musings

The most mysterious aspect of being alive

Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we’re going to die.  The most mysterious aspect of being alive might be that — and poetry knows that.

I read these sentences, from Terry Gross, on Beth Kephart’s beautiful blog last week and I simultaneously gasped and welled up with tears.  As I wrote in Beth’s comments, the lines reminded me of a Stanley Kunitz quote I shared over the summer:

“Years ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace such knowledge and yet to remain compassionate and whole – that is the consummation of the endeavor of art.”

I write incessantly about the same thing here: about the passage of time, about the deep way that unavoidable truth gouges into my spirit, about the tears that surprise me with their frequency and power, about the surpassing joy that exists in the tiniest moments of my life.  Isn’t this all simply a less articulately-conveyed description of the very lyric tension Kunitz describes, of what Terry Gross avers that poetry knows?

Perhaps my inclination towards melancholy and my exquisite sensitivity to the clock’s forward tick is inextricably linked to my passionate love of poetry.  Maybe all of these things – traits, preferences, leanings – are manifestations of the same central seam of meaning that runs through the human experience.  Maybe the shadow that flickers across everyone’s life is universal, and it’s just that I’m particularly sensitive to it.  Wouldn’t be the first time.

As you know I am often frustrated with myself for what feels like an endless circling of the same question, like I’m turning over a stone incessantly, hoping that somehow I’ll eventually uncover some message etched into its surface.  Several people have commented that instead of a circle, maybe it’s a spiral; a continued revisiting of the same themes, but with new understanding with each trip around.

The image that recurs for me is of the exhibit at the science museum that was the first thing to hold my attention when I visited as a child with my father.  It’s the one where a black ball makes circles around a gradually sloped surface, tighter and tighter circles, drawn inexorably towards the hole in the middle, into which it finally drops.  I believe the exhibit is a display of centrifugal force.  It’s that circling black ball that I think about, over and over: I’m drawn in a way I can neither understand nor particularly name, in a spiral that grows ever tighter, to a black hole in the center of my life.  And that black hole, I realize, when I read Terry Gross’s words, and Stanley Kunitz’s, is perhaps at the center of all of our lives.

The challenge, for me, is to incorporate my understanding of this most mysterious aspect of life into my experience without being utterly paralyzed by it.  The question is how to find peace despite this yawning abyss.  Is it possible, though, that life is full of grandeur, beauty, and blinding pain not despite but because of this black hole?

Clouds and clear sky


I went to New York for work last Friday.  It was a gray, rainy morning, dense with fog, and I sat in my seat on the airplane looking out of the small oval window stressing out about getting home that afternoon.  I have enormous travel anxiety: not about safety while flying, but about weather.  I fear- with an irrational ferocity – flights being delayed and canceled, not being able to get where I want to go (usually, home).

And then the plane lifted off, and we arced upward.  Raindrops streaked down the windows at an angle that spoke of our steep ascent.  It was gray and dark outside.  And then, suddenly, full sunshine.  Clear as a bell, and there were blue skies visible out across a thick carpet of fluffy white clouds.  We were above the clouds, and I thought simultaneously of my favorite painting by Georgia O’Keeffe and of a particularly charming observation by Whit last summer.

We were stuck in a holding pattern above Laguardia for a while, but I was not bothered by it.  I was transfixed by the clarity outside my window, by the simple, powerful truth that there is always blue sky somewhere.  Above, below, or through the clouds.  I have noted before that emotions are just clouds sliding across the sky of my mind, but while I find this metaphor poetic the truth is I often struggle to remember it.

Every time I am online in an airplane I vow to retain a sense of wonder about such a miracle.  This time, I also swore to myself that I will try harder to keep the clouds – literal or metaphorical – in perspective.

Scars

About a month ago I fell when I was running.  I’ve done this before, and have written often of my clumsiness.  This was a real fall, though, and I caught myself with my right hand.  I scraped off a lot of skin on my palm; the entire heel of it was hanging off in a flap.  I also scraped my hip (ripped my tights) and my elbow.  After contemplating for a moment whether to finish my run (really! how insane am I?) I walked home.  By the time I got home my shirt was covered in blood where I’d been cradling my hand.  My family was still sleeping so I washed it off myself, gritted my teeth, and went about my day.  With some extra-large band-aids, lots of neosporin, and about a month, I am almost all healed up now.

Looking at my palm, with its quarter-sized circle of new, pink flesh, I am reminded, again, of the resilience of the human body.  And of the parallel resilience of our spirit.  As I move into the middle of my life, with its unexpected challenges and astonishing joys, I am aware in a new way that the years are making their mark on my body.  I know this is true for all of us, though the marks are from different reasons: accidents, childbearing, illness.   Life leaves its mark.  And, of course, it makes invisible but indelible marks on our spirits.

Some of these wounds heal relatively simply, into clean scars, like my hand.  Others, much less so.  I have specific injuries, both physical and emotional, that I am still tending to, and whose healing is slower, more complicated.  But I keep pushing on my palm, feeling the slight twinge of sensitivity, remembering the sharp pain that was so recently there, trying to remind myself that we do heal.  The process may be slow, the scar jagged and imperfect, but we heal.

… see how the flesh grows back across a wound, with great vehemence, more strong than the simple, untested surface before.  There’s a name for it on horses, when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh, as all flesh is proud of its wounds, wears them as honors given out after battle, small triumphs pinned to the chest. – Jane Hirshfield

The world breaks everyone, and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. – Ernest Hemingway

You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp. – Anne Lamott

Some questions

I found this meme/questionnaire on Somemother through Meagan Francis’ wonderful blog The Happiest Mom (I highly recommend it and read it religiously).  I just liked it and hope you will join in and participate – just link in the comments!!

ESTABLISHING YOURSELF (a few details that help somemothers know what they have in common with you).

I am 37 years old.

I am married.

I have an 8 year old daughter and a 6 year old son.

I work part time outside of the home.

I am upper-middle class.

I live urban.

I own my house

I completed high school, college, and graduate school.

I am straight.

Of note about my ethnicity and/or cultural background: I am Caucasian

NOW, TWENTY QUESTIONS ABOUT YOU

1. The most significant aspect of my upbringing: I moved around a lot: born in Cambridge, to Paris at age 3, back to Cambridge at 7, to London at 12, back to the US to boarding school at 16.

2. My best advice to mothers about to enter the stage of child rearing that I just went through: Forgive yourself if you don’t love every minute.  But try to pay attention to it all regardless.

3. Something that concerns me about my child(ren): My daughter: her relentless desire (need?) to please others.  My son: his absolute disregard for authority.

4. My absolute worst mothering moment: Hard to say.  Watching my daughter fall out of a shopping cart onto her head at the age of 18 months.  Hearing my daughter tell me at age 8.5 that she was hurt I was spending so much time with my own mother, who was badly injured (hello, middle place!).

5. What annoys me most about other mothers: The unwillingness to admit that they haven’t figured it out, that their kids aren’t perfect, that they often doubt themselves, their choices, everything.

6. I am happiest: By the ocean, when my children look at me with untrammeled joy in their eyes, when I read a line of poetry or prose that sinks deep into me, with those few people I hold dearest.

7. I am saddest: When I feel alone in the world, misunderstood or un-known, like I’m failing at everything I do.

8. My biggest fear: Being abandoned by those I love most.  Not being safe.

9. I am ashamed of: Of being too sensitive, too emotional, just plain too much.

10. Something I need to forgive: Myself.  For all the ways I’ve let myself and others down.

11. Something I wish I could say to someone: To Mr Valhouli: thank you.  For making me realize I had something to say and something to offer.  For showing me the brilliance of the life of the mind.

12. Something I have never told anyone: Sure not going to start here!

13. Something I am trying to change about myself: Trying to accept the essential wound that underlies my daily sense of wonder at the world.

14. My biggest accomplishment: That my children seem – so far! – happy, well-adjusted, curious about the world, and to still want me around.

15. I wish: There was peace on earth, and enough prosperity that nobody was homeless.  The homeless people begging in Harvard Square make me cry every single day.

16. Something my relationship with my mother has taught me about parenting: That it’s valuable to have a life outside of your children – not only for yourself, but for them.

17. Something my relationship with my father has taught me about parenting How powerful a true passion can be.  His, for European history and culture, propelled our family across the ocean not only once but twice.

18. How I would describe my faith life. Continuing to evolve, increasingly important to me.  I was brought up Episcopalian, though casually.  I was confirmed in the Church of England.  I never knew faith mattered to me until the last few years.  Now I know it does immensely.

19. Something I hope will be different for me by this time next year: I hope I will be closer to my dream of being a writer.

20. Something important about my story that hasn’t been captured by the questions above ???

BONUS: A question you would like to see added to this list that readers can respond to in the comments What is your favorite book, and why?

You can and you can’t go back again

When I decided to go back to Legoland with Grace and Whit this summer, I worried that maybe it was wrong to try to revisit and recapture one of the most glorious memories of my time as a mother.  Perhaps we would all be disappointed, inevitably, and I’d regret the decision.  Ultimately I couldn’t resist the clarion call of those happy moments, and decided to risk a return.

And it was just as wonderful.  Different, but marvelous.  The whole four days we were there I was struck by the proximity of the past, felt last year’s four days right alongside this year, keenly aware of the ways in which things are the same and the way they are different.  Some combination of familiarity and maturity meant that the children felt masterful at Legoland.  Remembering the routine at the hotel and navigating the park, they knew what they were doing.

Whit went on the rides, Grace seesawed wildly between adorableness and surliness, and I had a blackberry to check.  This was all new.  There was sheer joy in their faces on the safari ride, they careened ahead of me down the hall from the room to the 5pm wine-and-snacks lounge, I took the elevator down while they raced me on the stairs.  This was all the same.

So much new, so much the same.  The children change with blinding speed and yet there’s a permanence to my bond with them, some eternity that beats in its core.  I found myself falling into the black hole of regret about all that has changed, mourning the younger children Grace and Whit were and the year that I’ve lost in the interim.  And then, just as quickly, I shook my head and tried to reimmerse myself in the moment I was living, knowing as I did that within weeks I’d be nostalgic for it.  As I walked through the park, a child’s hand in each of mine, I knew, vividly and viscerally, that immediately I’d wish I had that minute back.

I’ve sworn and promised that we’ll return to Legoland again next summer.  And I know that when we do I will slide back in the slipstream between now and then.  And I can’t wait.