everyday life

As much radiance as shadow

The world spins as it spins.
Your life is on that same axis,
half shadow, half radiance
and turning, always turning.

-Maya Stein

There is as much radiance in my life as shadow.  I know that I lean towards the shadow, for lots of reasons, but in so doing I may give the impression that there is little radiance in my life.  That couldn’t be further from the truth.  There are moments of overpowering sweetness in every single one of my days.  That bear?  Whit won him at Legoland.  His name is Lego.  Whit had to balance on a teetery ladder and climb up quite high.  The smile on his face when he won?  Beyond description.  The generosity Grace showed (she did not win) in celebrating her brother’s achievement?  Impossible to convey.  A million other flashes of radiance light my days.  There is no question about this, and I am sorry if I ever seem that this is not so; that makes me feel ungrateful, something I try very hard not to be.  I must do a better job capturing the endless light and joy that streams through my days; there is richness, too, in happiness, though it feels to me more slippery somehow.

Even – or maybe especially – the moments of radiant joy, though, are twined around some sadness.  That is just how I’m wired.  I can’t figure out the shape of the shadow, whether it is a faint rim around the happy experiences or a jagged grain at their center, but I am certain of its origin, which is about time’s passage.  The unavoidable reality that it can never come again haunts the edges of a moment even as I live it.  I am ever more certain that coming to terms with impermanence is the great challenge of my life.

I know that life is both an endless alleluia and a constant goodbye.  That the shadow and the radiance are a single axis along which my life spins.  Always turning.


I am the one whose love overcomes you

I am the heart contracted by joy ..

I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you,
when you think to call my name …
(Jane Kenyon)

Grace, Whit,

I hope you will always remember this trip …

The rides, the winning of Lego the enormous green bear, the fact that your first words every morning, Whit, were “I love you, Grace,” the late-afternoon cheese & crackers and running on the grass, the holding hands, the morning Cocoa Pebbles, the races between the stairs and the elevator, the laughter, the swimming in the pool (even me!), and the kisses on the tops of your heads. The tears in my eyes at random moments, which took you (and me) by surprise. The waking and sleeping and breathing and eating all together; the way our very pulses synched.

I hope you will always remember how very, very much I love you.

taking pictures of everything

Last week Grace and I were sitting in the car with her friend who we had driven home from camp. We were waiting to drop her off and of course I was early so we had a few minutes to kill. Grace wanted to show Jessie a particular picture (I can’t remember which one) so I handed them my iphone. They scrolled through all the pictures I have on it (which isn’t actually that many, I seem to be the only person I know who deletes photographs after uploading them!).

Grace and her friend starting giggling and I turned around to look at them.

“What?” I asked. They looked at the screen, not at me (preview of things to come, surely). “Seriously, what?”

“Nothing, Mum,” Grace said with a newly dismissive tone that has crept into her voice lately.

“Grace, your mum takes pictures of everything!” Grace’s friend said, not unkindly, more in surprise.

“She does. This isn’t even the half of it. She takes pictures of the sky a lot, and Legos Whit builds, and my art, and shoes, and our backs, and shadows, and glasses on the table and … wow, yes, she does!” Grace trailed off.

Yes, I do. I take tons of pictures of little random moments in our lives that I don’t want to forget. These images can hold as much potent memory as the more traditional ones that I often show here, of Grace and Whit, smiling at the camera, together or apart. These seemingly random glimpses of inanimate things can reawaken for me all of the emphermal details of the experience, of who precisely I was at that specific moment. So yes, I do take pictures of “everything,” and wow, oh wow, am I grateful for that.

Hadley’s beautiful faded pink-gray hydrangeas.


Favors for Whit’s 3rd birthday party (personalized plates with each child’s name and a drawing of a clown) all wrapped up the night before.

Sparkling rose, Diet Coke, and water, all lined up, at a celebratory lunch with Bouff.

Spring peonies on my kitchen island.


A breathtaking late summer sunset.


My feet standing in the lapping waves at the shore of the Marion beach.


My shadow, with Grace and Whit on either side of me, cast against the concrete path behind my in-laws’ house in Florida.


A dandelion, just proffered with enthusiastic affection by Whit.


Grace’s overnight bag, packed for a sleepover, half of which is taken up by her two well-worn, deeply-loved bears (creatively named Brown Bear and Yellow Bear).


Two bright buckets.


An ornament that I had made for the Christmas that Grace was just one, that she had just hung on the 2009 Christmas tree.

The scatter of yellow leaves on a wet autumn pavement.

Must Stop Myself. I could bore you with hundreds, if not thousands, of photographs like these.

In truth, the random photographs like these are often just as evocative (and sometimes more so) than the more traditional family and friend photographs.

The struggle and the beauty

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
– Sigmund Freud

Many thanks to Anthony Lawlor, from whom I found this quote on Twitter. I do believe this to be true, absolutely, though it’s so incredibly difficult to remember in the moments where the struggle seems overwhelming. The struggle which occurs for me on so many levels these days. The struggle to stop my crazy squirrel brain from frantically spinning over and over on the same questions. The struggle to remain patient and present with my lovely children who can be charming, curious, and incredibly aggravating. The struggle not to over-identify with Grace, to maintain the distance and perspective I need to parent her well. The struggle not to crush Whit’s effervescent spirit, whose enthusiastic bubbles sometimes challenge the rules and norms. The struggle to try to keep alive my professional and creative selves, as well as to have enough left over for those who need me.

“These are the day of miracle and wonder”
– Paul Simon

For some reason that lyric was in my head nonstop this weekend. My subconscious was trying to remind me of the richness of the present moment, I suspect, which can be so hard to really see.

It was a weekend with plenty of struggle as well as ample beauty. Somehow the struggle is so quick to occlude the beauty, so much more urgent and immediate, so hard to shake off. Does this make sense? It is here, on the page, and through the lens of my camera that I am more able to see the beauty. It rises more slowly, over time, asserting itself in memory rather than in the vivid moment. The beauty is in the smallest moments, infinity opening, surprising me every time, from the most infinitessimal things, like a world in the back of a wardrobe (there really are only two or three human stories, and we do go on telling them, no?). Why is it, then, that the struggles, also often small, can so quickly and utterly yank me back to the morass of misery and frustration, away from the wonders that are revealed in the flashing moments of beauty?

I wish I could change the dynamic between these two, but the beauty, fragile as it is in the moment, seems sturdier over the long arc of a life. Freud’s quote supports this, the notion that the beauty develops over time, like a print sitting in the solution for a long time, image gradually forming on the slick surface of the photo paper, slowly, haltingly hovering into being. It is, of course, the photograph that is the enduring artifact of the experience.