Camp

The summer camp I attended was a vitally important place to me.  I spent nine summers there, up to and including two as a counselor.  In the rapidly shifting seas of my family life (we moved back and forth across and ocean in those nine summers) camp was the one steady place, a raft moored stubbornly, an unmoving spot in a gale. I can’t wait to pick Grace up there tomorrow.  Absolutely my primary motivation in signing her up to go this summer was my firm belief in the importance of independence and my certainty that she would have a terrific, and valuable, experience.  But it was also that I wanted her to share a place that had been so incredibly meaningful to me.  When I am there the memories rise up, as evanescent but as tangible as puffs of sand blowing off of the dunes.

I grew up in the dunes and fields of Brewster, Massachusetts.  I’m as sure of that as I am of anything.  I met several people who remain incredibly important to me.  First, of course, Jessica.  I also made other special friends, like Leigh and Stacy, and another person who I haven’t written much about.  Ours was a unique and formative friendship, platonic and enduring, and I think of him far more often than we are in touch.

He taught me to appreciate a gin and tonic, to understand the healing power of real, deep laughter, and to love John Coltrane.  He gave me a fistful of memories I still return to, an underlined copy of Christopher Robin, and a sliver of belief that I might be worth something as a human being.  If someone so incandescent with life, so filled to the brim with charisma, intelligence, humor, and kindness, saw something in me, well, that was enough for me.  He knows who he is.

Thank you.

The deepest manifestation of gratitude

“When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself… That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life.”
– Stanley Kunitz

All That is Holy

I read about Carrie Newcomer’s song, Holy As a Day Is Spent, on Dominique Browning’s lovely blog Slow Love Life.  I’ve had the song on constant repeat for the last day and am hearing the lyrics over and over in my head.  The celebration of life’s ordinary divinity reminds me intensely of my reflections that everyday life is a practice and a poem.

Sometimes I think I focus overly on the practice part of the equation, on the relentless rhythm with which I trip and then, humbled, begin again.  Newcomer’s song made me think about all that is sacred in my life, the little things that I believe tend to hold the most holiness.  I didn’t sleep well last night at all, and I lay there thinking of some of those little things and moments, places where divinity lives in my ordinary life:

Running a washcloth over my son’s back, water sluicing over his wings

Wearing my mother’s wedding ring while she is in and out of medical care for an accident.  I look down at my right hand and see her ring and am filled with connection to her.  I wore her mother’s wedding right on my wedding day (she was my only grandparent who was no longer living, and not there) and am always reminded of that too.

The mumbled, mostly-asleep “I love you”s I get from the children when I tuck them in before I go to bed, pressing kisses to their foreheads, pulling the sheets up, closing my eyes and falling back, for a moment, through all the years of goodnights.

The sky, at all hours, in all weathers, in all seasons.  The way light, from a source beyond our knowing, streams through clouds.  The endless permutations of clouds, texture, and color that exist in the sky.  Watching weather roll in on the horizon.  For me, that is where divinity most surely lives.

A framed, handwritten copy of Yeats’ When You Are Old that Jessica gave to me on my 21st birthday which sits on my desk.

The way Grace and Whit notice birds in the backyard.  “Look, Mum, a cardinal!  A blue jay!”  Likewise, Grace’s mingled delight and worry (“will they be hit by a car?”) as a family of geese stroll across the major road in front of us.

My morning cup of coffee (now with rice milk and agave instead of milk and splenda).

Clean white sheets on my bed, where I often seek refuge surrounded by books, a darkened room, a fan blowing.

The tinkling notes of familiar lullabyes drifting through both Grace and Whit’s doors after they’ve gone to bed at night.

Folding laundry.  I love the smell of clean laundry, love the practice of smoothing out well-worn and well-known clothes, love creating neat piles out of a tangled basket..

Hydrangeas on the kitchen island, freshly cut from our front bushes.

The pink shell, decorated with drawings and splotches of sequins, that Whit gave me.  I have it on the windowsill of of my office so I see it a hundred times every day, each time I turn to look out the window at my tree.

Tell me, where do you find holiness in your life?

Falling Apart in One Piece

Last summer, at BlogHer, I saw Stacy Morrison across the room.  She was getting ready to sign copies of her new memoir, Falling Apart in One Piece.  She looked happy, masterful, confident, and I remember thinking: she seems really cool.  Little did I know.  She is definitely cool!  And I adored her memoir,  Falling Apart in One Piece, which I read last week and loved.  I wept, I laughed, I underlined, I read aloud to my husband, I tweeted quotes.  Generally, I did all the things I do when a book truly speaks to me.  And this one did.

Falling Apart in One Piece is, at first glance, a memoir about divorce, but I think its message is also much more broadly relevant.  Essentially, the book is about what happens when life doesn’t turn out the way you planned and expected, and about how thoroughly that reckoning can dismantle your sense of self.  I certainly have been through these choppy waters myself, as have most of the people I know.  The triggers and circumstances that lead us into the rapids differ for each of us, but I think there is tremendous universality in the lessons.  This is the power of Morrison’s book.

Falling Apart in One Piece begins with a relatively brief description of Morrison’s childhood.  Her portrayal of her mother moved me the most.  “I thought she possessed magic, even though she also carried so much sadness,” she says, brilliantly evoking the woman whose strong pull on her continues into her adulthood.  Perhaps in response to her mother’s sadness, Morrison develops a “big personality” and a strong instinct for being in control.  She describes falling in love with her husband, Chris, and the authenticity of their feelings comes through vividly.  She lets down her guard for Chris, calling him  “the person who knew the scared, sad girl who lived inside me that I didn’t let anyone see.”  They marry young and, in many ways, grow up together.  Despite Morrison’s stubborn independence, it is clear that Chris and she are utterly intertwined.

It is only when their marriage ruptures that we see the extent to which Morrison’s sense of self was also intertwined with Chris.  The part of Falling Apart in One Piece that traces Morrison and her husband’s stop-and-start, stuttering efforts to save their marriage are among the most humane and realistic descriptions of an adult relationship I’ve ever read.  We see how deeply they love each other, but we also see the deep grooves they’ve each worn into each other.  Falling Apart in One Piece reminds us that deep love and lots of effort is not always enough to save a relationship.

That sounds cynical and depressing, but this memoir is absolutely neither of those things.  There is a deep and abiding optimism at the heart of Morrison’s story (in fact “one optimist’s journey through the hell of divorce” is the book’s subtitle).  Certainly, though, we watch her fall apart completely, a collapse that was triggered by having to let go of the way she thought her life was going to be, and by learning that the person who had defined her for so many years was not only gone but also, possibly, wrong about her in essential ways.  She has to learn to trust her own voice in her head rather than hearing Chris’s.

Even in the darkest months of her life, the times when she is least sure of anything, Morrison has moments of startling peace and, even, joy.

As I looked at the mosaic floor my son was joyously dancing on, I was reminded that what you see in your life isn’t one thing one picture, one thought.  Life is a thousand little pieces, sliding and moving, like bits of glass in a kaleidoscope.  You may get a moment of suddenly taking in a pattern whole, and then it’s gone again in a flash, changing, shifting into something else.

Morrison also shares scenes of emotional disintegration that took my breath away their intimacy and their familiarity.  She lies on the floor of her kitchen, weeping, “in full submission, a circumstance I had spent my whole life furiously fighting to avoid,”  forced to stare her own fragility and fear directly in the face.  Morrison endures sieges from both rain and fire that are biblical in nature and scale.  The metaphor is impossible to avoid: every single atom in the universe seems to have joined in the chorus telling her that she is not in control.

Morrison’s indomitable spirit carries her through these disasters and keeps her moving forward.  As her son grows into a cheerful toddler he, too, begins to act as a cord tugging her forward, out of her sadness and fear, into the moment that is right at her feet.  She finally sells the house with the flooded basement and the memories of her marriage ending, and moves to a new apartment and a new life.  She tiptoes onto firmer land, begins to realize that the negative way that Chris (and, importantly, she) saw herself at the end of her marriage is not, in fact, the ultimate judgment on her character, starts to see the potential of a family configured differently than she had imagined.  Even so, the waves of sadness and difficulty continue.

I needed to continue to find the way to make peace with the challenges of the way every day contained a little sad and a little good, the way grief was a constant undercurrent to my moving-forward life.

I need to write these lines on an index card and put them above my desk (right next to Wendell Berry’s The Real Work).  This is the work of my life right now.  Morrison goes on to reflect on her flooded basement, noting “I realized now that my soul had been carved deep to take in life’s water,” and I gasped, thinking of my own reflections on how my propensity for great sorrow and hurt is inextricably correlated to my immense capacity for wonder and joy.  Yes, yes, yes.

Even as she moves forward in her life, settling into new patterns and rhythms, Morrison finds herself occasionally blindsided with grief, shocked with a sadness she thought she had processed and moved past.  She expresses frustration that she is not “finished with this crushing grief” yet, describes with resigned awareness “this continually appearing astonishment that life could hurt so much and that I could be so unprotected.” Morrison’s refusal to wrap her story up in a neat happy-ever-after ending is part of what I love best about this memoir: it is honest, and real, in its description of grief’s winding course, in its assertion that a human being growing into herself is a decidedly non-linear enterprise.

I underlined furiously in the last couple of chapters of Falling Apart in One Piece, finding many beautiful reflections on life that rang inside my chest like a deep gong.  I can’t possibly share them all, so I will close with my favorite.  I urge you to read this book.  Morrison’s memoir is beautifully written and powerfully captures what I believe is a fundamental task of growing up as human beings: letting go of what we thought it was going to be in order to embrace what is.  What Morrison realized, and shares gorgeously, is that between the letting go and the embrace is a freefall, both liberating and terrifying.  I am living in that freefall right now, experiencing its wild freedoms and overwhelming fearsomeness on a daily basis.

That I believe in the power of love.  That I believe that life is worth living.  That I believe it is just as likely that there is something good, something amazing, waiting for me around life’s next corner as it is that there is something terrible.  I expect some of both, frankly.

Also, check out Stacy’s fabulous blog, Filling In the Blanks, which has swiftly risen to the top of my daily reads.

My little soul mate

Last Thursday we dropped Grace off at camp.  My heart was still soggy from the night before, but I put on my sunglasses and got in the car and off we headed.  As we drove the familiar roads on Cape Cod, turned into the driveway with the archery range and sun-bleached grassy front fields, I was flooded with memories.  The smiling, white-clad Junior Counselors looked so young, and I choked up inside.  I was trying to reconcile the fact that I was just them with the knowledge that that was more than half my lifetime ago.

After a check-in at the infirmary (we passed the lice test, yay!) off we went to Cabin 50.

Cabin 50 is directly across from Cabin 54, the place where I first laid eyes on Jessica and commenced a lifetime friendship.  I’m not sure Julia and Grace were as moved by this detail as Jess and I were, but we both noted the proximity of the place where it all began, and smiled, eyes glistening.  We helped the girls unpack, Grace on the top bunk and Julia on the bottom.  Then they put on suits and we headed up to the pool, with the other new Juniors, for their swimming test.

The daughter of another dear friend of mine from camp was also in the girls’ cabin.  Three of them!  My head swims looking at this picture, remembering when we were 10 and when we were 16 and when we were 21, of all the experiences we shared in this very same place.  And we all have girls, and hopefully they are embarking on a similar road, together.  I had tears in my eyes the whole time we were there.

There was no good time to leave so we did so, somewhat abruptly, at the pool.  They were waiting for their test and we were the only parents still there.  I can’t get the way Grace looked at me out of my head: her eyes were filled with wild surprise, nearing panic, and sadness swamped her entire face.  I hugged her and kissed her and walked away.  Their JCs and counselors swarmed around the crying girls, their white backs blocking them.  So we couldn’t see, as we walked, if they were still crying, but we sure were.  I don’t like the way I left her, but I’m not sure if any moment would have been better.  At least this way, my friend said, they had something to focus on immediately, a task to dive into, both literally and figuratively.

I was utterly shocked by how sad I was, all day long.  It pains me to admit that – what mother didn’t expect to miss her child? – but it’s true.  I knew I’d miss her, but I didn’t really think through the visceral, physical missing: the tears that wouldn’t stop, the ache in my chest, the way I winced every time I glanced back at her empty booster seat.  I know this kind of independence is precisely what I want for my child, and it’s impossible to overstate how completely I trust this camp to take care of her.  I know she will have a wonderful time.  But still.  Her face, the tears, the abandonment: they rise up in my head, over and over.  I guess this is her first experience of Pema’s timeless wisdom about being thrust out of the nest.

I emailed a close friend later that day, expressing the way sorrow had startled me, sharing how much I missed my daughter.  She responded immediately with this: “Not surprising. She’s your soulmate in many ways.”  These lines stunned me with their truth.  This isn’t the first time this friend has knocked me back with her insight and support.  My soul yearns for its little partner.  Of course it does.

And still, I believe absolutely that this experience will be excellent for her.  I hope she makes sturdy, possibly lifetime friendships, I hope she tries new activities, I hope she develops confidence in her own ability to be in the world without me, and I hope she internalizes the camp motto, emblazoned above the outdoor theater: