musings

Cathedral

Cathedral, by Auguste Rodin

I absolutely adore this sculpture.  I found this photograph on a beautiful blog called A Year With Rilke.  Every day the blog shares a passage from Rilke, paired with a piece of art.  Rilke’s words alone are bone-chillingly gorgeous, and the juxtapositions with the pieces of art make them even more powerful.

This particular sculpture has been in my head ever since I saw it last week.  There’s something stunning about the angle of the hands, something animate in between them.  The title invokes the holiness manifest in human hands and in the space between.

The most mundane of things, our very own life-scarred hands, are equally as transcendent as the most ornate and soaring cathedral.  There is as much power and as much wonder in the simple human hand as in a grandiose cathedral.  And just as the empty space in a cathedral can be charged with meaning, with import, with grace itself, so can the spaces of our ordinary lives.

Several people have noted that kaleidoscopes are an image I return to, again and again.  It occurs to me as I write this post that cathedrals are, likewise, an important trope for me.  I spent my childhood visiting cathedral upon cathedral with my father, Hilary and I rolling our eyes at ADC (another damn cathedral) as we entered.  Yesterday I re-read Raymond Carver’s ever-powerful short story, Cathedral.  And I have an unpublished blog post from last summer about the light and shadow in the Harvard stadium as I ran up and down it, referring to a personal cathedral.  Cathedrals.  Alternately inspiring and intimidating to me, cathedrals are places where faith, and the willingness to leap into it, is palpable.

This week has felt like an awful lot of hard practice, and less like poetry.  But looking at this image, thinking about the cathedrals, literal and figurative, that I’ve known in my life, I feel chagrined, and ready to recommit to wonder.

May I enter the cathedral of every day with a heart open to awe.

I was one of those kids

I saw The Race to Nowhere last week.  I was tremendously moved by it.  I’m not sure I know what to do, precisely, with my ever-stronger sense of how I want to parent my kids.  There is a doctor of adolescent medicine in the film who says even he, a specialist who writes books about the toxicity of pressure on our kids, worries about how to walk the line between protecting childrens’ childhoods and holding them back.  He worries about the potential harm that his beliefs – supported in his case by all kinds of medical research and a PhD or two – may wreak on his daughters.  I worry too, and I have only my – albeit strong – intuition behind me.

The movie made me feel concerned about Grace and Whit, but the anxiety I feel about them comes from a profoundly personal place.  I was one of those kids.  I still am.  I was “perfect” in the achievement sense of the word.  I got the 4.0 GPA.  I went to Exeter, and Princeton, and Harvard Business School.  I played by the rules, followed the map, achieved everything I aimed for.  My father often comments that it was easy to raise Hilary and I because we went “straight down the middle of the street.”  Be careful, I always caution him: there’s still time!!

I related intensely to the kids in the movie, and to a culture that praises highly performance and achievement.  At one point in the movie a teacher says, in response to parents being surprised when their kids struggle or fall apart or otherwise cave under the pressure: “They all say, ‘but my kid’s a good kid!’  And I always say back, ‘You know your kid’s a good performer.  How do you know they’re a good kid?'”

That’s what I was.  A good performer.  A great achiever.  And you know what?  It didn’t add up to anything.  I’m writing a memoir, in fact, about what it’s like to realize that that kind of life, built on achievement and success and external validation, doesn’t necessarily lead you to happiness.

As Glenda Burgess so beautifully put it in The Geography of Love, “Eventually, I constructed a layered exoskeleton, a coral reef instead of a life.  The structure was there, but the essence was missing.”  This is certainly my personal experience: I realized, in my early 30s, that my model of approaching life, which was all about goals and achievements, was irreparably broken.  I was missing something fundamental; there was an echoing emptiness around the core of my life that eventually I could not ignore.

I think this is what worries me the most about The Race to Nowhere: we are raising a generation of children who don’t know how to tune in, to figure out what the essence of their lives is.  I know.  I am one of them.

Figuring out how to make my way through life without the external guideposts of achievement has been much harder than I ever imagined.  As I’ve said before, I am now navigating by the stars.  And that is much harder than simply being the perfect performer.  So I worry about myriad things that The Race to Nowhere represents: overscheduled kids who have lost their propensity for wonder, exhausted children who are physically harmed by the pressures on them, students who “do school” as opposed to developing aptitude for – and joy in – learning.

Probably most of all, though, I don’t want my children to grow up as deaf to the voice of their soul as I was for so long.  If they want to achieve and do well I think that’s ok – there’s nothing wrong with that in the abstract.  I just want to be sure they know that’s not the only skill that matters, and not to forget to tend to the essence of their lives as they race into the great wide open.

Trust Tending

Kristin Noelle has a new blog, Trust Tending, which is all about what trust means in our lives.  The subtitle of Trust Tending is Reflections, Conversations, and Art to Nourish Life Beyond Fear.  I love Kristin’s writing and her drawing, and think she’s exploring some very important and fertile terrain on Trust Tending.

Kristin interviewed me yesterday on the topic of trust, which is my (very first!) word of the year.  I’m so honored to have my thoughts featured on her beautiful site.  You can find the interview here.  Stay a while and check out Kristin’s whole blog.

The world, muffled in the snow globe, then washed clear

I have been thinking for days about writing a post about snow, and, lo and behold, it’s snowing again!  It’s so great with the universe comes through like that.  Of course, it’s been snowing almost non-stop since December 26th, so possibly it’s a coincidence.  When I look out my office window, whose four panes frame so many hours of my gazing out at the world, it looks like I live in a snow globe.

People always write about the “muffled” quality of snow, about its quiet, the silence it lends to the world.  For me this is absolutely true when it’s snowing.  There is an outside-of-real-life feeling when the sky is mottled with moving white snowflakes.   Maybe it’s a vestige of childhood snow days, maybe it’s the way movement in the outside world is slowed down to a crawl.  Something just floats over me, a gossamer cape of wonder, a reminder to breathe and watch.  The snow globe is a good place to live, insulated from the real world, the rough jolts of life somehow less jarring, muted.

And yet when it’s no longer snowing, but the world is covered with snow, I don’t find it muffled at all.  It’s the opposite: I find it sharp, its clarity in such high definition that sometimes it hurts.  Pam Houston’s words always come to mind: “When everything in your life is uncertain, there’s nothing quite like the clarity and precision of fresh snow and blue sky.”  There’s something wide-awake, hyper-saturated and, as she says, precise, about life with clear skies overhead and snow underfoot.  Emerging from my swaddled time in the snowglobe, everything seems purified, clarified, washed clear by the white everywhere.

Today I knelt on the floor by my office window and watched the flakes fall.  This afternoon they were huge, big clumps of snowflakes dropping out of the pale steel-gray sky.  Watching them, I remembered the passage in Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years about how “each snowflake bore the scars of its journey.”  I looked up into the sky, straining to see as far as I could.  I thought of another time that I instinctively knelt, when, just like today, “…I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused.”

Another thing about snow: it is practically impossible (at least for a hack like me) to take pictures that capture the falling snow.  Hello, metaphor.  You just have to watch.  Pay attention.  Inscribe it on the vellum of memory.  What you see is what you get.

Waiting for the harvest of our dreams

When I started thinking about my word of the year, trust, and thinking about what that word really means to me, one thought rose almost immediately to my mind.  And that was of Tracey Clark.  I love Tracey’s blog and have been a long-time reader.  And in her I Am Enough Collaborative I find almost the purest expression of what I mean by trust when I claim it as my word.  Tracey’s collaborative is about learning, owning, and embracing the true worthiness that resides in each of us.  It is about trusting that we are, in fact, enough.  It was a distinct honor to share my story in the collaborative this past summer, and it’s one of the places in the wilds of the internet that I feel the strongest sense of identification.

Tracey’s whole blog is gorgeous.  She shares stunning photographs, writes of her daily life, both with her children and as an individual, and basically makes me both cry and smile every single time I read her.  I loved the words she shared with me about trust.  I hope you do too.

We plant Seeds. We till and mulch and water. We nurture and wait knowing that if we take proper care that the seed will grow. We trust. We are patient. The work below the surface is happening; we know it is just as it has been proven to us time and time again, without ever seeing it. We never question. We just tend to it. And wait patiently.

So what about the Seeds of our Dreams? We plant and nurture and wait. But too often we don’t trust the work that is happening under the surface. The magic can’t always be seen but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. The waiting leads to wondering which leads to questioning and doubting. We forget that waiting is an essential part of the process.

After we plant the Seeds of our gardens there is waiting. And waiting. And we never once wonder, what if? Or Is it working? Or Will I have tomatoes red, ripe and juicy at the harvest? Of course we will. We always do. When the Seeds of our Dreams are working and growing in ways unseen by our own eyes, why do we wonder and fret that maybe our dreams won’t come into fruition? Do we not have faith in our own Dreams, our own growth process like we do in our garden?

It’s a slow process watching our fruits and vegetables gain momentum from unassuming seed, to tiny promising sprig, to thriving vine to precious new flower to budding fruit to ripe and juicy bountiful gifts. And amidst this process we carry on with our daily lives. We wash dishes and linens. We prepare our kitchen and set the table. We pour over recipes, plan our meals, and look forward to the feast. And what about our Dreams? Instead of carrying on from a place of eager anticipation of the goodness to come, we wring our hands, discount and distrust the growing process. We water one day and parch the soil the next out of fear and uncertainty. We are afraid to hope. Afraid to put our energy and work into something that might not bloom. What if our dreams don’t thrive? we worry.

What would happen if we deliberately choose to leave to questioning behind? What if it isn’t a matter of IF they will grow but rather WHEN they will grow? As our Dream Seeds begin to grow, sight unseen, what if we choose not to worry and wonder? What if we just use the waiting time to prepare?

As my recently planted Dream Seeds lay quietly sit beneath the surface of my life, they are working, silently but steadily gaining their own momentum. I am nurturing them tenderly as I know that my faithful unwavering practice will eventually lead to a harvest. There is nothing I can do to speed the process so instead, as I hold in my heart excitement for the fruition of my Dreams, as my mouth waters in anticipation of the juicy adventures that are the horizon, I will prepare. I will ready my heart and soul. I will wash the dishes and do the laundry. I will take the time to tidy my home honoring what is to come. I will wake each morning to my watering can and tend to my Dreams but I will not rush them. And I certainly will not doubt them. I will be patient and approach each day knowing that I don’t have much time to until my Dreams are ripe on the vine. I want to be ready for the harvest; to have much of the work out of the way so that when my Dreams are ready I will be too.