everyday life

In the labyrinth

I am reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s beautiful An Altar in the World right now and loving it.  Several different and disparate people recommended it to me and they were all right.  There are many passages that resonate – most of all the section called “reverence,” which is the best way I know how to describe my instinctive posture towards the world.

In the book’s section on groundedness Brown Taylor writes of the ancient spiritual practice of labyrinth walking and I thought instantly of last spring, when Grace and I went to Kripalu.  Together we walked the labyrinth there, and I was startled by how utterly she seemed to sense the palpable peace and – well, reverence – in the air.  I followed Grace in silence, watching her narrow shoulders, her bobbing ponytail, the little freckle at the base of her neck that I remember noticing when she was only months old.

Just like life, Brown Taylor says, the labyrinth had “switchbacks and detours,” and “the path goes nowhere.”  In fact, “the journey is the point.  The walking is the thing.”  I’ve walked the Kripalu labyrinth twice, once alone, and once with my daughter, and both times I found myself doubting, at a certain point in my passage, that the winding back-and-forth path will ever get me to the center.  The center that I can see so clearly and yet, rule-abider that I am, I refuse to simply walk into. Of course, with a little trust and some forbearance, the path eventually got me there both times.

More importantly, though, there’s no actually no eureka at the center.  There’s a pole which says let peace prevail on earth (I was delighted when I noticed that an identical pole stands in the playground of my children’s school), and some small piles of stones, which remind me of the cairns at Walden.  I stood in the quiet center, my entire being prickling with awareness, and then, after long moments of listening to my own breathing (and Grace’s), set back out again on the winding path.  There’s nothing, really, at the center.

The journey is the point.

I am deep in my own labyrinth right now.  Some unexpected switchbacks and detours are causing my faith in the security of the path waver.   That it isn’t the destination I am doubting is evidence of enormous internal growth for me.  I don’t much care about the destination, anymore – after years and years and years, I’ve honestly and truly let go of that.  But I’m feeling the ground under my feet shaking some, and I don’t like wobbling.  So I’m trying to close my eyes and revisit the labyrinth at Kripalu, hear my own breathing and Grace’s, and put one foot in front of the other.  To remember: the walking is the thing.

Only light can drive out darkness

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Only in the darkness can you see the stars.
Martin Luther King had some good things to say about my current obsession, light.

Last year I posted a few excerpts from MLK’s famous speech, which I make a practice of reading in full on this day every year.  I recommend you do too: his words remain immensely powerful to this day.  Last year, for the first time, Grace and Whit watched the video of him delivering the speech.  They were spellbound, and I plan to watch it with them again today.

…I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream….

…one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers….

…This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

Martin Luther King, August 28, 1963

 

Holiness

We live in all we seek.  The hidden shows up in too-plain sight.  It lives captive on the face of the obvious – the people, events, and things of the day – to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious.  What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

I went back to my dogeared copy of Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being this week, I’m not sure why.  As I leafed through the familiar pages, these words jumped out at me.  During these days when we wake in darkness and we eat dinner in darkness, when the light is so full of both endings and beginnings, the sun bright yet weak, I am trying to see the holiness spread all over this life of mine.

Some days it jumps out and snaps foil in my eyes, waking me up. How can I miss the beauty in this sky, that was spread out above me on a recent walk with Grace?  If that’s not divinity, tangible in this human world of ours, I don’t know what is.

Or this sunset, seen from my desk.  The sky went deep pink, and I took pictures, and then returned to my computer.  And suddenly, for some reason I can’t recall (maybe I heard car doors slamming and the screeches of my children) I looked back out.  And the sky had caught fire.  If I hadn’t looked over, I would have entirely missed it, as the entire show lasted no more than 5 minutes.  It is impossible not to drop to my knees in reverence, not to feel the presence of something that exists beyond logic – over the horizon – in that sky.  And so I do.

Other days I have to be slightly more aware.  When I parked the car the other day, on my way to an interview on a cold early morning, I could not believe how loud the song of sparrows was.  I looked closely and saw that the bush right by the road, barren and brown, was absolutely full to bursting with sparrows.  I tried to take a picture but of course it didn’t quite capture what I saw.  In the midst of all these dead branches, this fallow world, there is song.

January updates

I took this picture one afternoon last week, from my seat at the desk where I spend so much of my time.  This second week of the new year feels like it’s all real now, like it’s time to sink into our regular lives again, whether they are defined by new words or not.  I’m feeling uninspired right now.  A few short updates, instead.

1. I’m not much of a resolution person.  Nevertheless, I think it’s really valuable to be reminded of what our priorities are as we launch into a new year.  These glorious words by Jena Strong, on this topic, took my breath away.  The simplest acts of tending, full of meaning, full of metaphor.  Oh yes.  And she quotes these extraordinary lines, suggesting this as one alternative to the standard resolutions, and I nodded vigorously and blinked away tears.  May we all remember to feel the wonder.

Drink the awe
It’s a brutally fast-paced, Facebooked, hypertext-drunk world, my loves, and it’s just ridiculously easy to take it all for granted, to sit there and type your message into your glorious little device and attach a video and send it halfway round the world as you sip your coffee that came from 8,000 miles away and think nothing of it all, when in fact there are roughly 1,008 astonishing miracles banging around your life right this second if you just were able to realize their wobbly gifts. What a thing.

2. I finished a draft manuscript of my memoir!  Yikes.  Scary.  I’m am now looking for an agent.  Wish me luck!

3. It was a huge pleasure to meet a few online friends last week.  Christine Koh from Boston Mamas, Rachel Bertsche from MWF Seeking BFF, and Katie Leigh from cakes, teas, and dreams.  My experience certainly defies that who claim that online friendships are not real, and I have mostly been hugely impressed by everyone I’ve met in person who I knew here first.  These three women were no exception.

4. I’m devouring everything Michael Ondaatje wrote that I haven’t yet read.  His poetry, his novels.  It surprises me, over and over again, that my favorite fiction writer is a man, but there it is.  The working title of the novel I’m working on is drawn from a line from one of his books, and Divisadero is one of the books I love best of all.

5. Grace (and sometimes Whit) and I are in a habit of going for walks around the neighborhood as much as we can.  We notice the nests in bare branches, we notice the houses that still have Christmas (or Halloween) decorations up, we notice the light on trees, we notice the different colors in the sky.  Even in this barren season, of early darkness and raw cold, there is so much beauty.

What are you doing these January days?

September: Trust the tides

On September 1st I took Grace and Whit on a last summer adventure.  We drove about an hour north to the beach.  The day was magical.  It started out with Grace noticing a rainbow in the cloudy sky – not the standard arc but literally a patch of rainbow among the clouds.  I thought of the Tennessee Williams line I love about a complete overcast, then a blaze of light.  The rainbow is always there, even in a sky mottled with clouds.  You just have to look.

We got to the beach early and it was low tide and beautifully deserted.  Throughout the morning the tide came in, creating and then erasing a series of sand bars as it did so.  We spent the day dancing with the inexorability of the tides.  We stood on sandbars until the water lapped at our feet, wondering at how something that can be so seemingly solid – the sand under us – can suddenly disappear into the ocean.  Whit kept shouting about how the sandbar had been “washed out to sea” and I explained that no, the next time the tide went out it would reappear again.  He looked at me when I said this, baffled, but then he smiled, visibly reassured.

Grace and Whit played in the shallow water as the waves came in, noticed how you could feel the water pulling away at sand under your feet as it receeded.  They jumped in the waves, holding hands.  I watched, fighting tears.

Then they built a castle right at the water’s edge and worked at defending it against the incoming tide.  Grace scooped out a moat in front of the castle and Whit piled new sand on top of it.  They giggled as the waves washed over their castle, slowly wearing it down to flat sand.  No matter how hard they worked, of course, the tide won in the end.  But of course we know, with utter certainty, that the tide will turn and go out again next.  May we trust the tides.