everyday life

Inexorable as the tides

summer 2007

summer 2011

Still rocking the 3T seersucker suit.  What happened to my baby?

first day of Beginners, September 2009

last day of Kindergarten, June 2011

My baby is 6.5  He swims competently, though inelegantly.  He reads short words.  He loves Star Wars and Legos.  He beats up on his sister.  He makes me laugh every single day.  He is about to lose a tooth.  He still curls up in my arms when I pick him up at night.  He tells me he loves me as much as the sky.  He has a very strong sartorial point of view.  It’s not his fault, but he also makes me cry every single day.

The transitions, big and small, keep coming at me, inexorable as the tides.  When will I learn to let go, to float on them?

Solstice

Yesterday was the summer solstice.  I’ve written before of how important the solstice is to me.  For all the years of my life my parents have hosted a party from 9 to midnight on the night of December 21st (awesome when it’s a Thursday, less awesome when it’s a Sunday).  As midnight nears, a friend, the co-host, leads us in an ancient Mayan ceremony to welcome the light back.  This tradition gives me goosebumps every single time I experience it, and a huge room full of people holding candles does seem to ward off winter’s intense darkness for at least an evening.

I am fiercely attached to the winter solstice.  Not so the summer solstice.  In fact, I find it a little sad.  It marks, after all, the slow rotation back towards darkness.  As of today, the days are getting shorter again.  I know, I know: buzzkill.  Believe me, if I could somehow change this orientation of mine, this way I lean always towards melancholy, I would.

I am often preemptively sad, well before I need to be.  And yes, this can cloud the brightness of even the most luminous moments.  Why on earth can’t I just relax into right now, these swollen days of both sunshine and sunlight, these happy children, this relative ease?  I don’t know, and I hate that I can’t.  I am simply too aware of the shadow behind that swollenness, too achingly conscious of the turning of the earth, of the hovering darkness on the horizon.

Often I am jealous of those who can walk through this world without being so regularly brought to their knees by both its grandeur and its heartbreak.  I wish – desperately, wholly, wildly – that I could just sit and enjoy a day of my life.  One day.  I wish I could sit by a pool, giggling at my children jumping off a diving board, a glass of white wine in my hand and a dear friend at my side.  And if you were at that pool, that’s what you would see.  That’s what it looks like from outside.  But inside there is an essential crack in my spirit that yawns open, more narrowly or more widely depending on the moment.  This crack – this wound – is always there.

I promise I’m not a hugely depressing person.  I’m not even depressed.  I’ve been there, believe me, and this isn’t it.  I’m actually a fairly happy person.  A new friend (hi Jane!) who knew me here before she knew me in person even remarked that I was much funnier in person than she expected.  I try to keep my heartbreak to myself.  But the truth is that even on days like yesterday, a day as gorgeous and perfect a summer day as I can imagine, the longest day of the year, there is a kernel of sadness buried deep inside my experience that I can’t ignore.

And there is still so much here I do not understand.  These are my favorite lines in Adrienne Rich’s deeply moving poem that I publish every winter solstice.  No matter how much I struggle and think and unpack and write, there is still so much that is unclear to me, both within and without, so much that I find perplexing, sad, complicated.  What I am beginning to see that it is in these knots of tangled meaning that my life actually exists.  Certainly they are shot through with strands of radiant joy, that only revealed themselves once I started really paying attention.   I’m slowly realizing that my hope that someday I’ll be sailing smoothly down some clearly-defined path is simply naive.

3 months ago I said this:  “I realize, again, fiercely, is that this is how I want to live:  in the right now of my life with a broken heart.  I want this, in full knowledge of the pain it carries, far more than I want to keep hiding from my life.”  Reading this avowal is a reminder of something I do know, somewhere deep inside myself.  On a day like this when I want to simply enjoy, it is easy to forget these commitments I make, to myself, to my family, to those I love.  But I won’t.  I will pull out my camera, take some pictures of this glorious day, of my alarmingly tall and lanky and funny and sad children, surrender to the knot of sadness that will gather in my heart as the sun sets, and acknowledge this is what it is to be me in this world.  It just is.

the snail in the back yard

This morning we worked in the yard.  The “yard,” I should mention, is a little white-picket-fenced square in front of the house and a very small, mostly gravel, patch behind it.  The kids washed dirty buckets and watering cans on the sidewalk while Matt pulled an overgrown ivy bush out of the front garden.  I weeded in the back by myself.  It was slow work, and quiet, pulling the weeds that had grown through the small stones that cover the back yard.  The space is entirely shaded (hence the stones, rather than anything that, for example, grows) and I crouched down by myself, falling into that meditative state everybody who gardens talks passionately about.

As I continued working in the quiet of our shaded backyard, I started envisioning how this little patch could be transformed into a more inviting space. The small, gravel-covered area seemed to hold potential beyond its current state. I began to imagine adding elements that would bring a touch of warmth and personality, like decorative garden pieces that could create a more engaging atmosphere.

I decided to explore options from a reputable garden decor manufacturer to find items that would enhance the space. Adding features such as whimsical garden gnomes, elegant lanterns, or even a small, beautifully crafted garden lighthouse could bring life to this shaded area. These decorations not only provide visual interest but also create a sense of coziness and character, transforming the backyard into a delightful and serene space for relaxation and enjoyment.

There is a beating-back-the-onslaught-of-disorder feeling about weeding that I like, akin to the creating-order-out-of-chaos satisfaction that folding laundry gives me.  My back started to ache and my fingernails were quickly blackened, but I kept at it.  Feel around for the root, pull firmly enough to get it out but gently enough that I don’t also bring up a huge clod of dirt.  Throw into the bin.  Repeat.

Then I saw the small brown snail.  I did a double take, because I didn’t recognize it at first.  The shell was mottled browns, its whorl distinctive, lovely.  I could even see the muddy gray body of the snail, glistening, moving slowly along the uneven rocks.  It was fleeing, I imagine, from the threat it perceived I was.  I crouched there, watching it move.  And for the rest of the day I could not get Tom Robbin’s words out of my head:

Every passive mollusk demonstrates the hidden rigor of introversion, the power that is contained in peace.

I don’t even think a snail is a mollusk, actually, but it’s what I thought of then.  I often wish I had a shell to protect me and to retract into when the world seemed fearful or overwhelming.  And then I thought about peace, that thing, that feeling, that sensation like an exhale of the spirit, that I grasp after so awkwardly.  I don’t think anyone who knows me well would use “peaceful” to describe me.  And it’s really what I’m longing for, with all of this lunging after trust, isn’t it?  The last few weeks, as I’ve discussed, have been far from peaceful: instead of feeling calm, my spirit is itchy, uncomfortable, restless.

I didn’t even feel peaceful, that moment, in the shady back garden, my hands full of weeds.  But I was reminded, again, in a visceral way how much I want to.  I suspect that true peace, like abiding trust, will come to me only when I stop trying so desperately to grab it.  If only I had a safe shell to curl into while I tried to figure out how to stop my frantic, frenzied efforts.

An indestructible sense of wonder

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over
the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each
child in the world would be a sense of wonder so indestructible that
it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the
boredom and disenchantment of later years, the sterile preoccupation
with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of
our strength.

– Rachel Carson

(thank you, HWM, thank you, thank you)

The dark side of my moon

I don’t know if it’s the awful weather, or the echoing, empty aftermath of last week’s End of School celebrations, but I’m sad and not entirely myself this week.  I know, you say: I’m always sad.  Well, I’m actually not.  I’m sensitive, yes, prone to waves of sorrow, but they are, on a regular day, interspersed with rushes of joy and wonder of an equal intensity.  This week, though, it’s mostly grief I feel, alongside the odd, crawling-out-of-my-own-skin anxiety that sometimes overtakes me, preoccupying me as completely as a leg full of itchy bug bites or a grain of sand in my eye.

Do you know this feeling?  There are days when I’m so impatient, so utterly aggravated with every single thing – and person – in my life that I can’t even stand myself.  I slam on the brakes at red lights, am annoyed with everything anyone says, and find myself snappish.  I’m also forgetful, even less coordinated than usual: driving to the wrong destination, stubbing my toe on things, walking into rooms and not knowing why I’m there.

I feel a frantic discomfort, as though I literally want to climb out of the container of my own life.  As if I cannot bear another single moment inside my body.  All of the rushing and distraction is just, I know, a desperate effort not to be present, not to really look and see.  What I don’t know is why it is so insufferably difficult for me to do that, to be here, right now.  I try to remind myself that my intense agitation comes from a deep well of sadness.  That its source is the swirling darkness that exists always inside me, swelling, sometimes, so that I cannot think of anything else.

Despite my being a Leo, born in the year of the tiger, and in posession of defiantly sunny hair, I’ve always felt distinctly not-feline and not-sunny.  I’m more like the moon, I think.  Surely my pulse thrums in some kind of mysterious accord with the tides.  And I inhabit a dense, mostly dark place, speckled with blindingly bright stars.  This week, then, I’ve been on the dark side of my moon.