On Glimmers
I’m very concerned that our society is much more interested in information than wonder. In noise rather than silence. - Fred Rogers
Dear Friends,
I’ve had to move my workspace twice this morning. First, when my daughter woke up at 5:15, interrupting my quiet work time with a request to watch Daniel Tiger because she “wasn’t sleepy anymore.” I gave her and the pantsless tiger the couch and moved my laptop to the kitchen.
Then, around 6:15, my husband appeared, and began scraping oatmeal fragments out of a pot that was, I suppose, not fully cleaned in the dishwasher. Scrape scrape scrape scrape, plastic on metal. The sound was just soft enough that most people wouldn’t notice it, but we sensory-sensitive (dare I say, neuro-spicy?) people feel the sound itself.
On Instagram last week, Amanda Watters compared sound triggers, namely bad ones like leaf blowers, to being in the game Operation when the tweezers hit the metal edge. BUZZ. BUZZ. Is your skin crawling yet? Maybe you’re a little neuro-spicy, too.
Anyway, oatmeal pot. I moved to the bedroom.
It’s been like this lately. Constant noise, the railings of a toddler unhappy in her own developing brain, the noises of living together. Ping, a voicemail. Ping, a text from my sister, from the middle of the night in France, where she has been bitten by a spider in her hotel room. Ping, a text from my friend, with her child in the emergency room. Somewhere, a dog loses its mind. Somewhere, a truck is backing up.
The whole world is an ingrown hair.
A group of teenagers walks down my sidewalk, and one jumps and bops the tree branch of my Kwanzan cherry blossom, sending a shower of pink petals down onto the group.
“Hey, cease and desist,” I call from the deep pit of my uncool. The teenagers flip their middle-parted hair and roll their eyes.
“Ugh,” I mutter to my brother, who is visiting. “The disrespect.”
“Get off my lawn!” my husband calls from the kitchen, mocking the teenagers, but mostly mocking me.
Like everything else, the rude teenagers are–what’s the word? Triggering?
And yet, the next day, the rain comes, and the rest of the Kwanzan blossoms fall to the ground, glopping together like some sort of melted pink confectionery, beautiful even in their showy departure.
Were the teenagers, in their disrespect, part of the natural cycle of things?
It’s such a pure human urge, when you’re fourteen, to jump up and hit things. The top of every threshold. A perfect canopy of delicate blossoms.
Suddenly, I realize this is a glimmer.
When I was in grad school, I attended a world-shifting craft workshop with writer Pam Houston, who talked about her approach to writing as collecting “glimmers.”
Here’s how she describes them:
As I move through the world, I wait to feel something I call a glimmer, a vibration, a little charge of resonance that says, “Hey writer, look over here.” I feel it deep in my chest, this buzzing that lets me know this thing I am seeing/hearing/smelling/tasting on the outside is going to help me unlock some part of a story I have on the inside…Then, when I have some time to write, I read through the glimmer files in my computer and try to find a handful that seem like they will stick together, that when placed in proximity with each other will create a kind of electricity. I try to keep my big analytical brain out of this process as much as possible, because I believe my analytical brain at best only knows part of the story and at worst is a big fat liar. I believe—like religion—that the glimmer, the metaphor, if you will, knows a great deal more than I do. And if I stay out of its way, it will reveal itself to me.
I’ve been thinking of my own writing process this way for the last fourteen years, noting the glimmers when they appeared before me, stitching them together to create meaning.
There’s a note in my phone that looks like this:
My daughter scrapes her leg outside, says, “it’s red, like the bottom of a fruit”
Madeline tells me mother flamingos turn white because their babies take all the nutrients. A signal to leave me alone
Walking to school after Christmas break, a garbage truck passes by. Nora asks “what’s that smell?” But instead of garbage, the smell is pine. The truck is filled with discarded trees
This way of writing has turned into a way of living that makes a deep kind of sense to me.
So I was delighted this week when my friend Sarah shared this Instagram post referencing licensed clinical social worker Deb Dana’s own definition of “glimmers”:
In Dana’s book The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, she refers to “glimmers” as the opposite of triggers–small moments when our biology is in a place of connection or regulation, sending a cue to our nervous system to feel safe or calm.
In the IG caption, Helen Marie gives examples of glimmers: “a sunset, the stars in the sky, a beam of dancing light, a smile from a stranger, the warmth of the sun on your face, a random act of kindness, connection, your favourite song, freshly baked bread or a moment of peace/solitude amidst the chaos.”
Houston’s glimmers and Dana’s glimmers aren’t entirely the same, but they do share qualities. Connection. Peace or beauty in chaos. Often the natural world. A method of meaning-making that feels both powerful and possible.
A commenter on the Instagram post writes, “It's overwhelming to think we should be trying to think positively, be mindful, seek joy, etc. But noticing glimmers seems far more doable and sustainable.“
Noticing glimmers is a creative practice, a mindfulness practice, and for Pam Houston, perhaps a religious practice, too.
She writes, “In addition to being my method, the way I have written every single thing I have written, it is also the primary way I worship, the way I kneel down and kiss the earth.”
For those weeks that seem especially filled with jackhammers, bright lights, or teens being teens, it’s possible glimmers of both kinds are the antidote.
Glimmers that make it into my writing are often moments of levity or contrast, so I begin to make a list of the other simpler, easy glimmers of my week:
Watching my daughter paint with watercolors (before she ran through the house threatening to smear paint on the white walls)
Having my hair shampooed before a haircut
Resting in bed while my daughter listened to an audiobook in her room
Coffee in my favorite Alexandria Art Therapy tumbler
Birdsong, bike rides, blue skies
Waking after going to bed early
There is power in these moments if we use them, as Houston does, to then create the narrative. Triggers, trauma, and tragedy have a way of taking over the story. This is life–this is the world we live in. There’s so much noise—both actual and metaphorical. Bad things happen, and we don’t always get a reprieve. Without the glimmers, I’ve found that the bad things tend to eke away at my humanity. Grief, overwhelm. Even just too many hours of parenting without a break.
“I’m going to Target after bedtime,” I told my husband one day last week. “I need to feel like a person.”
Noticing the glimmers is a way of reclaiming that humanity. Of saying yes, disease and racism and heartbreak–but also kindness, connection. Noise and beauty. A thoughtless leap. A glorious shower of petals.
Take good care,
Dot
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Blog Posts
In our latest blog, we’re checking in with about how The 100 Day Project is going this year. (Or, in Dot’s case, how a shortened version wrapped up.) Read the post for thoughts about making time for creativity and accepting imperfect work as part of the process.
Links We Like
A case for self portraiture (and the science behind why you don’t like photos of yourself).
Art of the weird: banana bruises.
“The real magic is supposed to happen between the art and the reader and not between the artist and the reader. It sounds like a small distinction, but it’s really important. It’s not about me having a connection with my audience. I have a connection with my art, and then the art has a connection with the audience. What’s happening between them is beyond my control.” A wonderful interview with Christoph Niemann.
Is therapy-speak making us selfish?
Consider keeping a messier home.
On bubble baths and other “basic” self care. My favorite? Retail therapy. Oops.
Looking forward to listening to this.
“This pink against that blue is a manifesto.” Photo by Cig Harvey:
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I am so glad I came across your writing. Lots of meaning for me. I am about to start the day and I'll be ready to consider what glimmers there maybe around
Wow. WOW.