musings

Maybe I’m Amazed, Into the Mystic, and the future glinting in the present

When Matt and I got married, a hundred years ago, I didn’t overly obsess about most of the wedding details (as you can see, I wore a ponytail and my dress was a sundress, notable only for the fact that it had a scalloped hem).  The only things I really cared about were the songs and the readings.  I cared a lot – agonized, even – about choosing readings for the service and also about our first dance song.  Our readings were two: Cavafy’s Ithaka, and an excerpt from The Book of Qualities.  Our first dance was to Maybe I’m Amazed by Paul McCartney and the last song we danced to before we left, on a small boat into the dark harbor, was Van Morrison’s Into the Mystic.

I thought of this yesterday when I was driving and Maybe I’m Amazed came on the radio.  This doesn’t happen much – the song that Paul McCartney wrote for his wife Linda, while lovely, isn’t exactly on constant repeat on Kiss 108.  I chose it, as is often the case when it comes to my musical attachments, for the lyrics.  But really, when I read the lyrics now, I think I chose it for the title.

Maybe I’m amazed.

I couldn’t help thinking, as I drove, the setting sun chasing me home along the Mass Pike, that some part of the 25 year old me knew this would be, in many ways, the anthem of my life.  It’s definitely no understatement to say that I have been startled, and continue to be, by how much flat-out amazement my experience contains.  This life amazes me every single day, with its surprising beauty, with its stunning pain, with its lingering grief, with its enduring sturdiness.  Of course I was thinking of my marriage, and my soon-to-be-husband when I chose Paul McCartney’s somewhat random song, but I think I also knew I was thinking of my life.

Of course Into the Mystic hits the same note, too.  That’s what this life, is after all, isn’t it?  A journey into the mystic, into a dark harbor, into a world lit by sputtering sparklers who consume themselves as they burn brightly, by fireworks whose flare leaves an imprint in the sky even after it fades.  I am so often hard on my younger self, focus so resolutely on all the poor choices I made and things I did not do well enough.  It is a welcome change to recognize that even in that young, impressionable bride there was a flicker of the future, an awareness of the themes that would come to define both my marriage and, most of all, my life.

Are there specific memories, or choices, in your life like this?  Places you can see the future glinting in the present, even if it takes retrospect to really understand what those flashes were?  And if you’re married, what song did you dance your first dance to?

 

Trust, faith, belief, and religion

What does belief mean?  What does faith mean?  I am pretty sure that these are not the same as being religious in the conventional sense of the word, but I’m also sure there are large swaths of overlap.

These questions floated around the room this weekend as I looked out my office window at my tree and noticed the faint swelling at the ends of the still-black branches that tells me they are moving towards spring.  I know that swelling will grow, eventually bursting into bright green bloom, in a riotous assertion of new life that will surprise me, as it does every single year.  Why was I thinking about faith, about belief, about religion, as I looked at the tree branches?  I don’t know but somehow it seems to make sense.

I’ve often had moments of deep emotion, as inarticulate as it is undeniable, a sensation that feels like my spirit acknowledging something external that is its equal in power and mystery.  Very often these moments come over me when I’m observing the natural world, as I did through my window, or when I’m outside in it, for example sitting in my favorite cemetery or running in the pre-dawn darkness.  The feeling, as I’ve described it before, is the sense equivalent of the sound of birds’ wings flapping or of lines beating against masts in the wind.

These experiences of startling awareness also form constellations around each of my children: they’ve occurred at each of their births, in their shadowy, nightlight-lit bedrooms, and at other, random moments throughout my life as their mother.

Sometimes this sensation does float over me in a classically religious setting.  I’ve felt it at church, particularly when riding the swells of a congregation speaking in unison.  I had an experience in the crypt at the Assisi Cathedral that I’ve never forgotten, when something buried deep inside my chest stirred.  That day something was agitated inside of me that I am still struggling to understand, and it was connected, I’m sure, to my location deep inside one of the places most imbued with tangible spirituality I’ve ever been.

Moments like those make me wonder about the Venn Diagram that exists between religious fidelity and spirituality more broadly defined.  I know it’s the same feeling, for me, regardless of the setting.  I have spent years trying to put these encounters with something beyond rational thought into words.  It’s brushing up against the eternal.  It’s feeling the chill of what lies beyond this world waft by me, reminding me that each moment is essentially fragile, hugely tenuous.  It’s a piercing awareness of how tiny I am in the universe, which is somehow both immensely reassuring and hugely terrifying at the same time.

What I wondered, as I stared at my tree, is how this – this thing, these encounters, this emotion, this feeling, this bigger-than-me shadow – relates to religious faith.  The fact that it (how insufficient “it” is to describe what I’m talking about, but I don’t know what else to say) has visited me in church suggests maybe it has something to do with it.  The truth is, though, I’m not sure.  I suspect that faith, belief, and trust all spring from the same root, and together form a braid of things I desperately want more of in my life.  While for some people religion may be a synonym for what I describe, I’m also certain that many people who are not traditionally religious know of what I speak.

As I stared at my tree, wondering how long I’d have to watch, without blinking, before I could actually observe the swelling of the buds, I realized it doesn’t really matter.  What I want is the trust, the faith, the belief in something bigger than me, in a benevolent universe, in a design so vast.  What I call it is irrelevant.

Your days are short here

Your days are short here.  This is the last of your springs.  And now, in the serenity and quiet of this lovely place, touch the depths of trusts, feel the hem of Heaven.  You will go away with old, good friends.  And don’t forget when you leave why you came.

-Adlai Stevenson

Last Friday I had these lines in my head all day long.  Of course they’re dear to me, because Adlai Stevenson delivered them at Princeton.  He was speaking to the class of 1954 and with tremendous personal knowledge, because he himself graduated in 1922.  So these words always, instantly, bring to mind the four marvelous springs I spent at Princeton: the magnolias and the music, the beer and the bravado, the mundane and the magical.

But it wasn’t Princeton I was thinking about last week.  I was considering these lines in a new way.  Our days are short everywhere.  All of our seasons – those defined by the sun’s presence or absence from the Earth as well as those whose demarcations are emotional – eventually draw to a close.

And we ought never forget, even when something ends, why we began it.  This is another universal statement; in my experience, very often something begun with intention, verve and enthusiasm can wind to an utterly unanticipated close.  Still, I have to remind myself, there’s value in the journey, no matter where it takes us.  But I also need to remember – we all do – why it is we set out in the first place.  Even if we didn’t go where we thought we would.

While I don’t know yet precisely what it is in my life that’s ending, these words in my head, my ever-keener awareness of earth’s very rotation underneath me certainly speak of the thinning out of a season.  I am crossing through, I think, the attenuated border of one phase and into another.  Though some of life’s seasons end abruptly, I think these transitions are mostly gradual, with one interval of time fading into another before we’ve even realized what is happening.

In these moments when I realize how short my days are, the challenge is to open my eyes to the radiance of all that is coming even as I mourn what is lost.  Today, anew, as we turn towards the days of magnolias again, I will try again to be as aware of welcoming the beginning as I am of grieving the end.

What’s ending for you?  And beginning?  Do you remember why you came?

Here, now

I don’t know how it’s possible that I didn’t know this song before.  Ray Lamontagne’s Be Here Now has been on repeat, in my car and on my computer, in my head, for the last many days.

It’s not a secret that these have been raw, vulnerable weeks for me.  January brought with it a new and intense awareness of how fragile everything is, one that I did not anticipate as the year turned.  I’ve been walking and listening and crying and reading and hugging my children.  I have been watching the light.  Some days the lengthening of the days feels so visceral, it’s as though I can literally feel the earth turning under my feet.

I can tell I’m particularly porous these days because, even more than usual, I’m crying at everything.  I feel more aware than ever of the extraordinary magnificence of this life.  I walk into Grace’s room and find this on the floor, a drawing from her brother, and dissolve into tears.  Tears of gratitude and tears that acknowledge the unavoidable, blinding pain of this moment’s impermanence.

I cried reading the book that Whit brought home from the library, a frankly poetic picture book called Moonshot, about the flight of Apollo 11.  The description of walking on the moon, in a place where nobody had ever been before, was so full of palpable wonder my expansive emotions overran my body, leaking out in tears.  I wonder how much of Whit’s current fixation with space, the planets, and flight is wound up with the way I keep seeing the moon rising.  A few weeks ago everybody in his class had to pick a biography from the library to bring home and read with their parents.  His choice of Amelia Earhart, predictably, made me cry.

I’ve walked by this window in the Nike store several times, and I’ve even stopped to photograph it before.  But last week I read the words, now familiar, and gasped at their truth.  As much as it feels I’ve plumbed those limits, the truth is I have no idea.  None of us ever can.

One afternoon last week Grace, Whit and I went to Mount Auburn, one of our favorite places.  It was deserted and quiet and the late-afternoon painted everything gold.  We wandered around, noticing things everywhere.  Grace and Whit are drawn to the wild and peaceful place as surely as am I.  They jogged and gazed and enjoyed each other’s company in a place whose every inch speaks of the power of both life and death.  More than once I had to blink back tears as I watched them.

Sometimes there is so much sweetness I can’t stand it.

Be here now.

Moon rising

Several weeks ago, I couldn’t stop seeing nests in the trees.  They were everywhere I turned.  And then there was a week when I kept hearing the deafening chorus of sparrows singing in brown bushes.  I’m sure it is no accident that there are times when the same thing – sight, sound, image – keeps presenting itself to me, over and over again.  It is similar to, and an equal demonstration of the universe’s benevolent if confounding hand, the way quotes, poems, and song lyrics sometimes rise insistently to my mind.

These days I see the moon rising every afternoon.  I often set out on my dusk walks when the world is splashed in that gleaming late-afternoon light, as thick as maple syrup and as golden.  As I walk the light changes quality as the gold gives way to something clearer, more attenuated.  And it is in that still-blue light that I start, always, noticing the moon.  I watch it growing from a faint, ragged-edged disc, almost translucent, into a brighter, more solid orb.  As the day’s light goes down, the moon rises and asserts its radiance.

This doesn’t seem like a coincidence.  Someone recently told me there is a chiaroscuro quality to my writing here (thank you for the lovely comment; you know who you are) and that made me think immediately of the way the moon is always present for me.  Even in a sky still bright with sun, the ultimate icon of the night is visible.  The highest joys of my life have had seams of sorrow in them, and, likewise, there is always some beauty in the depths of sadness.  Light is made meaningful by the presence of darkness.  And each time I watch the moon rise, I remember this anew.