“Throughout my whole life,” he noted later, “during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within.”

Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

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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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One evening last week Whit and I sat in companionable silence in the family room.  He was building a LEGO and I was working.  “Mummy?” At his voice I looked up from my laptop.

“Yes?”  He was perched on the side of the low train table, LEGO pieces in one hand and the other held to his chest.

“I can feel my heart beating.”

“Cool, Whit.”  Why did you suddenly think of this?  The inner workings of Whit’s mind and heart will always be a mystery to me.  Which reminds me, daily, of the vast and essential unknowability of even those we love best.

After a long moment of silence, during which I watched him sit, holding his hand over his heart, he spoke again.  “It feels amazing, Mummy.”

Why yes, Whit.  It is amazing.

The next morning was Whit’s seven year doctor’s appointment.  He sat on the doctor’s examination table in just his jeans, his white chest looking impossibly tiny and incomprehensibly grown-up at the same time.  The doctor pressed his stethoscope to Whit’s back.  He asked him to turn his head this way and that.  He kept listening.  Time stretched uncomfortably.  I glanced at Matt, my anxiety mounting.  What was he hearing?  What was he listening for?  Whit looked over his shoulder at the doctor, sensing, too, that this was taking an awfully long time.  “Whit, turn this way,” the doctor’s voice was stern, his face limned with concentration.

I chewed a nail and watched, feeling my own heart skittering in my chest.  Was last night’s comment a harbinger of this, a prompt by the universe to appreciate the amazement of our hearts beating, of this most taken-for-granted and yet outrageous gift?  I could feel my breath speeding up and I began to awful-ize.  He needs open heart surgery.  I should have paid attention last night, put down my computer, pressed my hand to his chest, noticed the extraordinary beauty of his ordinary heartbeat.  I should have done that years ago.

“Okay,” the doctor cleared his throat and pulled the stethoscope out of his ears.  “He’s fine.”  I exhaled, but only part way.  “But you can hear the whooshing of the blood in his aorta.  It’s something we see rarely in kids, and I kept asking him to turn his head to test if it was that or not.  I wish my med student was here right now; this is rare and it’s cool to hear.”

“But it’s really just normal, and not an issue?”

“Yes, really.  Promise.  It’s just a detail.  It’s interesting, and unusual.  His blood just flows close to the surface, your kid.”  I exhaled the rest of the way and helped Whit pull on his shirt.

After a few more minutes, we walked back to the car.  I thought of a quote I’ve always related to, which I just tweeted recently, by Alan Gurganus: “Her life stayed closer to the skin than most people’s.”  I let go of Whit’s hand and held my fingers against his back.  Thump, thump, thump.  His small heart rabbited against my hand.  It is amazing, mummy.  Calamity is always so close.  We walk the line between ordinary and catastrophe every moment.  Thump, thump, thump.  Close to the surface.

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I have written a lot about friendships, about those few fertile times in my life that I’ve made special ones, about how few true native speakers I’ve met, about the immense value I place on my female friends.  I was with one of those native speakers this weekend, and I can’t fully articulate the joy, ease, and sheer grace of being in her presence.

Q is unquestionably one of the people I love most dearly in the entire world.  She is one of my first child’s godmothers.  She is also a redhead with brown eyes, a combination I didn’t realize was unusual until I was an adult.  We don’t see each other enough, but when we do we slip immediately back into shorthand.  I think her husband is wonderful and she and Matt have private jokes of their own.  She gets all of my references.  She gets me.

I met Q 19 years ago, on a hot early-fall afternoon in Princeton.  She is everything I want to be, myself.  She is smart, funny, loving, honest, occasionally clumsy and frankly beautiful.  We share a commonality of both history and outlook that is unique in my life.  She has the rare position, shared by a few, of having both witnessed and deeply impacted my becoming who I am now.

We are peers and have moved through the stages of life largely in tandem.  Some of our choices have been different but our essential values are near-identical.  It was next to Q that I ran out Princeton’s FitzRandolph gate for the first time (legend holds that you cannot exit this gate until the day of your graduation, which is the day we did so).  She was one of the first people I called when I got my heart broken, got into business school, got engaged, got pregnant.  She wore blue as my bridesmaid and I wore coral as hers.  We’ve talked about wrinkles and mortgages and crock pots and the delights and fears that populate our every single day as mothers.

Together we rode a ferris wheel on Saturday afternoon.  High over Chicago, in a crystal-clear, cold blue sky.  With our first-born children sitting, together, across from us.  Up, up, up into the cloudless blue.  Knocked around a little by the wind.  Sitting next to each other we gazed around, laughing, wide-eyed.  And then we rode slowly down down, completing the arc set in motion so many years ago.

I can’t think of many people I’m more grateful to have next to me on this ride.

I love you, Q.  Thank you.

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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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Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.

Mostly he just pays attention to the things he sees: trees, fields, warblers, light.  As he does, they become doors to other things: grief, love, amazement, blessing.

This kind of blessing prayer is called a benediction.  It comes at the end of something, to send people on their way.  All I am saying is that anyone can do this.  Anyone can ask, and anyone can bless, whether anyone has authorized you to do it or not.  All I am saying is that the world needs you to do this, because there is a real shortage of people willing to kneel wherever they are and recognize the holiness holding its sometimes bony, often tender, always life-giving hand above their heads.

all from An Altar in the World, by Barbara Brown Taylor

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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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It is with my iphone, most of all, that I capture those tiny moments and details through which I glimpse the eternal.  Here are some, from the 7th birthday edition.

The view from the sink at our dear friends’ house in New Hampshire where we spent Martin Luther King weekend.  I remember the weekend when that red barn went up.  Now it is time-scarred and worn.  More evidence of life, leaving its mark on all of us, in ways both visible and unseen.

Reading to a six year old before bed for the very last time in my life.  After putting him to bed I bawled my eyes out.  I know, I know, I know: very ending is a new beginning, and it does just keep getting better and better.  Still, something is ending, and I’m incapable of not mourning that.

On Whit’s birthday I found him standing, silently, in my office looking out the window at the snow.  He was delighted beyond words at the white world.  When we got to school, both kids and Matt made tracks in the fresh, untouched blanket of snow.

The message Whit left in the snow: I’m 7.  It reminded me of our late-summer day at Crane’s Beach, when the children both wrote in the sand and then watched their messages eroded by the inexorably rising tide.

We celebrated Whit’s birthday with dinner at home.  My parents and Matt’s dad joined us for pizza, roast chicken, and salad with homemade croutons (Whit chose the menu).  The birthday boy’s cake request was chocolate, with chocolate icing.

Our front door.  I actually dislike Valentine’s Day, and always have.  I like its decorations, though, and I finally realized it is because I love red and pink together.  This wreath makes me smile every time I come home.

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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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