everyday life

Lightness visible

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“Mummy!” Whit spluttered as he came up, blowing water out of his mouth, his snorkel mask askew.  “Look!” He indicated below where he was treading water.  Simultaneously we ducked under.  I looked over and watched him gazing at the school of fish swarming along the bottom of the ocean.  The wonder was palpable in his eyes.

When I broke the surface I saw Matt and Grace floating on the surface a few feet off to my left.  We were in the Galapagos Islands. The clear, turquoise water was even more extraordinary than I had imagined.  We had just spent 20 minutes only feet away from four baby sea lions who tumbled over each other and themselves in the shallow water at the rocky shore of an island.  Grace had watched them, marveling at how close they were, gasping and exclaiming out loud over and over.  Finally they had swum away and so had we.

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My favorite part of this beautiful afternoon was the way the sunlight slanted through the water.  The tangible beams reminded me of the way you could see light coming through the windows of one of the big lecture halls at college, somehow solid, real, floating with dust motes and years and years of memories.  This light was similarly visible, and I watched Grace, Whit, and Matt kick their way through the slanting skeins.  The bubbles that our kicking created sparkled like tiny diamonds in the water.

I hung back, watching my family swim.  Sometimes, though rarely, I am aware even as I live a moment that it will be one that swells and takes on shape and solidity in memory, something I return to, a touchstone of a season in time.  I have come to think of this sensation as the closest thing I know to grace. It came over me then, in the empty Galapagos ocean. (note: this is different, though related to, the sensation that I’m living, alongside my children, a Life Lesson, like in the hockey rink)

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Grace looked like a long, lean mermaid as, her courage growing, she dove down below the surface, the silvery fish parting as she neared.  Whit’s seersucker swim trunks ballooned around his pale legs as he bicycled in the water.  I kept my head down, watching them swim, the only sound my own breathing through the snorkel.  Suddenly William Styron’s seminal, powerful book, Darkness Visible, came to mind and I thought: this is lightness visible.  In every sense of the word.  The light streaking through the water, the silver fish glinting as they glided over the ocean floor, the glittering bubbles, my children learning something new in a place so far from home I’d described it before we left as the dark side of the moon.

I kept watching, head down, my own breathing loud in my ears, for another long while.  And then we all swam back to the dinghy, climbed in, and headed home to the boat for the evening.

Photo credit: William Rice

Children of the 21st century

I have often discussed the dissonance that comes from staring 40 in the face while still feeling like I’m 18.  Or maybe 21.

But now and then I am reminded that I can’t be that young anymore, mostly when I realize that Grace and Whit really are growing up in a hugely different world than the one in which I did.  I love those lists of things that children of the 70s can relate to, and they always make me laugh.

Grace and Whit, though, are children of the 21st century.  Herewith, eleven ways my children are growing up in a world different than that in which I was a child:

1. They love – in fact, prefer – to talk on the phone on speaker.  This segues nicely into being very comfortable with FaceTiming.  I had a conversation recently with the ear of someone in their 60s over FaceTime because they assumed that you hold a phone to your ear.  I’m somewhere in between these two poles.  We’ve come a long way from the phone on the kitchen wall with the long twisty cord.

2. They don’t think a device needs charging until it is actually dead.  I start looking around frantically for a plug when I’m at about 70%.

3. Their passion for YouTube knows no bounds.  It is almost always the first stop in trying to find anything – music OR video – online.

4. They love scented things.  This may not be generational, but in our house it is.  Grace walks around billowing clouds of Wonderstruck by Taylor Swift.  Me?  Unscented.  Less glamour, sure, but also less choking.

5. Carseats are so integral a part of life in America that cars come with built-in tethers for them.  In our day?  Floating around the “way back” (untethered to anything) was my favorite way to travel.

6. They have never known a world when TV shows were on certain times, on certain days.  Friday night was when Dallas was on, and you had better be there at 8:00 to watch it, or else you were taking a big risk if you tried to program your VCR.  They want to watch something?  They just click to it.  Incredible.  And VCR?  They have no idea what that is.  They don’t even know what “to Tivo something” means.

7. They wouldn’t know what a mimeograph machine is if it hit them in the head.  The smell of those purply-blue print pages, however, takes me back to grade school faster than almost anything else.  Grace and Whit log onto the class Google Drive to check their homework assignment.  I flipped through the mimeographed pages in my Trapper Keeper.

8. Their ability to suspend disbelief is pretty weak.  I see this when we watch old movies – notably, lately, The Princess Bride.  “Those are not real,” Grace scoffed when the rodents of unusual size scurried across the screen.  I blame the extremely lifelike special effects in movies today.

9. Photography is an unlimited exercise for them: we were recently discussing buying a disposable underwater camera, and Whit asked whether we bought memory cards for it.  No, I explained, you had 27 exposures, and that was it.  Both Grace and Whit were frankly aghast at the idea of paying per photograph, of pictures only in hard copy, of having to wait overnight to have your film developed.  In fact, at the word “film” at all.  Totally foreign.  I like digital photography myself, an awful lot, but I do think that we have lost some discernment and care now that a camera roll is unlimited.

10. They don’t know a single phone number.  For that matter, neither do I.  Whereas I can still remember the (home) numbers of my childhood home as well as a few close friends.  Those were the numbers I punched into that kitchen phone with the twisty cord.  Grace and Whit don’t have to remember anything since it’s all programmed.

11. They don’t know how to read a map.  My father always told me that one of the most essential life skills was ability to read a map while traveling.  Now, my aforementioned carsickness often got in the way here, but I do know how to read a map and often joke that I’m one of the last remaining people who prints out maps before going somewhere.  Grace and Whit just assume a destination will be punched into a GPS and we’ll be guided there.

Are you a child of the 70s?  Are you parenting a child of the 21st century?  What differences do you note in growing up now vs. growing up then?

 

 

Poetry and blue sky

Yesterday, we went to Walden.  As you know if you’ve been reading for any length of time, this is a very special place for Grace, Whit, and me, and we like to go year-round.  Every summer we have a morning swim there, and we also like to go in the fall, winter or spring, to walk around the often-deserted pond.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that for us (and, I know, for millions of others), Walden is holy.

We woke up to an empty Sunday.  What a divine privilege these wide-open days are.  I know that now that I can sense their running through the hourglass of years.  We had a quick breakfast, Whit was whining, Grace was annoyed at something, Matt was reluctant, but I kept us moving and all four of us headed west.

IMG_5123The path was iced-over and slippery when we took off around the pond.  Grace and Whit scampered ahead, knowing their way around now, exploring up and down the snowy hillsides that arc away from the pond.  IMG_5091

The beach was snowy and the pond was frozen completely solid.  We arrived at the site of Thoreau’s house, where the pile of rocks, usually studded with cairns, was covered with snow.  I read the famous lines that I know by heart under my breath, watching my children climbing on the pile of snow marking where the writer had lived, feeling the familiar sense of tightness in my chest and hot tears in my eyes.  Yes, this: to live deliberately.  This: to learn what life has to teach.

So many of those lessons are to be found in the achingly blue sky, the brilliant white snow, the tangible peace in the air, the evocative lines of poetry.  There are so many lessons about life right here in nature, and I recalled again how powerful it is to simply be in the world, to look and listen and breathe, a lesson I keep learning over and over again.

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By the time we’d circled the pond and come back to where we started we all had pink cheeks and calmer hearts.  As it always does, Walden had worked its particular, mysterious magic on all four of us.  The poetry and the blue sky had soaked through our pores, through our spirits, and we were reminded of what it is to live this life.

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And I lagged behind my family, watching them walk away, standing on the frozen beach and gazing at that unbelievable, outrageous blue.  This beautiful world.

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Little wonders all around

This blog began, and continues to be, a catalog of my life’s most ordinary moments.  Over the course of years, as I memorialized fragments of my everyday experiences, I realized that they were actually the most lambently beautiful of my life.  I used to regularly write posts about these small moments, when I glimpsed the glitter of divinity, when I remembered, and powerfully, that life is beautiful.

I don’t know why I stopped, but it feels like time for another benediction of the little wonders that are all around me.

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A Wrinkle in Time was my favorite childhood book.  Grace read it last year and Whit just finished it.  Watching my children fall in love with a story that I adored is among the most wonderful experiences of parenting.  Whit in particular loved it and is working his way through the series now.  I think he relates to Charles Wallace in a strong way.

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A glorious sunrise from the sky en route to Chicago for the day.

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A couple of weeks ago I played hooky for an hour to walk to school to get the kids in a blizzard.  We walked home slowly, stopping to play in the rapidly accumulating snow.  Both Grace and Whit were relaxed and joyful.  I defiantly ignored my blinking blackberry and sank into their delight.  There is so much magic here: we just have to let ourselves see it.

IMG_4676I love so many things about the organic geometry of bare branches against winter’s steel-gray sky, but most of all I love the way I can see birds’ nests that are hidden in other seasons.  I am constantly struck by this metaphor: when things are stripped down to their most essential architecture the trust safe spots are revealed, these nests whose existence in a New England winter belies their apparent fragility.  There is sturdy comfort in the most barren places.
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We didn’t go away for President’s Day weekend as I had to work a lot, but we did do a Saturday day trip to our favorite mountain and skiied with some of our dearest friends. I took this picture at the top of a narrow, deserted glade as I watched my children, my husband, and two of the adults I love most ski down. I felt a powerful awareness of how incredibly fortunate I am.

In those moments, like at the top of the mountain or in the air watching the sun rise, I feel a soul-stirring sense of awe which I can express best with the inarticulate and inelegant “wow.”

In the last few months I’ve found this in the skyfire of sunset and in the glow of the moon rising, in the nests in bare trees, in the sudden, noisy song of dozens of sparrows even though I can’t see them, in the long shadows of my daughter’s eyelashes against her sleeping cheeks, in the words of poets and writers too numerous to mention.

Does this constant wow contradict the low note of lamentation that plays constantly in my life?  I don’t actually think so.  Maybe remaining open to the wow necessitates a permeability of spirit that means I’m also open to a certain sorrow.  These are the two edges of the world’s beauty that Virginia Woolf described, anguish and laughter springing from the same single truth.  I suspect I’m just joining my voice to an ancient chorus here, kneeling in supplication among a swirling sea of humanity.  And we all whisper the same thing under our breath:

wow.

(I wrote parts of this in in April 2012, and every word is still true)

All you ever have

photo 3Sunday morning.

Much of the time, our family of four functions fairly smoothly.  Sometimes, though, we don’t.  Some days everybody’s edges feel especially jagged and as we rub up against each other emotions protrude and tempers flare.  Yesterday morning was one of those times.  All was not well at the homestead.  Matt and Grace left to do an errand.  Whit busied himself building something with Legos and blocks.  I put in a load of laundry, emptied the trash cans, finally sorted through the holiday cards (March 2nd seems like time).  I felt a familiar restlessness running under my skin.

Finally I went upstairs to our family room, lay down on the couch, and watched Whit.  He was building a luge track using blocks, legos, clipboards, and small rubber tires.  It was elaborate, and he kept testing and adjusting, testing and adjusting.  I glanced out the window at the tree that has accompanied me through the last 13 years, remembering sitting in this very room nursing a colicky baby Grace and watching dawn spread across the sky through the tree’s familiar branches.

As often happens, I felt the years between then and now collapse in on each other, telescoping into a tunnel of memory and loss.  My eyes filled with tears as I watched Whit play, overcome suddenly with emotions more complicated than I can fully parse or name.  I felt gratitude for this life, this boy, these bright Legos, this warm room, the years I’ve been able to be Grace and Whit’s mother.  I felt guilt for all the hours and days and weeks I have failed to appreciate, all the times I was distracted and short and not present enough.  I felt awareness of all that was over so keenly it felt like a physical pain in my chest.  I felt the frantic and dizzying sensation of time slipping through my fingers even as I try to grasp on.

What I didn’t feel, though, as I swam in that tearful wave of thankfulness and sorrow, was any of the frustration and aggravation that had marked the first hours of my day.  By sinking into the now of my life, by watching Whit carefully, by breathing and just being, I had touched again the hem of heaven, reminded myself of what matters, of all the divinity that glints through our daily lives like mica glittering in the concrete pavement.

My phone, which I’d forgotten was on the table next to the couch, beeped.  I glanced over.  My best friend from high school, a woman I see not nearly enough but still love fiercely, had texted me this quote.

The tears that had threatened to fall did so now, slipping down my cheeks. Thank you, universe.  Thank you friends and children and love and trees and everything about this daily life.  Thank you.

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