Month: June 2011

Summer at last

It is finally summer. A few images of the last several days:

Crazy gorgeous blue sky.  I love the faint tracing of an airplane’s straight line juxtaposed with the puffy clouds.  A reminder of all that is linear and all that is utterly non-linear.
Grace on the camp bus.

Continuing to try to let go.  Lately have been thinking of how it’s futile to try to surrender.  Ridiculous to effort to let go.  Trying to parse that one.

The steeple of the art center on the corner against a blue sky is one of my very favorite views.

Walking back from the school bus in the slanting late-afternoon sunlight.

My Renaissance man painting on the beach (under the wonderful tutelage of Sally, one of the Four Family mothers)


Matching shoes for dinner out at a local restaurant.

Sound sleep, in a hot room with animals nearby.

empty

Sometimes it feels like what I do, all day long, is empty things.  I empty the trash cans.  I empty the dishwasher.  I empty the basket of drycleaning into a bag to take it down the street.  I empty the grocery bags into the fridge.  I empty the childrens’ backpacks and I empty their lunchboxes.  I empty the mailbox and pay the bills and make a note of the babies to send gifts to and the things I need to RSVP to.  I empty the front hall table, bringing all of the detritus that accumulates there up the stairs to where it belongs. I empty the basement, sorting through things we don’t need anymore, deciding what goes to be handed down, what goes to Goodwill, what goes to the trash.  I empty my email and my voicemail boxes.

I listen to the kids, let them empty onto me the things from their days that made them happy and the things that made them fret.  I listen to Matt, let him empty his frustrations and elations, big and small.

Everything is always overflowing and too full.  Sometimes it seems like the primary function of my life is to keep the encroaching entropy at bay.  I must be constantly vigilant against this rising tide of disorder, mess, stuff.

Why, then, do I feel so empty some of the time?

wings

I always think of their shoulder blades as wings.  Their wings, poking through their skin.  And his little back has two freckles on it now, marks marring his white, skim-milk skin, my skin.  Life beginning to make its mark on my child.

The wings, though, are on my mind today.  The wings.

This past winter Whit went through a phase when he slept every night with his hand clasped around the little compass my parents gave him in his stocking for Christmas.  I always wondered, when I went in to kiss him goodnight, where his dreams were taking him.  Where was he flying, in his sleep, guided by the true north he could always check in his palm?

May they have both a compass and wings, my children.  Oh, please, please: never let them lose that physical sensation of wonder, that feeling that I always associate with wings beating in my chest.  And please, please: let me help them each find their own internal compass, that needle that tugs north.  That internal compass which can be trusted to orient us, no matter what whitewater we tumble in.

I’m still looking for both my compass and my wings, and, oddly enough, my children provide them for me better than anything else in my life.  They seem to have both already.  Maybe we’re born with our wings and our compass, and the task of our lives, at once simple and enormous, is not to lose them.

Where the light enters

The wound is the place the light enters you. (Rumi)

There’s no question in my mind what my essential wound is.  It’s my sometimes-unbearable sensitivity to the passage of time, the immense difficulty I have accepting life’s basic impermanence.  This manifests in a thousand ways big and small, which I’ve documented in excruciating detail here on this blog.

It occured to me as I rolled Rumi’s words over and over in my head that maybe my wound is especially deep, particularly gapingly open: it lets so much light in that sometimes I have to shield my eyes.  The light floods in, bringing with it drawn-breath moments of astonishment and innumerable gifts, but also a stinging in my eyes and, often, tears.

I’ve contemplated before the idea – and by “contemplated” I mean dreamed, imagined, and ferociously wished – that this sensitivity could somehow be, someday, a source of strength, courage, wisdom.  Even more importantly, I continue searching for a way that this strand of my personality, which manifests mostly as a seam of sometimes shiny sorrow, could be a positive lesson and inheritance for my children.  Both of them already evince qualities that I know come from the same deep well of acute sensitivity that exists inside me.  I’m desperate to find a light in which this heritage isn’t just a suffocatingly heavy blanket of melancholy draped over their experience.

Both Grace and Whit are keenly aware of the world around them.  One of my traditions with them is going for “notice things” walks (sometimes, for extra fun, in our pajamas) during which I celebrate the things that they observe.  Always, without fail, they see something that I would have missed: a heart-shaped engraving on a tree trunk, the way the light hits a particular bush, a darting sparrow in a tree, the trail of white in the sky left by an airplane slicing through the gloaming.

Perhaps this is just the light entering them.  They definitely share my wound, but maybe they also share my propensity towards wonder.  Maybe this makes up for the pain.  I fiercely hope so.

Our mothers’ names

“How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers’ names.” Alice Walker

I was on the phone recently with one of my best friends who was headed to a family wedding, and our conversation shifted to talking about her aunts, uncles, and cousins who would be there.  I asked her what her grandmothers’ names had been, surprised that I didn’t know.  We talked about the names of the generations of women who walked before us, enacting, I suppose, the very thing that Virginia Woolf asserts: “We think back through our mothers, if we are women.”

And after we hung up I floated on a sea of names, whose waters swirl with women I know intimately, some of whom are now gone, and with women I never had the chance to meet.  Among all of these women, including myself and Grace, there ripples a cord of connection and commonality that is almost as difficult to articulate as it is impossible to deny.

Susan, Priscilla, Janet, Marion, Marion, Elsie, Eleanor

These are the names of where I come from, the names of my root system, the names of the women whose very blood beats in my veins.  They stand sentinel at my mother’s gardens, in search of which I found my own (Alice Walker).  I thought of Julie’s beautiful post about this, which I looked for after I’d started this post, and which opened with the very same lines (goosebumps).

Susan, Priscilla, Janet, Marion, Marion, Elsie, Eleanor.
And also: Grace.

What are the names you come from?