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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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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I am reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s beautiful An Altar in the World right now and loving it.  Several different and disparate people recommended it to me and they were all right.  There are many passages that resonate – most of all the section called “reverence,” which is the best way I know how to describe my instinctive posture towards the world.

In the book’s section on groundedness Brown Taylor writes of the ancient spiritual practice of labyrinth walking and I thought instantly of last spring, when Grace and I went to Kripalu.  Together we walked the labyrinth there, and I was startled by how utterly she seemed to sense the palpable peace and – well, reverence – in the air.  I followed Grace in silence, watching her narrow shoulders, her bobbing ponytail, the little freckle at the base of her neck that I remember noticing when she was only months old.

Just like life, Brown Taylor says, the labyrinth had “switchbacks and detours,” and “the path goes nowhere.”  In fact, “the journey is the point.  The walking is the thing.”  I’ve walked the Kripalu labyrinth twice, once alone, and once with my daughter, and both times I found myself doubting, at a certain point in my passage, that the winding back-and-forth path will ever get me to the center.  The center that I can see so clearly and yet, rule-abider that I am, I refuse to simply walk into. Of course, with a little trust and some forbearance, the path eventually got me there both times.

More importantly, though, there’s no actually no eureka at the center.  There’s a pole which says let peace prevail on earth (I was delighted when I noticed that an identical pole stands in the playground of my children’s school), and some small piles of stones, which remind me of the cairns at Walden.  I stood in the quiet center, my entire being prickling with awareness, and then, after long moments of listening to my own breathing (and Grace’s), set back out again on the winding path.  There’s nothing, really, at the center.

The journey is the point.

I am deep in my own labyrinth right now.  Some unexpected switchbacks and detours are causing my faith in the security of the path waver.   That it isn’t the destination I am doubting is evidence of enormous internal growth for me.  I don’t much care about the destination, anymore – after years and years and years, I’ve honestly and truly let go of that.  But I’m feeling the ground under my feet shaking some, and I don’t like wobbling.  So I’m trying to close my eyes and revisit the labyrinth at Kripalu, hear my own breathing and Grace’s, and put one foot in front of the other.  To remember: the walking is the thing.

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For so many years I tried to outrun my sadness and my sensitivity, but no matter how fast I went it trailed behind me, stuttering on the pavement like the cans tied behind a bride and groom’s getaway car.  No matter how hard I sprinted I could not evade it, this lingering sadness, this strange but overwhelming sense of loss that infused even the most ordinary moments, this heartbreak that hovered around the edges of my life.

In the last few years that heartbreak has caught up to me.  My deepest wound finally opened wide enough that I could no longer ignore it.  I’ve been slowly circling the black hole at the center of my life, drawn inexorably towards it even as I fear the heartbreak that lives there.  That black hole is the brutal truth that it all passes, that every single moment is gone even as I live it, that no matter how hard I try, how fiercely, white-knuckled, I cling, I cannot hold onto my life.

I’m certain it was my children who forced me to turn and to stare into the sun of my life’s blinding, but evanescent right now.  To fall into the place where the heart of my life beats.  Paradoxically, they demonstrated both the unavoidable drumbeat march of time and the critical importance of being still in each individual moment.  They inhabited the now with an impossible-to-ignore stubbornness, yet they also marked time’s passage in a visceral way.  Unaware of this contradiction, they tugged me to the place I’d always shied away from.  They taught me that being present is both the most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever done and the only way to truly live my life.

In the strange, out-of-regular-life lacuna that the last week has been, I spent some time thinking about how the way that I interact with the world has fundamentally changed.  It’s no insight to observe that a marked rupture from status quo can jolt us into reflection and a new perspective on that normalcy.  I realize, not for the first time, but again, that I’ve stopped – for the most part – those hiding-from-my-life behaviors.  Instead, I now live in a permanent state of broken-heartedness.  The savage and beautiful reality of life’s impermanence colors every moment of my life.

Sometimes I am jealous of those who are less porous, who can walk through life without being so frequently brought to their knees by the pain and brilliance of it.  My every conscious moment is filtered through this prism of my piercing awareness of how fleeting it is.  In the last few years I’ve become almost painfully aware of every detail around me.  The sight of a half moon, one edge ragged, foggy, in the morning sky makes my breath catch, a cascade of emotions tinkling inside me like windchimes: the physical beauty of this planet, the sky’s being near and yet far, the concrete evidence of time’s passage in imperfect not-wholeness of the moon.  I suspect this, the way I am so attuned to the most mundane of details, is either an attempt to fully inhabit each moment or an effort to freeze it, like an insect in amber, but I don’t know which.

And what I realize, again, fiercely, is that this is how I want to live:  in the right now of my life with a broken heart.  I want this, in full knowledge of the pain it carries, far more than I want to keep hiding from my life.  This is a decision I make not in one grandiose declaration, but every single day, every single minute.  It’s not even, really, a decision so much as following my intuition about the way I want to inhabit the world, and it lives in where I choose to place my attention.

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I distinctly remember, as a child, looking at the cover of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and thinking: those words are what I want.  In particular I gravitated towards glory (I’ve never been very interested in power).  That’s what I thought I wanted to be able to say I’d had at the end of my life.  Glory.

The words I lean towards now – as goals, ideals, inspirations – are very different.  They don’t have the glamor or the sparkle of glory. No, the words that I hold onto, and aim for, now are humble.  Nice.  Peaceful.  Solid.  Steadfast.

This last word in particular has been in my mind since I read the following words from Pema Chodron:

How do we cultivate the conditions for joy to expand? We train in staying present. In sitting meditation, we train in mindfulness and maitri: in being steadfast with our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts. We stay with our own little plot of earth and trust that it can be cultivated, that cultivation will bring it to its full potential. Even though it’s full of rocks and the soil is dry, we begin to plow this plot with patience.

Sadly, to my own disappointment, I am far from steadfast.  My footing is unstable, I am blown around by the winds, I feel insubstantial.  I want to be more sure, more certain, more definitive.  I want to trust, in myself and in the world.  I’ve written before of how I give up before things even get hard.  This is a theme in my life, and one I am quite ashamed of: it is rare that I grit my teeth and just stick it out.  Unless, of course, I really have to.  I think of Grace’s birth, or my most recent half marathon.  Both of those were things I truly thought I could not do.  But somehow – in the former, I didn’t have a choice, and in the latter I was determined not to walk, as I had the first time – I pushed through the resistance to the end.

How do I develop this determination, this commitment of spirit and heart?  My friend Pam writes – as usual, gorgeously – about realizing that she, too, has not fully committed to herself.  In the woods, during a trail race, she found reserves and commitment within herself.  Her words made my eyes well with tears (okay, fine, they usually do) and I recognized myself in them.

While I am not at all sure how to become more steadfast, I am certain that the effort is about gradual, not sudden, growth and change.  I must let my few but important episodes of seeing something through become a well I can draw on, a source of strength, a reminder that I actually can stick it out.  I don’t know what else to do other than to keep trying, even as I stumble, to inhabit my unassuming, yet urgent, words: nice. peaceful. solid. steadfast.

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The American Cancer Society believes that every birthday is a victory – another year that cancer has not won. Thanks in part to the Society’s cutting-edge scientific research, patient support, and prevention, education, and advocacy efforts, 11 million cancer survivors will celebrate another birthday this year.

Tiny Prints, the online stationary boutique, is fighting for more birthdays with an exclusive card collection on TinyPrints.com that is inspired by all of the ways the American Cancer Society saves lives.

From now until April 30, 2012, the Tiny Prints more birthdays card collection will be available here.  I love the cards, and in particular two.  These remind me of people I love whose lives have been touched by cancer.

Jessica is one of my very dearest friends, a true sister of the spirit and in the ways that matter.  We’ve known each other for most of our lives, and saw a day we’d both dreamed of come true in July when our daughters became bunk mates at the same camp where we met so many years ago.  Jessica’s family has been profoundly and irrevocably altered by cancer.  For some reason this card reminds me of her; like the image, she is composed of a million brilliantly-colored, uniquely-shaped layers which, together, create a beautiful whole.

The card reminds me of the famous Elisabeth Kubler-Ross quotation: “People are like stained-glass windows.  They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”  There’s nobody in my life who more surely embodies true beauty than Jessica, and I say this without reservation.  She manages to live with tremendous uncertainty and in the shadow of substantial loss, and she does so with joy, love, and passion.  Every single day.  In many ways, Jess is my hero.

I’m fortunate beyond words to have her in my life, and I hope fiercely to share another 60 years with her, to watch our girls grow up and have children of their own.  It is one of my devoutest wishes that Jess and I are able to keep up what has become a lifetime conversation about life and about books, about identity and about the sea, about love and about sorrow.  This conversation, this relationship, is a central cord that runs through my life and sometimes feels like one of the only things that anchors me to who I am and to what matters.

My maternal grandmother, Priscilla (Nana to me) died at the age of 78 of pancreatic cancer.    Nana was youthful and healthy when she was diagnosed, out of the blue, with pancreatic cancer.  Her battle was valiant but losing; she died six months to the day after her diagnosis.  This card reminds me of Nana and Ba’s house in Providence, the location of so many important childhood memories.  At Christmas they always put a single (electric) candle in each window of their house, so the glowing squares remind me of arriving to see them, tires squeaking on the gravel driveway, on dark December evenings.  Nana’s home was elegant and comfortable at the same time, and Hilary and I spent many happy weekends and weeks staying there during school breaks.  The card above represents home – and hope – powerfully for me, and there are few places I was more at home and hopeful than Nana’s house.

I wish, often, that Nana was here to know my children.  In particular Grace has certain facial expressions that can bring Nana to mind for me, and a similar tall, rangy stature and dark hair.  Nana was a talented athlete, graceful and coordinated, as well as a powerful intellect.  She was generous and gentle, kind and somewhat reserved, but loyal to her core.  From a very early age I remember simply loving talking to her.  She made me feel like the only place in the world she wanted to be was right there; she listened thoroughly and paid careful attention.

Nana’s birthday and mine were only five days apart we often celebrated them together.  I have several vivid memories of birthdays celebrated with Nana and Ba in August, on their screened-in porch at the back of their home in Providence or on their boat, Fleetwing, with a jug of cosmos from the garden perched in one of the bottle holders by the wheel.  I miss her all the time and wish that cancer hadn’t taken her from us so swiftly and so painfully.  I wish we could have shared many more birthdays.

Please go check out the Tiny Prints/American Cancer Society cards here.  Thank you!!

This sponsored post was written in conjunction with the American Cancer Society/Tiny Prints card collection launch. All content and opinions expressed here are my own.

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Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we’re going to die.  The most mysterious aspect of being alive might be that — and poetry knows that.

I read these sentences, from Terry Gross, on Beth Kephart’s beautiful blog last week and I simultaneously gasped and welled up with tears.  As I wrote in Beth’s comments, the lines reminded me of a Stanley Kunitz quote I shared over the summer:

“Years ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace such knowledge and yet to remain compassionate and whole – that is the consummation of the endeavor of art.”

I write incessantly about the same thing here: about the passage of time, about the deep way that unavoidable truth gouges into my spirit, about the tears that surprise me with their frequency and power, about the surpassing joy that exists in the tiniest moments of my life.  Isn’t this all simply a less articulately-conveyed description of the very lyric tension Kunitz describes, of what Terry Gross avers that poetry knows?

Perhaps my inclination towards melancholy and my exquisite sensitivity to the clock’s forward tick is inextricably linked to my passionate love of poetry.  Maybe all of these things – traits, preferences, leanings – are manifestations of the same central seam of meaning that runs through the human experience.  Maybe the shadow that flickers across everyone’s life is universal, and it’s just that I’m particularly sensitive to it.  Wouldn’t be the first time.

As you know I am often frustrated with myself for what feels like an endless circling of the same question, like I’m turning over a stone incessantly, hoping that somehow I’ll eventually uncover some message etched into its surface.  Several people have commented that instead of a circle, maybe it’s a spiral; a continued revisiting of the same themes, but with new understanding with each trip around.

The image that recurs for me is of the exhibit at the science museum that was the first thing to hold my attention when I visited as a child with my father.  It’s the one where a black ball makes circles around a gradually sloped surface, tighter and tighter circles, drawn inexorably towards the hole in the middle, into which it finally drops.  I believe the exhibit is a display of centrifugal force.  It’s that circling black ball that I think about, over and over: I’m drawn in a way I can neither understand nor particularly name, in a spiral that grows ever tighter, to a black hole in the center of my life.  And that black hole, I realize, when I read Terry Gross’s words, and Stanley Kunitz’s, is perhaps at the center of all of our lives.

The challenge, for me, is to incorporate my understanding of this most mysterious aspect of life into my experience without being utterly paralyzed by it.  The question is how to find peace despite this yawning abyss.  Is it possible, though, that life is full of grandeur, beauty, and blinding pain not despite but because of this black hole?

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At the end of every summer, my children become wretched.  They are also lovely, and we do special things like our spontaneous outing to Crane’s Beach.  But without fail, they are difficult.  I swear it’s the universe making it more bearable to go back to school, back to fall, back to the routines and strictures of Regular Life.  Right on schedule, the last week of summer, Whit had a terrible day.  He was talking back.  He was ignoring me.  He was misbehaving.  He received a warning, failed to heed it, and I sent him to bed at 5:30, without dinner.  I know.  I’m a witch.

In his bed, he cried on and off for an hour.  I sat in my office, right down the hall, remembering all of those nights that I waited out a wailing infant.  Every few minutes, he’d crack the door, tiptoe out and tell me quietly “I’m going to the bathroom.”  In the bathroom he would blow his nose and then creep back his room with a look at me.  Each time, I would say, “I love you, Whit,” and he would shuffle back to bed, tearful.

Finally, at about 6:45 I went in and sat on the edge of his bed.  He was red-faced and upset, but placid, quiet.

“Can we make up?”  He asked me, looking in my eyes.

“Of course we can.”  I hugged his little shoulders, feeling how warm he was, how damp his face and hair.

“I am sorry.” He said, muffled, into my neck.  I rocked him a little. “Mummy?  I’ll do anything you want if you will let me go play Legos.”

“No, Whit,” I said firmly, “You can’t.  This is a consequence.”  I felt, as I do so often, how much easier it would be to just give in.  But I didn’t.  We talked about why he’d been sent to bed.  About not talking back, about listening, about eating his dinner.

“Sometimes when I misbehave I don’t know it.”  His voice was soft, hiccupy.  “Can you sometimes tell me so you don’t have to do this to me again?”

“Yes, Whit.  That’s what the warning was for.”  I hugged him again.  “I will make sure I’m really clear with you.  But I think you do know some of the things you are not supposed to do.”  Sheepish, he looked down at the bright robots on his sheets.

“Are we really made up now?”  Looking up at me through his long eyelashes, he held out his hand as though to shake.

Trying not to laugh, I said, ” I think we should make up with a hug and a kiss, don’t you?”  He nodded, and sat up to hug me hard.  I kissed his cheek and asked if he was ready to go to bed.  “You’ve been really upset in here, haven’t you?”

He nodded again, more vigorously this time. “I’ve been talking to myself, angry at myself that I’m not listening.”

“Well, it’s good to figure out how you can do a better job at that.”  He clutched his Beloved Monkey even closer to him and looked at me.  “We’ll figure it out together, Whit.  I promise.”  I brushed his hair back from his forehead, thinking of all the times I’ve said goodnight in this room, of how often I’ve smoothed my palm across a brow right here, of how often I’ve heard the lullabies that drift from the small CD player.

The specifics of each moment tilt and shift constantly but the central emotions abide, unchanged, sturdy.

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A couple of years ago I realized that the annual, persistent cold I got in the spring was seasonal allergies.  Odd, I thought: I’ve never had these before.  My doctor told me that it’s actually common to develop them in midlife.  Okay.  So now I take Allegra for a while in the spring and all is well.  Last year, I noticed that on long runs I coughed a lot towards the end.  During my second half-marathon, in June, this was pronounced: I hacked and hacked all the way through the second half, never able to fully clear my throat or get a deep breath.  It finally dawned on me that maybe I’ve developed exercise-induced asthma?  I need to go see the doctor again to find out and, if so, what my options are.

Then this spring I started getting ugly red patches on the backs of my legs.  They came and went, grew and ebbed.  No big deal.  Over the summer they grew, started itching, and got really pronounced.  Matt noticed and said I needed to get them checked out.  My legs were raw from the knee down.  I saw my dermatologist in August and she took one look at me and asked, “Do you have seasonal allergies or asthma?”

Knock me over.  What?  Well, yes, I think I have both, and they are both new, I told her.  Why?

She told me about a syndrome called atopy.  For anyone who has this, or is a doctor, I apologize in advance for my butchering of the medical specifics.  As far as she told me, it’s basically a group of symptoms that demonstrate acute sensitivity to the world.  I am reactive to the air, to the very stuff of everyday life.  Just living in the world is a stress on my system.  This seems like a physical manifestation of my emotional porousness.

Why does this not surprise me at all?

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When I decided to go back to Legoland with Grace and Whit this summer, I worried that maybe it was wrong to try to revisit and recapture one of the most glorious memories of my time as a mother.  Perhaps we would all be disappointed, inevitably, and I’d regret the decision.  Ultimately I couldn’t resist the clarion call of those happy moments, and decided to risk a return.

And it was just as wonderful.  Different, but marvelous.  The whole four days we were there I was struck by the proximity of the past, felt last year’s four days right alongside this year, keenly aware of the ways in which things are the same and the way they are different.  Some combination of familiarity and maturity meant that the children felt masterful at Legoland.  Remembering the routine at the hotel and navigating the park, they knew what they were doing.

Whit went on the rides, Grace seesawed wildly between adorableness and surliness, and I had a blackberry to check.  This was all new.  There was sheer joy in their faces on the safari ride, they careened ahead of me down the hall from the room to the 5pm wine-and-snacks lounge, I took the elevator down while they raced me on the stairs.  This was all the same.

So much new, so much the same.  The children change with blinding speed and yet there’s a permanence to my bond with them, some eternity that beats in its core.  I found myself falling into the black hole of regret about all that has changed, mourning the younger children Grace and Whit were and the year that I’ve lost in the interim.  And then, just as quickly, I shook my head and tried to reimmerse myself in the moment I was living, knowing as I did that within weeks I’d be nostalgic for it.  As I walked through the park, a child’s hand in each of mine, I knew, vividly and viscerally, that immediately I’d wish I had that minute back.

I’ve sworn and promised that we’ll return to Legoland again next summer.  And I know that when we do I will slide back in the slipstream between now and then.  And I can’t wait.

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