Making room for new growth

Late last week I finally went out to the front yard and dead-headed the hydrangeas.  The gorgeous blooms from a couple of weeks ago had faded and drooped.  The bushes looked tired, laden with the clusters of paled and slightly-brown flowers at their base.  I clipped and clipped, filling an entire trash can.  When I was finished I had a full trash can full of fading beauty.

It was hard not to be overcome with the metaphor: to make room for new blooms, I had to cut way back on the existing ones.  The existing ones, which were not at their peak anymore but were still very beautiful.  I had to go in and clear space.  Clear out what was beginning to fade in order to allow for what was not yet visible.

Isn’t that what we all have to do, all the time?  It takes faith, doesn’t it, to cut away what we know is good, even though we understand that it is past its prime, in favor of what we cannot yet see?  And yet we must.  What is coming is beautiful.  I know it is.

A few things

“Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves…And my days are likely to be strung with them.”
–Virginia Woolf

I wrote an essay about Mrs Dalloway in college about which I can remember only that I used the metaphor of a string of pearls.  I know, I’m not the first person to come up with this one.  But I think of it all the time: life’s moments, strung together, are each gorgeous on their own and another thing entirely together.  These are some of these pearls, things that I’m loving, interested in, paying attention to, lately.  These are the things which, strung together, make up my days right now.

1.

Last week Grace and I dropped Whit at lacrosse camp on Monday.  We were in a large high school gym, and there were at least 40 kids running around.  It was “free time” before they started camp proper, and the other children, who looked much older and bigger than Whit, were playing basketball rowdily.  Whit hung back, looking around.  I had to get Grace somewhere and then to work.  After a few minutes I asked him how he felt about us leaving.  He looked at me, swallowed, and said quietly, “I don’t feel that great about that.”  So we stayed until they blew the whistle and started organizing into the various specific sports.

That afternoon Whit came home and announced that he had a great day.  I’m proud of a lot of things about my children, but watching them enter groups of other children, completely foreign, is on the short list.  They are so brave.

2. A couple of years of gentle affection for running skirts has tipped into full-blown love.  I love my running skirts.  I wear them everywhere, for everything, with the notable exception of running.  They are just so comfortable and great when it’s hot out.

3.  Despite the fact that I often hear lyrics in my head, I rarely listen to music.  One place I do is the car.  And now and then I actually make a CD and put it on nonstop rotation.  A few songs are on heavy repeat right now: Home by Philip Philips, The Scientist by Willie Nelson, and The Boxer by Mumford & Sons.

4.

On Thursday I took Grace to sleep away camp.  For the second year, she and Julia shared a bunk.  From the window by their bunkbed, they can look out and see the cabin where I met Jessica, Julia’s mother and one of my very, very closest friends, 25 years ago.  Jess was the first person I called on February 15, 2002, when a faint double line on a pregnancy test shocked me speechless.  Her daughter and mine were born 12 weeks apart to the day.  That they are turning 10, and friends, and together at the camp where we met and began our lifelong friendship is more powerful to me than I can possibly express.

5. This post by Sarah Bessey, In which this is saving my life right now, made me cry and it made me think.  In fact it wouldn’t leave me.  I kept thinking over and over again of those last lines: let me be singing when the evening comes.  They remind me of Jane Kenyon’s words, which ring through my head at least weekly: God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come.  Sarah’s post reminds me that my life is in the littlest minutiae of my days, in the grout between the tiles, in the things I give to those I love, every day, every day.

What are you loving, listening to, learning from, and paying attention to lately?

 

The peace that we are looking for

The peace that we are looking for is not peace that crumbles as soon as there is difficulty or chaos. Whether we’re seeking inner peace or global peace or a combination of the two, the way to experience it is to build on the foundation of unconditional openness to all that arises. Peace isn’t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth, it’s an experience that’s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened.

– Pema Chodron

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.

This was originally posted exactly 2 years ago, and it’s still all true.  Today I am dropping Grace off at sleep away camp, at the camp I went to for 10 years, with the daughter of my best friend from camp.  I miss her already, and she’s not even gone yet.  It will surely be a day full of both struggle and beauty.

Photo Wednesday 11

Tomorrow morning I will take Grace to sleepaway camp for the second time.  Her room is a maze of piles, all with nametags carefully applied, and today we will finally pack the trunk.  I am going to miss my little soul mate an awful lot.  I absolutely know that the experience will be wonderful for her, though, and that’s what I care most about.  As certain as I am, it feels like tomorrow morning we cross another threshhold.  These transitions, they keep coming.