everyday life

I want to be your little girl

Saturday morning dawned clear and cold.  I took Grace and Whit out to breakfast at our favorite diner while Matt slept in.  Later, we went to meet some friends to walk around the reservoir in our town.  Our friends have a five year old son and an 18 month old daughter.  Slowly, we circled the reservoir.  The big kids on bikes and so were our friends, with their toddler in a bike seat.  Matt and I walked.  The children biked out ahead of us, that raveling red string unfurling towards the horizon, stretching, as it does, but never breaking.  It was windy and we all walked hunched over, hands jammed into pockets.  I looked up, almost desperately, at the branches against the crystal clear sky, looking for buds.

Eventually my friend’s daughter, C, got cold in the bike seat so we took her out to walk.  As she wandered along the path, crouching to investigate every small dried leaf or blade of new grass, we joked about how toddlers are the ultimate in people who Stop and Smell the Flowers.  Everybody else got cold, waiting for C to amble along, so I picked her up, surprised by how light she was in my arms, and held her against my hip as I walked, talking to my friend, who walked her bike beside me.

Suddenly I noticed Grace biking urgently back towards me, and when she got close I saw that her cheeks were wet with tears.  “What, Gracie?” I asked, wondering if she’d fallen.  She was crying so hard it was hard for her to get the words out, and she gestured me over so we could speak privately.  I leaned down so that I could hear her, my forehead clunking into the chilly plastic of her helmet.

“Mummy,” she wiped ineffectually at her tears with her mitten, “I want to be your little girl.”

“Oh, Grace!” Instinctively I knelt, still cradling C against my side, and wrapped my other arm around Grace.  I hugged her and then pulled back, looking right into her eyes.  “Grace.  You will always be my little girl.”

“But I’m not as little as she is,” Grace nodded towards C, who was watching all of this with interest.

“I know, Grace.  But it doesn’t matter how big you get.  You will always be my little girl.  You will always be my first baby.”

Appeased, she biked away, and I stood up and resumed walking, but now it was my cheeks that were wet.

Where does this come from?  Whit, too, has broken down, sharing through sobs how own sadness at time’s passage.  Do they pick this up from my talking about it?  The thing is, I don’t actually do that in front of them.  More likely, I suspect, sensitivity about time throbs in their bloodstreams as surely as it does in mine.  I feel so ambivalent about this; what a weight they carry, and it’s all because of me.  I don’t think very much about whether I’d rather be wired differently, because I know I can’t change my leaning toward melancholy or my skinlessness, can’t escape my sometimes-exquisitely painful awareness of life’s beauty and loss.  But I don’t like reminders like this one from Grace, of the high costs of having a mother who is more shadow than sun, whose gaze is often through tears, who loves and hurts in equal, fierce measure.

Oh, I worry about them.  I want what all parents want, in unison, and with the force of a tide: I want them to be happy.  I want joy and ease and as much wonder as they can bear.  And then maybe more.  I hope the sheer basic fact of my being their mother has not precluded this already for them.

The meaning of the sky

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature – Frank Lloyd Wright

It’s no secret that I ache to believe in God.  The truth is I ache to believe in something.  What’s also true is that slowly, with almost infinitessimal steps, I’m finding myself doing so, in my own way: beginning to trust in the vast design, to believe that I can let go, to trust.

I see this shaky but growing belief, most of all, in the sky.  I recently paged through my zillions of photographs and realized how awfully many I take of the sky.  I simply adore the sky and am often moved to photograph it.  Though, of course, no photograph can capture the sky.  The assortment of clouds, the searing gorgeousness of a clear cornflower blue sky, the subtle depths of a vista of changing grays.  I take pictures looking up at the sky, mostly, and once in a while I take a picture out of an airplane window looking down at it.

In particular this winter I have been downright obsessed with the beauty in the way black winter branches net the often steel-gray sky.  I see poetry in the patterns that the bare branches, often ice-slicked, make against the winter sky.  I have dozens and dozens of photographs of different designs like this, and my children have taken to mocking me when I stop, stock-still, in the middle of going somewhere, often in the middle of the street, and fumble for my iPhone.

I’m realizing that my preoccupation with time and its passage informs this close observation of nature and the sky.  The changing quality of light as we move through the seasons speaks of the earth’s ceaseless rotation.  The sky’s meaning is found in its simultaneous permanence and momentary-ness and in the subtle, complex shifts in its light.  There is a tree outside my window, about which I’ve written before, and this winter many mornings I was stunned into a brief moment of silence by the light on its barren branches.  I tried and I tried and I tried to capture it, usually to no avail.

The seasons turn, the light changes, the branches swell with life and then burst into flower and then drop their leaves again.  Just like I like Walden Pond most during the barren months, I am most drawn to winter’s vistas and landscapes.  And it’s winter’s skies that I find the most beautiful.  Somewhere, in those erratic patterns of black against blue, I see … what?  Something.  God.  Something I can believe in, lean into.  I sense the vast design for which this blog is named. 

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.

– Louise Erdrich (The Bingo Palace)

I want to fill them up with poetry

Grace, Whit and I went to Walden today.  Over the years I have been there often, pulled by something beyond me, and I always go in the winter.  I like it empty and quiet.  I like to be the only person (people) there.  I like it when I can feel the spirituality crackling in the air.  I could today.

As we made our way around the pond Grace and Whit took detours to explore the woods and paused to wonder at the fact that the pond is still mostly covered with ice.  It is definitely not warm here yet, even though it is officially spring.  The trees are still defiantly bare, and their black branches net the sky.  Today that sky was gray, with occasional beams of sun breaking through the thick ridges of white-gray clouds.

As we walked I told Grace and Whit about Thoreau, about how he chose to live simply, to focus on the natural world around him.  Our adventure quickly turned into a Notice Things Walk, and each called out when they saw something worth sharing: a peculiar knot on the side of a tree trunk or the pattern of stones leading down to the water that looked like stairs.  When we arrived at the site of Thoreau’s cabin, we saw this sign and a pile of rocks.
As Grace read the lines, so familiar to me, and I felt my chest tighten.  They both had questions about the last line.  We talked about what meant to live a life so full that you felt sure, at the end of it, that you’d truly lived.  I had sunglasses on so neither child could see that my eyes brimmed with tears.  Then they busied themselves building a cairn in the rock pile, as others had done before.
Whit was very curious about the cairns and he moved carefully among the stones, examining the various piles.  I imagined what those who erected these monuments were commemorating: the example of a life thoroughly-lived, the commitment to art, the desire to immerse oneself in nature.
And then we were off again.  The trail wound its way around the pond, a multi-season combination of dead leaves and tenacious patches of snow and ice.  We walked in companionable silence, Whit’s hand in mine.  He announced, apropos of nothing, that when he went to college he still wanted to live at home.  “Why?” Grace piped up from ahead of us.  Whit didn’t answer right away, just squeezed my hand.  “I want to live at college for sure,” she averred confidently as she danced, occasionally skidding in her tractionless Uggs, along the path.

“Well,” Whit said, not looking at me, “Being with Mummy makes me feel safe.  And I want to stay safe.”  I gulped, remembering the time he told me that holding my hand makes him feel like his heart would never break.  I desperately wish I could keep his heart from breaking and keep him safe forever, but I know that neither of those things is in my control.

I gripped Whit’s little fingers and kept walking, breathing the piney Walden air, hearing Thoreau’s words in my head.  Ahead of us Grace’s red and white parka bobbed up and down.  The air was still, the bracing cold of winter mitigated by the promise of spring.  The only sound was our footsteps.

I want to make sure my children know the feeling I get at Walden, the soaring in the chest that speaks of a similar expansion in the spirit.  I want to encourage them to engage with life and to learn what it has to teach.  I want to fill them up with poetry.  Even more, I want to help them see the poem that lives in every day of their lives.

Alchemy

alchemy

any magical power or process of transmuting a common substance, usually of little value, into a substance of great value.

Alchemy has always been one of my favorite words.  And in that way the universe has, which I’m learning to pay ever-closer attention to, two marvelous people used it in their comments on my post where I confessed I’d almost majored in Chemistry.  I’d never made the connection before, and suddenly understood that yearning in the younger me much better.  For a word I love so dearly, I use it rarely.  I went through the archives of this blog and saw that I’ve spoken about the alchemical properties of cooking and about the “particular alchemy” whereby some of the memories I recall most vividly are of random, ordinary moments, whose power I could never have known while I was living them.

Alchemy is, I realize, the best word for what it is I try to do every moment of my life.  A line from Coelho’s The Alchemist says it best: “it’s the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary and only the wise can see them.”  I am working – slowly, slowly – to notice the small things in my days, and through careful observation, to see them as the miracles they are.  I’d never call myself wise, but this is surely the central effort of my life.

These things, even amidst the dust and frustration that seem to permanently swirl around me, are life incarnate.  The expression on Grace’s face as she walks into Hogsmeade at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.  The gradual slackening of Whit’s face as I watch him surrender to sleep, lying next to him in bed.  The transcendent peace that descends when I read a poem in O magazine.  Returning home to the relief of my familiar stack of books by my bed, to the practice of folding laundry, to the love that radiates off of the hand-drawn pictures from Grace and Whit tacked to my office wall.

Attention is the true alchemy, it seems to me. Being here, carefully witnessing, and breathing.  Realizing that even in the great aggravations and impatiences that crowd every day there are glittering jewels.  May I continue to believe in – and pursue – the alchemy that transmutes these ordinary moments into the most important of my life.

the miracle in everything speaks

I’m in, on the surface, one of the world’s un-poetic places.  Disney World.  And yet.  And yet. It’s been busy, with tired children and tired in-laws and lots of walking and lots of crowds.  Finally, at last, yesterday afternoon I had a few moments to sit down and read.  And I opened the new O magazine.  And it was all about poetry.  Once again, the universe smiled on me.

My favorite words in this issue packed with words I loved were these, from Mark Nepo, on the last page:

You Ask About Poetry

You ask from an island so far away
it remains unspoiled.  To walk quietly
til the miracle in everything speaks
is poetry.  You want to look for poetry
in your soul and in everyday life, as you
search for stones on the beach.  Four
thousand miles away ,as the sun ices
the snow, I smile.  For in this moment,
you are the poem.  After years of looking,
I can only say that searching for
small things worn by the deep is
the art of poetry,  But listening
to what they say is the poem.

To walk quietly till the  miracle in everything speaks is poetry.

Isn’t this, ultimately, what I am trying to do, every minute of my life?  To seek the poetry in everyday life?  To observe the miraculous twinnedness of life and death in the unfurling of trees around me, the endings and beginnings in January light, the message in a frost-covered field and the heartbreaking words of a five year old boy?  To be quiet so that the messages can come through, so that I can finally hear my own voice, so that I can be open to the thanksgiving that children offer?

To listen to what they say.

Yes.  Yes, it is.  Everyday life.  The practice and the poem.