Month: May 2016

Yours & Mine

I spent the weekend in Monterey, a very small town in the Berkshires. It’s one of the places I feel like I belong – the green rolling hills and the cows and the staggering weather shifts and the artists. I go to visit my aunt, who makes me laugh hysterically, in her comfortable house filled with Nakashima furniture and bright red pottery and blue bottles and wide creaking floors and cat hair and black and white photography. There are massive windows that capture extraordinary light, and window seats for reading People magazine or the NY Times. The walls are lined with original art by her mother-in-law – in these gorgeous, sumptuous, saturated colors with pops of hot pink and bright yellow – each capturing the staggering nature of the Cape, or the simple grace of a vase of wildflowers and a kitchen chair.

It’s a place that’s historically good for my soul. But also, one that brings me a wee bit closer to my own gaping, ravenous, gnawing, pitiful desire. The house and the art remind me of my own neglected paintbrushes, and my reluctance to risk bold colors on my throw pillows or walls. I feel the rising of a sad and sorry sort of jealousy.

The house is not the least bit pretentious, nor is my aunt, nor my two cousins, who I love madly. They are phenomenal women. And I mean, really phenomenal. The kind of people with astounding intelligence and kindness and humor and style, punctuated by seriously great accomplishment. And I mean, great. But what makes them the most fantastically remarkable is their sense of self. Each of them has such an unwobbling sense of who they are. I am kind of in awe, and a little bit pissy inside about it. I am happy for their success, and for their general sense of wellbeing, but inside, I’m a little pissy. And honestly it makes me nuts. It is not an attractive part of my personality – especially when these women I love madly are deeply grieving. And still, a small part of me stewed in a jaundiced knot all weekend long.

We went exploring in Great Barrington, and with a few dollars in my pocket I entered shop after shop and was floored by a crazy flood of desire. It hit me so acutely it actually left me breathless. The art! The lamps! The furniture! The aged cheese! I could barely breathe. There was a mid century modern yellow chair on Railroad Street that made me question every decision I ever made. Why wasn’t I a neurosurgeon again?

At the farmers market were two beautiful (interestingly beautiful) people, laughing together in their boots and paint-splattered jeans, putting gorgeous greens into worn canvas bags. Two artists, who shared a love of leeks. Why is everyone in love, and why don’t I buy leeks?

Even at the dump (yes, the dump), I felt somehow cheated. At the swap shop where you leave old fans and broken chairs, I spotted little glass dishes but a women before me picked them up and carried them off before I could say “bowl of cherries”.

I know it’s human to crave, compare and covet. And while this aspect of me is just a sliver and glint of my overall being – it’s existence deeply hurts me. I really am pretty happy with myself, so why does this hang on? What is it that it serves? How on earth can I get rid of it? For now I’m just paying attention to this yearning self – clearly, some part of me is still healing, still circling around wholeness, still stuck out there in the hinterlands without a coat. Or in a coat less attractive than yours.

Late Sunday afternoon, staring at the clouds and the sun and the apple trees and sky, my grasping eased a little. I started to let go of that jealous heart. As the day faded and the evening came, my Aunt and I stood under the stars together, and with a moon that belongs to all of us, I finally came home.

A Rock

My daughter called me her rock the other day, but really, I am only a rock because she is a river.

All those little eddies and undercurrents and flippity floppity fish tails. That churning water, the breathless rapids, the unexpected falling, the jolts, the rolling and clamor of pebble upon pebble, the constant swish and all the days we spent moving through and across and with the earth together. This is what has taught me strength; this is what has shaped me.

It is neither the rock nor the river that’s made me strong – but the relationship between the two.

The kind of strength a rock has is admirable, of course. It is immoveable and always and constant; changing only the way it looks; painted in old age by golden moss, or feathered briefly by a landed bird. And yes, it can be reshaped, but only after generations. It can be moved, but only by external force. What defines the fieldstone is that it remains. You can count on it. It lives always on one side of the fence or the other; it often is the fence, the wall, the thing we stand behind or hunker down with or have to climb over to get beyond. Standing in this particular field, staring at this particular rock, strength looks like something solid and steadfast – a state that is constant and true.

But I’m pretty sure whatever strength I have has come not from constancy, but by constant change. It’s not by overcoming and getting past the thing — but by living with the thing. It’s living with the thing that over time brings us somewhere new, and makes us stronger. I suspect that resilience is kinder to our souls than steadfastness, and closer to a living love. Because resilience is always relational — it adapts and takes in new information and keeps looking closely — and through that relationship, it becomes stronger. The rock just sits there waiting for something to happen. For you to return. It’s kind of a one-way street. Kind of a monologue, an island, an isolated hunk committed to only one thing – staying put.

Resilience breathes, and opens and receives. It takes in, it feels. It’s not a you-can-do-this resistance challenge that braces itself for the next onslaught with straightened shoulders and clenching fists. Nor does it hoist itself across great distances to come out ‘better’ on the other side. It’s a continual, ongoing, ever moving current of togetherness; of the thing in the world that bends us, and our own gradual understanding that we haven’t been broken at all.

That’s the beautiful thing about resilience –as we get better at it we are actually creating new pathways in our brains. We start to understand that what used to be doesn’t always have to be. This seems a more valuable framing than viewing strength as a hard-won truth – as a static, heroic, immoveable, if steadfast, state. Who the hell can maintain THAT high bar? The fact is we will be bent, by grief or loss or trauma — so low we almost break. But we’ll never know how much we can withstand until the wind brings us to our knees. And after many many storms, once we finally realize we’re still standing, a new way of being can now enter our consciousness.

It’s in relationship where we become strong, and where resilience grows. What strengthens us is our capacity to spring back from great disappointment or from crushing loss, so that someday we can flow around obstacles, or allow the obstacles to flow around us. I know that after many years, I’m a better mom than I was when I began. At one point I may have wanted my daughter to see me as a rock, but now she knows the truth of it – that I bend, but don’t break. And she is better for that knowledge.

So I may be your rock, Olivia, but together, we’ve become stronger than that. We’ve become resilient. We are river and rock and an unexpected free fall — and the glittering, deepening stillness of love.

Witness

In just a few days, I have fallen just one step behind you, just a heartbeat away from you, just a moment of silence removed. And in that space the cattail turned and the bud broke, and things that were born went unwitnessed.

While I wasn’t looking the smallest gap between us widened, and you’ve begun to feel impossible to reach. You’ve returned to place I could never be; too far away to hear you, you become a yearning, and sorrow, a hymn to the past – you live beyond all congregation, and belong to the lonely place where the grass is always greener, the bar is always higher, the way is unattainable, if true. While I wasn’t looking, somehow the distance between us grew as natural as the sky and the wingless bird — as the mountaintop and the moon.

I have missed you, and am reminded that the closer I am to you, the less you appear to be god. The closer I am to you, the more you become the ordinary miracle of magnolias and men – just a part of my morning walk to the pond, and the egret, and the owl, and the crinkles in the corners of my eyes. While I was away, I didn’t forget you were holy and here — I only forgot I was, too. I am grateful you waited, and grateful to be home.