That design – ferocious wisdom, implacable light, time’s ineluctable unfolding – is too large and brilliant for us to see, though sometimes we can feel the edge of the storm.
– Mark Doty, Heaven’s Coast
Month: December 2015
2015 in retrospect: January, February, and March
Whit turned ten in January.
We had heroic, apocalyptic snow in Boston. That coincided with my annual crazy month at work in a way that made February feel totally separate from real life.
We went to Paris with my parents and my children in March. I love traveling with both my parents and Grace and Whit, and seeing them together on the street where I lived as a small child was indescribably powerful.
My favorite posts:
Her wounds came from the same source as her power
The increasing vulnerability of right now
A blur of otherworldly white
Parenting a tween: an exercise in presence
My favorite quote:
If we want to know what it felt like to be alive at any given moment in the long odyssey of the race, it is to poetry we must turn. The moment is dear to us, precisely because it is so fugitive, and it is somewhat of a paradox that poets should spend a lifetime hunting for the magic that will make the moment stay. Art is that chalice into which we pour the wine of transcendence. What is imagination but a reflection of our yearning to belong to eternity as well as to time?
– Stanley Kunitz
Around here now, my ordinary life
Tomorrow I’m going to start my first of four posts reflecting on 2015. I know! Already! But with that in mind, I wanted to capture what the last few weeks have been like around here, in photographs. Most of these images I’ve shared on Instagram (lemead) with the hashtag #everydaylife, because that’s what they are. By photographing and memorializing the details of my regular old life in words, I hope to remember them, since I know that it’s in the grit that the glitter lives. That was, after all the original purpose of this blog when I started it over 9 years ago.
When I was working on this post I read Katie’s gorgeous piece, Lighting Our Candles, her acknowledgment that ordinary work is a refuge, all we can do, and an occasional source of great joy. I adored her words, and felt deeply reassured by them. They reminded me of my own reflections from years ago that life’s quotidian demands can both hem us in and keep us together.
Katie’s post felt like an exhale, a reminder that I’m not alone, that my sense of rawness and raggedness is both internal and external, that feeling buffeted by the world these days hardly makes me insane. So, with her words echoing in my mind and with my renewed sense that celebrating the small moments is both all I can do and simultaneously the most important thing I do, are a few scenes from around here lately.
What a gift that Grace and Whit still enjoy reading picture books. The Christmas Magic
We put up our tree. As we decorated it, we discussed how some trees are decorated with beautiful, coordinated ornnaments and some are decorated with sentimental ornaments and sometimes those two things don’t coexist. Ours is the latter, they concluded swiftly. That’s ok by me.
I traveled a lot for work the first couple of weeks of December, and one night I was away Matt sent me this photo of dinnertime. I won’t lie to you: it made me cry. But I love it, too.
Finally, some skies, because there’s no faster and surer way to bring me back to right now, to wonder and gratitude, to realizing how very full with beauty this life is. I realize that admiring the sky doesn’t necessarily qualify as the “ordinary work” this post is meant to celebrate, but maybe, in some ways, it does? Looking, watching, seeing, noticing: in some ways those are a big part of my everyday work. I know that now.
Sunset from my office, December 7, 2015.
Sunrise from the air between Boston and Chicago, December 9, 2015.
This is what I have. This is what I see. This is what I feel. In a moment that feel so intensely dark – literally, but also metaphorically – these feel like small, small things. But maybe they are also as big as life itself.
makes the whole planet less lonely
This is not our holiday card, but I sort of wish it was. Totally unrelated to Mary Karr’s beautiful quote, but it’s how I feel this morning, home again after 2 weeks of travel. Exhausted but very happy.
But I still feel awe for us – yes, for the masters who wrought lasting beauty from their hard lives, but for the rest of us, too, for the great courage all of us show in trying to wring some truth from the godawful mess of a single life. To bring oneself to others makes the whole planet less lonely. The nobility of everyone trying boggles the mind …. None of us can ever know the value of our lives, or how our separate and silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world, if only by how radically it changes us, one by one.
– Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir
Stillness in motion
I write a lot about the various lines of poetry and song that come to mind for me, apparently unbidden, and about the mysterious calculus that surely underlines this process. Why am I thinking of certain words at certain times? Sometimes I can’t get specific lines of poems or songs out of my head. For what felt like months at a time, a few years ago, Let It Be was on the radio whenever I turned it on. I love Let It Be, but it being on the radio felt a little less obvious than, say, Bad Blood. It took me an embarassingly long time to realize that probably somewhere, somewhat, or something was trying to tell me to, you know, let it be.
What I can’t stop hearing in my head these days are TS Eliot’s famous lines from Four Quartets (which I re-read last year, and highly recommend, particularly for some reason in this season):
we must be still and still moving
I’ve always understood these poetic words to mean that life is about stillness in the midst of motion. I don’t know if that’s what TS Eliot means, but it’s what it means to me. That life won’t ever actually stop (God willing, not for a while) so what I need to try to do is find stillness, whatever that means, in the middle of constant motion.
December is a busy month for all of us. Right now, for me, what’s creating that busy-ness is work, not social engagements, though there’s also simultaneous pressure to wrap gifts and address holiday cards and trim the tree. It is also the month when I want most to be still. This paradox is at the heart of the dissonance many of us feel at the holidays, I’m sure of it. There’s something magical about all this light in the darkness, some deep-seated longing we have to touch something ephemeral and essential at this time of year. And yet the frantic do-ing sometimes occludes our ability to do this.
I’ve written a lot about the ways our family has pared back at the holidays and tried to simplify how we celebrate and what we do. While there’s more we could do, I’m grateful that we do usually have an opportunity to sit by the tree and listen to carols and drink hot chocolate. I have one more trip ahead of me and then I can settle into home – hours at the computer notwithstanding – until the new year.
This seems to be a lesson I need to keep learning (like so many of them!). There is no slowing down of life, so the slowing down needs to be internal. It’s on me. Only I can learn to still and still moving, but it might be the most important thing I do in my entire life.
And so, once again, I recommit to that. To sitting still, to breathing deeply, to reading with my children, to admiring the Christmas lights, to being here now. That’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it? To the tattoo-I-would-have, to the three words I return to over and over again: be here now.