You carry within you the capacity to imagine and give shape to your world. It is a pure and blessed way of living. Train yourself to this, but also trust whatever comes. If it comes from your desire, from some inner need, accept that and hate nothing.
During September I got several signs from the universe to slow down. And then in early October, another. And so I listened. I took to my bed. For the first week of October I slept. Oh, wow, did I sleep. 8-9 hours a night, and naps every day. I was – and still am – exhausted. I turned inward. I didn’t write. I hardly read anything other than magazines. Mostly I rested in bed, and talked aimlessly to Grace and Whit, and rested in bed some more. And I cooked. I’m doing another cleanse, like the one I did this summer, but this time for a month. So I have to cook a lot. I enjoy cooking, so that’s okay, though the confluence of exhaustion with demands to be in the kitchen was a little daunting.
I’m still feeling very inward. I wonder if I’m contradicting what I just said two days ago, about how we must not hoard our spirit and our love. But I don’t think I am: I am just saying, to myself, that for now, things need to happen at my cadence. Which is different than normal. This past weekend I slept and slept some more. And I went out with the kids twice – once to go apple picking, and once for a notice-things walk in the blooming fall foliage. Each time I had to go home and lie down after, so exhausted was I from the physical, emotional, and mental exertion. But it was gorgeous to be outside.
And, as usual, the words of someone far more articulate and brilliant than I came to my mind:
I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. (Thoreau)
Right now, it’s all about the sky, the trees, the leaves, my children, and my bed. I go out when I need to – for work, for example. But I am feeling fragile and quiet, bruised and wary, sensitive and somewhat sad. What is new for me – when I really think about it, astonishing – is that I don’t feel panicked. I know this is a phase which will pass as surely as the moon waxes and wanes and the tides rise and fall. So I’m just sinking into it. Into the blazing evanescence of the red leaves, into the ready embraces of my children, into the white sheets on my bed. Sinking in. Turning in. And it’s okay.
I heard recently that the our most formative relationships of all are with our siblings. Of all the mesh of relationships that define a person, from childhood to adulthood, the most vital and critical to who we are is that with our sibling(s). Well, if that’s true I am a fortunate woman indeed. In many ways, I think Hilary and I share a bond even more intense than usual, given how often we were in a foreign country with only each other for company. Certainly, as I’ve noted before, she is the only person on this planet who shares the unique terroir that cultivated me into who I am.
And yet, isn’t it remarkable, that grown out of the same soil, two people can be quite different? It seems to me that we’re converging as we age, which is a tremendous joy for me, but still, we are not very much alike. Two of my beloved blogging friends know Hilary well in person, which, I assure you, should elevate them further in your esteem. My sister is probably the best and keenest judge of character I’ve ever known. Her demeanor is somewhat reserved, but don’t ever mistake that for her not paying attention. Behind Hilary’s gorgeous greenish-brown eyes is a brain that is never at rest: she doesn’t miss a single thing. Not with people, not with the world at large, not with books. It was Hilary who busted me for having skimmed Middlemarch so quickly that I missed an entire (important) plotline. She shamed me sufficiently that I went back and read it again, every single page.
Last week, one of my aforementioned blog friends, Kristen from Motherese, was tweeting about Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector. We went back and forth and she observed something about sister-heroines of both Goodman’s book and the Austen/Eliot era. I responded that next to my sister I’m a mental midget. And it’s true. I grew up in the shadow of Hilary’s formidable intellect; but somehow it wasn’t a cold shadow, or a scary one. She has always urged me on, made me read more closely (see above, re: Middlemarch), pushed me to think harder, to articulate more carefully what I think and feel.
I humbly submit this as proof: last summer, we drove 45 minutes each way, with my father and brother-in-law, to visit a famed used bookstore on Cape Cod. This was the entrance hall. It was among the most enchanting afternoons of the whole summer, browsing peacefully, contentedly, next to my brilliant, wise sister.
Hilary is living in Jerusalem this year with her husband and two daughters (ages 3 and 5.5). I read her dispatches about life abroad hungrily, drinking in her adventurous spirit, hoping that with this I can quench some of my own odd, insatiable restlessness. Someone kind recently noted that Hilary’s family’s choice to spend their sabbatical year in Israel is further testament to our parents having raised us “bravely and well.” Reading this brought tears to my eyes. Now that I’m a parent, I stumble daily, and keep a little mental list of all the ways I fail Grace and Whit. I don’t feel brave, ever, and I rarely feel as though I’m doing it well. The more I grow into being a parent myself, the more I appreciate my own parents, and the family they created for both my sister and me. Regularly, I share questions, disasters, and triumphs with Hilary, and having her to share this journey with is one of my great sources of both solace and support.
Naturally, I don’t have any recent pictures of Hilary and me (the one above is from Thanksgiving, 2008). But I do have a picture of our four children, those inheritors of all that pumps through each of our bloodstreams, those non-redheaded children (how? how? how?) who I hope will always be dear to each other. Those siblings who are, daily, in ways more numerous and imperceptible to note, shaping each other just as Hilary so generously and kindly shaped me.
“And in a day we should be rich!” she laughed. “I’d give it to you, the pirate gold and every bit of treasure we could dig up. I think you would know how to spend it. Pirate gold isn’t to be hoarded or utilized. It is something to throw to the four winds, for the fun of seeing the gold specks fly!”
-Kate Chopin, The Awakening
I have loved this quote since reading The Awakening in college (the book featured in the introduction of my thesis) and it has been on my mind a lot in the last few days. I have been thinking about it as something other than a joyful statement advocating spendthrift behavior. I’ve been thinking about all the things that pirate gold is, in our lives, beyond actual gold.
The tiny things – tying cleats, reheating noodles, checking homework, driving to school on a rime-frosted morning, folding pajama bottoms – these are not things to be rushed through so that I can finally get to Life. They are life.
They are the gold flecks of life itself.
Only when we realize that these moments are the gold of life do we fully appreciate the gorgeousness of their flight. And, of course, the startling truth of their impermanence: what passes more quickly than gold flecks hurled into the wind?
I also read Chopin’s words, now, as an exhortation to spend, not to hoard: our time, our love, our energy, our spirit. It’s such a cliche, but I also grow ever surer of its truth: we only have today. So why save up for a future that is unsure? Certainly, one of the basic planks of my personality is frugality, and you’ll never talk me out of that. But I am aware of an instinct, in myself and in others, to sometimes hunker down, preserve, conserve. As though somehow our energy and love are zero-sum affairs. That may be true of energy, as I get older, but I’m sure love is limitless. By spending it we just see more gold shimmering in the sky.
So I guess what I hear now, when I read this long-loved passage, is this: throw yourself out there, as much as you can. And make sure you watch the incandescent gold pieces as they float by. If you blink, you can miss them. So watch.
(the streak of an airplane in the gloaming, observed by Grace on our new tradition, the Noticing Things Evening Walk)
Yesterday morning I attended a talk by Jon and Myla Kabat-Zinn at Grace and Whit’s school. Having read and enjoyed Jon and Myla’s book, Everyday Blessings, I was eager to hear them in person.
Jon and Myla spoke for about an hour about mindful parenting and led the group through some very short meditation exercises. Much of what they talk about – engaging in this moment right now, the primacy of living in the life we already have, and honoring the everyday – is familiar to me. Despite how intimately I know the importance of these practices and the value of this way of being in the world, I still find it very difficult.
At one point Jon asked us to close our eyes and turn our awareness to our bodies, to the feel of our physical selves in space, on our chairs, in this room. I closed my eyes and felt my right hip aching, felt the slight tightness in my chest because my breath was not deep enough, felt the hairs on my arm as imperceptible currents moved through the room.
Jon went on, asking us to hear the silence, and Philip Larkin’s lines leapt to my mind: “And sense the solving emptiness/ that lies just under all we do.” Couldn’t that emptiness also be read as the silence Jon urged us to listen to? The silence that is there all the time, underneath, supporting all of the rest of our life’s chaos. Beneath all of the frantic attempts to avoid the awareness, beneath the noisy thinking that distracts, beneath the shuttling between past and future to avoid staring into the sun of the present: silence.
It occurred to me, not for the first time, that awareness is not my problem – if anything I’m too aware, too porous, too open to all of the world’s input and stimulus. What I’ve been wondering all day is if I developed my distracting monkey brain as a way of escaping the intensity of this awareness. Is thinking, for me, a way of avoiding feeling? I am instinctively, naturally aware – hyper, incredibly, viscerally aware. Maybe my life has been a series of exercises to try to circumvent the sharpness that this awareness can bring. Of course this awareness carries tremendous gifts, soaring joy and feelings so strong I am on the edge of bursting. But it also trails with it sadness, and loneliness, and the brutal, inescapable truth of impermanence.
I’m so fortunate to have thoughtful, engaged readers, and one of my favorite things is hearing from you. At least ten times, and probably more, individual people have sent me (in comments and in personal emails) the same passage by T. S. Eliot. The frequency with which I receive it cannot be dismissed as random coincidence. It’s more like a chorus from the universe, and thank you to all of you who have participated in its chant.
The passage has long been one I’ve loved, too, but today I heard it a new way. Once again, you all knew something before I did: my journey, chronicled here in such exhausting detail, is just back to where I started. What I am doing is chronicling my slow, halting, back-and-forth circling back to the very place I came from. It’s to learning to live with – even embrace – the grandeur and terror that comes of the sensitivity and awareness that is an essential part of who I have always been.
We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring.
Will be to arrive where we started.
And know the place for the first time.
(T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets)
A repost from almost exactly a year ago. Still very much on my mind. I guess you could say I am still engaged in the slow, halting, back-and-forth circling.