As I was driving last night, Like a Prayer came on and my thoughts drifted, immediately and firmly, to Leigh. They always do. Leigh is a dear, dear friend of my childhood. We met at a camp on Cape Cod when we were 12 or 13 and for several summers enjoyed an intense friendship. Leigh was everything I was not and wanted to be: beautiful, artistic, musical, outgoing, confident. She played Dorothy in our camp’s presentation of the Wizard of Oz, she mastered all of our various activities with aplomb and ease, and everybody at camp knew her name. For some reason she chose me as her tightest confidant, and we spent several summers arm-in-arm. We were LeighandLindsey. We shared clothes and a bunk bed and whispered stories late into the night and endless letters back and forth during the school year.

One year Leigh and I choreographed a dance to “Like a Prayer” for the talent show. We performed it over and over again, practicing daily in the outdoor theater with rustic wooden benches clustered under a stand of trees. Above the stage, across the front of the simple wooden building, the camp motto was displayed proudly: I Can and I Will. That song, for the rest of my life, will bring me right back to that summer of 1989 or 1990, to Leigh and I dancing down the dusty aisles between the benches, singing along during our practices and with broad smiles during the actual performance. I remember it as a rare moment of abandon and confidence for me: somehow, in the light that Leigh cast off, I felt brave. In her aura I too was lit from within.

This was a special, formative friendship for me, one I have held close even though we were out of touch for years. It was an enormous treat to see each other again a couple of summers ago. The occasion was our camp’s anniversary celebration, and we met for a day of swimming at her family’s house on Cape Cod. It was lovely to see Leigh’s parents, who had been a real part of my childhood, and to meet her son and husband (the pictures are from that day). I was reminded again of how that summer camp brought me some very special friends, chief among them Jessica. There are others, though, and I feel very lucky. (One of these special friends, who lives in Alaska, generously sent Grace – who he has never met – pictures from watching the actual Iditarod this past weekend. Her class has been studying the Iditarod for weeks {yay 1st grade private school education!} and Grace’s bringing the photographs in was apparently an enormous hit. Thank you K!)

Leigh, you are on my mind now and you are every single time I hear Madonna singing Like a Prayer. When I hear that song, I feel as though I can close my eyes and be back on the stage in Brewster, dancing our hearts out, sheer energy and delight radiating from us. I feel in touch with both you and the me I was then. This is such a gift. Your voice, you, those sunlit summers of our teen years, all of that will always feel like home. I hope to see you soon.

I took this picture last weekend.  I am struck by two things: the incredible, blade-like line of the airplane moving through the sky with purposeful speed, and the achingly blue of the sky.  The movement and the stillness that underlies it.  The trajectory and the background.  This image is a good metaphor for something I’ve been thinking about lately: having drive, and being driven.  Our society says both are excellent qualities.  But both of these descriptors puzzle me, for correlated but separate reasons.

To have drive.  To be ambitious, to believe in oneself, to do great things.  Right?  But drive also assumes motion.  For most of my 35 years I would have nodded vigorously and agreed with this.  But in the last couple of years I’ve heard an increasingly loud voice in my head telling me that that may not be right.  Telling me that maybe the ultimate goal is not motion but stillness.  That, even in the midst of a frenetic life with many goals, the real richness is right here.  That “great things” in fact consist not in having propulsion, necessarily, but in having the patience and strength to be still. 

To be driven.  Same general connotations: eagerness, striving, energy, goals and aspirations.  And yet.   To be driven is to give the agency to another, no?  Who is driving?  This might sound a little pat and pedantic, but, really, what does it mean?  And where are we being driven to?  Are we setting the direction from the passenger seat? 

These questions, clearly, are part of my larger rumination on the notion of velocity vs. direction, speed vs. stillness.  This is not a new theme for me, of course, but it’s much on my mind lately.  I wrote about this last fall at Mrs. Chicken’s lovely blog, Chicken & Cheese.  There are so many ways that this tension reverberates in my life.  Writ large, I think I’m questioning velocity as a defining emphasis for life.  Starting to realize the ways that focusing on where we are going takes us away from all we have: here.  now.  And yet there are parts of me that are innate, immutable: I am impatient, I speak and move quickly, I am not, by nature, a still and calm person. 

What’s new, I guess, is my longing to be.  And if I’ve learned anything in the past year or two, it’s that being engaged, present, patient, is less a trait and more of a practice. Sure, I think it comes more easily for some, but I am greatly encouraged by a strong sense that this is something we can work on.  As Dani Shapiro said at her book reading, the practice is beginning again.  Recognizing our thoughts taking over, and returning again to the place of stillness. 

What if I wasn’t driven?  So what?  Begin again.

What if I didn’t have drive?  So what?  Begin again. 

What if I’m distracted, my mind doing cartwheels, my anxiety bubbling up?  So what?  Begin again.

Be here.

A fabulous memoir by Isabel Allende.  I read it a couple of years ago, but turned back to its pages last night for some reason.  I won’t even attempt to say anything that Allende can’t say better herself. Some of my favorite passages:

Never do harm, and wherever possible do good.

All the air blew out of our rage in an instant, and deep in our bones we felt a grief as vast as the Pacific Ocean, a pain we hadn’t wanted to admit out of pure and simple pride.

What does imagination feed on, anyway?  In my experience, on memories, the vast world, the people I know, and also the persons and voices I carry within to help me on the journey of living and writing.  My grandmother used to say that space is filled with presences, of what has been, is, and will be.

Love is a lightning bolt that strikes suddenly, changing us.

The entire tribe was there to celebrate her, and once more I found that in an emergency you toss overboard the things that are not essential, that is, nearly everything.  In the end, after a thorough lightening of loads and taking account, it turns out that the one thing that’s left is love.

And my favorite:

I didn’t know then that sadness is never entirely gone; it lives on forever just below the skin.  Without it I wouldn’t be who I am, or be able to recognize myself in the mirror.

I sat at the kitchen table yesterday afternoon drinking tea and watching my children play in our back yard (“yard” is optimistic – suffice it to say we live in a very urban area). Still, I’m always delighted when they entertain themselves with little fuss or stimulation, and they did.

For some reason I was randomly poking through my archives and found a post that I wish I had written today. Maybe because I am entering a period of ambiguity and am aching for peace.  Maybe because the friend I mention had another scare about her daughter this week, and still in the midst of that found time to be generous and thoughtful towards me. Maybe because, despite the sunshine, it’s been a fairly gray weekend. I don’t know. Apologies for the retread, but this speaks to how I’m feeling and I wanted to repost it.

Holding Ambiguity and Emanating Peace

The membrane between me and the world is very porous.

Certain people have unfettered access to me; I take their input and criticism as truth. It is like having a central line into my chest. Which is good as long as the input is well-intentioned, even if negative.

I celebrate compassion. I believe kindness is the most important thing. That life is not black and white. That there are many grays. That what matters is doing the best you can. And I believe that most people are genuinely doing their best.

I think that relationships are art, not science. It is a fallacy – a comforting, seductive one – that there are clear rights and wrongs. That there are rules. There aren’t. There is instinct, there is fuzziness, there is lack of clarity. This is uncomfortable. You have to let go and trust. In fact, to force human relationships into a rigid framework of binary 1s and 0s is to miss out on some of their most exquisite, moving nuances. It is in the spaces between that the real love exists.

Life is endlessly long and it is heartbreakingly short. We are all flawed and wounded, we all limp. None of us dances without stumbling. But none of us needs others to tell us we are broken. We aren’t. There is a fine line between wanting to help each other be better people and being downright destructive. There is much good in every single person, so much to celebrate. None of us is more important or more worthy than anyone else. Nobody. This I believe as firmly as I believe anything.

People are amazing. There is more in each of us than we know. Last weekend I watched a dear friend practicing her passion. She had taken a risk, walked away from a safe professional harbor, and she is also enduring significant pain and fear in her family. Handling – with such grace – something most of us can barely imagine. And there she was. Laughing and smiling and creating beauty in the world. She is amazing. People like her make me realize I need to be a better me.

We must learn to hold ambiguity in our hands and still, somehow, emanate peace. We need to accept the terrifying uncertainty of it all. Maybe, actually, embracing that uncertainty is the only road to true freedom. It could all end tomorrow. This moment – and only this moment – is life. What are we all waiting for?

I am delighted to be over that The Kitchen Table today, writing about talking to my kids about God and understanding in a new way what holiness is.

Also, thanks to Corinne at Trains, Tutus and Teatime for showing me the way to this great, collaborative site.

Images of Whit (this time in photographs, not words)

A handwritten valentine for his favorite girl classmate.

Look what the melting snow unearthed in the back yard!

Epic bedhead (this, by the way, was how he looked on Picture Day – A+ for motherhood that day).

A Lego robot he built himself.

Dinosaurs and superhero cape: just another afternoon in Whit’s room.

First day of school.

Okay, so not a still life, but my absolute favorite picture of my son EVER.

Because you need tools for meals (note also plate made by Grace, which says “Whit the monster”).

A “sunflower” that Whit made in school and presented, beaming and proud, to me. I cherish it.

His (and my) favorite pajamas.

I’ve been trying to live in the moments this week (okay, this and every week). And so I wanted to capture a few of them. In words, this time.

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Driving Grace and Whit to school in the morning, stopping at Starbucks for my venti nonfat latte, then heading to school while both children belt out “Funny how falling feels like flying, for a little while” at the top of their lungs. Peeking in the rearview mirror to catch them smiling each other with that conspirational, we-are-sharing-something-fun smile.

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Monday night, 10:45, Whit wandering into my room and saying, “my throat hurts, mummy.” I picked him up to take him back to bed and he sprayed vomit over my shoulder (miraculously, only onto the hardwood floor). I stripped off his pajamas and rushed him into the bathroom. I watched him, wearing only a pull-up, retching over the toilet. He turned to me, shivering on the cold tile, his hair messy with sleep and his eyes watering with the violence of throwing up, and said, “I’m sorry I made a mess on your floor.” Oh, little man. No matter.

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Taking Grace to a one-hour yoga class on Wednesday afternoon (genius: kids’ yoga simultaneous to adult vinyasa class). As we walked to the car, her cheeks were pink and she was quiet. I asked her what was wrong and she said she was tired and did not feel well. “Could it be my spleen, Mum?” she asked with concern. I assured her that if it was I was sure she would have sharp localized pain, but the whole way home I could tell she was trying to control and brush off her anxiety about it. I feel terrible that the requirement to avoid contact sports after mono (for risk of a spleen rupture) has engendered such paralyzing fear.

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Sitting down at a work meeting and pulling a few pages I had printed out from my bag. As I smoothed them on the table and looked through them, I found Whit’s five year appointment health form interleaved amid the work stuff. The form I hadn’t been able to find that morning. Excellent. Also excellent: the curious looks from across the table.

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Snow flurries every single day. Running in the snow on Thursday, coming in to see myself in the front hall mirror, the blue baseball cap from my college roommate’s wedding in Florida totally white with snow.

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My father coming over for an impromptu visit. The children barreling into him with joyful surprise at his appearance. The clink of ice cubes in his scotch glass. His insightful commentary, as always, shot through with humor and wisdom.

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Walking home from hearing Dani Shapiro read last night in the dark and rain by myself. Her words, the themes of Devotion and its probing questions, falling over themselves in my head. Feeling both clear and confused, solitary and not at all alone as I walked with the rain misting in my face.

I’m absolutely delighted to be participating in Snippets at Boy Crazy: finding clarity in the chaos today.  Elizabeth’s brilliant idea about collaborative art makes the most of this disparate and wonderful web community.  Together our voices and eyes can be more than any of us is individually.  I love the concept she has pioneered and hope you will too.

Inspired by Chatting at the Sky today, a glimpse of my home.  My desk, where I spend most of my time. Photographs of old friends and family.  A few quotations.  Printed lines of emails from my mother and father.  Art by Gracie.  Two prints whose messages speak to me.  And of course, my trusty laptop.  What does your home look like today?

I had a professional conversation yesterday morning that triggered a landslide of self-doubt. I realized anew, sitting in a conference room as snow drifted down outside, how little I feel I have accomplished in the 10 years since I graduated from business school. I have very clearly chosen a path of a foot in both worlds (“career” and “home,” both in quotations because I think these definitions are simplistic) and as a result I have a home in neither. In being unwilling to give up active participation in either world, did I just end up doing a poor job at both?

What does it mean to have a foot in both worlds? I think it can be wonderful and it can be tormented, depending on the person and the situation. I’m just not sure which it is for me. I’ve always straddled the gulf of the mommy wars, always worked part-time, always spent part of my week in office buildings and part in the sandbox. I have adamantly insisted on keeping a “foot in the door” professionally because I was sure I’d want to “ramp back up” someday. All of these phrases seem foreign on my tongue now, like a language I used to speak but have lost.

I made an active decision to scale back my professional aspirations and involvement in order to have more flexibility to be home with Grace and Whit. And yet I have such an ache about having missed the babyhood of my children. It’s easy to blame that on the fact that I was at work some of the time, but when I’m really honest I don’t think that is the reason at all. I think it’s about my wiring, my frantic restlessness, the way I struggle to be fully engaged in one thing at a time. Still, I wonder if I had chosen to be home full-time I would feel better about my childrens’ infancies, if I would feel I had caught more of the swollen moments of feeling that are what it’s all about.

And yet I also feel frustrated by what feels like wasted years, spent only partially engaged in jobs which, in retrospect, did not mean very much to me. In order to keep the flexibility I prize so highly (to allow, among other things, time for writing) I have had to take jobs that are often peripheral and not core to a company’s function. This has eroded both my sense of real contribution and my feeling part of a cohesive team. What was the point of having missed hours with my faintly baby-powdered scented babies, for something that feels so insubstantial and inconsequential now?

Of course, the dirty truth is that I didn’t really want to be there every single second. I hate admitting that, because now I wish so devoutly that I had every single one of those seconds back. But, still. I know I needed the perspective of time away. I guess I just wish that I felt better about what I had accomplished in the hours I was away. I wish I didn’t feel like a fraud who is hiding the fact that she doesn’t know anything real.

There are two things that people tell me all the time about the way I have navigated the complicated territory of work/home. One is that I am lucky to have flexible, part-time work. This infuriates me because while I am deeply, firmly aware of my tremendous good fortune, I think calling my professional situation lucky trivializes the amount of work and forethought that went into it. And then, of course, my gerbil brain goes off on the wheel of: oh my God, I spent all of that time planning … this??? Anyway. The second is how well I’ve figured out how to have both. And when people tell me that, I always smile and nod and express my satisfaction with my situation. But I haven’t figured anything out, and those comments always make ambivalence and regret roll into my heart like thunder. They remind me of all of the anxieties and misgivings I have about the trade-offs and choices I have made.

Aidan at Ivy League Insecurities wrote a couple of weeks ago about how she frets that she has wasted her education. I relate to this, though my reasons are slightly different. I worry that I am letting down my parents, for their enormous financial and emotional investment in my education. I worry that I am failing the special teachers who took a particular interest in me, made me believe I was not stupid, helped open my mind. And I don’t feel that I am letting those people down because of my specific choices but because of who I am: that I am not more curious, ambitious, intelligent.

Days like today I feel that I’m the epitome of that trite and critical saying, “a mile wide and an inch deep.” I feel as though I’ve skimmed the surface of many worlds but not had the courage to really pick one and immerse myself in it. On other days I think that, as I wrote at Kelly’s blog, Cleavage, I am simply more kaleidoscope than laser. On those days, when I am feeling kinder towards myself, I think a life splintered into myriad pieces just fits me. I think that I could never commit to one place because I never found one that felt like home. I don’t know. I just know that today ten years of frantic effort has left me with a handful of dust and a heart full of questions.