Uncategorized

Almost a year ago I drove over an hour to have lunch with two new blog-friends.  Jo from Mylestones and Corinne from Trains, Tutus, and Teatime.  Over flatbread we chatted and chatted and barely had time to take a breath.  The time flew by.  And then, over the summer, I got to spend lots more time with Corinne when we took the train to and from BlogHer.  We’ve had a couple of visits since then, notably to hear Gail Caldwell read from Let’s Take the Long Way Home.  It’s never enough though, and I am particularly hoping to meet Corinne’s delicious Fynn and Page, who feature prominently in her blog.

Corinne’s blog is a beautiful series of meditations on real, ordinary life.  She writes about her everyday experiences with her children, about her sobriety journey, and about her nascent but vital spirituality.  She and I have in common a passionate attachment to the ocean and the beach, and I particularly adore her posts about her visits there.  Corinne shares her beautiful photography, too, and I am often as refreshed and inspired by her images as I am by her words.  I urge you to click over to Trains, Tutus, and Teatime and to spend some time immersed in Corinne’s world.  I am certain that I am better for this immersion; there is something about Corinne, both in person and on the page, that makes me calmer, more patient, more open to my own humanity.

And more good news!  Corinne’s creativity has a new outlet.  She has thrown herself wholeheartedly into knitting, and I’m thrilled to point you to her brand-new etsy shop, A Soft Landing, here.  I am the proud owner of a pair of Corinne’s handwarmers, and I tell you I can feel the love that went into the knitting of them every time I pull them on.

In the meantime, I’m honored to host Corinne here today for Present Tense.  I know that the effort to remain open to her own life is important to Corinne, as she and I have talked about it.  I was delighted when she agreed to answer my questions.  So here is Corinne, with her trademark wisdom, humility, and flat-out wonderfulness.

I shared my word of the year yesterday.  Trust. What I wrote about it follows down below if you didn’t read it on Stacey Curnow’s Midwife For Your Life blog.

The James Baldwin quotation that I close with is my favorite, and comes the closest to capturing what it is I mean when I say trust … for me it’s about trusting life, and the universe, trusting that something will catch me, and that there is something of value deep inside me and in my story.  Trusting, also, that the rhythms beat on, that pain will give way to radiance, and again and again, tidal, circular, eternal, folding in on itself and somehow opening at the same time.

I spent a happy couple of hours yesterday looking through my old quote books for some of my favorite words about trust, as I understand it at this point in my life.

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.  – James Baldwin

To trust is to let go. – Margaret Atwood (Surfacing)

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between. – Diane Ackerman

She felt as if a mist had been lifted from her eyes, enabling her to look upon and comprehend the significance of life, that monster made up of beauty and brutality. – Kate Chopin (The Awakening)

Have patience with everything that remains unresolved in your heart. – Rilke

May we all grow in grace and peace, and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us. – Thomas Merton

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be. – Douglas Adams

Listen to your life.  See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.  In the boredom and the pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness. – Frederick Buechner

**********

Trust

I’ve never chosen a word of the year before.  Not because I don’t like words.  In fact, I adore words.  I live on them, in fact.  I have a file on my computer titled, simply, “Words.”  It contains pages of words I love.  I have a notepad by my bed that I scribble words on in the night, in the dark, when I wake up from a dream with them running through my head.  I’m accompanied every day by a steady stream of words – lyrics, poems, quotations – that rise up unbidden, often unexpectedly, into my head.

So it’s always been really difficult for me to consider picking one word.  That’s like choosing a favorite child.  I can’t do it.

But this year, much the way lines from William Wordsworth poems or the refrain of certain Christmas carols insist that I hear them, a single word keeps pushing to the front of my consciousness.  Over and over again.  Maybe it’s my word, I found myself thinking last week.  Maybe it is.

Trust.

Trust.  I’ve been talking, and writing, for years, it seems, about letting go, and opening myself up to what comes.  About trusting. And this is authentically what has been on my mind.  But somehow, it feels like the stakes are ever higher, and like I need to actually do what it is that I’ve been talking about.  Maybe I need to stop talking about it and start doing it.  Start trusting.

The essential thing that I need to trust is that I can release my white-knuckled grip on how I wanted my life to be.  I need to acknowledge that certain things are lost to me, and that other things will never be.  But what is left in the lacuna between those poles is still rich, teeming with meaning and love.  It is my life.  And I need to trust that it is enough.

I need to accept, with a deep internal settling, the passage of time against which I rail so often and so furiously, and to trust that I won’t be swept away in the fast-moving currents of life.  I need to trust that if I let go of my frantic effort to control the universe, all will be well.  I need to trust that I have something to say and that my story will unfold, in life and on the page, as it should.  I need to trust that my best is good enough, for my children, for my husband, for my friends, for my job, for myself.  I have this recurring image of letting go of a high trapeze bar and free-falling, which is terrifying.  But sometimes I imagine myself bouncing into a pillowy bed, which envelops me with safety and comfort.  That, I think, is trust.  To believe that I will be caught.

One theme I’ve become aware of in my life in recent years is the way things cycle, around in circles, back and forth like tides, waxing and waning like the moon.  For me, this takes the form of returning again and again to things.  Certain stories, people, words, thoughts recur, at intervals whose rhythm I don’t always understand until much later.  As I burrow into my word of 2011, trust, I remember the quotation I included on our family Christmas card in 2002.  2002 was, I realize now, a seminal year for me when many things ruptured and changed and when the seeds of who I am now really began to take root.  And these are the lines I chose then, which come back to me now, whispering their powerful wisdom:

“Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.” – James Baldwin

I wanted her to see that the only life worth living is a life full of love; that loss is always part of the equation; that love and loss conjoined are the best opportunity we get to live fully, to be our strongest, our most compassionate, our most graceful selves.
-Pam Houston

I was thinking this weekend of the universality of sadness, of the inescapable fact that the sunshine of every life is mottled with shadow. I think the thing that varies is our sensitivity to the shadow. Some of us are just feel more keenly the loss that is always part of the deal. Some of us are more prone to shadow than sun. Some of us have a narrow but deep moat of loneliness around our hearts which is uncrossable by anyone else.

I love Pam Houston’s confident assertion that this awareness of loss lends itself to strength, compassion, and grace. I spend a lot of time worrying about what I have bequeathed to my children, through example and heredity. Pam Houston’s words offer a stunning change of perspective and I can imagine – momentarily – that this inheritance is a gift and not a burden. What if, as Adrienne Rich said, “her wounds came from the same source as her power”? What if what seems like great weakness is the source of great strength?

I fret about the message I’m sending my children by not hiding from them my occasional sweeping sorrow. Sure, there are days I act happy when I feel blue. And of course there are genuinely joyful days, many, many of them. But there are also days where my eyes unexpectedly fill with tears and when they ask why I explain, quietly, that the world is making me sad. I just re-read my words about a particularly sad weekend Grace had last winter and cried, again, struck by the fact that already, at seven, she has the self-awareness to say “I’m just sad, Mum.” Actually it’s more than the awareness that strikes me: she has the propensity to be just sad in the first place, and this is clearly part of the legacy I leave her. I often feel soggy with guilt about it.

Grace and Whit both witness and inherit my melancholy leanings, though so far Grace exhibits them much more frequently. I have decided, personally, that to teach them to honor and accept all of their feelings, even the difficult ones, is more important than to put on a happy face all the time. Of course, I am not sure I’d actually be able to fake it, so it might be convenient to call this a “decision.” But I do believe that helping my children to recognize their strong emotions, even sadness and anger, is an important thing for me to do. I also think there is great power in learning that one can be thoroughly tossed around in emotional whitewater and still come out the other side, spluttering, maybe, with sand in your pants, but still, standing.

In fact the words I wrote in July (in my musing on whitewater) seem to echo Pam Houston’s gorgeous lines (though less elegantly):

I know the terms I want to live my life by start with compassion and empathy and kindness, and that they include a deep need to honor the reality, savage and beautiful as it is, of my life.

It makes me sigh with comfort to weave together my own definition of what matters most and Pam Houston’s belief that awareness of loss can contribute to a fully-lived life. It only comes in passing, this profoundly reassuring sense that my sensitivity, which marks how I approach everything, could be, in fact, my road home. But in those moments I feel grateful and calm: maybe Grace and Whit can take what they learn from me and use it to be strong, and compassionate, and full of grace.

I do want my children to learn that the best lives are full of love, and that loss is part of the deal – I believe both of those things as firmly as I believe anything. If I can do anything to help Grace and Whit believe this, through my example, my genetic material, or my direct teaching, then I will have done some good in the world. Of that I am sure.

Originally written in October 2010

The effort to be present in my life has been the single most important thing I’ve undertaken in the past couple of years. Maybe ever. It has transformed how I think about the world and myself, and the relationship between the two. When I say “being present” I mean, literally, being engaged in and awake to my life. This sounds so simple, right? Well, for me, it’s not. No way. Perhaps I had further to go than most people: I am certainly one of the most preoccupied and distractable people I know, and I take multi-tasking to an Olympic sport (and then past it, where I start doing so many things I’m doing them all poorly). I’m extremely rarely engaged in just one thing, or one person.

It’s hard to articulate just how pervasive this not-presence was. And doing so makes me feel ashamed. I would often check my voicemail, remember that there were five messages, and be unable to recall the content (or caller) of a single one. I’d turn the wrong way down familiar streets because I was not paying attention. I used to play Scrabble with my family (under duress, since I am not an avid game-player) and play solitaire on the side because it was too slow otherwise. I play tetris on conference calls and read google reader during movies.

Beyond just distracted, though, I was also, even more toxically, wishing my life away. Every night, I’d hurry my kids through bathtime so I could get back in front of the computer or my book. I’d will them to JUST GO TO SLEEP ALREADY so I could have my night alone. And now? I’d give a lot of things to have some of those nights back. I’d go to soccer practice and spend the 90 minutes worrying about all of the rest of the things I had to do that day. I’d leave events early in preemptive worry about being tired the next morning.

I was never really there. And sometime in the past couple of years, I realized I was missing my life. There are great swaths of Grace and Whit’s babyhoods that I simply don’t remember. I took a ton of pictures, so I can look back at those, but I truly don’t have memories beyond the photographs (and I wonder if I was taking pictures, somehow, to compensate for how utterly not-there I was).

I suspect this behavior was a defense mechanism, because opening up to the actual moments of my life meant exposing myself to the reality of their impermanence. I knew instinctively how painful this would be. At some point in my early thirties, however, the balance shifted and I wanted to be there more than I wanted to avoid that hurt. I didn’t want to miss anymore of Grace and Whit’s lives. If it meant I had to take on some pain, some acceptance of how ephemeral this life of ours was, I was willing to do that. It is certainly my childrens’ arrival that precipitated this shift in outlook for me: the stakes were higher once they were here, and it wasn’t just my days I was squandering anymore.

It sounds trite, in some ways, but it is also essentially true: this moment is all I have. This moment is my life. Somehow, gradually but irrevocably, this realization seeped into my consciousness over the past few years. I realized how much I had already wasted, and I didn’t want to do that anymore. I am already heading into the middle of my life, and I don’t want to miss anymore of it. All those days that I felt I was waiting for my real life to begin, what a loss they all were. Colin Hay’s voice sings in my head, along with Ram Dass’s iconic book (I treasure my copy), Be Here Now.

So I’m not saying that I believe we should every single moment be playing trains with our kids on the floor. That we should evade our responsibilities to engage constantly in a always-happy celebration of childhood. Impossible, both of those things. And unrealistic. I’m not saying that there aren’t heaps of laundry and piles of dishes and lunches to endlessly pack and unpack in my life. Of course there are. I just mean that I want to be there while I do those things.

I am also not saying that I enjoy every moment of my life. Of course I don’t! To pay attention to my life is to receive both the good and the bad, and believe me, there is plenty of bad that makes me sad and regretful. Yes, sometimes it feels like pressure, and I realize I am just starting out on what will be a long, difficult journey. I get snappish and annoyed and wishing things would just be over … daily. But I know now what it is like to be engaged in my life, to really pay attention, and the fullness of the moments where I am able to do that makes up for all the times I fail. It is the memory of that momentary richness that brings me back to begin again. And again.

It is not a surprise to me that I’ve been drawn to books that meditate on this theme: Dani Shapiro, Katrina Kenison, and Karen Maezen Miller have all become important teachers of mine, despite their not knowing or having asked for that title. Each of them tells, in her own lyrical and compelling way, of her journey home. Of her journey to right here. To right now. I have been deeply, deeply moved by each of their stories. And the questions are as insistent as they are difficult (just thinking about these sometimes makes me feel like crying): What would it take to really inhabit the hours of our days? And what do we lose, if we don’t start trying?

When I talk about being present, I mean it in the most literal sense possible. I mean being in my life. I want my mind to stay inside my head for a little bit. I want my heart to dwell here, in the rooms of my days.

Originally written in April 2010

Toward the Solstice, 1977

The thirtieth of November.
Snow is starting to fall.
A peculiar silence is spreading
Over the fields, the maple grove.
It is the thirtieth of May,
Rain pours on ancient bushes, runs
Down the youngest blade of grass.
I am trying to hold in one steady glance
All the parts of my life.
A spring torrent races
On this old slanting roof,
The slanted field below
Thickens with winter’s first whiteness.
Thistles dried to sticks in last year’s wind
Stand nakedly in the green,
Stand sullenly in the slowly whitening,
Field.
My brain glows
More violently, more avidly
The quieter, the thicker
The quilt of crystals settles,
The louder, more relentlessly
The torrent beats itself out
On the old boards and shingles.
It is the thirtieth of May,
The thirtieth of November,
A beginning or an end.
We are moving towards the solstice
And there is so much here
I still do not understand.
If I could make sense of how
My life is tangled
With dead weeds, thistles,
Enormous burdocks, burdens
Slowly shifting under
This first fall of snow,
Beaten by this early, racking rain
Calling all new life to declare itself strong
Or die,
If I could know
In what language to address
The spirits that claim a place
Beneath these low and simple ceilings,
Tenants that neither speak nor stir
Yet dwell in mute insistence
Till I can feel utterly ghosted in this house.
If history is a spider-thread
Spun over and over though brushed away
It seems I might some twilight
Or dawn in the hushed country light
Discern its greyness stretching
From molding or doorframe, out
Into the empty dooryard
And following it climb
The path into the pinewoods,
Tracing from tree to tree
In the falling light, in the slowly
Lucidifying day
Its constant, purposive trail,
Till I reach whatever cellar hole
Filling with snowflakes or lichen,
Whatever fallen shack
Or unremembered clearing
I am meant to have found
And there, under the first or last
Star, trusting to instinct
The words would come to mind
I have failed or forgotten to say
Year after year, winter
After summer, the right rune
To ease the hold of the past
Upon the rest of my life
And ease my hold on the past.
If some rite of separation
Is still unaccomplished,
Between myself and the long-gone
Tenants of this house,
Between myself and my childhood,
Between the childhood of my children,
It is I who have neglected
To perform the needed acts,
Set water in corners, light and eucalyptus
In front of mirrors,
Or merely pause and listen
To my own pulse vibrating
Lightly as falling snow,
Relentless as the rainstorm,
And hear what it has been saying.
It seems I am still waiting
For them to make some clear demand
Some articulate sound or gesture,
For release to come from anywhere
But from inside myself.
A decade of cutting away
Dead flesh, cauterizing
Old scars ripped open over and over
And still it is not enough.
A decade of performing
The loving humdrum acts
Of attention to this house
Transplanting lilac suckers,
Washing panes, scrubbing
Wood-smoke from splitting paint,
Sweeping stairs, brushing the thread
Of the spider aside,
And so much yet undone,
A woman’s work, the solstice nearing,
And my hand still suspended
As if above a letter
I long and dread to close.

(Adrienne Rich)

This is my annual (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009) marking of the solstice, a holiday that means more to me than any other, particularly this one, today, the winter solstice.  It marks the turning back to the light.  And yet there is so much here I still do not understand.