musings

Feast of losses

How shall the heart be reconciled/ to its feast of losses?
(Stanley Kunitz)

This time of year is undeniably about endings.  This is so even as the world bursts into bloom around me, asserting the fact that no matter what, life will return and triumph.  I am always heavy-hearted in the spring, as the school year closes.  Something deep inside me operates on academic time; this has always been true, even in the interval between my own student life and the time when my childrens’ school calendar delineated my days.  When your bloodstream pulses to the rhythm of school, early June is when things end.  I can feel the ending hovering now, growing closer every day, its presence as tangible to me as the thick pollen in the air.

Some days it is simply too much for me.  On these days the losses, the goodbyes, and the endings overwhelm me, and all I want to do is to sit down and sob.  I was talking to a friend the other day about how I am sad about the end of school, and she looked me in frank astonishment.  “Really?” she asked, genuinely surprised.  “But aren’t you glad for the summer?”  Yes, I said, I was, but saying goodbye to a year makes me genuinely, deeply sorrowful.  It occurred to me in that moment, as it does over and over again, that there are lots of people out there who simply not sentimental.    And it also occurred to me, not for the first time, that I’d often like to be one of them.

I guess I’m just awash in the end of things right now, much more aware of the bitter than the sweet.  I ache for all that I have lost: hours, days, weeks, years of my life, my babies and my toddlers, friends and family who are gone from me, younger, more innocent versions of my own self.  Yes.  I know there are many good things ahead, and that every ending brings a beginning in its wake.  I know this intellectually, but it is of no emotional solace when the endings and goodbyes seem to keep coming so relentlessly.

I fold up clothes that don’t fit the kids anymore, save the special things, hand the rest down. I scroll through old pictures in preparation for my college reunion next weekend.  I am visited in my sleep and in my waking by my grandmothers and by Mr. Valhouli.  All that I’ve lost rises up in front of me, sometimes, and I feel as though I could dive into it like into a wave. The past – those lost days and people – seems so near, and I am both reassured and shaken by its proximity.  I can sense those past experiences in an almost-animate way, and I wonder at how something or someone who is gone can feel so near.

Stop!  I feel like screaming in these fecund, beautiful, swollen-with-life days.  I want to press pause and just sit still for one moment, but I can’t, and time cranks inexorably forward.  As I try to grab onto the minutes of my life I feel them slipping by, so I tell myself all I can do is pay attention and live each one.  Still, like a silk cord that I can’t quite grip, time ripples across my palm, and I weep as I watch it go.  Even in the time it took to write this blog post I watched the sun slip beyond the horizon through my little office window, another day winding to its close.

Driving through Harvard Square this weekend I saw that they had put tents up for graduation.  It reminded me of the deep ache in my gut that the sight of the reunions fences gave me every year in college.  The fences meant the end was in sight.  They delineated the site of each major reunion, but they also closed off another one of our precious years on campus.  The fences always, always made me cry.

The fences and the tents in Harvard Square are just manifestations of the threshold between now and the next thing.  I traverse this boundary every single year, and each time I’m startled, anew, by the pain that crossing entails.  I am aware, all the time, of the losses my heart has sustained, but at this time, in liminal moments like the end of the school year or my birthday, I feel them especially sharply.

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.

I contradict myself

On Monday afternoon I interviewed about 8 people for positions in finance.  In between interviews, I hurriedly opened Katrina Kenison‘s Mitten Strings for God and devoured a few pages.

Last summer I drove down to New York for an event that Aidan hosted with Dani Shapiro.  As I drove, I listened to Mary Oliver reading her poems (At Blackwater Pond – highly recommended) and intermittently switched over to listen to Top 40.  This mirrored my summer reading list, which was conspicuously short: I read almost everything in Mary Oliver’s oeuvre (many for the second time) and also didn’t miss an issue of US Weekly.

I have many photographs of wine glasses juxtaposed with sippy cups or crayons scattered across a desk with my work computer.

My bag contains separate two stacks of cards: one for my profession, one for my writing.

I often toggle back and forth between an Excel spreadsheet and a Word document.

More than once I’ve run home from a yoga class, showered and pulled my wet hair into a ponytail before sliding into heels and a suit and rushing to a meeting in a downtown high-rise.

These are just the kinds of incongruities that exist in every single day of my life.  And these reflect, I am realizing, the contradictions that live in every cell of my body.  Even more than that – these contradictions animate who I am.

I’ve spent so much energy on angst about these things: how is it that I can devotedly shop at only farmers’ markets in the summer months but also down lots of Diet Coke a day?  What does it mean that I give time and money to one of the causes that means the most to me, homelessness, but also own more than a couple of pairs of Jimmy Choos and Manolo Blahniks?  How did I, an at-least-borderline-introvert, end up in a career where I spend most of my day interacting with people?  Why is it that someone as incredibly sensitive as me, who assumes every single thing is a personal comment on my own inadequacies, is often told she comes across as aloof, even a b%t#h?

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
– Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

Of course there are lines we ought not cross.  There are ways in which one part of our lives can violate important tenets of others, or choices we can make that conflict with our essential values.  I’m not endorsing this.  But beyond these, I’m increasingly convinced that some contradiction is part of almost every person.  The challenge as I see it is to walk the fine line between acknowledging our inherent variety (and the occasional tension it produces) and recognizing when the friction between the various pieces represents that something is awry.

I remember a friend of my parents’ saying once, years ago, that she was suspicious of people who were, as she put it, “smooth like an egg.”  There’s something to this, I think.  Any time I have really gotten to know someone I’ve witnessed incongruities and things I did not expect.  None of us is as simple as most of the world would like to imagine: that is what makes people so fascinating, so tender and so terrible, so human.

My magazine list represents my multi-faceted interests; you could ascribe this list of titles to someone who has no idea what she wants, or you could simply say they reflect a kaleidoscope of a person.  Even in my “about me” page on this blog I instinctively described myself in terms of some of my seemingly opposed traits: “I am strong (I delivered both of my children without any pain medication) and I am weak (I get really sick at least 3 or 4 times a year). I cry every day, possibly more than I laugh (and I want to change this ratio).  I grew up moving around every five years, which has left me with a contradictory combination of restlessness and a deep craving for stability. I’ve been to most of the countries in Europe and only about ten states.”

As long as we do not make choices that oppose essential values, I think this kind of complexity is both entertaining and captivating.  The fact that we do not, any of us, fit into the narrow categories that the world would seek to cram us into is the source of our very humanity. As long as all of these facets are authentically felt, they are not inconsistent; they are real.

Sure, there is friction, because the world is more difficult to order and understand when people are always overflowing out of their compartments and subverting the black-and-white definitions others would like to impose on them.  But it makes the terrain of the world so endlessly transfixing and the stuff of art.  And I don’t want to live in a world where every single week doesn’t contain both wine and sippy cups, poetry and Hollywood magazines, and sneakers and high heels.

Very well then, I contradict myself.

(a repost from September 2010, on a topic that is still very germane for me.  I increasingly believe that each of us contains within us a myriad number of unresolvable paradoxes, and, furthermore, that people who don’t are misrepresenting themselves, probably unconsciously.)

The whitewater between thinking and feeling

Great thoughts always come from the heart.
(Marquis de Vauvenargues)

When I was working with the brilliant Lianne Raymond (think someone can’t be gentle and thunderously powerful at the same time?  I didn’t either, until I met Lianne) I used to routinely stumble over thinking and feeling.  She’d ask me how I felt about something and I would launch into an answer that began “I think….”  She’d point this out, with her trademark delicacy, humor, and directness, every single time.  I found my confusion itself confusing.  Aren’t I a feeler?  I’m 100% F in the Myers-Briggs, cry all the time, and am routinely – daily – told I’m far too sensitive to live in this world.  Why was my thinking getting in the way?

This weekend, Dani Shapiro read from Joan Didion’s famous essay, Why I Write.  I’d heard the quote “I write entirely to find out what I am thinking” many times, but had never read the piece in full.  In the essay, Didion confesses a total inability to think, to “deal with the abstract.”  She describes being drawn over and over again to the peripheral, the specific, the concrete.  To that she can touch, smell, see, hear.  To that which she can feel.

And suddenly I understood.   There are two things going on.  The first is that I use my mind to evade actual feeling.  Often it hurts too much to feel, so I try to intellectualize things.  This has been a defense mechanism of mine for a long time.  It has something to do with what Pema Chodron says about “never underestimat[ing] the urge to bolt,” which my friend Pam explored in beautiful detail last week.  I wrote a while ago that my brain must get out of my heart’s way, but I realize that for a long time I intentionally put it there.  It hurt to much to experience my heart directly.

The second is that I realize I actually conflate feeling and thinking: I describe thoughts when I am really talking about feelings.  My mind does veer towards the abstract, but it’s always through the vessel of the specific, usually through nature.  Through the most concrete of details – the light on a steeple at dawn, the smell of magnolia petals crushed under my feet, the way my son’s hair curls at the nape of his neck – I can access the eternal.  The divine, even.  For some reason, which I suspect has something to do with my PhD physicist of a father, I grew up knowing that you start sentences with “I think.”  Even when I’m talking about something utterly different, which is my feelings.  I’m not sure if this is simply acculturation to a world that prizes the intellect above all else, or something else, but it’s a tic I realize I have.

I’m not sure if the grayness I experience between thoughts and feelings for me is some kind of vestige of years of avoidance or a profound respect for the fact that our deepest emotions come from the same raw, root source, the essential wellspring of who we are.  Either way, I adore this quote from Marquis de Vauvenargues.

Do you ever get muddled in the whitewater between thinking and feeling?

A weekend of magic and dandelion fluff

Grace and I got to Kripalu on Friday afternoon and almost immediately headed down to the labyrinth.  This is a quiet, holy place, a maze I’ve walked before.  You follow the winding path into the center where there is a post that says “may peace prevail on earth” in several languages.  Grace walked in front of me and after a few minutes she turned to me and said, “does this really lead into that middle?”  You could see the post in the center, with offerings of beads and buddhas at its base, but the path wound around and around and it did indeed seem hard to believe we’d ever get there.  “Trust the path, Grace,” I said without thinking about it.  And she did.  And I did.  Once in the middle, I turned to find this:
Later friends arrived, and Grace met Abby, the daughter of my dear friend Denise.  They hit it off and spent the weekend giggling and exploring.  Other friends from the ether who were there were Lisa, Christine, and Sarah.  The sessions with Dani were extraordinary.  I’d gladly travel the world over just to be in her presence.  The fact that Katrina was there, assisting, just made it all that much more magical.  It gave me goosebumps when, over the course of two days, Dani shared many quotes that I love dearly.  Two of them I’ve written about before: Pain engraves a deeper memory (Anne Sexton) and You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way (E.L. Doctorow).

In the afternoon, Abby, Grace, Denise and I walked down to the lake that you can see from Kripalu’s hilltop location.  At the shore of the lake the girls played in the sand and we sat and watched and talked, our hearts expanding.
Everybody’s eyes opened a little this weekend, I think.  I imagine that Denise, like me, was hearing Dani’s words about paying attention in her head.  We noticed a black turtle sunning himself on a log in the swamp.  The girls blew fat white dandelions and the fluff floated around us like snow, or like grace.  We stopped to gaze at the word “love,” spelled out in little rocks on a large flat boulder.
At dinner Katrina joined us and I felt again the immense comfort and gratitude I’ve felt in her gentle, keenly intelligent presence since the first time we met, a not-coincidence that altered the current of my life.  After putting Grace and Abby to sleep – to their overwhelming delight, together – Denise, Lisa and I sat around and talked.  Lisa is far more extraordinary than I’d even imagined, which is saying something, since I was deeply impressed already.  The three of us talked as though we’d known each other forever.  We covered writing, cancer, lecherous grade school principals, navigating pre-puberty with daughters, the joys and challenges of younger sons, twitter, and more writing, writing, writing.

Yesterday afternoon I went, unenthusiastically, for a long run.  I ran by the Charles River and one small part of my route winds through the woods.  I was alone in there today, running, feeling tired, achey, weak.  The wind came up then and suddenly I was surrounded by a cloud of dandelion fluff.