musings

Dreaming of paragliding in a winter wood.

I haven’t been sleeping super well lately. On Monday night, though, I had a vivid dream. A dream that was interrupted by Whit whining at the top of the stairs, but it was so powerful (and I almost never remember my dreams) that after putting Whit back to bed, I scribbled some notes on my palm in pen in the dark. In the morning, of course, I had forgotten the dream, until I saw the chicken scratch on my hand and it all came flooding back.

I was in the woods in winter with a group of people. All was bleached, muted, with those beautiful pale colors that I associate with the dormant landscape. Everything was crunchy, leafless, dry, dead. I don’t know who I was with, other than one old friend, Ann Moss. She is one of my sister-friends from growing up, one of the Four Families who flanked me as a child. I know I felt a surpassing sense of peace and comfort in this group of people, and Ann’s presence is hint that they were old, constant, trustworthy friends.

Somehow, the group of us held hands and closed our eyes and said some kind of chant, and suddenly we were paragliding. I have never done this before. My father’s younger brother, who died years ago, was a glider pilot and this imagery has always captivated me. Perhaps it is on my mind lately because of Kelly Corrigan’s assertion in Lift that to stay aloft we have to steer straight into the turbulence. I don’t know. But I was gliding through the sky, one of my oldest and truest friends at my side, and it was marvelous. I felt both free and safe, a combination I have felt so incredibly rarely in my life.

I’m still unpacking the meaning of this dream, trying to just hold it in my mind and let it soak in, but I’m certain the messages are both about taking risks and about seeking the safe, steady comfort of friends I can really trust. I have so much fear of flying. Dreaming about it makes me wonder if it is time to stare into the discomfort of the endless questions, to trust that flying can feel like falling, and to let myself fly.

Three moments

Friday

Matt took the kids out for dinner and taught them his favorite party trick (yes, those are napkin boobs).

I had dinner with two of my dearest friends from college. We are all in various aspects of transition, and sometimes it feels like we all orbit each other like atoms, always aware of one another but never in the same spot. It was an immense pleasure and treat to have a couple of hours to simply sit, and talk, and be. I am reminded over and over again about how important these friendships are, these women who knew me when I was becoming who I am now.

Saturday

Mother-daughter book club at our house in the afternoon. Grace chose a book called Grace for President which I adore. I actually wish the protagonist wasn’t called Grace, because that has nothing to do with why I like it. The book makes me choke up every single time I read it. It’s a great, empowering read for girls in elementary school (with a double bonus lesson about the electoral college).

We did something at book club that we have not done before, which is go around the room and have everyone read a page. There was something magical about those minutes, with girls hesitating before long words, reading aloud, voices growing in confidence as they forged ahead through a paragraph. I was mesmerized, looking around the room at these nascent girls, all tall and lean and angular, seemingly more so by the day, confidence and tentativeness wrapped up in each individual personality. Their eyes shone and their giggles erupted and their camaraderie was palpable.

Sunday

Palm Sunday church service with Mum, Grace, and Whit and then lunch with one other leg of the stool. I loved watching Grace and Whit with these friends that they are growing up with like family. I remember when each of these children was born, literally the day (and I’m not speaking of my own here!) – it really stuns me, as cliched as it is, that they are so big now.

All three moments speak of the themes that shape my life: the unstoppable advance of time, the way that certain moments present an opportunity to be still and really see into the life of things, the deep bonds of motherhood and friendship.  My life exists in the penumbra of my awareness of time’s passage, I know that now: the sadness and inevitability of each moment’s death colors it even as I live it.  Yet somehow I am also seeing that paradoxically, only by accepting this irrefutable truth can I actually, fully inhabit the time that I do have.

Beyond the headlights, retrospect and prospect, and letting go of my need for an order

I have a friend who spent her 20s dabbling. For various unforseen personal reasons she wound up on a somewhat circuitous professional route. She went to journalism school, she travelled around the world, she wrote, she taught yoga. Things happened, bad things, and heartbreak. At 30 she decided to change her life and go back to law school. She had always been intrigued by the idea of law school, though had not anticipated going at this point in her life.

She forged ahead. We spent many hours, drinking wine, crying, talking about the twists in life’s road that we did not anticipate. She was full of angst about her concern that her various choices and jobs did not really add up to anything. She felt tormented at what felt like wasted years. Several months ago, a year into her post-law school job, she emailed me about a new job opportunity that had come her way. I read her email with tears in my eyes. “This is it,” I wrote back, my fingers not able to write as fast as I wanted them to, so eager was I to convey my enthusiasm. “Really?” she responded, admitting that I’d always been the cautious voice of reason and she had not thought I’d react this way. “Yes,” I wrote, “This is the thing that makes it all make sense.”

And I’ve thought about that exchange so much. I don’t know when my friend will make the move into the opportunity that I was so excited about, but I feel certain she will eventually. And suddenly there is a glowing sense of peace about her, at least when I look, a design that has descended onto what previously looked like randomness. In retrospect, now, with this piece of reality in place, we see the order.

What strikes me is that my life is kind of the opposite. All of my decisions made sense prospectively; it’s only now that they appear not to have been adding up to anything. I always made the “right” call, in the moment, at least if you define right by what the world will approve of, as the most conventional option. And now, at 35, I find myself reflecting on 20 years of careful choices that have brought me … here. Home to … myself. To this frantic restlessness.

Maybe what we really need is to let go of the need for an order. Maybe what I need to do is to let go of my desperate desire for there to be a plan, an ordering logic. Perhaps making a decision in the moment, with all of the information we have at that time, is the best we can do. That, and accepting the surprises that come our way, shifting our course infinitessimally but irrevocably. Maybe my friend and I aren’t that different, after all. Maybe we both have the same single and fundamental task: to make peace with the roads we have travelled, as straight or winding as they have been, and to trust that we are up to the task of what lies ahead, whatever it may be.

E.L. Doctorow’s quote comes to mind: “You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Maybe now my job is to stop squinting past the headlights. It’s only causing me panic that I can’t see, hurting my eyes, and taking my attention away from what is right in front of me.

I am grateful, sad, scared, and in the middle of my life.

With so much gratitude to Alana at Whole Self Coach for this wonderful meme, and belated thanks for the Sunshine Award! I’d love to hear any of your answers to these simple but thought-provoking questions

I am: Sitting in bed next to my son. Grateful. Sad. Scared of change. In the middle of my life.

I think: Too much. Sometimes self-defeatingly.

I know: Less than ever, almost nothing for sure.

I want: To believe in something. To know that my faith will catch me if I fall and that there is grace for us all.

I have: So much more than I need.

I dislike: Entitlement. Unkindness. Rudeness.

I miss: My grandmothers.

I fear: Abandonment. Loss. That I am squandering my life.

I feel: All the time. So intensely that it often makes me cry.

I hear: My son whispering to himself as he builds a Lego on the floor next to me.

I smell: Sunscreen, laundry, and, faintly, the Goldfish he is eating.

I crave: Safety. To be seen and known, completely, and loved anyway.

I usually: Take things far too personally.

I search: For the glowing, surpassing sense of peace that visits me, infrequently but undeniably. Usually it comes in words, the sky, or the sleeping faces of my children.

I wonder: What the months and years ahead hold. What Grace and Whit will remember from these days. What I am supposed to be doing in the world.

I regret: More than I can enumerate.

I love: My children. My family. My dearest friends, who know who they are. Words. Running. The sky.

I care: Deeply. About homelessness. About education. That the people who matter to me know that they are loved.

I am always: Early.

I worry: About big things that I cannot control. The economy. The environment. Change in general. As a child, every single night, I prayed that there be peace on earth and no nuclear war. Literally, for years and years that was the one thing I prayed for.

I remember: Many small moments, preserved like so many tiny jeweled Faberge eggs in my memory. My teacher, Mr. Valhouli, who was the first person to really light me on fire about the power of words and literature.

I dance: Infrequently. Dancing with me is like driving a truck.

I sing: Poorly. It is the thing I am worst at in the world.

I don’t always: Remember that most of what other people say and do is about them, not me.

I argue: Too often.

I write: Because I can’t not. To find out what I think.

I lose: At board games and leisure sports, all the time.

I wish: That everyone had a roof over their head. That I could turn off my brain sometimes. That I could be a more sunny and more serene mother for my children.

I listen: Not as well as I should.

I don’t understand: Very much at all.

I can usually be found: At my computer, in my little third-floor office looking out of the window.

I am scared: That the people I love most will leave me. That I am not contributing enough to the world.

I need: 8 hours of sleep a night.

I forget: How to speak French. Almost anything of importance. My own email address, sometimes.

I am happy: Near the ocean. On transatlantic flights. In the pages of a beautiful book. When I am able to be still with my children. In the presence of dear, trusted native-speaker friends.

Why do I write?

Jo at Mylestones described yesterday her weekend of quotidian experiences with her children, concluding, with lovely, resonant truth: “I write so I won’t forget. I write because the little moments matter to me, because they add up to my life.”

She closed her post by asking her readers two questions: Why do you write? What small little moments of the last few days do you want to remember?

I’ll take those in reverse order. The last few days have held a profusion of small moments. Last night, checking on Grace and Whit to see them sleeping in the same bed (the condo we are staying in has two double beds in their room). They were turned away from each other, each a comma on the pillowy white landscape of the pristine bedding. Convincing a crying, ornery Whit yesterday to ride on the bike attached to the back of mine only to hear him proclaim, after a few minutes, “Hey, mummy! You were right! This is super fun!” Watching the backs of two cousins heads, dark and otter-sleek, as they bobbed together in the pool. The night sky scattered with more stars than I’ve ever seen – the light-spangled darkness seemed to arch over us in a semi-circle, coming all the way down to the horizon – last night while Hilary and I walked on the beach after dinner.

The why I write question is one I think of all the time. The answer is both simple and complex. It is about community, it is about catharsis, it is about excavating truth even as I speak it. It is about, more than anything, the way that I am inspired, over and over again, as a reader, and about my stubborn and perhaps wrong-headed hope that I might provide that feeling for someone else. (originally written on 9/20/2009):

There’s been a proliferation of interesting writing on the topic of Why We Blog this week. Ronna addressed it, focusing on three main points: that blogging is a way to get outside ourselves, is therapeutic, and is a way to tell our stories. She asserted, and I agree, that we all have myriad stories to tell. She hinted that in this telling we are both ourselves enriched and, possibly, privileged to participate in the growth of others. Ronna included an Isak Dinesen quote I love: To be a person is to have a story to tell.

She followed up this post with a second, the next day, about the way that “blogging is a way to create and experience community.” I very much agree with this point, which echoed Aidan’s thoughtful observations on why she blogs. I share the sentiment that blogging is a way to meet (and be met by) people whose lives and stories are very different from our own. I am sometimes keenly aware of the general homogeneity of my life. I love my life, of course, but I do have a certain restlessness of the spirit that is slaked, in part, by learning about people whose lives and choices are very different from my own.

So I’ve been thinking this weekend about Why I Blog. I know I feel a visceral impulse to share the stories of my life, both the mundane ones and the meaningful ones. I know that writing often helps me put shape around my nascent or amorphous thoughts, helps me understand the underlying current beneath a riptide of emotion. Joan Didion put it best: “I write entirely to find out what I am thinking.”

But there’s another, impossible to ignore, reason why I blog. After all, blogging both assumes and actively seeks an audience. Obviously I need, on some level, to know that someone is reading my words. I think this is a reflection of the basic human need to be truly seen. But is it exhibitionistic? Does it make the thoughts and content less meaningful? Is it the wrong thing, to want someone to be reading? I have thought about this a lot, struggling with the initial feeling that it is immature and needy of me to need someone to be out there reading me. On some level this is just a continuation of a pattern of needing to be validated and approved by the big bad world out there, isn’t it?

I think it is that, yes. But I think it is more than that too. I imagine that most writers write for an audience, whether it’s an audience of one (perhaps Steven King’s Ideal Reader) or millions. I cannot in good conscience claim the title of “writer” for myself, but I know that one reason I blog is because I hope to, someday, provide for someone else that shimmering sigh of recognition that some writing I’ve read has given me. That bone-deep sense of being not alone when someone else can put into words thoughts or feelings that have swarmed incoherently around my head and heart. If I can, someday, give a single reader that feeling that I have had so many times in my years of blog-reading, then I will be happy. It feels arrogant to even wish for that, but in truth, I do. I am personally sustained by those moments when someone else’s writing makes my heart physically swell with identification and awareness, and I aspire to provide that for someone else.

For me, more than the community, more than the catharsis, more than the story-telling, it’s about that. About that feeling of recognition, that single moment when you read a sentence or a paragraph and suddenly understand something you’ve known all along in a new way. Which, when I think about it, is sort of an amalgam of community, catharsis, and story-telling. I’ve been blessed to be on the receiving end of that feeling many times, and I continue to hope that I might provide it for someone out there.

To illustrate my point, here is one such passage – a paragraph that made me shiver because it put into such beautiful words something I’ve thought before. A paragraph that happens to be ABOUT that feeling. (oh so very meta).

Have you ever looked at, say, a picture or a great building or read a paragraph in a book and felt the world suddenly expand and, at the same instant, contract and harden into a kernel of perfect purity?
– Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

Yes, I have. And I did just there. And that’s why I write.

(And no, I am not arrogantly comparing myself to one of the great writers of the last few decades. No. I come up to Carol Shields’ ankle. But she inspires me.)