Month: May 2010

Bilingual

Inspiration-less on a Sunday night … I started this several weeks ago.

Something I want to remember, from these swollen days: that Grace loves my company above all others. On Friday night, after I read some Harry Potter to her, she read alone in her room as she is allowed to do before bed. She bounced into my bedroom minutes before the time I had told her to turn out her light, face lit with delight as she told me about what had happened in the chapters of Ramona the Pest she just read. She paused in her story telling to ask me if I would tuck her in. Of course I did, and as I was doing so she said, “Mummy, I just love talking to you.” I hugged her tight, blinking back tears, knowing that this will not always be true and hoping that I can remember, when it is not, the days that it was.

We are still in the all-encompassing part of parenting where my presence, spiritual and physical, is what she wants. Still in the union of intense togetherness, of my being her sun. I can see over the edge of the horizon, though, that this time will draw to an end, and I am already mourning it.

…………… (and now, now)

Again with the preemptive regret, sorrow’s shadow coloring the moment even before the loss itself has arrived.

Last week we got our hair cut together. Sitting in the chair, she was a teenager, resplendent in her black smock, chatting comfortably with the stylist. When it was my turn, she sat at my feet, drawing an elaborate cartoon story which she showed me after. She has invented her own character, Peace Girl, whose adventures she has begun to chronicle.

At soccer on Saturday morning, Grace kept wiping out, and her knees were covered in green skid marks flecked with blood where she’d actually skinned her knee. She’d race over to me, face contorted in a dramatic mask of pain, and I’d lean over and kiss her knee before shooing her back into the game. That’s all it took. These days, too, are numbered. I know that.

And then, at half time, after her snack, she walked over to me, a sly grin on her face, watermelon juice hanging like parentheses on either side of her mouth. She held out this offering:

I cheered her on the whole game, knowing how her eyes dart to me immediately after she scores, passes, or messes up. It’s as though life doesn’t happen unless I’m there to witness it; I hope I’m arrogant in that impression, but I fear I’m not. All day long, she hollers: “mummy! watch this!” and I do, trying to be patient, failing a lot.

Later, when I twisted my hair up to squeeze the water out of it at the end of my shower, I noticed a soggy dandelion on the floor of the shower. I’d put it behind my ear for the rest of the game and forgotten. My Gracie girl. Skinned knees, lanky, gangly legs, shaky smile, flashes of confidence in a general fog of awkwardness. Harry Potter and the library and please, please, please Mummy pack Oreos in my lunch. She needs me to tie her shoes, she asks for a flashlight to use as a microphone when she dances alone in her room to a new CD of top 40 songs she got as a birthday party favor, she needs to be tucked in and kissed on the forehead before she can sleep.

She is like a person fluent in two languages, whose switching between them can bewilder those listening. She hopscotches between worlds, between phases of development, with a fluid ease whose pattern I cannot discern. She is demanding and loving in equal measure, bilingual as both giver and taker. Her brown eyes flicker with doubt, with feeling, with questions, with emotion, and always, always she looks to me for answers, reassurance, comfort. And the best part? Most of the time, I can still provide it. These are long, heavy, heady times with my Gracie.

I wish these days could last forever.

I rest in the grace of the world

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

ā€” Wendell Berry

Happy Birthday, Matt

This guy. Matt. International man of mystery.

A lot of you have asked me about him. Well, you’re neither the only nor the first to do that.Ā  When Grace was a baby, she went to daycare the 3 days a week I worked. After about 6 months one of the teachers confided that some of the staff suspected that I had made up my husband. She was dead serious.

So … whoever of you have wondered if he exists – you’re in good company. The truth is, I just have carved out a little tiny part of my life to be – shocker – private. I imagine you can all understand. Don’t worry – he’ll be in the book. šŸ™‚

Anyway, Matt has a birthday this weekend. A milestone one. And so I thought it was high time to bring him out of the wings, show you all that he exists, and to say a public Happy Birthday to my dear husband. A happy birthday:

To the man who married me in a thunderstorm so violent we had to pause during our vows (could not speak over the thunder).
To the man who has never met a ski slope that he couldn’t ski elegantly down.
To the man who reads textbook-style history books for fun.
To the man who works long and hard and who flies around the world for our family.
To the man whose face I see in Whit every single day.
To the man who summited Kilimanjaro with me just months after we had met.
To the man who canceled our first date the day after meeting me at a cocktail party (not smooth, buddy, not smooth).
To the man who makes a mean latte and has never forced me to learn how to do it myself (learned helplessness, that one).
To the man who steadfastly tolerates my mood swings and melancholy leanings, patiently waiting for me to come to my senses.

To the man who gave me these two treasures.
Happy birthday.
I’m amazed.

The spaces that hold our memories

I’ve been thinking today about the places in our lives that hold our rawest and most treasured memories. Sometimes physical space seems so mute, so indifferent; it surprises me that somehow the important moments that have transpired in a place don’t remain there, echoing, animate, alive somehow. Maybe they do. Occasionally, in returning to a place that hosted an important moment in my life, I can feel that moment, hovering, bumping into me, invisible to the eye but not to the spirit.

The Exeter chapel is one such space for me. The chapel was a place that provided solace and comfort during what were rugged and lonely years for me. There were two specific times each week that I went to the chapel, often alone. I viscerally remember walking in the rough stone door, my sadness leaking from me, and sitting quietly in the dark wooden pews.

Each Thursday morning Exeter had a period called “meditation,” during which a member of the faculty, staff, or senior class read a personal essay in the chapel. The tradition was that seniors wrote their meditations in English class and a select few were chosen to read during our senior spring. Mr. Valhouli, my beloved English teacher, was an ardent lover of this tradition and when he read his personal comments in 1991, I was lucky enough to be there.

I’ve often thought that it took guts for a school that is so heavily judged on quantitative measures like test scores and college admissions to defend the value of the personal story with a tradition like this. It has taken me many years to parse through the legacy of Exeter, beyond that most obvious one, Mr. Valhouli’s teaching. The meditation tradition has had a deep impact on me, for the way it privileges the individual telling of experience, for its high valuing of the learning inherent in telling and hearing stories.

The other weekly time I went to the chapel, like clockwork, was Tuesday night’s evening prayer service. This was the exception to the nightly curfew, and at 9:30 (I think) students filed into the chapel, always lit just by candlelight. “Prayer” is a misnomer for this decidedly secular event: someone would perform a couple of songs, acapella or accompanied, and then read poems or quotes. This was probably my favorite half hour of the week at Exeter. I remember those evenings so vividly, though not the specific songs or readings. I just remember the fullness that I would feel in my chest, the tears that often spilled down my face, the swelling sense of being both entirely alone in this place and somehow part of something larger than myself.

Unfortunately the chapel at Exeter was not open the last time I was on campus. I expect in that space I’d have the feeling I described, of sensing the past in the present. I’d like to go back there and see if I can see, either with my eyes or my heart, the 16 year old me. I feel like she’s there, somehow, in some way. She’s sitting quietly, shoulders hunched, eyes glossy with tears and feelings. I’d like to go back to this chapel which was and is a sacred space for me, one that held some of the most whole and emotional moments of my time at Exeter.

Present Tense with Dani Shapiro

I think anyone who’s been reading this blog knows how profoundly touched I was by Devotion, Dani Shapiro’s memoir that came out this winter. I was very privileged to meet Dani at a couple of her readings this winter; she is everything in person that you’d imagine from her graceful, honest memoir, and more. Devotion has stayed with me months after I finished it, its lines presenting themselves fully-formed in my head, its lessons growing ever more compelling and wise, its elegant language prompting me always to try to write more carefully, more lucidly. Dani also has two fantastic blogs, both of which I now eagerly follow.

One reason I identified so strongly with Dani from the start is because she is clearly interested in the central issue that preoccupies me now: presence. In both her memoir her blogs she wrestles with questions of how to be more engaged in her life, less distracted, better able to live within the shadow of time’s relentless passage. These are all questions I struggle mightily with, daily, and I have already learned so much from Dani’s writing about them.

You can imagine how elated I was when Dani agreed to participate in Present Tense! There aren’t really superlatives strong enough to describe how my I admire Dani, so I’ll just say she’s both a role model and an unwitting teacher. Thank you.

1. When have you felt most present? Are there specific memories that stand out for you?

When I think of when I’ve been most present, I think of silence. Of moments of quiet–when I have been with the people I most love, my son, my husband–not necessarily doing anything, but rather, being. I often feel very present, for instance, when tucking my son in for the night, sitting on the edge of his bed in the darkness. Or with my husband, when we have time together to just be, rather than the constant racing that takes up too much of our lives.
Travel, too, pushes me very much into the present. There’s no greater reminder to “be here, now” then the realization of how fleeting the moment is. My family and I take a trip each year to Positano, Italy (my husband and I direct a writers’ conference there) and when I wake up in our darkened room that first morning, then open the shuttered doors that lead to the patio and the view of the sea, the fleetingness of our time there, the way it marks the years passing each March, the place unchanged, us all a year older… there is something so beautiful, so bittersweet about that awareness that I feel pierced by it.

2. Do you have rituals or patterns that you use to remind you to Be Here Now?

Without a doubt, my yoga and mediation practices are my two greatest reminders. They are also, for me, inextricably linked. I don’t know how to meditate without first spending an hour practicing the physical, asana part of yoga. I wish I were able to just plunk myself down and meditate — but I find that I need the preparation of yoga, my body spent, wrung out, before I have any hopes of sitting for any length of time. Of course this means that I need, like, ninety minutes to do it all — which I don’t have every day. But the days I unroll my mat are far better days than those when I don’t get around to it.
3. Do you have specific places or people that you associate with being particularly present? Who? Where? Any idea why?
I completely relate to what you’re saying here, and I’m also still working out why that is — why some people seem to command my full attention more than others. I am most alive, and most myself, and most present, when I’m engaged in genuine conversation. Intimate, real dialogue. Cocktail party chatter, social banter — these make me flee somewhere deep inside myself, I guess because I feel both bored and uncomfortable. I’d much rather talk about something real — and when I do, my attention does not feel split, and I am fully present.
4. Has having children changed how you think about the effort to be present?

Yes, yes, yes! Since the birth of my son, Jacob (he’s now eleven) I have such a strong feeling of wanting to get it “right” — aware of my failings, wanting to do better, be better. Wanting not to miss a single moment, which is, of course, impossible — but desperate not to look back some day and realize that I was racing from one thing to the next and missing the magnificence of his childhood, and of early motherhood. I heard another mother recently say that she realized that the time in the car — you know, that time when you’re often racing just to get from one thing to the next, late, irritated, attention fragmented — that time actually is the thing. The time in the car. Thinking of the time in the car as sacred has really helped me. I look forward to it now. It’s often where we get our best talking done.
5. And just cause Iā€™m curious, what books and songs do you love?

Oh, where to begin! Books — well, I keep Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary on my desk at all times, which should tell you something about how I feel about Woolf, generally. I read a lot of my friends and peers — Martha McPhee has a wonderful new novel called Dear Money coming out pretty soon. Jennifer GIlmore just brought out Something Red, which is also terrific, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is a tour du force. I go back often to Annie Dillard’s work. And for spiritual writing, I read anything by Sylvia Boorstein or Jack Kornfield, again and again. Each re-reading bears new fruit.
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There is so much in these answers I relate to, Dani. The time in the car, that is the thing. That is motherhood. That is our life. That resonates so powerfully with me, and I too am so often rushing through it. I remember months ago my son went through a phase where he demanded that I buckle him into his carseat, despite very clearly being able to do it himself. For some reason I had the patience, in that phase, to step back and say: pretty soon he’ll never want me to do this again. Let me enjoy the intimacy of those rote movements, of that buckle, buckle, snap. And that – seeing this mundane reality of every day life as, as you say, sacred – helped me hugely.
Your description of accessing a meditative state only through physical exertion is also keenly familiar. I remember this from when I first stumbled into a yoga practice more than 10 years ago. Somehow the exhaustion of the body paves the way for quiet in the brain; I don’t understand the alchemy, but I recognize it as you talk about it.
Similarly, I totally know what you mean about feeling very present as you sit and tuck him into bed. I know that feeling well; sometimes there’s an awareness of the meaning of the moment as I do that, specifically around bedtime, and I feel cracklingly alive, aware of the seconds as they pass, full with my stroking his hair back from his forehead and kissing his cheeks, smelling his just-tubbed smell. Also, when I read with Grace before bed. It is so routine, so regular, but also I know that in the blink of an eye it will be over. And that’s the essence of all of this: how to live in the moment even as we realize it is already dying to us. This is almost unbearably painful, for me at least, when I stop and think about it. Awakening to that has been the task of the last few years for me, the path that I am clearly walking.
Dani, thank you again for holding a light on this path for me and for so many others. Your example, your honest inquiry and willingness to “live inside the questions” makes me feel less alone and less afraid. Thank you.