musings

What matters is how well we have loved

Like many of us, I was deeply touched by Barack Obama’s speech on Wednesday at the Tucson memorial service.  The lines that spoke to me most are these:

“We’re shaken from our routines, and forced to look inward. We reflect on the past. Did we spend enough time with an aging parent, we wonder. Did we express our gratitude for all the sacrifices they made for us? Did we tell a spouse just how desperately we loved them, not just once in awhile but every single day?

So sudden loss causes us to look backward – but it also forces us to look forward, to reflect on the present and the future, on the manner in which we live our lives and nurture our relationships with those who are still with us. We may ask ourselves if we’ve shown enough kindness and generosity and compassion to the people in our lives. Perhaps we question whether we are doing right by our children, or our community, and whether our priorities are in order.

We recognize our own mortality, and are reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame – but rather, how well we have loved, and what small part we have played in bettering the lives of others.”

Obama’s sentiments reminded me of one of the few things I know to be true: we don’t, ever, adequately express our gratitude and love for those closest to us.  We just don’t.  Interestingly, I had written an email to a friend on the 11th, an old friend with whom I’ve lost touch, and of whom I was thinking.  I wrote to her of how much she meant to me and of how much I cherished her despite our lack of contact.  The next morning I heard back from her, and she said, “So often, we all think things about other people but fail to tell them.  I’m touched you thought enough to send your nice thoughts.”

Her words, and Obama’s, both remind me of how tragic the paucity of our gratitude towards those we love most can be.  I wrote these words years ago, but they feel right again today.

I believe that those we hold dearest can never be told enough how much we care about them. I think often of Peggy Noonan’s wonderful editorial after 9/11 about the last phone calls made and messages left by those who perished in the attacks.  Her line that I love is this:

“We’re all lucky to be here today and able to say what deserves saying, and if you say it a lot, it won’t make it common and so unheard, but known and absorbed.”

I believe this deeply: expressing how we feel frequently doesn’t cheapen the words, but allows them to sink into the object of our affection’s very marrow.  Our grateful words are all spoken in the shadow of the fact that we can’t know when that day will come, that day when we can no longer say “thank you, you mean a lot to me.” It is tragic to hear of people rushing to a deathbed to share how they feel, or, worse, to hear about regret at not having been able to express those feelings in time. It seems obvious that we ought to work harder to thank people, to let those who we love know it, as we go along.

As we travel the arc of our lives, whose shape – graceful and long or abrupt and short – we cannot know, it would behoove us to be grateful, thoughtful, and communicative. Easier said than done, of course. Like cleaning up as you go along while cooking dinner, this is instinctive for some, learned for others, and impossible for a few.

How about we all take two minutes to share our gratitude for someone who is important to us today?

Trust: personality accedes to self

In celebration of my first-ever word of the year, Trust, I have decided to ask a few writers to share their thoughts on the topic.  It was easy to think about who to ask first: Julie Daley represents the absolute embodiment of trust as I mean it.  Her writing never fails to move me.  In the embrace of her words I feel that I might be able to sense – and, ultimately, trust – the divine feminine that moves within me.  (at least, she says it does).  Julie’s writing and thinking is graceful and has both the fluidity and power of moving water.

I love the piece she has shared today because it is about pigeon, which is probably the single most difficult and simultaneously profound yoga pose for me.  Please read her words on what it is to trust – our bodies, our lives, our selves, and the universe.  Nobody says it like Julie does.  It is an honor to share her words with you here.

***

Sometimes, moments of trust can appear when you least expect them. Sometimes, it simply takes awareness. Awareness of when we trust, how we trust and what we trust in; awareness of who we are, what we are, and what we’re willing to experience; and awareness of when we grab a hold, when we let go, and what happens when we simply sit with it all.

I’ve discovered that in the question of trust, the body can be a great guide. The body doesn’t lie. The body is our vessel for experiencing life. The body can show us the way if we’re willing to invite it to do so.

On a particular day a few weeks ago, I was entertaining the question of “When do I feel most alive?” for a blog challenge I was involved with. It was Friday, a yoga day. In class, the teacher asked if we had any requests for class (something she does when the class is small). A number of people voiced their requests. Then she mentioned that usually when she asks that question, someone pipes up with ‘Power Yoga’. I realized that’s what I wanted that day, to sweat hard and to push the boundaries of what my body can do, so I raised my hand to make it clear that’s what I wanted.

She laughed, then obliged.

She seemed to fill each of our requests, taking us from intense twists, to shoulder openers, to hip flexor stretches, to the ever-optional Chaturanga, and even a one-legged Chaturanga for me, the one that wanted power yoga.

She then led us into pigeon pose. Here in the intensity of pigeon pose, I remembered the inquiry I’d been holding for the day. I sat, so to speak, with this question of what it is to feel fully alive as my entire pelvic girdle was responding to the immediacy of this invitation to open.

I could feel the tightness of the muscles hanging on, as if to say, “It’s up to us to keep things under control.” And, in contrast to that tightness, I could feel my skeleton resting on the ground, responding to the muscles saying, “It’s okay. I’ve got it. You can let go.”

Alongside this conversation between the muscles and the bones, there was another conversation. I noticed a feeling of something deeper, what I can only call deep awareness, holding my mind as it flitted about, trying to manage the perceived pain of the stretch in which the body was engaged. This deeper place, this place of serenity and constancy simply invited me to let go, to drop in. I found myself dancing between simply being this place of invitation and being the mind with its manic need to manage the experience.

And then it happened. I let go. The muscles gave it over to the bones. The mind let go into the heart. The heart dropped into the body. Something deeper just held it all. And in this moment, I felt the physical palpable opening of the hips, where groin crease relaxed into thigh, and bones settled into the mat. Hot sweat dripped, while pain settled into sensation. Struggling to hold on let go.  Cranial fluid softly pulsed. Joy surfaced on the waves of breath.

It all became simple. Personality acceded to Self.

In this moment, I could feel muscles held by the bones, and bones held by the earth. I could feel the mind held by the heart, and the heart held by the body.

One let go into the next, and before I knew it I felt deeply alive. Human. Open. Trusting.

Invitee.

Invited.

Acceptance.

Simple.

Word of the year

I’m am honored to be writing about my (very first) Word of the Year at Stacey Curnow’s Midwife for Your Life blog today.  Stacey regularly writes beautiful and thought-provoking posts about things that are dear to my heart: the soul, the spirit, what it means to fully inhabit your life.  She also shares fantastic quotations, most of which make me gasp and reach for my quote book in order to write them down.

Please click over and read about my Word of the Year and poke around Stacey’s blog while you’re at it.  You won’t regret it!

Gentleness

For the last few days gentleness has been very much on my mind.  And then the internet did that thing it sometimes does, where I sense a powerful twining together of individual experiences and perspectives into something far greater than any one of us.  First, on Sunday, Lisa wrote about the power of steadfast kindness and gentleness.  Then, Monday morning, Susan Piver tweeted “I believe in supreme gentleness, agenda-less curiosity, outrageous self-expression, and kindness.”

Maybe the turning of the year has hit me particularly hard this year.  The coldness, the blizzard, the illness of my father-in-law, the ferociously-fast growing-up of my children.  I don’t know, but I’m finding myself in particular need of gentleness.  My thin skin is even more attenuated than usual, stretched to where it might split open at any moment.  My already-porous self feels even more exposed than usual.

I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong. – Leo Rosten

I am beginning to understand that gentleness is the epitome of strength.  Those who have accepted themselves fully enough to be able to look at, see, and embrace others for who they are – rather than falling prey to their own reactions, assumptions, and judgments, which come from insecurity – are those who are truly gentle.  I know I can work on this myself: I’m not always gentle, and on reflection I know why.  I think improvement here starts with gentleness towards myself and with releasing others from the prison of what I can be so sure that they should be/think/feel.

In this cold and dark season, this interval before we start seeing more light, before the ice melts, before the colds stop coming so persistently, I ache for gentleness.  I don’t know how much more bruising my heart can take.  I want it to be held gently now.

There is gentleness all around me, I know that.  Not always from those from whom I want it, and not always in the guise I expect.  But when I open my eyes, I see what it in front of me.  Gentleness.  The kind where you put your hand softly over your brother’s healing stitches, read Harry Potter slowly so that he can follow, and answer patiently his myriad questions.

Grace will lead me home

Amazing Grace (John Newton)

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

T’was Grace that taught my heart to fear.
And Grace, my fears relieved.
How precious did that Grace appear
The hour I first believed.

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;
‘Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far
and Grace will lead me home.

I’ve written before about my intense sensitivity, about how porous I am to the world, about what a generally difficult friend I am because I take everything so ridiculously personally.  I’m certain that this sensitivity, in particular that to the passage of time, is my wound.  Whether it is also a strength remains less clear to me.

It’s all mixed in with Grace.  And, of course, grace.  Grace announced herself to me on the day after my father-in-law was diagnosed with a terminal illness, and those two lines on the pregnancy test shocked me so completely I almost fainted.  I had not anticipated being pregnant – in fact if I’m honest, I hadn’t wanted to be.

When I was 20 weeks pregnant I went to a new prenatal yoga class.  I didn’t love prenatal yoga, finding most classes to be too much breathing through our chakras and not enough vinyasa.  This class was small, just me and three other women.  At the end of class, as we lay in savasana, our teacher asked us to “go inside and communicate with our baby.”  I swear I rolled my eyes behind my eyelids.  Lying there, trying to figure out how I could leave without offending the teacher, I heard an unfamiliar but distinct voice in my head.  It said, “grace.”  I sat up, startled, and looked around the room.  Just three domed-bellied women, eyes shut, and one teacher in lotus position.  I lay back down, willing the voice to come back.  It didn’t.  But I’ve never forgotten that moment.  She was always Grace.  Always my grace.

And then she arrived, and she broke my heart.  The postpartum depression that I plunged into after Grace’s birth terrified me, completely dissolved me, and in its wake I was reformed into a new person.  She taught my heart to fear, and then, slowly, gradually, but surely, she relieved my fears.

She is leading me home.  Of that I am certain now.  And when I sang Amazing Grace last week at a funeral, I burst into tears at that last line.  My daughter pushes every single button I have.  She infuriates me and hurts me and sends me to a shouting, tearful mess faster than anyone else on the planet.  She demonstrates keen sensitivity and an astonishing ability to take things personally, and both of these things annoy me and hurt me in equal measure.  As I lose my patience with her, stumble, and get up again, hugging her against me, my tears dropping wetly into her thick brown hair, I am trying to tell myself, as much as her, that everything will be okay.  To reassure the child – and adult – me as much as my daughter that we will be safe.

In parenting Grace I am confronting, over and over again, my own flaws, my own weaknesses, the deepest reaches of my own self.  What if that sensitivity that I’ve so often bemoaned is not an obstacle on my path but the road itself?  I’m beginning to suspect it is.  And, holding my daughter’s hand, the hand of my grace, my Grace, I’m finding my way home.  She might think she’s following me, but, the truth is, I’m following her.