If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.
Meister Eckhart
musings
The flare of roman candles exploding
Thanksgiving. My heart is full, the kind of fullness that verges on discomfort. I reread my 2007 and 2008 posts about what I was thankful for, and it all still feels right today. Also in my mind right now, adding to the fullness of my heart, is the memory of seven years ago, of my father-in-law’s heart transplant. I am reminded, again, of all the days and hours that I am not grateful enough, for this good fortune and for a host of others.
I read Anne Lamott’s Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith on the plane ride down to Florida. (Aside: one thing I am very grateful for is having a seven-year-old who can be utterly entranced with a combination of Jet Blue cartoons and Magic Treehouse books for a 3 hour flight, allowing me to read undisturbed). I think I underlined something on every single page – there’s no question that Anne Lamott is my favorite writer. But one passage really stuck with me, and that seemed to speak to me where I am right now, in this season full of both thanksgiving and lengthening shadows.
Maybe this is what grace is, the unseen sounds that make you look up. I think it’s why we are here, to see as many chips of blue sky as we can bear. To find the diamond hearts within one another’s meatballs. To notice flickers of the divine, like dust motes on sunbeams in your dusty kitchen. Without all the shade and shadows, you’d miss the beauty of the veil. The shadow is always there, and if you don’t remember it, when it falls on you and your life again, you’re plunged into darkness. Shadows make the light show.
Oh, yes. There is so much I love about this passage, too much to describe in this post. That would mean spilling the contents of my heart onto the page, and unfortunately they are too messy and incoherent for public consumption (except for a lucky few of you! :)). I love the image of “as many chips of blue sky as we can bear,” because it hints at something Heather of the Extraordinary Ordinary helped me see clearly. It’s okay to admit there there is only so much brilliance we can take. This is an adjunct admission to that of owning that we are not capable of living fully engaged in the moment, heart open and receiving, all the time.
I am thankful today for the acknowledgment, by others and myself, that it’s okay to live this way. I am thankful for Anne’s gracious, lyrical reminder of the fact that shadows make the light show. There is self-acceptance, for me, in saying this out loud. It is simply the way I am, inclined towards melancholy, but that does not have to mean I have a sad life. Absolutely not. And I am thankful to Gwen Bell, whose words helped me see that just last week.
Isn’t it, after all, the interplay of light and shadow that provides the texture of our lives? The darkness creates contrast, but it also scoops out some emotional part of me, allowing me to bear – experience, recognize, feel – more joy. I am grateful, I realize anew, for way my lens on the world is striated with both light and dark.
I am thankful today for evening light on bare trees, for the deep, glowing blue of the afternoon sky, for the words of a friend that make me feel less alone, for the tousled hair of sleepy children, for the lyrics of a song that bring tears to my eyes, for the moments when I am really and truly present, when I feel my spirit beating like wings in my chest.
So, this is happysad day for me, in a reflective season. My heart swells with awareness of my tremendous blessings, of the extravagant beauty that is my world. My thoughts are quiet and shadowy, but lit by incandescent beams of light. Like a night sky whose darkness is obliterated over and over by the flare of roman candles exploding, their colors made more beautiful by the surprise of them against the darkness. Like my life.
Today is a day full of that uncomfortable heart I mention, so I repost this from last year instead of diving into the wreck (which some days – today – I cannot bear)… happy Thanksgiving to all.
Heartbreaking but necessary work
Jo wrote yesterday at Mylestones about the common – and toxic – belief that “life is what happens next, if we could just get past the hurdle right in front.”
Her post is beautiful, powerful writing; probably my favorite I’ve ever read by her, which is saying something as I read every word she writes. It reminds me of the beginning of something I wrote last summer, inspired by another blogger (Kate at sweet/salty – the italics are her words).
We like to think that life is joy punctuated with pain but it’s not. Life is pain punctuated with moments of joy.
The optimist in me wants to disagree with Kate about the joy/pain balance of life, but the pessimist in me senses that she is right. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, really, what the equation is, as long as we appreciate the joy and it sustains us through the pain. Of course everybody’s particular calculus is different, their balance of happy and sad, light and shadow individual. It’s no secret that mine leans towards shadow.
Life is not fairly represented in a Flickr photostream. It is not false, but it is not the whole truth. Memories are kneaded into something different from what we actually experienced. In the gulf between the two there is necessary sorcery.
I love this image, of the sorcery that exists in the gulf between experience and memory. Yes, how true it is, that even as we live moments we are not always sure of how they will transmogrify in our memory. Some of the “big moments” of my life are blurs in my memory, while some of the most mundane and unspecial days are the ones I remember with the clarity and dazzling color of light through a prism. Some of the memories that I return to the most often for comfort and inspiration, crystalline in their power, are of experiences that I did not realize the importance of as I lived them. Most, in fact.
This truth supports the fact that, as Jo says, “Life is years of labored breathing with occasional seconds of breathless euphoria.” It’s in the labored breathing, sometimes, that the most vivid things happen. These are the moments cached in our ordinary days, the ones we don’t realize we will never forget until after they are gone.
I disgust myself with how ungrateful I can be. I mourn the ability to be as blindly ungrateful as I please. I love my kids but I miss myself. I’m tired of wrangling and refereeing and spotting.
I often bemoan my own ingratitude, my inability to get out of my own way to see the glory and beauty of my life. My children are at a tennis lesson and I miss them. Then they are home and I miss the silence of their absence. I look at them sleeping and am overcome with a wave of love so simultaneously fierce and gentle that it shocks me. They wake up, start bickering, and within five minutes that intense warmth has shifted to something decidedly less gentle. Repeat. Ad nauseum.
And this musing brings me right back to Jo’s post – the challenge, I think, is recognizing the sweetness inherent in the muck, the stuff that we might think we just have to get through. I remember several years ago, talking to a friend about how this was a tough time because of X or Y and suddenly I realized … hell, there is always going to be an X or a Y. Probably a Z, too. And you know what? That is my life.
The difficulty in seeing that, at least for me, comes in the inevitable sadness of acknowledging that life won’t be just as pictured. Recognizing that life is here, not tomorrow, not after this or that accomplishment or challenge, involves letting go of how we wanted it to be. And that is heartbreaking, but necessary work.
The least we can do is try to be there
“The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” – Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
“What Ruth has known all along: what will happen can’t be stopped. Aim for grace.” – Ann Beattie (Learning to Fall)
I love both of these passages, which seem to me to be saying different versions of the same thing. I’ve written before about how I feel I’m circling and circling, sometimes, not making progress enough, saying the same things over and over. Sometimes this frustrates me, makes me feel stuck. On other days the message coming at me externally (as in these two quotes, and in the bird I found sheltering in my porch the other night) and bubbling up internally (the aforementioned circling and circling) is so consistent, so strong and powerful, that I realize I ought to just put everything down and listen to it.
This is one of those messages. In fact, I suspect that, at least for me, this is the message.
Life – grace, beauty, peace, whatever you want to think of it as – is just right here. And white-knuckling my way through it doesn’t do anything but exhaust me. Things are unfolding in a way that I have much less control over than I’d like to believe, and the best I can do is open my eyes and see. Not miss, in my desperate, soul-depleting efforts to manage destiny, the gorgeousness that is at my feet right now.
Remarkable as it may be, the world seems to spin without me personally doing the spinning. It has taken me 36 years to really learn this. In fact, if I’m honest, I’m still learning it. The freedom that comes with letting go is immense, and I’ve tasted it, though I’m not always able to remember that. The lesson for me is to do so in a more complete way. Letting go – accepting that what will be will be, as Beattie says, enables a complete shift in perspective: instead of being a lamentation of what is not, life becomes a benediction of what is.
All we can do is show up. Isn’t this what the poets have been saying, since the beginning of time? And the priests, too? Yes, yes it is. Just by being in this world, banal and brilliant, where majesty and mediocrity coexist in every single moment, we are witness to beauty and grace. All we have to do is be there. And to watch.
Mythology and moments (II)
I really love the latest post on Chicken & Cheese about our personal mythologies, the moments that define us, and the sense of standing on the brink of one. I am so familiar with the scene she evokes: the late night, the insomnia, and most of all, the feeling of plates shifting under the surface. I know this creaking well.
I also know the way that this shifting can feel deafening to me, utterly preoccupying in its noise and, sometimes, its pain. It always surprises me that it is invisible and inaudible to others (or to most). Somehow, the movement of the fundamental structure that underlies who I am goes undetected to most of the world. Somehow, even when it feels as though I am cracking (which I do not today, by the way), I walk through the world as though nothing is happening.
Of course the flip of this is that we ought to treat everyone with a compassion that respects whatever whitewater they are riding inside their own heads and hearts. If the world cannot see our turmoil, our plates shifting, then we cannot know this of others. Be kind. Those with tear-glazed faces or cold eyes probably have internal demons that we cannot know. It – and this is hard for me, I admit, very hard – likely has nothing at all to do with us.
No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our lives are made. Destiny is made known silently. – Agnes de Mille
Today I am pensive (here in my pensieve), thinking about my personal mythology, about the moments of my life that shaped who I am today. Some of them are big, I know, like the births of my children, but many of them are small. In fact I think it is true, this notion of destiny taking shape in silence. Often the true shifts that change our direction irrevocably happen invisibly to others. This is the terrible, wonderful privacy of this life: nobody can know our internal terrain well enough to walk it without guidance.
From almost exactly a year ago … and I still feel every word of it…