musings

Choosing

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I shared this image on Instagram a few days ago.  This is what Sedona felt like – the sacred was all around us, and I couldn’t stop noticing it.  One day we went for the short hike up to the vortex on the property of our hotel.  We sat up there for a bit, talking to another guest, and Grace and Whit had lots of questions.  She was very nice, and told us all about the energy of the place.  I could tell that certain members of my family weren’t buying it.

As we walked down, though, Whit trailed behind with me.  He stopped briefly to examine the cairn he’d built on the way up, and I paused with him.  As he stood up he looked at me.  “I think I felt something,” he said quickly.

“Me too, Whit.”  I smiled, rubbed his shoulders, and we kept walking.

All week I felt the holiness in the air.  Maybe because I’d heard so much about it, who knows.  But whatever the reason, the very atmosphere in Sedona was charged with something both humming with vitality and deeply peaceful.  I thought about it a lot.  Annie Dillard rang in my head, alongside Barbara Brown Taylor (above, and the passage about altars I quoted on Monday): “What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.”

And since coming home I’ve been thinking about choosing.  Do I choose to see the divinity all around me? It doesn’t feel like a choice, I can tell you that. We can remain open to the sacred that exists in our ordinary lives, of that much I’m sure.  But do we opt to see it, or does it just appear to some people?

Maybe this ambivalence about choosing what we see is connected to how I’ve always felt a little reservation about the notion that we choose happiness.  Do we choose joy?  I’m honestly not sure.  I don’t know that I choose how I am in the world – I’ve been porous since day one, and as I get older I’m getting more that way.  But is this something I choose?  I don’t think so.  It feels more like how I exist in the world, the way I’m wired, some kind of deep-seated default orientation. Not saying I wouldn’t choose it, but I’m not sure that I do.

How do you feel about the notion of choosing joy, or choosing receptivity to life’s holiness? 

Constellations

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Part of the Star Finder that Whit made in the second half of this past weekend’s Family Science Saturday about the night sky.

Our school has a marvelous tradition of offering Family Science Saturdays occasionally throughout the year. It’s a great joy to me that Whit really likes to go.  This past weekend, we spent Saturday  morning flat on our backs inside an inflatable planetarium.  Whit and I crawled into the silver dome of plastic through a low tube of plastic, and we took our places lying down with our feet in the middle and our heads at the outside of the circle.

Once our eyes had acclimated to the dark, Miss D, Whit’s Science teacher, began to talk to us about constellations.  Since the beginning of time, she averred, people have looked up at the stars, and tried to see patterns.

Isn’t that what we are all doing, all the time?  Looking – up, out, across, down – and trying to see a pattern in the assortment of details that we observe?  Witnessing, and naming, if we can, that vast design, after which I named this blog almost ten years ago?

Miss D turned on the projector, and the planetarium filled with constellations.  “Mum!” I heard Whit whisper in my ear.  “That’s Orion!”  I could not tell where hsi hand was pointing, because it was so dark.  But I nodded and looked back and forth along the curved ceiling, trying to find the three stars in a row that mark Orion’s belt.

“I can’t see it, Whit,” I murmured.

“Right here,” he took my hand and pointed it to the ceiling.  “Follow your hand.  Right there.  Looks sort of like a scorpion?”

“So,” Miss D began, “first, we’ll talk about Orion.”  She turned on a laser pointer and the red dot showed us where Orion was.  I could feel Whit nodding next to me.  Then she told us about Andromeda, Cassiopeia, and Perseus.  As I lay there, listening to her voice and watching the constellations above, I thought about Kilimanjaro, all those years ago, about seeing the Big Dipper and the Southern Cross int he sky at the same time, about my deep belief that life is about learning to navigate by the stars.

That’s still true, and I’m still learning.  I know how to find Orion now.  My son showed me.  One of a zillion things he’s shown me already, and I know there are at least a zillion more ahead.

Ghosts

Lately, the air feels thick with ghosts.  Memories swirl around me on a regular basis, but these days I am particularly aware of their tendrils, and people and places and experiences from the past feel tangible in the air next to me.

Last week, one evening, Matt and I went to an event for the boarding school I attended, Phillips Exeter Academy.  I sat, listening to the new head of school speak, and found myself choked up over and over again.  It’s not a secret that I didn’t love Exeter when I was there, but it is equally as true that I respect the place more and more every year.  It is where I became who I am today.  In some ways I feel like I live in my life in widening circles out from that central point, that cold, dark campus in New Hampshire, those classrooms alight with thought and learning and life, those cross-country woods where I ran for so many hours, that tiny single bedroom in a house on Front Street where I lived.

I could feel the girl I was then – so full of the future, aware of all that lay ahead, nursing her first broken heart and missing home, across an ocean – pulsing in the room around me.  I felt so deeply grateful for the education I have been given that I could not keep back the tears.

Later that same night, I sat on the bathroom floor with my daughter, only a couple of years younger now than the girl I was then.  She wasn’t feeling well before bed, and the cold tile of the bathroom felt comforting to her.  I know that feeling.  We sat there, talking aimlessly about nothing and everything.  I reached up and grabbed a bottle of hand lotion and asked her if I could rub her feet.  She nodded with a faint smile.  I rubbed her feet with the lotion, remembering in an almost blinding flash that this is what my mother did with her mother when she was in the hospital.

In the spring and summer of 1997, when my grandmother was being treated for pancreatic cancer, my mother and I would often go visit her at the hospital in Boston.  More often than not, Mum would rub her mother’s feet with cream.  I remember marveling at the quiet intimacy of this gesture, and here I was, without having thought about it, doing the same for my daughter.  Four generations of women, united in a single small act.  I felt the presence of my mother and grandmother in the quiet bathroom with us, a spiralling back and forward at the same time, something sacred pressing on us from above, from below, from all around.

The word “ghosts” has negative implications, at least for me, but lately the presence of people who are no longer bodily here feels reassuring to me.  I have a vivid memory of the winter solstice, many years ago, and of watching the horizon as the sun set.  I felt then the visceral presence of people I have loved who were gone  (then, my grandmothers, my mother’s best friend and my second mother, Susie).  I swear to you they were right there, over the horizon, catching the sun as it slipped out of my sight.  I found that moment deeply affirming and comforting, and I’ve never forgotten it.  That’s how I felt last week remembering my teenage self and realizing I was subconsciously repeating rituals and rites in which my own mother and grandmother participated.  I was held by the past.  Rather than being sad about all the ways that then threads itself through now, I felt reassured by it.

 

So taut I might snap

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It has been a very difficult few weeks in my world.  Mostly work-related, but I feel worn down and stretched thin and generally as though I am about to fall apart.  I read my friend Amanda’s piece, Love, Doubt, and Guilt Dance on the Head of a Pin at exactly the right moment.  Last Wednesday night, to be specific.  I’ve been dropping balls.  I’ve been snappy.  I haven’t been sleeping.  I haven’t been writing.  I feel pretty terrible all around.  I read her piece, particularly these lines:

It’s inevitable that we spend moments pulling ourselves taut; it’s how we grow. Stretching doesn’t make us weaker or put us at risk of breaking, it makes us stronger. We lean into work, surrender ourselves to intimacy, devote time to our kids, these are the ways that we nurture the different parts of who we are and the people we love. It isn’t easy and I don’t think any of it comes without debt or compromise, but each instance of enduring the tautness and learning from it helps us understand the things that we want to hold on to and the ways that we can contribute.

Oh, God, I read this paragraph and started to sob, alone in my office with the rain pelting against the windows and the rapidly-darkening street outside.  Is this tautness, this feeling of holding my very life together with held breath and wobbling scotch tape, helping me grow?  I sure hope so. One thing I don’t feel a smidgen of right now – not even a little bit – is ease.  Not at all.  I feel tired, and wired, and anxious, and sad, and overwhelmed.

I loathe complaining (just ask my children: there are a few surefire ways to set me off and one is complaining). The truth of my feeling not-at-all-good is at war inside my head with my own awareness of my tremendous good fortune.  How can I be whining, when so much is so good?  How is it possible that I can admire the beauty around me – and I do – and still feel like this?  I don’t have answers for that, though I can’t stop thinking of what Leslie Jamison writes on the back of Marilynne Robinson’s exquisite book of essays, The Givenness of Things:

…Robinson’s determination to shed light on … complexities – the solitude that endures inside intimacy, the sorrow that persists beside joy – marks her as one of those rare writers genuinely committed to contradiction as an abiding state of consciousness.

Contradiction as an abiding state of consciousness.  Maybe that’s what this is.  The darkness and light that mark my life are shifting like tectonic plates, creating small earthquakes inside of me.  They are both still there.  Even on days – weeks, months – when the darkness feels all-consuming, when I feel brittle and exhausted and spent, I have to remember that the good exists, flickering like a pilot light.  I need to trust it will return.  And I do.

My problem with ease

I love my word of the year, ease.  I’ve been thinking about it a lot.  I make it my intention in yoga classes, I think about it before I go to bed at night.  And every time the word crosses my mind, I have an uncomfortable realization that I have a problem with the word.  Don’t get me wrong: it’s still my word, and it’s still my goal, and it’s still fundamentally what I want in life.  But it also brings up some complicated associations for me.

Perhaps because of my Puritan roots – which are both deep and irrefutable – I have long believed in my marrow that only things that are hard are meaningful.  Or maybe not only, but certainly that something being difficult makes it more likely to be valuable.  A tough climb makes the view more beautiful and all of that.

The other truth which is hard for me to admit is that I’ve always thought that a lot of people weren’t really trying hard enough.  The flip side of that is my deep faith that all problems could be overcome by just putting our mind to things and working hard.  This is part of why the deep postpartum depression I experienced after Grace’s birth was so disorienting for me: it was literally the first time in my life when gritting my teeth and just trying harder didn’t make something better.

That was a big, and hard, lesson for me to learn.  I’m still grappling with my basic belief that if things are easy they aren’t worth anything.  And with the notion that if I feel ease – if things flow – that means that I’m letting myself off the hook somehow.

I suspect part of why this word chose me this year is the creeping sense I have that the correlation between effort and meaning – a central tenet of my life up until now, as uncomfortable as admitting that makes me – doesn’t capture the whole picture.  I know that my goal isn’t a struggle- and difficulty-free life; in fact, maybe that’s part of my hesitation with this line of thinking.  I will never stop celebrating hard work, and I don’t want to.  But I do think that the automatic assignment of value to something hard – and, maybe more importantly, the refusal to grant importance to something that comes easily – is flawed.

Some of the time, things will flow.  Some of the time, I’ll have to put my nose to the grindstone and really work at something.  Both scenarios can be full of meaning, and value.  I just want to welcome both of those scenarios.  To invite both into my life.  With ease.