Perhaps each of us has a starved place, and each of us knows deep down what we need to fill that place. To find the courage to trust and honor the search, to follow the voice that tells us what we need to do, even when it doesn’t seem to make sense, is a worthy pursuit.
– Sue Bender (Plain and Simple)
Over Labor Day Matt and I attended the wedding of one of my college roommates. Oh, my, but it was fun. The bridesmaids surprised the bride with a flash mob dance to Dynamite. I’ve never seen her speechless before, but she was. I love the blur of the photo above, which captures the palpable love and sheer joy of those minutes.
And then it was back to school, and mornings were all about drop-off again. Whit never fails to make me laugh. Every single day, he does. Thank God.
One morning the moon hung in the sky even when the sun had come out. I stopped to admire, and photograph, the gorgeous, saturated blue (I think that’s my favorite color) punctuated with a hazy moon. Breathing a benediction. Saying a prayer for the sky. Thank you.
On September 9th I took Whit for a special outing after school. We went to a farm about half an hour away for a hayride and bonfire. It was an astonishingly gorgeous afternoon and we had so much fun: admiring nascent pumpkins, making smores, learning about a barn owl, and hiking to the top of a hill at whose summit was this perfect boulder.
The ensemble Grace put together for lunch the two of us one Sunday. She’s not afraid to mix patterns, this one. That’s very right now, isn’t it?
One Wednesday afternoon the kids and I were walking home from school when I noticed this leaf on the ground. “Oh, look!” I crouched down. “A heart!” I took out my phone to take a picture and Grace exclaimed “Wait! The heart is here!” She had noticed the piece of cement (below) just a few inches away, and thought that was what I planned to photograph. I showed her the leaf, she showed me the heart. I took pictures of them both. Messages from the universe. Love is all around.
I picked up Learning to Breathe knowing I’d love it. The topic appealed to me: the author’s yearlong quest to bring calm to her life. Dani Shapiro, whose opinion I trust implicitly, both blurbed it and personally told me she thought I’d like it. The description of the author as someone with a “great life” who nonetheless struggled with profound panic resonated somewhere deep inside me. So, I knew I was going to love it. But I didn’t know how much.
Priscilla Warner has crafted a universal story out of her very specific circumstance, and in so doing has established a light at the end of what many people experience as a fearful tunnel of darkness, fear, and anxiety. After a lifetime of serious panic attacks, she makes a decision to actively seek peace. She begins a regular meditation practice, explores Buddhism and mystic Judaism, and pursues a variety of therapeutic avenues. Learning to Breathe traces her steps towards peace, which are human in their stumbling and both inspiring and comforting in their success.
Describing her life before beginning her journey towards peace, Warner says that she had “always felt that [her] nervous system operated faster than normal,: for which she has taken Klonopin for years. Yet, “on the outside [she] was functioning just fine.” The chasm between outsides and insides, between what appears and what actually is, is a perilous place I know well.
One of the central themes of Learning to Breathe is Warner’s experience of her mother’s gradual but inexorable decline into Alzheimer’s. As she seeks peace, one thing she specifically wants is help with what is a challenging emotional morass. Any time studying Buddhism brings you face-to-face, almost immediately, with the central tenet that attachment causes suffering. But Warner wonders, as I have so often, “how can you love someone and not become attached?” Lama Tsondru, a teacher of Tibetan painting with whom Warner studies, tells her that if she “opens up [her] heart to others, the weight on [her] shoulders will lessen.” She begins to move towards acceptance, and at one moment where her mother demonstrates how much she has forgotten, Warner remembers the teachings of Sylvia Boorstein and observes that her “heart quivered in response to pain … Compassion took hold of me.”
Over time Warner leans into a new kind of trusting of her own body and mind. She “didn’t feel pressured to solve its mysteries” every day, and she “began to accept the unpredictability of [her] own galaxy.” I love the notion of an internal galaxy; it is a more evocative way to describe my observation that all people have a whole universe glittering inside them. This was just one of many places where Warner’s words touched something specific I’ve thought and felt, made me feel like I was reading a missive from someone who had been inside my own head. This is what I mean about the universal power in a particular story: who among us hasn’t felt lost and afraid? Warner’s story is a message of comfort to us all.
Warner finds teachers all over the place: Tibetan monks, American teachers of Buddhism, specialized therapists, and mystical rabbis. It is Rabbi Jacobson who teachers her the power of the tears, which she had always felt vaguely ashamed of, viewing them as a manifestation of the keen sensitivity for which she had often been criticized. To say I relate here is an understatement. But what Rabbi Jacobson tells her is that “people who cry in healthy ways are doing so because they sense a higher presence. And that’s beyond us. So we cry.” Warner – and I! – finds this logic reassuring, and she stops worrying about the tears that seem ever-present. I love the messages that this rabbi elucidates in Learning to Breathe. He also speaks about how life exists in the small, ordinary moments, a message that speaks directly to me:
Some of the greatest things in life don’t have to be so dramatic … It’s in the quiet moments that our lives are shaped. In homes, in cribs, in bedrooms, in the little things. That’s where it all happens.
As Warner moves to the end of her year, she begins to fully inhabit her new, hard-won peace. The universe, and the past, continue to speak to her in a variety of powerful ways. She witnesses the death of her trusted companion of 14 years, her dog Mickey, and even in the midst of that heartbreaking goodbye she realizes she had “never felt so present in my life.” She visits with another Zen priest and teacher, Roshi, who suggests that her “frequent tears … simply meant that I was touched by life.” They discuss impermanence, again, and Roshi comments that part of why cherry blossoms make people cry is “that these blossoms are so ephemeral.” I guess magnolias are my cherry blossoms: they are stunningly gorgeous, and they make me cry. During an Ayurvedic massages she experiences her father’s presence, and he tells her firmly that she was loved.
Even in impermanence, in the sea of life’s moments, some things endure. I highly recommend Learning to Breathe: it made me feel less alone, it taught me a lot about meditation and certain somatic therapies, and it fortified my belief that maybe, just maybe, there is peace out there for me yet. A message that Warner receives from a friend towards the end of her experiment sums up her book, her experience, and, in fact, nothing less than the human condition:
The convention of panic was just a thin veil for you … It cloaked the stillness and compassion that is you. It takes great courage to let it all go and to display the unbearableness of so much love.
Grace came home from a day of her second week of third grade with two announcements. The first was that this year she had Mrs. S for music, who also taught me, back in the dark ages. The second was that they were learning Joni Mitchell’s Circle Game. Whit, with his uncanny ability to suss out things that will pierce right to my heart, immediately took an interest. They spent a day or two learning the words, and I kept promising we’d listen to the recording (which of course I have).
Circle Game is up there with Landslide on the list of songs whose associations are so strong as to often overpower me. They are both songs that were a part of my own childhood, both songs whose lyrics grow ever more poignant as I grow up myself.
So the other afternoon we listened to Circle Game in my bedroom, dancing and singing along. We danced in a circle, holding hands, and Grace’s and Whit’s voices rang with Joni Mitchell’s. I tried to sing but was mostly crying so I could not. Several times I thought I should stop and take a picture, but I didn’t want to let go of their hands. Grace and Whit kept looking at me, emotion frank in their faces. It was a rare moment that I knew was becoming a memory even as I experienced it. For four minutes I said: be here, Lindsey. Don’t step out of the frame in order to photograph this. Just live it.
And I did. With tears streaming down my face and a little hand in each of mine and words as familiar as my own name ringing in my head and in my heart. I was there.
When the song ended, Whit flung himself onto the small Oriental rug on the floor and sighed, “I am already dragging my feet to slow the circles down, Mummy.” And he is. But wow, so am I. I am mostly frantic about and occasionally resigned to the rotation of the years. It occurred to me that Circle Game could well be an alternative title for the book I’m writing. Subtitle : captive on a carousel of time.
Are there songs that are laden with memories and emotion for you? Are there song lyrics that speak directly to your heart?
So, the final installment of the marvelous anniversary questions … I have saved the big questions, the ones I really struggled with, for last.
How has writing changed my living?
Certainly writing here, and in other places, has made me pay more attention to the details of my life. There is no question I’m more mindful – I even meditate sometimes, which those of you who have known me a long time will find hilarious, even shocking. In some ways, however, this is just another manifestation of an essential trait. I was always slightly removed, the official photographer, and I still am, hovering a bit at the edges, watching, observing. I still take a lot of pictures, but I’m often composing sentences in my head, paying close attention, trying to engrave the details of a moment on my brain. So while I think there has been a change, for sure, I think the basic tendency always existed.
Has writing improved my ability to linger in the moments?
This is a hard one. I think it’s improved my commitment to do so. For sure. Writing has made crystal clear for me that my life is right here in the moments, and has thus shown me how critically important it is to really live them. But has it made me better at doing so? I’m honestly not sure.
Does writing about the heavy stuff take it off my chest or result in more pondering?
To the extent that writing helps me figure out what it is I’m thinking about, it takes things off of my chest. But the truth is I’ve always got heavy thoughts with me, weighty stuff sitting right over my lungs. I never shed that, or rarely, so I’m not sure it makes a huge difference, writing through it here. That said, I’m not sure my goal is to get rid of it, either. I think it’s just part of who I am, a component of what beats through my veins as surely as the stuff in my blood.
What are my dreams, and what does the wild inside of me dream of?
I’m shocked by how hard this is for me to answer. I dream of writing and publishing a book. I dream of my children growing up happy, content, and knowing who they are and what road they want to take. My sister’s sojourn in Jerusalem is awaking a long-buried desire for adventure, so I dream of finding ways to incorporate that in my life with my family. I’m a little ashamed that I can’t answer this more completely or compellingly.
Do I talk about these questions with my friends and family? Do I live my life this deeply?
I talk about these questions with certain dear friends. There are a few, and I do mean a few, native speakers with whom I discuss these topics. Mostly, truthfully, I fear that the contents of my heart and mind are a bit too weighty for the average friend, and I fear scaring them off. So if I don’t have these conversations more often, it’s in large part because I don’t think it’s wanted by the other person.
Do I live my life this deeply? I think so. I have written before about how the person in this blog is the authentic me, and the in-person me is still figuring out how to entirely embody all that I know I care about and intend. So nothing here is artificial, and given that I write about what it is to live a life I think it follows that I do live this deeply. But I’m curious, to those who know me (if any of you are still reading), what you think of this. Do I?