Month: July 2012

I hope you dance

Yesterday morning, Grace and I drove Whit to camp.  This week is lacrosse camp for him, and she is home because she heads to sleepaway camp on Thursday morning.  En route, “I Hope You Dance” by Lee Ann Womack came on the radio.  I turned it up.  “Listen to this, guys!  No, really.  Listen.  This is the best summary I know of what I want for you both, as your mother.”

I glanced back in the rear view and saw that they were both listening.  Each was turned, looking out of the window on their side of the car.  Give the heavens above more than just a passing glance, sang Lee Ann.

“Well, we do that, Mummy.”  Grace chimed in.

“We do?” I smiled.

“Yeah, we look at the sky all the time!”  Whit added.  We fell silent again, listening.

I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean came out of the radio.  “I know what that feels like!” Whit laughed.  “When I swim out to the raft, or when we jump off the boat into the ocean, I feel tiny!  Sometimes it’s sort of scary!”  Grace nodded with a faint smile on her face.

When the song came to an end, I turned the radio off.  “What do you guys think that means, I hope you dance?”

“I think maybe it means doing big things, having experiences.  Right?” Grace said.

“Also, taking risks?” Whit offered.

“Yes.  I think it means living life, you know?  Jumping in.”

“Like we do off the boat, or we did at Walden that day?” Whit asked.  I remembered the two of them hurtling headlong into the clear, still water of Walden Pond early in the morning, remembered the peals of their laughter in the morning stillness.

“Yes.  Exactly.”  I blinked back tears.  “And you know, the other line I really, really love in that song is I hope you never lose your sense of wonder.”  The brake lights in front of me blurred.  I peered in the rear view mirror again.  They were both staring out their windows.  I started to say something and then I stopped myself.  I focused on the lights in front of me and I drove.  Grace and Whit were quiet in the back.

After a couple of minutes of silence, I finally said, “I really do hope that, you know.  Probably most of all.  Never lose your sense of wonder.  There’s magic everywhere, and I hope you can always see it.”

Attempts to express the whole

I believe it is often in the smallest details about a person that we best glimpse the whole.  I think Amy Palko, too, believes this.  She wrote about it before (and inspired me to do the same) and she recently shared this gorgeous quote by Hugh McDiarmid on her blog:

So I have gathered unto myself
All the loose ends of Scotland,
And by naming them and accepting them,
Loving them and identifying myself with them,
Attempt to express the whole.

The loose ends.  Oh, I am familiar with loose ends.  The loose ends are my life: my son’s ever-blonder summer hair, my daughter’s sleepy goodnight hugs, the stack of books on my bedside table, the outrageous explosion of hydrangeas by the front door, the broken air conditioning, the lines of poetry that run through my head daily, the way light from an indiscernible source illuminates a sunset sky.  The loose ends are the endless grains of sand that both imperceptibly and irrevocably add up to the contours of our lives.

We are drawn to these specifics, to the naming and identifying and accepting of what we can, as we search for the grand truths.  I for one am always looking, in the small moments of my life, for that whole – for that design so vast.  But why is this where we look? In some ways it is counter-intuitive, right?  To look down, as it were, to see the universe, all the power and glory that spreads above us, in the cracked shell at our feet on the beach.

These small things – these details, these loose ends – are like portals into the enormity of this life.  They are keyholes through which we glimpse that greater reality in which we all exist.   This is not a new idea, of course: the poets have been talking about this for centuries and longer, as Blake did with his world in a grain of sand.

But why do we seek the infinite in the defiantly finite?  I suspect it is because the whole is so extravagantly huge, so inexpressible, so far beyond the realm of our intellect.  It is impossible to draw the logical arms of our minds around the unwieldy, expansive whole.  We have no choice but to seek its reflection in the tiniest things, a bit like Plato watching the shadows on the back wall of the cave.

Isn’t that what this blog is about, in many ways?  More than anything, I think what I do here is polish the small, jagged stones of my life, startled every now and then when I look again and see the gleam of a gemstone.  This is the task of my life: the gathering of loose ends, the loving of them, and the endless, stumbling and imperfect attempt to express the whole.

Your heart is made to break

If you’re really listening, if you’re awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders.

~ Andrew Harvey

With big thanks to the extraordinary Lianne Raymond, my once and forever coach, for sharing this perfect, beautiful quote.

Quiet

I’ve documented here that I really prefer it quiet.  I took me a long time to realize my aversion to music on while trying to read, or write – or really, to do anything other than drive – was a part of a wholesale sensitivity to stimulus, broadly defined.  Loud noises generally either freak me out or aggravate me (the one notable exception is that I love thunder and lightning).  In a house with small children, my desire for it to be quiet is a bit of a liability: I do an awful lot of shushing.  Too much shushing.  But sometimes I just need ten minutes without anyone talking to – at! – me.

This preference for quiet is becoming more and more pronounced as I get older.  These days my favorite evenings are those when I tuck my children in and then sit in silence and read or write.  I have heard people say they find silence when they’re home alone (or, alone without any other adults) unnerving.  For me, it’s the opposite.  There’s something hugely comforting and familiar to me about silence.  I’m sitting in silence as I write this, having just watched the sky wheel through a pale, eggshell-colored sunset, and I feel calmer than I have all day.

The silence sings. It is musical. I remember a night when it was audible. I heard the unspeakable.  – Henry David Thoreau

I read this beautiful quote on Roots of She and thought: yes.  That’s it.  Because silence is not really empty, is it?  It is full of its own music: the humming of my work computer on the desk next to me, the faint notes of the familiar lullabye CD wafting from my son’s room, the barking of the dog next door.  It is also full in another way, because in silence I’m able to hear myself.  It is only when I quiet way down – in every sense of the word, both literal and figurative – that I’m able to really tune in and hear what it is my body and spirit are saying.
Years ago I wrote about the ways that our spirit communicates through our bodies. About a knowledge that is on the flip side of reason, beyond logic, to a place where all there is is belief. Something soaked in blood, in tears, in milk. Something that might – maybe? – be showing me the way towards faith, towards meaning, towards the things, both maddeningly abstract and all-important, that I ache for most powerfully.  I expressed my conviction to listen to the messages that I know throb in my bloodstream. There is more there than the simple beat of my heart. It occurred to me that this sense of something more basic than intellect animate in my own body was another expression of instinct and intuition, and actually the same internal choir I’ve been struggling so mightily to hear.
And I can only hear it when it is quiet.

Photo Wednesday 10: sailing

On Nana and Poppy’s boat, watching as we leave the harbor.  This is the same boat where, last year, they danced before the hurricane.  Those paying close attention will note that we were clearly under motor as the jib is still rolled.  On the way back it was blowing hard and we most certainly sailed.  Just another reminder that the wind that blows us around can shift enormously in a moment.