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The wound is the place the light enters you. (Rumi)

There’s no question in my mind what my essential wound is.  It’s my sometimes-unbearable sensitivity to the passage of time, the immense difficulty I have accepting life’s basic impermanence.  This manifests in a thousand ways big and small, which I’ve documented in excruciating detail here on this blog.

It occured to me as I rolled Rumi’s words over and over in my head that maybe my wound is especially deep, particularly gapingly open: it lets so much light in that sometimes I have to shield my eyes.  The light floods in, bringing with it drawn-breath moments of astonishment and innumerable gifts, but also a stinging in my eyes and, often, tears.

I’ve contemplated before the idea – and by “contemplated” I mean dreamed, imagined, and ferociously wished – that this sensitivity could somehow be, someday, a source of strength, courage, wisdom.  Even more importantly, I continue searching for a way that this strand of my personality, which manifests mostly as a seam of sometimes shiny sorrow, could be a positive lesson and inheritance for my children.  Both of them already evince qualities that I know come from the same deep well of acute sensitivity that exists inside me.  I’m desperate to find a light in which this heritage isn’t just a suffocatingly heavy blanket of melancholy draped over their experience.

Both Grace and Whit are keenly aware of the world around them.  One of my traditions with them is going for “notice things” walks (sometimes, for extra fun, in our pajamas) during which I celebrate the things that they observe.  Always, without fail, they see something that I would have missed: a heart-shaped engraving on a tree trunk, the way the light hits a particular bush, a darting sparrow in a tree, the trail of white in the sky left by an airplane slicing through the gloaming.

Perhaps this is just the light entering them.  They definitely share my wound, but maybe they also share my propensity towards wonder.  Maybe this makes up for the pain.  I fiercely hope so.

I think I’ve run out of superlatives to describe Pam.  I think I’ll just call her Pam the Great.

Any more of my words would sully the gorgeousness, the sheer this-is-what-life-is-about and so WAKE UP and start living it power of this piece.  So, without any more of my blathering: Pam.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

How to Navigate a Life

When Lindsey emailed me and asked if I would write something about trust, I stared at my computer for a second and then deleted her message. “Trust? Me? Um, no.” A little while later, I wrote back. I told her that I wasn’t really qualified to write about trust unless it was mistrust. Un-trust. “Great,” she wrote back a few seconds later. “I can’t wait.”

That was a few months ago. Obviously, I have been avoiding this, this process of sitting down and untangling. But I have been thinking about it a little, about why it’s so difficult for me. I have been thinking about how my husband takes one look at me some days and gently tells me I am being a porcupine, that my hackles are up. I have been wondering why, in Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese”, Scott remembers the line about letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves, while I always think of: “Tell me about despair, yours and I will tell you mine.”

If words could be things, Meanwhile would be a quilt or a down comforter. Meanwhile would be a steaming cup of tea or a hot bagel from H&H on Broadway. If words could be people, Meanwhile would be Pema Chodron. Ina Garten. I am trying to live into the word Meanwhile. I am trying to inhabit Meanwhile, even when part of my brain is freaking out and thinking about things such as how we have to move again in 11 months. I’m trying to remember Meanwhile, even as I think another move might just do me in, that I am tired of renting other people’s crappy old houses, that I may be the worst military wife in the history of military wives.

But meanwhile, I am fine. Meanwhile, the water is boiling for tea, the boys need a snack. Meanwhile it’s June and we are going to the park to meet a friend. Slowly I am learning how to relax into the palm of my own life. Last night I went to sleep thinking about trust, how it wasn’t that hard after all.

Also on the front seat were the car keys as well as the key to the front door of our house. (Because clearly I am an idiot). If I were another sort of person, I would be writing a post about the basic goodness of people, that despite the fact that the person who ransacked my car has some issues that need to be dealt with, he or she did not steal my car. They did not use my house key (my house key!!) to walk through the front door, steal our possessions, and then stab us to death with the set of Henckels that we received on our wedding day.

But I am not that kind of person. I am the kind of person who looks at the place where my iPod used to be, at the contents of my glove box spilling onto my front seat and thinks, “You fucking motherfuckers.” And then I turn all of that anger onto myself for leaving the door unlocked. For leaving the keys right there. “What the hell were you thinking?” I wonder. Because obviously this is my fault.

Right there, pretty much, is my lifetime relationship with trust. You relax and the world ends. You trick yourself into believing everything is going to be fine and then Something Happens. There is an accident. A diagnosis. A crash. A death. An unexpected incident. You leave your car unlocked and wake up to find it trashed, your children’s artwork thrown around like confetti from a party to which you weren’t invited. You give someone your heart and they take another girl to their fraternity’s spring formal while you are at a track meet in Indianapolis, they tell you you’re too difficult to love, they invite you to dinner and then tell you that they have no passion for this relationship. (At least, in the case of that last boyfriend, I had the presence of mind to ask for my CDs back). Those are just the little things of course, the ones I can write about. We have all endured more, much more. We have all had our trust shattered by rounds of ammunition. We have each lived through our own nuclear disasters.

So how does one recover after these catastrophes, especially the ones for which there is no incident report to file, no criminal investigation, no hope of justice. Once, years ago, after one of my roommates was going through a painful breakup, I asked how he was doing. He looked at me, stunned, and said, “Just because someone leaves doesn’t mean they give you your feelings back.”

It happens every day. Things get stolen. Our iPods, our health, our feelings. Our dreams of how it should be, our beliefs about how we should be. It starts out so good in our mind. We carry armfuls of hope like so many flowers, and then Something Happens, and we are left holding nothing, our empty hands grasping onto the air.

If the question is how to trust, I do not know the answer. If the question is why do we trust, I would only say that sometimes, we forget the disasters and do dumb things like leave our car doors unlocked. But this is not the answer. This is not even the question. I no longer even remember what the question is.

A few months ago, I was at a parent meeting at my son’s school. We had a guest speaker, a doctor who is well respected in the Waldorf community. One woman was asking the doctor how to get her husband to accept some alternative treatments for a child’s illness. Alternatives like letting a fever run or administering homeopathic remedies, delaying vaccines. “I think,” the doctor said after a moment, “That this is not so much a question about how to treat illness as it is how to navigate a marriage.”

I think this is not so much a question about how to trust, as it is how to navigate a life.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes.

Last night, I was commending myself for how well I was doing at living in the Meanwhile. But Meanwhile is where we all live, isn’t it, regardless of whether we want to or not. We are lighthearted until Something Happens. There is an accident. A diagnosis. A crash. A death. An unexpected incident. You leave your car unlocked and wake up to find it trashed. Meanwhile, the world goes on. Meanwhile our broken hearts keep on beating. Meanwhile, that relentlessly indefatigable part of our brain says “Inhale.” And then it says, “Exhale.” Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Our dumb old bodies. Our dumb old lungs that trust in all that empty air. Our dumb old hearts.

The other night I stood with a sleepy Whit while he went to the bathroom.  He looked out the window, the strangely-bright dark visible through the white slats of the blind.  “It’s really …” he began, halting, still looking intently out the window.

“It’s really what?  It does look kind of bright to me out there.”

“No, big.  It’s too big.”

“What is too big, Whit?” I brushed his hair back from his face, studying the familiar slope of his nose in the nightlight light.

“Everything.  Everything is too big.”

I sighed and carried him back to bed, aware that he gets heavier every day, wondering, again, if this is the last time.

Yes.  It is all too big.  The next morning was one of those raw, too-big mornings when I could not contain my heart in my chest.  Every morning now, like a drumbeat whose volume rises imperceptibly but inexorably, I hear the “these are the last days you have a child in kindergarten” refrain in my head.  This makes me feel a lot of pressure to stay with Whit and bring him up to his classroom, to read the morning message, to hug him on the mat before morning meeting.  Otherwise I could leave him at early dropoff (which he is very happy to do) and get my day started a good 25 minutes earlier.  Today I planned to stay with him.

And then.  We were heading over to walk Grace to her building when she turned to me, stricken.  “Mummy!  It’s the butterfly place field trip today!  We forgot to bring a camera!”

My heart fell.  We’d talked about this.  I was going to get her a disposable camera to bring to the field trip.  “Oh, Grace, I’m sorry.”

“Can you go now?” Her voice was urgent.

I started doing mental calculations.  The number of minutes before my first conference call.  The fact that I have to run somehow today.  The fact that I wouldn’t be able to take Whit up.  I looked at her, and she could sense that I was about to say no.  Her eyes filled with tears.  I made a decision.  “Fine.  I’ll run now to CVS and hope to get back before you go.”  They were leaving right after morning meeting.

I turned to hug Whit, sent Grace to walk to her building together, and ran to the car.  Every minute is a trade-off.  I felt heaviness in my chest as I thought, again, of all that I try and still cannot manage to do.  No matter how hard we try, we can’t capture it all, we let someone down every day, we have to barrel forward even when all we want to do is make it all stop and stand still.  I felt the loss of a dwindling number of kindergarten mornings with Whit, all because I forgot something I’d promised.  Some days – a lot of days – there is simply not enough of me for everyone around me.  I made it back to hand Grace the cardboard camera before they left.  And then I drove slowly home, feeling skinless, feeling sad, feeling spring pressing in on me on all sides despite the gray drizzle of the day.

And then I read this poem on Now is Good, a lovely blog I read.  And I wept.  Some days, it is all too big.

The Lanyard – Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

One of the many thought-provoking exercises that Dani Shapiro gave us while at Kripalu was to write for 10 minutes, without stopping, sentences that begin with “I remember.” This was inspired by Joe Brainerd’s classic memoir, I Remember.  Lisa, Denise, Christine, Sarah, and I all found this both fun and surprising – we discovered that we wrote down both long-cherished memories and ones we had not even realized we remembered.

We think this is a powerful and revealing exercise, and wanted to share a few of our “I remembers” as well as invite you to participate.  Please join us!  either by writing a post on your blog about what you remember and linking it here.   Or, by adding a few of your I remembers to our comments.  I look forward to reading your memories.

I remember …

I remember the wire hanger that my mother bent into a hoop over my head for my Pippi Longstocking braids one Halloween.  I remember how it dug into my head.

I remember watching my mother peel carrots into our guinea pig, Caliban’s cage.  I remember that Dad told us Caliban meant “sprite.”  I remember reading The Tempest in high school and learning what it really meant.

I remember going to the bathroom from 6^th grade homeroom and the school secretary telling me to tell my class that the Challenger had exploded.

I remember how my husband wept when our midwife turned over our brand-new second child and said he was a boy.

I remember skinny dipping off the pier at our old summer house.  In August there was phosphorescence.

I remember the morning that my father called me to tell me that my grandmother had died.  I remember that her mother’s day card, stamped and addressed, was sitting on the table by the door to be mailed.

I remember hallucinating and asking Matt if he could see the reindeer I saw as we approached the summit of Kilimanjaro in a white-out ice storm.