musings

I loved Michiko Kakutani’s wonderful article about Obama the reader, Obama the writer, as he prepares to leave the White House. There was much about the piece that moved me, but it’s this line I can’t stop thinking about:

He has a writer’s sensibility — an ability to be in the moment while standing apart as an observer

I read that and stopped.  I read it again.  And again.  I started to crying.  I’ve written ad nauseum about my fierce desire to be here now.  I’ve also written, over and over again, about the sense I have inside my own life of being slightly removed, of having my nose pressed against a window as I watch things happening through it. I am the official photographer, after all. But I’ve been thinking through the implications of that bias, that role, for many years.

I am trying to be here, and I am resolutely outside.

Can these things coexist?

By the way, I’m not saying I’m comparing myself to Obama.  I’m also not calling myself a writer.  But that sentence stopped me in my tracks, because I want so dearly to be in the moment, but I also recognize that I am often standing apart.  Am I trying to thread an impossible needle, reconcile two fundamentally opposed goals?  Or can I be both?

I don’t plan to stop trying to be here now, to stop trying to release the claim the past and future make on my present.  But maybe it’s a relief to honor the difficulty I have with that: maybe it’s part of my wiring.

Swinging on Christmas Day at the park near our house where Grace and Whit basically grew up. Something about this picture speaks to me of what passes, and of what abides.  And of trying to capture a child – a life – in motion, which is what I try to do here, and which I realize is fundamentally impossible. 

I’ve been thinking lately about what passes, and, conversely, but also, about what endures.  I’ve written before about the notion of this too shall pass, and about how often that is true.

Also, this fall I heard Tennyson’s lines in my head often: though much is taken, much abides.

Much passes.  Almost everything. In the last week, my ankle hurt strangely and to the point of limping for a couple of days.  My computer and phone were on fritz for a day.  Those things passed.  Grace and Whit and I lock horns and argue.  That passes.

Some things abide and endure.  No matter what happens – and the days of Grace and Whit at home are certainly something that pass – I will always be a mother to those two rapidly-growing, infuriating, extraordinary people I call my daughter and my son.  I will always have red hair, freckled skin (note my new scar, which is a downside of this coloring).  I will always be sensitive, and prefer quiet, and need to sleep (and the insomnia that’s plagued me lately is not helping). I will always be K and S’s daughter and H’s sister.  These things are eternal.

I’m comforted by what endures even as I feel anxiety about what passes.  Anxiety and ease in equal measure, I guess, when I’m honest: the things that are hard will pass, and that’s reassuring. But some things I dearly love pass, too, and that’s sorrowful.

I don’t know that I have a neat conclusion, rather an observation that has been on my mind.  Some things stay.  Most things go. Which is which is sometimes random.  These truths are both contradictory and a source of solace, at least for me.  That I can hold both of those things in my hand is perhaps a sign of maturity, I realize, as I write this.

So.  Let me breathe in what is, recognizing that some of that will pass, and some will stay, and that is as it should be.

In early January, Matt was showing me something to do with his leg.  He got onto his knees and turned around.  Just the mere fact of that caused me to draw breath: a few months earlier, he’d been immobile, flat on his back, with a good but attenuated prognosis.

My fingers moved unconsciously to the long scar on my left upper arm (shown above).  I had a mole removed right before Christmas, and it left a longer and larger scar than I expected.  It’s still raised (the kids call it my “caterpillar”).  But I’m fine.  As is Matt.

I can’t stop thinking about that.  I’ve written about scars before, and about our body’s ability to move on, showing the marks of its lessons and life, but I’m still amazed by all the ways that we can rebound. Years ago, I wrote an essay about finding the first freckle on Whit’s four year old body, and of the surge of sadness I felt when I realized that life had made its first imprint on him.

Jane Hirschfeld’s quote about proud flesh comes to mind:

… see how the flesh grows back across a wound, with great vehemence, more strong than the simple, untested surface before.  There’s a name for it on horses, when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh, as all flesh is proud of its wounds, wears them as honors given out after battle, small triumphs pinned to the chest.

2016 resulted in some new proud flesh for both Matt and me.  For different reasons, and to different degrees, but we have new scars (and I’m only talking about the visible, external scars). Our bodies bear the marks of our journeys. Whit has scars.  Grace has bumps.  Matt has a big scar.  I have several of each (I used to joke that if you hadn’t broken a bone – I’ve broken many – you weren’t trying hard enough). Yet our bodies also show a remarkable ability to move forward and to heal.  What an outrageous blessing that is.  We are all learning to dance with the limp.

Maybe this is what grace is, the unseen sounds that make you look up. I think it’s why we are here, to see as many chips of blue sky as we can bear. To find the diamond hearts within one another’s meatballs. To notice flickers of the divine, like dust motes on sunbeams in your dusty kitchen. Without all the shade and shadows, you’d miss the beauty of the veil. The shadow is always there, and if you don’t remember it, when it falls on you and your life again, you’re plunged into darkness. Shadows make the light show.

-Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

As I googled in my own archives last week looking for an Anne Lamott quote, I found this passage above, which brought me to tears yet again on an early January morning.  And my own words about the piece, about where I was that day (late 2009), spoke to me yet again. I’m spiraling through the same thoughts and emotions that have marked my my writing – and my life – for many years. In the worst interpretation of this pattern, I’m a broken record. In the best, I’m revisiting important topics, pushing on a bruise, trying to understand themes that are integral to who I am in the world. Broken record of bruise-pusher (or both), a few (edited) thoughts from late 2009, which still make tremendous sense to me now, on the cusp of a new year, 2017.

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It’s okay to admit there there is only so much brilliance we can take. This is an adjunct admission to that of owning that we are not capable of living fully engaged in the moment, heart open and receiving, all the time. I try but I cannot stare into the sun all the time.

I am thankful today for the acknowledgment, by others and myself, that it’s okay to live this way. I am thankful for Anne’s gracious, lyrical reminder of the fact that shadows make the light show. There is self-acceptance, for me, in saying this out loud. It is simply the way I am, inclined towards melancholy, but that does not have to mean I have a sad life. Absolutely not.

Isn’t it, after all, the interplay of light and shadow that provides the texture of our lives? The darkness creates contrast, but it also scoops out some emotional part of me, allowing me to bear – experience, recognize, feel – more joy. I am grateful, I realize anew, for way my lens on the world is striated with both light and dark.

I am thankful today for evening light on bare trees, for the deep, glowing blue of the afternoon sky, for the words of a friend that make me feel less alone, for the tousled hair of sleepy children, for the lyrics of a song that bring tears to my eyes, for the moments when I am really and truly present, when I feel my spirit beating like wings in my chest.

So, this is happysad day for me, in a reflective season. My heart swells with awareness of my tremendous blessings, of the extravagant beauty that is my world. My thoughts are quiet and shadowy, but lit by incandescent beams of light. Like a night sky whose darkness is obliterated over and over by the flare of roman candles exploding, their colors made more beautiful by the surprise of them against the darkness. Like my life.

Sometimes, I choose a word of the year.  Sometimes, I don’t.  It depends on whether a word presents itself to me in the days and weeks leading up to the end of a year.

My 2016 word was ease, which felt both ironic and essential as the year unfolded not at all easefully.  In 2011, I chose trust, and in 2012, I chose light.  I’m sure there’s some ineffable rationale behind why certain words present themselves to me at certain times (similar, of course, to my belief that there’s a deep-seated logic behind why certain quotes and lyrics run through my mind at certain times).

For the last several days, I’ve been thinking about one word: deliberate.

Deliberate.  That’s my word for 2017.

I wish to be deliberate about my love, my time, and my attention in 2017.  The truth is I already feel I’m pretty deliberate my choices. I’ve been thinking about this. Am I choosing something easy as it’s already something I do? Is that a cop-out?  Maybe. Ease sure wasn’t something I was good at, for example.  Arguably, neither are trust or lightness.  I do think there’s room for all of us to be more deliberate, though.  There are two other words that have been hovering in my mind, so much that I almost chose a triad of words for 2017.  Those other two words are gentle and human.

Maybe I want to be a deliberately gentle human in 2017?  A gentle, human, deliberate person?  All true.  I feel less laser-focused on deliberate than I’ve been on other words, but it does keep insistently presenting itself. I was speaking to a dear friend on the last day of 2016 and I mentioned deliberate as a possible word of the year.  This was the first time I’ve said this out loud.  “It seems so humorless,” I went on, saying that it felt like in some ways like a dull or uninspired choice.  Her reaction to the word was different, and that difference was validating to me. Something for me to think about, as I move forward in this new year, is why my impression of deliberate – a word I own as something I am – is boring and lame.  What does that say?  I’m not sure but I don’t think it’s good.

I will log off the computer now, as a deliberate act of choosing my family.

Do you have a word for this year?  If so, what is it?  Do you think deliberate is a humorless word? What does it mean that I chose it?