musings

I loved the movie version of Wild, a book I adored.  I came straight home and went to my heavily underlined- and written-in copy of Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language.  I read the first page, the first poem, which Reese Witherspoon specifically reads and thinks about in the movie.

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power

I’ve always loved these lines, and often think about them.  Leonard Cohen rose to my mind, then, singing about how “there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

For a long time I’ve wanted to believe this.  I’m often told it’s true.  I think it is.  I want it to be.  I know what my personal wound is.  It is my sensitivity, my awareness of time’s swift passage.  I wrote the paragraph below in 2010 (when I was 36):

It’s all connected, the way I observe the world in sometimes-excruciating detail, the untrammeled rushes of joy I can feel at the most unexpected times, the heart-wrenching pain my life delivers at others.  This is all a part of being an exceptionally porous person.  Is it any wonder that I’ve had to develop coping mechanisms, be they an aversion to true vulnerability or a tendency towards distraction, in order to mitigate the power of constantly living in such an exposed way?  I’m easily overwhelmed by the grandeur and terror of this life, and I have over 36 years built up a variety of ways of managing the pain that that inundation can bring with it.  It’s a package deal, the wound and the wonder.  I don’t know how to have one without the other.  Even the most swollen, shiny rapture is striated with sadness.

Four years later I read this and my first reaction is: I don’t instinctively think about my coping mechanisms anymore.  I wonder what that means.  Have I come to terms with the painful ramifications of my own wound?  I’m still easily overwhelmed by this life, there’s no question about that.  These days that overwhelm, and the observations that flood in its wake, form the bulk of what I write about.  Does that mean I am learning to access the power that comes from the same source as the wound?

I don’t think of myself as a powerful person.  At all.  So maybe that’s not the right word.  Perhaps inspiration works better.  My wounds and my inspiration have the same source.  That makes a lot of sense to me.  It’s also clear to me that the crack in me – the porousness, the sensitivity, the awareness – is absolutely where the light gets in.  It’s also where the shadow lives

And if there’s one thing I know, it’s that I can’t see the light without the shadow.  That much is abundantly clear to me now.  I take pictures of shadows – like the one above – all the time, and am drawn to the intersection of light and dark.  I guess that – the interplay of light and shadow – is one way of describing my wound, and also, I understand at last, my inspiration.

What do you think about Adrienne Rich’s assertion that our wounds come from the same source as our power?

So, onward into 2015.  Last year I opened the new year with some reflections on what I’d learned the year before (as well as with that paragraph above, which I think bears repeating).  I wanted to do so again.  Some of these are new lessons, others are continued of lessons that I seem to need to need to re-learn over and over again.

What did I learn in 2014?

No amount of being here now helps ease the essential pain of time’s passage.  It gives me rich memories, yes, but it doesn’t change my sorrow at how fast this life flies.

The cliche that raising a tween and teen is the most difficult part of parenting seems to have some truth in it.  That I feel I can say that as I embark on this new phase fills me, I’ll admit, with something approaching dread.

The best way to clear my head when I feel sad or angry or upset about something is to go for a walk.  To gaze up at the sky and the branches, to feel the air around me, to observe the familiar streets near my home.

40 is officially the age when you start taking your health seriously.  That means that when something’s wrong, all the what-ifs rear their ugly heads and suddenly have credence.  The worst could be.  But it also means that on a daily basis I feel aware of the great miracle that the human body is.  I strive not to take my own health for granted.  I’m sure I don’t do nearly a good enough job, but I do try.

My soul speaks in poetry.  It’s not an accident that so many years ago, I chose to write my senior thesis in college on poetry (and I love the instinctive choice that I recognize now as some kind of deep, essential knowing).  It’s most often poetry that runs through my head, and it’s in reading poetry that I feel most at home, most soothed, most comfortable.

Let go.  I must keep learning to let go.

There’s no marathon in my future.  There’s probably not even another half marathon.  30 years of running has accumulated on my knees and the wear is beginning to show.  I hate, hate, hate this fact.

Perhaps the biggest thing I learned in 2014 is how dearly I love my own life.  What I most devoutly want in 2015 is more these days, more of my shining, painful, ordinary life.  My wish for the new year is as simple and as arrogant as that: more of this.

What did you learn in 2014?  What do you hope for in 2015?

December 22, 2011, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem

These are the darkest days.  And they are so full of light. Yesterday was the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, which I regularly refer to as the holiest day of the year for me.

I find the darkness is deeply comforting.  Maybe because I can see all the light and glory that’s contained within it.

I always remember the moment I realized that I loved the darkness.  It was many years ago, in Devember 1996.  I was sitting on the 31st floor of a building downtown, at my first job, and I stood and watched the sun set out a window.  I had an interior office, so maybe I was walking back from the kitchen or the bathroom. I don’t know, but I wasn’t sitting at my own desk which was in a small room with a whiteboard on the wall with a running list of “things you don’t want the bargain version of” (I recall only “surgery” and “sushi”).  I had many hours of work ahead of me; it wasn’t anywhere near the end of my day.  But the sun slipped below the horizon and it was dark.  And I was struck with a powerful sense that this was absolutely okay.  For years the short days had troubled me, and I’d railed against them, but suddenly, that evening, I felt differently.  I was reassured by the dark.  I felt held by it.  I was dazzled by the beauty of the lights that spangled the buildings all around mine.  I also felt a new, bone-deep certainty that the days would lengthen and that the light would come again.  We were just turning, all of us together, the 31st floor, downtown Boston, this state, this country, this world.  Somehow the dark made me feel in a visceral way connected with the world’s population, not just now, but through history.

We are all turning.  And we always have been.  Maybe this essential truth is part of why I’ve had T.S. Eliot’s we must be still and still moving in my mind non-stop for days (well, and the fact that I re-read Four Quartets last week).

People often assume that I find the darkness of the winter difficult and depressing.  Perhaps oddly, I don’t.

That evening so many years ago feels now like a harbinger, like one of those moments when the future glinted through the present like a strand of gold thread running through fabric.  Somehow I sensed then what I know now, that the dark is full of staggering, startling, serendipitous beauty.  These days, I’m certain that without dark light has no meaning.  To see the dark’s glorious, shadowy beauty we have to surrender to it.  We have to let go of our fear of the dark.  We may prefer the light, but the truth is there’s nothing to fear in the dark.  Once we let our eyes get accustomed to it, we can see the treasures that dark can hold.

Light and dark is a theme that runs through my life and which animates much of my writing.  I speak often of the darkness at the heart of the human experience, of the black hole around which my own life circles.  For me, that darkness is impermanence and the unavoidable, brutal truth of life’s brevity. Yet without that darkness, would life’s stunning, breathtaking beauty have as much power.  I doubt it.  The inexorable turning forward of my time on earth is the shadow that hangs over my every day and a truth so blinding that to look directly at it feels like staring into the sun.  Even as I write about embracing darkness in order to see the beauty it contains, the metaphors of light flood in.  But aren’t total darkness and blinding brightness almost the same thing?

Every year light and dark get closer and more interconnected for me, not less.  Every year I feel the rhythms of the earth’s turning and the solstice more keenly.  We are always turning, towards the radiance and away from it, and the subtle changes of light and dark beat somewhere intimate and essential for me, as though in my own bloodstream.

It is Wendell Berry’s lines to which I return in this season, over and over again:

I dislike talking about being busy.  I’ve said this before.  We are all busy.  Everybody’s life is full.  I know this is true, and discussion of being busy feels like both an excuse and, frankly, a bit of a bore.

Lately, however, my own life feels particularly abundant, as it were, with demands, responsibilities, and, yes, joys.

Every single day it feels like I step into a slipstream in the morning and am carried along all day. Sometimes I am unable to take a breath. The truth is I can’t decide if this is good or bad feeling.  Sometimes the whitewater of my life makes me feel out of control, and that I definitely hate.  Other times, I’m aware that I truly love everything I’m doing, or at the very least I value all the responsibilities.  Furthermore, I choose them.  While I still feel somewhat overwhelmed, it’s hard to feel unhappy or complain in this situation.

I chose this.

Remembering our agency is a quick way to gratitude.  It’s an effective way to stop feeling victim-y and overwhelmed, too.  Busy is not bad.  Busy is not unique.  Busy does not have to be the end of the world.  How fortunate we are to have so many things that want our attention! (this reminds me of a piece I wrote a long time ago, about how the work-home tension is one of deep privilege).

Even so, it’s sometimes hard to maintain our – my – equilibrium when life is rushing at me like whitewater.  Still (continuing), I want to be still (not moving).

Years ago I wrote about stillness, and how I realized that it was never going to arrive, but instead be something I needed to actively seek amidst the activity of my full life. I think all the time – daily, at least – of TS’s Eliot’s lines from Four Quartets, We must be still and still moving. Being still in the middle of the busy-ness, that’s the goal, at least for me.  Finding ways to breathe and to be here, mostly because without doing that I miss my life.  And as I remind myself, over and over again, I chose this, this manifold set of responsibilities and identities which unfurl, shimmering, piling upon each other, beautiful and daunting at the same time.

More and more I’ve been instagramming with my made-up hashtag of #everydaylife, and I think in part that’s a way I force myself to stop and notice.  Sometimes those posts are the sky, sometimes they are the chaos of my kitchen island while the kids do a Chemistry project, sometimes they’re the scene as we head out the door in the morning.  When I stop and take a picture, and think to myself this is my everyday life, I am still.

For a brief moment, only, but still.  Still.