musings

Light

I have been thinking, for days now, of how to describe our magical adventure, our family trip to Jerusalem, a week full of delights and overwhelm and memories none of the four of us will ever forget.  We experienced things, individually and collectively, that moved us all deeply.

This is the photograph I keep returning to.  Not any of the more glorious ones, of famous sites, of gold domes and flags waving in the cornflower blue sky and 12th century churches, of childrens’ smiles.  It took me a while, but gradually I realized that this photograph asserted itself for a reason: it fits perfectly with my reflections on 2011 and hopes for 2012.

For me, Jerusalem was about faith.  It is a place where the extraordinary power of religion – to render both egregious harm and outrageous beauty – is undeniable, unavoidable, written indelibly on every cobblestone, every mosaic tile, every crying face.  We saw the silver star on the floor marking where Jesus was born and the rock where he was crucified.  We saw people weeping at the Western Wall and the stunning gold dome where Mohammed ascended for the first time.  I stood outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, listening simultaneously to a ghostly choir singing from somewhere inside (above us?) and to the haunting Muslim call to prayer, the two sounds floating on the same incense-scented air, colliding and, improbably, weaving together into nothing less than the sound of faith.

Faith is something I’ve written about a lot.  It’s something I think about in the middle of the dark night, something I lunge for, awkwardly, clapping my hands together, trying to grasp it even as it floats away, something I look for above me, in the clouds, in the patterns of bare branches against winter’s sky.  It is impossible not to be moved by the tangible faith all over Jerusalem, in the relics but most of all in the way faith itself is animate in the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims moving through the streets.

Above all, there was one moment.  On Christmas Eve, we made our way to Bethlehem (for the second day in a row: on the 23rd we’d gone, seen Jesus’ birthplace, walked around the Church of the Nativity).  We walked across the intense checkpoint between Israel and the West Bank, and after a slow taxi ride made the final half mile ascent into Manger Square on foot.  The sun was setting, and the streets were packed with a crowd whose mood seemed to skitter between ebullient and emotional.  I had a child holding each  of my hands.  And then I looked up.  And I saw the end-of-day light on the wall of the Church of the Nativity.  And my heart thudded and my eyes filled with tears.

That was my moment of faith in Jerusalem.  Not the big scenes, the places where pilgrims threw themselves to the floor and wept, the places where I imagined I might feel the presence of a sense sublime … of something far more deeply interfused.  No.  Instead, it was the setting sun on a wall that had been there for many, many years.  A wall that has mutely witnessed tragedies and glories, that has been watered by the tears of the faithful and been subtly shaped by the over-centuries erosion of their handprints.  It was the light.

Last year I chose a word of the year for the first time.  Trust served me well.  The truth is, I’m not sure – for me at least – there’s a whole lot of difference between trust and faith.  At least there isn’t in how I think of them.  I spent a lot of time thinking about trust last year, and while I still struggle with the effort to let go and to believe that everything is unfolding exactly as it should, I feel enriched and calmed by having focused on the word for 12 months.  I wasn’t going to pick a word for 2012, though.  Nothing really came to me.  But then in Jerusalem I kept thinking of this same word, and this picture, out of so, so many, kept pushing itself into my consciousness.  So here it is.  For 2012.

Light.

Light as in less-heavy: I want to laugh more, to remind people – maybe even all of you, and certainly myself – that there are many aspects of my personality that are not stiflingly serious.

Light as in light on trees, on stone walls, on the faces of my children.  Light from inside and light from outside.  The light of sunrise and sunset, whose source I cannot fully understand; this is the light that makes me feel trust, makes me feel faith.  I am already fairly attuned to this light, photographing it all the time and writing about it even more incessantly.

May the light from the Church of the Nativity, which tremendously moved me, stay with me in 2012.  May I never forget that the power in light resides, somehow, in its relationship to darkness.  Shadows exist at the edge where light meets dark, and they are where I have always found the most meaning.  There is no reason to be afraid of the dark.

July: A whole universe sparkling inside

“Another person is like a geode lined with hidden glittering.” – Catherine Newman

I believe this to be true.  I believe this with all my might.  I’ve been privileged enough to have gazed at this glittering, in awe, inside another person.

What I’m contemplating, lately, is that if I believe this about others, I might have to believe that it is also be true of me.  Right?  The last few nights, lying in bed before I fall asleep, I have seen a twinkling behind my eyelids.  I can’t describe it other than that – but I’m wondering if it’s the hidden glittering winking at me.  On the rare occasions that I let myself lean into a wave of trust, I can imagine that there is a whole universe sparkling inside of me.  An expansive space, a black sky speckled with constellations whose forms I don’t yet know how to read.

I have only seen passing glimpses of this world, and, frankly, only recently.  Why has it taken me so long to see it?  I suspect that it’s because to do so I need to squeeze my eyes closed, need to to firmly shut out all outside input, advice, and approval.  I have to go dark, as I wrote about in January.  While I’m drawn to this, like the reverse of a moth to a flame, it remains hard for me.

I wonder why all that is within me is pressing on the insides of my eyelids right now, trying to get my attention.  I guess it makes sense: this has been a tumultuous time, limned with a lingering shadow of farewell that I still don’t quite understand.  Perhaps all of that transition and letting go is making room for something burrowed within me that hasn’t had the space – or time, or courage, or what? – to come forth before.  Perhaps all of this is just the fundamental not-knowing of midlife sinking in, the beginning, at last, of my accepting that my home is inside the questions and not the answers.  Maybe I’m finally getting comfortable in my own skin, and my body is beginning to offer up deeply-buried messages.

I don’t know.

I do know that I’ve glimpsed a planetarium sky that I want to study, to watch, to learn by heart.  I want to live there.

May: moments of wonder

Last night I folded up a big Target box and put it in the recycling bin.  The box was covered in sharpie words and crayon drawings, and has been a major focus of this house for several days.  As I took it out, noticing that the air is positively swampy with spring as I did so, I thought how thrilled I am that Grace and Whit still find a cardboard box to be a thrilling thing to play with.   The arrival of a big cardboard box is met with celebrating, and provides days of fodder for playing together or alone.  I love this.

It reminded me of the night, a few weeks ago, when I decided to make a chocolate fudge cake that I’d first made for Whit, on his request, last summer.  I surprised the kids with the cake in the morning, and gave them each fat slices for breakfast.  They looked at me, bewildered wonder on their faces, suspecting, I think, that I was going to announce that I was joking and snatch the plates away.  I wasn’t, and I didn’t.  They were thrilled beyond all reason at this tiny surprise.  Grace even told me recently that she had written a “whole page” in her journal at school about this, and I groaned at her that she wasn’t making me look very good in front of her teacher.

I get the same sense of awed pride when I asked Whit recently what his favorite part of spring break was.  He said, without hesitating, “Disney,” but then he went on, “but close after that, our trip to Walden.”  Or when, after a dinner full of rowdy, obnoxious bickering, they calm down, within minutes, when we go for a pajama-clad ‘notice things’ walk.  Furthermore, that they ask, over and over again, for these walks.

I know for sure that this is one of the things I most want to pass on to my children: the propensity for delight, the willingness to be amazed, an openness to the hugeness of small things.  Whether it’s a trait or an inclination I’m not sure; I don’t know that it matters.  I do know, however, that it is one way to assure a life full of joy.  That doesn’t mean there won’t be great sorrow, too.  As far as I can tell they are often twined entirely together.  If there’s one thing I want to do as a mother, it is to help Grace and Whit hold onto their capacity for wonder.

I noticed, as I tried to find a link, that I have more than a few blog posts with “wonder” in the title.  All of a sudden it occurred to me that maybe that’s what this blog is about: the wonder of ordinary life.  The wonder of that design, of which we sometimes glimpse the contours, though never the whole.  The wonder of human relationships, the sky, the turning of the seasons, poetry, the power contained in the light of a day.  The wonder of living in the slipstream of time, whose eddies are both utterly unique and totally universal.  That’s what this blog has been, for almost five years: a record of my moments of wonder, both in their thunderous joy and their swelling sadness.  And a love letter to those two small guides who have shown me the way here.

April: The tenderness of pain itself

I didn’t have the best Easter I’ve ever had.  On Saturday afternoon I began feeling sick, a nausea that intermittently escalated and ebbed.  By 7 I was in bed with a fever, trying hard not to throw up.  Sunday I woke up feeling somewhat better, though I remained vaguely carsick all day long.  This made me short with the children and with Matt in the morning, barking at them when I felt frustrated, annoyed at myself that I could not avoid this behavior.  Everything felt frayed and difficult by 8:30 in the morning.

At church, ease floated down to rest on my shoulders.  Sitting there, in a place that has held so much of my history – my sister’s marriage, both Grace and Whit’s christenings (each, actually, on Easter weekend)  – I exhaled.  I sang the songs I know by heart, their lyrics rising from some deep, hidden reservoir of memory, from the years at St. Paul’s Girls’ School.  My eyes filled with tears as I remembered the three grandparents I have lost, particularly Nana, my maternal grandmother, who always cherished Easter above all holidays.  I sank deep into the familiar cadence of the prayers before communion.  I felt gladness enter my heart, and in its wake, gratitude.

But as soon as we left the church, into the almost startling brightness of the day, into the sudden full-bloom of spring, the grace I’d felt in the pew sloughed off and my agitation rose to the surface again.  I felt nauseous, I felt tired, I felt cranky.  We had a lovely egg hunt at my parents’ house, with both my godsister and her family and my cousin and her boyfriend.  And then we had a relaxed, comfortable lunch at our house, my father and mother full of fascinating stories and observations from the trip to Jerusalem from which they just returned yesterday.

The day was nothing short of delightful, with only a couple of whiny kid moments to mar its gleam.  And I felt the person – the mother, wife, daughter – I want to be floating in the room, sometimes within reach, sometimes not.  The presence and peace that I grasp for so clumsily was just in my palm and then jerked away again, replaced by an unease of the soul that manifests as physical discomfort.

After lunch my nausea rose up in my throat again, threatening, and I climbed back into bed.  I felt demoralized, frustrated: after so many years, after so much trying, how can I still stumble, fall back into these traps, these old ways of being?  Didn’t I just write, a few days ago, that the black emotions can blow through, like a squall, and still leave me with the memory of a beautiful day?  I know what this agitation is about, I think: it is hiding, it is refusing to stare into the sun.  It is my attempt to evade the pain that is an inextricable part of truly engaging in my life.

But oh, what irony there is in this, I see now.  The pain I feel in knowing how much I’ve missed, in realizing how much these avoidance behaviors have cost me is so much keener than the pain of looking my life in the eye.  I know this as well as I know my own name.  Many days now, like last week, I can acknowledge the irritation that comes as regularly as a tide, and let it pass.  On Easter I could not: I got tangled in it.

“Healing,” Pema Chodron reminds us, “can be found in the tenderness of pain itself.” I read this last Easter, on Katrina Kenison’s gorgeous blog, and the words returned to me today.  The pain of living my life, of accepting the passage of time, of embracing my own wounded heart: these are the kinds of pain that Pema speaks of.  The awful, toxic pain of regret, however, carries no tenderness.  There is no healing in avoidance, in the way I felt for big swaths of Easter Sunday.

What is Easter if not the day of renewal, rebirth, resurrection?  Yes, I squandered a lot of it being crabby and irritable and short-tempered.  Yes, I drove myself to sobs alone in my room thinking: I will never have another Easter egg hunt when Grace is 8 and Whit is 6.  I don’t know exactly why I felt this way on Easter, a day I’ve always loved deeply.  I know that instead of attacking myself for this waste, lying in the dark, crying, as my stomach roiled as though I’m at sea in a storm, I should instead embrace what Easter means, believe in the return of my peace.  I am trying.

March: The heartbreak that hovers

For so many years I tried to outrun my sadness and my sensitivity, but no matter how fast I went it trailed behind me, stuttering on the pavement like the cans tied behind a bride and groom’s getaway car.  No matter how hard I sprinted I could not evade it, this lingering sadness, this strange but overwhelming sense of loss that infused even the most ordinary moments, this heartbreak that hovered around the edges of my life.

In the last few years that heartbreak has caught up to me.  My deepest wound finally opened wide enough that I could no longer ignore it.  I’ve been slowly circling the black hole at the center of my life, drawn inexorably towards it even as I fear the heartbreak that lives there.  That black hole is the brutal truth that it all passes, that every single moment is gone even as I live it, that no matter how hard I try, how fiercely, white-knuckled, I cling, I cannot hold onto my life.

I’m certain it was my children who forced me to turn and to stare into the sun of my life’s blinding, but evanescent right now.  To fall into the place where the heart of my life beats.  Paradoxically, they demonstrated both the unavoidable drumbeat march of time and the critical importance of being still in each individual moment.  They inhabited the now with an impossible-to-ignore stubbornness, yet they also marked time’s passage in a visceral way.  Unaware of this contradiction, they tugged me to the place I’d always shied away from.  They taught me that being present is both the most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever done and the only way to truly live my life.

In the strange, out-of-regular-life lacuna that the last week has been, I spent some time thinking about how the way that I interact with the world has fundamentally changed.  It’s no insight to observe that a marked rupture from status quo can jolt us into reflection and a new perspective on that normalcy.  I realize, not for the first time, but again, that I’ve stopped – for the most part – those hiding-from-my-life behaviors.  Instead, I now live in a permanent state of broken-heartedness.  The savage and beautiful reality of life’s impermanence colors every moment of my life.

Sometimes I am jealous of those who are less porous, who can walk through life without being so frequently brought to their knees by the pain and brilliance of it.  My every conscious moment is filtered through this prism of my piercing awareness of how fleeting it is.  In the last few years I’ve become almost painfully aware of every detail around me.  The sight of a half moon, one edge ragged, foggy, in the morning sky makes my breath catch, a cascade of emotions tinkling inside me like windchimes: the physical beauty of this planet, the sky’s being near and yet far, the concrete evidence of time’s passage in imperfect not-wholeness of the moon.  I suspect this, the way I am so attuned to the most mundane of details, is either an attempt to fully inhabit each moment or an effort to freeze it, like an insect in amber, but I don’t know which.

And what I realize, again, fiercely, is that this is how I want to live:  in the right now of my life with a broken heart.  I want this, in full knowledge of the pain it carries, far more than I want to keep hiding from my life.  This is a decision I make not in one grandiose declaration, but every single day, every single minute.  It’s not even, really, a decision so much as following my intuition about the way I want to inhabit the world, and it lives in where I choose to place my attention.