musings

On my mind lately

(my endless task, in the golden light of dusk last week)

Once in a while I like to share pieces of loveliness that I’ve found out here in the wild and wonderful ether, as well as small things that are on my mind.

I’m hugely honored to be featured in Amy Kessel’s glorious Unfurling series.  All of her interviews are wonderful, so I encourage you to click through and read them all!  What a privilege to be among these brilliant, wise women.

Hilary reminds us that life is always now or never.

Bindu explores how each of us finds our own ways of taking refuge.

Roxane’s beautiful love letter to Jerusalem, a city I am pleased I can now imagine first-hand.

I tweeted recently that I am a Myers-Briggs INFJ.  I’ve never met another one in real life.  I was initially startled, and then not at all, when several of my very favorite on-line friends responded that they too were INFJs.  Freed of the constraints of real life and geographic location, it makes total sense to me that I’d gravitate towards truly kindred spirits.

A friend recently lent me the third issue of Kinfolk.  I’m absolutely smitten.

I’m also working my way through a stack of Wendell Berry’s works.  I have long loved his poems (here, here, here) but recently felt pulled to read much more of his writing: essays, fiction, poetry.

What is on your mind these days?  Any wonderful links to share?  And what is your Myers-Briggs type, if you know it?

Pentimento

Mary Oliver’s words about writing poetry with a pencil – so you could see the words that underlay the final words – made me think about pentimento, and I’ve been musing about that word ever since.  I had my own experience of pentimento, sitting there in the Wellesley chapel, because sitting beside my mother and me was a woman who has known me since birth.  She is part of the extended family who was such an integral part of my childhood.  That woman, a beautiful, serene person who radiates calm, is woven tightly into the fabric of my childhood.

She’s known all of the Lindseys who came before the Lindsey I am now.

The toddler with a bowl cut, the short girl with messy red braids, the bossy high schooler who forced all the other children into performing Circle Game wearing all white, the fellow mourner at Susie’s funeral, the bride, the new mother, and on, and on.  She knows – as does my mother, of course, sitting right next to me – all of the faces that are layered underneath the face I have now.

We are all composites.  We are made of all that has happened to us and all we have made happen.  Of the people we have loved dearly, those we have lost painfully, those who still walk beside us.  Of all of our erased words, our painted-over images, the things we prize and the things we aim to hide.  This is what I loved most about Darin Strauss’s gorgeous memoir, Half a Life: the examination of the way that who we are is made up of what has happened in our lives.

I’ve written before about the mute indifference of space, about how baffling it is to me to be in physical places that hosted important moments, and to feel as though somehow the space is just blank, empty.  It seems as though the place should still hold a shadowy remnant of what happened there.  I know inside of me there are certain events and people who, though long gone, beat on, steady as a pulse.

Similarly, certain freeze frame memories of who we were at specific moments seem more vivid than others, their imprint more visible on the palimpsest of our souls.  I’ve had moments with friends I’ve known intimately for a long time where all of the people they’ve been to me flash across their face.  These experiences reinforce the depth of a many-year bond.  I wonder if, when we think back on the pentimento of our own spirits, the images that rise up are the same ones that those who have known us longest see?

What I know for sure is that the irrefutable beauty of a person is in this texture.  What fascinates me about people is the way that who we were peeks around the corners of who we are now, informing it in ways both visible and not, and that we are not, in fact, immutable, but always changing, buffeted and shaped by those people and events we draw into our lives.

I never thought I’d compare oxbow lakes to pentimento, bring geography and art history into close adjacency, but the echo seems impossible to ignore now.  As I wrote in January, “As moving water marks the earth, so does time mark our spirits. Minutes add up to months, and months add up to our lives. And as they do, they indelibly shape and mark us.”  And that passage is visible, if we look closely, underneath the surface of each of us.

I wrote this in October, 2010, but they came to mind recently for two reasons.  First, in my words to Grace – in which I note the way her face contains all that she was and all that she will be, and second, because I just attended my 20th high school reunion and felt the presence of the me I was all those years ago beating in my chest.

Energy

Have you ever had the feeling that the universe is trying to tell you something?  Well, I have.  It happens with words and phrases I can’t stop thinking about or images and icons I can’t stop seeing.  And other ways.  My friend Elizabeth beautifully describes this exact phenomenon.  She finds herself keenly – painfully, even – aware of the energy of strangers, a psychic tells her she is a spiritual warrior, she finds moths – a symbol of metamorphosis – everywhere, and she opens Mark Nepo’s Book of Awakening randomly (or not) onto a page titled “How to be a Spiritual Warrior.”

The meta-thing is, I felt that way reading Elizabeth’s post.  Yes, yes, and yes.  For one thing, Mark Nepo’s Book of Awakening is the only book that lives permanently on my bedside table.  Everything she describes is intimately familiar to me, perhaps so close I never was able to put good, clear words around it.  Luckily for me, Elizabeth can.  She writes about reading Mark Nepo’s passage on how spiritual warriors have broken hearts, and my skin prickles and my eyes fill with tears.  I’ve written about this exact thing before.  But never this precisely or this beautifully:

I feel the energies of others so strongly because I am broken, my soul veined with deep fissures that allow their light and darkness to seep in through the cracks.  It seems like a lot of freight of haul around with me.  But there is a flip side.  Mystery and wonder are at my fingertips, although I’ve never fully allowed them to enter those deep crevasses.

I knew that I was so open to the energy of others and so finely aware to the nuances of a situation because of my own brokenness, though I’d never quite heard it said as beautifully as Elizabeth does.  That I am porous is a simple fact.  The myriad ways that that trait manifests in my life and personality is something I’m still untangling and understanding.  It occurred to me, suddenly, blindingly, as I read Elizabeth’s post, that instead of spending years trying to heal my brokenness, I ought to have instead spelunked into its caverns.  Perhaps it is in those caverns that the glittering universe that I’ve only glimpsed is hidden.

The easily-accessible mystery and wonder that Elizabeth mentions, the “flip side” of our common brokenness, is familiar to me as well.  Just last week I tweeted Shana Alexander’s quote: “We strain to renew our capacity for wonder, to shock ourselves into astonishment once again” with the caveat that I never have to strain.  If anything, I often wish I could tamp down my own awareness, my predilection towards awe.  It can be so sharp it cuts me, this constant noticing of life’s beauty.

I suppose this is just another circle in my orbit around the same questions, the echoing black hole in the center of my life.  Each time, I tell myself, I move closer to understanding my own essential nature, the commingled dark and brightness of my deepest wound, more clearly.  Thank you, Elizabeth.

A blur of white petals

I’ve often noted that I believe insight is everywhere, as long as you remain open to it.  I’m defiantly not an intellectual snob: recall my discussion of something I saw in Glamour magazine.

Lately, it’s the tree on a residential street that is near the end of my run.  This isn’t the first time things I’ve noticed something on a run that has made my think.  Maybe this is a series: seasonal reflections while running.  In winter, I was struck by the difference sunlight made.  One side of the street, in shadow, was crusted with ice and snow.  The other was wet, water flooding down the pavement.  Nothing took away the substance – water – but the power of light changed its form entirely.  Like inquiry, like honest discussion, I thought: in its light, things we fear lose their grip.

Last week I ran in the rain.  The world had a quality of light that I associate with a spring rain: clear, but vaguely pink-tinted, everything even crisper and more itself than usual.  I had to duck through the branches of the tree I mentioned because it was so heavy with white petals, soggy with water.  For blocks after I brushed through the branches, white petals flew off me as I ran.  The tree – and the world – was literally heavy with beauty, so replete with excess gorgeousness that it shed onto me, spread itself everywhere.  I kept hearing Kate Chopin in my head: “Pirate gold isn’t to be hoarded or utilized. It is something to throw to the four winds, for the fun of seeing the gold specks fly!”

A few days later the rain had dried and as I rounded the corner I saw that many of the petals had fallen off the tree.  I didn’t have to duck anymore; the tree, while still fulsomely dotted with white petals, had sprung back to the shape I was accustomed to.  I glanced down as my feet slipped, though, and noticed the sidewalk was a blur of white petals.

Beauty – physical, experiential, emotional – is evanescent.  Drink it in, and fling the petals all around you, while you can.

 

Motion and stillness

The tension – and the dance – between stillness and motion is one of the central themes of my life, my writing, my self.  It’s a line I walk all the time: how much activity is too much, how much stillness do I need, how do I practice being still even in a life that doesn’t stop whirling.  The truth is, stillness is not instinctive for me.  I am a person who moves, a lot: I fidget, I speak quickly, I move quickly, my mind is the very embodiment of the always-in-motion monkey mind.  I spent my whole childhood moving around, back and forth across the Atlantic.  My sport in high school was cross-country.  Impatience is my default.

I am in motion.  All the time.

Last week I read Kristen’s thoughtful, beautiful words about her life’s constant motion.  I read the on the small screen of my iPhone as I waited for an early morning flight to New York.  And then I thought about them as I stared out the open window my taxi into the city, watching the puffy clouds skid across the cornflower blue sky.  I was in motion but it was the stillest I’d been in days.  Sometimes I think my truest emotional and mental stillness happens when I am literally in transit: something about airplane flights or car rides sends me into a quiet, introspective state.

On the surface my life is busier now than it has ever been.  I have a demanding job that I love, two children for whose care I’m primarily responsible, a book and essays I am trying to write as well as a stack of books I’m desperate to read (and those 30 magazines I subscribe to monthly).  I have friendships I hold dear that I try to nourish.  I run as many days of the week as I can.

I am in motion.  All the time.

And yet, I feel more still inside my head than I ever have.  Some of the time, that is.  I guess what I mean is I feel I have the capacity for stillness, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, in a way that is new.  It is not always available to me, but there are times when I am able to focus and truly savor the moment I am living.  Often, unsurprisingly (to me), this happens in those most mundane, average experiences: the sky through the open taxi window, the feeling of Grace’s hand in mine as we walk down the street, the pattern of Whit’s pajama bottoms as I shake them out and fold them.

That this sensation can come over me even in the midst of such motion and busy-ness is immensely reassuring and somehow both confusing and inevitable.  For too many years I was running so fast I didn’t see anything around me.  And then, for a time, I felt anguish over my inability to be perfectly calm, and I held myself to a standard of stillness that I continually failed to meet.  Finally, I seem able to marry my instinctive way of being in the world with the capacity to pay close attention.  And what a blessing it is.  What happens to me in those moments of stillness is nothing short of a communion with the divine: I feel as though I can reach out and touch the hem of something holy.