oh this is hard

Energy

Have you ever had the feeling that the universe is trying to tell you something?  Well, I have.  It happens with words and phrases I can’t stop thinking about or images and icons I can’t stop seeing.  And other ways.  My friend Elizabeth beautifully describes this exact phenomenon.  She finds herself keenly – painfully, even – aware of the energy of strangers, a psychic tells her she is a spiritual warrior, she finds moths – a symbol of metamorphosis – everywhere, and she opens Mark Nepo’s Book of Awakening randomly (or not) onto a page titled “How to be a Spiritual Warrior.”

The meta-thing is, I felt that way reading Elizabeth’s post.  Yes, yes, and yes.  For one thing, Mark Nepo’s Book of Awakening is the only book that lives permanently on my bedside table.  Everything she describes is intimately familiar to me, perhaps so close I never was able to put good, clear words around it.  Luckily for me, Elizabeth can.  She writes about reading Mark Nepo’s passage on how spiritual warriors have broken hearts, and my skin prickles and my eyes fill with tears.  I’ve written about this exact thing before.  But never this precisely or this beautifully:

I feel the energies of others so strongly because I am broken, my soul veined with deep fissures that allow their light and darkness to seep in through the cracks.  It seems like a lot of freight of haul around with me.  But there is a flip side.  Mystery and wonder are at my fingertips, although I’ve never fully allowed them to enter those deep crevasses.

I knew that I was so open to the energy of others and so finely aware to the nuances of a situation because of my own brokenness, though I’d never quite heard it said as beautifully as Elizabeth does.  That I am porous is a simple fact.  The myriad ways that that trait manifests in my life and personality is something I’m still untangling and understanding.  It occurred to me, suddenly, blindingly, as I read Elizabeth’s post, that instead of spending years trying to heal my brokenness, I ought to have instead spelunked into its caverns.  Perhaps it is in those caverns that the glittering universe that I’ve only glimpsed is hidden.

The easily-accessible mystery and wonder that Elizabeth mentions, the “flip side” of our common brokenness, is familiar to me as well.  Just last week I tweeted Shana Alexander’s quote: “We strain to renew our capacity for wonder, to shock ourselves into astonishment once again” with the caveat that I never have to strain.  If anything, I often wish I could tamp down my own awareness, my predilection towards awe.  It can be so sharp it cuts me, this constant noticing of life’s beauty.

I suppose this is just another circle in my orbit around the same questions, the echoing black hole in the center of my life.  Each time, I tell myself, I move closer to understanding my own essential nature, the commingled dark and brightness of my deepest wound, more clearly.  Thank you, Elizabeth.

The soundtrack of those long, dark weeks

I sit at my desk in my small third-floor office, the only sound the click of the computer keyboard as I write a few sentences in Scrivener.  I listen to You Are My Sunshine wafting through Whit’s closed bedroom door and sit back in my chair, quiet, letting the song wash over me.  The song changes to Puff the Magic Dragon and my eyes fill with tears.  I go stand in his dim, nightlight-lit room, watching him sleep.

The shadowy room is full of ghosts who whisper to me.  I can hear the faint squeak of the yellow rocker as I sit in it, pushing back and forth, back and forth.  I hold a sleeping baby Grace and my tears splash on the blanket in which she is swaddled.  I lean over and plant a kiss on her forehead, my face wet with my crying, and murmur to her I am sorry.

I listen to those long-ago years, listen to the story they tell of a mother as newborn as her baby daughter, of a woman startled by the yawning cavern that has opened up right in the middle of her life.  I hear myself rushing through bedtime, desperate for an hour when I’m nobody’s mother.  I listen to Come Away To Sea, to Blackbird, to Baby Mine, to the soundtrack of those long, dark weeks and months.  I listen and I ache, wishing I could have those nights back.  In part because I want to do them differently, with more love, more patience, less frustration, less impatience.  Because I want my first experience of motherhood with my first baby to have been different.  But also just because I want those nights back.  Every single one of them.

To listen to You Are My Sunshine, to hear myself sing it in a whisper to a sleeping baby in my arms.  One more time.

Please click over to Momalom for lots of beautiful writing on today’s 5 for 5 topic, Listening.

The more I know, the less I understand

It’s no secret my life is running into a headwind right now.  I’m still walking, but it is slow going, and I feel like I’m facing big waves and a strong current.  I know enough about the tides of my own emotions to know this will ebb, and probably soon.  But what won’t change, I don’t think, is my ever-firmer conviction that adulthood is about uncertainty.  The adages about this fly fast and furious: the central gist is that as children we think we know everything and as adults we know we know nothing.

Trite, maybe.  Cliched, certainly.

But it is also true.  I wrote a while back about the pieces of myself that I left in the land of newborns, in those weeks and months steeped in exhaustion and milk and a dizzying sense that the world had just shifted on its axis.  “Most of all I left behind my certainty,” I wrote, and I think that’s utterly true.

But it didn’t stop there.  Instead, I seem to shed certainty every year.  Things I thought I knew for sure have been upended and challenged in more ways than I can count.  The universe does many things well, but one of the best is presenting me with opportunities to realize how erroneous my assumptions and certainties are.  So many times I’ve been absolutely – obnoxiously! – sure about something and I’ve come face to face with the unassailable evidence of my own idiocy.

What’s interesting to me is that as the questions and the not-knowing at the heart of my life grows so, too, does my faith.  By faith I mean my sense that there is something sacred and holy out there, simultaneously much bigger than I am and an intimate part of me, throbbing in my veins right alongside my own blood.  I use “faith” to describe a constellation of emotions, some amalgam of trust, belief, religion, and wonder.

What do I make of these seemingly-opposed developments inside my spirit?  Is my deepening faith a necessary survival response to the terrifying ambiguity of the world?  I don’t know.  I can’t believe these two tracks – my sureness unraveling just as my beliefs grow firmer – are unrelated.  All I know is the very real comfort I feel in the words of others much more brilliant and wise than I, who speak of something similar.

The more I know, the less I understand. – Don Henley

The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. – Anne Lamott

There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds. – Alfred, Lord Tennyson  (thank you, Ronna Detrick)

What do you think?  Is my developing faith just my subconscious trying to cope with the fearful uncertainty of the world?    Do either of these resonate with you?

Begin again

Everyone has moments – weeks, months, seasons – of sadness, fear, grief, anxiety.  That’s the human condition, right?  And we walk through the darkness, because, really, what choice do we have?  I can’t count the number of times in my life where I’ve felt like throwing up my hands, giving up, burrowing under the covers.  But then a child needs a glass of milk or help with brushing their teeth, or the work phone rings and I really have to take it, or laundry pile finally threatens to overflow the hamper.

And so I get up and deal with what needs to be done.

But the truth is that slogging through one of these valleys – even when I can see the other side, and know it’s bright – is tough and tiring.  Sometimes I feel like screaming up at God, or whatever the greater power out there that I hope I believe in is, “Okay!  Enough with the learning!  Enough with the tough love!”  Sometimes I just want to lie down and coast.

But I can’t.  I don’t know if others can; I really don’t.  A lot of people look better at dealing with the sine curve of life, at least from where I sit.  A lot of people – and I envy them, let me be clear – seem to experience fewer moments of spirit-shaking emotion than I do.  A lot of them can describe what Easter means to their children, or admire the clear, extraordinary blue of an April sky, or witness a christening, without bursting into tears.  Hell, a lot of people don’t burst into tears every single day.

I do.

Somehow that intense emotion, that wound at the very core of my being, is bearable most of the time.  Right now, though, it feels like too much.  I am bone-tired, my emotions are worn paper-thin, my is patience frayed.  I know my life runs close to the surface, that’s not news to me.  And this isn’t news, either, this sense of being deep in the weeds and of each step being a struggle.  It is so not-new, in fact, that I have a theory as to its cause: I suspect this exhaustion occurs when I’m letting go of something, even though I’m not sure what it is yet.  Right now I’m overly aware of the cracks in everything, and I can’t see the light they’re letting in.  Many days I feel a tightness in my chest and tears pricking my eyes and a general sense of sorrow that is, for now, as powerful as it is inarticulate.

But the children need their teeth brushed, and the work phone is ringing, and the laundry needs to be done.

What’s my choice, but to get up, to keep going, to begin again?

Adrienne Rich

I remember one shadowy afternoon in the winter of 1996 in college, sitting across from my thesis advisor talking about my work on three 20th century poets.  I picked up a sort of convoluted slinky thing made of cardboard that sat on her desk.  In my hands it morphed, rotating in and out and folding in on itself and out again.  It was a science experiment, a shell, a marvel of simplicity and complexity in a desk toy.  I couldn’t stop playing with it.

“Adrienne Rich gave me that,” my advisor said casually.

“She did?” My eyes grew wide and I looked down at the cardboard spiral in my hand.

Years later, I attended a reading Adrienne Rich gave at Harvard.  I dashed down to the front after she was finished to meet her, and was struck by how tiny and bowed she was.  And yet her miniscule person emanated a power I’ve rarely experienced.  Her eyes crinkled when I told her I’d written about her, and she managed to make me feel that she cared even though she’d surely heard that a zillion times before.

Adrienne Rich’s poetry has been important to me for a long time, some of her words so familiar they have become incantations, stones worn smooth with my mind’s constant turning over and rubbing of them.  She is one of a handful of poets – the others are William Wordsworth, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Stanley Kunitz – who I literally hear inside my head on a daily basis.

I’ve written about her here before, many times.  I consider her poem Towards the Solstice, which contains the lines “and there is still so much here we do not understand” a totem: to a person like me for whom light and dark and the turning of the earth are literal, visceral parts of my human experience it is among the very greats.  Power, her poem about Marie Curie makes me believe that my aching, painful sensitivity might somehow also be an asset: “her wounds came from the same source as her power.”

My mind is flooded with Adrienne Rich’s images, the great dark birds of history and the book in which our names do not appear and poetry being a land where she wasn’t anyone’s mother.  Yes, she was angry, filled with what the New York times called “towering rage,” but she was also brave and honest, a woman pursuing authenticity even when it meant howling into the darkness and rejecting the known.  I am familiar mainly with her poetry and with the prose of Of Woman Born, a book about “motherhood as experience and institution” (from its own subtitle).  In this part of her canon, the theme of creation, and its inextricable, complex relationship with procreation is central.  The female body is heavy and present, haunting almost all of her poems.

After I learned of her death I went back to my thesis and reread the chapter on her, but, even more importantly, I went back to the texts I read for the first time as I wrote it.  There are volumes of poetry and prose, all underlined and full of marginalia.  I can easily close my eyes and be back in my small study carrel in Firestone Library, reading these words and feeling them sink in, aware of something enormous turning over inside of me for the first time, an animal part of my spirit that was never quiet again after that initial awakening.  Rich herself midwifed that birth of a part of me, and remembering those days is bittersweet.

I don’t know how to adequately describe how vital this woman and her words are to me.  I grieve her loss while knowing that her words will live on, for me and for generations more, their incandescence undimmed.  I’ll just end with one of my favorite passages – resonant because of many things, but not least because I relate to the idea of reconstituting something, with no extraordinary power – from the last stanza of her poem Natural Resources:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.