musings

The fabric of my life is woven through with departures. There are big ones, whose nubs are visible on the surface of my life, and smaller ones, the thread of which just glint when you turn the fabric this way and that. Like the samskaras that Dani Shapiro so eloquently talks about in Devotion, these departures remain within me, hard little kernels of sadness that the rest of my experience flows around, but not undisturbed.

In the first big departure of my life I was the one who left. My family moved to London in January of my 7th grade year (incidentally, not timing that I would particularly recommend). I will never forget the evening that my parents told me, driving me home from my 6th grade graduation dance in the late-fading light of an early June evening. How could I forget?  That was the night I realized how small I was. It was concrete proof that I was not absolutely in control of my life.

It took me another 20 years, however, to realize that the right response to this slap in the face about my lack of control wasn’t actually to try to control everything. For those 20 years I gritted my teeth, clenched my fists, and exerted untold amounts of energy thinking – hoping? – that through sheer force of will I could bend the world to the shape I wanted it to be in.

That departure was deeply destabilizing for me.  It ruptured irrevocably the life I’d assumed would unfurl in front of me like a bolt of fabric rolling out. Even though I was the one doing the leaving, I was powerless and the deep tectonic instability that that represented has reverberated through my ability to feel secure ever since. Of course there were enormous riches that came from the move to London, of course, of course. I am grateful, and think often of the unique experiences I had during those years. But there were also ramifications in my spirit, not all easy, that I am still sifting through, and it is they are on my mind tonight.

In the second major departure that formed me I was the one who was left. The first man I ever loved (and it’s a short list!) moved to Asia, and I was left behind. While I intellectually understood his reasoning, even admired his wanderlust and adventurous spirit, emotionally I was devastated, rocked by further evidence that I really couldn’t count on anything or anyone. It took me years to understand that my panicky fear of abandonment was rooted in some ways in this original experience. To this day, I have a deep fear of being left behind, that those I love most will up and leave, and that I will be powerless to stop the departure.

Clearly, all of these departures were followed by arrivals, hellos, new beginnings. The ways that loss folds into life and then back again into loss in the world’s most complicated and ever-shifting piece of origami continue to amaze me. All of these events, as unpleasant as they were in the moment, and as long-lasting their ambivalent echoes have been, contributed to bring me to where I am now. I think often of Theodore Roethke’s lines,

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

It is a comfort, certainly, to believe that all of this leaving and being left that haunts my relationships and life now was in service of both fate and continued learning. That doesn’t mean there isn’t pain, though, or sadness. That doesn’t mean I don’t miss people, and regret some goodbyes, both made and received. I wish, like Roethke, I could not fear this going where I have to go. The truth is, though, I often fear it frantically, find myself scrabbling to keep the change or goodbye at bay. Hopefully in the afternoon of my life (Carl Jung) I can learn the acceptance that pervades Roethke’s words, feel the peace that I am going where I have to go.

I’ve been riding the swells of my moods lately, dipping into sadness, rising into joy, then back again. When I looked back at what I was writing a year ago, I see I was talking about the very same theme. I wonder if this is a bad thing, this apparent wallowing in the same topics, if I am not moving on, moving forward. Or if the continued exploration is just my getting deeper into an important rhythm of my life, a critical component of who I am.

I feel frustrated, sometimes, by the fact that I seem to write the same thing over and over.  When I slide down the trough into another sad day, I often feel like I’ve failed, that somehow all this work to be more present, more engaged, more patient, has amounted to nothing and my hands are as empty and grasping as ever.  Shouldn’t I be getting more steady, more happy, more mature?

Maybe not.  It’s gradually sinking in (I’m slow, I know) that the up and down of happiness and sadness, of life and loss, will continue no matter what. I’ve described this pattern as a sine curve before, but it also reminds me of waves, of tides, of the waxing and waning moon, of some fundamental drumbeat of truth that happens deep inside my body. It is as unavoidable as the turning forward of time and as essential as air, both an reflection of and somehow animated by the natural world.

What I am beginning to suspect, though, is that it is actually in this slow, meandering oscillation, both rhythmic and random, that life exists. I return again and again in my writing and in my thinking to this space, the space in between, to the inscrutable and unknown force that sets the cadence of these movements. Is this another example of dwelling, and not growing, or is it just that I continuing to tell one of the elemental stories of my life?

Maybe my whole life, and all my writing, is simply my search for metaphors to express this. Maybe, as to my son’s blue eyes, I’m being drawn somewhere that I just don’t understand yet. Maybe the way I return over and over to these themes is just an echo of the mountainous up-and-down terrain of my emotional landscape. I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

I believe we are all full of stories.

I believe we are all looking for the way home. To whatever our essential, fundamental home is, where we are truly ourselves, where we are seen and recognized and known and witnessed as such.

I believe that telling our stories – to others, maybe, but most of all to ourselves – is the only way to find our way home.

Some days, the words of my stories shower over me, like a waterfall or a sudden torrential squall. These are the days when I pull over on the highway to tap sentences onto my iphone. The days I wake in the night to scribble thoughts onto the pad of paper beside my bed. The days I run with words tumbling over themselves in my head, the words of others, songs and quotations, somersaulting over and with my own images and thoughts, and as I run I repeat them over and over, hoping not to forget them.

Other days the words are thin. I fear they are gone. I might catch a glimmer of them, like the surprising sparkle of mica in concrete pavement. But there aren’t enough to hold onto, not enough words to form a rope that I can use to go hand-over-hand from here to there. They are a fragile line, the streak of a snail’s slimy passage, the evanescent foam on the edge of a wave, the fading white path of an airplane, disappearing before my eyes in a hydrangea blue sky.

The words tell the stories that show us the way home. Without the words, it follows, I feel a bit lost.

Trying to trust the rain will come again.