musings

Sadness

Last week I read Susan Piver’s beautiful writing about the importance of sadness and sighed, nodded, and cried at the same time.  She was expressing exactly what I was trying to say, unsuccessfully, the other day.  I wasn’t having a bad day, though several friends called me and asked if I was OK after reading the post.  I don’t think I have a desperately tortured approach to the world, though perhaps others differ.

I was simply trying to describe what it’s like to be me in the world.  I feel intense joy and grief in equal measure, and it is safe to say that both emotions mark every single day of my life.  If the definition of a broken heart is feeling things, including sadness, overwhelmingly, then I have one.  Every single day.  It’s just another way of saying I’m porous.

I love, too, what Susan has to say about the instinct to turn sadness into one of the less uncomfortable emotions: bitterness, anger, helplessness.  Even defensiveness can be a place to hide from sadness.  It’s not an exaggeration to say that the last years for me have been a journey that is in large part about accepting my own fundamental sadness.  Resisting the impulse to run from the discomfort that true sadness brings.  Instead, leaning into it.  This is not easy, and for sure, a lot of the time it hurts.  Though there are many things that cut me to the quick, my essential sadness is time’s swift passage; that is the black hole at the center of my life, the unavoidable truth around which all the planets of my being orbit.

Virginia Woolf said “The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder” and I could not agree more.  In accepting the sadness I’ve seen so much more of the joy; in acknowledging my innate broken-heartedness I’ve also learned to be open to soaring moments of inspiration and even to belly laughter.

Naomi Shihab Nye’s gorgeous Kindness addresses also the ways that sadness is inextricably linked to sweeter emotions.  Her lines remind me of my thoughts about gentleness, another word that has been in my mind of late.

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth/
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

And so I supposed the message is not to shirk our own sorrow and not to bolt to safer harbors whose emotions are less painful.  At least if you’re wired like me, the path is paved with sadness, but that doesn’t mean the sky isn’t filled with glory.

Alchemy

alchemy

any magical power or process of transmuting a common substance, usually of little value, into a substance of great value.

Alchemy has always been one of my favorite words.  And in that way the universe has, which I’m learning to pay ever-closer attention to, two marvelous people used it in their comments on my post where I confessed I’d almost majored in Chemistry.  I’d never made the connection before, and suddenly understood that yearning in the younger me much better.  For a word I love so dearly, I use it rarely.  I went through the archives of this blog and saw that I’ve spoken about the alchemical properties of cooking and about the “particular alchemy” whereby some of the memories I recall most vividly are of random, ordinary moments, whose power I could never have known while I was living them.

Alchemy is, I realize, the best word for what it is I try to do every moment of my life.  A line from Coelho’s The Alchemist says it best: “it’s the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary and only the wise can see them.”  I am working – slowly, slowly – to notice the small things in my days, and through careful observation, to see them as the miracles they are.  I’d never call myself wise, but this is surely the central effort of my life.

These things, even amidst the dust and frustration that seem to permanently swirl around me, are life incarnate.  The expression on Grace’s face as she walks into Hogsmeade at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.  The gradual slackening of Whit’s face as I watch him surrender to sleep, lying next to him in bed.  The transcendent peace that descends when I read a poem in O magazine.  Returning home to the relief of my familiar stack of books by my bed, to the practice of folding laundry, to the love that radiates off of the hand-drawn pictures from Grace and Whit tacked to my office wall.

Attention is the true alchemy, it seems to me. Being here, carefully witnessing, and breathing.  Realizing that even in the great aggravations and impatiences that crowd every day there are glittering jewels.  May I continue to believe in – and pursue – the alchemy that transmutes these ordinary moments into the most important of my life.

the miracle in everything speaks

I’m in, on the surface, one of the world’s un-poetic places.  Disney World.  And yet.  And yet. It’s been busy, with tired children and tired in-laws and lots of walking and lots of crowds.  Finally, at last, yesterday afternoon I had a few moments to sit down and read.  And I opened the new O magazine.  And it was all about poetry.  Once again, the universe smiled on me.

My favorite words in this issue packed with words I loved were these, from Mark Nepo, on the last page:

You Ask About Poetry

You ask from an island so far away
it remains unspoiled.  To walk quietly
til the miracle in everything speaks
is poetry.  You want to look for poetry
in your soul and in everyday life, as you
search for stones on the beach.  Four
thousand miles away ,as the sun ices
the snow, I smile.  For in this moment,
you are the poem.  After years of looking,
I can only say that searching for
small things worn by the deep is
the art of poetry,  But listening
to what they say is the poem.

To walk quietly till the  miracle in everything speaks is poetry.

Isn’t this, ultimately, what I am trying to do, every minute of my life?  To seek the poetry in everyday life?  To observe the miraculous twinnedness of life and death in the unfurling of trees around me, the endings and beginnings in January light, the message in a frost-covered field and the heartbreaking words of a five year old boy?  To be quiet so that the messages can come through, so that I can finally hear my own voice, so that I can be open to the thanksgiving that children offer?

To listen to what they say.

Yes.  Yes, it is.  Everyday life.  The practice and the poem.

Grandmotherless

I started an essay years ago with this sentence:

I am grandmotherless.

I lost my grandmothers in 1997 and 2001.  I know: I am profoundly fortunate to have had four grandparents at my college graduation (see above, and please be kind about the swollen sunburned beer face I am sporting).   All four of my grandparents were a big part of my life for a long time (and one grandfather still is!) My grandmothers, Priscilla and Janet, were very different but they shared energy and intelligence; they were both tremendously important to me.  I’ve written about their influence on and example to me before.

Julie Daley writes compelling, gorgeous prose about the sacred feminine.  Months ago she urged us to name our mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, positing that in naming our matrilineage we can restore – or at least remind ourselves of – its innate power that has been dismissed in so many ways.  And so I did: Susan, Priscilla, Janet, Marion, Marion.

Last week Julie shared a video that is nothing short of stunning of a poet, Mayda del Valle, speaking her words – her truth – at the White House.  I urge you to watch it.  Del Valle speaks about grandmothers, about the wisdom that exists in womens’ bodies, about reclaiming the sacred feminine and creative power that has been taken away from us.  Hers is an incredible performance, one that made me cry and stunned me into contemplative silence.

abuela how did you pray before someone told you who your god should be?
how did you hold the earth in your hands and thank her for its fecundity
did the sea wash away your sadness
how did you humble yourself before your architect
did your lower yourself to your knees
or rock to the rhythm of ocean waves like I do
grandma how did you pray ?

Del Valle evokes the cords that ripple between generations of women and the truth that beats deep in our bodies.  This truth is “…a knowledge that is on the flip side of reason, beyond logic … a place where all there is is belief. Something soaked in blood, in tears, in milk. Something that might – maybe? – be showing me the way towards faith, towards meaning, towards the things, both maddeningly abstract and all-important, that I ache for most powerfully.”

Speaking directly to her grandmother, del Valle shows us that women “have always raised our hands to the sky wanting to touch the invisible force that holds these cells together into a fragile mass.”  She reminds me of my own grandmothers, whose lives I sometimes feel throbbing in my own bloodstream, whose faces float near me from time to time, whose words recur in my head.  We are all a part of something larger than ourselves, something that of course encompasses men too but that somehow exists deeply in the fertile soil of the female body.  We are linked through the generations – through generation, in its basic sense – and to lose sight of that connection is to rupture our access to the source of humanity itself.

The moon, like a conductors’ baton, sweeps the ocean back and forth.  These tides operate in the female body too, which resonates, like the sea, with the moon.  This was true for our grandmothers’ bodies, and for their mothers’ bodies, and for as far back as we can see.  We have all been simultaneously buffetted and held by currents beyond our understanding and control.  We must remember and honor where we came from, the place of dark, tidal passion and sacred knowledge, a place that inspires both fear and wonder, a place that began in the women that came before us.  May we not forget it, or them.

I am that loved

As usual, Kelly made me cry.  She also made me smile, nod vigorously in agreement, and think furious.  Her post, mothersisterdaughterfriend: woman touched something deep inside of me.  She writes about the emotional post-birth weeks when she fell in love with her daughter – and when she fell in love with her mother.

When I saw my beloved, magnificent, miracle-baby in my mother’s arms, the fraught kaleidoscope of mother-daugther angst cleared to reveal a truth that levelled me. The way I overwhelmingly love, adore, fear, and worship my daughter, how I know that she is the best of me and more, is the way my mother loves me….I am that loved.

I am that loved.

I remember those weeks, and I know intimately that fraught kaleidoscope.  I remember vividly a day in the first couple of weeks of Grace’s life, when Mum came over to stay with her so that I could try to sleep.  I lay in my bed, my daughter asleep on the floor above me and my mother in the kitchen cooking on the floor below me.  I was flanked by my own matrilineage, and I could not sleep for the pounding in my chest.  I felt the generations collapsing and expanding at the same time, felt a visceral awareness of the women from whom I came and of the girl I’d just birthed.

I’ve always been fascinated by mothers and daughters.  I am one of two girls.  I wrote my thesis in college on the mother-daughter relationship (and wrote in my acknowledgements to my mother: “Especially thanks to you, Mum, for having the patience to allow me to study so intently this relationship.  The examined bond grows every stronger”).  The preface to my thesis, which was titled “the main thing” (for Anne Sexton’s line “a woman is her mother.  That’s the main thing”) was Margaret Atwood’s stunning poem, Spelling, about a mother watching a daughter play with words.

I fully admit that I was afraid the universe was going to respond to my unambiguous passion by giving me only boys.  But then I had Grace.  My grace.

And I am immensely blessed to be witnessing the flowering of my daughter’s relationship with my mother.  Is there any greater privilege?  I suspect not.  I won’t lie: there are absolutely issues and deep bruises and hurts in my own maternal relationship that are triggered now that I’m a mother myself.  No question.  But there are also reservoirs of love that I did not realize I had, accessed through the extraordinary experience of watching my mother and my daughter together.

My senior year in college I wrote my thesis in a tiny study carrel in Firestone Library.  The bulletin board front wall of the carrel was full of tacked-up index cards filled with quotations about mothers and daughters, creativity and procreativity, the dense and complicated morass in which I now tread.  I could never have imagined how animate all of these black-and-white words would become for me, how viscerally I would live the ideas and concepts I blithely dissected in my thesis.  Kelly’s post reminded me of this, in particular her stunning evocation of the moment we realize, staring, wild with love, at our own baby that our mothers loved us like that.  This sublime experience folds us in love and makes us look at our own mothers (if we are fortunate enough to have them near, and I know there are those who are not) with a renewed intimacy and intensity.

Anne Sexton, in a letter to her daughter Linda, writes “Talk to my poems, and talk to your heart – I’m in both.”   Reading that, my eyes fill with tears, overwhelmed at the image of my 21 year old self quoting that, understanding only half of the equation.  I knew well the daughter role, but I had no idea of the richness and ambiguity that motherhood would bring.  I know now what I did not know then: I exist in my daughter’s heart (and in my son’s), and my mother exists in mine.  Put another way, as Kelly says, I now know how I am loved.