everyday life

Messages from the universe

I often find words – lyrics, snatches of poems, quotes – rising to my thoughts, unbidden.  There’s also an external component – songs that come on the radio seemingly all the time, a book I keep reading about, etc.  In both cases, I think that these messages are real, from our subconcious or the universe or both.  I believe they are not at all a coincidence.

In the last several weeks, I’ve encountered Naomi Shihab Nye’s beautiful poem, Kindness over and over again.  I read it in Oprah’s magazine and wrote about it, I saw it somewhere else, it appeared today in my Google Reader.  The twinning of kindness and sadness, and the assertion that the latter is critical to fully appreciate and comprehend the former, very much resonates with me.

This past summer, every single time I turned on the radio it seemed like the Beatles were singing Let It Be.  Okay, I murmured to myself, okay, I hear it: I will try to let go.  I will try to trust.  Last summer – radiant, full of joy and wonder – was a time of major transition for me, and I definitely needed every reminder to let it be.

When I was pregnant with Grace, a pregnancy which surprised me and which began the unravelling and change that brought me here, I found pennies on the ground all the time.  Literally, probably six out of seven days a week.  For weeks and weeks.  I picked them all up – of course, to get the luck – and I wish I’d collected them.  For a while, in fact, my dear friend Courtney referred to Grace as my “lucky penny baby.”

And right now, everywhere I turn, I see hearts.  I see them in the pavement, in leaves, on signs.  I’ve photographed some but not all of the hearts that have stopped me in my tracks recently.  What’s interesting is that some of these are not newly in my path.  For example, the heart traced into the pavement is right outside the post office I’ve been going to for years.  And obviously it is not new, since it was drawn in the wet concrete.  And yet it’s only now that I’m noticing it.  Coincidence?  I don’t believe so.  What are these hearts telling me?  Be aware of my heart, be careful of my heart, surrender when it swells to the point of discomfort?  Love is all around.

What message is the universe sending you these days?

You become

I’ve written before of how I love this passage from the Velveteen Rabbit.  Of how it makes me cry.  It is true, isn’t it: it takes a long time to become who we are, to grow into ourselves, to learn to inhabit every inch of our spirits, to become Real.

This has obviously been on my mind lately: just last month I wrote about how “most of life happens in the current of dailiness, whose slight and invisible variations are nevertheless enough to carve enormous swooping oxbows into the terrain of our souls.”  About the ways that many of life’s critical roles are made up of small, daily occurrences.

What I’m thinking about today is how true this is of becoming a mother.  You have a child, and you also become a mother.  The thing is, for me at least, those things didn’t really happen simultaneously.  Well, obviously I was a mother, technically, the moment I delivered Grace myself and pulled her onto my chest.  But the meaningful, emotional inhabitation of “mother” took a lot longer.  I wish I had known that at the time.  I think knowing that would have made me much gentler and kinder to myself about the rocky traverse from one sense of self to the other, which I expected to be immediate and instinctive but which was instead slow and soaked in tears.

May I have patience as I continue to become, and trust about what I am becoming.

Words on the wall

This is the wall behind my desk.  My office is a tiny garret room on our third floor, and I adore it.  The desk, which takes up half the room, is a big slab of wood, an old kitchen table that came from Matt’s family’s house years ago.  I look at a bulletin board with pictures of my family, my best friends, my godchildren, and Mr. Valhouli.  There are also a few pieces of paper with words on them: a Wendell Berry poem up there, two Yeats quotes (one hand-written for me on my 16th birthday by Jessica), a piece by Jen Lemen, my sister’s wedding announcement, and notes from both of my parents.

A couple of years ago I took down all of the diplomas and awards, both mine’s and Matt’s, that filled the wall behind my desk.  In their place I hung these three prints.  A cowboy hat of Grace’s, from years ago, hangs on the hooks above the prints.

I often turn around in my chair and study them, feeling my chest rise and fall with my breath, reading the words I know by heart.  I suppose this is a way of meditating, of coming back to right here, of beginning again.

we are all made of stars – peace be still – you are so loved

Perfect

One day last week I changed the school drop off routine a little.  Whit walked halfway across campus with us and then waited, sitting on the bottom step of a building in the middle, while I took Grace the rest of the way.  She whined a little about this change (Whit didn’t join us at all in the past), insisting that her brother would intrude on our “special time.”  She glared at me as we pushed our way through the double doors to the playground.  I wanted badly to snap at her that she was being a brat, but I bit my tongue.  Moments later, they were walking ahead of me, heads bent together, murmuring about something I couldn’t hear.

It was perfect.

Saturday morning broke clear and cold, cold, cold.  I watched Grace’s soccer game hunched over, with my hands jammed into the pockets of my down coat.  It was so cold my eyes teared behind my sunglasses.  I had a lovely conversation with another Soccer Mom (gah!) and was taken aback when, mid-chat, Grace came running over, face flooded with tears.  “Mummy!  I just scored and you missed it because you were talking to Sophia’s mom!”  She crossed her arms across her chest and stamped her foot, the very picture of righteous indignation.  I hugged her instead of blowing up, guilt and irritation swamping me at once.  With her face pressed against my coat she couldn’t see the emotions at war on my face. How can I possibly live up to this standard? rang in one ear and Oh my God I misssed seeing her score a goal shouted in the other.

“I won’t score again today and you missed it,” she wailed against my parka.

She did score again, and I saw it.  I also observed her cheering on a teammate who tore down the field and scored her own goal, which made me far prouder than anything else (and I told her that).  I kept remembering: it won’t be long until she doesn’t want me to watch her anymore.

It was perfect.

After soccer, I took Whit to make good on a promise from his birthday.  He received several duplicate Legos so I told him I’d take him to the Lego store and he could choose anything he wanted (within reason).  He was overwhelmed by the Lego store, and spent long minutes walking its perimeter, eyes wide, finger trailing across the various boxes.  He could not make up his mind.  I urged him to pick something already, fretting to myself that if we didn’t get to Johnny Rocket’s before noon we’d have to wait for a table.  I chewed a fingernail, impatience swelling inside me, and told him again that it was time to choose.  Let’s be honest: I rushed him.

He decided on a Lego, we went to lunch, there was no wait, and he was utterly charmed by the faux-retro-diner details.  Then, at J Crew he picked out a pirate sweatshirt and was given this enormous, Willy Wonka-esque lollipop.

It was perfect.

I need to trust that as surely as my frustrations and irritations, my guilt and paralyzing panic about missing it rise up, they will ebb away.   These emotions are clouds sliding across the sky of my life, that is all.  This is what I am realizing: it is up to me whether I let these feelings, these moments when I am not the mother I want to be, mar the perfection of this life.  And I won’t let them.  I can’t change, I don’t think, the spikes of agitation and restlessness that sometimes overtake me so fast my head spins.  But I can change how I let them impact my overall sense of my days, of my life.

Thank you, Katrina, for the exact words I needed at the precise time I needed them.  As usual.

This life, this moment: it’s all so perfect it breaks my heart.  Every day.

Song and memory

This weekend was glorious: finally, full sunshine, open windows letting in soft spring air, children biking and running until they were exhausted, and dinner at a restaurant so nearby that Matt and I could walk there through the dusky spring evening.

Saturday I spent five hours in the car scanning unfamiliar radio stations.  I’ve written before about the power that songs have in triggering memory for me; for hours, it was like spinning an old-fashioned rolodex and seeing what was written on the card that it fell open to.  In many cases the words to songs rose up out of some deep reservoir of memory: the words seemed to be carved indelibly on some scroll hidden deep in my consciousness.  I had no idea I knew the words to a song, often, until I was singing along to it.

I’ve realized that my years at camp are full of musical memories.  I wrote about how Like a Prayer will always remind me of being 16 years old and dancing down the dusty dirt aisles of the camp theater, the sheer joy of movement overtaking me.  That song will always, every single time I hear it, remind me of a special, influential friendship and of the fact that I used to love to dance.  One camp tradition that I loved was that each Sunday one unit would perform a song that they’d practiced all week.  These were themed and though I can’t be sure I’m remembering right, I think there were also poems and quotations read aloud.  One year my bunkmates and I sang Landslide, and yesterday, The Logical Song by Supertramp came on and I remembered that that was one too.  Then the Go-Gos came on, and I remembered my Assistant Counselor year, when my 11 peers and I got up during one camp assembly and sang Our Lips Are Sealed.

I just cannot wait for Grace to experience camp, and I hope that the place is as important to her as it was to me, magical and grounding at the same time.

The Soup Dragons came on, singing I’m Free, and I thought about another time when dancing was important to me.  Senior year at Exeter I participated in the dance concert instead of doing a sport.  My dear friend C, a rare real, substantive friend in those years, and I did it together.  We choreographed several pieces, one of which was to I’m Free. In the annals of embarassing photographs, here’s one from another piece (for I’m Free we wore cut-offs and tie-dyed shirts, and I do not have a picture of it).

And then a couple of songs sent me back to college, specifically to my little quad in the sky.  The Freshman, by Verve Pipe, Lightning Crashes, by Live, and Whenever I Call You Friend, by Kenny Loggins, each carried specific and visceral memories.  Whenever I Call You Friend, in particular, reminds me of when I had a broken leg and my wonderful roommates took it upon themselves to dance and sing to entertain me.  In the photograph below they are serenading me, and I remember leaning over to grab my camera, and taking the picture, remember how I was laughing so hard that I could barely hold the camera straight.

And then REM’s Night Swimming brought me back to a spring evening, not altogether unlike this one in Boston, when I walked from my freshman dorm to meet a boy for a first date.  The air was thick with the smell of magnolias, the sky perfect, hydrangea blue; we were in the weeks when Princeton is at its most beguiling.  I walked through the junior and senior dorms, gothic facades on either side of me, feeling vaguely intimidated to even be in these spaces that were still foreign to me.  As I approached the room where I was going, the lead-paned windows were all open and REM’s Night Swimming wafted out into the early evening.  I felt anticipation and nerves, was somehow aware, deep in my consciousness, that I was about to step into a relationship that would be one of the most important of my early adulthood and most formative of my life.  I’ve never heard that song since that night without thinking of that walk, and that sense of promise, the tangible presence of the future right in front of me.

And then, as I neared home, poetically, Southern Cross came on.  I’ve always loved CSN(Y), and this song is one of my favorites.  I thought instantly of the summer of 1998, when Matt and I spent 6 weeks in Africa.  We had known each other only a month or two when we planned the trip; I think my parents probably thought I was coming home in a bag.  We climbed Kilimanjaro and on night before the summit ascent it was crystal clear and gorgeous (not so the night we summitted – white-out blizzard conditions).  We could see both the Southern Cross and the Big Dipper in the sky which, our guide told us in his lilting, accented voice, was very rare.  Only possible right near the Equator.  We both looked up, spellbound at the enormous sky above us, at how far we were from everything we knew.  And yet, at that moment, I’m certain we both felt at home.  “For the first time you understand … why you came this way.”  And we did.

What songs trigger important memories for you?