Month: July 2010

The fabric of my life is woven through with departures

The fabric of my life is woven through with departures. There are big ones, whose nubs are visible on the surface of my life, and smaller ones, the thread of which just glint when you turn the fabric this way and that. Like the samskaras that Dani Shapiro so eloquently talks about in Devotion, these departures remain within me, hard little kernels of sadness that the rest of my experience flows around, but not undisturbed.

In the first big departure of my life I was the one who left. My family moved to London in January of my 7th grade year (incidentally, not timing that I would particularly recommend). I will never forget the evening that my parents told me, driving me home from my 6th grade graduation dance in the late-fading light of an early June evening. How could I forget?  That was the night I realized how small I was. It was concrete proof that I was not absolutely in control of my life.

It took me another 20 years, however, to realize that the right response to this slap in the face about my lack of control wasn’t actually to try to control everything. For those 20 years I gritted my teeth, clenched my fists, and exerted untold amounts of energy thinking – hoping? – that through sheer force of will I could bend the world to the shape I wanted it to be in.

That departure was deeply destabilizing for me.  It ruptured irrevocably the life I’d assumed would unfurl in front of me like a bolt of fabric rolling out. Even though I was the one doing the leaving, I was powerless and the deep tectonic instability that that represented has reverberated through my ability to feel secure ever since. Of course there were enormous riches that came from the move to London, of course, of course. I am grateful, and think often of the unique experiences I had during those years. But there were also ramifications in my spirit, not all easy, that I am still sifting through, and it is they are on my mind tonight.

In the second major departure that formed me I was the one who was left. The first man I ever loved (and it’s a short list!) moved to Asia, and I was left behind. While I intellectually understood his reasoning, even admired his wanderlust and adventurous spirit, emotionally I was devastated, rocked by further evidence that I really couldn’t count on anything or anyone. It took me years to understand that my panicky fear of abandonment was rooted in some ways in this original experience. To this day, I have a deep fear of being left behind, that those I love most will up and leave, and that I will be powerless to stop the departure.

Clearly, all of these departures were followed by arrivals, hellos, new beginnings. The ways that loss folds into life and then back again into loss in the world’s most complicated and ever-shifting piece of origami continue to amaze me. All of these events, as unpleasant as they were in the moment, and as long-lasting their ambivalent echoes have been, contributed to bring me to where I am now. I think often of Theodore Roethke’s lines,

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

It is a comfort, certainly, to believe that all of this leaving and being left that haunts my relationships and life now was in service of both fate and continued learning. That doesn’t mean there isn’t pain, though, or sadness. That doesn’t mean I don’t miss people, and regret some goodbyes, both made and received. I wish, like Roethke, I could not fear this going where I have to go. The truth is, though, I often fear it frantically, find myself scrabbling to keep the change or goodbye at bay. Hopefully in the afternoon of my life (Carl Jung) I can learn the acceptance that pervades Roethke’s words, feel the peace that I am going where I have to go.

What does it mean that the earth is so beautiful?

All through our gliding journey, on this day as on so many others, a little song runs in through my mind. I say a song because it passes musically, but it is really just words, a thought that is neither strange nor complex. In fact, how strange it would be not to think it – not to have such music inside one’s head and body, on such an afternoon. What does it mean, say the words, that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring the world? What is the life that I should live?

– Mary Oliver, Long Life

taking pictures of everything

Last week Grace and I were sitting in the car with her friend who we had driven home from camp. We were waiting to drop her off and of course I was early so we had a few minutes to kill. Grace wanted to show Jessie a particular picture (I can’t remember which one) so I handed them my iphone. They scrolled through all the pictures I have on it (which isn’t actually that many, I seem to be the only person I know who deletes photographs after uploading them!).

Grace and her friend starting giggling and I turned around to look at them.

“What?” I asked. They looked at the screen, not at me (preview of things to come, surely). “Seriously, what?”

“Nothing, Mum,” Grace said with a newly dismissive tone that has crept into her voice lately.

“Grace, your mum takes pictures of everything!” Grace’s friend said, not unkindly, more in surprise.

“She does. This isn’t even the half of it. She takes pictures of the sky a lot, and Legos Whit builds, and my art, and shoes, and our backs, and shadows, and glasses on the table and … wow, yes, she does!” Grace trailed off.

Yes, I do. I take tons of pictures of little random moments in our lives that I don’t want to forget. These images can hold as much potent memory as the more traditional ones that I often show here, of Grace and Whit, smiling at the camera, together or apart. These seemingly random glimpses of inanimate things can reawaken for me all of the emphermal details of the experience, of who precisely I was at that specific moment. So yes, I do take pictures of “everything,” and wow, oh wow, am I grateful for that.

Hadley’s beautiful faded pink-gray hydrangeas.


Favors for Whit’s 3rd birthday party (personalized plates with each child’s name and a drawing of a clown) all wrapped up the night before.

Sparkling rose, Diet Coke, and water, all lined up, at a celebratory lunch with Bouff.

Spring peonies on my kitchen island.


A breathtaking late summer sunset.


My feet standing in the lapping waves at the shore of the Marion beach.


My shadow, with Grace and Whit on either side of me, cast against the concrete path behind my in-laws’ house in Florida.


A dandelion, just proffered with enthusiastic affection by Whit.


Grace’s overnight bag, packed for a sleepover, half of which is taken up by her two well-worn, deeply-loved bears (creatively named Brown Bear and Yellow Bear).


Two bright buckets.


An ornament that I had made for the Christmas that Grace was just one, that she had just hung on the 2009 Christmas tree.

The scatter of yellow leaves on a wet autumn pavement.

Must Stop Myself. I could bore you with hundreds, if not thousands, of photographs like these.

In truth, the random photographs like these are often just as evocative (and sometimes more so) than the more traditional family and friend photographs.

Cloudy with a chance

It is my distinct honor to be guest posting today at Karen Maezen Miller’s beautiful site, Cheerio Road. Karen’s book, Hand Wash Cold, is among those that have most moved and touched me in the last few years, and I’ve come to think of her as one of my teachers, one of my shepherds.

What a week it’s been for me with these women whose words and thinking shepherds me (even though they never asked for the job): I was fortunate to meet Katrina Kenison last week, I am going to hear Dani Shapiro tonight (thank you, Aidan!) and here I am reading my own humble words in Karen’s extraordinary space.

If you don’t know Karen’s work, you have an enormous gift in store. Run, don’t walk, to buy Hand Wash Cold. And please click over and read my post, Cloudy With a Chance, and then spend some time immersing yourself in Karen’s world. You won’t want to leave. I never do.

The struggle and the beauty

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
– Sigmund Freud

Many thanks to Anthony Lawlor, from whom I found this quote on Twitter. I do believe this to be true, absolutely, though it’s so incredibly difficult to remember in the moments where the struggle seems overwhelming. The struggle which occurs for me on so many levels these days. The struggle to stop my crazy squirrel brain from frantically spinning over and over on the same questions. The struggle to remain patient and present with my lovely children who can be charming, curious, and incredibly aggravating. The struggle not to over-identify with Grace, to maintain the distance and perspective I need to parent her well. The struggle not to crush Whit’s effervescent spirit, whose enthusiastic bubbles sometimes challenge the rules and norms. The struggle to try to keep alive my professional and creative selves, as well as to have enough left over for those who need me.

“These are the day of miracle and wonder”
– Paul Simon

For some reason that lyric was in my head nonstop this weekend. My subconscious was trying to remind me of the richness of the present moment, I suspect, which can be so hard to really see.

It was a weekend with plenty of struggle as well as ample beauty. Somehow the struggle is so quick to occlude the beauty, so much more urgent and immediate, so hard to shake off. Does this make sense? It is here, on the page, and through the lens of my camera that I am more able to see the beauty. It rises more slowly, over time, asserting itself in memory rather than in the vivid moment. The beauty is in the smallest moments, infinity opening, surprising me every time, from the most infinitessimal things, like a world in the back of a wardrobe (there really are only two or three human stories, and we do go on telling them, no?). Why is it, then, that the struggles, also often small, can so quickly and utterly yank me back to the morass of misery and frustration, away from the wonders that are revealed in the flashing moments of beauty?

I wish I could change the dynamic between these two, but the beauty, fragile as it is in the moment, seems sturdier over the long arc of a life. Freud’s quote supports this, the notion that the beauty develops over time, like a print sitting in the solution for a long time, image gradually forming on the slick surface of the photo paper, slowly, haltingly hovering into being. It is, of course, the photograph that is the enduring artifact of the experience.