issues as well–what does it mean to be a witness to others’ pain? How can we hold space for mourning on a global scale? How do we make sure we don’t look away from injustice even when it makes us uncomfortable?

Lesson 3: There is no “getting over” grief, at least in my experience, but it gets easier to hold. As Mary Oliver says, it is all about learning how to balance our grief.

“It’s not the weight you carry
but how you carry it–
books, bricks, grief–
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it
when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”

Lesson 4: To love means being vulnerable to loss. A few weeks ago, some of my former colleagues and I were sitting around a campfire, under a gorgeous Lake Cayuga sunset, reflecting on the last few months. We had all been new to Wells, with only 1, 2 or 3 years there. We put so much energy into our students and our programs. All of us uprooted to come here. And we all expressed sadness, and some anger too, at the way it all collapsed. And yet, in that fire-side conversation one of my colleagues said, “I would do it again. I would come to Wells even if I knew it was going to close.” And I agreed, I would do this again. We would do this again.

Lesson 5: Grief and Joy can co-exist. This summer for me has been one of sadness, and also deep joy, and reflection. I have been spending a lot of time in my garden. Rejoicing in the cucumbers, the squash, tomatoes, peppers, kale. Many of which were gifted to me by friends, or former students. Indigo and I have felt very loved and uplifted by our community the past few months, and have appreciated every question that we have gotten about how we are doing, and whether we are going to stay. (The answer is yes, we are trying to stay!)

Lesson 6: We keep loved ones present by talking about them and telling stories and sharing memories. Someone or something that we love, that has been lost, will never be here again, and yet, will always be with us. I have often cried with Indigo, reminiscing about my mentor, Fran, from college, while also laughing through my tears at the memory of something that she has said. This past week would have been the first week of classes at Wells College, and I am grateful that I had this opportunity to talk with you about my memories, and to record here some of the details about my time there.

Lesson 7: Sometimes endings bring new beginnings. One of the difficult things about losing my job at Wells is that I am also facing the potential loss of my academic career. Indigo and I have built a home here, and we do not want to uproot ourselves yet again to pursue an academic job, especially given the instability of higher education overall. So I have to reimagine who I am, and what I want to do. What does it mean to teach without a classroom, what does it mean to be a professor without a university? What role do I want to have in young people’s lives? What kind of change do I want to create in the world?

As I say goodbye to what was, I open up possibilities for what will become.

Silent worship

Hymn: Let it Be, Blue 27

Closing prayer or message:

This Meeting has had a lot of loss over the last year, and I know many of you have experienced a lot of grief in your lives. I hope that this message resonates with all of you, and if it didn’t, my final lesson about grief is that it is different for everyone and that there is no right way to feel grief, there are many ways to mourn.