musings

Nests

This is the absolutely most barren time of the year.  I realized this recently on a walk around my neighborhood as the sun set around me at 4:30.  The air has that crispness to it, a kind of fullness that is also utterly empty.  The trees are stripped down to their barest architecture.  The outrageous cornflower blue sky is broken into tiny pieces, like irregular shards of glass, by the trees’ black branches.  And then the shadows gather, so early, the darkness is total, and our faith that the light will return carries us through.

Later, as winter moves in, there will be snow banks, icicles limning roofs and eaves.  Somehow, though colder, it’s less empty in those months.  That’s it, really: it’s empty right now.  There’s an echoing emptiness right now that goes hand in hand with the shortest days.  I’m more aware than ever of the way we exist under a big bowl of sky.  The sky – which has been, as I mentioned, heartbreaking blue this week –  is often striated with these puffy pink clouds, both as the sun comes up, late, and as it goes down, early.

On my walks I keep seeing nests in the bare trees.  Nests that must have been there when the trees were full of leaves, but I could never see them.  When the trees are stripped to their bones, we see the nests.  I couldn’t help thinking about this metaphor in our lives, too.  Do we have to let everything extraneous fall away, even things we never thought we could live without, before we know where the true, sturdy nests are?  I don’t know.  I’m not sure I’ve worked it out yet entirely, but there’s something about those nests of sticks, whose very existence through a windy, rainy fall belies their apparent fragility, that fills me with a strange combination of comfort and yearning.   And that I’ve never noticed them before, not in other winters, not in the other seasons, well, that seems not a coincidence.  Perhaps I am in search of those nests of my own, as I burrow deeper, curl in on myself, and turn towards the solstice.

Drudgery and divinity

Sunday was one of those rare days I’ve come to treasure almost above all others: a day with absolutely no plans.  We puttered as a family, each of us doing his or her own thing, coming together in various combinations at different moments.  Grace and I went to the grocery store and to drop some things off at Goodwill, and she sighed from the backseat, “Mummy, I love days like this with you.”  My eyes filled immediately and I nodded, not speaking for fear she’d hear the tears in my voice.  Whit and I curled up on the couch and he read The Velveteen Rabbit to me, proud of his newly-fluent reading.  The kids and I made cookies for their school’s teacher appreciation lunch, and then worked at the dining room table on a puzzle while they baked, the house filling with sugar cookie smell and the sound of Christmas carols.

I made homemade tomato sauce and apple sauce, hardboiled some eggs, baked two potatoes for lunch.  I did two loads of laundry.  As I was folding Whit’s pajamas and stacking Grace’s jeans in a careful pile, I felt a swell of gratitude and of well-being.  I realized, not for the first time, that there is something I find deeply comforting and satisfying in the most quotidian domestic tasks.  It has to do with the mundane and the magnificent that I have written about before, with the way that life is a collage of the prosaic and the transcendent.  I wrote then, and I still believe, that the divinity and the drudgery are both essential for me, and that somehow they sharpen each other’s vividness.

This belief is joined now by a new one: in some way that I don’t quite understand yet, the drudgery actually allows me to access the divine.  Over the last few years we’ve cut way back on our childcare, and I have all of the household responsibilities now.  And I am startled, I admit, by the deep sense of satisfaction these tasks give me.  I feel actual happiness when I fold laundry, or when I unpack half-eaten lunch sandwiches, or when I wake my children up every single morning, brushing their sleep-tangled hair back from their faces.  Or perhaps what I feel is contentment.  But I’m not sure there’s a big difference between happiness and contentment anyway; are you?

I suspect that this is a manifestation of a larger settling into my own life, a sinking into what is, in all its dishwasher-emptying, lunch-packing, homework-checking reality.  The everyday details and endless work of taking care of a house, and children, and a marriage sometimes daunt and frustrate me, sure.  But more often than not, these days, they also fill me with something warm and steady that feels awfully good.  I am certain it’s no accident that this sinking in comes just as I realize how truly numbered these days are.  This time, with small (and medium) children at home, of lost teeth and found pennies, of delight at a bird on the porch and despair at a missing teddy bear, will not furl out indefinitely.  For some reason lately I sense the preciousness of these days; the awareness that they will end floats constantly around the corners of my experience.  For so many years I assumed that life would be this way forever, one combative naptime spilled into another, the rocking before bedtime felt endless, and so forth.  I took these days – with their bathtimes and melanine plates and kissed bruises, their exhaustion and their wide-eyed wonder – for granted.

But no, they aren’t forever.  In fact they only last a minute.  And I am so immensely grateful that I realized that before they were gone, and that I found, in my daily chores and responsibilities, a door through which I can glimpse the holiness of this season in my life.

Maelstrom

Life lately has felt a little like a hurricane, a chaotic maelstrom, a funnel of wind picking up tons of dust, but the occasional piece of tinsel too.  I’m standing in the middle of it – though not quite in the eye, because it’s definitely not eerily calm – and trying to keep my eyes open even as the flotsam and jetsam in the air stings them.

And this tornado is not because of holiday craziness; I’m happy with my efforts to pare down this season to what matters to us.  It’s more how quickly everything is flying by: the years are spinning so quickly I feel dizzy, the ground is shifting under my feet, the room tips regularly as I survey it, stunned by how everything is precisely the same as and utterly different from the last time I looked.

Wasn’t it just yesterday that I was sitting at the littlest kids’ holiday concert at Grace and Whit’s school, with both of them crowded onto my lap?  She was in first grade and he was a Beginner.  Seriously: that was yesterday.  But wait!  It’s her mouth in those picture that’s missing teeth, and his hair looks distinctly shaggier.  In fact they don’t both fit on my lap like that anymore.  This year will be my last year attending that concert, with its sit-on-the-floor informality and small voices singing Jingle Bells and our favorite, Snowpants.  Never again.

Oh, I am such a cliche, but it’s all so true.  Life’s river swirls on and on, consistent and yet ever-changing, and I struggle to keep my balance in the rapids.  The whitewater isn’t so different from the dust; they both sting me a lot and scare me a little, and can get in the way of all the beauty.

I so desperately want to keep my eyes open despite all that dust, so that I can see the sparkle of the tinsel.  It reminds me of an evening recently when I was chopping onions over the sink.  My eyes were filled with tears and I rubbed at them with my knuckles, trying to clear my vision.  As I was doing this, Grace exclaimed, “Look!  It’s our cardinal!  In the back yard!”  I tried hard to open my eyes, to see the bright red bird through the sluice of my tears.  I saw the red, though it was streaked with tears, and it hurt a bit to open my eyes.

Maybe this is just the lesson.  It hurts a little, and it’s not always completely clear, but if we keep our eyes and our hearts open we can see the color, the shimmer, the shine.

Turning our brokenness into something beautiful

This is the darkest season; we wake in darkness and we watch the sun wane again before the clock has hit 5:00.  The light in the middle of the day is often pitched, somehow, at a high, wavering note; it is full and thin at the same time, endings tangible within it.  Somehow, the dark bothers me less than it used to.  There is an internal light that helps keep the thick, sometimes-threatening darkness slightly at bay.

The optimist in me feels a wild surge of hope about this: perhaps I am witnessing the birth of my own faith. This is a holy month, after all, full of imagery of light, regardless of your religion. Perhaps it is the flickering, nascent light of my own belief that illuminates these dark days. The candles in windows and the holiday lights strung on trees and in windows everywhere I look both reflect and contribute to that internal flickering.

We move towards the solstice, every day closer.  The winter solstice may well be the single holiest day of the year for me.  I definitely prefer it to the summer one, which demonstrates as clearly as any detail about me how much the promise of something (good and bad) impacts me.  Even at the height of summer, with the longest days we’ll ever know, there is something gloomy to me about the solstice.  It represents the turning back to dark.  That’s the preemptive regret that I’ve written about, which can completely occlude any present radiance for me.  This solstice, two weeks away, is the opposite.  It promises a turning back towards the light.

A year ago I read some of Meg Casey’s thoughts on the holiness that exists in darkness.  Once in a great while I read a piece of writing that makes me want to kneel and press my head to the ground, saluting its gorgeousness and ability to evoke emotion. This is one such piece. Please read it.

December is a holy month. Maybe it is the dark silky silence that descends so early, that speaks to me of reverence. Maybe it is the promise that December holds–that no matter how dark, how cold, how empty it can get, the light is coming back. Something always shifts in me when December arrives–I embrace the darkness and am eager for the coming solstice when the whole world is still and holds its breath, waiting to be reborn again. December whispers to me of midnight mass, of ancient choirs, of stained glass windows turned into gems by candle light.

Meg then goes on to talk about the connection between holiness and wholeness, using the image of a stained glass window: Broken, jagged, sharp pieces of glass held together magically, transformed into one perfect design not by gold or silver but by something as mundane as lead. And, of course, it is the light that animates the beauty.  Meg’s post reminds me of one of my very favorite of Anne Lamott’s lines: “Love is sovereign.” Yes. As Meg says, Love is the transformative power that turns our brokenness into something beautiful.

I love this because I think we often think of light as exposing flaws, unearthing chinks, revealing ugliness.  Yet in Meg’s metaphor it is light that knits disparate pieces into a whole, that reveals the light that exists within them.  Love as light.  Transformative, healing brokenness, uncovering worth.  May we all strive to be this kind of light, even in the dark moments of our lives.

There are some themes in my writing of which I’m very conscious.  Others emerge organically, and I’m not aware of them until I reflect for a moment.  Light and darkness has been a message to which I’ve returned this year, over and over.  I am often moved to tears by the quality of light in nature, and the metaphor of dark and light has also been one to which I am consistently drawn. Light and darkness.  Holiness and grace.  Radiance and shadow.  We keep on turning, and the shadows keep dancing, the light flickering.  All I can do is keep watching.

A repost from last December that is still immensely resonant for me.

Steadfast

I distinctly remember, as a child, looking at the cover of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and thinking: those words are what I want.  In particular I gravitated towards glory (I’ve never been very interested in power).  That’s what I thought I wanted to be able to say I’d had at the end of my life.  Glory.

The words I lean towards now – as goals, ideals, inspirations – are very different.  They don’t have the glamor or the sparkle of glory. No, the words that I hold onto, and aim for, now are humble.  Nice.  Peaceful.  Solid.  Steadfast.

This last word in particular has been in my mind since I read the following words from Pema Chodron:

How do we cultivate the conditions for joy to expand? We train in staying present. In sitting meditation, we train in mindfulness and maitri: in being steadfast with our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts. We stay with our own little plot of earth and trust that it can be cultivated, that cultivation will bring it to its full potential. Even though it’s full of rocks and the soil is dry, we begin to plow this plot with patience.

Sadly, to my own disappointment, I am far from steadfast.  My footing is unstable, I am blown around by the winds, I feel insubstantial.  I want to be more sure, more certain, more definitive.  I want to trust, in myself and in the world.  I’ve written before of how I give up before things even get hard.  This is a theme in my life, and one I am quite ashamed of: it is rare that I grit my teeth and just stick it out.  Unless, of course, I really have to.  I think of Grace’s birth, or my most recent half marathon.  Both of those were things I truly thought I could not do.  But somehow – in the former, I didn’t have a choice, and in the latter I was determined not to walk, as I had the first time – I pushed through the resistance to the end.

How do I develop this determination, this commitment of spirit and heart?  My friend Pam writes – as usual, gorgeously – about realizing that she, too, has not fully committed to herself.  In the woods, during a trail race, she found reserves and commitment within herself.  Her words made my eyes well with tears (okay, fine, they usually do) and I recognized myself in them.

While I am not at all sure how to become more steadfast, I am certain that the effort is about gradual, not sudden, growth and change.  I must let my few but important episodes of seeing something through become a well I can draw on, a source of strength, a reminder that I actually can stick it out.  I don’t know what else to do other than to keep trying, even as I stumble, to inhabit my unassuming, yet urgent, words: nice. peaceful. solid. steadfast.