everyday life

Almost all days have rainbows in them

On Saturday morning Grace and I were puttering around the house.  She was in her room and I was folding laundry, and I could hear her humming “Rainbow Connection” to herself.  They are learning it in music to sing at an all-school assembly that is obviously designed to make me break down in hysterics.  After a few minutes she trotted in and offered me this piece of paper.  My first reaction was to correct her spelling but I bit my tongue and let delight at this wonderful sentiment wash over me.

“Oh, Grace, thank you!  It totally brightens my day.”

“I had rainbows on my mind because of the song,” she explained.

“I know.  I could hear you singing.”  She smiled.  “Do most days contain rainbows, Grace, do you think?”

She glanced out the window at the sleety, defiantly gray late-March day.  Of course she knew I was speaking metaphorically.  “Yes.  Almost all days have rainbows in them.”  She looked right at me, her mouth set.  “Don’t you think?”  I nodded.  “You just have to pay attention to notice them.”

Amen.

I can’t stop saying wow

I almost tripped again running this week in the morning, and I realized there’s a reason I so often stumble on the ground.  It’s because I am so often so dazzled by the morning sky.  The grayish clouds grew pink, lit from below by the rising sun.  As I ran my head and heart thrummed with “Wow, wow, wow.”

I can’t stop saying wow.

I wish there was a more articulate, more elegant word than “wow” to describe the soul-stirring sense of awe that sweeps over me multiple times a day.  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.

Images from a week by the sea

A symphony of blues.

9.5 years since a successful heart transplant.

Our long shadows on a morning walk out to the end of a pier into the ocean.

Caped in towels, they disappear around the curve.

Sunsets every evening over the Gulf of Mexico that took my breath away.

If that’s not sacred, I don’t know what is.

Enormous excitement over the honey badgers at the Naples Zoo.  I swear Whit has not seen the YouTube video, but you’d think he had because his rendition of “honey badger don’t care” is eerily good.

Where I’ve Been

Inspired by the luminous, brilliant, brave, and generous Jena Strong …

Watching my children leap into the pool at their grandparents’ house, the bald eagle on the roof of the building next door, the morning sky cracking open into pale radiance as the sun comes up during my morning runs.

Walking out to the end of the pier into the ocean, our shadows long in front of us on the faded wooden planks.

Listening to Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift on my running mix in the mornings.  And sometimes Selena Gomez.

Feeling tired, and a little bit broken, and lonely, and sorrowful, but aware that we are on the cusp of spring and hoping that is true in every sense of the word.

Admiring, awestruck, sunsets over the Gulf of Mexico full of grandeur and holiness.  And sometimes the flocks of birds that fly, at dusk, across the sky.

Eating macaroni and cheese, grapefruit, Eggo waffles, and Dove dark chocolates.

Writing not nearly enough.  When I do, I’m mostly trying to write fiction.  Stumbling.  Continuing to try.  Working on a couple of essays.  Feeling the pull to this space, here, more powerfully than I have in a long time.

Trying to let go of my white-knuckle grip on life’s steering wheel.  The wheel is one of those artificial ones, anyway, installed in the passenger side, without any actual power to drive.  I know that, but still I grab for it, over and over again.

Reading memoir upon memoir after a novel phase.  Just reread most of the oeuvre of the late, great Laurie Colwin.

Working a lot, and on the whole really enjoying it.  Remembering that my “real job” is something I care about, a lot, for a lot of reasons.

Holding onto the things I know to be true, even as so many things shift around me, even the ground under my feet.

 

Magic

That’s the magic. We have no idea. Ever. We have no idea until the storm passes and we are on our backs in a field ten miles away from home….
Surprise is where the magic lives, between the margins of to-do lists, the aftermath of the eviction notice, the tiny movements on the ultrasound machine….
Or maybe, somewhere, deep within us, sits a pocket of magic. And once in a while, we are given the option to tap into it, to watch from the audience as the rabbit comes bounding out of the hat, free and fearless and full-speed ahead, surprising even the man with the wand.

I’ve been a big Rebecca Woolf fan for years, and I think you should all be reading her blog if you’re not already.  But this most recent post, Magic, struck me even more than her words usually do.  I read it weeping, smiling, realizing that yes, yes, and yes, she was saying all the things I knew but hadn’t been able to put into words before.  She writes about exactly a year ago, the day she found out the third child she and her husband conceived after much deliberation was actually twins.  That was not the plan.  And it was, in the end, magic.  Absolute, utter magic.

And she is right.  There is sheer magic in those surprises, those shocks, those startling moments when we wake up and see life itself shining like foil being shaken in our eyes (shook foil is one of my favorite images for awareness).  However they come – with a thunderclap or a quiet whisper – these moments of magic all remind us that we are not in charge.  We are not pulling the strings.  Instead we are gazing up at a star-speckled night sky, believing in the design even if it is so vast that we can’t see it from where we stand.  That belief – that all this randomness, good and bad and painful and beautiful, adds up to some kind of whole whose meaning is much larger than its individual parts – is magic.

Maybe children see this better than we do.  When Rebecca writes about her son, Archer, it reminds me of my Grace.  He has an uncanny ability to see, and express, truths that far exceed the reaches of most logical human minds.  When I read Rebecca’s poetic musings on magic I thought of something Grace said, just last summer.  I was putting her to bed the last night before she went to sleepover camp for 10 days.  As I kissed her goodnight I could literally sense the churning river of time flowing through the room.  I told Grace I’d miss her, enormously, and that while I knew she’d miss me she should remember that she was having an enormous adventure, and I would be living my ordinary life, which would remain unchanged when she returned.  She leaned back, looked me right in the eye, and pronounced with undeniable intensity:

“Your life is not ordinary.  Your life is full of magic.”

Her words startled me, took my breath away by pointing out something right in front of me that I had forgotten to admire.  By reminding me of the surprise, and the magic, that exists in both the littlest moments and the lightning storms of life.