Month: May 2011

I remember

One of the many thought-provoking exercises that Dani Shapiro gave us while at Kripalu was to write for 10 minutes, without stopping, sentences that begin with “I remember.” This was inspired by Joe Brainerd’s classic memoir, I Remember.  Lisa, Denise, Christine, Sarah, and I all found this both fun and surprising – we discovered that we wrote down both long-cherished memories and ones we had not even realized we remembered.

We think this is a powerful and revealing exercise, and wanted to share a few of our “I remembers” as well as invite you to participate.  Please join us!  either by writing a post on your blog about what you remember and linking it here.   Or, by adding a few of your I remembers to our comments.  I look forward to reading your memories.

I remember …

I remember the wire hanger that my mother bent into a hoop over my head for my Pippi Longstocking braids one Halloween.  I remember how it dug into my head.

I remember watching my mother peel carrots into our guinea pig, Caliban’s cage.  I remember that Dad told us Caliban meant “sprite.”  I remember reading The Tempest in high school and learning what it really meant.

I remember going to the bathroom from 6th grade homeroom and the school secretary telling me to tell my class that the Challenger had exploded.

I remember how my husband wept when our midwife turned over our brand-new second child and said he was a boy.

I remember skinny dipping off the pier at our old summer house.  In August there was phosphorescence.

I remember the morning that my father called me to tell me that my grandmother had died.  I remember that her mother’s day card, stamped and addressed, was sitting on the table by the door to be mailed.

I remember hallucinating and asking Matt if he could see the reindeer I saw as we approached the summit of Kilimanjaro in a white-out ice storm.

A weekend of magic and dandelion fluff

Grace and I got to Kripalu on Friday afternoon and almost immediately headed down to the labyrinth.  This is a quiet, holy place, a maze I’ve walked before.  You follow the winding path into the center where there is a post that says “may peace prevail on earth” in several languages.  Grace walked in front of me and after a few minutes she turned to me and said, “does this really lead into that middle?”  You could see the post in the center, with offerings of beads and buddhas at its base, but the path wound around and around and it did indeed seem hard to believe we’d ever get there.  “Trust the path, Grace,” I said without thinking about it.  And she did.  And I did.  Once in the middle, I turned to find this:
Later friends arrived, and Grace met Abby, the daughter of my dear friend Denise.  They hit it off and spent the weekend giggling and exploring.  Other friends from the ether who were there were Lisa, Christine, and Sarah.  The sessions with Dani were extraordinary.  I’d gladly travel the world over just to be in her presence.  The fact that Katrina was there, assisting, just made it all that much more magical.  It gave me goosebumps when, over the course of two days, Dani shared many quotes that I love dearly.  Two of them I’ve written about before: Pain engraves a deeper memory (Anne Sexton) and You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way (E.L. Doctorow).

In the afternoon, Abby, Grace, Denise and I walked down to the lake that you can see from Kripalu’s hilltop location.  At the shore of the lake the girls played in the sand and we sat and watched and talked, our hearts expanding.
Everybody’s eyes opened a little this weekend, I think.  I imagine that Denise, like me, was hearing Dani’s words about paying attention in her head.  We noticed a black turtle sunning himself on a log in the swamp.  The girls blew fat white dandelions and the fluff floated around us like snow, or like grace.  We stopped to gaze at the word “love,” spelled out in little rocks on a large flat boulder.
At dinner Katrina joined us and I felt again the immense comfort and gratitude I’ve felt in her gentle, keenly intelligent presence since the first time we met, a not-coincidence that altered the current of my life.  After putting Grace and Abby to sleep – to their overwhelming delight, together – Denise, Lisa and I sat around and talked.  Lisa is far more extraordinary than I’d even imagined, which is saying something, since I was deeply impressed already.  The three of us talked as though we’d known each other forever.  We covered writing, cancer, lecherous grade school principals, navigating pre-puberty with daughters, the joys and challenges of younger sons, twitter, and more writing, writing, writing.

Yesterday afternoon I went, unenthusiastically, for a long run.  I ran by the Charles River and one small part of my route winds through the woods.  I was alone in there today, running, feeling tired, achey, weak.  The wind came up then and suddenly I was surrounded by a cloud of dandelion fluff.


For Mum

Happy Mother’s Day, Mum.

Thank you for teaching me to write thank you notes, to look people in the eye, to say “may I please,” to treat all people with respect, to use the silver for everyday, to cook casually, to identify puffs of wind by rough spots on the water, to sing even though we’re tone deaf, and to approach life as a grand adventure.

Thank you, more than anything, for showing me the essential truth of your senior yearbook quote and mine: To miss the joy is to miss all. (Robert Louis Stevenson)

I love you.

Making me happy right now

Grace and I are off to Kripalu today for Dani Shapiro‘s memoir workshop.  I can’t wait!!  So, instead of a post, a few things that are making me happy right now:

  • Finding flowers on my bedside table from Grace and Whit yesterday (with Whit’s marked with an old toilet paper roll: classic).  They had picked them at the park in between downpours yesterday afternoon.
  • Om Shanti, from Madonna’s Ray of Light CD.  It reminds me of my trip to Feathered Pipe years and years ago.  And it still inspires me.
  • Loose, peasanty silk blouses by Rebecca Taylor (I have one leopard, one floral, and I am wearing them on repeat)
  • Cropped skinny white jeans (with the aforementioned blouses)
  • Peonies, peonies, peonies
  • J Crew boys pajamas (particularly the blue and white striped shorty ones with a long-sleeved top)
  • My new Mala beads from Tiny Devotions.  I swear I can feel their energy when I wear them.
  • Our plans to visit my sister and her family during their sabbatical next year for Christmas.  I can’t wait.  Have to get my children passports (the fact that they do not, I think, horrifies my parents: by the time I was Grace’s age I’d already lived in Europe for four years)
  • My morning green smoothie: pear, cucumber, spinach, ice cubes, coconut water, mint, agave, chia seeds

Please tell me, what is making you smile these days?

Wonder

I am so grateful for the thoughtful comments on my post last week asking what this blog is about.  What, you say?  I write it, I should know?  Yes, well … I realize I should.  Pam emailed me after her day with Karen Maezen Miller and said, “I think you should simply say you write about the face of God.”  And I laughed, and went on with my day, and I kept coming back to it.  I don’t know that I’d say it quite like that, but I do think one of the things I am most interested in is the way that divinity itself flashes through even the most ordinary day.  And the thing is, it was only when I really started paying attention and began living inside my own life that I began to see it.

Another way of saying this: I am utterly preoccupied by wonder.

While I’m far more aware now, I do have a few memories from long ago of being simply started by the brilliance of the world.  One of the most vivid is of one late afternoon in AP Biology.  I went to high school in New Hampshire, and we went to class from 4 to 6pm, so it was pitch black during the last period for much of the year.  Pitch black, freezing cold, cloaked in ice and snow.  Hospitable, the environment was not.

I sat in AP Bio, the dark windows all around us contributing to the sense that were floating alone in the world.  My wonderful teacher could have been from central casting, with his bald head, neatly trimmed beard, and clipped British accent.  He was talking about the human body, gesturing to his own arm, talking about bones and tendons and blood vessels.  Something about the many tiny bones in the human hand.  He held his own hand up, looked at it, bent the fingers.  A hush fell over the room.  He looked at us, his dark eyes sweeping across our faces, and whispered, “Isn’t it amazing?”

Oh, it brings tears to my eyes to remember that moment.  I thought of it tonight when listening to Elissa’s gorgeous podcast called What Takes Your Breath Away?

I’m immensely grateful, more than I can express, at the frequency with which the world – and my own life – takes my breath away these days.  May I never stop being amazed.