I wish you quietness, and the kind of rest that has you wake up feeling calm. And warm feet and glowing embers, and shortbread cookies or latkes and rosy cheeks or whatever sustains you. And tears if you need them, wet and cleansing.
These words render me mute by being all that matters.
And so I pass them on, and nod to you.
From Kate at sweet/salty. Beautiful.
As she alludes, there is nothing more to say (I think).
I am reading Awaiting the Child by Isabel Anders, a beautiful meditation on waiting, light, pregnancy, darkness, and religion. Thank you, Nicki, for the recommendation! The book is written as a daily journal by a minister’s wife, experiencing Advent as she also awaits the birth of her first child. It’s a lovely and thoughtful book, profound without being off-putting (to me).
Last night one chapter about wintry and summery believers really resonated.
Wintry spirituality is a kind of awareness, an acceptance of paradox – the coexistence of the irreconcilable. For the wintry believer, irony is a motif and a theme in our human story that cannot be ignored. Winter people know that even the most fulfilling presence of another is best mixed with a pinch of absence for contrast. The harder paradox is one of accepting that pain, too, has purpose and can be redemptive in the end…
This reminds me yet again of the same theme of light and darkness, joy and sorrow, the seems to echo through my days (and my writing, apologies for the ad nauseum pounding of the same thematic drum). I wonder again about this dichotomy, this coexistence of the irreconcilable: is it a venn diagram with one contained within the other (if so, which is bigger?), two overlapping circles, or neither? Does it matter? I don’t know. I know my instinct, always, is to categories, understand, bucket, as though by doing that I can control and compartmentalize my emotions. I know much better than that by now, but the instinct remains strong.
It will surprise nobody that I love charts, graphs, and all kinds of graphical displays of information (my love of maps is well documented). I grew up tripping over Tufte and still worship him. Indexed has been a great find for me, speaking to the Tufte-lover in me as well as the admirer of all things droll and cerebral (Jessica Hagy manages to be both simultaneously).
A random post this morning, but one that captures the multitude of weirdly-connected things that swirl in my head any given day. A beautiful book about spirituality and religion, musings about winter and summer, warm and cold, light and dark, and admiration for those who can succinctly and elegantly sum up complex thoughts in simple graphical terms.
I had Sarah Jarosz’s “Long Journey” in my head yesterday.
I have just begun
A long journey that will run
The length and width of summertime
And the cool fall air will blow me home
I had one of those tender and tentative afternoons, gradually tiptoeing my back from a night and morning of feeling positively terrible. Before bed, Grace wanted to write a note to her beloved Mr. Hove, the intern teacher in her classroom who is moving on after this term. She is really sad about saying goodbye to him and has been talking about it all week.
She wrote him the note above. Totally earnestly, she asked me if she could include a dollar in the note. She has eleven dollars saved up, from losing teeth and a couple of other random things, and she sincerely wanted to give him one. She was so sweet, so genuine when she asked this, and I had to stifle a giggle. It was hard to explain why that was probably not the right way to show him how much she appreciated him.
Ultimately we decided she would give him her very favorite Magic Treehouse book. This is a treasured item in her life, and I am impressed at the fact that she gives it away freely. As I tucked her into bed, Grace was noticeably sad.
“Are you okay, Gracie?” I asked
“Yes, I’m just sad tonight.” She didn’t meet my eyes, instead concentrating on her hands as she fiddled with her teddy bear’s ears.
“Why?”
“I am so sad about Mr. Hove leaving.”
“I know, sweetie. It’s hard to say goodbye.”
“Why do things have to change? I don’t like that. I want them to stay the same.” She shook her head fiercely, pursing her lips and visibly fighting back tears.
Oh, Gracie. Me too. Oh, me too.
After both children were in bed I went downstairs to the kitchen. I passed through the living room on my way back upstairs, pausing to look at the Christmas tree, lit up and sparkling in the dark room. I felt a wave of emotion wash over me, fear about change, sadness about farewell, a grown up version of the same things Gracie had just elucidated.
I knelt on the floor and rested my elbows on the coffee table, hands folded. This is not a position I have ever found myself in before. Ever. I stared at the tree in the darkness, resting my chin on my hands, feeling an unfamiliar mixture of intense anxiety and deep peace. I closed my eyes and heard my own breathing and felt infinitely big and infinitesimally small at the same time. Again, again, I heard Wordsworth’s familiar lines in my head:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused.
I was suddenly, startlingly aware of the presence of something in the room with me. The fragility of the day, my daughter’s sagacious words, the glimmering lights in the near-solstice darkness all combined into a potent cocktail that seeped into my marrow. I feel I am perched on the edge of something big, and new, and scary. Neither those fears nor the desperate, anxious sadness of saying goodbye to a comfortable status quo are new. But what is new is the undeniable current of calm I felt, that sense sublime that throbbed like a bass note under the melodic and deafening descant of my far more verbal and outspoken fears. I don’t know that it will always be there, but it was last night, and I hope it will again.
Big Little Wolf wrote beautifully yesterday about home. In her trademark eloquent prose she wrote about the consequences when “home” shifts, the difficulty of feeling really at home in a place or with a person, what it means to be homeless, whether or not you can “go home again.”
I read her words with tears streaming down my face. I’ve written before about my stubborn sense of not really belonging. Big Little Wolf’s words accessed this same seam of feeling, reminded me of my feeling of having a foot in many words but a home in none. This feeling runs deep in my soul, and always makes me sad when it bubbles to the surface. It animates many of my actions and habits.
There is no point in wallowing in it, that much I do know. And today I am interested in its source. Where does my persistent feeling of not really fitting in come from? It would be easy to point fingers at my nomadic childhood (I lived in three countries by the age of 12 and moved consistently across an ocean every 4-5 years). But I think that is an overly simplistic answer. My slippery but inescapable sense of being outside rather than in is more fundamental than that. I think the restlessness of spirit that keeps me from fully engaging in any one world, from fully embracing a single identity is innate. It courses through my bloodstream as surely as platelets and plasma.
Is it some kind of defense mechanism? Why is it that I refuse to fully let go and surrender to one clearly-defined life? What am I afraid of? Of being seen? I write all the time about the human need to be seen, but I wonder if I’m actually afraid of the vulnerability that goes with this kind of being known. If I skip around between worlds, never fully engaging in or identifying with one, do I hope to innoculate myself from this scary vulnerability? Am I scared of what someone who really sees me will see?
Or is it a basic unease in my own skin? For some reason that I cannot articulate yet, maybe I am not wholly sure of where I fit because I am not entirely sure who I am yet. Maybe I have met so few native speakers because I am still fumbling around with my own language. I do like people, and I am lucky to have many friends; the fact remains, though, that there are very few with whom I feel truly at home.
The shadow of this discomfort about belonging follows me around, its size and darkness varying by the day. It feels like the oblong shadow of a balloon floating above me whose string keeps changing length; some days it is far ahead of me, and I walk in light, and at other times it is positioned just right so that my entire face is obscured by the penumbra.
It makes me oversensitive and insecure, for sure, but I think it also makes me empathetic. I am hyper-aware of other peoples’ comfort or discomfort in situations. I am compassionate and identify with those who do not belong. I also have a faint but undeniable suspicion towards those who exhibit an easy sense of belonging. Are they real?
This sense of not being fully at home anywhere is so essential to my being in this world that I can’t imagine a more secure and simple feeling of belonging. It is ingrained in my spirit, and it colors the lens through which I see and experience everything. In this holy season of darkness and light, may I turn my empathy and compassion on to myself. My vague discomfort in any single home rises like pentimento from underneath of the painting of every day, regardless of how beautiful the scene I manage to draw. May I forgive myself for this, and may I embrace it for the texture that it brings to the art that is my life.
Last week I had a line of a hymn in my head: let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
Today the hymn fragment that is caught in my head is: abide with me. I think this phrase lodged in my head several days ago when I bought Elizabeth Strout’s book of the same name, after being so impressed with Olive Kitteridge that I wanted to read more. But it keeps coming back, humming its short descant in my brain.
So I guess I should listen. My friend whose due date approaches wrote to me, in response to my post to her, If there is only one thing about mothering, about loving, period, it’s that we face things with each other. We can’t fix things or stave off loss or change people, but we can face things together. In classic fashion she spoke clearly something I’ve been thinking fuzzily. And this seems to me another meaning of abide with me.
Isn’t this – this abiding with one another – one way we make our love and affection manifest? It seems another way to talk about “holding space,” a wonderful expression that I learned from Nancy Jane Smith at Live Happier. Holding space – abiding with someone – seems as simple and as challenging as just being with that person.
Just being – ourselves, with someone else, aware – is no small feat for most of us. Being present to someone else with our conscious self. Bearing witness to someone else without judgment. Listening to someone else without agenda. This is a true gift. And I know I’m not great at it. Which is no doubt why the universe has planted this reminder in my head. I’m listening.