Several weeks ago, I couldn’t stop seeing nests in the trees.  They were everywhere I turned.  And then there was a week when I kept hearing the deafening chorus of sparrows singing in brown bushes.  I’m sure it is no accident that there are times when the same thing – sight, sound, image – keeps presenting itself to me, over and over again.  It is similar to, and an equal demonstration of the universe’s benevolent if confounding hand, the way quotes, poems, and song lyrics sometimes rise insistently to my mind.

These days I see the moon rising every afternoon.  I often set out on my dusk walks when the world is splashed in that gleaming late-afternoon light, as thick as maple syrup and as golden.  As I walk the light changes quality as the gold gives way to something clearer, more attenuated.  And it is in that still-blue light that I start, always, noticing the moon.  I watch it growing from a faint, ragged-edged disc, almost translucent, into a brighter, more solid orb.  As the day’s light goes down, the moon rises and asserts its radiance.

This doesn’t seem like a coincidence.  Someone recently told me there is a chiaroscuro quality to my writing here (thank you for the lovely comment; you know who you are) and that made me think immediately of the way the moon is always present for me.  Even in a sky still bright with sun, the ultimate icon of the night is visible.  The highest joys of my life have had seams of sorrow in them, and, likewise, there is always some beauty in the depths of sadness.  Light is made meaningful by the presence of darkness.  And each time I watch the moon rise, I remember this anew.

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Please accept with all my love this inner and outer chronicle of those last weeks of our old century and our old millennium – and the first weeks of your own beginnings  – when so many things were on their way to us, things we neither anticipated nor, in some cases, ever could have imagined.  This is the story of how we met them and were changed by them.  May we continue to meet what is coming to us with courage in our hearts.  – Gail Godwin, Evensong

These lines, on the last page of Gail Godwin’s gorgeous Evensong, have been ringing in my head for days.  I believe utterly that there is some hand at work out there – some design, even in the vastness – and therefore I’m not surprised that it was right now that I picked up Evensong.  I won’t even try to write about this vast, beautiful book, beyond saying that it moved me immensely.  Godwin grapples with issues of faith and doubt, evokes humanity in all of its flawed complexity, dives into the deepest manifestation of what it means to trust.  And I read, spellbound, until the end.  And then I found these last lines.

May we continue to meet what is coming to us with courage in our hearts.

Indeed.  Is there a more eloquent way to describe the topics I’ve struggled with here – so loquaciously, so repetitively, so inelegantly – for years?  I don’t think so.  And so I walk on.  Gazing at the world, at the nets of black branches against cornflower blue, at the glowing, ragged-edged moon rising in the dusky sky.  Trying, every single day, to meet what is coming to me with an open mind and heart full of trust.  My courage flags, my eyes fill with tears, I trip and fall.  And all I can do is wake up every morning and try again.

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I am honored to have my essay, My Subject Chose Me, published at Literary Mama.  I love so much of what Literary Mama stands for, most of all the power that is contained in commingling motherhood and writing.  The work that I’ve read there is without exception both beautifully-written and thought-provoking, intelligent and honest, suffused with love of both the written word and the small, noisy people who populate our days.

Please click over to read my piece and spend some time on the site.  You won’t be disappointed.  I’d love to hear what you think.

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I’ve seen this image several times, all over the place, and finally I downloaded it because I love it.  I love the font, I love the gray and white, and I love the message.

Trust your struggle.

These words honor that we all have struggles, and they contains within them trust that all the effort and difficulty is in service of something.  That we’re all where we are supposed to be, doing what we’re supposed to be doing, no matter how painful or pointless it might seem.

I’m doing both right now.  Struggling, and trying to trust.

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These are a few things I know to be true right now.

• Delight and despair are shadows thrown by different lights on the same large object.  Or the same light against different hulking masses.  I don’t know quite, but they are entirely related, twisted together, inextricable.
• A walk outside, in any weather, is the best way to reorient myself to my place (miniscule) in the universe.
• Sometimes it feels like some weird combination of inertia and sheer will is keeping me from shattering into a million tiny shards.  These times come, and they pass, and they come again.  I must learn not to panic.
• I will never be able to fully measure the weight of awe, the power of wonder.
• Most people are deeply good at their core.  Some are not.  I’m skilled, but not infallible, at discerning which is which.
• The morning is my favorite time of day.  Running in the pre-dawn and coming home to my hot coffee and sleeping house are some of the happiest moments of my life.
• As soon as I feel like I’ve got my balance, the ground under my feet will shift.  Everything changes, and stability is an illusion.  I can either white-knuckle my way through this, or learn to flow with the changes.  My default is the former, I long for the latter.
• Poetry speaks to me – and to many – on a level that runs beneath the rational.
• The central task of adulthood, for many of us, is letting go of how we thought our lives were going to be.

What do you know to be true?

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Sometimes I stagger under the weight of my own feelings.  This season has turned so swiftly from one of relative calm to one of choppy seas and brand new changes, and I am still struggling to find my balance.  On a daily basis, both my anxiety and my good fortune overwhelm me.  How to take the measure of each?  I can’t.  I can only seesaw back and forth between moments of panic and those of intense awareness of how good my life is.  Maybe it is precisely this gratitude that makes the uncertainty feel so perilous.

There are moments when I am literally brought to my knees by a sharp reminder of something that is lost or by a breathtaking pang of fear about what may come.  But then, often, in the wake of those powerful emotions comes the world, weak but undeniable in its insistence that I open my eyes.

Yesterday, Julie Daley tweeted a beautiful line by Rumi: “I can’t stop pointing to the beauty.”  This is so right, and so true; while I am occasionally swamped by bleakness, almost always there are faint fissures in the dark through which light, and reminders of goodness, can creep.

The suddenness with which this has become an uncertain and unstable time cautions me, again, not to ever grow too attached to the way things are in a specific moment.  It all changes.  I’m thrashing around in these suddenly stormy waters, but trying to keep my eyes on the light, on the cracks, on the sunrises where I can still see the moon (the picture above was taken on the way to Jerusalem, when we landed in Madrid at dawn).  There is so much loss, and so much fear, and it is easy for me to lose sight of the beauty all around.  It doesn’t make up for some of the heartbreak, and certainly doesn’t take away the roiling anxiety, but it can ameliorate it.  Some of it.

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Yesterday I wrote about the ways in which the universe, in all of its grandiose, extravagant meaning, is often best glimpsed in the tiniest details.  And then, in one of those coincidences-that-aren’t, I read Amy Palko’s fabulous post about “all those tiny details that create an individual.”  I love the way we can glimpse, in the tiniest, most specific things, the whole of who she is.  And isn’t this the only way, actually, to see who someone else is?  The details of their lives – choices, actions, preferences – are the window through which we can glimpse their spirit.  It’s there that we see the hidden geode glittering.

Inspired by Amy’s post, I wanted to share some of the tiny things that exist in the enormous pile of details that make up me.  I would love to hear yours.

• I can’t drive a stick shift car.  I wish I could, and I’m embarrassed that I can’t.  In a correlated detail, when I was learning to drive I almost pitched our old Jeep directly into the ocean.  Perhaps also correlated: my parents insist that their vehicles be manual, so I can’t drive either of their cars.
• I’m born in the Chinese year of the Tiger and I’m a Leo.  Despite these associations, I don’t really like cats.
• I was born 3 weeks early.  I’ve been in a hurry ever since.
• One day as a child living in Paris, I woke up to snow and shouted, “Mummy!  Mummy!  Il neige!”  To this day I still call my mother and say that most days that it snows.
• I have 3 pairs of neon running socks that I love and wear almost exclusively.
• I drink my coffee with rice milk and agave in it.  I haven’t been to Starbucks since July and I don’t miss it one single bit.  I have usually made and set the coffeemaker for the next morning by 5pm the day before.
• When we lived in London I had such a British accent that often people didn’t know I was American.
• My son and my sister have the same middle name; he is named after her.
• My father and my husband are both Geminis, second-born twins, and MIT graduates.
• I have to have a fan blowing directly on me to sleep.  And a pitch-dark room.  Being a better sleeper is on the very short list of things I would change about myself if I could.
• When I was 14, in London, I played a fairy on a short-lived TV series called East of the Moon.
• I am a committed and unshakeable devotee of the Oxford comma.

 Please, please share some of the details – at once minute and essential – of yourself with me!

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“The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite.”
- Gail Godwin

I have known and loved this quote for a long time but I have never read anything by Godwin.  That’s about to change as Evensong is next in my stack.

I think Godwin’s words explain exactly what it is I’m looking for – and seeing – in the black branches against the saturated blue of a January sky, in the small knot of a brown bird’s nest, in the way a leaf stuck to the back of my car window looks like a heart, in the whorl of my son’s ear.  It’s the same thing I look for, and see, in the hearts of others.  It is in the tiniest, most specific moments – the way someone’s hands cup their baby, the kind words in an email, the look in a pair of eyes as they study mine – that I can glimpse the glittery chasm inside of another person.

Isn’t it, actually, in most infinitesimal details that the eternal resides?

Isn’t it the the smallest moments and most minute images that offer us a portal into the extravagant pageant of this life?

I think it’s partly because the universe, either within or without us, is too enormous and complex to be grasped in its entirety.  I keep having the image of not being able to back up enough to get the whole into a single frame.  So instead we turn to the tiniest flowers embroidered in an enormous tapestry, to the smallest manifestations of that gigantic, endless whole that animates our lives.

I take pictures of everything, and I walk around in wonder at the smallest things.  I think Godwin’s words say exactly why.  In those tiniest things I see the universe itself.

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We live in all we seek.  The hidden shows up in too-plain sight.  It lives captive on the face of the obvious – the people, events, and things of the day – to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious.  What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

I went back to my dogeared copy of Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being this week, I’m not sure why.  As I leafed through the familiar pages, these words jumped out at me.  During these days when we wake in darkness and we eat dinner in darkness, when the light is so full of both endings and beginnings, the sun bright yet weak, I am trying to see the holiness spread all over this life of mine.

Some days it jumps out and snaps foil in my eyes, waking me up. How can I miss the beauty in this sky, that was spread out above me on a recent walk with Grace?  If that’s not divinity, tangible in this human world of ours, I don’t know what is.

Or this sunset, seen from my desk.  The sky went deep pink, and I took pictures, and then returned to my computer.  And suddenly, for some reason I can’t recall (maybe I heard car doors slamming and the screeches of my children) I looked back out.  And the sky had caught fire.  If I hadn’t looked over, I would have entirely missed it, as the entire show lasted no more than 5 minutes.  It is impossible not to drop to my knees in reverence, not to feel the presence of something that exists beyond logic – over the horizon – in that sky.  And so I do.

Other days I have to be slightly more aware.  When I parked the car the other day, on my way to an interview on a cold early morning, I could not believe how loud the song of sparrows was.  I looked closely and saw that the bush right by the road, barren and brown, was absolutely full to bursting with sparrows.  I tried to take a picture but of course it didn’t quite capture what I saw.  In the midst of all these dead branches, this fallow world, there is song.

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I have been thinking about light.  Of course I have.  Even more than usual.  MK Countryman sent me a fascinating interview from NPR with Arthur Zajonc, an academic who “bring[s] together physical and poetic understandings.”  Zajonc is a physicist and also a committed meditator, and his practice of contemplation-enriched science really spoke to me (remember, I grew up in the space between science and poetry, and have a strong interest myself in both).

The interview is full of interesting topics.  Zajonc touches on Rudolf Steiner, Goethe, and Einstein.  I highly recommend reading it in full.  A couple of points resonated the most with me.

“But…if you don’t have an object for light to fall on, in fact, we only see darkness.”  Zajonc takes this image and uses it as a metaphor for all of contemplation.  He imagines light to me this kind of meditation, this thinking, this falling into the spirit of things.  Through careful use of this light, “one comes to know the inside of every outside. It’s not only human beings that have an interior or an inside, but that the world around us as well can be known inwardly.  So life is dense with those levels of experience, but we need to calm ourselves, get clear, get quiet, direct attention, sustain the attention, open up to what is normally invisible, and certain things begin to show themselves. Maybe gently to begin with, but nonetheless it deepens and enriches our lives. If we are committed to knowledge, then we ought to be committed also to exploring the world with these lenses, with this method in mind and heart.  You know, otherwise we’re kind of doing it halfway. And then when we go to solve the problems of our world, whether they’re educational or environmental, we’re bringing only half of our intelligence to bear; we’ve left the other half idle or relegated it to religious philosophers. But if we’re going to be integral ourselves, you know, have a perspective which is whole, then we need to bring all of our capacities to the issues that we confront, spiritual capacities as well as more conventional sensory-based intellects and the like.”

This passage is long, but the ideas it contains strike a gong deep inside of me, and remind me that the word light came to me, now, for a reason.  The internal light, brought to bear on our experience, can help us knit together the worlds of the intellect and the spirit.  And it is in this combination that the true meaning of our life here on earth is found.

Zajonc talks about another important duality: “colors come in to being through the interaction or the conflict or the meeting of light and darkness.”  This makes me think of my own musings on light and shadow, and of my belief that it is in the shadows that the most important and interesting insights are found.  Where light borders darkness, in the liminal corners of life.  These are the places I am drawn to, the places I find the most richness.

I think part of why I like the light this time of year, or in summer evenings, is that I can actually see the light.  As opposed to most of the time, when light – unless you look incredibly closely, and have a finely-tuned eye, which I’m not sure I do – is invisible, illuminating all that we see without getting involved.  This is why I love my photograph of the setting sun on the Church of the Nativity.  I love moments when light itself is a participant in my experience, because they remind me of the immense power of something that is often so invisible.  Invisible, and yet crucial, to our sight.

At the end of the interview, Tippett asks Zajonc about his “vocabulary of mystery.”  I adore this image, and wonder if it isn’t another, more poetic way to describe what I keep writing and searching for, so fumblingly, about here.

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