everyday life

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.

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.