Living Between Stories: An Excerpt from “The Body is a Doorway” by Sophie Strand
Dear Mystics,
What if sickness is not a separation from the body? What if health is not quite so easy to see? Is there healing beyond the human? Beyond the hope for a cure or a happy ending?
At age sixteen, author, poet, and lecturer Sophie Strand was suddenly beset by unexplained, debilitating illness while on a family trip abroad. Her once vibrant life became a tangled miasma of medication, specialists, anaphylaxis, and seemingly never-ending attempts to explain what had gone so terribly wrong. In her lyrical, radically expansive memoir The Body Is A Doorway, Sophie explores the intersecting spaces of her own chronic illness, the complex ecology of a changing world, and the very nature of the stories we tell ourselves.
Read on for an excerpt from the chapter “Living Between Stories: Hermit Crabs and Cocoons,” where Sophie explores what it feels like to be in the space between illness, grief, the disillusion of a relationship, and a global pandemic—and how Tarot helped her find a foothold.
The Body Is a Doorway: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human by poet and author Sophie Strand goes on sale March 4th, 2025. Find it in hardcover, audiobook, and ebook editions wherever books are sold.
Living Between Stories: Hermit Crabs and Cocoons
A month into quarantine, I sat in my living room. I sat between stories. A potato bug on my windowsill crackled and jumped like a spark loosed from a campfire. I pulled a card from my Tarot deck. I’d given amateur readings to friends and family for years, but in the aftermath of my breakup and miscarriage, I kept grasping for a foothold, a cosmic answer. Please, tell me what to do.
The Fool. The Fool card is the zero of the Tarot, standing outside of linearity and organization. The Fool is both the first and the last card, living interstitially as a nonparticipant in the dramatic narrative of the Tarot. I closed my eyes and imagined my foot hanging in void air like the figure on the card. “As if there were a story. As if it could be told,” reads one of the final lines in my mentor Ann Lauterbach’s poem “Company.”
As if. As if. When I looked at the past ten years, I did feel like a fool.
As if I was going to get better.
As if there was going to be a miracle drug.
As if anyone would love me enough to be my partner.
What a fool I was to think that there would always be another chapter.
The Fool card insisted that I jump, but I laughed at the pointlessness of the gesture. Hadn’t I been jumping for years? Disease, heartache, and ecological collapse had already pushed me off the cliff before I ever had the chance to choose to jump.
So many other species had been forced to jump, trying to salvage life on islands of plastic trash, sending out love songs to mates that would never arrive. I listened to the mating song of the last Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō bird again and again, tearing up during the pauses, knowing they represented the lover that would never arrive. The last of a species is called an endling. Our world is filled with endlings.
What if I wasn’t between stories? What if, with my crooked body, I was actually the Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō bird, writing love poems for a lover who would never arrive? What if I was an endling?
I stared at my disinfectant-blistered hands, sterilized for safety, kept safe from the tenderness of touch. Who could possibly help me navigate the bardo realm between different lives that, paradoxically, exists within a single life? I’d been to countless doctors, bodyworkers, acupuncturists, healers, therapists, nutritionists, psychics, and physical therapists, and no one seemed to have good advice on how to navigate the uncertain and the incurable—the questions that opened up like badly healed wounds, rejecting the scabs of flimsy answers. What is the plan for when there is no plan?
When we receive a diagnosis, when we fall ill, when a partner leaves, we feel the cards fall out of our hands. We are not holding a book or a story. We are holding the zero, the empty air past the cliff’s edge of the Fool card.
During those first weeks of quarantine, I kept thinking of the hermit crab with a fleshy stomach, a delicate structure, and the dire need for a shell that its body cannot independently produce. These little crustaceans make do with snail shells that they eventually outgrow. The curious moment occurs when a hermit crab, spilling out of its shell, exceeding its narrative, finds another shell that is a little too big. Instead of trying to enter this spacious shell, it waits patiently, sometimes for up to eight hours, for another, slightly bigger hermit crab to arrive and take the big shell, discarding a protective home more suited to the original hermit crab. Sometimes as many as twenty crabs will congregate and perform a truly amazing ritual called a vacancy chain. When they have finally assembled, the crabs will quickly evacuate and exchange shells, each claiming the new one that best suits their size.
What does it feel like to be that first hermit crab, overflowing its shell, waiting beside another shell that it also cannot properly inhabit? What does it feel like to be so soft, unprotected, and incapable of immediately producing a new story? The hermit crab says wait. And he also says that we never reach the next story on our own. We need a group. A group of people all willing to vacate and exchange their stories. Even more wildly, these stories do not belong to any single one of us. They were produced by something outside of our species. A snail. The story that will fit your new body, your new desires, your new needs, will be intimately excreted by a being living well outside the bounds of the human.
Perhaps when we are jellylike, formless, and without a guide, we should look outside the bounds of human culture and narrative for our new shape, our new shell.
When I woke up and found the bed empty, myself still surprised by the lack of a partner. When I went through a quarantine day without seeing or speaking to a single person. When I felt myself in my own private version of the movie Groundhog Day, increasingly unmoored from a sense of linear time, I began to wonder, “What beings have left behind their shells for me? Shall I wear the skin of the mountain, the creek, the blue heron for a while? What feral, furred, horned, lichenized stories can I live inside briefly while I navigate this narrative bardo?”
Hermit crabs, when at a loss for snail shells, have been known to live inside pieces of wood and stone. Shall I be a tree today? A moonlight streak of quartzite in the cliff face?
Maybe I was an endling. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t break the rules. Maybe my love poems were made to stretch symbiotically across the chasms of extinction into the yearning of songbirds and bumblebees and seaweed.
I kept the Fool card face up on my altar, decorated with pictures of ancestors, hawk feathers, and splinters of mica. Often, I would pause and stare down into the zero hovering above his handsome head. I thought of the electron swooping around a nucleus, denying a single story, living between classifications as a particle and a wave. One of the most intriguing aspects of the electron, the study of which led to quantum physics, is its ability to “hop” orbits around a nucleus without being traced. The only way we can locate where the electron has gone is by the photon it emits when it jumps orbits.
I imagined the Fool card jumping off the cliff and then thought of the electrons jumping between orbits, between the solidity of the particle and the oscillation of the wave. The story and the uncertainty. What if something beautiful happened when we jumped between stories? What if we, too, emitted a photon of light as we navigated the gray realm between narratives?
Dive Deeper
The Body Is a Doorway: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human by poet and author Sophie Strand goes on sale March 4th, 2025. Find it in hardcover, audiobook, and ebook editions wherever books are sold.
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