November 2009 – A Design So Vast

Florida sunrise

November 30, 2009

I ran on Saturday morning in Florida. It was cold, 47 degrees, and I only had a tank top and shorts. By the end of my run my fingers were curled around my beloved orange iPod like a claw. It was dark when I set out, about 6:30. As I ran and watched the sun rise all around me, I felt a familiar regret that I didn’t have my camera with me. So I resolved to remember it and felt the words to describe what I was seeing coursing through my brain just like the blood did in my body.

For some reason, that morning I looked at the sunrise with unusual perspicacity. Maybe it was being away from home. Maybe it was getting up from a night of very little sleep and feeling that hyper-awareness that exhaustion sometimes brings (me, at least).

At first I noticed the deep orange and vivid fuschia sun peeking out right at the edge of the horizon. It was really just the rays of the sun breaking through the darkness, not even the actual sun yet. Then the sun rose and its brilliance split the sky in a sudden, definitive way. I swear there was a moment when the sun rose. I know that sounds trite, but I have never noticed it before.

The colors at the horizon brightened and broadened, radiating into the darkness and turning the night sky into an ashy dawn gray. There were uneven bands of coral pink, lavendar, gray, orange. I thought of something Courtney has always said: “Nature always gets it right.” There is no color dissonance in nature. Ever.

I ran on, listening to some of my new favorite songs (“A Lack of Color,” Death Cab for Cutie, is my current obsession – a title that has some irony given the color, somehow both riotous and gentle, I watched as I listened). The sky continued to lighten, and by the time I turned around the sky was, in patches, the pale pink of the inside of a seashell. The most luminous, gorgeous color. And faint blue morning sky breaking through. And, if I squinted, I could almost make out actual beams of sunshine darting through the washed-out easter egg colors of the sky.

It was the kind of sunrise that makes me want to stop and just watch, agape and in awe. It was the kind of sky that makes me believe in heaven. My struggle to find faith – a faith that I can surrender to, lean into when I am weak, really trust in – is one I have written about here. There are times, few but undeniable, when I feel close to faith. It is a feeling of bumping into something large, something shadowy and indistinct, but also irrefutable, of somehow brushing up against a mystery that can only be something greater than I am. Saturday morning was one of those times. And I was able to suspend my brain’s chatter for long enough to really watch and feel, in my heart more than my head, the glory of the morning unfolding before me.

Florida Snapshots

November 29, 2009

Time at the brand-new and utterly deserted playground
Reading in bed while a 4 year old boy watches Justice League on the computer next to me
Grace’s increasing fluency navigating both an iPhone and a Mac, and her obsession with americangirl.com
Louboutin espadrilles on top of Wired magazine
Endless Go Fish games
Shivering by the pool, wrapped in towels, while the fat-less (thus uninsulated) children swim happily for hours
Walking out to the end of the rough wooden pier into the ocean, watching kites flying, fish jumping, and birds swooping into the water.
Toasts to Thanksgiving, new hearts, one month birthdays, and anniversaries, both 43 and 5 years
Goggles, pool noodles, and water guns
Stunning sunsets from the living room windows
Whit’s utter ineptitude at Jenga
Asleep by 9:30 every night!
The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Olive Kittredge (two Annes, a translation, and a Pulitzer prize winner)

A way of seeing that involves a letting go

November 29, 2009

Oh this reminds me of my post about how I am the photographer, and the ramifications this has to my ability to be present. This is, as far as I am concerned, as close to perfect prose as I have ever read. It traces the collision of poetry and physics. A way of seeing that is a way of letting go. Yes. Yes. It is not merely a physical act, seeing: it is also spiritual, emotional, and an act of will. Yes.

Oh, be still, my heart. This is the language I aspire to. I am merely a peon at the ankles of this language.

But there is another way of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut … When I see this way I see truly. As Thoreau says, I return to my senses … But I can’t go out and try to see this way. I’ll faint, I’ll go mad … The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise … I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit til you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
(italics are mine)

HWM

November 28, 2009

Hilary and me with each of our first-born children, spring 2006.

This is not my first love letter to Hilary, nor will it be my last. Hils has been on my mind this week, as she celebrates her fifth anniversary and as I reflect on even-year Thanksgivings in Marion with our entire family. My mother is a professional at Thanksgiving: two turkeys, over 20 people, etc. And always with aplomb and a complete lack of stress. How? I don’t know.

Anyway, back to my baby sister. I don’t think I’ve ever said it better than I did in May 1996: Hilary is the world’s only older and wiser younger sister. And I am more grateful every year that she is my older and wiser younger sister. Hilary is home: the only person who can understand the world I came from and whose terroir is largely the same as mine.

Yesterday I finished two of the three books I brought to Florida. I started the third, a book I’ve dipped into on and off throughout the years, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. It’s a gorgeous book, one whose words are swarming around in my mind, but it’s dense and not something I am able to sit and read cover to cover. So, from my seat by the pool (don’t be too jealous: I was wrapped in towels against the cold) I emailed Hilary and asked for her views on a couple of books I was considering.

She answered immediately, with a thoughtful perspective on each one. Of course she had read them both. She also chimed in that she had written her college application essays on Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which I had not known though I’d have picked Annie Dillard as one of her favorite writers. I do know that Hilary’s book recommendations are always excellent. And I know that her writing is lucid and wise and beautiful. “A two star hotel far from the center of town” … I think not.

I thought about how that exchange epitomized many things about Hilary to me. She is well-read, she is generous, she is responsive, she is thoughtful. Hilary is one of probably three or four people in this world who I would genuinely call brilliant. I am in awe of her intelligence. She’s the one who called me on how I missed a major sub-plot in Middlemarch because I skimmed so aggressively (aside: Dux did the same thing re: Vanity Fair and my skimming – I think there’s a theme here with me and enormous Victorian novels). She’s modest, so you might never know, but she’s read everything Jane Austen ever wrote, and a whole lot more besides. She inhales literature and has an educated point of view on all sorts of political and legislative topics that are totally foreign to me. This may be the difference between reading NYT.com and only twitter.

Hils is also profoundly committed to the things she cares about. She and T live more in accordance with their values than anyone I’ve ever known. I admire that deeply. They are educators first and foremost, committed to both the craft of pedagogy and to the larger administrative and leadership issues around education, broadly defined.

She is a generous and loyal friend. Everybody I’ve ever gotten to know through Hilary has been absolutely wonderful. I really don’t say that lightly. She does not become close to people who are not bright and genuine, open and honest. It is my privilege to have met some of these people. I could name some of you bloggers, but I won’t. You know who you are! 🙂

Hils, thank you. Thank you for the ways you make me feel not crazy, not alone, not so sad. Thank you for your example of a way to live a life of integrity and purpose. Thank you for your wonderful, patient mothering. Thank you for having shared Q kamir and ADC and the tadpoles on the Berlin wall chunks with me, and for the way those joint experiences allow you to understand the soil we both grew in as nobody else does.

I’m looking forward to seeing you over Christmas, and to seeing our children together. I love you.