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.

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.

Do you know that feeling, when your perspective alters quickly, unexpectedly, and you go from feeling pretty good about yourself and all gods creatures, to wondering why you are such a failure, and how come everything around you is in a constant state of mess? That pendulum swing that happens when things gets hard, or you make a mistake, or something completely out of your control happens to knock you off your center and you start to see the whole thing – the world, the dog, that bag of Goldfish crackers — yourself — in a darker, doomier way?

The perspective switch sounds extreme, but if I’m not careful that’s where my thoughts take me – I’ve always had a tendency toward all or nothing thinking. In the middle of a heavy duty blow of emotion, don’t ask me what I think of life, because I might just forget myself and tell you the whole thing is a load of crap and I’ve done nothing during my time on this planet to improve the situation. Fortunately, this long, black thread of Plath doesn’t unravel me completely anymore, but I still tug at the end of it fairly regularly.

And fortunately, I have a lighter, trusted center. I wish I had a more original word for it than “center” –but it’s the place I go as touch point — a sacred space within that helps me unwobble myself and find a bit of balance. And I’m so grateful I have that place; that sense of light within. It’s hard won, actually. It took me a lot of time to clear all the weeds and do a controlled burn and prune out the deadwood and look closely enough to see the little green bits growing in all the right spots – so I’m glad I’ve found this opening in the copse, this meadow in the forest, this clearing in the wild. This place I can return to after a long day in the bristle and brush, so to speak.

Because sometimes the brush beats you up, the thorns grab for blood, you are in the thicket of it, and can’t see your way out. How could there be such a quiet, strong and lovely space right here within me – and why does it disappear when I enter the world?

It doesn’t disappear, I know. I just need to keep a birdseye view. Of both and all, of each and everything, of this and that. Of me, in the clearing – and life in the thicket. Together I guess they make the whole of the world. I just have to remember to find my way home — to middle earth, to the gray area, to where the light of my center, meets the dark of the woods. The place where my center, and my edges, both find their way home.

Dear Earth,

Thanks so much for everything you do for me. Honestly, I couldn’t live without you. Everything I am I owe to you; all of my best stuff comes from the field and the pond and the sea – from the seasons changing and from the skies — from the sun you surround and the moon that makes you wild. I am frequently stunned by your acts of generosity, and humbled by the way you hold me up, yet still find time for the rest of the world.

It’s man that I’m struggling with a bit. Well, our limitations, I should say – in the face of all we are capable of. Like how we haven’t figured out how to make a comfortable bra. Or discovered some natural vitamin we can pop to ward off ticks and mosquitos. And mostly, I can’t understand why we can’t do more to help you out. I’m sorry for that. I really am. For all the times I’ve popped a k-cup or walked by an empty beer can without picking it up.

Anyway, a day in your honor seems ridiculous, of course – when we owe pretty much every day to you. But I just wanted to take a minute to say thank you for it all. There’s so much more of you I hope to get to know, and there’s so much more we can give to you. May it all work out between us – and until then, let’s both keep turning toward the light.

Pamela

I spent the week in the Berkshires, surrounded by orchards, and grieving daughters, and greening mountains. The days consisted of love and sorrow; of connection and laughter; of recognition of the fleeting nature of our time on this earth. The hours were full of quiet moments and church steeples; of coffee and Kleenex; of swarms of people doing great acts of kindness. I spent the week feeling the lift and swell of both the hills and the heart.
When I returned I had one day to finish my taxes, and a backlog of work, and stressed out clients, and phone messages and emails and bills. One would have thought I went to Narnia and back – the way the two worlds collided. Not even the wardrobe was the same.

Death and taxes, indeed.

There are times in life when the absurdity of it all just strikes you. We carve such tiny slices for meaning – trying to stuff it in the moments between TurboTax and texts – maybe with a quick meditation, or a walk on the beach. But the majority of our time is spent everywhere and anywhere – but nowhere near the quiet center of our own selves.

Sometimes we don’t even recognize “busy” as a problem, because in many years of practice and experience we’ve gotten as quick as the storm around us, and we’ve learned to spin at the same exact speed as the tornado carrying us; here we don’t feel busy is a problem at all, really. In fact, we feel as if we are moving with lightening efficiency across the surface of the day – we feel powerful as we lift off the ground and take all around us with us toward the fury of success. We feel like we are accomplishing a great deal, getting a lot done, being very productive. We feel we are doing life quite well.

But the thing is, winds change. And it all stops without warning, of course, and then we are screwed, as we, and all those we’ve picked up and carried along the way, and all the flotsam and debris, all falls to the ground in one shattering moment, and everything, including you, just lays there breathing heavily and wounded and exhausted beyond belief and wondering what happened. Where all the time went. Why we didn’t slow down and notice the world as we spun wildly and efficiently across it.

It’s not easy to be at the center of our days and stay centered on what matters, and I think it requires practice. Time within the silence, within the eye of the storm; time removed from life as we know it, to build the muscles of life as it was meant to be.

Death comes, and when it does, where will you be? And where will you be when you return again to the world? What will you carry with you, back through the threshold and home again? I hope it’s more than a W-2 and a bank account. I hope you remember the hills. And I hope you remember the heart.

Dear Stefan,

Everyday since Stephanie told me the news, I’ve driven to the sea, walked to the edge of the waves, and watched the horizon. I’m watching for how the colors shift suddenly, how white caps rise from nowhere, how diamonds dance. I’m watching, and thinking of you — and feeling the brace of it all; the brine, the beauty, the power, and how it shifts so abruptly with a single bank of clouds or a strong wind or a sudden spring rain.

Of course, it is an immense gift to be here, to be standing here, to have a whole world to wander wildly through. It is an immense privilege to have this body and breath, and it is astounding that we can forget, even for a moment, the miracle it is to inhabit this earth. It is astounding that we can forget to look at what is right in front of us – before the bank of clouds returns to dim the sky.

And it seems to me that you never forgot that – that you were always looking closely at what was right in front of you — the sea, the field, your children. It seems to me you stood at the shore of the world, and knew the miracle before you.

And as for me, I want to thank you for giving me something that is hard to come by, even in a lifetime of living.

I want to thank you for giving me the gift of belonging. Because In your eyes I felt as miraculous as any other part of the natural world – I felt I belonged as much as the sea and the field. As much as the cat curled in the sun, or the grasses in the garden.

I think you did that for nearly everyone you met. You made us all feel as if we really belonged. You looked into our eyes as you would the horizon – as if we were holy ground, just waiting to be noticed.

I will miss you. You have been there for us at the center of it all — in silence, in consideration, in quiet strength at every clamoring and every clang of the family bell. For me, you will always belong to the sea, and the field, and to your family who loved you beyond all words.

You will always belong to the world.

And as for the world, it belongs to those of us who show up to its shore with reverence and wholeheartedness – to those who remember the fleeting miracle of it all.

Owen, my youngest, turns 20 this weekend. He was born on the most perfect day in the history of Virginia days. The day spring got its name, the moment cherry blossoms blossomed, the morning all the world was waking to robins and redbuds and rhododendron. I woke at 3:00 am, and labored on the screen porch while the sun came up, surrounded by the softest, sweetest scents in the history of April. In the history of gardens. In the history of breaking dawns.

Until then, I never liked spring much. My dad died on the first day of spring, and that, too, was a perfect day. Wakened with the news in the early morning hours, the neighborhood felt inappropriately bouncy to me. Like the whole world was wearing brand new Keds while I was immobilized in a block of ice. Like everyone was falling in love in their little sleeveless tops and I was still wrapped in layers of wool.

The creation and the carve; after all this time, still I am full, still I am empty, still spring comes, and with it all the ways I’ve loved and lost. And time folds upon itself, and I see my Dad in Owen’s wry sense of humor. They never met but somehow here they are, both together, while the robin wakes the day.

Yesterday my uncle died. No, he wasn’t particularly old. Yes, it was sudden. Yes, my heart is breaking. And I’m thinking of the way grief comes, and scoops a hole where he used to be, and the way death sneaks up on us, every fucking time, and they way we are left wanting one more conversation. The way we are left wanting. The way we are left.

I am left without words, suddenly. I am left without him.

His daughters, his wife, his grandchildren – his friends – all of us are left, scooped out and hollow, while holes of various sizes take his place. The holes are what we are made of, now — what we have, what we are left with. This hollow place, the one we are left with, the one left for us. The one we are still gaping at. The one we reach across and find empty. The one we didn’t see coming.

The hole we kneel by, staggered.

The hole we are left with is ours alone, for each he shaped for us. And into the holes our tears will spill – and soon the holes are oceans, lakes, rivers, ponds and pools. Soon he is the brine of it all, soon he is the water that fills us, soon he is everywhere – when rain falls, when tides come in, when moon shines on seas. Soon he is one with us again, but deeper than my feet can walk merrily across.

Soon, he is with us again. But for now, I am left with the land scooped from my days.

I am left with his shape to fill.

I am left.