musings

I can’t stop saying wow

I almost tripped again running this week in the morning, and I realized there’s a reason I so often stumble on the ground.  It’s because I am so often so dazzled by the morning sky.  The grayish clouds grew pink, lit from below by the rising sun.  As I ran my head and heart thrummed with “Wow, wow, wow.”

I can’t stop saying wow.

I wish there was a more articulate, more elegant word than “wow” to describe the soul-stirring sense of awe that sweeps over me multiple times a day.  In the last few months I’ve found this in the skyfire of sunset and in the glow of the moon rising, in the nests in bare trees, in the sudden, noisy song of dozens of sparrows even though I can’t see them, in the long shadows of my daughter’s eyelashes against her sleeping cheeks, in the words of poets and writers too numerous to mention.

Does this constant wow contradict the low note of lamentation that plays constantly in my life?  I don’t actually think so.  Maybe remaining open to the wow necessitates a permeability of spirit that means I’m also open to a certain sorrow.  These are the two edges of the world’s beauty that Virginia Woolf described, anguish and laughter springing from the same single truth.  I suspect I’m just joining my voice to an ancient chorus here, kneeling in supplication among a swirling sea of humanity.  And we all whisper the same thing under our breath:

wow.

Social networks

I’ve established, to a painfully detailed degree I imagine, that I lean towards introversion.  Also, I work pretty much full time, so I spend a lot of time at my desk in front of my computer.  I also spend a large part of the day on the telephone for work, which means I don’t often talk to friends.  All of these factors surely contribute to the fact that for a long time email has been my preferred way to communicate with most people.

It’s not a surprise, then, that I’ve followed the explosion of social media in the last several years.  I was late to join Facebook, though I’m there now.  I love Twitter, and for years it has been my primary news source.  I visit Pinterest and Instagram (name: lemead) regularly.  I would love to connect with any of you in any of those places.

Part of why I’m eager to connect with people on Facebook, Twitter, and beyond is that I’ve made very real friendships in this virtual space.  Some of my relationships that began in the ether have become an important and sustaining friendship, including time together in the real world.  Aidan, Denise, and others (so many others!) have transitioned from twitter icon on my screen to people I’ve spent in-person time with.  In some cases these virtureal (hat tip: Aidan) friends have met my children, and I have met theirs.

I believe it goes the other way too, by which I mean when a dear in-real-life friend (made in the days before – gasp – the internet) moves, say, to China, you can continue your closeness through virtual channels for a very long time.  This applies also when your only, beloved sibling moves, say, to Jerusalem.

Have you met people in this virtual world who have become in-real-life friends?  What is your favorite social network?  Please let me know and I’ll pop over and follow you!

 

The spirit and living at the edges

I have just spent a week at the ocean, and Mark Doty has been in my head.  This can only send me in one direction: it makes me think, as I often do, of one of my very favorite essays, Doty’s Cold Dark Deep and Absolutely Clear, part of which is available here. The essay is a meditation on the death of Doty’s partner, Wally, and it contains some of my favorite sentences ever written. Doty talks about a wounded seal on the beach, and muses on the image of the merman, a being who slides easily between worlds. The coast becomes place where this slippery transferability is made easy.

Doty also shares some observations on writing and ways of imagining and integrating our experience.  As someone whose instinct – in writing as in life – leans towards the metaphorical, I love what he has to say about that as a way of understanding the world.  His lines about the spirit are among those I hear most often in my head; he’s up there with Wordsworth for most-frequent haunter of my thoughts.  Haven’t we all had moments where we feel our spirit, like flames, both a part of our physical presence and something, somehow, ineffably separate?

My way of knowing experience is to formulate a metaphor that describes or encapsulates a moment; it is a way of getting at the truth. And a way of paying attention, of reading the world.

The spirit is that in us which participates. It moves alone, like air or fire, and it moves with the body, lifting the body’s earth and water into gesture and connection, into love.

Doty’s essay is not strictly about the ocean but it is suffused with images of the coast and of distant water (cold, dark, deep, and absolutely clear).

The body is not me. I am my body, but I extend beyond it; just as my attention laps out, as my identity can pour out into the day. I have learned more about this, living beside the water, as if the very fluidity of the landscape gets inside us and encourages our ability to slip our fixed bounds and feel ourselves as extended, multiple, various.

There is something I find essentially familiar about being near or on the ocean.  This is something I must have inherited: my parents, both passionate and intuitive sailors, cite as one of the major reasons for moving home from London their longing to be close to the ocean again.  I am at my core a liminal being, born just at the beginning of the turn from one season to another, drawn to the edges and hems of this human experience, beguiled most of all by the shadow at the border where light and dark bleed together.  It is surely no accident that I am so deeply moved by sunrise and sunset, which are the edges of time just as the coast is that between earth and sea.

Perhaps I am drawn to these boundaries because it is there that I feel, as Doty says, extended, multiple, various.  Maybe it’s here, in the blur between one world and another, between one night and a new day, that my spirit recognizes its true home and, in its comfort and elation, makes its presence known to me.

Filling the spaces

It’s true more often than we realize: each new love is built from the wreckage of the loves that came before.  In Kath, Mike saw Lisa; in Art’s eyes, she resembled our mother.  I can’t look at Mike’s face without seeing Dad’s.  Art, to Ma, was the living ghost of Harry Breen.  We love those who fit the peculiar voids within us, our hollow wounds.  We love to fill the spaces the old loves left behind.

– Jennifer Haigh, Faith

This passage, from Jennifer Haigh’s lovely novel Faith, has been haunting me for days.  It’s not an understatement to say that this is the central theme of the novel I am so clunkily attempting to write: an exploration of the holes inside each of us, punched out in the shapes of our earliest loves, first dear friends, and family members, around whose contours our own are shaped.  I am fascinated by the ways our lives are shaped and directed by early experiences, and by the disproportionate power of those we first love.

I am thinking this week about the people in my life who contributed to those hollow wounds, those whose words and input will echo throughout my life.  For many of us the – most, even – I suspect that the response to those who early, and irrevocably, shaped who we are is subconscious.  Certainly we are rarely aware of the spaces as they are being gouged out; more likely we happen upon them, later, either because they howl and ache or because we trip over them, startled, on one way somewhere else.

Are you aware of those who shaped and defined your own peculiar voids?  My sense is that for some these people are obvious, and for others they are a surprise.  Maybe that combination exists, actually, in each individual life: we are carved out and hollowed by both those we might imagine (a parent, a first love) and those whose power we did not understand in the moment (a friend, a quick relationship).  I often think of the interior of others as a landscape (or as of a night sky, full of sparkling) and so I love this image of there being hollows and chasms in that terrain, molded by people long gone.

And on we walk.  Empty and full, shaped and carved out, swollen with love and devastated by loss, every single day.

 

Actual and ideal

“How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousin.”
– Henry David Thoreau

Kirsetin Morello is leading a fascinating project on her blog.  Every Monday she posts words that intrigue her, move her, interest her.  On Wednesday she shares her reflections on those words and invites others to do the same.  These words from Thoreau, which I had never read before, are this week’s featured quote.

Thoreau’s words remind of the adage that the perfect is the enemy of the good.  They also remind me something I’ve said before, which is that for many of us the central task of adulthood is letting go of what we thought our lives would be like.  We compare what is to what we wanted, or imagined, and very often reality falls short of those dreams.  And so we fall, over and over again, into the perilous lacuna between the vision and the truth.

It’s only after we are sufficiently bruised from these falls that we stand up, brush ourselves off, and realize: no more comparing.  Instead we vow to turn our gaze to what is here, now, and to embrace that for what it is.

Of course this is true, too, for friends.  While I think Thoreau’s point has broad resonance beyond actual friendships, it is relevant with respect to those we love, also.  Many years ago I realized, for example, that I’d have only a handful of truly intimate friends, native speakers who I felt understood everything about me.  I mourned this truth for a little while, not because I wanted more of these friends of the heart but because mine were not local, and I ached for them.  But then, in an adjunct realization, I allowed myself to understand that there were great benefits to friends who were not connecting with every single dimension of me every single minute.  There were, once I let myself enjoy them, great joys to be had with friends who were fabulously fun to drink wine with, or fascinating to talk about books with, or partners-in-mothering with whom I could share the nitty gritty details of my son’s latest tantrum.  And so what if it wasn’t a single person spanning all of those realms?  That was okay.

Let’s not turn our backs on our friends, or on our lives, because what is ideal is not real, and the holding one up to the other results in nothing but anguish.  Instead, may we learn to lean into those friends and that truth that is right here, now, imperfect and wonderful all at once.