everyday life

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.

missing my life

Last week I was away from home.  I was physically away, in a different city, but I was also really, really emotionally away.  I was totally released from my day-to-day domestic responsibilities and completely consumed by my professional ones.  In this state, untethered from the ordinary life in which I’m usually so entirely rooted, I realized how intensely I love it.

With the crystalline perspective of distance, I fell in love, all over again, with my own life.   The practice and the poem.  I missed the poem and I even missed the practice.  I am immensely grateful for this reminder of how blessed and fortunate I am, for this reminder, again, to stop and look and breathe and be there for my own life.

I missed picking a sleeping Whit up before I go to bed and taking him to the bathroom, his head heavy on my shoulder, his feet dangling against my knees.  He is always soft with sleep and I have to prop him up in front of the toilet.  When I carry him back to bed, even though he’s surely more awake, he curls against me just as tightly, and often keeps his hands wrapped around my neck an extra moment or two after I put him back down into his bottom bunk.

I missed the morning chatter that Grace and Whit share as we drive to school and then hurry, cold, into the lobby of the Morse Building.  I’m keenly aware that Whit only has one more year in the Morse Building and then these cozy mornings in the lobby with the polka-dot rug and old teachers who envelop my children in enormous hugs are over.  Grace and Whit like to sit and talk to me for a few minutes before I take them to their respective before-school destinations.

I missed rubbing Grace’s back as she says her prayers, her voice slowing as she drifts towards sleep.  My fingers trace her spine, remembering the string of pearls, bright on the fuzzy ultrasound screen, so many years ago.  Grace’s prayers are full of thanks.  She always thanks the universe and her family and mentions her parents’ hard work and our tremendous good fortune.  I know she means these things and I fiercely hope she always knows them.

I missed talking to one of my closest friends every day for a catchup on all the minutiae of a life, my husband’s lattes, getting the mail out of my brass mailbox in the morning, and my familiar running route around my neighborhood.

I missed the strangely soothing inside-outing of pajama pants as I fold laundry, the smoothing of bright robot-covered underpants, the folding of tee-shirts, each piece of clothing full of memories.  I missed the flowers I always have on my kitchen island.  I  missed my long-term toxic beverage, Diet Coke (my office is a Diet Pepsi office!), and my brand-new beverage, morning green smoothies.

It’s so good to be reminded of my immense good fortune, to have my gaze yanked back to the abundance that overflows right here, right now.  I don’t want to wait for bad news, or disaster, to realize what I have now; none of us should.  Say thank you today for every single ordinary day.  As Katrina says, each one is a gift.

Lightning in a jar

My children are 8 and 6.  It is life’s biggest cliche and most painful truism that just yesterday they were babies.  This week my friend Kris pointed me to Julie’s post about watching her children play in the ocean and I gasped, remembering watching my own children in the Massachusetts coast waves this past summer.  They were 5 and 7, she towered over him, he was just learning to swim.

Admittedly, I am tired, having been away from home and not sleeping very much.  I’m even more porous than usual.  But I sat at someone else’s desk in my firm’s New York office with tears rolling down my face as I read Julie’s gorgeous words.  “… I’ve caught lightning here, in these slender vessels …” Julie writes, and my heart tightens with identification.  It’s all so astonishing, so baffling and overwhelming at the same time, and I feel awash, often, in the swarming wonder that is parenting.  My own children, growing tall and lanky in front of my eyes, their childhood passing in one swift swirl of color, the brilliance of their being here flashing intermittently like a firefly in the dark.

Julie’s photographs remind me of ones I took last summer and posted here.  There is something both profoundly moving and absolutely apt about children – the definition of liminal beings – playing along the border where earth becomes water.  Threshold-dwellers dancing at an essential threshold.

I suppose I’m just extra-aware right now, after long days away, of the piercingly poignant reality of Grace and Whit’s lives.  I feel abundantly grateful for their health and in frank awe of the basic fact of them.  It’s all such a gift, this opportunity to be in the presence of nascent human beings, to witness them step through these never-to-be-revisited halls of childhood, to watch their minds and personalities form.  They are as sturdy as they are evanescent, corporeally present even as they seem to waft by me, evading capture.

The dailiness of life

There’s a line in Train’s Marry Me that sums up something I think about all the time: marry me … today and every day.   Even the biggest things in life – marriage, motherhood, career – are built of a tiny little daily moments.  Each moment is as insubstantial on its own as a snowflake but in aggregate they become as solid and immovable as a snowbank.  A glacier.  We build our lives – our commitments, our desires, our identities – through quotidian acts that can feel infinitessimal and meaningless as we enact them.

Of course there are undeniable moments and decisions that shape us.  We can all reflect on the application we put in the mail or the date we said yes to or the job interview we went into enthusiastically or the day we looked at the two lines on the pregnancy test.  Even in this case though, as Kelly wrote beautifully this week, and as I’ve mused before, we don’t always know the big definining moment as we live it.  As Agnes de Mille says, “No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our lives are made. Destiny is made known silently.”

But the truth is that 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.  These currents, these slight moments of everyday-ness, so many unnoticed, pile up and we find ourselves in a life.  I remember for me it was the day I bought a station wagon.  At that point I had a husband, a daughter, a house, an MBA, a job, but somehow it was the station wagon that made me sit up and realize: I am a grown-up.  Wow.  Of course I’d been tiptoeing into that identity for a long time, minute by invisible minute, but then I looked around, triggered by the car, and saw what I’d built.

I’ve become exquisitely sensitized to those small snowflakes of moments now, have bounced to the other extreme where I can hardly see the snowbanks for my attention to every single particle that comprises them.  I guess this is on my mind because I’m heading out tomorrow morning for a week of work.   I am preemptively sad, already missing my children and the very mundane details of this ordinary existence.

Addendum:

My ever-wise sister Hilary, responding to this post, send me the following poem this morning.  Notably, it was read at Launa’s wedding.  I adore it.

Well Water

What a girl called “the dailiness of life”
(Adding an errand to your errand. Saying,
“Since you’re up . . .” Making you a means to
A means to a means to) is well water
Pumped from an old well at the bottom of the world.
The pump you pump the water from is rusty
And hard to move and absurd, a squirrel-wheel
A sick squirrel turns slowly, through the sunny
Inexorable hours. And yet sometimes
The wheel turns of its own weight, the rusty
Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear
Water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands
And gulp from them the dailiness of life.

Randall Jarrell