oh this is hard

Sometimes I stagger under the weight of my own feelings.  This season has turned so swiftly from one of relative calm to one of choppy seas and brand new changes, and I am still struggling to find my balance.  On a daily basis, both my anxiety and my good fortune overwhelm me.  How to take the measure of each?  I can’t.  I can only seesaw back and forth between moments of panic and those of intense awareness of how good my life is.  Maybe it is precisely this gratitude that makes the uncertainty feel so perilous.

There are moments when I am literally brought to my knees by a sharp reminder of something that is lost or by a breathtaking pang of fear about what may come.  But then, often, in the wake of those powerful emotions comes the world, weak but undeniable in its insistence that I open my eyes.

Yesterday, Julie Daley tweeted a beautiful line by Rumi: “I can’t stop pointing to the beauty.”  This is so right, and so true; while I am occasionally swamped by bleakness, almost always there are faint fissures in the dark through which light, and reminders of goodness, can creep.

The suddenness with which this has become an uncertain and unstable time cautions me, again, not to ever grow too attached to the way things are in a specific moment.  It all changes.  I’m thrashing around in these suddenly stormy waters, but trying to keep my eyes on the light, on the cracks, on the sunrises where I can still see the moon (the picture above was taken on the way to Jerusalem, when we landed in Madrid at dawn).  There is so much loss, and so much fear, and it is easy for me to lose sight of the beauty all around.  It doesn’t make up for some of the heartbreak, and certainly doesn’t take away the roiling anxiety, but it can ameliorate it.  Some of it.

For so many years I tried to outrun my sadness and my sensitivity, but no matter how fast I went it trailed behind me, stuttering on the pavement like the cans tied behind a bride and groom’s getaway car.  No matter how hard I sprinted I could not evade it, this lingering sadness, this strange but overwhelming sense of loss that infused even the most ordinary moments, this heartbreak that hovered around the edges of my life.

In the last few years that heartbreak has caught up to me.  My deepest wound finally opened wide enough that I could no longer ignore it.  I’ve been slowly circling the black hole at the center of my life, drawn inexorably towards it even as I fear the heartbreak that lives there.  That black hole is the brutal truth that it all passes, that every single moment is gone even as I live it, that no matter how hard I try, how fiercely, white-knuckled, I cling, I cannot hold onto my life.

I’m certain it was my children who forced me to turn and to stare into the sun of my life’s blinding, but evanescent right now.  To fall into the place where the heart of my life beats.  Paradoxically, they demonstrated both the unavoidable drumbeat march of time and the critical importance of being still in each individual moment.  They inhabited the now with an impossible-to-ignore stubbornness, yet they also marked time’s passage in a visceral way.  Unaware of this contradiction, they tugged me to the place I’d always shied away from.  They taught me that being present is both the most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever done and the only way to truly live my life.

In the strange, out-of-regular-life lacuna that the last week has been, I spent some time thinking about how the way that I interact with the world has fundamentally changed.  It’s no insight to observe that a marked rupture from status quo can jolt us into reflection and a new perspective on that normalcy.  I realize, not for the first time, but again, that I’ve stopped – for the most part – those hiding-from-my-life behaviors.  Instead, I now live in a permanent state of broken-heartedness.  The savage and beautiful reality of life’s impermanence colors every moment of my life.

Sometimes I am jealous of those who are less porous, who can walk through life without being so frequently brought to their knees by the pain and brilliance of it.  My every conscious moment is filtered through this prism of my piercing awareness of how fleeting it is.  In the last few years I’ve become almost painfully aware of every detail around me.  The sight of a half moon, one edge ragged, foggy, in the morning sky makes my breath catch, a cascade of emotions tinkling inside me like windchimes: the physical beauty of this planet, the sky’s being near and yet far, the concrete evidence of time’s passage in imperfect not-wholeness of the moon.  I suspect this, the way I am so attuned to the most mundane of details, is either an attempt to fully inhabit each moment or an effort to freeze it, like an insect in amber, but I don’t know which.

And what I realize, again, fiercely, is that this is how I want to live:  in the right now of my life with a broken heart.  I want this, in full knowledge of the pain it carries, far more than I want to keep hiding from my life.  This is a decision I make not in one grandiose declaration, but every single day, every single minute.  It’s not even, really, a decision so much as following my intuition about the way I want to inhabit the world, and it lives in where I choose to place my attention.

I distinctly remember, as a child, looking at the cover of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and thinking: those words are what I want.  In particular I gravitated towards glory (I’ve never been very interested in power).  That’s what I thought I wanted to be able to say I’d had at the end of my life.  Glory.

The words I lean towards now – as goals, ideals, inspirations – are very different.  They don’t have the glamor or the sparkle of glory. No, the words that I hold onto, and aim for, now are humble.  Nice.  Peaceful.  Solid.  Steadfast.

This last word in particular has been in my mind since I read the following words from Pema Chodron:

How do we cultivate the conditions for joy to expand? We train in staying present. In sitting meditation, we train in mindfulness and maitri: in being steadfast with our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts. We stay with our own little plot of earth and trust that it can be cultivated, that cultivation will bring it to its full potential. Even though it’s full of rocks and the soil is dry, we begin to plow this plot with patience.

Sadly, to my own disappointment, I am far from steadfast.  My footing is unstable, I am blown around by the winds, I feel insubstantial.  I want to be more sure, more certain, more definitive.  I want to trust, in myself and in the world.  I’ve written before of how I give up before things even get hard.  This is a theme in my life, and one I am quite ashamed of: it is rare that I grit my teeth and just stick it out.  Unless, of course, I really have to.  I think of Grace’s birth, or my most recent half marathon.  Both of those were things I truly thought I could not do.  But somehow – in the former, I didn’t have a choice, and in the latter I was determined not to walk, as I had the first time – I pushed through the resistance to the end.

How do I develop this determination, this commitment of spirit and heart?  My friend Pam writes – as usual, gorgeously – about realizing that she, too, has not fully committed to herself.  In the woods, during a trail race, she found reserves and commitment within herself.  Her words made my eyes well with tears (okay, fine, they usually do) and I recognized myself in them.

While I am not at all sure how to become more steadfast, I am certain that the effort is about gradual, not sudden, growth and change.  I must let my few but important episodes of seeing something through become a well I can draw on, a source of strength, a reminder that I actually can stick it out.  I don’t know what else to do other than to keep trying, even as I stumble, to inhabit my unassuming, yet urgent, words: nice. peaceful. solid. steadfast.

Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we’re going to die.  The most mysterious aspect of being alive might be that — and poetry knows that.

I read these sentences, from Terry Gross, on Beth Kephart’s beautiful blog last week and I simultaneously gasped and welled up with tears.  As I wrote in Beth’s comments, the lines reminded me of a Stanley Kunitz quote I shared over the summer:

“Years ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace such knowledge and yet to remain compassionate and whole – that is the consummation of the endeavor of art.”

I write incessantly about the same thing here: about the passage of time, about the deep way that unavoidable truth gouges into my spirit, about the tears that surprise me with their frequency and power, about the surpassing joy that exists in the tiniest moments of my life.  Isn’t this all simply a less articulately-conveyed description of the very lyric tension Kunitz describes, of what Terry Gross avers that poetry knows?

Perhaps my inclination towards melancholy and my exquisite sensitivity to the clock’s forward tick is inextricably linked to my passionate love of poetry.  Maybe all of these things – traits, preferences, leanings – are manifestations of the same central seam of meaning that runs through the human experience.  Maybe the shadow that flickers across everyone’s life is universal, and it’s just that I’m particularly sensitive to it.  Wouldn’t be the first time.

As you know I am often frustrated with myself for what feels like an endless circling of the same question, like I’m turning over a stone incessantly, hoping that somehow I’ll eventually uncover some message etched into its surface.  Several people have commented that instead of a circle, maybe it’s a spiral; a continued revisiting of the same themes, but with new understanding with each trip around.

The image that recurs for me is of the exhibit at the science museum that was the first thing to hold my attention when I visited as a child with my father.  It’s the one where a black ball makes circles around a gradually sloped surface, tighter and tighter circles, drawn inexorably towards the hole in the middle, into which it finally drops.  I believe the exhibit is a display of centrifugal force.  It’s that circling black ball that I think about, over and over: I’m drawn in a way I can neither understand nor particularly name, in a spiral that grows ever tighter, to a black hole in the center of my life.  And that black hole, I realize, when I read Terry Gross’s words, and Stanley Kunitz’s, is perhaps at the center of all of our lives.

The challenge, for me, is to incorporate my understanding of this most mysterious aspect of life into my experience without being utterly paralyzed by it.  The question is how to find peace despite this yawning abyss.  Is it possible, though, that life is full of grandeur, beauty, and blinding pain not despite but because of this black hole?