“This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know; that the soul exists and is built entirely out of our attentiveness.”
-Mary Oliver
(thanks to my friend Stacey Loscalzo for bringing my attention to this wonderful quote)
Month: July 2013
Sturdy joy
Dusk, July 4th, Vermont. Can you see the holiness? Actually, how can one not see the holiness?
It has taken me so long, with this lengthy waking-up process and this endless circling around the spiral of the same questions, the same heartbreak, the same wound, but I am occasionally aware of a sense of joy so sturdy I think I have to call it contentment. The truth is I’m unaccustomed to this kind of happiness.
Untrammelled joy is just not a part of my normal range of emotion. Spikes of overwhelming happiness alloyed with a breathtaking wonder at this world? Yes. Dark moments of despair and equally overwhelming awareness of all the ways in which this life cuts me? Yes. But this sense of steady pleasure at my life? That is new.
And it’s not constant. Far from it. Oh, sadness will always be a part of me, an undeniable part of my personality. I’ve written about the seam of sorrow that runs through me and it is stitched through every moment of my life. But there was a morning recently where I woke up, noticed the particular grey of the sky (it has been a hideously horrible summer for weather here), sipped my coffee, read some blogs I love. As Grace and Whit were having breakfast, before I drove the to farm camp, they started bickering. And it aggravated me, but somehow it felt different. It didn’t disrupt the current of my morning, did not dislodge the sense of contentment that had floated over me in the morning.
Something fundamental has shifted. Daily, I am overcome with the sheer outrageous privilege of living on this earth. That’s not new, but perhaps the accumulation of days has finally come to something, built a base of joy on which I now stand. I’m the same person, and I still cry every single day, and I get snappy and short and frustrated and aggravated. But there is something more rooted, something firmer, as though some essential contentment that has spread over the soil of my soul.
I keep thinking of Annie Dillard’s quote that “Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.” It’s as though I have finally learned to see that holiness, and now I can’t stop seeing it. No matter how bad a day I have, that holiness is always there, and it buoys me.
Do you know what I’m talking about? I feel as though my connection to the world is gradually deepening, and this tether feels firm, solid. I can hold onto it. On the worst days, when all i can do is whisper “thank you” and try to remember that I mean it, when Whit comes to me and looks at my face and asks me if I feel like Temple Grandin (he was very affected by that movie, and immediately understood that the ways in which the world overstimulates her were similar for me), when everything makes me weep, I can hold onto that tether and know that it will bring me back to center eventually.
Waking up
The universe is always speaking to us. That, I believe. I’ve written before about the various themes and totems that have emerged at various points in time: bird nests in bare trees, the moon rising in the late-day sky, hearts all over the place. I also think there is a subconscious message in the quotes and lyrics and poems that come to mind at different moments, as well as in the particular memories we recall.
Right now, what I keep on thinking about, prompted by cues both literal and figurative, is waking up.
I think I am waking up.
Annie Dillard’s line that “we wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery” has pushed itself insistently into my head, over and over again. It’s running across my thoughts like a banner advertisement lately.
And then I read Katrina Kenison’s beautiful words about waking up, prompted by David Whyte’s poetry. I was in tears reading her reminder that “…I can wake up. I can pay attention to the subtle currents of my life, and allow them to carry me in a new direction. I can feel my feelings, rather than avoid them. I can be fully present, rather than half here. I can wake up to the challenges of the journey, the conversation I don’t want to have, my fears about where I’m headed, the truth of who I am, the gifts and and losses of my life as it is.”
Those were the two prompts that established waking up as a theme right now for me, and in their wake it was was Roethke I couldn’t stop hearing: “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.” Yes, there is no question I’m taking my waking slow. It’s been a process of years, hasn’t it? Slow, with many returns to sleep, but here I am, unequivocally awake, with all the undeniable joys and horrors that that entails.
But I am waking up. And there’s no going back to sleep.
Full of mystery
“The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.”
– Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
The ability to course correct
A random photo, both recent and unrelated. Though, really, don’t hydrangeas meet what is in their path and, with mute implacability, correct their course? They wind around looking for light, they change color, and they live on.
I am increasingly convinced that the key to happiness and success in this life is the ability to course-correct. Last weekend, we were in Vermont at a (wonderful) family reunion. I was putting Grace and Whit to bed in sleeping bags on the floor and Grace was tired and cranky. She gave me attitude and was pissy, and, exhausted from a long drive and day, I didn’t have the slack to be generous with her. I snapped back and, with a genuine but short “I love you,” left the room.
About 30 minutes later Matt came down and whispered to me that Grace wanted to see me. He had gone upstairs to get something and had talked to the still-awake children when he was in our room. I walked upstairs and crouched by their sleeping bags. Grace’s face was wet with tears, and Whit looked anxious and somewhat upset.
“Everything okay?” I leaned over Grace and hugged her. Hiccuping, tearful, she told me she was sorry, she felt bad, and she did not want to go to bed angry. She wanted to clear the air, she said. She was sorry and it was the Fourth of July and she did not want to mar it with an argument.
I am not sure I’ve ever hugged her harder. I owed her an apology, too, and I offered it. But I thanked her for having the ability to say hey, let’s put that behind us, let’s not hold a grudge, let’s move on. And I meant it. We hugged and she went to sleep and I went downstairs and all was well.
I thought about the maturity it took for her to say: I am sorry, let’s let go. I thought about the days I’ve ruined by attaching to my own failure to concentrate or to my own wounded ego or emotions. I am sure we’ve all had the experience of something going poorly and of deciding well, hell, it’s all lost. I’m equally sure that the key to success and to happiness – hell, to life – is in the ability to say: you know what? That sucked. I’m doing X or Y badly. But I’m going to let go of that disappointment, hurt, or dismay, and try to move on with a light heart and an open mind.
This is one of those insights, muted rather than blinding but absolutely essential, that this season of my life has held for me. Learn how to let go of our failures rather than to let them bring us down and to let go of how we wanted it to be so that we can have it as it is. Because I don’t want to ruin these days by attaching myself to all the ways that they – and more importantly, I – disappoint me. If I do that I miss their extraordinary, astonishing brilliance.
Really, I think what I’m saying, is that we need to learn to begin again. Every day. Over and over.