blogging

These are things that speak to me now

I am heavy and full right now, waterlogged with feeling, tired and a bit burned from exposure to the sun, both literal and figurative. The changes of the last month or two are settling in, making themselves at home, and the rhythm of this new reality (albeit an interlude for just this summer, which creates its own anxiety) is becoming familiar. I feel a bit out of words, but also as though there is a tide of them brimming up inside of me, the vague pressure slowly mounting. I hope I can ride this tide to somewhere that has meaning, and peace, and calm. I’ll let you know.

In the meantime, I seek refuge, as is my habit, in the words of others. Today, Meg Casey’s essay, These are things I know now, spoke to me. I’ve quoted Meg before, and I think she’s one of the most exquisitely honest writers out there. Her journey resonates with me and I’m touched every single time I read her words. Maybe what I’m feeling right now is surrender to my empty bowl, to the trust that something essential and life-giving will fill it.

Meg, thank you, as always, for providing solace when I feel the undertow most strongly, for when I feel storm-tossed and run aground at the same time.

These are things I know now – Meg Casey

That sometimes the most beautiful innocence can be born from deep suffering, desperation and ugliness
That nothing is ever one thing and even the most exquisite joy and breathtaking beauty can be punctuated by sadness and loss and even the most heartbreaking grief can be tinged with a rosy kindness
That laughter and silliness and ridiculousness is sometimes the only answer to heaviness
That my heart will whisper to me exactly what I must do next
That angels most certainly must exist
That I have sisters who I will walk with and they will not leave me and I will not leave them because our paths are intertwined whether we like it or not (though we mostly like it)
That love (not sappy silly love by lionness roaring love) is alchemical — it is the magic ingredient and while it sounds so trite its true
That the youngest among us are extremely powerful and hold all the wisdom that we forgot
That miracles are like tsunamis and leave disasterous messiness in their wake and it is a saint’s job to clean up what comes behind, physically hold the wounded together to sutcher their souls.
Saints also bring lemon cake and stand on chairs tip toe to hang paper hearts from the ceiling

One Way or the Other

So, I read a lot of blogs.  We’ve established that.  Still, I have my very favorites, those that I treasure and hold dear, whose words routinely speak straight to my heart.  Heather’s blog, The Extraordinary Ordinary, is one of those very favorites.  It has been such a joy to get to know her in the past year, to have her insightful answers to Present Tense, and to call her my friend.  I feel very much as though I’ve met a kindred spirit in Heather, and look forward to reading many more of her magical words.

I’m honored to share one of her posts with you today.  I adored this post when I first read it, and I’ve returned to it more than once.  I’m sure it will touch you as it did me.

One Way or the Other

There are dust bunnies. So many. They are under the bed and in me, scurrying across the wooden floors of my home and my heart. They are moving much too fast through the empty, bumping into toys and crayons and dried up play-doh, then coming to a weary stop.

It seems no matter how we try to keep up with them, they are winning. So we sweep up only the ones that are out in the open and then we leave the house, coming and going with the living of everyday life.

We could hold them out in the palms of our hands to show that we have them, but the bunnies float and they spin and we can’t seem to catch them. We push them under the rugs to hold them still.

We ignore them.

We force them to unnoticed parts of our cluttered minds, and move on to do the easier, the more manageable and mundane things. We go through the motions.

This thinking I’m doing about dust bunnies and life began the other day when Ryan was playing with the boys on our bed, wrestling. Arms and legs were flailing and there were giggles and shrieks.

Then Ryan’s coffee mug was knocked to the floor by one of those flailing feet or hands. It fell with a crash, shattering off the nightstand and splashing into a large puddle under our bed. Coffee covered the floor and chased the bunnies.

So we stopped the easier things we were doing and lifted the bedside table, we wiped clean the unseen places, sliding as far as we could across the wood floor under the bed, on our bellies, reaching. It seemed like a gallon of coffee under there, dripping down the walls and oozing into the floorboards.

I sighed and sat back as I saw all the other things that needed cleaning while I was there. Something sticky, dog hair, and those dreaded dust bunnies.

The more I look, the less I want to do this, I thought.

We did not rot the floorboards by leaving that mess that seemed too big. Instead, we were knees to the floor, uncovering the darkest places so long ignored. And then the stubborn bunnies rose in protest, making it even harder. Oh, how they hurried and hunkered with each reach of the broom or rag. They fought to find their way back to the darkest corners, annoyed at being forced out and up.

So we tried harder, we took to chasing them down and wiping them out.

We were cleaning up the dark places, together.

It needed to be done.

It’s much easier to walk away from those same kind of ignored places between us, the ones that itch at the subconscious and tug at the heart, the ones swept under rugs. But even when that goes on too long, unexpectedly but certainly, a destructive wind of change will blow in. The kind of blast that forces us to look under the bed and into the dark corners, because of all that shattered glass.

Then we lift up the rugs, letting up the dusty air, revealing what we’ve told ourselves is just fine the way it is when it’s not.

It breaks the quiet that’s not really peace after all.

It pulls the bunnies from under the rug and puts them in the palms of our hands where we cannot deny them, where we have to grasp them and then take them away from our home, from ourselves.

Sometimes we remember to keep working at a clean house, belly crawling and then grasping and releasing before it all gets out of hand.

At other times, we find ourselves strangely thankful for spilled coffee and broken glass, for the overwhelming messes that pull us down to the dark places, to take a look and make a change.

Languages

I grew up in Paris. I went to French school, learned to read in French, and when we moved home my parents said Hilary and I were mostly playing together in French. Point is, I spoke fluent French. These days? Not so much. I can barely remember any words, and I certainly can’t read it or follow conversation. I’m not one of those people who picks up languages easily. I struggle with them. I’ve been thinking lately, though, about how languages can be understood much more conceptually, much more broadly. Language, really, is a way of communicating, right? That can be more than English, French, Spanish, Mandarin.

On Friday morning I went to yoga for the first time in over a month. I was reminded, again, of how my body can flow through the vinyasa series, no matter how long its been. My body speaks that language, by heart. Some kind of powerful spirit and muscle memory takes over and my body just knows what to do. It’s not easy, of course, and I find that it is always, always my shoulders that give out first. Is this because they are so worn out from carrying the weight of the world or a further example of how they are too weak to do that? I don’t know.

The language that I fell seamlessly into on Friday morning is just one manifestation of the myriad ways the body speaks. I know the language of the physical female body, though I can lose touch with it easily. I’ve written before of that sense of something true deep inside my body, something “soaked in blood, and tears, and milk,” something that is one way that intuition expresses itself.  This is the language that whispered in my ear through Grace’s long, difficult unmedicated labor.  It is a deep dialogue between my soul and my body, some message about truth that beats alongside my heart. I speak it, and though I don’t understand it fully I suspect that this language exists beyond the realm of conventional “understanding.”

Another language that operates on the far side of logic is poetry. I speak this language too, where words can be untethered from their ties to the traditional sentence, out past the border of rational thought. Sometimes when I read poetry my heart soars in a way it never does otherwise. The words of Mary Oliver, Jane Kenyon, Sharon Olds, and my thesis poets, Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, and Adrienne Rich have all done this. Poetry can skirt around my brain and access my spirit directly. I appreciate this, especially because of all the ways that my head gets in my heart’s way

There are many languages I don’t speak. We’ve covered that I am lousy at traditional foreign languages. I also can’t read music. I’m tone deaf, and music was always something I was terrible at. I remember in grade school trying desperately to figure out how to interpret those little black ovals riding up and down the pleasantly symmetrical horizontal lines, but I just couldn’t and still can’t.

I can’t read financial statements. This makes me a truly pathetic MBA, but there you go. I truly cannot understand what the line items on a balance sheet or income statement are, and I recently embarrassed myself mightily by confessing that I thought “credit” was the opposite of “debt” – in fact apparently they are the same thing. So a credit fund is a debt fund. Which is bonds. Hmm. Who knew. (Who cares?) You learn something new every day!

On the whole I’m pleased with the languages I do speak, and comfortable with those I do not. For someone as concrete and dogmatic as I sometimes can be, it is heartening to note that I am more fluent in the more abstract, soulful languages of the body and poetry than I am in the specific languages of finance and music. The black symbols on the white page may escape me, but the more colorful, more diffuse expressions speak to me. In truth, this distinction surprises me, and I embrace it.

My detour

I was flattered when Lauren from Embracing the Detour asked me to share the story of my life’s big detour.  The detour that began one Friday morning when, wearing my Madonna-in-concert headset and on a conference call about recruiting plans for the next year, I glanced down at a pregnancy test and saw two pink lines.  I did a double take, finished my sentence about how we should hire more engineers, and then stared at the test, mouth agape in full-blown shock.

That morning changed everything.  Everything about my life but, more importantly, everything about how I see myself and, fundamentally, who I am.

Please go read my story here.  And please stay a while to explore Lauren’s wonderful blog about her own detour.  She inspires me with her commitment to enjoying the journey even as she heads towards a destination that is generally though not specifically clear.  Thanks, Lauren, for hosting my words today.  It is an honor.