Month: January 2012

Invisible to mortal sight

I’ve mentioned my father before, the physicist–poet whose influence looms large over me (as does my mother’s).  Well, in a single gesture this week, Dad reminded me yet again of the craggy peaks of his intellect; he read my post about light and responded with an email in which he shared a passage from Paradise Lost.  A passage about light.  A passage I haven’t read in years, a passage that brought to mind long, drawn-out conversations about ancient poetry under magnolia trees at Princeton, a passage that reminded me that Dad has read and re-read Paradise Lost, the whole thing, on his own, more than once.  The guy who has a PhD in Engineering.

You get my point.

Anyway.  I wanted to acknowledge my super-cool Dad, for this generous gesture that tells you a lot about the terroir in which I grew up.  But I also wanted to share a few of Milton’s truly incandescent lines (a word Dad used in his email, one that is one of my very favorite words, reminding me yet again of the continued power of light in my life).  The lines I love best from the (longer) passage that Dad sent me are these:

So much the rather though, celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.

Of course celestial Light, and angels, and the power of faith, religion, and belief are all front of mind right now.  But these lines also remind me of some I recently re-encountered, when Grace read them for the first time.  She actually told me, that night, as I was tucking her in, that she’d read something she really liked.  And she’d thumbed her paperback carefully, found the page, and read me this sentence.  And I blinked back tears.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; What is essential is invisible to the eye.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

I’ve never been afraid to draw parallels between disparate sources (Dr. Seuss and Mark Doty, anyone?), but this one doesn’t actually feel that disparate.  And what these two passages remind me of is that light, as a concept, as a trope, as a way of understanding the world, functions both externally and internally.  As I continue to strive for lightness – humor and laughter – and to sink into the gorgeousness of the shadows and light and dark at play in the sky, I want to also remember the immense importance of that internal light.

I want to honor the spirit’s seeing, which happens by the beam of that internal light.

Jerusalem

I still don’t quite have words to fully describe our experience in Jerusalem.  I recommend Hilary’s reflections, and in lieu of any writing, offer some photographs.

My sister Hilary and I and our families by the Dome of the Rock.  We went to the Temple Mount twice, and both times I was moved by a sense of calm and peace in the expansive plaza that surrounds the beautiful, exquisitely-detailed building.  Looking at this picture I’m struck, also, by the evidence that Hilary and I are, in fact, grown-ups, and that we have created these real live families.  Which, somehow, continues to shock me.

Jesus Christ’s birthplace in the basement of the Church of the Nativity.  Like so many of the high, holy spots in Jerusalem (and in this case, Bethlehem) I was struck by what seemed like simultaneous ornateness and randomness.  We knelt in front of this silver star and touched it, in a small, low-ceilinged basement lit by hundreds of gas lanterns.

Bethlehem rooftops, with a mosque and two churches cohabiting.  And the stunning blue sky that graced our whole visit except for Christmas Day, when it poured all day long (and created an entirely different, but also real, beauty).

Grace and I on the Mount of Olives on Christmas Eve.

Christmas Eve in Bethlehem.  Heavily armed guards and Santa.

Sunset over Shepherd’s Field, where the angels first appeared to tell of Jesus’s birth.  We sat in an ancient church, open to the air, and sang Christmas carols as the sun set.

Christmas morning in a 12th century Crusader church.  The children went forward to light the advent wreath’s four candles.

Mark of Islam against the same glorious sky.  So many of my pictures are of crescent moons and crosses and flags against the blue Jerusalem sky.

Again, the Dome of the Rock.

The crosses of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  Visible in the same frame as the gold dome, if I had had a wider lens.

My son looking up to my father – in so many ways, literal and figurative – at the Western wall.

The prayer that Grace put into the Western Wall.  I left one too.  Praying is saying thank you.

Damascus Gate.  One morning we circled the ramparts around the old city, and explored behind this ornate and beautiful facade.

Inside Jesus’s tomb, from which he ascended into heaven.  I love this picture because you can see the children are praying and I am looking up.  That’s what I do, always, when prayer is called for.  I look up: to the sky, to the stained-glass windows above the altar, just up, up, up.  It’s my automatic instinct.

And so, enriched by a week in December, looking up, always, I go forward into 2012.  Thank you, HTHM.

Trusting myself

Before we went to Jerusalem, I had an exchange with my friend Aidan about how mothers universally doubt themselves.  This is simply and inherently part of the terrain, she said, and I agree.  But for days after our conversation I found myself thinking about those moments – rare, but important – where I have trusted myself as a mother even when the prevailing wisdom said otherwise.  To understand how vital these experiences are to me you have to understand that I was never a “maternal” person – I had never changed a diaper until I had Grace, I didn’t babysit as a kid, and having children was never part of the future I ran so aggressively and directly for.  It wasn’t not part of the vision I had of my life, but somehow it – motherhood – was never an explicit part of my plan.

And then, as you know if you know me or read this blog, motherhood came upon me suddenly, without warning; my pregnancy, a surprise, announced itself the same day that Matt’s father was diagnosed with a terrible illness.  Indeed, Grace’s gestation, birth, and infancy are wound tightly around my father-in-law’s illness and eventual, miraculous heart tranplant.

All of that is to say that I reflect with a very real sense of wonder at the moments when I did trust my own mothering instincts.  I was often not aware of this in the moment, but with perspective certain turning points stand up, insistently, reminding me of the undeniable power of an identity to which I’d never given much thought: mother.

During my labor with Grace, I went somewhere I’ve never been again, to a land of incendiary and incandescent pain, and I knew somehow that she and I were going to be okay.  A more conventional birth environment probably would not have allowed this to happen, so my choice at 28 weeks to move to the midwifery practice at the small local hospital – which was, on the face of it, somewhat radical – is one I continue to be proud of (and amazed by).

When Grace was almost 2 and she had some symptoms that our doctor could not understand.  He sent us to a specialist at Children’s, and she had blood work, x-rays, ultrasounds, a CAT scan.  The doctor began talking about possibility of a brain tumor.  In this midst of this – a time that I recall more than anything as utterly devoid of panic – I decided to switch her from soy milk to rice milk.  I was worried about the estrogen-mimicking qualities of soy.  All of her doctors scoffed at me.  Her symptoms disappeared in 2 weeks, and I’ve been profoundly skeptical of soy ever since.

When Whit was 3 his nursery school teacher was worried about his speech, and was unsure whether something cognitive was going on.  She sent us to speech therapy, where had him evaluated, and the whole time I failed, again, to freak out.  I knew he was fine and he was (and is).  He just speaks – to this day – with a slightly funny accent.  Now it makes us all laugh.

When Grace was 5 (almost 6) she flew on an airplane alone.  She flew from Philadelphia to Boston as an unaccompanied minor.  I put her on the plane (well, I watched her walk down the gangway with a flight attendant) and Matt and Whit met her at the gate in Boston.  Unbeknownst to me, she wrote about it in her kindergarten journal, and I cried when I saw it at our parent-teacher conference.  I received stinging criticism on the playground and from other mothers (notably, not from any of my close friends).  To this day she talks about the experience, evincing great pride and self-confidence about the fact that she did it.

And these days, I follow my intuition every day.  It weaves a narrow path, glimmering, through the overscheduled, overstuffed, more-more-more world of childhood today, and I try to follow it, hand-over-hand, like I’m palming a ribbon.  I take my children for walks, I take them to the playground, we thrill at the small sparrow on the porch.  I worry – I’ll admit it, a lot – that their lack of skills at Mandarin or violin or hockey will be a problem eventually when it comes to applying to schools, colleges, etc.  But even more, I believe in the small still voice in my head that says: protect this time.

Aidan, thanks for prompting this conversation, for causing me to dive into my own memories, to remember anew that I do have instincts here, despite how often I bemoan the fact that mothering does not come naturally to me.

Do you have memories like these, about any aspect of your life, that bolster your trust in yourself?

Light

I have been thinking, for days now, of how to describe our magical adventure, our family trip to Jerusalem, a week full of delights and overwhelm and memories none of the four of us will ever forget.  We experienced things, individually and collectively, that moved us all deeply.

This is the photograph I keep returning to.  Not any of the more glorious ones, of famous sites, of gold domes and flags waving in the cornflower blue sky and 12th century churches, of childrens’ smiles.  It took me a while, but gradually I realized that this photograph asserted itself for a reason: it fits perfectly with my reflections on 2011 and hopes for 2012.

For me, Jerusalem was about faith.  It is a place where the extraordinary power of religion – to render both egregious harm and outrageous beauty – is undeniable, unavoidable, written indelibly on every cobblestone, every mosaic tile, every crying face.  We saw the silver star on the floor marking where Jesus was born and the rock where he was crucified.  We saw people weeping at the Western Wall and the stunning gold dome where Mohammed ascended for the first time.  I stood outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, listening simultaneously to a ghostly choir singing from somewhere inside (above us?) and to the haunting Muslim call to prayer, the two sounds floating on the same incense-scented air, colliding and, improbably, weaving together into nothing less than the sound of faith.

Faith is something I’ve written about a lot.  It’s something I think about in the middle of the dark night, something I lunge for, awkwardly, clapping my hands together, trying to grasp it even as it floats away, something I look for above me, in the clouds, in the patterns of bare branches against winter’s sky.  It is impossible not to be moved by the tangible faith all over Jerusalem, in the relics but most of all in the way faith itself is animate in the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims moving through the streets.

Above all, there was one moment.  On Christmas Eve, we made our way to Bethlehem (for the second day in a row: on the 23rd we’d gone, seen Jesus’ birthplace, walked around the Church of the Nativity).  We walked across the intense checkpoint between Israel and the West Bank, and after a slow taxi ride made the final half mile ascent into Manger Square on foot.  The sun was setting, and the streets were packed with a crowd whose mood seemed to skitter between ebullient and emotional.  I had a child holding each  of my hands.  And then I looked up.  And I saw the end-of-day light on the wall of the Church of the Nativity.  And my heart thudded and my eyes filled with tears.

That was my moment of faith in Jerusalem.  Not the big scenes, the places where pilgrims threw themselves to the floor and wept, the places where I imagined I might feel the presence of a sense sublime … of something far more deeply interfused.  No.  Instead, it was the setting sun on a wall that had been there for many, many years.  A wall that has mutely witnessed tragedies and glories, that has been watered by the tears of the faithful and been subtly shaped by the over-centuries erosion of their handprints.  It was the light.

Last year I chose a word of the year for the first time.  Trust served me well.  The truth is, I’m not sure – for me at least – there’s a whole lot of difference between trust and faith.  At least there isn’t in how I think of them.  I spent a lot of time thinking about trust last year, and while I still struggle with the effort to let go and to believe that everything is unfolding exactly as it should, I feel enriched and calmed by having focused on the word for 12 months.  I wasn’t going to pick a word for 2012, though.  Nothing really came to me.  But then in Jerusalem I kept thinking of this same word, and this picture, out of so, so many, kept pushing itself into my consciousness.  So here it is.  For 2012.

Light.

Light as in less-heavy: I want to laugh more, to remind people – maybe even all of you, and certainly myself – that there are many aspects of my personality that are not stiflingly serious.

Light as in light on trees, on stone walls, on the faces of my children.  Light from inside and light from outside.  The light of sunrise and sunset, whose source I cannot fully understand; this is the light that makes me feel trust, makes me feel faith.  I am already fairly attuned to this light, photographing it all the time and writing about it even more incessantly.

May the light from the Church of the Nativity, which tremendously moved me, stay with me in 2012.  May I never forget that the power in light resides, somehow, in its relationship to darkness.  Shadows exist at the edge where light meets dark, and they are where I have always found the most meaning.  There is no reason to be afraid of the dark.