Month: February 2015

Some folks hide, and some folks seek

How can one person be more real than any other?  Well, some people do hide and others seek.  Maybe those who are in hiding – escaping encounters, avoiding surprises, protecting their property, ignoring their fantasies, restricting their feelings, sitting out the pan-pipe hootchy-kootch of experience – maybe those people, people who won’t talk to rednecks, or if they’re rednecks won’t talk to intellectuals, people who’re afraid to get their shoes muddy or their noses wet, afraid to eat what they crave, afraid to drink Mexican water, afraid to bet a long shot to win, afraid to hitch-hike, jaywalk, honky-tonk, cogitate, osculate, levitate, rock it, bop it, sock it, or bark at the moon, maybe such people are simply inauthentic, and maybe the jackleg humanist who says differently is due to have his tongue fried on the hot slabs of liar’s Hell.  Some folks hide, and some folks seek, and seeking, when it’s mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous can be a form of hiding.  But there are folks who want to know and aren’t afraid to look and won’t turn tail should they find it – and if they never do, they’ll have a good time anyway, because nothing, neither the terrible truth nor the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of the earth’s sweet gas.

– Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker

A blur of otherworldly white

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I’m not going to lie to you: it’s been a difficult month.  My professional life has a very busy few weeks every year (very busy – as in round-the-clock, 3-hours-of-sleep, can’t-leave-desk) and they happened to coincide with the relentless snow in Boston. In some ways that was a blessing: since 2011, I’ve gone to New York for what is for me a long stretch away from home to be there during this busy season, but this year, in part due to the blizzards, I stayed here.  In other ways it was hard.  I felt far away from the team I work with and it was difficult to really immerse myself into what could have been a joyful time at home.

In January of my sophomore year in college I broke my ankle.  Because of this, instead of joining my friends for a week in Mexico as planned, I went home and got my wisdom teeth out.  This past month has felt like nothing so much as that: challenge piled on unpleasantness, a cast on top of an ice pack on my mouth, aching and pain and a deep sense if isolation.  More than once, Whit woke up in the night to go to the bathroom and found me sitting at my desk, a pool of light overhead and snow falling outside.  More than a few times, when I finally did go to bed I couldn’t sleep, amped up with exhaustion and anxiety, which just added to the sand-in-my-eyes feeling the next morning.

I’ve been snappier and more cranky with my family than I want to be.  I haven’t been able to go sledding when the children wanted to.  Matt did a lot – a lot – of shoveling all by himself.  I am as tired as I can remember being in years.  I have barely exercised in a month.  I have been wearing yoga pants or snowpants, and often both simultaneously, for as long as I can recall.

But at the same time, these weeks have been so removed from real life they have had a magical quality to them.  It has been a blur of white, inside and out, snow on both sides of the glass, a time historic and difficult and, I’m already aware, unforgettable. I am grateful, most of the time, that I got to experience these historically snowy weeks here with Grace and Whit.  I don’t think it’s bad that they see their mother working hard, and they have witnessed both laughter and tears – often daily.

I suspect part of what I love about snowstorms is the obvious: weather reminds us of how small we are, and how little true control we have. The endless snow actually cut away a lot of life’s BS.  Just getting around Boston was so hard for a while that it felt like life had been distilled to its essence: my family, our house, and what we could walk to.  Knowing I wasn’t able to leave my desk to really be with Grace and Whit the way I would have wanted makes me sad, but at the same time, I was here, and I am grateful for that.  Sometimes what we have has to be enough.  This is a lesson I’m learning over and over again.

The last month has stripped away any hard skin I had, and left me exposed, raw, exhausted, emotional.  I read Oliver Sacks’ beautiful piece about learning he has terminal cancer, and the whole thing made me cry.  But this last line, oh, it made me sob out loud:

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

This is love to me.  Recognizing the beauty even when it appears in the midst of a crabby moment, 74 new emails in a half hour, snow so thick it covers the windows, an iceberg hanging off of the roof, and another snow day.  I’m already aware of how golden and glazed with special-ness the last month has been, even as I emerge from it slowly, creaky and exhausted.  It has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

What is love?

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One of my favorite recent pictures, from last October, with my parents, on the water.  I used the photo on this year’s Valentine card.

I’ve long believed that love – actually, life itself – resides in small things.  Yes, roses on Valentine’s Day are nice and weddings can be powerfully moving and the toast at a big birthday celebration carries all kinds of importance.  But day by day, hour by hour, we show people that we love them through our smallest acts.

There are three people in the world that I love the most.  You may have noticed that I write about two of them less and less (and one of them, almost never, though that’s not a change).  Grace and Whit are growing into their own stories, and it feels trickier and trickier to share them here.  In this case, I was very curious about what love looks like for them.  So I asked them.

Grace

Love is when Mum tucks me in at night and listens to me talk about my day.  It’s when she stops doing something important to help me when I need it.  Love is sacrificing some of the things she loves for us – like going out to dinner with friends or reading by herself.  Love is when she thinks of new recipes and makes something new for family dinner.  Love is keeping the kitchen stocked.  Love is sitting in cold rinks and cheering us on at hockey games (though not too loud).  Love is letting us go to sleep away camp even though I know she misses us.

Whit

Love is when Mum snuggles with me at bedtime every night.  It is when she reads me Harry Potter.  When she doesn’t pick up the phone so she can be with me.  When she makes us dinner.  I know 90% of her life right now is work but the other 10% is caring about us and that is love.  She does things that try to make our lives better.  Love is driving around the world constantly to get us places.  Love is when she goes to the library and picks out lots of books for me to see what I like.

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I really enjoyed this exercise.  Sometimes the things we think mean the most don’t, and vice versa.  Nobody mentioned lunchbox notes, for example, which I write sporadically but not always, and nobody mentioned presents at all.  In fact neither of them mentioned things.  I recommend asking those you live with or love the most what touches them the most.  And then do more of that.

our yearning to belong to eternity as well as to time

If we want to know what it felt like to be alive at any given moment in the long odyssey of the race, it is to poetry we must turn.  The moment is dear to us, precisely because it is so fugitive, and it is somewhat of a paradox that poets should spend a lifetime hunting for the magic that will make the moment stay.  Art is that chalice into which we pour the wine of transcendence.  What is imagination but a reflection of our yearning to belong to eternity as well as to time?

– Stanley Kunitz

I’m not sure anyone better articulates this tension between now and then, forever and the moment, that animates so much of my life.  These lines from Kunitz about this paradox remain some of my favorite).

My favorite quotes

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I really loved Jeanette Leblanc’s post, 10 Inspirational Quotes for Writers and Lovers and Speakers of Truth. The first time I read it, I marveled at the powerful passages she chose, and I’ve returned to the post several times since.  It’s no secret that I too love quotations.  I’ve written many times about that passion here, and wondered what mysterious alchemy causes certain lines and snippets of poetry to rise to my mind at specific times.  I’m sure there’s some deep reason behind that, but I haven’t yet discerned its pattern.  I’ve also noted the particular poets and lines that live on the walls in my office, where I spend most of my time, and within my skull, where I spend all of my life.  I even share a favorite passage once a week, on Fridays.

It’s impossible for me to choose favorite passages.  So I decided instead I’d share the first ones that come to mind.  Here are a few of those most familiar, well-worn, and oft-remembered words.

For when I lose touch with what matters most in this world.

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

– Mary Oliver

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. – Annie Dillard

Ordinary life was laced with miracles, I knew that, had read enough poetry to understand that we are elevated with the knowing, and yet it was difficult to notice and be grateful when one was continually fatigued and irritated.  I suppose that unquenchable sense of wonder is what separates us dolts from the saints and the poets.  This was the lesson, perhaps, that I was sent to learn: the old life was worth having at any expense. – Jane Hamilton, A Map of the World

For when I feel lost.

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close. – Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace

Life gives us what we need when we need it.  Receiving what it gives us a whole other thing. – Pam Houston, Cowboys Are My Weakness

It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
We have come to our real work.
And when we no longer know which way to go,
We have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
– Wendell Berry

For when I cannot put anything into words.

There’s no vocabulary for love within a family, love that’s lived in but not looked at, love within the light of which all else is seen, love within which all other love finds speech.  This love is silent. – T. S. Eliot

Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep. – Felix Frankfurter

For when life brings me to my knees.

In this moment there is life and food for future years. – William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know. – James Baldwin

When I need to release my grip.

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us. – Joseph Campbell

What are your favorite words, and which do you think of most often?