musings

My awkward, stumbling search for faith is no secret. I write often of the way I trudge through my days, alternating with lightning speed and cloudy confusion between certainty and doubt. There are times, though, when the idea floating up in my mind seems to be echoed by external messages in a way that can’t be an accident. I was thinking yesterday of the ways that my spirit manifests through my physical body, and then I read three things that convinced me this inquiry was something to dwell on. I started a book that I already know is going to change my life (and I don’t say that lightly): Devotion, Dani Shapiro’s new memoir. And I read posts by two of my beloved blogfriends, Ronna and Julie.

They all seemed to be speaking about what I’d been thinking about. There is something that is true deep down in your body: listen to it. Okay. Perhaps I should believe that my attention is being drawn, like my eyes to shook foil, to this theme for a reason.

Dani Shapiro describes how the word please “seemed to emerge from some deep and hollow cavern” inside of herself. Please, as in: please help me to understand. This is so familiar to me. Often the word that I hear over and over is just that: please. please, please, please. She then shares her view that the startling moments of clarity come at random times, and that “those insights are already fully formed – they are literally inside our bodies, if only we know where to look.”

Ronna writes about “this deep, before-time wisdom that I know-that-I-know-that-I-know that I have; that … all women have.” And Julie speaks of the energy of the Great Mother, and of how she “first became conscious of Her presence a number of years ago. It felt as if someone was pulling me down, way down into my body, into the depths of the darkness that the descent illuminates.” Julie mentions that she initially resisted this pull into her innermost physicality because it contradicted all the years of spiritual teachings about “transcendence” and “Light.”

There is something here. It’s not fully formed yet in my head, but there is something about the wisdom of the body, the story in the pulse, the truth in the marrow of our bones. It’s more than just the way we – certainly I – can sometimes know things in a visceral way. It is more than the cyclical nature of the female body, the ways that we spiral through circles and seasons, ebbing and flowing and waxing and waning in a way much less directly linear than either the world or, maybe, the male body. It’s more than the ways the state of my spirit manifests in my physical well-being, specifically how my lack of boundaries results (I believe) in my being sick far more often than I’d like. I am permeable, porous to the outside world, letting in both good and bad influences far too easily.

What is this something? What is this that I’m sensing, to which I’m being guided gently to by the words of the world? I don’t know. Something about the ways that our spirit communicates through our bodies. Something about a knowledge that is on the flip side of reason, beyond logic, to a place where all there is is belief. Something soaked in blood, in tears, in milk. Something that might – maybe? – be showing me the way towards faith, towards meaning, towards the things, both maddeningly abstract and all-important, that I ache for most powerfully.

I can think of so many examples of this thing – this energy? this truth? – animate in my life. The way my physical self slept ten hours a night through my senior year in high school, hibernating through a lonely and sad winter the way an animal might. The way some vibrating core of power I didn’t know I had, exhausted but ferocious, propelled me through Grace’s delivery. The way my body shrank into a husk of itself within weeks of that delivery as my depression drove me to try to hide, escape, vanish. The way my dear friend Taylor always used to talk about people being “in their bodies” as shorthand for being present, engaged, conscious.

I don’t have a clear conclusion yet, only a newfound conviction to listen to the messages that I know throb in my bloodstream. There is more there than the simple beat of my heart. It occurs to me (just now!) that this could be merely another expression of instinct and intuition, the same internal choir I’ve been struggling so mightily to tune into. So when this trio of women whose writing I respect all seemed to speak about the same thing, they are the universe speaking to me: yes, this is a worthy effort. The answers you seek are already there: you just need to know where to look and how to listen.

I spent four years in school in England growing up. Throughout all of our ceaseless back-and-forth across the ocean, my parents remained committed to educating us in the local systems. So a French preschool taught me to read, and the British system taught me a lot of stuff which culminated in ten GCSE exams at the end of 10th grade.

One of the subjects I took for GCSE (the old O Levels) was Geography. This was not, as you might assume, the study of maps and the world’s order. Anyone who’s spent any time with me, and observed me arguing my firm belief that Peru and Tibet are right next to each other can vouch for this. No, Geography was more a tour of totally random subjects loosely connected to the natural world – rain, different climate systems, oil rigs in the North Sea, city planning. Pretty random stuff, but I found it oddly fascinating.

One of the subjects that has really stayed with me is the study of how, over time, a river meanders. Meander is both verb and noun here: the meander of a river refers to its bends, which gradually grow more and more concave (or convex in the other direction). Over time, the quality of the moving water (differences in speed, suspended silt) carves a once-straight river into the swooping arcs we have all seen. Eventually the river cuts itself off, returning to a straight passage and stranding the arc into a now-lonely oxbow lake. These movements are driven by tiny differences in the amount of sediment suspended in water, or in the speed that water moves. Such massive, permanent engraving on the face of the earth is driven by such miniscule things.

This metaphor rings through my mind all the time. How small things, things we don’t even notice, add up to huge changes. How without even realizing it, as we move through our days of small mundane actions, we are carving permanently into the soil of our lives.

Yet water doesn’t always carve. Witness sea glass, edges smoothed from a sharpness that could slice into soft, perfect roundness by the power of water’s passage. The water of the ocean tumbles sharp things, wearing them smooth. So, moving water has the power to either cut us or to sand us to smoothness.

Water is time. Time, whose passage thrums with the same irrefutable, unavoidable urgency as does a river’s flow or the ocean’s tide. I can’t reconcile why sometimes we wind up a smooth, beautiful piece of sea glass and sometimes we end up an abandoned oxbow lake. I just know that in both cases, the movement to that reality is made up of a million imperceptible things. As moving water marks the earth, so does time mark our spirits. Minutes add up to months, and months add up to our lives. And as they do, they indelibly shape and mark us.

I love this picture that I took a few days ago of the heartbreakingly clear blue sky with the moon and a plane. I love it. I’m moved by seeing man’s boldest, bravest gamble (to fly!) juxtaposed with the moon, which represents (to me) the timeless, ever-turning nature of the universe. By the contrast between the linear motion of an airplane and the cyclical motion of the moon and the planets. Straight lines and circles. Forward and around and backward: time folding in on itself, time present echoing time past and foreshadowing time future. All in the cornflower blue sky that is probably my favorite color.

*****

It has been a quiet few days for me, without a lot of sleep. The sadness and loneliness that walk with me every day are a persistent undertow, and I struggle to stay upright. I walked with Grace and Whit down to the drycleaner today in the afternoon’s full sunshine. It strikes me that the same tension existed in that moment as I see in the photograph above. As my children ran straight down the street, straight into their futures, their laughter seeming to echo off of the barren trees I was painfully aware too of the unrestricted, repetitive circling of my own mood, my own thoughts clear standing water to muddied, restless eddies. As we walked, the straight, irrevocable line of time scraped against the circular, non-rational loops of my spirit. As is often the case, there was pain in the scraping, and a little bit of blood drawn.

*****

On Monday afternoon I ran in what can practically be called a monsoon. It was pouring. The kind where you are soaked to the skin just in the walk from your car to your door. It was also warm, which meant that the snow had been melting and there were deep puddles. I was ankle-deep in dirty water by the time I’d hit a quarter mile. The sidewalks were murderously slippery: a few tenacious strips of snow, packed to a dirty translucence that resembles ice, hid under the running water. I almost wiped out several times. Once again, my body moved forward in a straight line, my breath and footsteps both beating a regular cadence, but my mind ran its endless, convoluted circles.

The contradiction between time’s relentless linearity and the irregular, swooping arcs of my heart and mind is a theme of my life.  They even exist, held together in their opposition and duality, in the body of every woman: we are defined by the arrow-straight path from birth to death and also by the cyclical nature of the various bodily processes that allow us to bear life.  The challenge for me is not letting there be too much tension between the two rhythms, but learning to let them coexist as peacefully as possible.