musings

I have written about my attraction to the edges of things, to this world’s, and this life’s, borders.  I was born on the cusp as one season turns into another, and I am drawn over and over again to the places were one thing turns into another – darkness and light, memory and the present, water and sand at the coast.  There are a million examples I can think of.

What I’m thinking about today is similar, and feels like a related or adjacent topic, but it’s slightly different. I am thinking about the poles that we each hold as we navigate this life.  Or, at least, the poles that I know I hold.  These days, the world feels so terrifying, so bleak, in many ways.  And at the same time, I’ve never been more aware of its beauties, of its tiny joys.  These poles.  These opposites.  Every single day holds both terror and delight.  I think that has always been true for me, but it does feel particularly bold now, the contrast between these two things.

I read my friend and mentor Katrina Kenison’s gorgeous post on a similar topic last night and haven’t stopped thinking about it. n The whole piece is exemplary, and it was hard to pick a passage to share, but these words, the ones she closes with, are a manifesto for us all:

Given the state of our fractured, imperiled world, it seems safe to say we’re in this struggle for the long haul.  If we’re going to find the strength to carry on and to fight for what matters, we must also continue to celebrate what we love.  To embrace delight, to dance with abandon, to soak up beauty, to share each day’s small gifts and doings, is to take care of ourselves and each other. So, if you should see a tree full of robins or a mackerel sky, be sure to tell someone. Your delight is mine.

In my comment I wrote about Katrina’s piece giving me permission to allow these seemingly contradictory poles of life to coexist.  Sometimes it can feel overwhelming, schizophrenic, the way I can be deeply sad about something and, simultaneously, intensely touched by the particular blue of the sky.  But Katrina’s post got me thinking that perhaps these two extremes of experience are – rather than random, unusual, or something to bear with – absolutely necessary.  Maybe we need both.  Or at least I do.  It also occurs to me that these seemingly-opposed feelings can be effectively mapped onto the bigger canvas of my life, as much as they can also inhabit the smallest moments of my day.

I’ve written before about the months after Matt’s and my fathers both died quickly and suddenly, and about the Robert Lowell lines that “darkness honestly lived through is a place of wonder and life.  So much has come from there.”  I said that that time had both “difficulty and surprising grandeur.”  And that’s true.  And it strikes me that those dark experiences somehow burrow into us, making room for the light. That makes sense on some existential level, right?  Was it Kahlil Gibran who said “the deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain?”

When I write about “holding both poles,” an image of my child hands holding ski poles comes to mind.  Not sure why, and obviously that’s not the poles I mean.

Regardless.  I just felt like sharing that visual.

It is true that these days – whether that’s 2020 or being 45 or just the particular ecosystem I live in – things feel particularly charged, in both directions. The world feels threatening, unstable, and worrying.  And it also feels gorgeous.  I am so aware of spring being right around the corner, of everything about to burst into life. This tension – this pain and this beauty – is animate in the very bodies of my children, flying towards young adulthood as they both are.  It’s impossible for me to look at them without blinking back tears, some days.  It’s just all so outrageously lovely, and so unavoidably, excruciatingly short-lived.

I think I have a sense of why the world feels perilous and dark right now.  I think often of Dad, who in the months before he died was increasingly speaking about how uncertainty that the United States would stay united, and who I wish I could talk about what’s going on in the world.  It’s less clear to me why my awareness of life’s tiny joys and beauties feels so amped up right now.  Maybe it’s a coping mechanism.  Maybe it’s growing into midlife.  I’m not sure why, but I’m grateful.  I hope we can all hold both poles, welcome life – with all of its heartbreak and its beauty – with open arms.  As another one of my beloved teachers, Dani Shapiro says, “this too.  this too.”

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

-Zora Neale Hurston

I think very often of Hurston’s quote.  And, in the last few weeks, even more than usual.

After a series of years that asked questions, 2019 was (at last) a year that offered some answers.  I described 2019 on Instagram as a year “with blessedly rounded edges.”  And it was.  And maybe the lesson was a simple one, one that’s eluded me for 45 years: just let go a little.  Let things come as they may.  Everything, after all, passes.  Both the good and the bad.

I’m grateful that 2019 was a year of relative smoothness, and whose ease offered some answers at last.  I haven’t chosen a word this year, because none has presented itself.  I’m also not a big resolution person.

But I do have Shawn Colvin in my head, right alongside Zora Neale Hurston (remember, years ago, when I wrote about Doctor Seuss and Mark Doty in the same breath?).

Steady On.

That’s what she keeps saying.  So I will.  And I’ll hope for another year that answers questions.  But if it decides to ask them instead, what I know now is I’ll make it through.

we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

Dad died two years ago today.

Thanksgiving is on Thursday.

I don’t feel sad necessarily, so much as skinless, feeling it all – the bright and the painful, the glory and the hurt, the joy and the sorrow.  There is so much of life that swirls around these last weeks of the year.  That’s always been true, but it’s a more emotional time for me now that it’s inextricably wound together with my memories of Dad’s sudden death two years ago.

I have Merwin’s beautiful words in my head, the same poem a line of which I shared the morning of my last Thanksgiving with my Dad (11/23/2017) and through whose prism I have long viewed Thanksgiving.  I just understand them better now.

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.
…
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

For a bunch of reasons lately, I’ve been reflecting on the fact that I definitely privilege hard work and toughness.  I may over-privilege it, truthfully.  I’ve been thinking about Dad, one of whose strongest messages (in a litany; we have established that his is, above all, the voice that I hear in my head, the original imprimatur that guides my living, doing, and being) was that life was full of uncertainty and challenge.  One thing you could count on, he taught me, was that there was a lot out of your control.

His view was probably overly cynical; I think he felt tht when things worked out that was a happy accident, and that mostly we should be prepared for challenges and switchbacks.  But he was also clear that life’s unexpected detours often took us to the most beautiful vistas.  His Fulbright year in Germany, for example, which happened because of the well-intentioned suggestion of a college professor, kindled a life-long passion for Europe and led to his spending a decade there with his young family.

Difficulty made life worth living.  He often joked that our family motto was “never easy, never dull,” a memory that truthfully makes me squirm a little bit inside.  I guess I would take that over boring, but sometimes, isn’t there value in things being easy?  I told him once, at a dinner the two of us in the mid 2000s, that I wanted someone to “keep the world at bay for me” (I’d been listening to a lot of Dixie Chicks.  I can still remember this facial expression upon hearing this; he shook his head, his scorn palpable.  His message, though delivered slightly more gently than this, was: no daughter of Kirt Mead’s needs the world kept at bay for her.

Run into the world.  Engage with the world.  You can and you will.

I am intolerant of wallowing and of complaining when something can be done to change a circumstance.  I think I can be overly tough on this dimension.  Sometimes life calls for love that isn’t tough.  I know that, and I’m working on it.

But life in the last few weeks has caused me to reflect on this important lesson of my childhood: that when things go wrong, it doesn’t mean all is lost.  There may be surprising adventures to be found in these unanticipated detours and even if not, hard work will get you moving forward again.  Never give up.  Life was not meant to be lived in a straight line.  It was never going to unfold without hiccups.  That’s the way of the world.  The weather is inevitable, and what matters is how you proceed through it.