books

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.

Libraries Matter

It is my distinct honor to be guest posting at World’s Strongest Librarian today.  I adore Josh’s writing and was surprised and delighted when he agreed to share my reflections on libraries.  Please head over to read my post, Libraries Matter, and then spend some time exploring Josh’s site.  You won’t be sorry!

Hand Wash Cold

I had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of Hand Wash Cold: Care Instructions for an Ordinary Life by Karen Maezen Miller. I was midway through Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Everyday Blessings, which I put aside to read this beautiful, slender book. I loved every word of it, of this book that communicates its deep wisdom in a deceptively gentle way. I say deceptively because it is easy to read, conversationally written, approachable, and yet it is immensely powerful: Karen’s words have already permeated my porous mind, shifted slightly but irrevocably the way I look at the world.

Hand Wash Cold, which is on the surface somewhat unassuming, has in fact the most ambitious and noble goal of all: to change how we live our lives. Karen asserts that life’s grandeur is right here, in the laundry, in the dishes, in the view out of the window above the sink. Admittedly, I’m a receptive audience, as this is the theme I return to over and over lately, the message that the universe is sending me more and more loudly over time. Even so, I adored this book. It is lovely, lyrical, potent, and sage. Actually, Karen’s description of reading the Tao Te Ching is an apt description of how I felt reading this book:

But the words fell inside me, dropped all the way down and echoed back up again. My skin shivered. My heart throbbed.

The words echoed and are still echoing. Karen is able to express the ineffable space of true holiness: the power of attention, the importance of letting go of attachment and judgment, the futility of looking for others to complete our own selves. As I read this book I thought of cathedrals, and of how what Karen has crafted is the opposite of that. Let me explain. Cathedrals awe me: they are ornate, expansively beautiful, often glittering, a celebration of something far away, revered, not fully understood. Faith, however, is something truly different; faith is more intimate. It is right here. It is understood so completely it does not need to be articulated. It is curled in my very chest. Hand Wash Cold is, in my view, a pure expression of faith.

There are so many passages that I underlined, so many sentences that made my breath catch in my throat and my eyes fill with tears. I love Karen’s writing about how we are not our emotions, her head-on confrontation of the things that most of us fear most deeply (they are all going to come true anyway, she posits, rightfully, so why waste the energy?), her articulate distillation of that place that is “beyond the intellect,” and her longing, loving descriptions of parenthood as “complete and inexpressible union with the divine. As I flip through the book, there is ballpoint pen on almost every page, notes scribbled in margins and passages underlined.

There is so much to say about this book, but at the same time I don’t want to lard my review with excess language, to complicate in my words the phosphorescent simplicity of Karen’s message. The message that your life is right here. In front of your eyes. In the laundry. In the mess. Nowhere else. Not even tomorrow. The message is both a challenge and a reassurance: there is simultaneously so much to do, emotionally, and also nothing at all. Just sit here, breathe, and look at your life, Karen seems to be saying. It – and you – are already enough. Thank you, Karen, for these glowing words of wisdom. I will return to them – I already have! – as touchstones, turning them over like secret rocks in my pocket, drawing strength from their smooth surfaces in my fingers. I close with my favorite passage:

Life is suffering. No one can make less of it. Pain finds us without fail. Hearts break; dreams die; hatred flourishes; sickness prevails; people and promises leave without a trace. I dare not trivialize. I only dare to turn toward the glimmer and let it lift me into a moment’s radiant grace. This is the turn we have to take, over and over, to make our way home, to reach the untrammeled peace, the pure marvel, of an ordinary life. We must finally see that the light we seek streams from our very own eyes and always has.

Kelly Corrigan: I dare you

Sometimes the biggest secret women keep is what they really want to do with their lives.

Go on: I dare you.

(I dislike watching video on the computer, intensely, but this is worth it)

The Gift of an Ordinary Day

A beloved blog reader sent me the YouTube video of Katrina Kenison reading from her book, The Gift of an Ordinary Day. Predictably, the video made me cry, hard. I ordered the book immediately and it sat on my bedside table for a few days before I picked it up. And then. I read it, in a couple of long sittings, underlining and nodding vigorously as I went. In the simplest terms, this is the poetry of midlife, and a heartfelt exploration of loss. Kenison describes a vague but growing sense of unease in her comfortable suburban life that reminded me of both Dani Shapiro’s description in Devotion of being pushed from behind and my own deep, restless discomfort.

Kenison describes this feeling beautifully: “Watching my sons growing and changing so visibly, almost from one day to the next, I sensed something inside me breaking loose and changing as well, something no less powerful for being invisible.” She and her husband make a decision to leave their familiar town without being entirely sure where they are going. They move in with her parents and eventually buy a small and falling-down house on a hilltop in rural New Hampshire.

The book traces a summer spent in the cabin on the hill, the decision to raze it and the process of building a new home in the same location. Kenison is a gifted chronicler of the everyday: under her steady gaze the most mundane moments become luminous pearls. She describes a late-in-the-day snowshoe with her son and the way that a sunset brings meaning and color to an entire day, the lessons learned in the careful, rote stripping of years and years of paint from their cottage’s old doors, intended for reuse, and the heartbreaking mix of pride and sadness in watching her older son across a college cafeteria, chatting with sophomores and seemingly already right at home.

The book is suffused with loss. Kenison explores the very same themes that preoccupy me every single day. She wrestles with the impermanence of life, the inevitability of time’s moving forward, and the profound desire to recognize the beauty right in front of her. The project of building a house and of falling in love with a specific landscape becomes a metaphor for finally putting down roots, literal and symbolic. This, of course, entails closing doors and accepting what will never be, which Kenison acknowledges and mourns.

Being alive, it seems, means learning to bear the weight of the passing of all things. It means finding a way to lightly hold all the places we’ve loved and left anyway, all the moments and days and years that have already been lived and lost to memory, even as we live on in the here and now, knowing full well that this moment, too, is already gone. It means, always, allowing for the hard truth of endings. It means, too, keeping faith in beginnings.

Another theme that Kenison speaks about is the importance of making space for her sons to simply be. She describes the difficulty of ignoring the culture’s “siren call” but is delighted about the summer in the cabin when the family does nothing. She is passionate about giving her sons the space to daydream and to become themselves. This is so resonant for me, and of course I am reassured to have such an eloquent and intelligent person advocating the view I share.

As Kenison unpacks boxes in her new home she stumbles upon a pile of old journals. In their pages she rediscovers her old self, from 10 and 15 years ago. She realizes that her desire to live in the moments of her life, to really see the peace and the beauty that she knows is heaped in front of her has always been there.

This, I realize, is what I’ve wanted all along: to be more attentive, to honor the flow of days, the passing of time, the richness of everyday life. Some part of me has always known it, known it well enough, apparently, to write it down, over and over again, year after year. Finally, there is another part of me that’s ready to stop and listen to what I’ve been telling myself, ready to pay attention to what I know.

She knows that she already knows the answers, such as they are. Perhaps, really, there is no single answer, but only more questions. Still, to sit with oneself and to learn what we already know: this is no small feat, no simple task. It takes maturity and wisdom and peace. To be quiet enough to trust what our body, and our spirit, is telling us. Kenison etches this journey in gorgeous, simple words: the faint markings of the first frost on a window come to mind, lit to sparkling brilliance by the sun coming up. Her search is both blindingly simple and the most complicated thing in the world: to know who she is, out beyond the traditional markers of identity (“mother,” “wife,” “publisher,” “writer”) and to recognize that much life’s task is to say goodbye. To those we love, to places that have held us, to versions of ourselves we may have been very invested in.

In the keen awareness of her son’s movement away from her, Kenison hears the call to grow herself. This, of course, takes faith: in the face of fear and change, it would be easy to instead cling to the familiar, to make a shrine of that which has always been known, always worked. But no.

I know I can’t make time slow down, can’t hold our life as it is in a freeze frame or slow my children’s inexorable journeys into adulthood and lives of their own. But I can celebrate those journeys by bearing witness to them, by paying attention, and, perhaps most of all, by carrying on with my own growth and becoming.

That is what this book is. It is a beautiful witnessing of Kenison’s ordinary family life and of her growing sons. It is a record of three unsettled years of moving towards a new definition of home. And it is the commitment of a woman at midlife to continuing to grow, which means letting go of old identifiers and, ultimately, coming home to herself. In moving foward we circle back, we women do, to something that has always been true but that has required a certain amount of life experience for us to be able to see. Doors open and doors close, we move resolutely forward, yet we also dance back to something primal and primitive. We must accept that every single moment is limned with loss.

The transience of life breaks our hearts and also gives them back to us. In letting go of our attachment to the now we are pierced with loss, but we also know something new will come. Kenison quotes Jack Kornfield, “To live is to die to how we wanted it to be,” expressing the interconnectedness of true awareness and painful loss. It is in trusting the journey that peace comes. My favorite line from the book is this one, towards the end:

The future is never ours to call anyway. No matter how carefully we may try to orchestrate or foretell outcomes, there are forces at work in this universe that are far more powerful than any of our human machinations. So be it. We all learn by going where we need to go. Let us welcome the mystery then, and trust that what is meant to be, will be.

Read this book. It will sweep over you like a wave of truth, like the soft morning air at the ocean, like the smile of a good friend. If you are interested in what it means to be a mother, a woman, a seeker of peace and contentedness, you will find much here to love. This is a much, much more beautiful rendering of many of the thoughts and fears that are dearest to my heart. Thank you, Katrina Kenison. Thank you.