musings

Where they can find you

Poetry and hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things that get you.  And all you can do is go where they can find you.”

– AA Milne

I’ve been thinking about these lines since my friend Garrett reminded me of them a few weeks ago.

This is as good as any summary I’ve read of what my life is essentially about: going where life’s outrageous beauty can find me.  Remaining open to the poetry that exists in every day.  That sounds simple, or at least unequivocal: who wouldn’t want to be open?  Who wouldn’t choose that?

For me at least, though, it’s not that clear, nor very simple at all.  Going to where the poems can find me entails a great deal of pain.  A couple of weeks ago, I was folding laundry on a rainy Sunday night.  Matt walked in to find me sitting on the floor by the base of our bed, a blue t-shirt of Whit’s clutched to my chest.  My face was streaked with tears.  In alarm he looked at me and asked what was going on.  I held the shirt to my cheek and looked at him mournfully.

“This is a baby Gap size 4T t-shirt.  I remember buying it with Whit.  He was home sick, and we went to Harvard Square in the afternoon, just to get some fresh air.  He picked this shirt out.”  Matt nodded slowly at me.  “I won’t ever get that day back,” my voice caught in my throat.  “And I won’t ever buy him a shirt from baby Gap.  He is too big now.”  I shook the shirt out, looking at the robot on the front.  I could reach back and feel that day, turn it over in my palm, the memory visceral, real.  But also: gone.

“Lindsey,” My husband shook his head.

“I know.  Do you think most people get tearful when they fold the laundry?”  I wiped at my face as fresh tears streaked down.

“No.  I’m pretty sure they don’t.”

That is the poetry of life right there, isn’t it?  The swift passage of the years, the brilliant, mundane, heartbreaking contents of a day, the blue robot tee shirt that contains in its soft cotton folds a memory of a long-ago day when my blond son held my hand as we climbed the Gap stairs.  So much poetry.  And so much heartache.  The poems and hums can find me, there’s no question about it.  I wouldn’t have it any other way, but it’s not easy.  It is never, ever easy.


Thanksgiving

Grace meeting my maternal grandfather, Ba, for the first time.  Her middle name (and my mother’s, and mine) is his name.

Today we are celebrating Thanksgiving with my father’s family.  It will be our first Thanksgiving without Pops, who for many, many years presided over a table groaning with 2 turkeys and circled by well over 30 extended family members (and the odd random – I love them, Mum, I really do!).  I actually can’t imagine the meal without his saying grace first, his voice halting and cracking, his eyes filling with tears.  We will miss him acutely today.

But it is the Thanksgiving 10 years ago that is on my mind.  On November 28, 2002, Matt and I drove the hour south to my parents’ house in near-silence.  Matt’s father was still in a coma after his heart transplant two days ago.  I was deep in the darkness of my newly-diagnosed postpartum depression.  The economy was in freefall.  In those days, we both walked gingerly, wondering if the earthquake was finished, hoping the roof over our head was sturdy, trying to find our balance.

In those shaky hours, my head swarming with questions and my heart galloping with anxiety, I was able to recognize the abundant good.  Both of my grandfathers held my brand-new daughter.  In the evening, we visited my father-in-law in the hospital and heard that he was beginning to wake up.  We were suspended between then and now, between birth and death and the infinite shades of gray that exist in between.  My gratitude was almost – but not quite – smothered by bewilderment and fear.  This is the lesson I remember today: there are always miracles, and there is always beauty.  Always.  We just have to look carefully.

with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you…
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

-W. S. Merwin

Make peace with the quest

In the summer of 1992, my father gave me a document that he’d written for me.  It was called Advice for a College Freshman from her Father, and I still have it.  The advice was all wise, the writing, as usual, crisp and perfect.  But this right here is my favorite line.  I don’t know how many years ago I cut it out and put it on the board in front of my desk, but it has greeted me every single day, at eye level, for a long, long time.

I sit down at my desk and I glance up and I see this.  Every morning.  Have I made peace with the quest?  I don’t know.  I have been asking myself that.  The quest continues to be mutable, its fluidity confounding.  Just as soon as I think I’ve figured out how to be in the world, that certainty cracks open.  As soon as I grab the brass ring on which I’ve focused all my attention, it dissolves and another distant one takes its place.

What I do know that I didn’t know 20 years ago was that the quest is all there is.  I suppose that is what my wise father meant, in fact: make peace with the fact that the quest is your life.  Live in the quest rather than for the destination.  Such a cliche but also, of course, such an unbearable, unavoidable truth.  Dad would never disavow goals or ambitions, I know that for sure.  And it is important to remember that there is great value in having dreams and goals and in aiming for them.  I would never want to raise children who shy away from ambition and achievement.  I just don’t want that to be the only thing they care about.  What I’m learning is that ambitions and achievement can coexist with a peaceful submission to the process, with an embrace of the journey from here to there.

As it often does, my mind skips, just like the rocks my father so skillfully skips into the sea, to the words of another that I know by heart:

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” – Ursula LeGuin

The Five Most Beautiful Things Project

I was instantly smitten and moved when I read about Jen’s Five Most Beautiful Things Project.  What she says about the essential human need for beauty, and the power of waking up to realize that it is all around us, moved me deeply.  Jen asks, what if we walked around looking for beauty instead of looking for things to be stressed about or offended by?   She then challenges everyone to write down the 5 most beautiful things around them once an hour, and challenges her readers to make this effort, this active engagement with the outright gorgeousness of our lives, go viral.

I love this idea, and it speaks to me on a very deep level.

The search for the poetry that exists in every day life is one of the central tasks of my life.  I’ve written endlessly about this, about the beauty that’s exposed when we lean into our lives, about the phosphorescently-bright moments of joy that streak days of monotonous, often mundane activity.  It took looking closely at the weave of the fabric of my life for me to see the glint of that thread of meaning, of gorgeousness.  It’s there.  I promise you, it’s there.  And it manifests, this beauty, in a thousand different ways, every single day.

Paying attention – the only real advice I have for writing and, in fact, for life – helps us see the shimmer of the sacred even in our most ordinary hours.  There is real power in deliberately celebrating the beauty in our lives.  For me, at least, the act of noticing and honoring this holiness has been nothing short of transformational.  There is plenty of grit in my life, I assure you, of tears and raised voices and frustration and exhaustion.  But I can’t look at those things anymore without seeing the grace mixed in too, and that irrefutable truth casts a light onto my experience of every single day.

What are your five most beautiful things?  Mine, right now:

1. The framed charcoal drawing of Grace at age 6 months that hangs over my bureau.  All it takes is looking at that to tumble down the long hall of memory to those early days of motherhood, when I was besotted and confused in equal measure, overwhelmed with both wonder and fear.

2. The sounds of Whit’s lullabye CD drifting through his door after he has gone to sleep.  Every single note of the CD he’s listened to every night for almost 8 years is familiar, and the songs are suffused with memory.  Often, they bring me to tears.

3. The smell of clean laundry, which has always been one of my favorite smells.

4. The few spare red leaves against the heartbreakingly blue sky that I noticed when I glanced up this weekend at the playground.

5. The taste of the green juice I just drank.  I’ve come to absolutely love this juice (I make it myself, daily) and drink it every day.  Don’t worry, I also drink Diet Coke daily.  I remain full of contradictions.

Please share the five most beautiful things you can see (or hear, smell, touch, or taste) right now.  I agree with Jen, that the practice of deliberately looking at the world through this lens can fundamentally alter our lives.  Let’s all participate in that.

Comfort in the darkest season

Light and darkness is a theme that runs through my writing and, more importantly, through my life.  I’ve written at great length about how important the solstice is to me.  This is particularly true of the winter solstice, which is the holiest day of the year for me.  Part of this is from our long family tradition of celebrating on December 21st with a black tie party that, towards midnight, involves a ceremony to mark the return of the sun.  More, though, the day is sacred because it’s the closest I come to communion with the earth’s actual turning, with the essential, primal rhythms of day and night, light and dark, to which our lives thrum.

I don’t think it’s merely because I chose light as my word of 2012 that these are themes to which I’ve returned with even more regularity and zeal this year.  I am often moved to tears by the quality of light in nature, and the metaphor of dark and light has also been one to which I am consistently drawn. Light and darkness.  Holiness and grace.  Radiance and shadow.  We keep on turning, and the shadows keep dancing, the light flickering.  All I can do is keep watching.

I used to dread the coming of the dark.  And in many ways, I still do: the shift of the world towards fall fills me with an inchoate but undeniable sorrow.  Fall and early winter is a season of endings, there is no question about that.  But in the last several years I’ve been more comfortable with the deep dark of December.  I still find January and February long and dreary, but December no longer depresses me.  I suspect that this change has to do with my profound embrace of darkness in all its forms.  It took me many years to figure out a truth I know now is unassailably true: without the darkness the light is meaningless.  When I write it like that it feels so trite, so cliched, but the truth is this learning has undeniably changed the way I exist in the world.

As the planet turns towards the darkest months I start to notice nests in the trees’ bare branches and the sky turns an almost unbearably crystalline blue.  I’m sure it’s no accident that Sunday, the first day after we fall back and enter the season of the shortest days, the light had a clarity that made my heart ache.  I sat on a bench at the park, listening to my children laugh on the swings, and my eyes were drawn up, up, up to the boundless blue.  I can’t put words around the quality of that morning’s light, but it nudged something free in me, something jagged and sad but also deeply, profoundly glad.

That afternoon, as I sensed the day drawing itself towards dusk, I kept hearing in my head it is the evening of the day.  As Tears Go By floated through my thoughts, over and over again.  It is the evening of the year, it is the season of gloaming, and we plunge again towards darkness.  But my God, how unspeakably, outrageously beautiful is the light, even in this dark month.  For the first time in my life I see that that those two facts are not coincidence, but profoundly interfused.

My relatively new comfort with the year’s darkest days gives me a deep sense of optimism.  I understand, finally, that my life’s richest meaning exists in the shadows on the border between light and dark.  Maybe, also, I have begun to trust on a cellular level that the world will always turn back towards the light.

The photograph is of dusk on December 21, 2011, on the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.  It felt meaningful that we landed in Israel on the solstice, and emerged from the airport to this startlingly beautiful sunset.  As the children slept on either side of me in the back of the taxi, I frantically took pictures out the window with my iPhone, wiping away tears so that I could see.  We landed in the holy land on my holiest day, and the sky certainly cooperated to mark the occasion.