musings

Making room for new growth

Late last week I finally went out to the front yard and dead-headed the hydrangeas.  The gorgeous blooms from a couple of weeks ago had faded and drooped.  The bushes looked tired, laden with the clusters of paled and slightly-brown flowers at their base.  I clipped and clipped, filling an entire trash can.  When I was finished I had a full trash can full of fading beauty.

It was hard not to be overcome with the metaphor: to make room for new blooms, I had to cut way back on the existing ones.  The existing ones, which were not at their peak anymore but were still very beautiful.  I had to go in and clear space.  Clear out what was beginning to fade in order to allow for what was not yet visible.

Isn’t that what we all have to do, all the time?  It takes faith, doesn’t it, to cut away what we know is good, even though we understand that it is past its prime, in favor of what we cannot yet see?  And yet we must.  What is coming is beautiful.  I know it is.

A few things

“Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves…And my days are likely to be strung with them.”
–Virginia Woolf

I wrote an essay about Mrs Dalloway in college about which I can remember only that I used the metaphor of a string of pearls.  I know, I’m not the first person to come up with this one.  But I think of it all the time: life’s moments, strung together, are each gorgeous on their own and another thing entirely together.  These are some of these pearls, things that I’m loving, interested in, paying attention to, lately.  These are the things which, strung together, make up my days right now.

1.

Last week Grace and I dropped Whit at lacrosse camp on Monday.  We were in a large high school gym, and there were at least 40 kids running around.  It was “free time” before they started camp proper, and the other children, who looked much older and bigger than Whit, were playing basketball rowdily.  Whit hung back, looking around.  I had to get Grace somewhere and then to work.  After a few minutes I asked him how he felt about us leaving.  He looked at me, swallowed, and said quietly, “I don’t feel that great about that.”  So we stayed until they blew the whistle and started organizing into the various specific sports.

That afternoon Whit came home and announced that he had a great day.  I’m proud of a lot of things about my children, but watching them enter groups of other children, completely foreign, is on the short list.  They are so brave.

2. A couple of years of gentle affection for running skirts has tipped into full-blown love.  I love my running skirts.  I wear them everywhere, for everything, with the notable exception of running.  They are just so comfortable and great when it’s hot out.

3.  Despite the fact that I often hear lyrics in my head, I rarely listen to music.  One place I do is the car.  And now and then I actually make a CD and put it on nonstop rotation.  A few songs are on heavy repeat right now: Home by Philip Philips, The Scientist by Willie Nelson, and The Boxer by Mumford & Sons.

4.

On Thursday I took Grace to sleep away camp.  For the second year, she and Julia shared a bunk.  From the window by their bunkbed, they can look out and see the cabin where I met Jessica, Julia’s mother and one of my very, very closest friends, 25 years ago.  Jess was the first person I called on February 15, 2002, when a faint double line on a pregnancy test shocked me speechless.  Her daughter and mine were born 12 weeks apart to the day.  That they are turning 10, and friends, and together at the camp where we met and began our lifelong friendship is more powerful to me than I can possibly express.

5. This post by Sarah Bessey, In which this is saving my life right now, made me cry and it made me think.  In fact it wouldn’t leave me.  I kept thinking over and over again of those last lines: let me be singing when the evening comes.  They remind me of Jane Kenyon’s words, which ring through my head at least weekly: God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come.  Sarah’s post reminds me that my life is in the littlest minutiae of my days, in the grout between the tiles, in the things I give to those I love, every day, every day.

What are you loving, listening to, learning from, and paying attention to lately?

 

Attempts to express the whole

I believe it is often in the smallest details about a person that we best glimpse the whole.  I think Amy Palko, too, believes this.  She wrote about it before (and inspired me to do the same) and she recently shared this gorgeous quote by Hugh McDiarmid on her blog:

So I have gathered unto myself
All the loose ends of Scotland,
And by naming them and accepting them,
Loving them and identifying myself with them,
Attempt to express the whole.

The loose ends.  Oh, I am familiar with loose ends.  The loose ends are my life: my son’s ever-blonder summer hair, my daughter’s sleepy goodnight hugs, the stack of books on my bedside table, the outrageous explosion of hydrangeas by the front door, the broken air conditioning, the lines of poetry that run through my head daily, the way light from an indiscernible source illuminates a sunset sky.  The loose ends are the endless grains of sand that both imperceptibly and irrevocably add up to the contours of our lives.

We are drawn to these specifics, to the naming and identifying and accepting of what we can, as we search for the grand truths.  I for one am always looking, in the small moments of my life, for that whole – for that design so vast.  But why is this where we look? In some ways it is counter-intuitive, right?  To look down, as it were, to see the universe, all the power and glory that spreads above us, in the cracked shell at our feet on the beach.

These small things – these details, these loose ends – are like portals into the enormity of this life.  They are keyholes through which we glimpse that greater reality in which we all exist.   This is not a new idea, of course: the poets have been talking about this for centuries and longer, as Blake did with his world in a grain of sand.

But why do we seek the infinite in the defiantly finite?  I suspect it is because the whole is so extravagantly huge, so inexpressible, so far beyond the realm of our intellect.  It is impossible to draw the logical arms of our minds around the unwieldy, expansive whole.  We have no choice but to seek its reflection in the tiniest things, a bit like Plato watching the shadows on the back wall of the cave.

Isn’t that what this blog is about, in many ways?  More than anything, I think what I do here is polish the small, jagged stones of my life, startled every now and then when I look again and see the gleam of a gemstone.  This is the task of my life: the gathering of loose ends, the loving of them, and the endless, stumbling and imperfect attempt to express the whole.

Quiet

I’ve documented here that I really prefer it quiet.  I took me a long time to realize my aversion to music on while trying to read, or write – or really, to do anything other than drive – was a part of a wholesale sensitivity to stimulus, broadly defined.  Loud noises generally either freak me out or aggravate me (the one notable exception is that I love thunder and lightning).  In a house with small children, my desire for it to be quiet is a bit of a liability: I do an awful lot of shushing.  Too much shushing.  But sometimes I just need ten minutes without anyone talking to – at! – me.

This preference for quiet is becoming more and more pronounced as I get older.  These days my favorite evenings are those when I tuck my children in and then sit in silence and read or write.  I have heard people say they find silence when they’re home alone (or, alone without any other adults) unnerving.  For me, it’s the opposite.  There’s something hugely comforting and familiar to me about silence.  I’m sitting in silence as I write this, having just watched the sky wheel through a pale, eggshell-colored sunset, and I feel calmer than I have all day.

The silence sings. It is musical. I remember a night when it was audible. I heard the unspeakable.  – Henry David Thoreau

I read this beautiful quote on Roots of She and thought: yes.  That’s it.  Because silence is not really empty, is it?  It is full of its own music: the humming of my work computer on the desk next to me, the faint notes of the familiar lullabye CD wafting from my son’s room, the barking of the dog next door.  It is also full in another way, because in silence I’m able to hear myself.  It is only when I quiet way down – in every sense of the word, both literal and figurative – that I’m able to really tune in and hear what it is my body and spirit are saying.
Years ago I wrote about the ways that our spirit communicates through our bodies. About a knowledge that is on the flip side of reason, beyond logic, to a place where all there is is belief. Something soaked in blood, in tears, in milk. Something that might – maybe? – be showing me the way towards faith, towards meaning, towards the things, both maddeningly abstract and all-important, that I ache for most powerfully.  I expressed my conviction to listen to the messages that I know throb in my bloodstream. There is more there than the simple beat of my heart. It occurred to me that this sense of something more basic than intellect animate in my own body was another expression of instinct and intuition, and actually the same internal choir I’ve been struggling so mightily to hear.
And I can only hear it when it is quiet.

Hydrangeas

I love hydrangeas.  They remind me of the summer in this part of the world, of faded clapboard houses and halyards snapping against masts and our wedding day.  I’ve always particularly liked blue hydrangeas, and only recently realized it’s because they are basically the same color as a saturated sunny sky (and, also, as my son’s blue eyes).

But I think there are other reasons I love these flowers so.  As Heather commented on my post last week, hydrangeas last and last.  They are sturdy and durable flowers.  And their colors shift subtly as the season turns forward.  The blue gets deeper and then, in August, shifts again, fading to a purplish green.  I love tracing the passage of weeks in the changing colors of the flowers in my front yard.  That love has a hem of sadness in it, though, because the changes present irrefutable proof of time’s passage.

The thing I love best, though, is the way the composition of a hydrangea’s soil dictates the color it is.  As you can see from this photograph (taken down the street from my parents’ house, and upon exclamation by Grace that there were “multicolored flowers!”) sometimes this variation happens within a single bush.  This is tangible evidence of the power of terroir.  I think often of where I’m from, of the ways the thread of the past glints through the fabric of now.  Hydrangeas, blue or pink depending on the pH of their soil, are an irrefutable manifestation of the way the circumstances we grow and live in shape who we are.  And this is, I think, the most beautiful thing of all.