an inheritance of restlessness

an out breath in the form of a poem:

There is an addiction to busyness
and its opposite of minimal rest

It leaves me deeply tired
Each moment is about "what's next"

Is being there for someone more important than being there for the world?

Do we find the world in these small interactions,
these moments promised to family yet spent in my head...

In the way I want to be patient but feel resistant and compliant
when it's giving working class living amazon-large suburban life
with my parents that go at the speed of the turnpike
and rest like the sinkholes,
surrendering only to the last resort...

I'm not judging them, I'm deeply concerned

Or maybe just in denial to accept the way things are,
that I'm not the one who decides how who lives and what their capacity is.

And here they see my thoughts as deeper than any foundation worth holding a building up

I’ve tried so hard but I'm no good at being surface sustaining or sky scraping

I promise I'm not judging, or at least I don't want to...

But the way you feel upset gut wrenched
when we watch nature docs with lions hunting gazelles
is how I feel when we watch that three story penthouse built
only to house some extreme ladder climber

I don't even want to think about what it takes or what one takes or doesn't think to live like that

But somehow it subsides when we agree to watch Lenny Kravitz' mansion tour;
there is life and music and reason sprinkled into luxurious living
there is reclamation and inspiration there

Like the way I'll sit in silence while you pray before dinner

I want to feel the resonance not the resistance to difference

Like my lungs to the air here or
whatever the fuck the reason is I always feel like shit
when I visit
these paved over Lenape lands

Why does my heart still break when I see change and choice in live action?

No amount of practicing can take this away -
but it certainly does prepare and resource me.

Only a fraction of the woods I knew growing up still live here

Yet its hard to notice since there seems to be enough trees sprinkled everywhere…
present but not together

Unless mycelium can sustain beneath asphalt, maybe there is hope?

Two foxes running across 46 within
seconds of getting hit by
the third cop car we've seen on this road

Am I just the other side of the negativity
my mother, life-giver
wants so understandably to escape?

I know her radiance lives within me but
I can't be the same kinda reflection of pure positivity

Even when I know all you want is for me to stop taking my thoughts too far

But I think this is what makes me feel alive

You said happy (you try to hard to give it to them and me)

But I'm about aliveness,

Creativity that you gave to my brother and me

And I know abuela's anxiety (and/or neurodivergence, trauma response, whatever the fuck) also lives in both of us

Long down that line of fighters who found
strength in cooperation and homegrown resiliency

Oh the ways we try to smother it with tough or tender love

We are not passive but passionate

Planning, giving, analyzing, pathologizing

Not your fault, nor mine; not wrong, nor right

This Earth-given life and all the lives intertwined

Through an inheritance of restlessness

How do I stay present to both our dissonance and remembrance?

Pastels on black paper • Rachael Amber, April 2025.

•••

a poem about the struggle of loving anxious family members in an overwhelm(ed/ing) society (while being anxious yourself)

by Rachael Amber

written in NJ, April 2025.