books

The Sum of Our Days

A fabulous memoir by Isabel Allende.  I read it a couple of years ago, but turned back to its pages last night for some reason.  I won’t even attempt to say anything that Allende can’t say better herself. Some of my favorite passages:

Never do harm, and wherever possible do good.

All the air blew out of our rage in an instant, and deep in our bones we felt a grief as vast as the Pacific Ocean, a pain we hadn’t wanted to admit out of pure and simple pride.

What does imagination feed on, anyway?  In my experience, on memories, the vast world, the people I know, and also the persons and voices I carry within to help me on the journey of living and writing.  My grandmother used to say that space is filled with presences, of what has been, is, and will be.

Love is a lightning bolt that strikes suddenly, changing us.

The entire tribe was there to celebrate her, and once more I found that in an emergency you toss overboard the things that are not essential, that is, nearly everything.  In the end, after a thorough lightening of loads and taking account, it turns out that the one thing that’s left is love.

And my favorite:

I didn’t know then that sadness is never entirely gone; it lives on forever just below the skin.  Without it I wouldn’t be who I am, or be able to recognize myself in the mirror.

Lift

Today, Lift arrived. I pulled it out of its Amazon cardboard eagerly, turning the slender volume over in my hands. As soon as I had wrestled my children to bed (Whit, despite having been up last night throwing up, despite complaining of being exhausted all day, still went to sleep with the calm and peace of a motorized robot without an off switch). And then I opened the book. And I read it, falling into Kelly’s world for 45 minutes, emerging blinking as though I’d come out of a soothing room with a friend into a bright and cacophonous city street. Lift is a lovely letter to her daughters, Claire and Georgia, a book whose slightness belies the weight of its message.

Kelly’s voice is the same as in The Middle Place: both humorous and serious, somehow light while talking about the heaviest of subjects. She writes clearly, without extravagance or fanfare but with memorable imagery (hair that looked burnt on the ends, razory screams). The book is, ultimately, a meditation on that topic closest to my heart: the way that every moment of life, and motherhood in particular, is shot through with the awareness of the transience of time. Early on she cites a favorite Rilke quote that captures this gorgeously:

“the knowledge of the impermanence of that haunts our days is their very fragrance.”

Sigh. Yes. Kelly uses three stories to talk about the way that risk and loss are woven inextricably through the very fabric of parenthood. She talks about the scare of her second daughter’s infant meningitis, the death in a car accident of her favorite cousin’s teenage son, and her best friend’s decision, at 40, to pursue single motherhood. These narratives, while different, are all animated by the human longing to commit deeply to parenthood in spite of the fact that danger hovers around every corner. They all circle around the same central, unavoidable truth: even knowing how much pain we will cause ourselves, we feel powerfully compelled to take this risk. We can’t help ourselves.

The book’s title and central metaphor is taken from a story Kelly tells about hang gliding. Talking to a friend’s husband about his passion for hang gliding, she asks “what keeps you up?” The friend goes on to explain that the glider is kept aloft by going from “thermal to thermal,” which entails going straight into the turbulence. Kelly expresses confusion, and her assumption that a tiny human being hanging in the sky would want to avoid turbulence. No, says her friend, “Turbulence is the only way to get altitude, to get lift. Without turbulence, the sky is just a big blue hole. Without turbulence you sink.”

And we do, don’t we? We dive into the turbulence. We hurl ourselves into the heart of life, into being parents, despite all of the logical and rational reasons we know we ought to take care. Kelly’s stories illustrate the risks of this. But the rewards, of course, are commensurately (or more) enormous. It’s glitteringly clear that Kelly’s daughters are the most important people in her life. “Mothering you is the first thing of consequence that I have ever done,” she says, and then, later, tells them simply, “You are sacred to me.” Her fierce devotion to her girls, despite her self-confessed weaknesses and propensity to “detonate,” comes through in every line of this book.

My favorite passage in the book is towards the end, as Kelly talks about her dear friend Meg’s decision to pursue pregnancy and motherhood by herself. She muses: “I want her to have this thing I have that’s so ordinary and tedious and aggravating, and then, so divine.” Kelly’s slim letter to her daughters, 82 pages, manages to touch on the grand themes of life: forgiveness, acceptance, risk, faith, passionate adoration. She very humanly describes her own mistakes and with humor she paints a familiar picture of a woman recommitting, over and over again, to being a better, more present, more patient mother. Hers is a profoundly human voice, in awe of the task of mothering even as she acknowledges its immense challenges. Lift‘s words, which speak of both my heart’s tenderest fears and of its profoundest truths, will continue to echo with me for a long time.

Devotion

I’ve been waiting to write my review of Devotion. Waiting in a state of frank reverence as I feel the book permeating my thoughts, my heart, and, dare I say, my spirit. I’ve also been delaying, I confess, because I know I won’t be able to adequately express how powerfully this book spoke to me. Dani Shapiro has created a cathedral of words: her memoir is both spare and intense, glittering and peaceful, pure and deeply complex. Devotion is both an elegy and a profound expression of hope.

Dani’s voice felt immediately familiar. There are many images and themes in the book that resonate with my own experience. She quotes two of my favorite poets, Anne Sexton and Jane Kenyon. She cites the Buddha’s statements of contrast, reminding me of my musing about the way I hold several contradictions in the palm of my hand. She uses the metaphor of time shaping our lives the way that water carves into stone, both imperceptibly and indelibly. She writes about loneliness, and about the feeling of always being “at the edges of any group.” The way Jacob’s illness marked Dani’s experience of motherhood reminded me of the way that my post partum depression has colored everything about how I see parenting. I could go on: there are literally at least 20 places where I felt like I was talking to myself, albeit a more sophisticated, accomplished, beautiful version.

At the outset of the book, Dani talks about a feeling of being “pushed from behind,” about her middle-of-the-night panic attacks, and about how it was “hard work to try and control the universe.” All of these things are so familiar to me they make me simultaneously laugh out loud and feel my eyes well up with tears. My sense of deep unease, however, manifests differently, most often through tears. I find myself crying often, at the slightest provocation or even for no obvious reason at all. Sometimes I open my mouth planning to speak and find tears streaming from my eyes instead. I’m aware of a snarl of emotion, something complicated and tense inside my chest, and it seems increasingly insistent on making itself known.

Dani describes something similar when she introduces the concept of samskara, which becomes a recurring theme in the book.

Yogis use a beautiful Sanskrit word, samskara, to describe the knots of energy that are locked in the hips, the heart, the jaw, the lungs. Each knot tells a story – a narrative rich with emotional detail. Release a samskara and you release that story. Release your stories and suddenly there is more room to breathe, to feel, to experience the world.

I did not know the word samskara, but I know the theory of emotions held in parts of our bodies. I can also remember one specific moment, at Feathered Pipe Ranch in Montana, when after about 20 minutes in pigeon (a hip opener that is probably the single hardest yoga pose for me) I felt my hips literally liquidate, moved probably about an inch further into the pose than ever before, and found myself in floods of tears and lost in a vivid memory of my mother’s best friend who died tragically at 49. For the first time I understood what my yoga teachers had meant about “holding stuff in our hips,” and it is this memory that surfaced the moment Dani started talking about samskaras.

Dani mentions that certain stories are samskaras inside of her, “at the core of all the other stories that are easier to tell.” The image this brought to my mind is of moving through increasingly tangled knots, into the white-hot core of whatever it is that is she is moving towards. As we learn from Devotion (and from life), asking questions leads only to more questions. This is the true fearlessness of Dani’s memoir: she has the courage to enter a deep well of inquiry knowing that there is likely no neat resolution, no single answer, only more, increasingly difficult questions.

At the Boston reading I attended, Dani mentioned how she had spent years thinking that people who chose certain things from different traditions were “cherry-pickers,” and described a childhood infused with a very all-or-nothing approach to religion. Dani’s father’s Orthodox Judaism haunts both her memoir and her life. One of Devotion’s central stories is the way she carefully, respectfully honors her father’s memory while also shrugging off the yoke of this absolutist Orthodoxy. She explores her Jewish roots while also developing affection for aspects of Buddhism and yoga.

As Dani experiments with meditation, she attends a retreat at Kripalu. At the first session, she seats herself by the door, a choice that evinces a lack of conviction about the experience ahead. This reminded me of some yoga and meditation classes I’ve had (some at Kripalu, even) where I could barely conceal my rolling eyes behind my shut lids. But somehow, in spite of all of these defenses, in many cases the power of the practice came steamrolling through for me, as it does for Dani. When I was 20 weeks pregnant with Grace, I attended a prenatal yoga class that I found very self-conscious and overly “out there” – there was too much breathing through our chakras and not enough asana, for my taste. As we lay in savasana, I was literally plotting ways I could escape without drawing the teacher’s wrath when she asked us to go inside and “communicate with our baby.” Somehow my monkey brain fell silent for a moment and I heard a very clear voice in my head say “grace.” My daughter was always Grace (I did not know I was having a girl at the time).

Meeting Steve Cope is central to Dani’s story. I’ve read his book (Yoga and the Search for the True Self) and agree with Dani that it is powerful and thoughtful. Steve’s example is essential in Dani’s gradual movement from an all-or-nothing philosophy of religion to a more pluralistic one. She even begins to realize that this approach, far from being one of “copping out,” may be the most authentic way of truly believing.

As I sat with my new friend, I realized that perhaps he was doing the hardest thing of all: living inside the contradictions. Buddhism, yoga philosophy, the high Episcopalian tradition in which he had been steeped as a child, were all able to coexist for him and create a greater, richer equilibrium. This wasn’t spiritual laziness. To the contrary, it required even greater effort and clarity.

This is one of the major strands of Devotion: Dani’s growing sense that practicing religion as she had known it as a child is not the only way to have faith. She observes that “doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it’s an element of faith.” Dani’s father’s religion left no room for doubt, and for her to let this doubt in and still trust that her faith is real is a significant process. Faith, in fact, starts to mean something altogether new and different to Dani. She refers to the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield’s musing on the possibility of being emptier, more silent, more “in touch with the spaces between words.” Dani says, “The key word was between. When I allowed myself to fearlessly enter that between-place even for a few seconds, I had accomplished faith.”

Another theme that Dani touches on that is close to my heart is of the effort required to truly live in the now. She describes “longing for the moment I was in, even as I was in it.” She recognizes the way that “time can slow to a near standstill simply by existing inside it” and asserts that this is a lesson she “needed to learn over and over again: to stop and simply be.” Yes. It is that for me as well. And, I recognize, probably the most important and urgent lesson of all.

One of the phrases that Dani returns to is the mantra that she learns from Sylvia Boorstein when she is learning metta meditation. It is simple: May I be safe, may I be happy, may I be strong, may I live with ease. This becomes the focal point of her increasingly important meditation practice. Given my very recent reflection on my profound desire to feel safe, this screamed at me. This was yet another way that this book speaks my language.

I am writing a book. It is about how in midlife all of the ways that I understood the world suddenly seemed broken, about how all of the achievements and validation that had given my life meaning up until that point were suddenly void. It is about learning to find out what I want, instead of just doing what the world tells me it wants. It is about tuning in, about trusting that I can learn to hear my own voice again, about faith in myself. I felt like I was listening to a better version of me when I read this:

Once I realized that the things I had habitually used to prop myself up … were as fleeting as a sugar rush, they lost their luster. I had spent years – my whole life! – taping myself together like so many torn bits of paper, bolstering myself up with ephemera. What was I supposed to use to hold myself together, now they were gone?

The conclusion, of course, is ambivalent. There is no single solution. I suppose the key is letting go of the need to be bolstered at all. Letting go, freefalling into the unknown without our usual clearly-articulated identities or firmly-held beliefs, and trusting that we will be caught before we crash. Dani’s exquisite, shining example makes me brave that I might be able to do this.

Devotion is structured as 102 small pieces, and it skips back and forth in the chronology of Dani’s life, telling stories from her childhood, her son’s perilous illness in infancy, her family’s move from New York to rural Connecticut, and the present day. There are searingly vivid images of her father’s devout faith and heartbreaking snapshots of her conflicted, beautiful mother. 9/11 looms over a few of the pieces, as dark and acrid as the clouds that filled the sky for days. This book is very much the story of an entire life, but it is told in a series of circles whose pattern we cannot quite discern. With faith, we simply follow the path, and we follow Dani through her questions, her discovery, her heartache, her truth.

The book’s refusal to close with a neat conclusion or an answer lives vividly in its very last sentence: “Still, we are reaching, reaching.” There are no answers, and Dani’s journey is colored by both the glory of this realization and by its pain. How much simpler would it be to have belief be absolute, utter, final. Of course it is not. But the book does show movement, which we see as a gradual, creeping sense of peace imbues Dani’s words. We sense that Dani has knit together her own personal faith, weaving aspects of different traditions into a singular rope that steadies her. She has accepted her own “samskaras, [her] own contradictions.” This is the faith that I ache for: it is neither simple nor simplistic, but its complexity reflects genuine inquiry, authentic reckoning, and true commitment. The closest thing to a “conclusion” I read in the book is this passage, at the end of piece 90:

Finally, I had my second eureka moment, but this time it didn’t arise from that intense wanting. Instead, it came from a place closer to the core. This is my life, was how it went. My singular, blessed, imperfect, beautiful life.

This kind of eureka moment glows with a surpassing peace, and it is towards that that I am reaching, reaching.

The great Catherine Newman

I’ve been poking through my archives today, leafing through old posts and reading quotations that I want to post again.  These are all by Catherine Newman, who is without a doubt one of my favorite writers – her book Waiting for Birdy is fantastic, and I miss the blog she used to write for babycenter.  Hers is one of the voices I hear in my head, one of the perspectives I hold most dear.

*****

“In the deep of night, I am inclined towards heartbreak. I lie awake the muscle in my chest beating like a metronome, ticking away the rhythm of life’s passing, while outside the cicadas answer with their own clicking, also like a metronome, like a bike shifting gears, like a person in Greek mythology doomed to clip their toenails forever.  I regret every time I’ve spoken sharply to the children, every time I’ve answered curiosity with distractedness, met need with impatience, countered gentle trust with self-importance.  In the night, these occasions spook around me like the ghosts of Bad Behavior Past, hauntingly distorted.

I’m not being hard on myself, not exactly.  I don’t expect perfection.  I know that I have appreciated this journey; inhaled the children’s hair and smiles, crouched down to listen, lay down to comfort.  Every day I have gathered handfuls of my own gratitude and flung them skyward, exalted; I have knelt down in gratitude to press my humble face to its grit.  But oh, I have taken so much for granted.”

****

“Another person is like a geode lined with hidden glittering.”

****

“And I’m remembering an email my friend Brian wrote me a couple of years ago, about his sons: “There WILL be a day when they don’t want to be carried up the stairs … But the idea that the last time will go unmarked and slip away without being cherished just made me so sad.”

I’m trying to hold this in mind when Ben wants me to put his socks on or carry him in from the car when he’s actually still awake or stay with him and Birdy while they fall asleep at night. I feel the familiar ripping-away impulse — the same impulse you might have if, say, a baby had been stapled to your bosom — and sometimes I act on it, whispering, “I’ll check on you guys in a few minutes,” and unwinding the arms that are boa-constrictored around my neck, loosening the very claws of love from the hem of my shirt, trotting out before the poor lonely bed-goers can make their emphatic case for my company. But sometimes I just lie there. Let there not be a last time, I think — a last time that slips away without being cherished.”

****

“I don’t know what to say about this — the way I incline towards sadness, latch on to it as it floats past, ride up into its currents. But it keeps me grounded somehow, however paradoxical that may sound…Looking into the face of loss is like a bell of mindfulness for me. This very heart that pounds sometimes with anxiety — this heart is beating! These very noisy children who make me want to fill my ears with rubber cement — they are vibrantly alive! This very full-to-bursting life — well, it’s life, life itself. “

****

“Sure, there are recurring themes: anxiety and impatience; my chaotic efforts at peace or the way I lumber after gratitude.”

****

“I am still confused sometimes about what it means to be a parent — how much you advise, how much you leave alone. They are yours but also their own. They reflect me and surpass me. I am their trusted shepherd, and it is a privilege to have them in my flock. Love and grief, holding hands and skipping down the lane of my crazy heart. When my eyes fill with tears in the car, it’s joy, yes, but I don’t think it counts. It’s way too bittersweet.”

Abide with Me

I read Olive Kittredge in November and fell in love with Elizabeth Strout’s writing. Kathryn suggested that I read Abide with Me, claiming that it was even more beautiful. The book has been sitting in my stack for a while, and contributed no doubt to my having that hymn in my head in December.

And, wow. The book is, as promised, beautiful. It’s sitting here now on my desk next to me, a used copy with slightly beaten-up pages, and I keep looking at it, wondering at the marvels that can be contained in a slim volume of fiction. In many ways the book reminded me of Gilead. Maybe that comparison is obvious, since both describe in detail the inner lives of religious men, but I think it goes beyond that. Like Marilynne Robinson, Strout’s prose somehow manages to be straight forward and exquisite at the same time. She doesn’t tangle herself in wordy sentences, but her images rise off the page with the power of mirages: I can’t stop thinking about certain lines (“…by summer he seemed like a big tractor being driven by a teenage kid, slipping in and out of gear.”)

Abide with Me draws vivid parallels between the New England seasons of its small town setting and the internal landscapes of its main characters. We go from the splash of late-summer sun on a barn, to the heartbreaking blue of the autumn sky, to the barren, bitter spiderweb of bleak winter branches against a steel gray sky. The book is about nothing so much as it is about the transformative power of grief: the way that loss can change us. The main character, Reverend Tyler Caskey, moves from loss to numbness to powerful redemption. He navigates his relationships with his lost wife, his daughters, his mother, his housekeeper, and, perhaps above all, his committed and challenging congregation.

The book reminded me, actually, of Kelly Diels’ post yesterday about relationships. My favorite lines in her post:

We are all, fundamentally, mysteries to each other. Sometimes we are mysteries to ourselves.
But, I believe, we want to be known. To speak the same language as our loved ones. To be heard. Understood.

This confusion, the deep loneliness bred by the inscrutability of even those closest to us, animates Abide With Me. And when those intimates pass on, leaving us alone with our confusion and loneliness? Then we are left to parse these emotions, often blinding in their mute, dense power, all by ourselves. How to forgive someone when they can’t answer our questions? This is the challenge of Tyler’s life – and, by extension, of all of ours. How can we free someone from the prison of our expectation, of the snap judgments we form about them? Especially someone with as critical and larger-than-life presence as the minister of a congregation? It is not simple, Strout asserts, but it is critical: it is the only way to truly know and be known.

Abide With Me is a melancholy book, shot through with moments of brilliant joy and truth. Strout’s vision of the world is about forgiveness, and about how the inability to give those we love room to be fully themselves hurts us most of all. It is about wounded people struggling to look each other in the eye, and about moving to a new kind of joy once life has handed us great pain and disappointment. A set of lines in the last chapter say it better than I ever could, in Strout’s incomparable language:

Finally, George said, “No one, to my knowledge, has figured out the secret to love. We love imperfectly, Tyler. We all do… I suspect the most we can hope for, and it’s no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.”