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 mentioned that things are a bit shaky chez moi lately, with unanticipated changes and tremors, a brand-new and somewhat startling shakiness to the ground. Last week I felt tentative and edged my way out into the world only when it was necessary. Other than one dinner out (a celebration with a few of our dear local friends) I have been staying very close to home. The truth is I am feeling internal again, quiet, and there are only a few people I feel comfortable being with.
I have been working a lot, writing, reading, sleeping when I can (not that well), and curling up with Grace and Whit. Cooking random vegetables out of the bin that arrives weekly, making my way through Gail Godwin’s glorious Evensong, working slowly on a couple of essays I have in process.
I’ve also been going for walks in the afternoons. Whenever I can, when I have breaks between calls, I sneak out, bundle up, pull on a fleece hat and mittens and parka and head down the street. It’s often late afternoon when I go out, so in particular I have been watching the light change. In the space of a couple of days it suddenly seemed as though the days were markedly longer. A movement which had seemed slow, almost imperceptible, like the hour hand creaking around a clock, suddenly jumped and made itself known.
I walk and I watch. I see the light on the trees, the black nests in bare tree branches, the glowing rough-edged moon in the saturated, still-blue sky. The unfortunate thing, though, is that I seem to go on every walk with myself. No matter how far or how fast I walk, I can’t get away from myself. Sometimes I can still my racing thoughts and heart with the abiding calm of a late afternoon in deep winter, but most of the time I can’t. I’m right there with myself. As it were.
And still, not really knowing what else to do, I keep walking. Looking up, looking down, noticing things every step of the way, often feeling waves of wonder. Realizing that no matter what, I can’t outrun myself. Even as the world turns towards light again, I am, in ways big and small, turning inward. Who knows how long this will last, this phase of inwardness, this time of late-afternoon walks, this season of anxiousness and waiting, of patience and fear. I can’t know how long. So I just keep walking.
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“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.
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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