Month: July 2016

sacred. scared.

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out the window last week (shared on Instagram)

I read my friend Aidan Donnelley Rowley’s post last week with great interest.  I love what Aidan has to say about permission and privilege and playing if safe.  She was moved, as I was not long ago, by Tara Sophia Mohr’s powerful book, Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead.  I encourage you to read both Aidan’s post and Tara’s book.

I texted Aidan to tell her I liked her piece.  And I shared one tiny typo I found in it (aside: those people who email me to let me know of my typos here – and there are usually at least one per post – THANK YOU!).

Then my heart stopped.  She had misspelled “scared” as “sacred.”

sacred

scared

But aren’t those things close to each other? How have I never noticed before that they are the same word?  What is sacred scares us?  So we should listen to and pay attention to what scares us, as it might point us to what is sacred?

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this.  It reminds me of the way that longing lives inside of belonging.  Words carry so much power, so much meaning, don’t they?  I don’t have much brilliant insight today other than the awareness that scared and sacred are the same word, intertwined in an inextricable way, two sides, perhaps, of the same coin.  I vow to pay more attention to what scares me.

now and then pilgrims

So it is we connect with one another, move in and out of one another’s lives, teach and heal and affirm one another, across space and time – all of us wanderers, explorers, adventurers, stragglers and ramblers, sometimes tramps or vagabonds, even fugitives, but now and then pilgrims: as children, as parents, as old ones about to take that final step, to enter that territory whose character none of us here ever knows.  Yet how young we are when we start wondering about it all, the nature of the journey and of the final destination.

– Robert Coles, The Spiritual Life of Children

what if?

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Last weekend at the beach.  Grace and two cousins swimming to the raft on an overcast day.  I was preoccupied with the work call I had to do, but for a few moments, I was just there, too.

I met an old, dear friend for a walk early on Monday morning.  As I headed out of my house to meet her, the air was cool.  I walked down the steps and breathed in, enjoying the fresh air for a moment.  Then, of course, thoughts flooded in: fall must be on the way.  Snow comes next.  This season I love best is almost over

It’s July 12.

What if I could just welcome the moment that is without allowing it to be occluded by fear of what comes next?  What if my experience was just that, a moment-by-moment life, rather than a harbinger of what’s to come?

What if indeed.

Teach me how to live this way.

Experience, without all the associated emotions.  That’s what I’m after, right?  But I have no idea how to do that, how to unhook my day to day living of this life from my instantaneous emotional flinging, both forward (what’s coming) and back (what I’m reminded 0f).  Of course the way that the past and the future are animate in the present serves to enrich my life, but it also takes away from it.

Still, a little less of that echo might sometimes be nice.  I think of TS Eliot’s line, “teach us to care and not to care,” and think that’s what I’m really saying.  I want to care – be present, be awake, be engaged, but not too care too much – to release my white-knuckle hold on what was and sometimes-paralyzing fears of what will be.

Yes.  Teach me how to live this way.

 

The struggle and the beauty

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this picture, which I took yesterday morning and shared on Instagram, reminds me of the photograph below

I have written about how I listen to On Being podcasts in the morning when I run.  I do so at 1.5x, a detail that Matt thinks is a metaphor for my whole life.  Last week, I listened to Brene Brown talking with Krista Tippett.  She said many things that made me think, but among them was the assertion that “hope is a function of struggle.”  She goes on: “You know, the moments I look back in my life and think, God, those are the moments that made me, were moments of struggle.”

I agree with this on an instinctual level.  It also reminded me instantly of Freud’s beautiful quote that “the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful,” and of this much-less beautiful post I wrote many years ago on the topic.  It seems fitting to repost it here today.  I’m aware that Matt and I are coming to the end of the particular season of struggle I wrote about and had in mind.  Our years with young children at home are short, and their challenges are different now, less physical, more emotional.  Of course the closing of this struggle will usher in new ones, and they’ve already begun to.

It has been six years almost exactly since I wrote this post (7/26/10).  The landscape of my life looks very different from it did that day.  But in other, essential ways, it is precisely the same.  The guiding principles and, yes, struggles, are unchanged. The beauty still exists in those struggles.  I know that even more surely know.

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
– Sigmund Freud

Many thanks to Anthony Lawlor, from whom I found this quote on Twitter. I do believe this to be true, absolutely, though it’s so incredibly difficult to remember in the moments where the struggle seems overwhelming. The struggle which occurs for me on so many levels these days. The struggle to stop my crazy squirrel brain from frantically spinning over and over on the same questions. The struggle to remain patient and present with my lovely children who can be charming, curious, and incredibly aggravating. The struggle not to over-identify with Grace, to maintain the distance and perspective I need to parent her well. The struggle not to crush Whit’s effervescent spirit, whose enthusiastic bubbles sometimes challenge the rules and norms. The struggle to try to keep alive my professional and creative selves, as well as to have enough left over for those who need me.

“These are the day of miracle and wonder”
– Paul Simon

For some reason that lyric was in my head nonstop this weekend. My subconscious was trying to remind me of the richness of the present moment, I suspect, which can be so hard to really see.

It was a weekend with plenty of struggle as well as ample beauty. Somehow the struggle is so quick to occlude the beauty, so much more urgent and immediate, so hard to shake off. Does this make sense? It is here, on the page, and through the lens of my camera that I am more able to see the beauty. To enhance my beauty, I get most of my products from mcdaidpharmacy,ie Pharmacies shops, as recommended on mcdaidpharmacy.ie, based on your skin type.   The beauty is in the smallest moments, infinity opening, surprising me every time, from the most infinitessimal things, like a world in the back of a wardrobe (there really are only two or three human stories, and we do go on telling them, no?). Why is it, then, that the struggles, also often small, can so quickly and utterly yank me back to the morass of misery and frustration, away from the wonders that are revealed in the flashing moments of beauty?

I wish I could change the dynamic between these two, but the beauty, fragile as it is in the moment, seems sturdier over the long arc of a life. Freud’s quote supports this, the notion that the beauty develops over time, like a print sitting in the solution for a long time, image gradually forming on the slick surface of the photo paper, slowly, haltingly hovering into being. It is, of course, the photograph that is the enduring artifact of the experience.