Month: July 2011

The summer of letting go

Letting go continues to be a theme in my life.  I think about what I wrote in December and it’s all still so true:

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.

But this summer there’s a new note in the chorus.   Whit is letting go, too.  Giving me no choice but to do so, and to watch him ascend, move away, stretch the raveling red string that ties his heart to mine.  First, there’s the lost tooth.  Oh, my aching heart.

This past weekend we visited friends on Martha’s Vineyard.  We spent most of Saturday at the beach.  At the end of the long dock there was a twisting slide that dropped off into the ocean.

It’s hard to convey how tiny he looked sitting at the top of this slide from the beach.  I walked down and stood by him as he deliberated, deciding whether to let himself go.  And, finally, without any announcement, he did.

(and yes, I swear I feed him)

The week before we went to the Vineyard, I’d enrolled Whit in a neighborhood camp around the corner.  He knew exactly zero people there.  And on the first day, I signed him in, watched him make a name tag, and then stood with him at the corner of the playground.  “Are you ready for me to go?”  I asked him.

He looked up at me, indicating I should crouch down so that he could whisper something to me.  “Yes.  See you later.  I love you.”

And then away I went.  With a few glances over my shoulder, to witness this.

He is tall and lean and looks like a full-blown boy, his hair is bleaching quickly to summer blond, his smile is now crooked, and he’s reading early readers about rockets and bugs.  It’s all blurring in front of my eyes because it’s moving so damn fast.  Like an invocation, I chant silently to myself: let go, let go, let go.

But still he still sleeps with his Beloved wrapped in his arms.  Still.

Commencement

A month or so ago, I was writing (incessantly) about the end of the school year and the way it triggers a cascade of sadness for me.  I was thinking about it even more unremittingly, I assure you.   One detail that kept popping up in my mind was the fact that graduation, one of the most official markers of an end in our culture, is called commencement.  I started writing about that several times, but never really figured out what I wanted to say.

I guess another month of life, with my baby losing his first tooth and my daughter slipping into flip-flops that sometimes get confused for mine has made it clear.  Isn’t this fact, on the surface odd, just a more elegant way of describing what might be the central preoccupation of my life?  Commencement.  You end and you begin, on the very same day.

As something ends something new begins.  Even though I never, ever embrace the endings, I am often surprised with joy at the beginnings.  You’d think after 36 years I might have figured this out.  You might imagine that I would have learned to lean into the certainty that there is sunshine around the corner.  Unfortunately, you would be wrong.  My sentimentality and melancholy is nothing if not tenacious, and it refuses to yield to logic.

Yes, I know all of the trite sayings: when a door closes, a window opens.  Etc.  I even know they are true.  But still.  But still.

One thing I know I write over and over here is the basic, simple tenet of begin again.  I stumble, I fall, I mess up, I yell, I shout.  I regret.  Oh, wow, do I regret.  I am sometimes so suffused with regret I can’t see anything else.  But what else is there to go other than to begin again?

Other than to commence?

(PS Commencement is the title of J. Courtney Sullivan’s first book, which I read and enjoyed.  I highly recommend also her new novel, Maine, which I read last week.

30 years

“Would it have been better or worse if I could have whispered to myself back then, I know the way?  Follow me.  But it will take 30 years.”

– James Richardson, Vectors 3.0

What are you reading now?

As you know, I like to read.  As you also know, the stack below my bedside table haunts me, reminding me that I will never, ever live as long as I need to read everything I want to read.  Still I’m always adding to it.  I find myself going through seasons with my reading, though they don’t necessarily follow the calendar.  Last summer I read only US Weekly and poetry; I just could not bear to read a real book.  I’m not sure why.  I read lots of memoir and then I crave fiction.  Etc.  I’m always, always looking for recommendations from others.

My friend Kristen from Motherese yesterday asked for summer reading suggestions.  It made me think I would like to hear from you all, as well, as to what you’re reading and planning to in this season that often offers more wide open space to sink into books.  As for me, I recently read J. Courtney Sullivan’s Maine, which I loved, and Annie Dillard’s Tickets For a Prayer Wheel, characteristically full of grace and thought-provoking imagery.  I am now reading Stacy Morrison’s Falling Apart in One Piece.  I’m furiously underlining and finding myself looking up from the book, gulping, relating to so much of what she writes.  Next up, in no order yet, are Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Jack Kornfield’s The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace, and Andre Agassi’s Open.  I’m also in a big Wendell Berry phase and am finding myself drawn to his poetry right now.

I’m eager to hear what you are reading, and what you plan to read this summer?

the words my body knows

My yoga practice used to be a big part of my life.  Now I go about every two weeks.  This is, for your information, the precise interval for maximum pain and difficulty: it’s hard, I never get stronger or looser, and I am always sore the next day.  I do not recommend this frequency but can’t seem to get out of its rut.

Every time I go, though, my body sinks back into the flow of the asanas with ease.  It’s a long-known language, embedded in my very bones, that I keep forgetting I know by heart.  I know the sanskrit names of the poses and my body finds them – sure, inelegantly, because I am both weak and tight – but it knows just what to do.  I’m always reassured by the familiar cadences of the postures, by the sound of my own breath, and every single time I swear to go more often.

It’s the deep memory that fascinates me, though.  These poses are buried in some fathomless pit inside my physical self.  They have burrowed into my spirit.  A very similar thing happens when I go to church (which I do even more infrequently than I go to yoga).

As I speak the service aloud, the words float up from some deeply-buried place.  The hymns, likewise, come to me from some unknown space of essential knowing.  The lilting language of the prayers of the people, the familiar meter of hymns that I did not realize I knew by heart: all of it swirls around me and creates a feeling of home that is surprising and not at the same time.

These – the yoga asanas, the words of Episcopalian prayers and hymns – are lodged in seam of my soul that is deep enough to be invisible to the eye.  They are part, somehow, of that truth inside my body that I began to recognize more than a year ago.  I wrote then that I don’t understand the meaning of this truth yet, but that I feel a conviction to listen to it, to that throbbing message that pulses in my veins.  I am still not able to articulate it, but I know better than I did before places where I can touch that profound, beyond-logic knowing, and two of them are in the yoga studio and in church.

Are there places like this for you, where you are reminded of a language you know in your marrow and spirit?