Month: March 2010

Dreaming of paragliding in a winter wood.

I haven’t been sleeping super well lately. On Monday night, though, I had a vivid dream. A dream that was interrupted by Whit whining at the top of the stairs, but it was so powerful (and I almost never remember my dreams) that after putting Whit back to bed, I scribbled some notes on my palm in pen in the dark. In the morning, of course, I had forgotten the dream, until I saw the chicken scratch on my hand and it all came flooding back.

I was in the woods in winter with a group of people. All was bleached, muted, with those beautiful pale colors that I associate with the dormant landscape. Everything was crunchy, leafless, dry, dead. I don’t know who I was with, other than one old friend, Ann Moss. She is one of my sister-friends from growing up, one of the Four Families who flanked me as a child. I know I felt a surpassing sense of peace and comfort in this group of people, and Ann’s presence is hint that they were old, constant, trustworthy friends.

Somehow, the group of us held hands and closed our eyes and said some kind of chant, and suddenly we were paragliding. I have never done this before. My father’s younger brother, who died years ago, was a glider pilot and this imagery has always captivated me. Perhaps it is on my mind lately because of Kelly Corrigan’s assertion in Lift that to stay aloft we have to steer straight into the turbulence. I don’t know. But I was gliding through the sky, one of my oldest and truest friends at my side, and it was marvelous. I felt both free and safe, a combination I have felt so incredibly rarely in my life.

I’m still unpacking the meaning of this dream, trying to just hold it in my mind and let it soak in, but I’m certain the messages are both about taking risks and about seeking the safe, steady comfort of friends I can really trust. I have so much fear of flying. Dreaming about it makes me wonder if it is time to stare into the discomfort of the endless questions, to trust that flying can feel like falling, and to let myself fly.

I live three blocks from the house where I was born. But.

The house my parents lived in when I was born is three blocks from where I live now. Literally. And my parents live 1.2 miles from us. People always hear this, and think: wow, you really haven’t gone very far, have you? The truth is, I lived in Paris for four years, London for four years (one of which I spent in the US at boarding school while my family remained in England), and New Jersey for four glorious years of no-self-serve gas stations. I’ve been away. I’ve been far, far away, many times, and I am back. I’ve come home.

This tension seems to be at the root of much of my sense of myself. Multiple layers of meaning emerge: first, the discrepancy between what appears and what is, second, the way that life is both cyclical and linear, moving forward and always, somehow, looping back, and finally, the way that I am now, in midlife, understanding home in a new way.

The treacherous gulf between surface and reality

An old theme I’ve come back to again and again. The importance of asking questions, of waiting to judge someone until we really listen to their truth. Everyone has something to say, and very often their external identifiers do not tell the whole story. I was talking to a friend today who was beating herself up for being sad about things when everything in her life was so good. I related, of course, and shared my view that as long as we retain perspective about our troubles (vis a vis those of people in true calamity, for example) I think that both honoring and exploring our own sadness is healthy.

Cyclical and linear

This is interesting to me particularly in light of my recent thinking about the lockstep march forward of time, which I always envision in a very linear, straight-line way. I contrast that with a very real sensation of cycles, and circles, of life beating in my body and my heart in a decided nonlinear and non-straight-line way. I can close my eyes and see my handsome, smiling father at his 40th birthday, standing in our back yard next to the windsurfer that my mother gave him. Salient, potent memories like these contradict the intensely forward-moving, loss-invoking image of time that often saddens me in a way that I find both confusing and hopeful.

Home

On Friday night, at dinner, I watched my two friends’ faces in the candlelight, animated and happy, so familiar and so dear. It is extraordinary to me that we have known each other 18 years now – half of our lives! I can toggle back and see K over the table at YY Doodles with a bottle of Great White and the other K at an arch sing, bobbing her head, singing her heart out. I can see those faces like it was yesterday, and those memories and many ones from the intervening years all collapse into the single moment of now, imbuing it with richness and also loss. With these women, I am home. I also got an email today from another friend from college, writing about how she feels like there is right now “so much and so little” at the same time, in so many ways. I immediately understood what she meant, and told her so. Friends like this sustain me. I don’t want drama in this life of mine. What I really, truly ache for are these friends of my heart, whose steady, compassionate presence warms my days. There are a handful of friends like this (some of whom are my family), whose lives thrum alongside mine in a visceral, reassuring way.  They are companions for the journey, no matter what. And this, I’m realizing, is home.

Three moments

Friday

Matt took the kids out for dinner and taught them his favorite party trick (yes, those are napkin boobs).

I had dinner with two of my dearest friends from college. We are all in various aspects of transition, and sometimes it feels like we all orbit each other like atoms, always aware of one another but never in the same spot. It was an immense pleasure and treat to have a couple of hours to simply sit, and talk, and be. I am reminded over and over again about how important these friendships are, these women who knew me when I was becoming who I am now.

Saturday

Mother-daughter book club at our house in the afternoon. Grace chose a book called Grace for President which I adore. I actually wish the protagonist wasn’t called Grace, because that has nothing to do with why I like it. The book makes me choke up every single time I read it. It’s a great, empowering read for girls in elementary school (with a double bonus lesson about the electoral college).

We did something at book club that we have not done before, which is go around the room and have everyone read a page. There was something magical about those minutes, with girls hesitating before long words, reading aloud, voices growing in confidence as they forged ahead through a paragraph. I was mesmerized, looking around the room at these nascent girls, all tall and lean and angular, seemingly more so by the day, confidence and tentativeness wrapped up in each individual personality. Their eyes shone and their giggles erupted and their camaraderie was palpable.

Sunday

Palm Sunday church service with Mum, Grace, and Whit and then lunch with one other leg of the stool. I loved watching Grace and Whit with these friends that they are growing up with like family. I remember when each of these children was born, literally the day (and I’m not speaking of my own here!) – it really stuns me, as cliched as it is, that they are so big now.

All three moments speak of the themes that shape my life: the unstoppable advance of time, the way that certain moments present an opportunity to be still and really see into the life of things, the deep bonds of motherhood and friendship.  My life exists in the penumbra of my awareness of time’s passage, I know that now: the sadness and inevitability of each moment’s death colors it even as I live it.  Yet somehow I am also seeing that paradoxically, only by accepting this irrefutable truth can I actually, fully inhabit the time that I do have.

Qualities

Devotion

Devotion lights candles at dusk.  She braids her grandmother’s hair with an antique comb.  She works as an ecologist at the university.  She wears long flowing tunics with bright cotton pants.  She has never taken a dance class, but she moves with an unstudied grace, sensitive to the edge where her body meets the air.
Devotion balances periods of great stillness with times of moevement and exuberance.  She has prayed in many temples and seen evidence of God in unlikely places.  She keeps a postcard of Saint Francis above her desk.  A Yemenite amulet hangs in her window.  Always she remembers to honor the Mother.

Inspiration

Inspiration is disturbing.  She does not believe in guarantees or insurance or strict schedules.  She is not interested in how well you write your grant proposal or what you do for a living or why you are too busy to see her.  She will be there when you need her but you have to take it on trust.  Surrender.  She knows when you need her better than you do.

Honesty

Honesty is the most vulnerable man I have ever met.  He is simple and loving.  He lives in a small town on a cliff near the beach.  I had forgotten how many stars there are in the midnight sky until I spent a week with him at his house by the sea.
In my time I have been afraid of so many things, most especially of the heights and of the darkness.  I know if I had been driving anywhere else, the road would have terrified me.  Knowing I was on my way to see him softened the fear.  And in his presence the darkness becomes big and deep and comforting.  He says if you are totally vulnerable you cannot be hurt.

Joy

Joy drinks pure water.  She has sat with the dying and attended many births.  She denies nothing.  She is in love with life, all of it, the sun and the rain and the rainbow.  She rides horses at Half Moon Bay under the October moon.  She climbs mountains.  She sings in the hills.  She jumps from the hot spring to the cold stream without hesitation>
Although Joy is spontaneous, she is immensely patient.  She does not need to rush.  She knows that there are obstacles on every path and that every moment is the perfect moment.  She is not concerned with success or failure or how to make things permanent.
At times Joy is elusive – she seems to disappear even as we approach her.  I see her standing on a ridge covered with oak trees, and suddenly the distance between us feels enormous.  I am overwhelmed and wonder if the effort to reach her is worth it.  Yet, she waits for us.  Her desire to walk with us is as great as our longing to accompany her.

All from The Book of Qualities by J. Ruth Gendler.

Beyond the headlights, retrospect and prospect, and letting go of my need for an order

I have a friend who spent her 20s dabbling. For various unforseen personal reasons she wound up on a somewhat circuitous professional route. She went to journalism school, she travelled around the world, she wrote, she taught yoga. Things happened, bad things, and heartbreak. At 30 she decided to change her life and go back to law school. She had always been intrigued by the idea of law school, though had not anticipated going at this point in her life.

She forged ahead. We spent many hours, drinking wine, crying, talking about the twists in life’s road that we did not anticipate. She was full of angst about her concern that her various choices and jobs did not really add up to anything. She felt tormented at what felt like wasted years. Several months ago, a year into her post-law school job, she emailed me about a new job opportunity that had come her way. I read her email with tears in my eyes. “This is it,” I wrote back, my fingers not able to write as fast as I wanted them to, so eager was I to convey my enthusiasm. “Really?” she responded, admitting that I’d always been the cautious voice of reason and she had not thought I’d react this way. “Yes,” I wrote, “This is the thing that makes it all make sense.”

And I’ve thought about that exchange so much. I don’t know when my friend will make the move into the opportunity that I was so excited about, but I feel certain she will eventually. And suddenly there is a glowing sense of peace about her, at least when I look, a design that has descended onto what previously looked like randomness. In retrospect, now, with this piece of reality in place, we see the order.

What strikes me is that my life is kind of the opposite. All of my decisions made sense prospectively; it’s only now that they appear not to have been adding up to anything. I always made the “right” call, in the moment, at least if you define right by what the world will approve of, as the most conventional option. And now, at 35, I find myself reflecting on 20 years of careful choices that have brought me … here. Home to … myself. To this frantic restlessness.

Maybe what we really need is to let go of the need for an order. Maybe what I need to do is to let go of my desperate desire for there to be a plan, an ordering logic. Perhaps making a decision in the moment, with all of the information we have at that time, is the best we can do. That, and accepting the surprises that come our way, shifting our course infinitessimally but irrevocably. Maybe my friend and I aren’t that different, after all. Maybe we both have the same single and fundamental task: to make peace with the roads we have travelled, as straight or winding as they have been, and to trust that we are up to the task of what lies ahead, whatever it may be.

E.L. Doctorow’s quote comes to mind: “You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Maybe now my job is to stop squinting past the headlights. It’s only causing me panic that I can’t see, hurting my eyes, and taking my attention away from what is right in front of me.