everyday life

Walking

I’ve mentioned that things are a bit shaky chez moi lately, with unanticipated changes and tremors, a brand-new and somewhat startling shakiness to the ground.  Last week I felt tentative and edged my way out into the world only when it was necessary.  Other than one dinner out (a celebration with a few of our dear local friends) I have been staying very close to home.  The truth is I am feeling internal again, quiet, and there are only a few people I feel comfortable being with.

I have been working a lot, writing, reading, sleeping when I can (not that well), and curling up with Grace and Whit.  Cooking random vegetables out of the bin that arrives weekly, making my way through Gail Godwin’s glorious Evensong, working slowly on a couple of essays I have in process.

I’ve also been going for walks in the afternoons.  Whenever I can, when I have breaks between calls, I sneak out, bundle up, pull on a fleece hat and mittens and parka and head down the street.  It’s often late afternoon when I go out, so in particular I have been watching the light change.  In the space of a couple of days it suddenly seemed as though the days were markedly longer.  A movement which had seemed slow, almost imperceptible, like the hour hand creaking around a clock, suddenly jumped and made itself known.

I walk and I watch.  I see the light on the trees, the black nests in bare tree branches, the glowing rough-edged moon in the saturated, still-blue sky.  The unfortunate thing, though, is that I seem to go on every walk with myself.  No matter how far or how fast I walk, I can’t get away from myself.  Sometimes I can still my racing thoughts and heart with the abiding calm of a late afternoon in deep winter, but most of the time I can’t. I’m right there with myself.  As it were.

And still, not really knowing what else to do, I keep walking.  Looking up, looking down, noticing things every step of the way, often feeling waves of wonder.  Realizing that no matter what, I can’t outrun myself.  Even as the world turns towards light again, I am, in ways big and small, turning inward.  Who knows how long this will last, this phase of inwardness, this time of late-afternoon walks, this season of anxiousness and waiting, of patience and fear.  I can’t know how long.  So I just keep walking.

 

Close to the surface

One evening last week Whit and I sat in companionable silence in the family room.  He was building a LEGO and I was working.  “Mummy?” At his voice I looked up from my laptop.

“Yes?”  He was perched on the side of the low train table, LEGO pieces in one hand and the other held to his chest.

“I can feel my heart beating.”

“Cool, Whit.”  Why did you suddenly think of this?  The inner workings of Whit’s mind and heart will always be a mystery to me.  Which reminds me, daily, of the vast and essential unknowability of even those we love best.

After a long moment of silence, during which I watched him sit, holding his hand over his heart, he spoke again.  “It feels amazing, Mummy.”

Why yes, Whit.  It is amazing.

The next morning was Whit’s seven year doctor’s appointment.  He sat on the doctor’s examination table in just his jeans, his white chest looking impossibly tiny and incomprehensibly grown-up at the same time.  The doctor pressed his stethoscope to Whit’s back.  He asked him to turn his head this way and that.  He kept listening.  Time stretched uncomfortably.  I glanced at Matt, my anxiety mounting.  What was he hearing?  What was he listening for?  Whit looked over his shoulder at the doctor, sensing, too, that this was taking an awfully long time.  “Whit, turn this way,” the doctor’s voice was stern, his face limned with concentration.

I chewed a nail and watched, feeling my own heart skittering in my chest.  Was last night’s comment a harbinger of this, a prompt by the universe to appreciate the amazement of our hearts beating, of this most taken-for-granted and yet outrageous gift?  I could feel my breath speeding up and I began to awful-ize.  He needs open heart surgery.  I should have paid attention last night, put down my computer, pressed my hand to his chest, noticed the extraordinary beauty of his ordinary heartbeat.  I should have done that years ago.

“Okay,” the doctor cleared his throat and pulled the stethoscope out of his ears.  “He’s fine.”  I exhaled, but only part way.  “But you can hear the whooshing of the blood in his aorta.  It’s something we see rarely in kids, and I kept asking him to turn his head to test if it was that or not.  I wish my med student was here right now; this is rare and it’s cool to hear.”

“But it’s really just normal, and not an issue?”

“Yes, really.  Promise.  It’s just a detail.  It’s interesting, and unusual.  His blood just flows close to the surface, your kid.”  I exhaled the rest of the way and helped Whit pull on his shirt.

After a few more minutes, we walked back to the car.  I thought of a quote I’ve always related to, which I just tweeted recently, by Alan Gurganus: “Her life stayed closer to the skin than most people’s.”  I let go of Whit’s hand and held my fingers against his back.  Thump, thump, thump.  His small heart rabbited against my hand.  It is amazing, mummy.  Calamity is always so close.  We walk the line between ordinary and catastrophe every moment.  Thump, thump, thump.  Close to the surface.

Worn red barns, fresh snow, and birthday candles

It is with my iphone, most of all, that I capture those tiny moments and details through which I glimpse the eternal.  Here are some, from the 7th birthday edition.

The view from the sink at our dear friends’ house in New Hampshire where we spent Martin Luther King weekend.  I remember the weekend when that red barn went up.  Now it is time-scarred and worn.  More evidence of life, leaving its mark on all of us, in ways both visible and unseen.

Reading to a six year old before bed for the very last time in my life.  After putting him to bed I bawled my eyes out.  I know, I know, I know: very ending is a new beginning, and it does just keep getting better and better.  Still, something is ending, and I’m incapable of not mourning that.

On Whit’s birthday I found him standing, silently, in my office looking out the window at the snow.  He was delighted beyond words at the white world.  When we got to school, both kids and Matt made tracks in the fresh, untouched blanket of snow.

The message Whit left in the snow: I’m 7.  It reminded me of our late-summer day at Crane’s Beach, when the children both wrote in the sand and then watched their messages eroded by the inexorably rising tide.

We celebrated Whit’s birthday with dinner at home.  My parents and Matt’s dad joined us for pizza, roast chicken, and salad with homemade croutons (Whit chose the menu).  The birthday boy’s cake request was chocolate, with chocolate icing.

Our front door.  I actually dislike Valentine’s Day, and always have.  I like its decorations, though, and I finally realized it is because I love red and pink together.  This wreath makes me smile every time I come home.

 

The singular and the strange

Yesterday I wrote about the ways in which the universe, in all of its grandiose, extravagant meaning, is often best glimpsed in the tiniest details.  And then, in one of those coincidences-that-aren’t, I read Amy Palko’s fabulous post about “all those tiny details that create an individual.”  I love the way we can glimpse, in the tiniest, most specific things, the whole of who she is.  And isn’t this the only way, actually, to see who someone else is?  The details of their lives – choices, actions, preferences – are the window through which we can glimpse their spirit.  It’s there that we see the hidden geode glittering.

Inspired by Amy’s post, I wanted to share some of the tiny things that exist in the enormous pile of details that make up me.  I would love to hear yours.

  • I can’t drive a stick shift car.  I wish I could, and I’m embarrassed that I can’t.  In a correlated detail, when I was learning to drive I almost pitched our old Jeep directly into the ocean.  Perhaps also correlated: my parents insist that their vehicles be manual, so I can’t drive either of their cars.
  • I’m born in the Chinese year of the Tiger and I’m a Leo.  Despite these associations, I don’t really like cats.
  • I was born 3 weeks early.  I’ve been in a hurry ever since.
  • One day as a child living in Paris, I woke up to snow and shouted, “Mummy!  Mummy!  Il neige!”  To this day I still call my mother and say that most days that it snows.
  • I have 3 pairs of neon running socks that I love and wear almost exclusively.
  • I drink my coffee with rice milk and agave in it.  I haven’t been to Starbucks since July and I don’t miss it one single bit.  I have usually made and set the coffeemaker for the next morning by 5pm the day before.
  • When we lived in London I had such a British accent that often people didn’t know I was American.
  • My son and my sister have the same middle name; he is named after her.
  • My father and my husband are both Geminis, second-born twins, and MIT graduates.
  • I have to have a fan blowing directly on me to sleep.  And a pitch-dark room.  Being a better sleeper is on the very short list of things I would change about myself if I could.
  • When I was 14, in London, I played a fairy on a short-lived TV series called East of the Moon.
  • I am a committed and unshakeable devotee of the Oxford comma.

 Please, please share some of the details – at once minute and essential – of yourself with me!

The universal and the infinite

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

I have known and loved this quote for a long time but I have never read anything by Godwin.  That’s about to change as Evensong is next in my stack.

I think Godwin’s words explain exactly what it is I’m looking for – and seeing – in the black branches against the saturated blue of a January sky, in the small knot of a brown bird’s nest, in the way a leaf stuck to the back of my car window looks like a heart, in the whorl of my son’s ear.  It’s the same thing I look for, and see, in the hearts of others.  It is in the tiniest, most specific moments – the way someone’s hands cup their baby, the kind words in an email, the look in a pair of eyes as they study mine – that I can glimpse the glittery chasm inside of another person.

Isn’t it, actually, in most infinitesimal details that the eternal resides?

Isn’t it the the smallest moments and most minute images that offer us a portal into the extravagant pageant of this life?

I think it’s partly because the universe, either within or without us, is too enormous and complex to be grasped in its entirety.  I keep having the image of not being able to back up enough to get the whole into a single frame.  So instead we turn to the tiniest flowers embroidered in an enormous tapestry, to the smallest manifestations of that gigantic, endless whole that animates our lives.

I take pictures of everything, and I walk around in wonder at the smallest things.  I think Godwin’s words say exactly why.  In those tiniest things I see the universe itself.