Month: April 2012

Motion and stillness

The tension – and the dance – between stillness and motion is one of the central themes of my life, my writing, my self.  It’s a line I walk all the time: how much activity is too much, how much stillness do I need, how do I practice being still even in a life that doesn’t stop whirling.  The truth is, stillness is not instinctive for me.  I am a person who moves, a lot: I fidget, I speak quickly, I move quickly, my mind is the very embodiment of the always-in-motion monkey mind.  I spent my whole childhood moving around, back and forth across the Atlantic.  My sport in high school was cross-country.  Impatience is my default.

I am in motion.  All the time.

Last week I read Kristen’s thoughtful, beautiful words about her life’s constant motion.  I read the on the small screen of my iPhone as I waited for an early morning flight to New York.  And then I thought about them as I stared out the open window my taxi into the city, watching the puffy clouds skid across the cornflower blue sky.  I was in motion but it was the stillest I’d been in days.  Sometimes I think my truest emotional and mental stillness happens when I am literally in transit: something about airplane flights or car rides sends me into a quiet, introspective state.

On the surface my life is busier now than it has ever been.  I have a demanding job that I love, two children for whose care I’m primarily responsible, a book and essays I am trying to write as well as a stack of books I’m desperate to read (and those 30 magazines I subscribe to monthly).  I have friendships I hold dear that I try to nourish.  I run as many days of the week as I can.

I am in motion.  All the time.

And yet, I feel more still inside my head than I ever have.  Some of the time, that is.  I guess what I mean is I feel I have the capacity for stillness, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, in a way that is new.  It is not always available to me, but there are times when I am able to focus and truly savor the moment I am living.  Often, unsurprisingly (to me), this happens in those most mundane, average experiences: the sky through the open taxi window, the feeling of Grace’s hand in mine as we walk down the street, the pattern of Whit’s pajama bottoms as I shake them out and fold them.

That this sensation can come over me even in the midst of such motion and busy-ness is immensely reassuring and somehow both confusing and inevitable.  For too many years I was running so fast I didn’t see anything around me.  And then, for a time, I felt anguish over my inability to be perfectly calm, and I held myself to a standard of stillness that I continually failed to meet.  Finally, I seem able to marry my instinctive way of being in the world with the capacity to pay close attention.  And what a blessing it is.  What happens to me in those moments of stillness is nothing short of a communion with the divine: I feel as though I can reach out and touch the hem of something holy.

The soundtrack of those long, dark weeks

I sit at my desk in my small third-floor office, the only sound the click of the computer keyboard as I write a few sentences in Scrivener.  I listen to You Are My Sunshine wafting through Whit’s closed bedroom door and sit back in my chair, quiet, letting the song wash over me.  The song changes to Puff the Magic Dragon and my eyes fill with tears.  I go stand in his dim, nightlight-lit room, watching him sleep.

The shadowy room is full of ghosts who whisper to me.  I can hear the faint squeak of the yellow rocker as I sit in it, pushing back and forth, back and forth.  I hold a sleeping baby Grace and my tears splash on the blanket in which she is swaddled.  I lean over and plant a kiss on her forehead, my face wet with my crying, and murmur to her I am sorry.

I listen to those long-ago years, listen to the story they tell of a mother as newborn as her baby daughter, of a woman startled by the yawning cavern that has opened up right in the middle of her life.  I hear myself rushing through bedtime, desperate for an hour when I’m nobody’s mother.  I listen to Come Away To Sea, to Blackbird, to Baby Mine, to the soundtrack of those long, dark weeks and months.  I listen and I ache, wishing I could have those nights back.  In part because I want to do them differently, with more love, more patience, less frustration, less impatience.  Because I want my first experience of motherhood with my first baby to have been different.  But also just because I want those nights back.  Every single one of them.

To listen to You Are My Sunshine, to hear myself sing it in a whisper to a sleeping baby in my arms.  One more time.

Please click over to Momalom for lots of beautiful writing on today’s 5 for 5 topic, Listening.

The afternoon of life

I am 37 years old.  I’m not going to pretend it is without angst, this early middle age of mine.  Two summer ago turning 35 made me very thoughtful and somewhat melancholy.  I got what felt like endless emails that summer protesting that 35 is not middle age.  But I disagree: I view middle age as a range: literally, the middle of life.  And there is no question in my mind that’s where I am.  The ferris wheel that I write about over and over nears its apex, and the view is breathtaking.  I can feel in my stomach, however, that we’re lurching close to the voyage down the other side.

I’m in good company, by the way: Carl Jung said that middle age begins at 35.  (he called it the beginning of the “afternoon of life,” something I read for the first time in Dani Shapiro’s gorgeous Devotion.) And life does have a different flavor these last few years.  The evidence that I am an adult continues to pile up: two children, a marriage, a graduate degree, a mortgage, a station wagon.  Oh, and the wrinkles.  I feel like a grown-up in the full sense of the word, which is both liberating and heavy.  Part of fully leaning into adulthood seems to be accepting all the things that will never be, and there is a deep sorrow in that though also a kind of sturdy settling, like an exhale.

But at the same time I feel a persistent disbelief that I’m actually an adult.  I still feel like I am 18.  I am still waiting for the real parents to come home and to take over with Grace and Whit.  It’s not a secret that one of the things I struggle most with is time’s passage; I wonder if my apparent willful ignoring of my own maturing is a way of refusing to acknowledge this reality.

I’m not sure.  It’s just one of the ways that life continues to surprise me, I guess, this oscillating between feeling very old and very young, sometimes in a single moment.   The constant letting go of what I thought, over and over again, that is never enough.  Releasing my hold on what might have been in order to embrace what is.  What is, in all of its new-wrinkled, dark-circled, surprisingly-achy middle-aged glory.  Maybe that will be primary joy of this afternoon of life: acknowledging and appreciating this life, this 37 (almost 38) years, right here.

Click over to Momalom to read many beautiful posts on today’s 5 for 5 topic, age.

Pictures

I am the official photographer.  It’s almost always me curating the memories of an event, corralling people into group shots, taking pictures of the flower arrangements, capturing candid images of laughter and conversation.  Sometimes, dancing as joy-filled as it is cringe-worthy.

I also take photographs of the non-events in my life, which is of course the majority of it, a large swath of ordinary days filled with images of the sky’s changing colors, the tree out my window, the faces of my children, the glasses on the table.  I take pictures of everything, and as I’ve noted it is often the most random images which, ultimately, carry the most salient memories.

Words are my lingua franca, there’s no question; words are my default way of capturing an experience and my instinctive way of trying to express an emotion.  But there are some things that are beyond the reach of words.  Often I grab at those things using my camera.  When I look back at pictures I’ve taken of the sky, or of Grace’s teddy bear packed in an overnight bag, or of Whit’s baby foot against my hand, I can see something that I haven’t yet been able to put into words.  This is when I feel most frustrated by my attempts at writing, when words seem clunky and imprecise, as though I use ten sentences to circle around a kernel of truth without really conveying it at all.

If I had to choose one way to record my life it would be words, certainly, but I am deeply grateful for the texture that pictures provide.  There are others who would choose another way, of that I’m sure.  People for whom the instinct pushes them to pictures, or perhaps to music; other ways to translate and share their human experience.  I think this Gilchrist quote gets at some of that:

I think colors made sense to him the way words to do to me. – Ellen Gilchrist, Winter

What’s your most basic language?  Words, pictures, music, or something else entirely?  What makes the most sense to you: color or words?

Please visit Momalom for a host of wonderful writing as part of 5 for 5.

 

A word after a word is power

Grace wants to be a writer when she grows up.  Well, that and a vet and an Olympic athlete, too.  And a mummy.  All of it.  And I don’t have the words to express how grateful, and proud, and overwhelmed I feel by those ambitions, dreams, hopes.  So I revisit, as is my habit, the words of others who can convey that inchoate swirl of emotion right under my breastbone in a way that I can’t.

Just recently, Grace swapped out the pink duvet cover that’s been on her bed since she first slept in it for one covered in peace signs.  Obsessed with peace signs, she is.  As part of her “redecorate my room” campaign, she asked me to take down a framed poster that had hung on her wall for years.  And, with a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes, I did.  The poster had a picture of her at the age of 4 writing her name, and a copy of Margaret Atwood’s poem Spelling.

This is a poem I have loved for a long time.  It was the epigraph to my college thesis.  I thought of my choice, 16 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.  I thought of the ways in which I was then anticipating now, this very girl who grows in front of my eyes, this moment when I was the mother, and I had that dizzying experience where time collapses on itself.

Before I took it off the wall, I read the poem to Grace one last time.  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
with 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.