everyday life

Turning inward

During September I got several signs from the universe to slow down.  And then in early October, another.  And so I listened.  I took to my bed.  For the first week of October I slept.  Oh, wow, did I sleep.  8-9 hours a night, and naps every day.  I was – and still am – exhausted.  I turned inward.  I didn’t write.  I hardly read anything other than magazines.  Mostly I rested in bed, and talked aimlessly to Grace and Whit, and  rested in bed some more.  And I cooked.  I’m doing another cleanse, like the one I did this summer, but this time for a month.  So I have to cook a lot.  I enjoy cooking, so that’s okay, though the confluence of exhaustion with demands to be in the kitchen was a little daunting.

I’m still feeling very inward.  I wonder if I’m contradicting what I just said two days ago, about how we must not hoard our spirit and our love.  But I don’t think I am: I am just saying, to myself, that for now, things need to happen at my cadence.  Which is different than normal.  This past weekend I slept and slept some more.  And I went out with the kids twice – once to go apple picking, and once for a notice-things walk in the blooming fall foliage.  Each time I had to go home and lie down after, so exhausted was I from the physical, emotional, and mental exertion.  But it was gorgeous to be outside.

And, as usual, the words of someone far more articulate and brilliant than I came to my mind:

I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. (Thoreau)

Right now, it’s all about the sky, the trees, the leaves, my children, and my bed.  I go out when I need to – for work, for example.  But I am feeling fragile and quiet, bruised and wary, sensitive and somewhat sad.  What is new for me – when I really think about it, astonishing – is that I don’t feel panicked.  I know this is a phase which will pass as surely as the moon waxes and wanes and the tides rise and fall.  So I’m just sinking into it.  Into the blazing evanescence of the red leaves, into the ready embraces of my children, into the white sheets on my bed.  Sinking in.  Turning in.  And it’s okay.

Flecks of gold

“And in a day we should be rich!” she laughed. “I’d give it to you, the pirate gold and every bit of treasure we could dig up. I think you would know how to spend it. Pirate gold isn’t to be hoarded or utilized. It is something to throw to the four winds, for the fun of seeing the gold specks fly!”

-Kate Chopin, The Awakening

I have loved this quote since reading The Awakening in college (the book featured in the introduction of my thesis) and it has been on my mind a lot in the last few days.  I have been thinking about it as something other than a joyful statement advocating spendthrift behavior.  I’ve been thinking about all the things that pirate gold is, in our lives, beyond actual gold.

The tiny things – tying cleats, reheating noodles, checking homework, driving to school on a rime-frosted morning, folding pajama bottoms – these are not things to be rushed through so that I can finally get to Life.  They are life.

They are the gold flecks of life itself.

Only when we realize that these moments are the gold of life do we fully appreciate the gorgeousness of their flight.  And, of course, the startling truth of their impermanence: what passes more quickly than gold flecks hurled into the wind?

I also read Chopin’s words, now, as an exhortation to spend, not to hoard: our time, our love, our energy, our spirit.  It’s such a cliche, but I also grow ever surer of its truth: we only have today.  So why save up for a future that is unsure?  Certainly, one of the basic planks of my personality is frugality, and you’ll never talk me out of that.  But I am aware of an instinct, in myself and in others, to sometimes hunker down, preserve, conserve.  As though somehow our energy and love are zero-sum affairs.  That may be true of energy, as I get older, but I’m sure love is limitless.  By spending it we just see more gold shimmering in the sky.

So I guess what I hear now, when I read this long-loved passage, is this: throw yourself out there, as much as you can.  And make sure you watch the incandescent gold pieces as they float by.  If you blink, you can miss them.  So watch.

Look at the light of this hour.

I try to protect Wednesday afternoons to spend with Grace and Whit.  This past week Wednesday was sunny and warm: classic Indian summer.  I walked to school to pick them up and we walked home, stopping at the playground on the way.  After a stop at home to finish Grace’s homework, we went to one of our favorite places, the tower at the back of a cemetery in our town.  We like to climb it in all seasons, survey the world that we live in spread out all around us, admire the changing foliage and quality of the light, feel the wind on our faces.  The kids also like to race up the stairs, counting them as they go. The last time we went up there was in May, on a stormy day that became a tornado-warning evening.

As we climbed the stairs to the base of the tower, Grace stopped suddenly.  I was ahead of her, following Whit.

“Mummy!  Look!”  She pointed at something in between two of the stone steps.

“What?”  I admit I was a little impatient.  Whit was running ahead of us.

“Look.  Just look.”  I climbed down a few stairs and saw what she was pointing to.  A heart.  My little soul mate: she sees and feels things in the very ether just like I do.

As he so often does, Wordworth ran through my head:

With with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

At the top of the tower we admired the deep green of the leaves on the trees all around.  Grace and Whit found the playing fields of their school’s upper school, and watched tiny figures running up and down.  The breeze was cool but the sun was still warm.  The green was spotted in a few places with autumn’s red and orange, and Grace asked if we could come back up someday soon when all the leaves had turned.  Of course.  Of course.

After we descended the tower we visited the fairy stream.  That my children remain enchanted by the small, still place makes me happier than I can describe.  As we left it, Grace cartwheeled ahead and Whit slipped his hand into mine.  “Do you think there are really fairies, Mummy?”

“Yes,” I said firmly.  “Yes, I do.  Do you?”

“Yes, yes.  I was just wondering where they went when we arrived.  Do you think they hid under the rocks or flew away?”

Pondering this, we walked around a bit in amiable silence.  I told Grace and Whit about my very favorite headstone, though I couldn’t actually find it.  “It’s very simple,” I said.  “I just love the words.  It says: look at the light of this hour.”

The kids walked on, quiet, for a few steps.  Grace then turned to look at me.  “You mean, well, that means, to really pay attention, right?”  I nodded at her.  “So, like the way you take pictures of the sky all the time?”  I smiled and nodded again.  She turned back to her walking, thinking.  A moment later, “I was doing that when I noticed the heart, right, Mummy?”

I hugged her and said, “Yes, Grace.  Yes, you were.”

Look at the light of this hour. It is golden, and it contains the life of things.

Some September moments

Over Labor Day Matt and I attended the wedding of one of my college roommates.  Oh, my, but it was fun.  The bridesmaids surprised the bride with a flash mob dance to Dynamite.  I’ve never seen her speechless before, but she was.  I love the blur of the photo above, which captures the palpable love and sheer joy of those minutes.

And then it was back to school, and mornings were all about drop-off again.  Whit never fails to make me laugh.  Every single day, he does.  Thank God.

One morning the moon hung in the sky even when the sun had come out.  I stopped to admire, and photograph, the gorgeous, saturated blue (I think that’s my favorite color) punctuated with a hazy moon.  Breathing a benediction.  Saying a prayer for the sky.  Thank you.

On September 9th I took Whit for a special outing after school.  We went to a farm about half an hour away for a hayride and bonfire.  It was an astonishingly gorgeous afternoon and we had so much fun: admiring nascent pumpkins, making smores, learning about a barn owl, and hiking to the top of a hill at whose summit was this perfect boulder.

The ensemble Grace put together for lunch the two of us one Sunday.  She’s not afraid to mix patterns, this one.  That’s very right now, isn’t it?

One Wednesday afternoon the kids and I were walking home from school when I noticed this leaf on the ground.  “Oh, look!” I crouched down.  “A heart!”  I took out my phone to take a picture and Grace exclaimed “Wait!  The heart is here!”  She had noticed the piece of cement (below) just a few inches away, and thought that was what I planned to photograph.  I showed her the leaf, she showed me the heart.  I took pictures of them both.  Messages from the universe.  Love is all around.

What the writing life looks like for me

Now, time for more answers … another group of questions emerged, around the logistics and reality of blogging and writing.  Do I ever feel like I’m running out of ideas?  Am I a quick writer or do I linger over words?  When do I write?  Do I write lots of posts at once?  How do I find the space/time to be so connected to my thoughts and emotions?

So … Yes, yes, and yes, I often feel like I’m running out of ideas.  In those times I will write about what I see out my window, or I’ll share photographs, or an old post that I love, or a quotation or poem.  Often I find that just when I think I’ve got nothing to say I’ll be inspired or triggered by another blog post, or by something I read offline, or by something my kids or friends say or do.  Sometimes life just comes to the rescue.

I am a quick and careless writer.  This question actually made me chuckle, because almost 100% of my posts contain typos or grammatical errors and I often catch them midway through the day with horror.  I do everything quickly, and sometimes a bit haphazardly. I wish I was more methodical and cautious, to be honest.

Mostly, I write in the evenings.  It is pretty hard to get me out of my house during the week; my strong preference is to stay home, read, write, and go to bed early. I know! I’m so much fun it’s hard to stand it sometimes.  But my kids go to bed early so I often write for an hour or two after that.  Those are calm, quiet hours that I really enjoy.  At other times I can squeeze in a blog post or a page of offline writing during the day, between meetings or sometimes when I get up early.  I guess the answer to “when do you write” is both simply and totally unhelpful: when I can.  And yes, I often write several posts on the weekend and queue them up for the next week.

There’s no question these are busy years, that most days are so full of commitments and obligations and experiences that often I go to bed feeling a weird combination of overwhelmed and drained.  I wrote a piece for Talking Writing this summer about how the reality of life with small kids permeates the experience of writing for me right now, for better or for worse.  I don’t have advice, necessarily, for people wondering how to balance writing with a demanding life and career.  I guess my only advice is : don’t let that stop you.  Sit down.  Even if it’s for ten minutes.  Just put some words down.  They will probably take you somewhere you never imagined, and following that trail is hugely illuminating.

The question about space and time to be connected to my emotions and feelings flummoxed me a little.  I don’t feel like I have a choice about that.  My emotions are so insistent, I can’t imagine not dealing with them.  I’m a lousy compartmentalizer and I can’t stuff things down and ignore them.  So I just deal with things as they arise.  This is not an ideal way to be, truthfully, because the spiritual weather changes I go through have a real impact on those around me, most of all Grace and Whit.

A couple of you were interested in the book I’m writing, on whether blogging creates momentum for it or not, and generally about its topic and status.

There’s no question in my mind that I wouldn’t have written a book if I hadn’t started blogging.  So yes, absolutely yes, writing here fuels my other writing.  For sure.  It also interferes, of course, because it’s another place to spill my words that isn’t my manuscript.  But for me, that’s worth it: I am certain my “other” writing benefits enormously from the discipline of writing here daily as well as from my now-ingrained habit of recording the smallest nuances of my daily life.

It is hard for me to even put out in public that I’m writing a book.  It really is.  Pathetic, but true.  But I can hear Lianne in my ear urging me to put my dearest dream out there into the universe so, gulp, here it is.  I have a very rough draft of a memoir about the way my unexpected pregnancy with Grace and the bleak postpartum depression that followed her birth have indelibly altered the way I approach the world.  I don’t know that the book in this form will ever reach the world, but I think it’s an important and universal topic and I’m working on figuring out how to tell it meaningfully.  I also have about half of a novel written about friendship and first love, and while I had put it aside for over a year, lately I’m waking up at night with those characters in my head.  I think I’m supposed to turn back to it, so I plan to do that very soon.