Month: December 2010

The internal ocean

I read Katrina’s beautiful words about the unclear, uncertain path that is writing last night and my tears fell freely.  Not eyes welling up with tears.  No, these were tears rolling down my faces, unabashed.  Full-fledged crying.  I wiped my face with the sleeves of my tee shirt but I couldn’t keep up.  Tears fell onto the pages of my friend Tracy’s essay, which I was reading for my writing group.

When I pulled myself together enough to look back down at Tracy’s work the page was speckled with the splotches of darkness where my fat tears had fallen.  A few words were blurred with the wetness.

I thought about how often tears blur things for me.  They blur my vision when my eyes fill with tears for the unexpected, unanticipated reasons that each day – each hour – seems to offer up.  They blur words on the page, either literally, as today, or as I read, when the writing of others, in blogs or books, moves me to tears.  This happens daily too.

I cry every single day.  And those tears cause a blurring at the edges, literally and figuratively, of my life.  My world suddenly swims; all at once my view of the light on trees, or the black and white words of a sentence, or the expression on Whit’s face dissolves into a swirl of wet saltwater emotion.

Last year, the tears blurred the white lights on our Christmas tree into streaks of light in a dark room.  This happened in a moment when I felt the presence of something far greater than myself.  This is a moment I’ve come back to again and again in my head, a moment when I instinctively assumed the posture of prayer, when I felt “infinitely big and infinitesimally small at the same time.”  What I don’t know is whether the blurring was a result or a cause of that fleeting, powerful feeling.

There are so many tears in my life.  Just as I return to the sea for my metaphors and my meaning, I cry an ocean from my very own eyes.   The ocean is inside of me as surely as it is outside.  Maybe this internal ocean has something to teach me.  Let me learn to sit with it and learn from what I see in the blur.

Turning our brokenness into something beautiful

This is the darkest season; we wake in darkness and we watch the sun wane again before the clock has hit 5:00.  The light in the middle of the day is often pitched, somehow, at a high, wavering note; it is full and thin at the same time, endings tangible within it.  Somehow, the dark bothers me less than it used to.  There is an internal light that helps keep the thick, sometimes-threatening darkness slightly at bay.

The optimist in me feels a wild surge of hope about this: perhaps I am witnessing the birth of my own faith. This is a holy month, after all, full of imagery of light, regardless of your religion. Perhaps it is the flickering, nascent light of my own belief that illuminates these dark days. The candles in windows and the holiday lights strung on trees and in windows everywhere I look both reflect and contribute to that internal flickering.

We move towards the solstice, every day closer.  The winter solstice may well be the single holiest day of the year for me.  I definitely prefer it to the summer one, which demonstrates as clearly as any detail about me how much the promise of something (good and bad) impacts me.  Even at the height of summer, with the longest days we’ll ever know, there is something gloomy to me about the solstice.  It represents the turning back to dark.  That’s the preemptive regret that I’ve written about, which can completely occlude any present radiance for me.  This solstice, two weeks away, is the opposite.  It promises a turning back towards the light.

A year ago I read some of Meg Casey’s thoughts on the holiness that exists in darkness.  They moved me so much then, and continue to, that I want to post them again.  Once in a great while I read a piece of writing that makes me want to kneel and press my head to the ground, saluting its gorgeousness and ability to evoke emotion. This is one such piece. Please read it.

December is a holy month. Maybe it is the dark silky silence that descends so early, that speaks to me of reverence. Maybe it is the promise that December holds–that no matter how dark, how cold, how empty it can get, the light is coming back. Something always shifts in me when December arrives–I embrace the darkness and am eager for the coming solstice when the whole world is still and holds its breath, waiting to be reborn again. December whispers to me of midnight mass, of ancient choirs, of stained glass windows turned into gems by candle light.

Meg then goes on to talk about the connection between holiness and wholeness, using the image of a stained glass window: Broken, jagged, sharp pieces of glass held together magically, transformed into one perfect design not by gold or silver but by something as mundane as lead. And, of course, it is the light that animates the beauty.  Meg’s post reminds me of one of my very favorite of Anne Lamott’s lines: “Love is sovereign.” Yes. As Meg says, Love is the transformative power that turns our brokenness into something beautiful.

I love this because I think we often think of light as exposing flaws, unearthing chinks, revealing ugliness.  Yet in Meg’s metaphor it is light that knits disparate pieces into a whole, that reveals the light that exists within them.  Love as light.  Transformative, healing brokenness, uncovering worth.  May we all strive to be this kind of light, even in the dark moments of our lives.

There are some themes in my writing of which I’m very conscious.  Others emerge organically, and I’m not aware of them until I reflect for a moment.  Light and darkness has been a message to which I’ve returned this year, over and over.  I am often moved to tears by the quality of light in nature, and the metaphor of dark and light has also been one to which I am consistently drawn. Light and darkness.  Holiness and grace.  Radiance and shadow.  We keep on turning, and the shadows keep dancing, the light flickering.  All I can do is keep watching.

The drum and the descant

(one of my favorite pictures, ever)

I really only listen to music when I’m driving.  And I tend to listen to the same song over and over again.  I know, normal!  On any given day a different song is preoccupying me.  Coldplay’s Fix You, U2’s Kite, and Matt Nathanson’s Come On Get Higher have all played on repeat in my car (and in my head).  A few years ago, December 2004 specifically, it was Shawn Colvin singing Love Came Down at Christmas.  I remember it vividly.  It was freezing, I had a two year old toddler, and I was pregnant with Whit.

The song is on my very favorite Christmas CD, which I listen to all year round but constantly during this month. Last Friday the familiar notes of Love Came Down at Christmas came on as Grace, Whit, and I were driving to school.

“Whit,” I said, turning around to look at him, wearing his new wool hat with robots on it.  “I listened to this song over and over and over again when you were in my tummy.”

“I remember that,” Grace chimed in authoritatively, though I’m certain she does not.  He smiled.  Both kids, for some reason, love stories of when I was pregnant with them and of when they were babies.

“You used to kick whenever it came on,” I mused, remembering the feeling of feet in my ribs, the eerie, powerful sensation of another person turning over inside of me.  The kind of feeling you couldn’t imagine until you experience it.  And one that fades; I can hardly remember that sensation any more, so unique in its joint visceral physicality and overpowering spirituality.

“Maybe I was trying to be the drums,” Whit offered casually from the backseat.

Oh, Whit.  Yes.  You are the drumbeat of my life, steady, underlying everything, a constant presence.  Your humor and stubbornness, intractability and lovingness twine together into the rhythm to which my life is set.

Grace, you are the soaring descant.  Sometimes your notes are there, lifting me to the rafters with their beauty, sometimes not, their absence as keenly felt as their presence.  A sound less steady, higher at its highs and lower at its lows.

Together you two are creating every day the music of my life.  The song that I, who is tone deaf and woefully unskilled at all things musical, hear in my head every single hour.  The tune to which I walk, stumble, and dance.

The courage that comes before courage

Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be prevenient courage that allows us to be brave – that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is a great harm.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Maybe this year, 2010, has been the year that finally the prevenient courage has visited me.  Finally I mustered the strength to raise my eyes to the blinding sun of this life, to risk being burned in order to look into the heart of it.  At last my lifelong fear of the pain of that burning, which manifested itself in so many distracting and agitated behaviors, was outweighed by my increasing awareness that I simply had to honor these gifts.

The prevenient courage comes in that before I knew I could stand it, I knew I had to.  And it hurts, sometimes more than I can bear.  But it’s the only way I want to live now.  To do otherwise is a great harm.

Day 5 of Reverb10 – Let Go

#Reverb10, day 5: Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?

That’s a picture of my neck.  With my Let Go necklace that I bought and wore often in 2010.  This prompt feels awfully close to home; it lands somewhere between my throat and my heart, right where those two discs sit.  I’ve done some letting go in 2010 but I know there is a lot more to do, and this necklace is a daily – hourly – reminder of that goal.

More than specific people, though I do think I have a tendency to cling longer than I should, and to fiercely refuse to give up in some cases where I ought to, the thing I most need to let go of is What Might Have Been.

This letting go is releasing my white knuckle grip on the way I wanted my life to be.

It is EM Forester’s familiar words: “We must be willing to let go of the life we had planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

It is also acknowledging that certain things are lost and other things will never be.

It is accepting, with a deep internal settling, the passage of time against which I rail so often and so furiously.

It is the sentence of Jack Kornfield’s, to which I return again and again with an instinct as rhythmic and powerful as the tide, its truth ineffably sad and profoundly uplifting at the same time:

To live is to die to how we wanted it to be.

Let go.