I remember you

Woke up to a text from my beloved sister that she read this poem and it made me think of her.  I have read this before but not in ages, and was touched that it made her think of me.  I love it.  Happy almost-spring Wednesday, all.

What the Living Do – Marie Howe

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

Right now; February 2023

sunrise, Boston, February 2 2023

Happy new year.  A few things on my mind lately.  I’d love to know what you’re reading, loving, and thinking about.

More and More, I Talk to the Dead – I love all of Margaret Renkl’s writing (her book, Late Migrations, is gorgeous) and this piece in the New York Times is no exception.  This article made me gasp out loud, and I relate.  The article reminded me of one of my most vivid memories, which is from years ago on the Solstice, December 21st.  I was walking at sunset (which was around 4:30) and had a sudden and strong sense of people that were gone to me – most of all my grandmother and my mother’s best friend Susie, who was a kind of second mother to me – standing just over the horizon.  It was like they were there.  And instead of being eerie, the sensation was reassuring, comforting.  Now dad is with them, and my other grandparents, too.

I’ve also been thinking about when Matt and I summited Kilimanjaro, in June of 1998.  Perhaps because I’ve been listening to Southern Cross on repeat.  And as I wrote on Instagram, as we headed up to the summit we could see both the southern cross and the big dipper in the sky at once.  As we kept climbing, a storm rolled in.  Our summit photos could have been taken in front of a show blower at Killington; the background is just white.  No spectacular sunrise for us.  Anyway, at the top of Kilimanjaro we met two other people who we thought were heading to the summit. You get towards the top and there’s about an hour to the actual summit (and the famous sign that you’ve seen in friends’ photos – but not ours!).  They had stopped moving and were heading down.

“Did you get to the top?”  We asked them.

“No, but we got to this spot and it’s close enough.” One of the two men answered.

We nodded at them.

“I mean, who will know?” He continued.

“Well, you will.” I said, before I could apply my filter (my filter is not, at the best of times, particularly well developed).

We continued up.  It was slow going.  We got to the top and headed down.  The next day, we were getting onto a bus at the base of Kili back to the hotel where we had been staying.  One of the men we’d encountered at the top was sitting on the bus.  He smiled at me, and said hello. “I have you to thank,” he said to me, surprising me.  What was he talking about?  “I would never have gone to the actual summit if not for you.”

“Oh, wow.  I did not realize.  I’m sorry I was so abrupt with you at the top.”  I had been feeling badly about my comment to him.

“No, I want to thank you.  It’s because of you that I got to the top.”

I’ve never forgotten that.

That’s my February 2 2023 update.  How are you all doing?  What are you reading and thinking about?

Thoughts on darkness

In a dark time, the eye begins to see. – Roethke

This is the darkest season.  Here in the northeast, we have two days until the shortest day of the year.  I love the photo above because I think it could be sunrise or sunset.  It’s the morning, though, day break from the air, a week and a half ago.

It’s fair to say that the contrast, interplay, and interrelation between light and dark is one of the central preoccupations of my life.  I’m fascinated by the way one allows the other, the way we need both to live in this world, the fact that light and dark are at once polar opposites and so closely related as to be two sides of the same coin.  When I search my archives for “light” I come up with 33 pages of results.

You might imagine that I have strong emotions about this particular time of the year, these week of deep darkness.

And you would be right.  I used to dread this time.  I can easily recall the physical sensation of gloom and fear that came over me as the days shortened.  And it’s true that in the spring, perhaps around February, I am buoyed when I begin to notice that the days are creeping longer.

But I don’t dread these dark days anymore.  I actually love them.  There’s something deeply reassuring to me about this season.  I’ve written extensively about my attachment to the solstice, and that is surely part of this comfort.  It isn’t hard for me to summon a roomful of candles, and to know how quickly they can dispel the darkness.

There is more going on, though.  I suspect it has something to do with the Roethke quote above, or with Wendell Berry’s lyrical lines which run through my head all the time:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.  To know the dark, go dark.  Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is travelled by dark feet and dark wings.

– Wendell Berry

Berry asserts that to really know the dark we have to surrender to it.  We have to let our eyes adjust, which means we must go in without any external light.  And that, in that darkness, there is a beauty that we never imagined.

It’s a short leap from thinking about the darkness out the window to the darkness inside myself.  I am still getting to know the darkness there, learning to gaze into the ragged hole that exists in the center of all of our souls, practicing pushing on the bruise and feeling the wound.  I have often described the feeling of that intense darkness as staring into the sun.  Again, light and dark are so close together as to be inextricable, sliding across each other, both occluding and showcasing as they do so.

Maybe that’s what this life is: an eclipse.

I read Margaret Renkl’s beautiful essay in the New York Times, Falling A Little Bit in Love with the Dark, today, with interest.  She too recognizes the gifts – threatened and rarer though they are- in darkness.  I haven’t thought through her point about how rare true darkness is, in a world in love with light (metaphorical and real).  My favorite line:

So I am teaching myself to rest in uncertainties, to revel in the secrets of darkness.

It has only been when I have really let myself lean into that darkness, accept that my deepest wound is the profound sadness of impermanence, that I’ve started seeing the gifts that are there.  As I sink into the way my life actually is, everyday I find unexpected gems buried in the mundane.  Sure, I also cry a lot more.  I grieve and mourn constantly, far more than I imagined possible.

But there’s also beauty here.  Surprising, staggering, serendipitous beauty.  Divinity buried in the drudgery.  Dark feet and dark wings.

Every year I feel more at ease in these dark days, protected, somehow.  I realize now that this is a manifestation of my increased comfort with my own darkness.  I have begun to see.

We All Want Impossible Things

I knew Catherine Newman was a kindred spirit (“the happy-saddest person who ever lived” – we might be tied) and I knew I loved her writing.   But wow.  I just finished We All Want Impossible Things and I am actively crying and feeling that deep ache of how beautiful life is, at the same time.  This gorgeous book made me sad and happy simultaneously, made me laugh and cry, reminded me of all the ways life is mundane and luminous in the same day, same hour.  It’s about friendship and family and being confused and being clear, about the people who accompany us in this life, about all the ways we abide by and honor those we love most.  Run, don’t walk.  This book is glorious and heartbreaking and abolutely vital.  As CS Lewis said, we read to know we are not alone.  Thank you, Catherine Newman, thank you for doing that with this book (and all your work, honestly).

One of my favorite quotes is below.  The other is:

“Is it better to have loved and lost?  Ask anyone in pain and they’ll tell you no.  And yet.  Here we are, hurtling ourselves headlong into love like lemmings off a cliff into a churning sea of grief.”

Signal Fires

I walked the dog this morning before the sun came up and at one point I stopped, head tipped up, looking at the sky spangled with stars and thinking of Waldo.  Waldo who is, as Dani Shapiro said on Tuesday with Claire Messud at Brookline Booksmith, the beating heart of this beautiful book.  I finished Signal Fires last night and it without question belongs on my “best of 2022” list.  What a gorgeous novel, both quiet and compelling, full of the shining strands that weave us together and into our own individual lives and into the great wide world at the same time.  To me, this story is above all about time and memory (which are the great preoccupations of my own life).  It’s also about love and family and forgiveness and the ineffable, unavoidable echo of the past through the present.  I’m so grateful and honored to call Dani my teacher, literally (I took her class for several years) and figuratively (have read all of her work and consider her a role model both on the pages and in life).  If you haven’t read Signal Fires, run.  If you have, I’d love to talk about it.  Thank you, Dani.