musings

City of my heart

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On Sunday, the day before Patriot’s Day and the Boston marathon, Grace ran her first road race.  On the marathon course.  I was in New York for work, so I missed it, but I was sent this fantastic picture.  My heart swelled with both pride and shock, because really, how can my baby be that old?  That tall?

On Monday, Patriot’s Day, as you know, there was an explosion at the Boston marathon.  That tall, lanky girl, for whom I think the word coltish may have been coined, dissolved into a puddle of anxiety.  I told both she and Whit what had happened the minute I heard (they were home from school, sitting in the room next to my office), mostly because I was so startled by the news.  She hovered around my office all afternoon, lurking, asking constant questions, reading over my shoulder.

Right before the explosions, we had been talking about groups of people from the Marines (or Army, I admit I don’t know) who ran the course in their uniforms with backpacks.  Grace’s first reaction to the events, and to the few pictures she saw of the devastation (before I turned the TV off), was: “But those poor people just came home from war, where they saw this all the time.  They weren’t supposed to see it at home.”

Indeed, they weren’t.

I spent the afternoon toggling between bewilderment at this world that we live in, trying to understand what feels like a relentless wave of violence, and hugely heartened by it, as I received more texts and emails than I can count from people from all corners of my life (and the world) checking that we were okay.

But most of all, this: the city of my heart, my home, is bleeding and broken, under attack.

On our day of celebration, which starts at dawn with reenactments of the battles of Lexington and Concord and ends with the last runners limping across the finish line long after the sun has gone down.  Our day of inspiration and striving, of humanity at its finest: I am always moved equally by the runners who push themselves past all reason and by the spectators who come out to watch the river of dedication and devotion.  Marathon Monday is a pure celebration of our beating hearts and of our feet walking on this earth.  This day, this Patriot’s Day, our day, is now forever marked by explosions, lost limbs, dead children (my GOD – an eight year old – Whit is eight – how is this possible?), senseless death and hurt.

I hate that it happened on our day, on Patriot’s Day, on Marathon day.  I hate that this happened at all.

I ache for my city, the city I was born in, the city I’ve lived in since I graduated from college, the city I love, my home.

I know that many other cities in our country have been visited by tremendous pain and brutality over the last several years.  I feel a sense of “it’s our turn,” followed immediately by outrage that I could ever say that. What world do we live in where that’s the deal?

 

What I see right now

I take pictures of everything.  When I leaf through the last few weeks or months on iphoto or instagram, I’m reminder of countless moments that a fleeting sense of wonder startled me to stillness.  When I have those experiences, my instinct is often to photograph whatever it is that caught my attention and reminded me of the grandeur of this ordinary life.  The photograph never, ever captures the moment (the best example I can think of is falling snow: I’ve never taken a picture that even remotely shows the extraordinary beauty of falling snow) but it does remind me of those tightness-in-chest, gasp-of-breath moments that I’m grateful to have every single day.  The photographs are a record of what I see.  And, remember: what you see is what you get.

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The late-winter, early-spring light on a steeple, against one of the most devastatingly blue skies I’ve ever seen.
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The light streaming through my front door one afternoon, when it seemed tangible, visceral.
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Grace’s shooting star tattoo, which inspired part of my ode to age ten: Ten is a complicated hymn, a falling star, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in time, an otherworldy flash of green gorgeousness in the dark ocean.
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This book, that Grace wrote at school, whose “About the Author” section moved me the most.  “It took Blue five years to write Chasing Vermeer,” it says, “because she was teaching and also taking care of her kids.”  I swooned.
Moon

A swollen moon hanging on the horizon in Washington.  Grace actually noticed this as we walked back from dinner one night.  The moon, the moon, the moon: a constant reminder that we need dark to be able to see the light.

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The sun coming up, as seen on the tree outside my kitchen door.

What are you seeing these days?

How many greater things

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We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see.  How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding!  How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile.   – Thoreau

For as long as I can remember, I have been literal.  I have almost always wanted with a fervor bordering on desperation to control, categorize, and to understand.  I am the child of a physicist and engineer, remember.

And yet that has been changing.  Years have given me perspective, and now I can look back through the lens of time.  The arc of my life is loftier, but also less clear.  I understand so much less than I used to.  But I also see so much more.  This can’t be a coincidence.  And the things that really capture my imagination are those which I understand the least: the sky, the passage of time, the capricious, unpredictable nature of memory.

A few years ago I asked my readers what this blog was about.  I still don’t have a good answer, when people ask me.  I hem and haw, stutter and stumble, coughing out some inarticulate paragraph about what it is to be in the world, to pay attention, to parent and live in a mindful way.  A succinct elevator speech it isn’t.

But I was fascinated by the answers I received from you.  One word came up over and over again, far more than any other: wonder.  And I do think that wonder is at the center of what it is I want – for myself but perhaps more importantly, for my children – in this life.  I want to help protect Grace and Whit’s capacity for wonder.  And isn’t wonder, at its core, the absolute opposite of logic and understanding?  At the very least, I am certain that true wonder requires the willingness to suspend our often-frantic need to comprehend and intellectualize our experience.

This must be connected to the fact that I am more and more intimate with doubt.  As I get older, I move further away from a ravenous desire to understand.  The not knowing at the center of our lives is immutable, I’m coming to see.  What we need to do is inhabit it, enfold it, learn to live with it.  Our human lives flow around some essential, unknowable truths, like a river around jagged rocks.  We can’t change the existence of those rocks.  So instead I am learning to love the glitter of the water’s drops as they bounce off of it.

Multitasking

I used to so frequently parallel process and multitask that I actually didn’t know how to sit still or to do just one thing at a time.  I played Tetris during conference calls, needlepointed while watching a movie on demand, tapped out work emails while at the park with my children.  It wasn’t a deliberate behavior as much as it was my instinct.  I think I just kept moving, all the time, because that’s all I had ever done.  I was always in a rush to get to the next stop on the map.  Until I vaulted over the edge of that map, and realized I needed to start navigating by the stars.

That’s approximately when I started slowing down.

I’m sure it’s not coincidence that I now find many kinds of multitasking unbearably difficult.  This is most of all true when people talk to me while I’m engaged in something else, whether that is writing, reading, or listening to someone else.  It literally frays me to have my attention split like that.  I truly cannot stand it, and my poor children, who are frequently on the receiving end of a finger held up to say just one minute, can attest to this.

I sometimes feel like one of those many-armed Indian goddesses, and I need to sit down, take a breath, and remind myself: first things first.  One thing at a time.  Certainly part of this is a conscious effort I started making several years ago to be here now.  After all, my real life has already begun and I do not want to miss a moment of it.

But this feels like more than just my deliberate effort to be conscious of my experience.  When I’m interrupted when trying to write something, or when I try to do too many things at once, I sometimes feel like I’m going to leap out of my skin.  I feel a surge of sudden, overwhelming discomfort that verges on pain.  If I’m driving and don’t know where I’m going, for example, God help the person who turns on the radio: I will yelp and demand that you turn it off.  I need quiet to do a lot of things these days: not just navigate but read, write, think.

I still check my phone more than I should.  And I still sometimes play some quiet Tetris while listening to a call.  But on the whole my distracted, two-things-a-time behavior has gone way down.  And my irritation at being interrupted when I’m engaged in something has gone way up.  When I actually think about it, the change in how I inhabit the world is seismic.

Is this a symptom of old age and diminishing mental powers?  Or is it my slow turning towards genuine engagement in my own experience?  I can’t tell if it’s ironic or absolutely logical that this decreasing ability to parallel process coincides with my being busier than I have ever been.  It’s inconvenient timing, for sure, but perhaps it makes total sense.  I don’t know that there’s insight in the recognition that multi-tasking takes away from our ability to focus, but I do know that my own life, my own mind and heart, are giving me very real messages that I must more often do just one thing at a time.  I’ve tasted what life is like when I’m paying attention, and I am no longer willing to live any other way.

Tales of Quirk and Wonder

Lisa Ahn’s blog, Tales of Quirk and Wonder, is one of my favorite corners of the internet.  Since late last summer, Lisa has been running a fascinating series about inspiration.  I was both startled and hugely honored when she asked me to contribute to her series. I’m so often not inspired, is the thing.  And part of why I love Lisa’s series is that it always triggers a cascade of thoughts, ideas, and reflections in me.

I decided to look for inspiration where I always do.  I went outside, tipped my head up, and gazed.  And then, after a walk, I sat down at my desk.  The muse doesn’t find me unless I sit at my computer, after all.

I believe we are all full of stories.

I believe we are all looking for the way home. To whatever our essential, fundamental home is, where we are truly ourselves, where we are seen and recognized and known and witnessed as such.

I believe that telling our stories – to others, maybe, but most of all to ourselves – is the only way to find our way home….

I’m delighted to be guest posting at Tales of Quirk and Wonder today, writing about what inspires me.  Please click through to read the rest of my piece.