musings

Commencement

A month or so ago, I was writing (incessantly) about the end of the school year and the way it triggers a cascade of sadness for me.  I was thinking about it even more unremittingly, I assure you.   One detail that kept popping up in my mind was the fact that graduation, one of the most official markers of an end in our culture, is called commencement.  I started writing about that several times, but never really figured out what I wanted to say.

I guess another month of life, with my baby losing his first tooth and my daughter slipping into flip-flops that sometimes get confused for mine has made it clear.  Isn’t this fact, on the surface odd, just a more elegant way of describing what might be the central preoccupation of my life?  Commencement.  You end and you begin, on the very same day.

As something ends something new begins.  Even though I never, ever embrace the endings, I am often surprised with joy at the beginnings.  You’d think after 36 years I might have figured this out.  You might imagine that I would have learned to lean into the certainty that there is sunshine around the corner.  Unfortunately, you would be wrong.  My sentimentality and melancholy is nothing if not tenacious, and it refuses to yield to logic.

Yes, I know all of the trite sayings: when a door closes, a window opens.  Etc.  I even know they are true.  But still.  But still.

One thing I know I write over and over here is the basic, simple tenet of begin again.  I stumble, I fall, I mess up, I yell, I shout.  I regret.  Oh, wow, do I regret.  I am sometimes so suffused with regret I can’t see anything else.  But what else is there to go other than to begin again?

Other than to commence?

(PS Commencement is the title of J. Courtney Sullivan’s first book, which I read and enjoyed.  I highly recommend also her new novel, Maine, which I read last week.

the words my body knows

My yoga practice used to be a big part of my life.  Now I go about every two weeks.  This is, for your information, the precise interval for maximum pain and difficulty: it’s hard, I never get stronger or looser, and I am always sore the next day.  I do not recommend this frequency but can’t seem to get out of its rut.

Every time I go, though, my body sinks back into the flow of the asanas with ease.  It’s a long-known language, embedded in my very bones, that I keep forgetting I know by heart.  I know the sanskrit names of the poses and my body finds them – sure, inelegantly, because I am both weak and tight – but it knows just what to do.  I’m always reassured by the familiar cadences of the postures, by the sound of my own breath, and every single time I swear to go more often.

It’s the deep memory that fascinates me, though.  These poses are buried in some fathomless pit inside my physical self.  They have burrowed into my spirit.  A very similar thing happens when I go to church (which I do even more infrequently than I go to yoga).

As I speak the service aloud, the words float up from some deeply-buried place.  The hymns, likewise, come to me from some unknown space of essential knowing.  The lilting language of the prayers of the people, the familiar meter of hymns that I did not realize I knew by heart: all of it swirls around me and creates a feeling of home that is surprising and not at the same time.

These – the yoga asanas, the words of Episcopalian prayers and hymns – are lodged in seam of my soul that is deep enough to be invisible to the eye.  They are part, somehow, of that truth inside my body that I began to recognize more than a year ago.  I wrote then that I don’t understand the meaning of this truth yet, but that I feel a conviction to listen to it, to that throbbing message that pulses in my veins.  I am still not able to articulate it, but I know better than I did before places where I can touch that profound, beyond-logic knowing, and two of them are in the yoga studio and in church.

Are there places like this for you, where you are reminded of a language you know in your marrow and spirit?

The dark side of my moon

I don’t know if it’s the awful weather, or the echoing, empty aftermath of last week’s End of School celebrations, but I’m sad and not entirely myself this week.  I know, you say: I’m always sad.  Well, I’m actually not.  I’m sensitive, yes, prone to waves of sorrow, but they are, on a regular day, interspersed with rushes of joy and wonder of an equal intensity.  This week, though, it’s mostly grief I feel, alongside the odd, crawling-out-of-my-own-skin anxiety that sometimes overtakes me, preoccupying me as completely as a leg full of itchy bug bites or a grain of sand in my eye.

Do you know this feeling?  There are days when I’m so impatient, so utterly aggravated with every single thing – and person – in my life that I can’t even stand myself.  I slam on the brakes at red lights, am annoyed with everything anyone says, and find myself snappish.  I’m also forgetful, even less coordinated than usual: driving to the wrong destination, stubbing my toe on things, walking into rooms and not knowing why I’m there.

I feel a frantic discomfort, as though I literally want to climb out of the container of my own life.  As if I cannot bear another single moment inside my body.  All of the rushing and distraction is just, I know, a desperate effort not to be present, not to really look and see.  What I don’t know is why it is so insufferably difficult for me to do that, to be here, right now.  I try to remind myself that my intense agitation comes from a deep well of sadness.  That its source is the swirling darkness that exists always inside me, swelling, sometimes, so that I cannot think of anything else.

Despite my being a Leo, born in the year of the tiger, and in posession of defiantly sunny hair, I’ve always felt distinctly not-feline and not-sunny.  I’m more like the moon, I think.  Surely my pulse thrums in some kind of mysterious accord with the tides.  And I inhabit a dense, mostly dark place, speckled with blindingly bright stars.  This week, then, I’ve been on the dark side of my moon.

Lightning

One night last week there was a big thunder and lightning storm.  This was after a torrential squall in the morning and a tornado warning in the early evening.  The weather has been swooping dramatically lately; maybe the restlessness in my spirit these days is just another manifestation of the vibrations I sense out there in the universe.  Something feels out of whack right now.

I sat in the window of my bedroom watching the blackness of night crack open, over and over, listening to the rolls of thunder and feeling the house literally shake.  And I thought about another night of thunder and lightning.  I was with my almost-brother, Ethan, on the Vineyard, in the house our families rented together for several summers.  This house (we actually rented a few, in the same general neighborhood) had a separate guest house where the four kids stayed (Hilary, Tyler, Ethan, and me).  Ethan and I were sleeping in sleeping bags on the floor of the loft, underneath an enormous skylight.

I love lightning.  One summer on the Cape, when I was a camp counselor, a friend and I ran across the front fields in a torrential storm.  I remember literally dancing with the lightning, which blazed all around us.  What an idiotic and naive thing to do, I realize now.  At the time, it was thrilling: I felt as though I was inside the storm.

But last week my thoughts turned firmly, and completely, to that night on the Vineyard.  I remembered lying in the dark with Ethan, watching the sky burst into brilliant light right above our faces, whispering to each other.  It was Ethan’s birthday, or the end of it, because it was nearing midnight.  What I remember most vividly is feeling sad that his birthday was coming to a close, painfully aware of the last moments of his day ticking away.  Even all those years ago – I think I must have been 10 – I was anxious about endings and about time’s passage.

This realization made me feel something in my chest, a knot of inchoate feeling.  Am I saddened to remember the melancholy that twisted through me even as a young child?  Do I feel reassured, resigned, ready to stop struggling against something that is so clearly an essential and indelible part of who I am?  Or am I frustrated that still, so many years later, I’m experiencing the same sorrow, am twisting through the same spiral, over and over again?

I don’t know.  So I just sat, my ten year old self and my 36 year old self staring through the same eyes in frank wonder as the night sky burst again and again into light outside my window.

Keeping my eyes open

This is how life is right now. Gossamer, luminous, delicate.  I am as swollen and as fragile as that bubble.  If you look closely you can see my reflection on its surface, but I feel as though I’m also contained within it: floating above the world, looking down, my perch about to vanish at any moment.

The beauty of any given moment is as evanescent as it is startling.  It’s all so extraordinary, and short-lived, and stunning, that sometimes I feel like just hiding in the house rather than taking it in.  Because this bubble burst moments after I took the picture of it, and what had been there, a floating, hovering embodiment of gorgeousness, was just as quickly, and as completely, gone.

Sometimes the truth of the grandeur of my everyday life flashes in front of me, as beautiful as this bubble or as bright as phosopherescence, and as fleeting. Like the sheer shimmer of a soap bubble, the unexpected, bright swirls of glowing light in a night sea, the knowledge of life’s holiness leaves an imprint on the back of my eyelids, a reminder of something witnessed, something important from a place beyond rational thought.

The bubbles – the moments, with their sudden, shining beauty, and their abrupt, final end – break my heart.  Today I’m walking around with a broken heart.  There is so much beauty and so much sorrow.  So much grandeur and so much terror.  But I’m learning to keep my eyes open for the bubbles, even when what I see makes them sting.  At least there’s that.