Month: January 2012

In the labyrinth

I am reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s beautiful An Altar in the World right now and loving it.  Several different and disparate people recommended it to me and they were all right.  There are many passages that resonate – most of all the section called “reverence,” which is the best way I know how to describe my instinctive posture towards the world.

In the book’s section on groundedness Brown Taylor writes of the ancient spiritual practice of labyrinth walking and I thought instantly of last spring, when Grace and I went to Kripalu.  Together we walked the labyrinth there, and I was startled by how utterly she seemed to sense the palpable peace and – well, reverence – in the air.  I followed Grace in silence, watching her narrow shoulders, her bobbing ponytail, the little freckle at the base of her neck that I remember noticing when she was only months old.

Just like life, Brown Taylor says, the labyrinth had “switchbacks and detours,” and “the path goes nowhere.”  In fact, “the journey is the point.  The walking is the thing.”  I’ve walked the Kripalu labyrinth twice, once alone, and once with my daughter, and both times I found myself doubting, at a certain point in my passage, that the winding back-and-forth path will ever get me to the center.  The center that I can see so clearly and yet, rule-abider that I am, I refuse to simply walk into. Of course, with a little trust and some forbearance, the path eventually got me there both times.

More importantly, though, there’s no actually no eureka at the center.  There’s a pole which says let peace prevail on earth (I was delighted when I noticed that an identical pole stands in the playground of my children’s school), and some small piles of stones, which remind me of the cairns at Walden.  I stood in the quiet center, my entire being prickling with awareness, and then, after long moments of listening to my own breathing (and Grace’s), set back out again on the winding path.  There’s nothing, really, at the center.

The journey is the point.

I am deep in my own labyrinth right now.  Some unexpected switchbacks and detours are causing my faith in the security of the path waver.   That it isn’t the destination I am doubting is evidence of enormous internal growth for me.  I don’t much care about the destination, anymore – after years and years and years, I’ve honestly and truly let go of that.  But I’m feeling the ground under my feet shaking some, and I don’t like wobbling.  So I’m trying to close my eyes and revisit the labyrinth at Kripalu, hear my own breathing and Grace’s, and put one foot in front of the other.  To remember: the walking is the thing.

Unadventurous

There is no question that I am the unadventurous sibling.  I’ve mentioned my sister?  The one who is living in Jerusalem for the year, with her two daughters, ages 5 and 3?  Yes, that one. Apparently many boarding school teachers spend their sabbaticals reading books in a hammock at their lake house.  Not so my brother-in-law and my sister.  Instead they moved their small children halfway across the world to the Middle East.  And whoa, am I proud of her.

On the other hand, I have lived in the same house for 11 years.  A house that is a mile from where my children go to school and less than a mile from the house my sister and I were born in.

Hilary and I grew up in the same world; we are from the same terroir.  In fact she’s the only person in the world who was by my side during those formative early years with me.  It is she who was bundled under the seat in front of me (and my mother) on a transatlantic flight when we were 1 and 3.  It is she who’s standing next to me in so many pictures across Europe, with Another Damn Cathedral (ADC) soaring behind us (you can see that I did not inherit my father’s photography skills: in the photo above we’re standing before the Dome of the Rock.  But I chose a less-than-optimal spot for capturing the moment.  Classic.).

Coming as we do from the same particular soil, one that was intense, challenging, and rich, Hilary and I have a great many things in common.  I’ve always thought we look very much alike, a fact that I think is apparent in the photograph above (which redeems it, in my view, from its lack of excellence in the touristy-shot category).

But there are some big differences, and today it’s this one – the appetite for adventure and risk – that’s on my mind.

I’ve long believed that people are more a product of nature than nurture, so who knows how much of Hilary’s and my differences are innate and how much of them come about through our different reactions to the same circumstances.  But regardless, I look at her and T, and think of the extraordinary experiences they are engraving n their daughters’ early memories, and I wonder why it is that I went so thoroughly the other way.

My father has long held that an international adventure is critical for proper family life.  I know I’m a bit of a disappointment, at least on that dimension.  It’s true that my own personal experience of our transatlantic childhood was not unequivocally positive.  I would never do it differently, but for me the back-and-forth across the Atlantic rhythm had some difficult repercussions.  But of course there were tremendous riches, too.  And when I visit Hilary in Jerusalem, and witness all that they are exploring and learning, I recall only the horizon-expanding moments.

I’ll never know why it is that I responded in such an unadventurous way to my childhood.  I regret it, in some ways, but in others I’m doing just what I said I’d do: stay put.  What I find myself thinking now, in the aftermath of our life-changing trip, is of how I can introduce adventure, particularly of the international sort, into our life without fundamentally changing its structure.  Whit’s godmother, one of my oldest friends, is moving to China this month.  I am dreaming of a visit to Beijing.  Stay tuned.

And Hilary, thank you, as always, for ever, for the continued inspiration you provide for me.

 

Only light can drive out darkness

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Only in the darkness can you see the stars.
Martin Luther King had some good things to say about my current obsession, light.

Last year I posted a few excerpts from MLK’s famous speech, which I make a practice of reading in full on this day every year.  I recommend you do too: his words remain immensely powerful to this day.  Last year, for the first time, Grace and Whit watched the video of him delivering the speech.  They were spellbound, and I plan to watch it with them again today.

…I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream….

…one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers….

…This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

Martin Luther King, August 28, 1963

 

Great and indelible solitude

The silence must be immense where you are living right now, immense enough to allow such tumult of sound and motion. And if you think that in the ocean’s vastness there exists not only the present moment but reverberations of primordial harmonies, then you can be patient and trust the great and indelible solitude at work in you. This will be a nameless influence in all that lies ahead for you to experience and accomplish, rather as if the blood of our ancestors moves in us and combines with ours in the unique, unrepeatable being that at every turn of our life we are.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter to a Young Poet (Paris, December 26, 1908)

From, again, the beautiful blog A Year With Rilke

Holiness

We live in all we seek.  The hidden shows up in too-plain sight.  It lives captive on the face of the obvious – the people, events, and things of the day – to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious.  What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

I went back to my dogeared copy of Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being this week, I’m not sure why.  As I leafed through the familiar pages, these words jumped out at me.  During these days when we wake in darkness and we eat dinner in darkness, when the light is so full of both endings and beginnings, the sun bright yet weak, I am trying to see the holiness spread all over this life of mine.

Some days it jumps out and snaps foil in my eyes, waking me up. How can I miss the beauty in this sky, that was spread out above me on a recent walk with Grace?  If that’s not divinity, tangible in this human world of ours, I don’t know what is.

Or this sunset, seen from my desk.  The sky went deep pink, and I took pictures, and then returned to my computer.  And suddenly, for some reason I can’t recall (maybe I heard car doors slamming and the screeches of my children) I looked back out.  And the sky had caught fire.  If I hadn’t looked over, I would have entirely missed it, as the entire show lasted no more than 5 minutes.  It is impossible not to drop to my knees in reverence, not to feel the presence of something that exists beyond logic – over the horizon – in that sky.  And so I do.

Other days I have to be slightly more aware.  When I parked the car the other day, on my way to an interview on a cold early morning, I could not believe how loud the song of sparrows was.  I looked closely and saw that the bush right by the road, barren and brown, was absolutely full to bursting with sparrows.  I tried to take a picture but of course it didn’t quite capture what I saw.  In the midst of all these dead branches, this fallow world, there is song.