everyday life

Summer solstice

Today is the summer solstice.  It is the longest day of the year.  The day out of 365 that holds the most light.  And from here we turn towards darkness again.

I have always felt a connection to the solstices, surely in part due to my family’s long tradition of celebrating December 21st.  But something even deeper than this tradition beats in me.  My soul vibrates with the ever-shifting balance of light and dark and recognizes the importance of its brief, teetering pinnacle (and nadir) on the summer and winter solstice.  I asked my husband recently which was the happier day for me, the summer solstice or the winter solstice.  It was a little quiz.  He got it wrong.

The answer is the winter solstice.  From there we are turning towards the light, moving in the direction of longer days, out of the dark days that takes the most faith.  The summer solstice comes at the very beginning of a season I love so dearly, with its swollen days and evenings of slow-arriving dusk, fireflies and popsicles, sandy toes and children worn out from wonder and the ocean.  But I do find June 21st tinged with sadness.  It reminds me that we are commencing our revolution towards fall and winter again.

I wish – desperately, wholly, wildly – that I could just sit and enjoy a day of my life.  One day.  I wish I could sit by a pool, giggling at my children jumping off a diving board, a glass of white wine in my hand and a dear friend at my side.  And if you were at that pool, that’s what you would see.  That’s what it looks like from outside.  But inside there is an essential crack in my spirit that yawns open, more narrowly or more widely depending on the moment.  This crack – this wound– is always there.

I promise I’m not a hugely depressing person.  I’m not even depressed.  I’ve been there, believe me, and this isn’t it.  I’m actually a fairly happy person. My husband has even noted that I’m funnier in person than anyone would imagine from my writing here.  I guess I try to keep my heartbreak to myself.  But the truth is that even on days like today, a day as gorgeous and perfect a summer day as I can imagine, the longest day of the year, there is a kernel of sadness buried deep inside my experience that I can’t ignore.

And there is still so much here I do not understand.  These are my favorite lines in Adrienne Rich’s deeply moving poem that I publish every winter solstice.  No matter how much I struggle and think and unpack and write, there is still so much that is unclear to me, both within and without, so much that I find perplexing, sad, complicated.  Also, yes, there is also so much that I find devastatingly beautiful, radiantly joyful, and deeply satisfying.  What I am beginning to see is that it is in these knots of tangled meaning that my life actually exists.  I’m slowly realizing that my hope that someday I’ll be sailing smoothly down some clearly-defined path is simply naive.

Last year I said this:  “I realize, again, fiercely, is that this is how I want to live:  in the right now of my life with a broken heart.  I want this, in full knowledge of the pain it carries, far more than I want to keep hiding from my life.”  Reading this avowal reminds me that for all the uncertainty, there are things I do absolutely know.  On a day like this when I want to simply enjoy, it is easy to forget these commitments I make, to myself, to my family, to those I love.  But I won’t.  I will pull out my camera, take some pictures of this glorious day, of my alarmingly tall and lanky and funny and sad children, surrender to the knot of sadness that will gather in my heart as the sun sets, and acknowledge this is what it is to be me in this world.  It just is.

Parts of this post were originally shared on this day last year.  And they are still so true, as I continue my spirals through the same questions, the same concerns, the same sadnesses, the same joys. 

Bumps

I separated my shoulder last fall, part of my brief sojourn in and introduction to the foreign and awe-inspiring land that is pain.  The injury hurt a lot in the immediate aftermath, and it has mostly but not entirely healed.  I’m told that’s part of the deal with separated shoulders: the joint is never quite the same again.  On random days, doing motions I do every day I will experience a startling jolt of pain.  I can never predict when or why it will come.  Also, I have a small but noticeable bump where my collarbone meets my shoulder.  Fortunately my collarbone and shoulder are sort of bumpy in general, so it’s not quite as stark as it might be, but it is still noticeable if you look.  I have a bump and I always will.

After 6 weeks of recovery, I went back to my orthopedist.  I asked him, tentatively, whether the bump would ever go away.  He is a tall, gentle man about my age, and he looked directly at me in the small room.  I’ll never forget what he said next.

“No, it won’t.”  I swallowed.  “But you know what?  If you’re living, you’re going to get bumps.  I have a bump on my shoulder.  You’re 37.  Don’t we all have bumps?  Everybody’s got a bump.”

I laughed it off in the moment, but in retrospect I think there was deep wisdom in this comment.  Of course this moment has been on my mind lately as Grace’s collarbone heals.  She has a small but visible bump that we are told will flatten out as she grows.  It’s on her left side, too, and I find this parallel both totally coincidental and breathtakingly not.

These bumps are just like our scars, outward manifestations of places we’ve been broken and healed.  Whit’s long scar on his leg, the trace of a skidding epi-pen, has already faded from angry red to raised white.  Grace’s broken bone, originally an enormous protrusion from her collarbone, has begun to flatten out and presumably the bones have begun to knit together.  At 7 and 9 my children have already been marked by life.  I myself am a map of scars, internal and external: several different bones healed, spots where suspicious moles were removed, the scar where I was hit on the face by a wine press when we lived in France.

We are all marked by our passage through life.  Some of these marks are visible and some are not.  I think it is valuable to remember the moments and experiences that made marks on us, for better or for worse.  They are part of what shaped us into who we are now, after all.  This reminds me of a passage from Donald Miller’s lovely book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

Last year, I read a book about a man named Wilson Bentley, who coined the phrase “No two snowflakes are alike.”  He is the one who discovered the actual reality that no two snowflakes are geometrically the same.  Bentley was a New England farmer who fell in love with the beauty and individuality of snowflakes…. What amazed Bentley was the realization that each snowflake bore the scars of its journey.  He discovered that each crystal is affected by the temperature of the sky, the altitude of the cloud from which it fell, the trajectory the wind took as it fell to earth, and a thousand other factors.

Big thanks to Erin, who told me she likes her own private collarbone bump for the reminder it is of her brave, tough child self.  I hope Grace feels the same way someday.

Ease

As I sat in pigeon the other day in yoga, listening to my breathing, the familiar mindfulness meditation language rose up in my head: may I be healthy, may I be happy, may I be calm, may I live with ease.  (enormous apologies to Dani, Karen, Katrina, and all of you who can tell me how wrong I have it… that’s how the words come to me, so I’ve decided not to fight it!)

It occurred to me that that was really it: Ease.

That’s what I want.  Everything else I say I want can be folded into this single thing.  I want to live with ease.  To let the clouds of my emotions and reactions skid across the sky of my spirit without overly attaching to them.  To let the weights of sorrow and joy, which are part of my life in near-equal measure, slide off my shoulders rather than staggering under them.

I grimaced as my hips screamed (pigeon is without a doubt my least favorite yoga pose, and equally unquestionably the one I need the most) and tried to return to my breath.  Calm, health, peace, trust, light.  They are all captured by ease.  There was nothing easy about the discomfort – okay, fine, pain – I felt sitting there, my forehead sticky against my mat, my hip burning, my eyes shut as I tried to simply breathe.  This is not ease, I thought, teeth gritted. But it is, almost surely, the path to ease.

I don’t know that I can untangle that paradox yet, but it posits an unavoidable truth: to achieve the life I want – a life with at least some quality of ease – I must head straight into the discomfort and learn to sit there.  Only by facing that which causes pain can I dissemble it, reduce its power, learn to live without such ferocious reactions.

Which brings me back to the breathing and the mantra.  Following those things, hand over hand like palming a rope to lead me through a dark room, seems the only way through.  Through to what I truly, deeply, essentially want: ease.

Roller coasters

I’ve always hated roller coasters.  As in, really hated them.  Last year, on our third day at Disney I finally capitulated to Matt’s endless teasing of me and conceded to go on one roller coaster with him.  Our guide promised it wasn’t “that serious” a coaster.  Sure.  It was all inside, in the pitch black, first of all.  It’s also one of the only roller coasters in the world to go from 0 to a zillion miles a minute in 3 seconds.  No slow clacking ascent for this coaster.  As we sat in our seats, waiting to go, harnesses snapped down over our shoulders.

“Why are there restraints over our shoulders, Matt?” I asked innocently.  I’ve been on many mellow coasters with the kids, which have always entailed a mere seatbelt.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, smirking.

Well, I soon found out we needed the full-body harnesses because we went completely upside down.  Multiple times.  After the ride came to a stop Matt looked over at me sheepishly.  “You’re kind of green,” he ventured.  Then he admitted that was the most hard-core roller coaster he had ever, ever been on.

I still haven’t forgiven him.

So, I still don’t like (serious) roller coasters.  I’m totally fine with the ones where you only have to be 36 inches tall to ride them.  II actually like those.  But the crazy, upside-down, twirling, lose-your-lunch (not to mention your bag, your sunglasses, anything not nailed down) rides?  No thanks.

For some reason I was thinking about that this weekend.  Probably because we just went to Santa’s Village over Memorial Day with our dear friends, and because Storyland and Legoland are on the horizon this summer.  It is easy to ascribe my dislike for roller coasters to my desperate need for control.  Which is real, of course.  My white knuckle grip on the handle of the universe is exhausting, but essential to assure that the earth keep rotating.  Surely this means I hate being strapped into a carriage without any ability to control my speed, direction, or orientation.

But it occurred to me as i thought about roller coasters that there could be another reason I don’t like them.  Perhaps the swooping up-and-down movement along the tracks is simply too close to my own internal topography, which is already a kind of roller coaster.  I climb to outrageous joy and plummet to tearful heartache every single day.  Hell, I do that every hour.  Just inside my own head and heart.  Maybe it’s too overwhelming to also have my body do this.

I know that there is great excitement and learning to be had on life’s roller coasters, both literal and metaphorical.  In 2010 Whit refused to go on anything at Storyland and Legoland.  Literally, anything.  Last summer he gave in to Grace’s determined pleas that he go with her (and me) on the flume ride at Storyland.  He went, wrapped in my arms and frozen with anxiety.  As we neared the top of the rise, as the steep slide down came into view, I gripped him tighter against me, worried about his reaction.

At the bottom, sputtering, our shirts damp from spray, Whit turned to me.  I was nervous to see an expression hovering between terror and awe on his face.  But then, over Grace’s hoots of laughter, he whispered, “Mummy!  My stomach was full of butterflies!”

Yes, Whit, it is.  My stomach is full of butterflies every single day.  Every day of my life I rise and fall, I climb and plummet, I ride a sine curve whose specific contours I neither determined nor can anticipate.  I should focus more on the butterflies and less on the panic and fear.  I will keep trying.

Do you like roller coasters?  I think the world seems to be split into those who do and those who don’t.  If you do, or don’t, why?