Month: December 2010

Safe

Danielle talks about our core desired feelings, and asserts that all of our behavior, conscious or not, is in search of feeling these feelings. It’s embarassing, maybe, that it’s taken me 35.5 years to figure this out, but I am certain that one of my core desired feelings, probably the primary one, is safety.

This is one of those places where the rational and logical people in my life roll their eyes. I know. I’m one of the safest people in the world. How can I possibly not know – not feel – it!? I don’t know. But I do know this realm, this space of most devoutly desired feelings and deepest, most primal anxieties, is not a place where reason and logic rule. I have struggled my whole life with feeling unsafe. There. I said it.

There are many layers of this unsafety (and it’s actually not the same as my deep and toxic insecurity, either, a topic for another post). I have terrifying fears about financial safety that, while not tethered to reality, have their claws deep into my psyche. I worry that there will not be enough. I worry constantly about not being able to pay basic bills, not having a roof over my head, losing everything. This turns into enormous pressure on myself to earn money. It has also created a completely irrational panic about all things money-related, which, combined with my deep resistance to ever talking about the topic at all, makes money into a powderkeg of a subject, one that I both fear and avoid.

I also worry about the safety of my physical self. I’ve always worried about it: perhaps this is hypochondria, perhaps it is a psychosomatic way of handling my anxieties about my spirit in the world. I wait, day in and day out, for the other medical shoe to drop. My daughter’s mononeucleosis diagnosis this week felt like a manifestation of this deep sense of being at risk: I spent two terrifying hours imagining very bleak news (with reason, given what the doctors said and did) and wondering if I had, with my incessant worrying and fearing, somehow brought this onto her. The actual news that she had mono felt like a radiant relief after what I had imagined and blamed myself for creating.

Perhaps most vitally, though, I want to be safe from myself. I want to be clearly seen for who and what I am – something that I have truly felt so rarely in my life – but also loved in spite of it. I know I misbehave, I know I am far too emotional, reactive, insecure. I want to be kept safe from those monsters running in my head: I want someone to wrap their arms around me and tell me that I am safe from my own rampaging emotions.

Someone told me recently that there is no meaning without safety. I’ve been mulling over the comment, turning it over, and finding myself nodding. Yes. Given my preoccupation with the search for meaning in my small little life, this is a vital truth, not a mere nuance or turn of phrase. And it must explain why for me there is such frantic fear around not being safe. In those rare moments where I have felt safe enough to relax my white-knuckle grasp one very single little thing, I’ve been able to see and experience meaning. To relax into my life, to live it rather than hold it in my panicky, breathless, fearful grasp.

I want to feel safe. What will it take? How do I build a life around those people, places, and experiences that provide that? How do I not transmit this irrational but deeply destabilizing fear to my children? How do I learn to control my own reactivity so that more people might be willing to be here, so that I can trust that they will keep me safe? I don’t know the answers. I’m only barely seeing the questions shimmering up through the morass of roiling thoughts in my head. I turn back to Rilke, and commit yet again, as another day turns towards morning, to living the questions.

During this holiday season I’m going to repost my favorite posts from 2010.  This is from January, almost a year ago, though every single word still rings true.

Solstice

Toward the Solstice, 1977

The thirtieth of November.
Snow is starting to fall.
A peculiar silence is spreading
Over the fields, the maple grove.
It is the thirtieth of May,
Rain pours on ancient bushes, runs
Down the youngest blade of grass.
I am trying to hold in one steady glance
All the parts of my life.
A spring torrent races
On this old slanting roof,
The slanted field below
Thickens with winter’s first whiteness.
Thistles dried to sticks in last year’s wind
Stand nakedly in the green,
Stand sullenly in the slowly whitening,
Field.
My brain glows
More violently, more avidly
The quieter, the thicker
The quilt of crystals settles,
The louder, more relentlessly
The torrent beats itself out
On the old boards and shingles.
It is the thirtieth of May,
The thirtieth of November,
A beginning or an end.
We are moving towards the solstice
And there is so much here
I still do not understand.
If I could make sense of how
My life is tangled
With dead weeds, thistles,
Enormous burdocks, burdens
Slowly shifting under
This first fall of snow,
Beaten by this early, racking rain
Calling all new life to declare itself strong
Or die,
If I could know
In what language to address
The spirits that claim a place
Beneath these low and simple ceilings,
Tenants that neither speak nor stir
Yet dwell in mute insistence
Till I can feel utterly ghosted in this house.
If history is a spider-thread
Spun over and over though brushed away
It seems I might some twilight
Or dawn in the hushed country light
Discern its greyness stretching
From molding or doorframe, out
Into the empty dooryard
And following it climb
The path into the pinewoods,
Tracing from tree to tree
In the falling light, in the slowly
Lucidifying day
Its constant, purposive trail,
Till I reach whatever cellar hole
Filling with snowflakes or lichen,
Whatever fallen shack
Or unremembered clearing
I am meant to have found
And there, under the first or last
Star, trusting to instinct
The words would come to mind
I have failed or forgotten to say
Year after year, winter
After summer, the right rune
To ease the hold of the past
Upon the rest of my life
And ease my hold on the past.
If some rite of separation
Is still unaccomplished,
Between myself and the long-gone
Tenants of this house,
Between myself and my childhood,
Between the childhood of my children,
It is I who have neglected
To perform the needed acts,
Set water in corners, light and eucalyptus
In front of mirrors,
Or merely pause and listen
To my own pulse vibrating
Lightly as falling snow,
Relentless as the rainstorm,
And hear what it has been saying.
It seems I am still waiting
For them to make some clear demand
Some articulate sound or gesture,
For release to come from anywhere
But from inside myself.
A decade of cutting away
Dead flesh, cauterizing
Old scars ripped open over and over
And still it is not enough.
A decade of performing
The loving humdrum acts
Of attention to this house
Transplanting lilac suckers,
Washing panes, scrubbing
Wood-smoke from splitting paint,
Sweeping stairs, brushing the thread
Of the spider aside,
And so much yet undone,
A woman’s work, the solstice nearing,
And my hand still suspended
As if above a letter
I long and dread to close.

(Adrienne Rich)

This is my annual (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009) marking of the solstice, a holiday that means more to me than any other, particularly this one, today, the winter solstice.  It marks the turning back to the light.  And yet there is so much here I still do not understand.

Moving towards the solstice

We are moving towards the solstice.  In only a few days the world begins its slow revolution back towards the light.  And yet, even with that knowledge, this feels like a complicated, dark time.  There are so many feelings tangled inside of me.  In the last two days two of my very best friends lost a grandparent (and one of those was my almost-grandmother who went along with my other-mother, who has also passed away).  Our Christmas plans have substantially changed to accomodate the illness of a family member, which is unnerving and scary.  Grace continues to be challenged by things that I know I’ve personally handed down to her.

Days of feet slipping on ice, of progress made haltingly, if at all.  And there is so much here I still do not understand.

If I could make sense of how my life is tangled with dead weeds, thistles, enormous burdocks, burdens … Life today contains already its share of ghosts, woven through my experience, and I know there will only be more.  The folding of the generations is happening before my eyes, and my peers and I stand up to take our place as the robust center of families, step into the middle place.  Many of us have learned to say yes, and learned to say no, and learned to say hello.  Now we learn to say goodbye.  Of course these lessons happen out of order for some, painfully, but for me they are unspooling conventionally.

I am trying to hold in one steady glance all the parts of my life. And I never knew this would be so hard.  This is a lesson of midlife, this holding of paradox, this acknowledgement that containing multitudes makes me, instead of inconsistent, a mature adult.  The gaze that contains all of these divergent and, occasionally, more problematically, contradictory truths hardly feels steady, though.  It feels thready, weak, throbbing with an erratic pulse.

To ease the hold of the past upon my life. Along with letting go of my sometimes-frenetic focus on the future, this is another of my central tasks now.  To embrace memory, to own the girl I was, to know that all of those versions of me exist inside me still, but to trust that a lighter grip is enough.

We continue spinning.  Spinning and spinning, returning again to the same motifs and metaphors as we strive to understand our experience, to the same people and places as we mine our memories, to the same truths about who we are.  Just as the earth spins on its axis so too do our lives spin, linear progress becoming less relevant as we understand more and more the fluid and cyclical nature of what really matters.  The seasons beat forward and so do we, trusting that the light will come back, that the work of our lives is no more and no less than this: surrendering to the rotation.

Little wonders

Last year, I blogged about something I saw in Glamour magazine.  I asserted that if you just keep your eyes open, you can find both insight and inspiration in all kinds of unexpected places (remember, what you see is what you get).  While running earlier this week I was stopped in my tracks by the wisdom of a Rob Thomas song.  I’ve heard the lyrics before, and made a mental note to look them up when I get home, and I’ve always forgotten.  This time I remembered.

Without further ado, the poetry of Rob Thomas.  The first verse and the chorus are my favorite.  (I know, he’s no William Wordsworth, but still …)

Little Wonders

Let it go, let it roll right off your shoulder
Don’t you know the hardest part is over?
Let it in, let your clarity define you
In the end we will only just remember how it feels

Our lives are made in these small hours
These little wonders, these twists and turns of fate
Time falls away but these small hours
These small hours still remain

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me

I am downright obsessed with my annual holiday card.  I spend as much time choosing the message as I do the photographs and design.   When I look at the messages I’ve chosen over the last several years, a distinct theme emerges:

2005 – Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me
2006 – Throw your arms around the world at Christmastime
2007 – Dona Nobis Pacem (grant us peace)
2008 – Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me
2009 – Love came down at Christmas, love all lovely, love divine
2010 – May the wind be always at your back

Imagine my delight when, this week at Grace’s school holiday assembly, they sang both Dona Nobis Pacem and Let There be Peace On Earth.  I was thrilled, and my heart soared with the high-pitched voices of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders.  I’ve been singing Dona Nobis Pacem under my breath all week and Grace excitedly told me a few days ago that she recognized it as a song that was going to be in the concert (it was not the one her class sang).

This has been a season of quiet, house-bound afternoons and evenings for us.  I’ve been spending a lot of time with Grace and Whit, not going out hardly at all, doing my work in the hours that they are in school. One morning this week Grace’s advent calendar said “sit by the tree and watch the lights while drinking hot chocolate.”  And so we did.  After dinner she, Whit and I curled up on the yellow couch with mugs of hot chocolate and admired the tree.  Grace dashed upstairs to get a small comforter to pull over the three of us, and then we read several Christmas books (and the defiantly non-Christmas pop-up book about dinosaurs that Whit chose).  It was pretty divine.

The night of Grace’s concert we made pizza.   As they were eating, the children decided they wanted to hear “Let There Be Peace On Earth.”  So I youtubed a version of it, and then another, and pretty soon it was on repeat in the kitchen and Grace and Whit were spellbound by the music and the images that accompanied each rendition.  Whit said to me, “This song reminds me of What a Wonderful World, Mummy.”

And how.  What a wonderful world it would be if everybody chose peace.  Wouldn’t it?

It’s impossible for me not to think of Saint Francis’s iconic prayer.  And of last year’s haunting video of Sarah McLachlan singing it.  I urge you to listen to it: it’s gorgeous, calming and inspiring at the same time.  It makes me want to work harder to be worthy of this blessed, brutal, beautiful life, and of my children’s instinctive orientation towards goodness and peace.  So, Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

And let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.