The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil.

(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Baby Boy.

John Harmon Scully.

My new godson! I am so honored to be a part of the Scully family in this way. Hadley, I love you!

This morning, running across the river in the morning breeze, I felt buffeted, literally physically moved around, by the wind. I felt insubstantial. This is something I’m not accustomed to feeling: usually I am physically solid in the world, aware of my own presence and literally grounded by it. Insubstantial. An apt metaphor for how I feel these days, somehow: swayed by various winds that blow on me, not always firmly tethered, a bit adrift.

Thanksgiving. So much to be thankful for. And, still, so much here that I do not understand (Rich, Towards the Solstice).
What am I grateful for, on this dark and warm evening in 2007?

• Dear friends, near and far, old and new – friends from childhood, friends from adulthood, friends from motherhood, friends from all the stages of my life, and those few special friends who cut across the boundaries of those stages and identities
• Health, my own and that of my family – particularly salient at this time, with John’s new heart, Jessica’s recovery, and many others doing well in spite of steep obstacles
• As Lacy calls it, the benevolent universe – I never expected such blessings at this time in my life; complex though they may be, they are all good and I am aware of my great good fortune
• The memory of those no longer here, but nearby – Nana, Grammy, Ba, Gaga, Jonathan – family and others who are gone now but remain near. In particular, Nana and Ba, who I think of every time I drive to Providence, and whose spirit and memory animates much of my time in Rhode Island.
• The spirited generation that comes after us – Grace and Whit, Hannah, Sophia, Catherine, Johann, and the extended family: Charlie, James, Benjamin, Will, Emma, Charlotte, Jack, Thacher, and so many others … I am confident that the world is in good hands!
• Poetry, literature, writing of all kinds – “we read to know that we are not alone” – how much solace words have brought me over the years, to this day!
• My overly muscular legs, for letting me run far and long; it is on my runs when I can be blessedly alone with my thoughts. My favorite run of 2007: in the Stanford hills
• Mentors and teachers who have helped me to where I am now: Mr. Valhouli, Elaine Showalter, Amy Glass, Mike Ahearn, Katie Clancy, Paige Price. Your influence, wisdom, and advice means more than you can imagine. I am spurred onward by the memory of the commitment to and investment in me you each have made.
• Mum and Dad, whose example and love is with me every minute of every day. Now that I am a parent I am so incredibly, viscerally aware of all the ways in which you gave of yourselves. It is my profound hope that I can be to Grace and Whit a fraction of what you were (are) to me.
• Hilary Whitman Mead, of whom there is still no better description than that in the preface to my thesis: “the world’s only older-and-wiser younger sister.”

Thank you for all of these things, and for so many more. I feel full of life tonight, full of thanks and emotion and sadness, and of the poignant happy-sad dichotomy that defines my life.

Thank you, whatever comes.
One hour was sunlit and the most high gods
May not make boast of any better thing
Than to have watched that hour as it passed.
– Ezra Pound

Thanksgiving morning.

Matt and the children are walking & scootering by the river with Mark and Sophia, and I’m at home putting the turkey in, etc. Also finished The Year of Magical Thinking. Wow. This book takes my breath away. I’m not quite able to articulate why, or how, so for now I’ll just cite a few passages:

“…even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs…”

An excerpt by Gerard Manley Hopkins (I love the notion that the mind has mountains):

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come.

“In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.”

“Did mothers always try to press on their daughters the itineraries of which they themselves had dreamed?”

“We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”

“Time is the school in which we learn.”

“I think about swimming with him into the cave at Portugese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that.”