musings

To meet what is coming

Please accept with all my love this inner and outer chronicle of those last weeks of our old century and our old millennium – and the first weeks of your own beginnings  – when so many things were on their way to us, things we neither anticipated nor, in some cases, ever could have imagined.  This is the story of how we met them and were changed by them.  May we continue to meet what is coming to us with courage in our hearts.  – Gail Godwin, Evensong

These lines, on the last page of Gail Godwin’s gorgeous Evensong, have been ringing in my head for days.  I believe utterly that there is some hand at work out there – some design, even in the vastness – and therefore I’m not surprised that it was right now that I picked up Evensong.  I won’t even try to write about this vast, beautiful book, beyond saying that it moved me immensely.  Godwin grapples with issues of faith and doubt, evokes humanity in all of its flawed complexity, dives into the deepest manifestation of what it means to trust.  And I read, spellbound, until the end.  And then I found these last lines.

May we continue to meet what is coming to us with courage in our hearts.

Indeed.  Is there a more eloquent way to describe the topics I’ve struggled with here – so loquaciously, so repetitively, so inelegantly – for years?  I don’t think so.  And so I walk on.  Gazing at the world, at the nets of black branches against cornflower blue, at the glowing, ragged-edged moon rising in the dusky sky.  Trying, every single day, to meet what is coming to me with an open mind and heart full of trust.  My courage flags, my eyes fill with tears, I trip and fall.  And all I can do is wake up every morning and try again.

My subject chose me

I am honored to have my essay, My Subject Chose Me, published at Literary Mama.  I love so much of what Literary Mama stands for, most of all the power that is contained in commingling motherhood and writing.  The work that I’ve read there is without exception both beautifully-written and thought-provoking, intelligent and honest, suffused with love of both the written word and the small, noisy people who populate our days.

Please click over to read my piece and spend some time on the site.  You won’t be disappointed.  I’d love to hear what you think.

Trust your struggle

I’ve seen this image several times, all over the place, and finally I downloaded it because I love it.  I love the font, I love the gray and white, and I love the message.

Trust your struggle.

These words honor that we all have struggles, and they contains within them trust that all the effort and difficulty is in service of something.  That we’re all where we are supposed to be, doing what we’re supposed to be doing, no matter how painful or pointless it might seem.

I’m doing both right now.  Struggling, and trying to trust.

 

What I know now

These are a few things I know to be true right now.

  • Delight and despair are shadows thrown by different lights on the same large object.  Or the same light against different hulking masses.  I don’t know quite, but they are entirely related, twisted together, inextricable.
  • A walk outside, in any weather, is the best way to reorient myself to my place (miniscule) in the universe.
  • Sometimes it feels like some weird combination of inertia and sheer will is keeping me from shattering into a million tiny shards.  These times come, and they pass, and they come again.  I must learn not to panic.
  • I will never be able to fully measure the weight of awe, the power of wonder.
  • Most people are deeply good at their core.  Some are not.  I’m skilled, but not infallible, at discerning which is which.
  • The morning is my favorite time of day.  Running in the pre-dawn and coming home to my hot coffee and sleeping house are some of the happiest moments of my life.
  • As soon as I feel like I’ve got my balance, the ground under my feet will shift.  Everything changes, and stability is an illusion.  I can either white-knuckle my way through this, or learn to flow with the changes.  My default is the former, I long for the latter.
  • Poetry speaks to me – and to many – on a level that runs beneath the rational.
  • The central task of adulthood, for many of us, is letting go of how we thought our lives were going to be.

What do you know to be true?

Fissures in the dark

Sometimes I stagger under the weight of my own feelings.  This season has turned so swiftly from one of relative calm to one of choppy seas and brand new changes, and I am still struggling to find my balance.  On a daily basis, both my anxiety and my good fortune overwhelm me.  How to take the measure of each?  I can’t.  I can only seesaw back and forth between moments of panic and those of intense awareness of how good my life is.  Maybe it is precisely this gratitude that makes the uncertainty feel so perilous.

There are moments when I am literally brought to my knees by a sharp reminder of something that is lost or by a breathtaking pang of fear about what may come.  But then, often, in the wake of those powerful emotions comes the world, weak but undeniable in its insistence that I open my eyes.

Yesterday, Julie Daley tweeted a beautiful line by Rumi: “I can’t stop pointing to the beauty.”  This is so right, and so true; while I am occasionally swamped by bleakness, almost always there are faint fissures in the dark through which light, and reminders of goodness, can creep.

The suddenness with which this has become an uncertain and unstable time cautions me, again, not to ever grow too attached to the way things are in a specific moment.  It all changes.  I’m thrashing around in these suddenly stormy waters, but trying to keep my eyes on the light, on the cracks, on the sunrises where I can still see the moon (the picture above was taken on the way to Jerusalem, when we landed in Madrid at dawn).  There is so much loss, and so much fear, and it is easy for me to lose sight of the beauty all around.  It doesn’t make up for some of the heartbreak, and certainly doesn’t take away the roiling anxiety, but it can ameliorate it.  Some of it.