Friday random, with laughter


Grace, pensive at the library on Sunday.

I like the Hopper-esque light.

Sometimes I think I give the erroneous impression that Grace is serious all the time. She can be serious, yes, and she is certainly, more than anyone else, my clanging gong of truth and clarity, bringing me back to awareness.

But she’s also a seven year old girl. Who likes a good giggle, Judy Moody, Taylor Swift, and, well … shoes. I came downstairs after putting Whit to bed the other night to find this. You can’t really see that she is also draped with several sparkly necklaces she had hand-selected from my closet. And the shoes, which she had also picked out herself (from a fairly large set of options, I confess). Good taste, no? This child never met anything sparkly, spangly, or sequined she did not love. She may have been a Vegas showgirl (with an old soul and an introspective streak) in another life.

What strikes me most is how huge her feet are. She can wear these pretty soon.

And, this guy. Where Grace is my grace, Whit is my wit. I didn’t have any idea when I named them how they would come to embody these traits (well, Whit/wit, go with me, please). He is my clown (not the creepy kind), my reminder, always, to look at the hilarity that is there in every situation. His young soul and joyful spirit is such a nice counterpart to my more melancholic leanings.

On Tuesday night I took both the children out for pizza. After we sat down, the waiter arrived, asking for our drink orders. I’ve been encouraging them to place their own orders, because I think it’s a good way to practice such important and incredibly difficult (why?) life skills such as looking someone in the eye. Grace ordered water. We all turned, expectantly, to Whit.

“A Lone Star, please,” he said. The waiter’s head snapped to look at me. He was clearly appalled and, simultaneously, trying not to laugh. I did a double-take at my own child and said, “He’ll have a chocolate milk.” My first reaction, I admit, was to be proud that he had said please.

But, a Lone Star? Where did he get this? We have never, to my knowledge, had Lone Star beer at home. Neither Matt nor I drink it. I have no idea. I immediately thought of the day that I asked him, shaking my head in resignation, “Where did you come from, Whit?” and he answered, point blank, “Texas.”

Maybe he really is from Texas. Grace, as a baby, was nicknamed “Gracie Big Pants” because of the photograph below. To this day I still call her GBP. I have an LL Bean bag monogrammed “GBP.” I’m thinking Whit From Texas needs one with “WFT” on it.

Two halves of this achingly full and short life

Yesterday was a tough day. I was sad and tired and emotional. Midmorning, driving home from an errand, I instinctively turned into a big cemetery near my house. I love this cemetery; I grew up visiting it with my mother. We’d walk around, admiring the trees and flowers in the various seasons. I have also attended many funerals at the chapel in the middle of the cemetery. It is a hushed and private place, with beautifully tended landscaping interspersed with headstones and formal tombs of weathered white marble. It is big and rambling, and it is easy to get lost. I drove around today until I found my favorite spot, by one of several little ponds.

I parked my car and walked to a stone bench by the pond. I was alone and didn’t see another person for the whole 45 minutes I sat there. It was cold and gray, and I shivered in my Juicy sweatpants and thin fleece jacket. I hunched over, shoving my hands deep into my jacket pockets for warmth. I kept my sunglasses on even though it was spitting rain, mostly to hide the tears that were rolling down my face.

Even on this resolutely, steely gray day, spring was apparent everywhere. The trees are bursting into bright green bloom, and the bush on my right was dotted with tight, bright pink buds. Two ducks, a male and a female, swam in the reeds at the pond’s edge right by my feet. In the rough patch of grass and wood chips where the lawn met the pond, a few tightly curled fiddleheads emerged. Their luminous greenness stood out against the dull brown of the wood chips.

Every single thing I could see, even the very place I had come, bidden by something I can’t name, sang of the interconnectedness of birth and death. Of beginnings and endings, wound together into a tangled knot. Impossible to separate. I sat there and felt the waves of emotion rising in my chest, trying to regulate my breathing but failing, nature’s insistent nascence in front of me blurring with my tears. I thought about Elizabeth‘s words: sometimes the big picture is more than I can carry. Sometimes – yesterday morning – I know this feeling intimately..

Loss haunts every single moment of this life, even the most suffused with newness, with birth. It is undeniable. The reality of this is sometimes more than I can bear. The awareness of loss, of death, of endings bangs around in my chest like a moth trapped against a screen window. Sometimes so powerfully I can’t believe I’m not visibly jerking around. Impending loss pulses in every single moment, throbbing like a heartbeat, making me think of the way you can faintly feel blood pumping out of a papercut.

Maybe it’s not a knot, though. Maybe it is simply two flip sides of a single reality. As we say goodbye to things, so we welcome new ones. I wish I could trust that. Or that it somehow mitigated the searing pain of the loss. That is so hard for me, who is so very attached. I know I should be less attached. I don’t know how, though. I realize that these are just the two halves of this human experience, of this achingly full and short life: beginnings and endings, birth and death, loss and life. They are as inextricable as night is from day.

And so I sat there. Trying to do as I have been trying to do: to feel my feelings, to sit with them without panic (so hard for me) and to just be patient. I looked at the water and the life bursting forth everywhere. I felt the roaring inside my chest and the raindrops on my skin, watched the ducks, tried to believe in the little green shoots that were so valiantly growing up through the ground. As I felt the tension leaving my body my shoulders fell and my back sagged into a comma, and my racing heart finally slowed. I began to breathe as I noticed that even in a place defined by death, and endings, life pushes through. I am trying to trust that. Really, really trying.

Present Tense with Elizabeth from Clarity in the Chaos

Elizabeth. How to introduce Elizabeth? Even her blog title, Boy Crazy: Finding Clarity in the Chaos, could be the subtitle of my life (sans the three sons of course, though my one gives me a run for my money). Or, hell, the TITLE. Elizabeth writes lyrically about her day to day life with her three boys, about juggling a return to work, about the turning seasons she sees out of her window and about her effort, so familiar to me, to really engage with her life and the people in it. She is candid about her struggles and the ways that overwhelm-edness threatens, about the hilarious and frantic situations that pepper her days (the blueberries on the hands, still one of my favorites), and about the incandescent moments of feeling that can sweep through our hearts and minds, surprising and filling us.

Elizabeth writes about making an explicit choice to live her life more mindfully. To “let time pass at its true pace.” This, of course, speaks directly to the heart of everything that is sacred to me right now. She expresses beautifully how her commitment to mindful living has changed the way she sees and interacts with the world. Elizabeth writes – and lives – in a way that I aspire to. She truly seems to focus on what is right in front of her, and the evocative way she speaks of what she sees convinces me even more that this is the road to the true riches of this life. In this way, she is a teacher and a guide and an inspiration, and her blog is one of my absolute favorites out there in the wilds of the internets.

It has been a true joy getting to know Elizabeth, first through her writing on her blog, then through her collaborative art project, snippets (what a cool and community-building idea), and finally through our email exchanges. I am proud to call her my friend. And delighted with her thoughtful and wise answers to my questions. Oh, and it’s her one year blogging anniversary today! I feel privileged to be publishing these words today. Happy one year, Elizabeth. May there be many, many more. Without further ado…

1. When have you felt most present? Are there specific memories that stand out for you?

The times I have felt most present for extended periods of time (like, an hour or more) have been during the labors of all three of my sons, in yoga – specifically savasana, when making art, or listening to live music. I also have a lot of random instances I could mention. There are times I intentionally remain where I am, taking in the moments with all my senses rather than letting my mind wander. Lying in bed with my 6 year old talking about his day, hanging out with my 3 year old just the other day, or on the bus on the way to work. I’ll keep my iPod tucked in my bag and my book closed, and I’ll take it all in. The road, the people out the window, the other passengers on the bus. I watch what people are doing, I listen to the snips of conversation around me, I smell the mix of perfume and coffee and cigarette smoke lingering on someone’s jacket, I feel the hard seat and the bumps of the drive. Sure, there are days when I travel that whole route without paying one bit of attention to where I actually am, letting my music or my book or my mental anxiety or to-do list transport me. But most days, I like to be where I am, fully.

When I was writing my thesis in grad school, I had a 2 year old and was pregnant with my second kid. I would often find myself reading him a book while I was analyzing statistics in my head. I really struggled with being present on those days at home because my research felt all-consuming. But when I really worked at it and tried to just be mentally where I was physically, I felt so much better.

2. Do you have rituals or patterns that you use to remind you to Be Here Now?

The first and easiest tool I have is to turn off the music or shut the computer. Those distractions are half the battle.

My personal mantra is to let each minute last sixty seconds. I don’t like to let time fly, or drag. I really embraced this idea right before my third baby was born and I was thinking about how time goes by so much more quickly when we’re busy. I intentionally slowed down and began living each moment, no matter if it was a pleasant, easy moment or a hard one. I just wanted to be there, to feel it, to live it all so that I didn’t wake up a year later and say “where did that year go?”.

Breathing always helps, as does visualization (which I describe in a response below). It also helps me to remember being in labor with my three kids. When I experience emotions and thoughts that hurt or scare me or stress me out, I try to breathe and to lean into those feelings. To give up on resisting them or stuffing them away or distracting myself from them, and instead I let them wash over me (like a contraction). Because it’s not going to kill me to feel something that isn’t easy to deal with. In fact, by acknowledging my thoughts and feelings and letting them wash over or through me, I come out the other end having made some progress, not unlike in labor. Now when I catch myself ‘somewhere else’ and it’s because my mind is wandering to everything else rather than where I am, I try to let go of whatever I’m thinking about and notice where I am with all my senses. I listen, I look, I touch, I smell. (And with food – I taste. How easy is it to shovel an entire meal down my throat without tasting it because I was thinking about something else or checking my email or editing a report?)

All of it – I soak it all in, let the experience add another layer of texture to me, let it become part of me as I move on, take the next step, inahle – exhale. It’s so easy to run through life on Auto-Pilot, getting from Point A to Point B without noticing where we are or what we’re actually doing. I could hop on the bus and end up at work without noticing one thing about the weather or what’s going on out the window or in the seat next to me because I’m so distracted by my own brain. But when I mentally put down the juggling act in my head and just focus on being where I am, I feel my pulse slow down and a (relative) calm set in despite whatever is on my plate for that day (or month, or year).

And I don’t want to paint being Present as all smooth and easy times. Sometimes I waltz in from work to sheer pandemonium. I have to see the kids and make dinner and deal with the witching hour(s) after I’ve been at work all day, before my husband comes home. My house is a mess and the boys need me and I have deadlines for projects that haven’t been started and phone calls I haven’t returned in a month and an inbox full of business and pleasure and friends that want to go out that night and a husband I’d like to spend some time with and we’re down to one roll of toilet paper and the dog hasn’t been walked and it’s really freaking easy to let these things bombard me and overwhelm me, but it is SO MUCH BETTER for me to let go of everything that isn’t happening at that exact moment. To focus on one moment at a time, because then it’s manageable. I pay attention to the fact that I’m chopping veggies (or stirring mac’n’cheese) and I listen to my son’s stories (or to them playing/fighting in the other room) and I take in each moment as it comes. It is too overwhelming for me to see it all. I like to think of it as intentional myopia. Sometimes the big picture is more than I can carry. So I hold a fleeting piece in my hand. I feel each raindrop as it falls and I don’t resist as it slips through my fingers. But I can’t hold the entire storm in the palm of my hand. It would knock me over and render me useless (and crabby).

Geez, the last thing I want to suggest is that this is easy or that I handle it the way I’d like to all the time. But through practicing yoga and meditation, it has come much more naturally than it used to.

3. Do you have specific places or people that you associate with being particularly present? Who? Where? Any idea why?

Yoga, contemplative writing practice, the shore of Lake Michigan, the early days with a new baby (I rarely read or watched TV while nursing. I liked to just watch my baby. To be there mentally. It’s amazing how easy it is to be in the middle of next week or next year when really you’re sitting on the couch in your living room with a baby on your breast). On the flip side, where have I been least present? In church, growing up. I would spend the entire service following a train of thought, and then randomly stopping and asking how I got there, then following the train of thought backwards until I got back to where I started, which I had always forgotten until I got back there. It was my favorite game. And also – driving. I am rarely really where I am when I’m driving. My mind is back in high school or it’s 20 years into the future or it’s solving the sorrows of the world or it’s on Mars or wherever, but certainly not on that stretch of road that I’m driving at that moment.

4. Have you ever meditated? How did that go?

Yes. I am part of a contemplative writing practice (ala Natalie Goldberg) that meets weekly. We start the practice (after a brief check-in and hello) with a sitting meditation (then we listen to a writing prompt and follow with 20 minutes of free writing). I love it. I also meditate during Savasana in yoga practice, and during Restorative Yoga sessions. I keep my attention on my breath, when I notice thoughts and obligations and next week’s worries or my grocery list popping up or lingering, I acknowledge the thoughts and then release them. They are bound to pop up, at least for a novice like me. A visualization that helps me is that of raindrops falling in a river. Whatever these thoughts or worries or to-do’s are, I see them falling, they’re very much there. But when they land in the river, they dissipate and flow downstream. And I stay where I am, letting the river flow past and through me, letting thoughts flow on past while I just stand there, just being, in the river and the rain. It has been an incredibly helpful visualization for me.

5. Has having children changed how you think about the effort to be present?

Truthfully, I never gave any thought to being present before I had kids. Looking back, I see that I fluctuated between extremes. In college I was always multitasking, finding distractions to help me escape the present when I needed it. But then also being able to fully just be wherever I was and to soak in my surroundings through all of my senses without any thought to tomorrow’s schedule or obligations. Right before we got pregnant with our first son, my husband and I took a several-month-long road trip with no itinerary or schedule. We traveled down Highway 1 from Seattle to San Diego and then into the southwestern states and eventually back to Wyoming (from where we started). I was incredibly present on that trip. We drove until we felt like stopping, and we stayed where we were as long as we felt like it. Sometimes staying four weeks in one place, other times just an afternoon. It was incredibly freeing and we grew so close on that trip. And now, with kids, I can’t even imagine taking a trip like that. I’m sure it’s do-able, but I think it would be a lot harder for me.

6. And just cause I’m curious, what books and songs do you love?

Oh, with music I am remarkable fickle. Lately, I find myself coming back to Mike Doughty – both the Rockity Roll album (especially Down on the River by the Sugar Plant and Ossining) and Haughty Melodic. Also anything by Ben Folds, and randomly — very old school Smashing Pumpkins. I also could listen to the Garden State soundtrack on repeat for the rest of my life. Another song that pops to mind with nostalgic value: Pictures of You by The Cure. Have you heard the PS22 Choir from NYC sing this? My lord. Search my blog for a clip. Tears, every time. Oh, I love Ingrid Michaelson, although I haven’t listened to her in months. This really isn’t even a slice of the songs that move me.

And books? I haven’t had time for fiction in years. I read mostly collections of essays, anthologies, or nonfiction with short chapters. I, like every woman who writes, adore Anne Lamott and consider her my personal therapist and life coach. I recently was enamored with If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland, which is really a book about art, inspiration and life. She was so ahead of her time in so many ways. And right now I’m finishing up The Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chodron. Although I am not Buddhist myself, many of the teachings compliment my Christian faith and resonate with me.
Well, there is so much here that I relate to that I have to be careful not to just quote everything Elizabeth says. Never gave much thought to being present and aware until I had kids? Um, yes. Never even occured to me. It was not until I had these living, breathing yardsticks of time’s passage in front of me that I realized how much I was missing. It’s amazing, how true that cliche is about children being our teachers, isn’t it?

The contemplative writing group sounds extraordinary, and I think I need one (any takers in the Boston area?). Fickle with music (and yet needing to turn it off to have a prayer of being focused?)? Moi aussi. Labors being among of the most vivid and present moments of your life? Yes. The powerful lessons of Buddhism, that for now feel complimentary to a Christian upbringing? Yes.

Elizabeth, I am impressed and inspired by you, by your commitment, by the strength of your spirit. You are an example, a shining and honest and human one, of what it looks like to really let your minutes be 60 seconds long (to paraphrase you). Thank you for sharing your kindness, your wisdom, your brilliance, and your humanity with us today. Thank you for you.

My subject chose me

“I never had to choose a subject – my subject rather chose me.”
-Ernest Hemingway

I’ve loved this quote for a long time. And ever since Saturday night I’ve been thinking about it in light of Margaret Atwood’s provocative poem, Spelling. There are so many lines of that poem that echo in my head, but the one I’ve been mulling specifically is “I wonder how many women/denied themselves daughters…/so they could mainline words.” She beautifully refers to the age-old tension between creativity and procreativity that defined women artists for centuries. As recently as 1899, Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier walked into the sea as a way of avoiding the choice she could not make.

I feel so grateful to live in a time with more room for women to be both mothers and artists. Even more, for women to be both mothers and not-mothers, mothers and someone-other-than-a-mother at the same time. So glad because, ultimately, the subject that chose me clearly has a lot to do with my having had children. I don’t know that I would have come to the place that I am today, where my old way of being in the world simply does not suffice anymore, without them. It’s not precisely that my “subject” (if there is such a defining thing running through these diffuse musings) is my children, though clearly they are a big part of it. It’s more that the insistent awareness that I was missing something critical in this singular, short life of mine came only after I was a mother.

Of course it is not always simple, trying to mother and to write. Of course not. Adrienne Rich’s famous line that “Poetry was where I existed as no-one’s mother” speaks to the eternal trading-off of time, attention, and identity that we all engage in. But for me, one sphere enriches the other in ways I cannot yet fully articulate. They provide ample material, Grace and Whit do, but it’s actually more than that. It was they who woke me up to the sleepwalking way I was moving through my life, they who shook the foil in my eyes, they who said “Right here! Right now” loudly enough that I finally listened.

They, Grace and Whit, brought with them noise and sleeplessness and worry and chest-tightening love and most of all, a keen, bittersweet awareness of the fleetingness of it all. They brought stuffed animals and soccer balls and exercise pants and Harry Potter and sleepy whispers of love and a handful of dandelions offered with grubby hands and proud eyes. They brought my attention to my life, to a thousand million tiny moments, some of which glitter brilliantly, most of which blend into the slurry of memory. They brought me my subject. And how wildly, extravagantly fortunate I am that I don’t have to choose.

A word after a word after a word is power

Grace tonight told me that they were studying poetry at school, and asked if I still had the poems she had written for me ages ago. I did, I said. As she was getting into bed, she caught a glimpse of this framed poster on her wall, and stared at it for a minute. I wondered what she was thinking. “Is that a poem, Mummy?” she asked me. “Why yes, Grace, it is,” I answered, a smile wrestling with the tears the sprang to my eyes.

A poem I’ve long loved, in fact. A poem that was the epigraph to my college thesis. A poem that I wrote on a poster that I printed for her after she wrote her name for the first time. A poem that’s been hanging, large and framed, on her wall for over 3 years.

I thought of that choice, 14 years ago, to include this poem (with a photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe‘s naked breasts and hand) in my thesis, which was about the mother-daughter relationship.  Thought of the ways in which I was then anticipating now, this very girl at my feet, this moment when I was the mother, and I had that dizzying experience where time kaleidoscopes into a single radiant moment.

“Will you read it to me, Mummy?” she asked, settling down into a cross-legged position on her floor, looking up at me beseechingly.

“Of course I will, Gracie.” And I began. And more than once, I had to pause to regain my composure and to swallow back the tears. Reading this poem to my eager daughter while looking at pictures of her writing her very first word. Pictures of her first word, her name. Grace. grace. Dear, dear universe. Thank you. Words, poetry, pen on paper, names, spelling, grace.

Gracie, my grace.

Spelling (Margaret Atwood)

My daughter plays on the floor
wit plastic letters,
read, blue, & hard yellow.
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.

*

and I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.

*

A child is not a poem,
A poem is not a child.
There is no either/or.
However.

*

I return to the story
of a woman caught in the war
& in labor, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.
Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.
A word after a word
after a word is power.

*

At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.
This is a metaphor.

*

How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky, & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.