musings

Ease

As I sat in pigeon the other day in yoga, listening to my breathing, the familiar mindfulness meditation language rose up in my head: may I be healthy, may I be happy, may I be calm, may I live with ease.  (enormous apologies to Dani, Karen, Katrina, and all of you who can tell me how wrong I have it… that’s how the words come to me, so I’ve decided not to fight it!)

It occurred to me that that was really it: Ease.

That’s what I want.  Everything else I say I want can be folded into this single thing.  I want to live with ease.  To let the clouds of my emotions and reactions skid across the sky of my spirit without overly attaching to them.  To let the weights of sorrow and joy, which are part of my life in near-equal measure, slide off my shoulders rather than staggering under them.

I grimaced as my hips screamed (pigeon is without a doubt my least favorite yoga pose, and equally unquestionably the one I need the most) and tried to return to my breath.  Calm, health, peace, trust, light.  They are all captured by ease.  There was nothing easy about the discomfort – okay, fine, pain – I felt sitting there, my forehead sticky against my mat, my hip burning, my eyes shut as I tried to simply breathe.  This is not ease, I thought, teeth gritted. But it is, almost surely, the path to ease.

I don’t know that I can untangle that paradox yet, but it posits an unavoidable truth: to achieve the life I want – a life with at least some quality of ease – I must head straight into the discomfort and learn to sit there.  Only by facing that which causes pain can I dissemble it, reduce its power, learn to live without such ferocious reactions.

Which brings me back to the breathing and the mantra.  Following those things, hand over hand like palming a rope to lead me through a dark room, seems the only way through.  Through to what I truly, deeply, essentially want: ease.

Roller coasters

I’ve always hated roller coasters.  As in, really hated them.  Last year, on our third day at Disney I finally capitulated to Matt’s endless teasing of me and conceded to go on one roller coaster with him.  Our guide promised it wasn’t “that serious” a coaster.  Sure.  It was all inside, in the pitch black, first of all.  It’s also one of the only roller coasters in the world to go from 0 to a zillion miles a minute in 3 seconds.  No slow clacking ascent for this coaster.  As we sat in our seats, waiting to go, harnesses snapped down over our shoulders.

“Why are there restraints over our shoulders, Matt?” I asked innocently.  I’ve been on many mellow coasters with the kids, which have always entailed a mere seatbelt.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, smirking.

Well, I soon found out we needed the full-body harnesses because we went completely upside down.  Multiple times.  After the ride came to a stop Matt looked over at me sheepishly.  “You’re kind of green,” he ventured.  Then he admitted that was the most hard-core roller coaster he had ever, ever been on.

I still haven’t forgiven him.

So, I still don’t like (serious) roller coasters.  I’m totally fine with the ones where you only have to be 36 inches tall to ride them.  II actually like those.  But the crazy, upside-down, twirling, lose-your-lunch (not to mention your bag, your sunglasses, anything not nailed down) rides?  No thanks.

For some reason I was thinking about that this weekend.  Probably because we just went to Santa’s Village over Memorial Day with our dear friends, and because Storyland and Legoland are on the horizon this summer.  It is easy to ascribe my dislike for roller coasters to my desperate need for control.  Which is real, of course.  My white knuckle grip on the handle of the universe is exhausting, but essential to assure that the earth keep rotating.  Surely this means I hate being strapped into a carriage without any ability to control my speed, direction, or orientation.

But it occurred to me as i thought about roller coasters that there could be another reason I don’t like them.  Perhaps the swooping up-and-down movement along the tracks is simply too close to my own internal topography, which is already a kind of roller coaster.  I climb to outrageous joy and plummet to tearful heartache every single day.  Hell, I do that every hour.  Just inside my own head and heart.  Maybe it’s too overwhelming to also have my body do this.

I know that there is great excitement and learning to be had on life’s roller coasters, both literal and metaphorical.  In 2010 Whit refused to go on anything at Storyland and Legoland.  Literally, anything.  Last summer he gave in to Grace’s determined pleas that he go with her (and me) on the flume ride at Storyland.  He went, wrapped in my arms and frozen with anxiety.  As we neared the top of the rise, as the steep slide down came into view, I gripped him tighter against me, worried about his reaction.

At the bottom, sputtering, our shirts damp from spray, Whit turned to me.  I was nervous to see an expression hovering between terror and awe on his face.  But then, over Grace’s hoots of laughter, he whispered, “Mummy!  My stomach was full of butterflies!”

Yes, Whit, it is.  My stomach is full of butterflies every single day.  Every day of my life I rise and fall, I climb and plummet, I ride a sine curve whose specific contours I neither determined nor can anticipate.  I should focus more on the butterflies and less on the panic and fear.  I will keep trying.

Do you like roller coasters?  I think the world seems to be split into those who do and those who don’t.  If you do, or don’t, why?

Bones

Grace has had several x-rays over the last week or so.  The first one in particular haunts me.  It shows half of her rib cage, her shoulder socket, and her clavicle, clearly broken in two right in the middle.  I have it on CD and on a piece of paper and I keep looking at it, marveling at how a single second can break something in us so dramatically.  Looking at it also sends me into the disorienting tunnel of memory, the image of Grace’s ribs colliding in my head with the memory of the only ultrasound I had when pregnant with her.  I remember two things about that experience: the first is of my breath catching in my chest when I saw the tiny but bright blinking light on the fuzzy screen, proof positive that another heart beat under my own.  The second is of the regular circles that arced through the middle of the oddly shaped blob, the string of pearls that I quickly realized was my baby’s spine.

And here on last week’s x-ray is that same spine, those tiny bright pearls, grown into an actual spine, into the bones of a child only a foot shorter than I am.

There is another reason, though that the cloudy white images on the black background astound me.  The bones appear ghostly, bird-like, insubstantial, striated with brighter and fainter white.  They remind me immediately and indelibly of the enormous swollen full moon I ran towards the other morning.  That moon, hanging on the horizon as the sky broke open into dawn’s Easter egg blues and pinks, was similarly mottled, almost translucent while also undeniably, defiantly present.  There is something about the shadowy bones on Grace’s x-ray that reminds me intensely of that moon.  They share the quality of being simultaneously indelible and tenuous.

The duality of sturdiness and fragility which I see in the texture of the moon and my daughter’s bones underlies all of life, of course.  For me, its most poignant manifestation is in my children.  But there is something else, another echo of the moon in my daughter’s very bones.  The moon pulls the tides and the bodies of women in fundamental ways, and reassures me on some deep level that I still can’t quite articulate.  Both the full moon hanging in the dawn sky and the shadows of my daughter’s bones on a piece of paper took my breath away.  What I’m realizing is that that might be because, in some way, they are composed of the same material.

 

Broken

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. – Ernest Hemingway

It seems like the world is composed of those people who break bones and those who do not.  I’m the former, and my husband is the latter.  At this point Grace seems to fall in my camp.  I’ve been thinking a lot in the last week about what it means to be broken, and then to heal.  I do realize that not everything in life is a metaphor – sometimes a cold is just a cold, a friend told me once – but this one is hard to avoid.

As scars speak of wounds we have suffered and healed from, so too do our bones bear the marks of our journey, our falls and our recoveries.  The big difference, of course, is that bones, when healed, are invisible to the naked eye.  That means that my body is full of healed breaks, bones that have reset themselves, grown back together, not as perfect as before, not as straight, but (as of now) solid

I am easily broken.  And yet I have always, so far, healed.  It’s hard not to ponder why it is that some of us are more breakable than others.  Did Grace somehow inherit my predisposition towards breaking?  It wouldn’t be the only difficult legacy of mine she’s received.  Am I weak?  I often feel that way, there’s no question: fragile is one of the words I would use first to describe myself.  But as I think about this more it occurs to me that this is perhaps just a physical manifestation of my emotional and spiritual orientation towards the world.  Maybe my bones simply echo the way my heart is easily broken, by all the gorgeousness and pain it witnesses every day.  Maybe I don’t know any other way to be, deep down in my core, in the very marrow of my self, than vulnerable to breaking.

I understand that there is great pain in breaking, but I also have to believe there is much to learn.  At the very least it makes me appreciate being whole.  And of course it fills me with awe, the idea that bones, the scaffolding on which our entire bodies hang, can knit themselves back together.  The analogy this offers for life itself is compelling to me, and inspiring. I hope that if Grace did inherit my propensity for breaking she also can see the beauty in this way of life.

Have you broken a lot of bones?  Do you think that makes a person weak?

 

 

 

20 years

Recently I went back to my high school 20th reunion.  And, again, I experienced that collapse of time, where years fold in on themselves and and a lifetime and a minute twist together in an disorienting spiral of memory and emotion.  It’s not a secret that I wasn’t particularly happy while I was at boarding school, but it’s also true that with every year that passes I respect my alma mater more.  I respect it for giving children credit, for holding them to an incredibly high standard, for asking a lot of young people because it knows that they are able to deliver it.

My memories of my time there are few, but vivid.  They revolve around cold, dark mornings and nights, running in the snowy woods, wet hair at late afternoon classes frozen into icicles, hours upon hours of homework, the senior play, and oval mahogany Harkness tables.

It was wonderful to be back.  Perhaps because my time on campus was not marked by particularly strong social bonds, returning is mostly devoid of the anxiety that revisiting this time in life holds for many.  There were, absolutely, joyful reunions with friends I hadn’t seen in a long time.  And happy conversations with people I didn’t know on campus but have come to since.  Perhaps most of all, it was powerful to watch my children with the children of my friends, all so much closer than we are to the age we were when we met, a fact that is dizzying, unbelievable, and irrefutable in equal measure.

There were a couple of places I was disappointed not to be able to get into, like Phillips Chapel and the indoors of the English classroom building, so I missed seeing them.  But otherwise, the day was jammed with special moments.

For instance, my daughter standing in front of the building where my love for words caught fire.  Those first two windows to the right of the front steps were where my favorite teacher taught.  It was in Mr. Valhouli’s classroom, and in the light of his kind, probing pedagogy that I first sensed my passion for reading and writing throb inside of me.  My daughter standing in the intersection of the quad across which I ran, holding my acceptance letter from Princeton (the first line of which said only, in bold all-caps, “YES!”) to hug my dear friend who was also going to Princeton.  The friend who is now Whit’s godmother, a true friend of my heart.

The new science center is downright awe-inspiring, and we wandered around it, agape, aghast, awe-struck.  The whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling, the large, professional-looking labs filled with shiny equipment, the walls filled with photographs, equations, and samples of bridge-building projects all drew Grace and Whit’s attention.  Mine was captured by this piece of paper, a photocopy of one of Mary Oliver’s poems, stuck on the wall of a Physics lab.  That right there tells you a lot about my high school.  And a lot about why I respect it so.  There’s a place for poetry even inside the world of Physics.  This is how I grew up, and it remains how I see the world.

The Academy Building in full sunshine, against a cornflower blue sky, reminds me most of all of my graduation day from this place.  It was a hot, early June day in 1992, and all four of my grandparents, my two parents, my sister, and my two godmothers were all there.  I am bewildered now to fathom the depth of this showing of support, and while I know I basked in love and family, I wish I could return there to look each of those people in the eye (three of them now gone) and tell them how much I love them, how often I thought of their counsel, how much I valued the ways they had shaped me as I grew into a young adult.

It has been 20 years since that day.  It feels like these 20 years flew by in a heartbeat, but I know that each year was lived thoroughly, to its depth and its width.  As I grow into my  middle-aged skin, inhabiting these years at the top of the ferris wheel, these years in the early afternoon of life, I reflect with nostalgia on a time when I was so young, so mutable, so filled with both promise and sorrow.  I feel deep compassion for my long-haired, confused, emotional adolescent self.  With the perspective of years, it is simple to identify those two years in New Hampshire as the ones where I learned how to learn, where my intellectual self took flight, where my passion for all the central cerebral interests of my life began.  And it is impossible to convey my gratitude for that gift.