Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying. – W.H. Auden
It is hard to get the news from poems/but men die miserably every day/for lack of what is found there. – William Carlos Williams
Perhaps this is why I love poetry – it speaks to me below the rational, conscious level of the mind.
Jenn’s words today (as they have other days) have me nodding and blinking back tears. Oh, Jenn. Yes. I know. First of all, I am not tired of your musings, nor do I suspect I ever will be. Second of all, I can relate to the sense of feeling pressure to be over it already, to get through this, to get out of my own head. Pressure to just stop fretting so. To stop being so sensitive, so sad, so stormy. And I imagine you know the answer to all of that pressure that I feel like screaming: You have no idea how much I wish I could!
This is as good as any summary I could write of where I am right now:
I parent… I owe. I miss. I yearn. I cry. I try. I fail. I try again…I’m not out to get anyone. I don’t think I’m special, or different, or that my sadness is worth more than yours.
I would never presume, Jenn, to say I know where you are. Of course I don’t and I could not. I do know, however, the bleakness of true chemical depression. For me that was an experience that changed my life, making me far more empathetic and less judgmental of people who struggle with mental illness of all kinds. It was a kind of darkness of the mind that I hope never to visit again. It was a time when I felt true despair of a kind I have only touched on since. It was a scary episode, and it left me with both a deep respect for others who struggle with psychological demons and a profound fear of returning there myself.
Where I am now – I think, I desperately hope – is different. This is a more common oscillation of attitude, though this particular valley has been long and deep. I do feel lucky in that I know, or I think I know, that my clouds will lift. I have no choice but to trust these rhythms of the mind, this gentle sine curve of mood that takes me through periods both blindingly sunny and disconcertingly dark.
It strikes me as an apt metaphor that while I refuse to go on roller coasters in the real world, I am in a very real way riding one inside my head on a regular basis. I wish I had more control over my thoughts and reactions. This is the inexorable pull of Buddhism and meditation to me: the dream of letting go of my monkey mind. Oh how appealing is this concept and, thus far in my life, how absolutely beyond my reach.
I sit here, listening to Lake Champlain lap up against the rocks below my cottage, watching the mist shift in the dark trees across the even darker water. My mind and my heart are both empty and full at the same time. I feel half asleep and agonizingly aware. My words come slowly, haltingly, and I doubt each one. I tell myself that these periods of sadness are, in retrospect, fertile times of growth and learning. I know this is true, but that doesn’t make me enjoy the passage any more.
Jenn, the reason you words mean so much is that it is indescribably helpful – maybe more helpful than anything else, actually – to know I am not alone in this journey. I think what we all want most of all is to be seen – and embraced – for who we authentically are. Reading words that ring so true is, for me, one way (the only way?) to feel felt and acknowledged. Thank you, Jenn. Consider my feet up on your coffee table. And thanks for letting me join you.
Actually operating the tractor. It doesn’t get better than this for Mr. Whit.
Jumping off of the diving board with nobody in the pool to “catch” him.
Celebrated this achievement by repeating it about 100 times.
Kate, at sweet/salty, is one of my favorite Internet writers. Her words are magical, full of gorgeous imagery and big leaps and blunt honesty. I love her post today. Some excerpts:
We like to think that life is joy punctuated with pain but it’s not. Life is pain punctuated with moments of joy.
The optimist in me wants to disagree with Kate about the joy/pain balance of life, but the pessimist in me senses that she is right. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, really, what the equation is, as long as we appreciate the joy and it sustains us through the pain. Of course everybody’s particular calculus is different, the balance of happy and sad, of light and shadow. It’s no secret that mine leans towards shadow, which is probably why Kate’s words resonate so strongly with me.
Life is not fairly represented in a Flickr photostream. It is not false, but it is not the whole truth. Memories are kneaded into something different from what we actually experienced. In the gulf between the two there is necessary sorcery.
I love this image, of the sorcery that exists in the gulf between experience and memory. Yes, how true it is, that even as we live moments we are not always sure of how they will transmogrify in our memory. Some of the “big moments” of my life are blurs in my memory, while some of the most mundane and unspecial days are the ones I remember with the clarity and dazzling color of light through a prism. Some of the memories that I return to the most often for comfort and inspiration, crystalline in their gorgeous power, are of experiences that I did not realize the importance of as I lived them. Most, in fact.
I wanted to hang my motherhood up on the hook that has MOTHERHOOD pasted above it in Office Depot ticky-tack, and wipe my hands on my pants, and walk away for a while.
I disgust myself with how ungrateful I can be. I mourn the ability to be as blindly ungrateful as I please. I love my kids but I miss myself. I’m tired of wrangling and refereeing and spotting.
I very recently bemoaned my own lack of gratitude. My own inability to get out of my own way to see the glory and beauty of my life. I am so thankful to Kate for admitting her own moments of wanting to just be herself, without hangers-on and people needing her. I know the feeling well, and wish I had my own hook to hang one of my identities on for a while now and then. My children are at a tennis lesson and I miss them. Then they are home and I miss the silence of their absence. I look at them sleeping and am overcome with a wave of love so simultaneously fierce and gentle that it shocks me. They wake up, start bickering, and within five minutes the gentleness vanishes and the fierceness has shifted to something decidedly less sweet. Repeat. Ad nauseum. Is this seesaw just the way it is, from now on?