Month: January 2011

Trust

I shared my word of the year yesterday.  Trust. What I wrote about it follows down below if you didn’t read it on Stacey Curnow’s Midwife For Your Life blog.

The James Baldwin quotation that I close with is my favorite, and comes the closest to capturing what it is I mean when I say trust … for me it’s about trusting life, and the universe, trusting that something will catch me, and that there is something of value deep inside me and in my story.  Trusting, also, that the rhythms beat on, that pain will give way to radiance, and again and again, tidal, circular, eternal, folding in on itself and somehow opening at the same time.

I spent a happy couple of hours yesterday looking through my old quote books for some of my favorite words about trust, as I understand it at this point in my life.

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.  – James Baldwin

To trust is to let go. – Margaret Atwood (Surfacing)

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between. – Diane Ackerman

She felt as if a mist had been lifted from her eyes, enabling her to look upon and comprehend the significance of life, that monster made up of beauty and brutality. – Kate Chopin (The Awakening)

Have patience with everything that remains unresolved in your heart. – Rilke

May we all grow in grace and peace, and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us. – Thomas Merton

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be. – Douglas Adams

Listen to your life.  See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.  In the boredom and the pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness. – Frederick Buechner

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Trust

I’ve never chosen a word of the year before.  Not because I don’t like words.  In fact, I adore words.  I live on them, in fact.  I have a file on my computer titled, simply, “Words.”  It contains pages of words I love.  I have a notepad by my bed that I scribble words on in the night, in the dark, when I wake up from a dream with them running through my head.  I’m accompanied every day by a steady stream of words – lyrics, poems, quotations – that rise up unbidden, often unexpectedly, into my head.

So it’s always been really difficult for me to consider picking one word.  That’s like choosing a favorite child.  I can’t do it.

But this year, much the way lines from William Wordsworth poems or the refrain of certain Christmas carols insist that I hear them, a single word keeps pushing to the front of my consciousness.  Over and over again.  Maybe it’s my word, I found myself thinking last week.  Maybe it is.

Trust.

Trust.  I’ve been talking, and writing, for years, it seems, about letting go, and opening myself up to what comes.  About trusting. And this is authentically what has been on my mind.  But somehow, it feels like the stakes are ever higher, and like I need to actually do what it is that I’ve been talking about.  Maybe I need to stop talking about it and start doing it.  Start trusting.

The essential thing that I need to trust is that I can release my white-knuckled grip on how I wanted my life to be.  I need to acknowledge that certain things are lost to me, and that other things will never be.  But what is left in the lacuna between those poles is still rich, teeming with meaning and love.  It is my life.  And I need to trust that it is enough.

I need to accept, with a deep internal settling, the passage of time against which I rail so often and so furiously, and to trust that I won’t be swept away in the fast-moving currents of life.  I need to trust that if I let go of my frantic effort to control the universe, all will be well.  I need to trust that I have something to say and that my story will unfold, in life and on the page, as it should.  I need to trust that my best is good enough, for my children, for my husband, for my friends, for my job, for myself.  I have this recurring image of letting go of a high trapeze bar and free-falling, which is terrifying.  But sometimes I imagine myself bouncing into a pillowy bed, which envelops me with safety and comfort.  That, I think, is trust.  To believe that I will be caught.

One theme I’ve become aware of in my life in recent years is the way things cycle, around in circles, back and forth like tides, waxing and waning like the moon.  For me, this takes the form of returning again and again to things.  Certain stories, people, words, thoughts recur, at intervals whose rhythm I don’t always understand until much later.  As I burrow into my word of 2011, trust, I remember the quotation I included on our family Christmas card in 2002.  2002 was, I realize now, a seminal year for me when many things ruptured and changed and when the seeds of who I am now really began to take root.  And these are the lines I chose then, which come back to me now, whispering their powerful wisdom:

“Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.” – James Baldwin

Word of the year

I’m am honored to be writing about my (very first) Word of the Year at Stacey Curnow’s Midwife for Your Life blog today.  Stacey regularly writes beautiful and thought-provoking posts about things that are dear to my heart: the soul, the spirit, what it means to fully inhabit your life.  She also shares fantastic quotations, most of which make me gasp and reach for my quote book in order to write them down.

Please click over and read about my Word of the Year and poke around Stacey’s blog while you’re at it.  You won’t regret it!

Gentleness

For the last few days gentleness has been very much on my mind.  And then the internet did that thing it sometimes does, where I sense a powerful twining together of individual experiences and perspectives into something far greater than any one of us.  First, on Sunday, Lisa wrote about the power of steadfast kindness and gentleness.  Then, Monday morning, Susan Piver tweeted “I believe in supreme gentleness, agenda-less curiosity, outrageous self-expression, and kindness.”

Maybe the turning of the year has hit me particularly hard this year.  The coldness, the blizzard, the illness of my father-in-law, the ferociously-fast growing-up of my children.  I don’t know, but I’m finding myself in particular need of gentleness.  My thin skin is even more attenuated than usual, stretched to where it might split open at any moment.  My already-porous self feels even more exposed than usual.

I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong. – Leo Rosten

I am beginning to understand that gentleness is the epitome of strength.  Those who have accepted themselves fully enough to be able to look at, see, and embrace others for who they are – rather than falling prey to their own reactions, assumptions, and judgments, which come from insecurity – are those who are truly gentle.  I know I can work on this myself: I’m not always gentle, and on reflection I know why.  I think improvement here starts with gentleness towards myself and with releasing others from the prison of what I can be so sure that they should be/think/feel.

In this cold and dark season, this interval before we start seeing more light, before the ice melts, before the colds stop coming so persistently, I ache for gentleness.  I don’t know how much more bruising my heart can take.  I want it to be held gently now.

There is gentleness all around me, I know that.  Not always from those from whom I want it, and not always in the guise I expect.  But when I open my eyes, I see what it in front of me.  Gentleness.  The kind where you put your hand softly over your brother’s healing stitches, read Harry Potter slowly so that he can follow, and answer patiently his myriad questions.

Grace will lead me home

Amazing Grace (John Newton)

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

T’was Grace that taught my heart to fear.
And Grace, my fears relieved.
How precious did that Grace appear
The hour I first believed.

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;
‘Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far
and Grace will lead me home.

I’ve written before about my intense sensitivity, about how porous I am to the world, about what a generally difficult friend I am because I take everything so ridiculously personally.  I’m certain that this sensitivity, in particular that to the passage of time, is my wound.  Whether it is also a strength remains less clear to me.

It’s all mixed in with Grace.  And, of course, grace.  Grace announced herself to me on the day after my father-in-law was diagnosed with a terminal illness, and those two lines on the pregnancy test shocked me so completely I almost fainted.  I had not anticipated being pregnant – in fact if I’m honest, I hadn’t wanted to be.

When I was 20 weeks pregnant I went to a new prenatal yoga class.  I didn’t love prenatal yoga, finding most classes to be too much breathing through our chakras and not enough vinyasa.  This class was small, just me and three other women.  At the end of class, as we lay in savasana, our teacher asked us to “go inside and communicate with our baby.”  I swear I rolled my eyes behind my eyelids.  Lying there, trying to figure out how I could leave without offending the teacher, I heard an unfamiliar but distinct voice in my head.  It said, “grace.”  I sat up, startled, and looked around the room.  Just three domed-bellied women, eyes shut, and one teacher in lotus position.  I lay back down, willing the voice to come back.  It didn’t.  But I’ve never forgotten that moment.  She was always Grace.  Always my grace.

And then she arrived, and she broke my heart.  The postpartum depression that I plunged into after Grace’s birth terrified me, completely dissolved me, and in its wake I was reformed into a new person.  She taught my heart to fear, and then, slowly, gradually, but surely, she relieved my fears.

She is leading me home.  Of that I am certain now.  And when I sang Amazing Grace last week at a funeral, I burst into tears at that last line.  My daughter pushes every single button I have.  She infuriates me and hurts me and sends me to a shouting, tearful mess faster than anyone else on the planet.  She demonstrates keen sensitivity and an astonishing ability to take things personally, and both of these things annoy me and hurt me in equal measure.  As I lose my patience with her, stumble, and get up again, hugging her against me, my tears dropping wetly into her thick brown hair, I am trying to tell myself, as much as her, that everything will be okay.  To reassure the child – and adult – me as much as my daughter that we will be safe.

In parenting Grace I am confronting, over and over again, my own flaws, my own weaknesses, the deepest reaches of my own self.  What if that sensitivity that I’ve so often bemoaned is not an obstacle on my path but the road itself?  I’m beginning to suspect it is.  And, holding my daughter’s hand, the hand of my grace, my Grace, I’m finding my way home.  She might think she’s following me, but, the truth is, I’m following her.