musings

Present Tense with Laura Munson

I read Laura Munson’s memoir, This Is Not the Story You Think It Is: A Season of Unlikely Happiness, over the summer, and adored it.  The book grew out of  Laura’s summer 2009 Modern Love column, which I remember reading with interest.  This Is Not the Story You Think It Is begins with Munson’s husband of many years coming home and telling her he’s not sure he loves her anymore.   Instead of responding with anger or throwing him out, Munson simply responds, “I don’t buy it.”  She commences a period of steadfast patience.  She is certain that her husband’s wavering has to do with him, and not her, and she is committed to waiting him out while he works through his crisis.

Munson’s memoir traces the months of this season, during which she waits, determined to save her marriage by demonstrating her deep commitment to it and to her husband.  This commitment takes the form of space, tolerance, and tremendous faith.  She chooses not to give in to the urge for drama, not to hurl accusations.  This is challenging beyond measure, and of course there are moments she loses her cool.  On the whole, though This Is Not the Story You Think It Is showcases the power of devotion and what can happen when we remember to put the prize we seek above our moment-to-moment personal needs.

Beyond being a story about marriage and midlife, though, This Is Not the Story You Think It Is is about becoming the source of one’s own joy.  It is about shifting the power over our own moods back to ourselves.  It is about the things that are possible when we fully commit to something, even when that effort is difficult and draining.

Munson talks about the teetering stack of books on her bedside table, many of which are about spirituality, peace, self-help.  She has been a lifelong seeker, she tells us, but it is not until this moment, with her marriage in crisis and fault lines running through a foundation she assumed was stable, that she really starts to understand what she has been seeking.

“But,” I whimpered, “I’m in a spiritual cul-de-sac. I don’t know how not to want. I’m very, very attached. Not in the least Zen. More . . . I don’t know . . . Episcopalian.”

It’s not simple, this letting go of how she imagined her marriage would be, this strident attempt to … not attempt so much.  Of course Munson falters.  She is funny and wise, humane and deeply human as she relates the ups and downs of her waiting season (an aside: like Munson, I’m an Episcopalian, very, very attached, and a lifelong seeker).

Munson wrote This Is Not the Story You Think It Is from the white-hot center of the experience; not for her was the advice to get a healthy remove from an emotional moment before writing about it.  No, she wrote in real time, as she lived through her summer of waiting, her weeks of doubt, her moments of surprising peace.  As she moves through time, she grows more and more clear about the process she is engaged in, which proves to go far beyond the situation with her husband.

“It’s about not taking things personally. Even when you feel the world is crumbling around you. It’s about choosing happiness over suffering. It’s about retraining the way we think.”

Of course, this is no small achievement; it might be the goal of a lifetime.  At least for me.  Many things go into choosing happiness; among the most important is learning to appreciate that which is right in front of you.  When Munson dives into what it means to not choose suffering, she hints at some of the nuances of her ordinary life, and suggests that it is in the embrace of these things that freedom, and joy, can come.

“Suffering sucks. Don’t do it. Go home and love your wife. Go home and love yourself. Go home and base your happiness on one thing and one thing only: freedom. Choose freedom, not suffering. Create a life of freedom, not wanting. Have some really good coffee and listen to the red-winged blackbirds in the marsh.”

I’m so glad to have found Laura Munson’s words, in both her book and in her blog, These Here Hills.  She writes for the Huffington Post, the New York Times (her recent Lives column, about a mother and her growing-so-fast daughter, made me cry), and on her blog.  Go read her words now – you won’t regret it.

1. When have you felt most present?  Are there specific memories that stand out for you?

Giving birth to my children, writing books, riding horses.  All three of these things require us to be in the present moment.  Like no other experiences I’ve known, they warn of the dangers of the mind.  Of engaging fear.  Of not being present.  All require a loosening, an opening and letting go; non-resistance.  Receiving what is…the illusions of the past and the future melting away.

2. Do you have rituals or patterns that you use to remind you to Be Here Now?

I have a very busy mind.  So in order to quiet it, I need easy, broken down methods.  So it’s three deep breaths when my mind is a-whirl.  Or it’s saying a prayer that I memorized as a child in time to those three breaths.  Or a heart shaped rock I hold in my hand to take pause—I collect them and keep them all over my house.  It’s silent and it’s simple.  And mostly it’s about identifying those destructive thoughts we all have, and loving them into submission.  I used to think we needed to hunt them down and make them die violent deaths.  Now I realize that when we’re doing that, we’re at war with ourselves because we’ve created those voices.  They’re of us.  So to love them like a scared child works much better for me.

3. Do you have specific places or people that you associate with being particularly present?  Who?  Where?  Any idea why?

The woman who I ride horses with is the most present human being I’ve ever met.  She has had a hard life and you never hear her complain and you rarely hear her speak about yesterday or tomorrow.  It’s “look at the immature eagle,” or “that mama doe has a new fawn hiding in that field,” or “that’s a mountain lion den” or “aren’t the larch trees stunning this year?”  We may get into conversation, but she is always keenly aware of what is happening around her and with her horse.  It keeps her calm and it keeps her safe.  I have worked with this woman for ten years and more than anything else, I’ve learned how to clean my mind and be present, all from our travels by horse in the woods of Montana.

4. Have you ever meditated?  How did that go?

Writing is my meditation.  It’s my practice.  It’s my daily prayer.  I have always been a seeker from a very early age.  And I’ve always had a rich prayer life.  My prayers have become lean.  More like little casts into a slow-moving stream—a few words.  Thanks.  Help.  Yes. I find great solace and inspiration in reading the work of the mystics from most religions who are all about love and the freedom of the present moment.  And yes, I have meditated in the sense of repeating a phrase in my mind in a deliberate way in a quiet place.  But for me a walk in the woods is the best meditation.  I always come back feeling clean-slated.

5. Has having children changed how you think about the effort to be present?

I try to teach them to be aware in the moment.  That all the suffering comes in our attachment to the illusion of past and future.  To own what they can own and then let go of the rest.  I try to teach them the freedom that comes from that awareness.  I’m a student and a teacher then, I guess.  When there are people you love and you see them suffering and you feel you have ideas and practices that pull people out of suffering, it’s easy to go into teacher mode, but I find that it’s much more effective to simply practice more than preach.

6. And just cause I’m curious, what books and songs do you love?

Jim Harrison is my favorite writer.  I love all of his work, and especially his poetry.  I love the book THE BROTHERS K by David James Duncan.  e.e. cummings and Rilke and Rumi and Neruda.  Salinger, especially FRANNY AND ZOOEY.  Truman Capote’s A CHRISTMAS MEMORY.  Annie Dillard.  And music…well…I love Bach.  I love the Durufle Requiem.  And old timey folk tunes.  My musical taste is all over the map.  From Puccini to Joni Mitchell to James Taylor to Ella Fitzgerald to The Velvet Underground to the Grateful Dead to the Violent Femmes.  Dixieland jazz.  Big Band music.  Depends on the weather.  The song I play on the piano, its lyrics appearing in my high school year book senior page, is CORNER OF THE SKY from the Broadway musical, Pippin, so there you have it.

Pensieve

Grace and I have been reading Harry Potter together for almost a  year now.  I read all seven books as soon as they came out, thoroughly enchanted by the world that JK Rowling created, and it’s been wonderful to revisit the story with Grace.  Last December I wrote about how moved I was to reconsider the Mirror of Erised and the deep power of love to both scar and heal.

We are nearing the end of book four now, and last night we read about the Pensieve.  The Pensieve is actually one of the images from Harry Potter that I’ve thought often of in the last years; like Diagon Alley, it’s one of the many, many ways that Rowling plays with language.  As a total word nerd, I adore these flourishes (aside: I have a Word document on computer called Words that is literally nothing more than a simple list of words I love).

Dumbledore (one of my favorite characters in all of fiction, EVER) tells Harry about the mysterious device, a stone basin full of swirling, silvery material:

“This?  It is called a Pensieve … I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind … At those times … I use the Pensieve.  One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure.  It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form.”

And all of a sudden it occurred to me: isn’t this blog, actually, my Pensieve?  Isn’t this how many of us use our blogs?  This is a place I come to excavate my own thoughts.  Sometimes, certainly, I’m reacting to having too many “thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.”  And, maybe more importantly, this blog certainly helps me parse these thoughts and identify patterns. Some of that is thanks to you, my incredibly thoughtful readers, whose comments and emails often form their own streams of meaning (witness the non-coincidental frequency with which I’m sent TS Eliot’s words).

It also occurs to me that there are certain people who play this role in our lives, places we can go to unpack some of the overflow in our mind, and who can help us draw connections and shepherd the patterns out of the chaos.  What – or who – functions as your Pensieve?

Thoughts like sparrows

Wednesday morning, early.  The sky was full of promise.  The clouds, the ever-lighter blue sky, all radiant as the sun bled over the horizon.  A sky of beginnings, of life, the kind of sky that, as I’ve said before, makes me believe in God.

Wednesday, mid-morning.  The ground a riot of yellow leaves, a blanket spread around the tree that they fell from.  A ground resplendent with endings, with the beauty of life flaming out, of a year drawing to a close.

Up and down, beginning and end, sky and ground.  These polarities exist in every single hour of every day for me.

This is not my favorite time of the year.  Darkness encroaches.  We are a day away from the turning back of the clocks, which for me marks the beginning of the cold stretch of the year when there is far more dark than light.  I’m filled with dread about the darkness, and I’m also walking with memories of the difficult weeks and months after Grace’s birth heavy on my shoulders.  As much as her birthday reminds me of the as-yet darkest season of my life, it also reminds me of the swift flight of the years.  I think, on balance, the latter is worse for me than the former.

I try to hang onto the inspiration and peace that so fill the morning sky, but it’s hard, when the days shift so quickly towards dusk and the sidewalks are muddy with wet, decaying leaves.  The black branches of bare trees form their nets against the gray sky, and there is poetry in their barrenness, but so, so many endings. 

I do have calm and peaceful thoughts, but they scatter like a flock of sparrows taking flight from those dark branches into the faded gray air.  In their wake, a faint current of air disturbed by the beating of their wings, a sense of sadness, of rawness.  Another season – fall, this year, my daughter’s eight year on earth, my eighth year as a mother – draws to a close. 

I’m moved enough by the morning sky, though, that it’s not all bleak.  There are strands of incandescent joy and beauty woven through this damp, dark time.  All over again, I am reminded of the inextricability of endings and beginnings, of death and life, and of the beauty that can exist in each.  Today it is Jack Kornfield’s words that are ringing in my head, over and over:

“To live is to die to how we wanted it to be.“

Words that accompany me

Last year Sarah at Momalom wrote a post about the words that surround us.  There is, of course, much meaning in the things with which we choose to fill the space we live in.  There’s no question that the single biggest non-human inhabitor of my living space is books.  They line the walls of my living room, family room, childrens’ rooms, and office, and exist in an ever-growing stack by my bed. I would certainly please Anna Quindlen, who said of her children, “I would be most content if [they] grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”

In my office, the place I spend so much of my time, there is surprisingly little in the way of words on actual display.  There are, though, close at hand, my four treasured quote books (filled with poems, quotes, passages in my handwriting, which changes markedly from 1985 when I began the first book to now), which I refer to at least daily.  I sit facing a board with photographs of various people stuck haphazardly into it, and there are a few precious words on there too.  There are cut-out slivers of paper, with typing from notes from both my mother and my father.

From Dad: “you need to make peace with the quest,” from a long letter he wrote me when I began my freshman year at Princeton.  Prescient, that engineer-poet, no?  From Mum: “Thank you, from my too big heart, for your attention and love,” from a note after she was hospitalized years ago with cardiomyopathy.

I also have a post-it note from Grace that says, in her years-go spidery hand, “I love you Mummy” and then, in the top corner, a card with the handwritten lines of When You are Old by Yeats (“…. how many loved your moments of glad grace/loved your beauty, with love false or true/but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you/and loved the sorrows of your changing face”).  Jessica gave this poem, which to me speaks of truly knowing someone and loving them, over long years and for their truest self, for my birthday in 1995.

When I move beyond my literal space, into the space of my head, there are many, many, many words that surround me.  I go through life in a cloud of words.  Sometimes these words feel like a soothing cumulous cloud, other times like a swarm of mosquitos.  I’ve written before about the way certain lines of poems, songs, or other works come to my mind, unbidden (consciously, that is) … we’ve all had the experience of having something stuck in our head.  I think there is much to be understood from excavating why certain sentences rise up when they do.

Some of the lines that most frequently run through my mind are these:

In this moment there is life and food for future years (Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey)

In the struggle lies the joy. (Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings)

Life gives us what we need it when we need it.  Receiving what it gives us is a whole other thing. (Pam Houston, In My Next Life)

Just be here now. (Colin Hay, Waiting for my Real Life to Begin)

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close. (Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace)

There are so many more.  These are the ones that came immediately to mind tonight.  When I revisited Sarah’s original post that inspired me, I saw that I cited two: “There are years that ask questions and years that answer” (Zora Neale Hurston) and “To miss the joy is to miss all” (Robert Louis Stevenson)  The list is endless.

We all have words that accompany us and surround us, in our literal and our virtual spaces.  I’d love to know yours: what words accompany you, in your physical and mental space, during your days?

The past, present, and future run through our lives, glinting in the light

I’ve written lately about how all the various people we’ve been exist inside the people we are now.  I am frankly spellbound by the persistence of the past, by the way that carrying our scars and joys subtly alters our gait as we make our way through life.

It is hard-won, and earned, the eventual realization that we are finally who we are supposed to be.  That slow-dawning awareness is the space in which we can recognize, at last, the continued presence of those we have been along the way, and in which we can parse the way various people and influences have contributed to the contours of who we are.

Is the reverse also true?  Can we look back on our past and see strands of that truth woven through our lives?  From our spot at the top of the roller coaster, as Dani Shapiro so poignantly describes in Devotion, can we look back and see moments that hinted at the place we find ourselves now?  My instinct says yes.  This is something I’ve explored the edges of before, I realize, in a post from March called Beyond the headlights, retrospect and prospect, and letting go of my need for order.  That post probed on the “thing that makes it all make sense,” but it hews to a similar theme: at a certain point in our lives, with the understanding we’ve garnered over years, the path that may have seemed winding or random starts making sense.

What I’m thinking about today is slightly different: are there specific proclivities or choices we made in our younger years that hinted at the truest self we now know?  I think yes.  One example is the way I’ve spent many years being misunderstood as an extrovert.  I’ve written about being an introverted connector, and the latter half of that descriptor has been sufficiently strong to influence the way people interpret me.  But every year in boarding school, college, and in my pre-married life I chose to live alone (a single exception: my sophomore year at Princeton).  That is not the behavior of a true extrovert, and it makes sense now: I needed (and still do) a place to be by alone, to gather myself back together after spending my energy all day.

That is just one example, but the larger point, I think, is the way that the past and present – even the future – run through our lives, glinting in the light, sometimes visible to our eye and sometimes not.  It is not surprising to me, then, that I’m occasionally aware of the past pressing on me in a powerful, real way.  Something visceral endures from who we were, and from the road we’ve traveled.  Our samskaras (another beautiful image from Dani Shapiro) live on inside us, just as the potential and promise of who we are now guided us, albeit beyond all logical understanding, as we navigated our way here.