everyday life

So fragile, so lovely.

Inspiration’s been a little slow in coming this week.  My writing has stalled to a complete halt and I’m trying not to panic about it.  I know that the specter of the end of the year has commenced its menacing looming; I can feel it flickering around the edges of every day.  Another school year is drawing to a close, bringing with it incontrovertible evidence that 365 days I can never have back have slipped by.  Grace and Whit grow ever taller, ever further from the babies they were just yesterday, as the raveling string between our hearts unspools.

All I have to offer today, from this morass of emotion, is a few moments from the last several days.

Another dandelion offering from Whit, proffered in a tight fist with a big smile and great pride.  I see no reason not to put these smack in the middle of my kitchen island.  I even move the peonies out of the way.

Grace still loves playing with her American Girls, and her absolute favorite thing is their dogs.  She is obsessed with dogs.  Witness them lined up by her desk.  This isn’t even all of them.  This child lobbies, daily, for a pet of her own.  I’m still holding firm to no but we’ll see …

This is how Whit went to bed the other night.  The famous exercise pants (size 3T) and a pirate hoop earring from Disney World.  Spray paint his torso gold and he could bartend at Studio 54.

The stunning flowers, even on a rainy day, that fill the yard of the kids’ school.  I’m sure the other parents wonder what I’m doing when I stand there, iphone pointed up, and take pictures of trees or sky.

The last pair of Grace’s shoes in size 13.  She is actually wearing a 2 now, but Converse run huge, so these were 13.  I can’t bear that she is out of toddler shoe sizes.  Really, I can’t bear any of it.

I was one of the parents who “helped” the kindergardeners hold the chicks.  Whit had this dear black one with a yellow splotch on his head.  I held him too, and could feel his tiny heart racing like a hummingbird’s against my palms.  So fragile, so lovely.

And then Whit drew this picture and wrote about his chick.  I cried at how I can read his writing now, at his detailed drawing, how he, like me, noticed the spot of yellow.  So fragile, so lovely.

A weekend of magic and dandelion fluff

Grace and I got to Kripalu on Friday afternoon and almost immediately headed down to the labyrinth.  This is a quiet, holy place, a maze I’ve walked before.  You follow the winding path into the center where there is a post that says “may peace prevail on earth” in several languages.  Grace walked in front of me and after a few minutes she turned to me and said, “does this really lead into that middle?”  You could see the post in the center, with offerings of beads and buddhas at its base, but the path wound around and around and it did indeed seem hard to believe we’d ever get there.  “Trust the path, Grace,” I said without thinking about it.  And she did.  And I did.  Once in the middle, I turned to find this:
Later friends arrived, and Grace met Abby, the daughter of my dear friend Denise.  They hit it off and spent the weekend giggling and exploring.  Other friends from the ether who were there were Lisa, Christine, and Sarah.  The sessions with Dani were extraordinary.  I’d gladly travel the world over just to be in her presence.  The fact that Katrina was there, assisting, just made it all that much more magical.  It gave me goosebumps when, over the course of two days, Dani shared many quotes that I love dearly.  Two of them I’ve written about before: Pain engraves a deeper memory (Anne Sexton) and You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way (E.L. Doctorow).

In the afternoon, Abby, Grace, Denise and I walked down to the lake that you can see from Kripalu’s hilltop location.  At the shore of the lake the girls played in the sand and we sat and watched and talked, our hearts expanding.
Everybody’s eyes opened a little this weekend, I think.  I imagine that Denise, like me, was hearing Dani’s words about paying attention in her head.  We noticed a black turtle sunning himself on a log in the swamp.  The girls blew fat white dandelions and the fluff floated around us like snow, or like grace.  We stopped to gaze at the word “love,” spelled out in little rocks on a large flat boulder.
At dinner Katrina joined us and I felt again the immense comfort and gratitude I’ve felt in her gentle, keenly intelligent presence since the first time we met, a not-coincidence that altered the current of my life.  After putting Grace and Abby to sleep – to their overwhelming delight, together – Denise, Lisa and I sat around and talked.  Lisa is far more extraordinary than I’d even imagined, which is saying something, since I was deeply impressed already.  The three of us talked as though we’d known each other forever.  We covered writing, cancer, lecherous grade school principals, navigating pre-puberty with daughters, the joys and challenges of younger sons, twitter, and more writing, writing, writing.

Yesterday afternoon I went, unenthusiastically, for a long run.  I ran by the Charles River and one small part of my route winds through the woods.  I was alone in there today, running, feeling tired, achey, weak.  The wind came up then and suddenly I was surrounded by a cloud of dandelion fluff.


Making me happy right now

Grace and I are off to Kripalu today for Dani Shapiro‘s memoir workshop.  I can’t wait!!  So, instead of a post, a few things that are making me happy right now:

  • Finding flowers on my bedside table from Grace and Whit yesterday (with Whit’s marked with an old toilet paper roll: classic).  They had picked them at the park in between downpours yesterday afternoon.
  • Om Shanti, from Madonna’s Ray of Light CD.  It reminds me of my trip to Feathered Pipe years and years ago.  And it still inspires me.
  • Loose, peasanty silk blouses by Rebecca Taylor (I have one leopard, one floral, and I am wearing them on repeat)
  • Cropped skinny white jeans (with the aforementioned blouses)
  • Peonies, peonies, peonies
  • J Crew boys pajamas (particularly the blue and white striped shorty ones with a long-sleeved top)
  • My new Mala beads from Tiny Devotions.  I swear I can feel their energy when I wear them.
  • Our plans to visit my sister and her family during their sabbatical next year for Christmas.  I can’t wait.  Have to get my children passports (the fact that they do not, I think, horrifies my parents: by the time I was Grace’s age I’d already lived in Europe for four years)
  • My morning green smoothie: pear, cucumber, spinach, ice cubes, coconut water, mint, agave, chia seeds

Please tell me, what is making you smile these days?

Wonder

I am so grateful for the thoughtful comments on my post last week asking what this blog is about.  What, you say?  I write it, I should know?  Yes, well … I realize I should.  Pam emailed me after her day with Karen Maezen Miller and said, “I think you should simply say you write about the face of God.”  And I laughed, and went on with my day, and I kept coming back to it.  I don’t know that I’d say it quite like that, but I do think one of the things I am most interested in is the way that divinity itself flashes through even the most ordinary day.  And the thing is, it was only when I really started paying attention and began living inside my own life that I began to see it.

Another way of saying this: I am utterly preoccupied by wonder.

While I’m far more aware now, I do have a few memories from long ago of being simply started by the brilliance of the world.  One of the most vivid is of one late afternoon in AP Biology.  I went to high school in New Hampshire, and we went to class from 4 to 6pm, so it was pitch black during the last period for much of the year.  Pitch black, freezing cold, cloaked in ice and snow.  Hospitable, the environment was not.

I sat in AP Bio, the dark windows all around us contributing to the sense that were floating alone in the world.  My wonderful teacher could have been from central casting, with his bald head, neatly trimmed beard, and clipped British accent.  He was talking about the human body, gesturing to his own arm, talking about bones and tendons and blood vessels.  Something about the many tiny bones in the human hand.  He held his own hand up, looked at it, bent the fingers.  A hush fell over the room.  He looked at us, his dark eyes sweeping across our faces, and whispered, “Isn’t it amazing?”

Oh, it brings tears to my eyes to remember that moment.  I thought of it tonight when listening to Elissa’s gorgeous podcast called What Takes Your Breath Away?

I’m immensely grateful, more than I can express, at the frequency with which the world – and my own life – takes my breath away these days.  May I never stop being amazed.

Pink petals, Jimmy, and the pain of saying goodbye

Yesterday was just another ordinary day.  A day of my life, bracketed in the morning and the evening with reminders to open my eyes and to appreciate what is right here.  It’s amazing, now that I see these nudges, how many of them there are.  I wonder how myopic I must have been, all those years with my eyes focused on that next thing, to have missed so many messages from the universe.  Well, were the messages from out there or were they from in here, the most intimate place there is?  From my spirit, my soul, my very life?

Early in the morning I set off to take the subway (the T) to a meeting.  I was walking down the familiar street to the T stop, a walk I’ve made hundreds of times in the nine years we’ve lived in our house, my nose buried in my iPhone.  I literally stopped dead in my tracks when I stepped onto a carpet of pink petals.

You can see I had made my way onto the edge of this gorgeous drift of pink petal snow before I woke up, literally.  I stood there and took pictures, breathing in the faint smell of the blossoms, their perfume spring incarnate. (not quite Princeton’s magnolias, but close).  I looked up and saw the cerulean blue sky through the pink branches.  And I was ashamed, truly, that I would have missed this.

I tucked Whit into bed tonight hugging Jimmy, the class teddy bear who spent the weekend with us.  Every weekend Jimmy visits a different classmate in Whit’s Beginner class, and this was ours.  Grace and I were just starting to read about Hermione and Harry’s vociferous defense of Sirius Black when I heard a strange sound from upstairs.  I paused.  “What’s that, Gracie?” We both listened.  Nothing.  I started reading again.  The noise started back up.  It was Whit, weeping

After a few moments where I tried to figure out if he was posing – yet another new trick to postpone bed? – she and I went upstairs to check on Whit.  He was lying in bed, face awash in tears, clutching Jimmy.  I sat on the edge of his bed and asked him what was wrong.  His words were punctuated with sobs as he choked out how upset he was to say goodbye to Jimmy tomorrow.  “Oh, Whitty,” I said.  My heart felt like it leaned over in my chest, angling towards him.  Deep in my chest I recognized his pain, the brutal symmetry of love and loss, so much on my mind lately.  I told him I know how hard it was to say goodbye to things we love.

A few minutes later, Grace and I were reading again when I heard Whit ask quietly, “Will you snuggle me?”  I looked up to see him standing forlornly on the stairs, Jimmy held against his chest.  “Of course,” I answered.  After I kissed Grace goodnight, I went upstairs and lay down on Whit’s bottom bunk..  I curled behind him, singing along in a whisper to his lullabye CD’s version of You Are My Sunshine, listening to his sobs grow slower and quieter.  After days of being all bravado and bluster, he had dissolved back into my emotional son, my little boy with big feelings, and I thought about how often he will shuttle between these two poles over the next few years.

“Are you ready for me to go?” I murmured against his neck.  “No,” he said quickly, quietly, and so I lay with him for another song.  And here I am now, at my desk, eager to get going on a new essay idea I have.  But first I have to put pictures of Jimmy’s visit into the class album, with narration of his weekend activities.  I’m not annoyed that I have to do that before my “real” writing.  This is also writing, in its own way, the writing of my ordinary life.

A repost from exactly a year ago … I’m startled by how I’m still thinking about the same themes, confronting the same challenges, grappling with the same emotions.  The very same.