everyday life

11 Questions, 11 Answers

This blogging world has brought me so many gifts.  One of the richest has been The Tribe, a group of creative women who have (foolishly, and I’m still waiting for them to realize their error) included me in their number.  One of these years I will be able to join the annual retreat on the coast of Oregon.  Elizabeth Grant Thomas is one of the Tribe, and if you don’t know her luminous, thoughtful writing, you should.  She writes about many of the same themes that haunt my work (and my life): impermanence and what endures, relationships and family, the fallibility and brilliance of memory.

Last week Elizabeth shared 11 questions and her answers.  I loved reading her stories, about the adorable way her husband proposed, her favorite historical period, and what day in her life she’d go back and re-live.  Then she tagged me in the meme, and I so enjoyed reading her answers that I was excited about answering with my own.

This is how it works:

  • Post the rules
  • Answer 11 questions the tagger posted for you
  • Create 11 new questions to ask the people you tag
  • Tag 11 people
  • Let them know you’ve tagged them

So herewith, my answers to Elizabeth’s wonderful questions, my own set of new questions, and the 11 people I would love to hear answer them!

1. What book has moved you the most in recent history?

I was tremendously moved by Stephanie Saldana’s The Bread of Angels.

2. What’s your favorite way to spend idle time?

Sitting in my bed, with my daughter next to me, reading (separately).

3. Share a silly photo of yourself.  What’s the story?

This was in high school, when my dear friend C and I were in the Dance Concert together.  We also ran cross-country together, and part of why I love this photograph so is that we are teaming up to run a 10K Mud Run in May together.  20 years and 5 children later, we’re back to running in the woods side by side.  I can’t wait.

4. What astrological sign are you?  Do you believe in astrology, or think it’s a bunch of hooey?

I’m a Leo.  I oscillate between believing and thinking it’s hooey.  Fun fact: my father and my husband are both twins and Geminis.  When I was growing up, I thought being a twin was a requirement of being a Gemini, since my father was both.

5.  What is the most memorable meal you’ve ever had?

Several dinners, cooked over a campfire, out in the African bush when Matt and I were on safari in the summer of 1998.  Somehow they conjured the most extraordinary meals out of nothing, and the setting sure helped.

6. Do you believe in fate, or that we’re masters of our own destinies?

This is a tough one for me.  I’m really not sure.  I lean towards the former, because I often sense the hand of something large and ineffable at work, but I also believe adamantly in the power of hard work and good decisions to shape our lives.

7. What is one of your favorite memories from childhood?

Singing Circle Game with my sister and our “four family” siblings, the extended family we grew up with.  We wore white, we stood in line by height, and all eight of our parents watched us with tears in their eyes.  There are also many special memories from my summers at sleep-away camp.

8. If you know it, what is your Myers-Briggs type?  If you don’t know it, would you characterize yourself as an extrovert or an introvert?

I am an INFJ.  100% F, 100% J, closer to the middle on the other two.  I am a big believer in the Myers-Briggs as a framework for understanding ourselves and others in our lives.

9. What is your favorite flower?

Peonies, hands down.  Ranunculus after that.

10. No one can ever believe that I’ve never seen The Princess Bride.  What movie have you never seen that everyone else seemingly has?

Silence of the Lambs.  I’m too scared.

11. What quote or motto best describes how you endeavor to live your life?

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.  (Erdrich)

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work. And when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.  The mind that is not baffled is not employed.  The impeded stream is the one that sings. (Berry)

To miss the joy is to miss all.  (Stevenson)

Did you really think I could pick one?

And so, here are those I “tag”:

Aidan of Ivy League Insecurities
Christa of Carry It Forward
Denise of Universal Grit
Pamela of Walking On My Hands
Lisa Bonchek Adams
Kathryn of Good Life Road
Hilary from A Year On
MK Countryman from My Suburban Life
Katie Gibson from cakes, teas, and dreams
Rebecca from June Carol Claire
Erin from Elements of Style

And these are my questions:

1. What is your favorite book?  Why?

2. What song brings you back most viscerally to a moment in your history?  Where does it take you?

3. Who is your favorite character in fiction?

4. What is your favorite food?  What about foods you abhor?

5. Are you a morning or a night person?

6. What is your default font when you write on your computer?

7. How many siblings do you have?  How many children do you have (as of now)?

8. What season do you like best?

9. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

10. If you practice yoga (even sporadically) what is your favorite pose?

11. When was the last time you cried?

Perfect

This past weekend was difficult.  Tensions ran high, nerves were frayed, voices were raised.  I was reminded, for the umpteenth time, that Matt and I are Grace and Whit’s weather, and though they exhibit it differently they are both keenly aware of our moods.  It’s a big responsibility, being someone else’s sky: when I’m stormy, that has a huge impact on them.  Still, still, I had my camera out, and I was able to unearth a few gems from a weekend otherwise filled with a slurry of sorrow and frustration.

Grace let me braid her hair.  This reminded me of my own childhood, spent often in two uneven braids.  This was the result of several tries; I’m not a good hair-doer.  Still, the braids were perfect.

Matt got home late on Friday night so I took Grace and Whit to our local pizzeria for slices for dinner.  As we waited I turned to shush them and saw that they were (loudly) dancing around the empty room.  My voice, raised to tell them to be quiet (oh, irony, I know) stilled in my throat and tears sprang to my eyes.  It was perfect.

Saturday night Whit would not go to sleep.  He was wired and tired, bouncing off the walls with a frantic energy.  Everything was a chore: trying to get him to brush his teeth, clean up his room, put on his pajamas.  My defenses were (and remain) paper-thin: the mere sight of his big top teeth coming in, where so recently there was a gaping gap, made me cry.  And still, amid all of that, I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw this in the mirror.  It was perfect.

Late on Sunday afternoon Whit and I dropped Grace off at a friend’s house and, needing an escape from the house, drove to the cemetery nearby.  We arrived at our tower to discover that they had just closed it.  Crestfallen, we got in the car, and then Whit asked me to pull over so we could climb down to a pond at the bottom of a ravine.  I did, and followed him as he skipped ahead of me down the narrow path.  The end of the day grew dusky, and I waved away mosquitoes as I watched Whit watching a pair of ducks and a small, silent turtle at the edge of the pond.  Moments of calm descended on me, but I also felt aggravated, and impatient, and aware of an internal thunder whose rumbling I could not quiet.

Finally we turned to head back to the car and made our way back up the path.  Whit trailed me, carrying his “walking stick.”  “Mummy?” I heard him say behind me.  I turned.  “Yes?”  “I really like when we spend time just you and me.”  It was perfect.

One year and one day ago I wrote these words:

I need to trust that as surely as my frustrations and irritations, my guilt and paralyzing panic about missing it rise up, they will ebb away.   These emotions are clouds sliding across the sky of my life, that is all.  This is what I am realizing: it is up to me whether I let these feelings, these moments when I am not the mother I want to be, mar the perfection of this life.  And I won’t let them.  I can’t change, I don’t think, the spikes of agitation and restlessness that sometimes overtake me so fast my head spins.  But I can change how I let them impact my overall sense of my days, of my life.

This life, this moment: it’s all so perfect it breaks my heart.  Every day.

And my emotional sky remains full of clouds, and it’s all still perfect.

The Brita-filler

Not long ago I wrote about a Gail Godwin quote I love:

“The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite.”

There’s so much in this that makes sense to me.  Sometimes I’m struck by a tiny detail about someone that seems to speak volumes about who they are.  For example: more times than I can count, I fill up other peoples’ Britas.  I see them almost-empty in their fridges, and I fill them up.  Why?  I don’t know.  But it says a lot about who I am, I think.

Also: I inevitably, always have the coffee for the next morning all set and pre-programmed by 6pm the night before.  In a related, kitchen-centric detail, I’m an avid clean-up-as-I-go cook.  When I served Thanksgiving dinner to my family last year, every single dish was washed and put away before we sat down.  I cannot comprehend why others don’t do this.

Also: I still make old-fashioned photo albums, every few months printing out a bunch of pictures and pasting them into the pages with the peel-back clear covers.

What does this combination of small things say about me?  I’m neurotic, thoughtful, and sentimental?  Those would all true.

What are some of the tiny but wildly telling details about you?

 

A benediction of what is

“The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” – Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

“What Ruth has known all along: what will happen can’t be stopped.  Aim for grace.” – Ann Beattie (Learning to Fall)

I love both of these passages, which seem to me to be saying different versions of the same thing.  I’ve written before about how I feel I’m circling and circling, sometimes, not making progress enough, saying the same things over and over.  Sometimes this frustrates me, makes me feel stuck.  On other days the message coming at me externally (as in these two quotes, and in the bird I found sheltering in my porch the other night) and bubbling up internally (the aforementioned circling and circling) is so consistent, so strong and powerful, that I realize I ought to just put everything down and listen to it.

This is one of those messages.  In fact, I suspect that, at least for me, this is the message.

Life – grace, beauty, peace, whatever you want to think of it as – is just right here.  And white-knuckling my way through it doesn’t do anything but exhaust me.  Things are unfolding in a way that I have much less control over than I’d like to believe, and the best I can do is open my eyes and see.  Not miss, in my desperate, soul-depleting efforts to manage destiny, the gorgeousness that is at my feet right now.

Remarkable as it may be, the world seems to spin without me personally doing the spinning.  It has taken me 36 years to really learn this.  In fact, if I’m honest, I’m still learning it.  The freedom that comes with letting go is immense, and I’ve tasted it, though I’m not always able to remember that.  The lesson for me is to do so in a more complete way.  Letting go – accepting that what will be will be, as Beattie says, enables a complete shift in perspective: instead of being a lamentation of what is not, life becomes a benediction of what is.

All we can do is show up.  Isn’t this what the poets have been saying, since the beginning of time?  And the priests, too?  Yes, yes it is.  Just by being in this world, banal and brilliant, where majesty and mediocrity coexist in every single moment, we are witness to beauty and grace.  All we have to do is be there.  And to watch.

A repost from 11/11/10.  And yes, I am still circling, still making the same observation, still learning the same lesson.

Alleluia

New questions we have fielded this Easter:

Those crosses that we saw, stacked on the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, what were they?  Oh, people carry them to walk on the same path Jesus took on Good Friday?

When he walked up Via Dolorosa, right?

And then that place in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, that we knelt, and touched the rock… that was where the cross went?  Into that rock?  That’s where he was crucified?  Why?

And then that place we stood in line for, that we lit candles beside, that is the tomb where he was buried?  Where they found linen cloths on Easter, but no body?  Is that where he went to heaven from?

So many questions, so many memories, so many new points of relationship.

This holiday has changed in character and flavor, for all of us, since our December trip to Jerusalem.  Both Grace and Whit noticed how many times Jerusalem, and Israel, were mentioned in church this morning.  Unrelated to that trip but nevertheless contributing to my emotions yesterday is that I had never fully appreciated the importance of the fact that both of them were christened the Saturday before Easter.

Easter, which was always my mother’s mother’s favorite day, has grown to carry enormous importance for me, too.  I have not been aware of it as it happened, but today, in church, it was clear.  Tears rolled down my face as our minister mentioned the babies he had welcomed to the church the day before, on the eve of the holiest and most joyous day of the Christian calendar.  I looked at Grace and Whit, so tall and angular now, and flashed back to when they were babies, wearing my family’s generations-old white christening gown, hoisted above the font.

It is the day of rebirth and of resurrection.  The day that my faith in the vast design is strengthened, the day I can imagine the universe as a soft net, ready to catch me when I stumble.  It is the day that I now experience in a far more nuanced way, for many reasons.

Alleluia.