everyday life

“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.

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.

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.