musings

A benediction of what is

“The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” – Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

“What Ruth has known all along: what will happen can’t be stopped.  Aim for grace.” – Ann Beattie (Learning to Fall)

I love both of these passages, which seem to me to be saying different versions of the same thing.  I’ve written before about how I feel I’m circling and circling, sometimes, not making progress enough, saying the same things over and over.  Sometimes this frustrates me, makes me feel stuck.  On other days the message coming at me externally (as in these two quotes, and in the bird I found sheltering in my porch the other night) and bubbling up internally (the aforementioned circling and circling) is so consistent, so strong and powerful, that I realize I ought to just put everything down and listen to it.

This is one of those messages.  In fact, I suspect that, at least for me, this is the message.

Life – grace, beauty, peace, whatever you want to think of it as – is just right here.  And white-knuckling my way through it doesn’t do anything but exhaust me.  Things are unfolding in a way that I have much less control over than I’d like to believe, and the best I can do is open my eyes and see.  Not miss, in my desperate, soul-depleting efforts to manage destiny, the gorgeousness that is at my feet right now.

Remarkable as it may be, the world seems to spin without me personally doing the spinning.  It has taken me 36 years to really learn this.  In fact, if I’m honest, I’m still learning it.  The freedom that comes with letting go is immense, and I’ve tasted it, though I’m not always able to remember that.  The lesson for me is to do so in a more complete way.  Letting go – accepting that what will be will be, as Beattie says, enables a complete shift in perspective: instead of being a lamentation of what is not, life becomes a benediction of what is.

All we can do is show up.  Isn’t this what the poets have been saying, since the beginning of time?  And the priests, too?  Yes, yes it is.  Just by being in this world, banal and brilliant, where majesty and mediocrity coexist in every single moment, we are witness to beauty and grace.  All we have to do is be there.  And to watch.

A repost from 11/11/10.  And yes, I am still circling, still making the same observation, still learning the same lesson.

The more I know, the less I understand

It’s no secret my life is running into a headwind right now.  I’m still walking, but it is slow going, and I feel like I’m facing big waves and a strong current.  I know enough about the tides of my own emotions to know this will ebb, and probably soon.  But what won’t change, I don’t think, is my ever-firmer conviction that adulthood is about uncertainty.  The adages about this fly fast and furious: the central gist is that as children we think we know everything and as adults we know we know nothing.

Trite, maybe.  Cliched, certainly.

But it is also true.  I wrote a while back about the pieces of myself that I left in the land of newborns, in those weeks and months steeped in exhaustion and milk and a dizzying sense that the world had just shifted on its axis.  “Most of all I left behind my certainty,” I wrote, and I think that’s utterly true.

But it didn’t stop there.  Instead, I seem to shed certainty every year.  Things I thought I knew for sure have been upended and challenged in more ways than I can count.  The universe does many things well, but one of the best is presenting me with opportunities to realize how erroneous my assumptions and certainties are.  So many times I’ve been absolutely – obnoxiously! – sure about something and I’ve come face to face with the unassailable evidence of my own idiocy.

What’s interesting to me is that as the questions and the not-knowing at the heart of my life grows so, too, does my faith.  By faith I mean my sense that there is something sacred and holy out there, simultaneously much bigger than I am and an intimate part of me, throbbing in my veins right alongside my own blood.  I use “faith” to describe a constellation of emotions, some amalgam of trust, belief, religion, and wonder.

What do I make of these seemingly-opposed developments inside my spirit?  Is my deepening faith a necessary survival response to the terrifying ambiguity of the world?  I don’t know.  I can’t believe these two tracks – my sureness unraveling just as my beliefs grow firmer – are unrelated.  All I know is the very real comfort I feel in the words of others much more brilliant and wise than I, who speak of something similar.

The more I know, the less I understand. – Don Henley

The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. – Anne Lamott

There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds. – Alfred, Lord Tennyson  (thank you, Ronna Detrick)

What do you think?  Is my developing faith just my subconscious trying to cope with the fearful uncertainty of the world?    Do either of these resonate with you?

Begin again

Everyone has moments – weeks, months, seasons – of sadness, fear, grief, anxiety.  That’s the human condition, right?  And we walk through the darkness, because, really, what choice do we have?  I can’t count the number of times in my life where I’ve felt like throwing up my hands, giving up, burrowing under the covers.  But then a child needs a glass of milk or help with brushing their teeth, or the work phone rings and I really have to take it, or laundry pile finally threatens to overflow the hamper.

And so I get up and deal with what needs to be done.

But the truth is that slogging through one of these valleys – even when I can see the other side, and know it’s bright – is tough and tiring.  Sometimes I feel like screaming up at God, or whatever the greater power out there that I hope I believe in is, “Okay!  Enough with the learning!  Enough with the tough love!”  Sometimes I just want to lie down and coast.

But I can’t.  I don’t know if others can; I really don’t.  A lot of people look better at dealing with the sine curve of life, at least from where I sit.  A lot of people – and I envy them, let me be clear – seem to experience fewer moments of spirit-shaking emotion than I do.  A lot of them can describe what Easter means to their children, or admire the clear, extraordinary blue of an April sky, or witness a christening, without bursting into tears.  Hell, a lot of people don’t burst into tears every single day.

I do.

Somehow that intense emotion, that wound at the very core of my being, is bearable most of the time.  Right now, though, it feels like too much.  I am bone-tired, my emotions are worn paper-thin, my is patience frayed.  I know my life runs close to the surface, that’s not news to me.  And this isn’t news, either, this sense of being deep in the weeds and of each step being a struggle.  It is so not-new, in fact, that I have a theory as to its cause: I suspect this exhaustion occurs when I’m letting go of something, even though I’m not sure what it is yet.  Right now I’m overly aware of the cracks in everything, and I can’t see the light they’re letting in.  Many days I feel a tightness in my chest and tears pricking my eyes and a general sense of sorrow that is, for now, as powerful as it is inarticulate.

But the children need their teeth brushed, and the work phone is ringing, and the laundry needs to be done.

What’s my choice, but to get up, to keep going, to begin again?

Alleluia

New questions we have fielded this Easter:

Those crosses that we saw, stacked on the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, what were they?  Oh, people carry them to walk on the same path Jesus took on Good Friday?

When he walked up Via Dolorosa, right?

And then that place in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, that we knelt, and touched the rock… that was where the cross went?  Into that rock?  That’s where he was crucified?  Why?

And then that place we stood in line for, that we lit candles beside, that is the tomb where he was buried?  Where they found linen cloths on Easter, but no body?  Is that where he went to heaven from?

So many questions, so many memories, so many new points of relationship.

This holiday has changed in character and flavor, for all of us, since our December trip to Jerusalem.  Both Grace and Whit noticed how many times Jerusalem, and Israel, were mentioned in church this morning.  Unrelated to that trip but nevertheless contributing to my emotions yesterday is that I had never fully appreciated the importance of the fact that both of them were christened the Saturday before Easter.

Easter, which was always my mother’s mother’s favorite day, has grown to carry enormous importance for me, too.  I have not been aware of it as it happened, but today, in church, it was clear.  Tears rolled down my face as our minister mentioned the babies he had welcomed to the church the day before, on the eve of the holiest and most joyous day of the Christian calendar.  I looked at Grace and Whit, so tall and angular now, and flashed back to when they were babies, wearing my family’s generations-old white christening gown, hoisted above the font.

It is the day of rebirth and of resurrection.  The day that my faith in the vast design is strengthened, the day I can imagine the universe as a soft net, ready to catch me when I stumble.  It is the day that I now experience in a far more nuanced way, for many reasons.

Alleluia.

An introvert in an extrovert’s world

I’ve read a lot about Susan Cain’s book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.  My recent favorite exploration of the topic is Bruce from Privilege of Parenting’s post about highly sensitive humans.  In a single sentence, defining introversion, Bruce turned on a lightbulb for me:

“It is the tendency to be highly sensitive, quiet, shy and be interested in the inner world of feelings, thoughts, and private spirituality—an ability or tendency to sense the numinous (i.e. a feeling of divine presence) in the seemingly mundane.”

I have never heard introversion described this way before.  It has always been about choosing to be alone, or being shy, or another simplistic distillation of what I think is nothing less than a way of being in the world.  Suddenly all of my relatively recent writing about the holiness in the everyday, about the practice and the poem of ordinary life, about extreme sensitivity made bright and cogent sense.

I flipped open Quiet at random this afternoon, and found myself immersed in a section about the experience of an introvert at Harvard Business School.  To say I relate is an understatement.  I haven’t read it carefully enough to comment on Cain’s points, but I recall the tension I felt during those two years.  What muddies the water of this topic for me is, I suspect, that I can often “pass” as an extrovert. But when I read Bruce’s words, or when I return to the basic definition I’ve always heard (an introvert both draws energy from and seeks out in times of need solitude and leans more towards feelings and thoughts than activities and people) there’s no question that introversion is my essential orientation.  It’s not that I am a curmudgeon who hates people.  Far from it.  It’s just that I am easily overstimulated by the world, and I cope with this best by retreating.

My lingua franca is that of the mind and heart, of interiority, of the quiet that allows me to really hear and see and, most of all, be.  As I’ve grown older I’ve made choices about how I spend my time that reflect this.

But it’s not that simple.  It never is, is it?  I walk, daily, through the extrovert’s world.  I work in a field that involves a lot of interpersonal interaction.  I am blessed with many wonderful friends.  I am often a resource for people on myriad, random topics: do you have a pediatrician to recommend, do you have a book I would like, can you put me in touch with a babysitter, hey thanks for sending me the name of that person in my new town, she is my new best friend, thanks for referring me to that professional connection, I have a new job.

A couple of years ago I took an online quiz to ascertain whether I was a Malcolm Gladwell-style connector and was surprised to learn that I was.  Really?  Left to my own devices, I spend my free time alone. I like solitary activities like reading, writing, and running. I don’t like the telephone, preferring to be in touch over email, text, or other social networks. There are very few people whose company I would choose for extended periods of time. How to square this with my apparent ‘connector’ self and the fact that many people have told me I appear “social” and “extroverted”? I am not sure.

What’s more interesting to me about this lack of inside/outside congruence, though, is the indistinct but inarguable internal discomfort I feel about it. Where does this come from? It’s not from a judgment of more-social vs. less-social people, I don’t think. I conclude that it comes from a frustrated feeling of being inaccurately labeled. To be told I’m one way when I don’t think it’s that simple is aggravating, and makes me feel reduced to categories that don’t quite fit. The labels don’t capture the nuance, the tensions, the tradeoffs.

Maybe I am simply a connector who very much appreciates time alone. Maybe I’m a loner who happens to know a lot of people. Maybe I’m a crazy schizophrenic! I don’t know. What I do know is this is just one place in my life where I experience dissonance between how I am sometimes perceived and how I actually feel.  I know, I know, this anguish is just so adolescent: even as I write it I sort of cringe. But it is true that I chafe against the way that the world seems to see me regularly and with more agitation than many people I know. It is true that I am apparently easily reduced to simplistic, caricatured qualities in the eyes of others.

My mind flits, again, to the wonderful Walt Whitman line, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”  There are innumerable dimensions of humanity, and I think most of us have at least several on which we refuse simple categorization.  These paradoxes are at the heart of who we are as humans.  At least that’s the conclusion my introverted heart, drawn as it is to the inner world of feelings, thoughts, and private spirituality, comes to when it contemplates this. 

Now, off to be by myself to read Susan Cain’s words.