Reverence

Sometimes if I sit quietly enough, if my heart is peaceful, it feels as though I can hear the drumbeat of life thrumming above and below and just beyond the grasp of my fingertips. And if I look inward, my heart  beats in line with this greater thrumming. But the rhythm of my own heart is just one component, one tiny piece of this enormous, amorphous, and indescribable whole. This is a thing we have forgotten, isn't it? That, at the end of things, we all belong to one another. Sometimes it is difficult to remember that the concept of separateness is, perhaps, the greatest myth of all.

You are there reading this and perhaps you are very, very far from me. And yet, can you not imagine me, sitting beside you close enough that you feel my heat, that you sense the brush of my hand as it rests by my side? Can you remember the beautiful things we made, the laughter we shared or the way our stories bridged our humanity? And has this distance actually changed a thing? Are we not limitlessly connected, your energy and mine, speaking easily across the miles?

And if we did allow that we all matter much more to one another than our scientific, rational minds allow, what would that mean for us? What kind of love, patience, and beauty could we provide one another? What gains could we make if, instead of judgment, we stood in awe of one another's humanity?

The nice thing about reverence is that it does not have to be grandiose. Moments of reverence in my life have often been small actions that threaten to topple me over. And these tiny moments have such  monumental impact because they connect me directly with that drum beat of humanity, my connection to the natural world a thread that ties me to all the things that have lived before and all the things that have yet to come.

There was reverence closing my eyes under the grand piano as an almost-lover played Clair de Lune in a great music hall at the end of a very important season of my life.

I felt it deeply in the back of the car, holding his hand, bleary-eyed from being up all night and in awe of the courage he brought to his long-term battle with cancer.

I felt it lying in the darkness on a mattress with the two of you, "Blackbird" playing on repeat over and over and over.

I have felt it in the strain of my heavy legs, the dog running somewhere just past my gaze, with the first rays of the sun peeking over the horizon.

I have felt it in the hundreds of kisses provided by the childhood of my children, who still worship each molecule of breath I exhale.

I have felt it in the room with a patient when the darkness and the low hum of the machine allows intimacy, in the stories they have had the courage to share and the vulnerability they have expressed; the newly widowed, the parents mourning the premature passing of a child, the new and terrifying diagnoses, the lives well-lived and the innumerable adventures collected from hundreds and hundreds of patients over a decade.

I have felt it every time the five of us return to the same place, laughter about Christmas cookies and strong thumbs and the ridiculous tales of fiction in which we have all participated and laughed about over too much wine and stomach-curdling white russians.

I felt it, always, with Arvo; in the way that he intuitively understood my soul without a word ever passing over the entirety of our relationship.

There is, indeed, reverence and holiness everywhere if we find peace enough to listen to the thrum, thrum, thrum of our collective humanity. We live in a place and a time of infinite miracles. Of beauty and kindness and bounty and connection. And when it is quiet and I close my eyes and extinguish the loudness everywhere, it is not so hard to understand how humans achieved things like the moon landing or the eradication of smallpox or the creation of the 9th Symphony. 

But mostly, I can't help but consider the infinite grace of having lived and shared even a moment's time with you. Count my knowing you as one of the infinite miracles of this life. Because if you are out there and reading these words, then perhaps there is nothing to be afraid of and, more importantly, none of us should ever again feel the empty, desperation of loneliness again. You and me and the infinite ties that connect all of us are nothing short of miraculous.

(can you hear it? the reverberations under your feet, even now? the thrum, thrum, thrum? it's me! it's you! it's us!)

Cool Mom Tricks Like Frozen Waffles

It is weird to think, isn't it, that these little people will likely be here so much longer than we will? My oldest daughter is six and when I think of her, I think of my perception of my own mom at that age; she seemed so old. She seemed so certain of the world and herself. To think that in thirty three more years I will be where she is and my daughter will be where I am makes the rapidity of the passage of time so very glaring.

This week I rushed through too many things. I have made a very dear and new adult friend (a true treasure!) and I mean to stop and look at her and pause the other things on my plate and ask with a truly open mind how she was and what new things she could tell me.

I intended to ask my kids more direct questions about school and how they're feeling. But if you are not there, the time passes, and the day moves on around the well-intentioned asking.

And per usual, Tim and I have been ships in the night, mostly relaying essential information to the functional workings of a household with three young children. We always send these essential messages congenially and with kindness, but it is often like some sort of business relationship, "I can do school pick-up, but if you run to the grocery store, don't forget to pick up waffles." 

(Also: the waffles are so that I can sit with the kids on the couch on Saturday mornings while they make their own frozen toaster waffles and I don't have to move: cooooool MOM TRICK!)

I don't think I even went out of my way to pet the damn dog. Moments in which I noticed grace? Probably twice. Moments where I expressed true gratitude for the kindness of others or relationships which feed me? Probably zero. Moments where I felt overwhelmed and guilty and wished I could be three or four different selves to get all the things done? Nearly all of them.

There is next week. And perhaps I can be more intentional about being present. About noticing grace. Perhaps, even, about finding time for rest and recovery and relish in a true absence of obligation.

Virginity Is for Ninnies

It is so quiet on this page. And the world is so loud. But that fever pitch is not who I am and it is not who you are meant to be, either. Today was a very loud day without rest or quality time with my kids or exercise. I don't like these days. And when they are over it is nearly impossible for me to turn down the volume, to stop the buzz of productivity and be still.

I thought today about our bodies, how temporarily we have them, and how essential it is that we enjoy them. Sometimes, when nothing is hurting, I will sit in my body and think solely about the pleasure of existing here, in this physical form, fully at peace because I know that a pain-free existence is temporary. Old age and aching joints and things not working quite the way we are used to is an inevitability. And so I sit in this body and I relish the way it works and moves, the food it digests, its ability to carry me over miles and miles and--somehow--elicit joy in the pain of feats of endurance and physicality. It is a cliche, but this form is the greatest tool given us. 

I often think about machines and robots and the mechanical creations of mankind in comparison with our physical bodies. When a Honda goes twenty years with minimal maintenance associated and then finally goes caput, we remark at the remarkable engineering. And yet, we sit in these bodies with bloody ball-and-socket joints and brains that allow us to communicate with absurd complexity and we have skin THAT REJUVENATES nearly imperceptibly when injured. Our liver can heal itself through catastrophic amounts of damage and a female body can produce another human being without the mother even having to think through a single component of cellular meiosis. These bodies are raw wonder. This is the magic we sometimes forget to see, isn't it?

When I was younger, I was afraid of my body. Because I grew up in a Catholic home, attended Sunday school, and did not miss weekly mass for the first sixteen years of my life, sex was discussed in the fairly caged way of relatively conservative Catholicism; virginity was to be cherished and sex was largely for reproduction and acts like masturbation or sexual exploration, though not addressed directly, were shoved into a gray zone where it did not require much imagination to believe participating in these acts would be sinful. And it was these subtle and subdued messages that led me to feel very guilty and very fearful of my body and of the desires programmed into my very existence as a result of being a human being with a body on planet Earth.

What a pity for me and for generations of others who explored far too late (and puritanically) the multi-faceted physical ways our bodies offer pleasure; the way your skin sings when it is in full contact with another person's, the full-body warmth elicited from a kiss delayed too long, the pleasure of learning to play your own body as a master does his instrument. What a pity I spent any time at all feeling guilty or concerned that my deep connection with my body was an act against a God (who I now believe with certainty, if it is that there is a solitary deity, would also relish in the pleasure of seeing us utilize these amazing tools in every way they are capable). 

Make no mistake that we must use these vessels in every possible way while we have time; we must relish in the comfort of a body at rest, pain free, existing in a sublime state of peace. We must seek out the company of partners who help us discover the pleasure of this physical form, be it an extended hug on a day when the world is melting and we can barely hold it together or the touch of a lover whose every movement is dedicated to providing this body with deep and undeniable ecstasy.

Throw out the puritanical and the ways your body scares you and live fully in this machine you have been given. Live, live, live, live, live! Do it now. Do it tomorrow. Do it before it is too late. You (and your body!) are a miracle. Today is the last day this body will ever be as young as it is now. So go out, push the lengths of its endurance and test its ability to sew pleasure. You get, as far as I know, just this one opportunity to live fully and without guilt and with a conscious mind about the infinite ways this body is valhalla.

Your charge today: live deeply and fully in this vessel. Cherish it. Pleasure it. And, above all, marvel at the infinite ways it exists to serve you. We are, after all, the clearest evidence that magic is not some intangible to be found only in literature; the very breath you exhale in this moment, the oxidation of your tissues, and the harmony that exists in each atom in your body is the most authentic evidence humanity has that miracles are commonplace; you, my dearest, you are a precious and irreproducible work of art.

Pumpkin Beer

It is snowing again. The clouds passed over the flatirons rapidly and wrapped around the mountains before sitting atop the city. The wind picked up and the flakes started dumping all at once. It is my favorite kind of blizzard, the decisive kind which appears rapidly and decisively, no time to lose in putting the world on mute.

I played a game this evening, attempting to watch a solitary flake as it fell from the top of our tree and collected in a pile underneath. It moved so quickly that it was nearly impossible to track; on its own, it was imperceptible. And yet, the force of an entire storm has the capability of shutting down a city, of wreaking havoc on everyday life. One snowflake is novel but forgettable, a sea of them lends itself to blindness.

I thought of us today, in Kate's sister's apartment. I texted you to ask if that was the first time we got drunk, because some of the memories I thought would be impossible to forget are becoming hazy around the edges. And you, of course, remembered the six-pack of pumpkin beer. And then there was Kate rummaging through her sister's things because we needed more and the idea of using her sister's passport as a fake ID was not the kind of thing that would give her reason to pause. So she drove her sister's car--a stick shift she could operate only marginally--with us giggling alongside her to the liquor store and purchased us something ridiculous like wine coolers.

It's the kind of moment that I cannot fathom now, three children, a marriage, a career, and a mortgage later. But I think it is cruel to the people we were to look back and say those years were somehow less complex. I remember feeling things deeply, of looking at the world and puzzling at my place. I remember feeling as distinctly and viscerally lonely then as I do now. I think I have struggled at each stage, with different types of challenges, but I don't think I have ever felt things more or less intensely. It has all been raw and new and I have always been so very thirsty for just a crumb of understanding. But most of all, I have always walked with travelers as joyful and weary and anxious and drunk with pumpkin beer as I myself have been.

I know, with certainty, I will look back on this time of raising children and wish terribly for its return. But if you had asked me in those first middle-of-the-night-crying-filled months of Aria's life if I thought children were worth it, I likely would have wished to rewind. It seems the discomfort of a thing wears off and, through most experiences, we are more than capable of enduring, of adapting, of shedding an old skin and acquiring a new one that fits just a bit more appropriately. And more than simple endurance, we are capable of change and finding infinite reasons for gratitude and joy and connection. Each and every time I thought life was coming to an end, I was nearly always right. But the thing just beyond that ending was rich and beautiful and fruitful and catalyzed metamorphosis.

What I can remember about the pumpkin-beer night is the overly warm apartment and the novelty of being on our own in an adult's space. I remember thinking her sister was so old and yet as I consider it now, she had just graduated law school, so must herself only been a young person feigning adulthood. I remember the joy of learning who you and Kate were, of talking long into the evening, the freedom of occupying an actual real-person home and meandering through one another's hopes and dreams and past traumas as a means of digging tunnels closer and closer and closer to one another so that the distance of these physical bodies might become moot or--hopefully--wholly disappear. I remember the spark of potential for friendship and the infinite joy of recognizing and feeling recognized, of finding humans with whom I felt such a strong sense of belonging.

I think often what my life at school would have been like without both of you that first year. Of prank calls over land lines and condom balloons on door knobs. But mostly, I ruminate about what it would all be without you. And that is a dark space I dare not occupy for any period of time; because, if we are lucky, we make the acquaintance of a few humans who see so closely to the actual reality of our selves that the very prospect of life without them is a nightmare-scape, a place of inconceivable isolation (and, certainly, a distinct absence of pumpkin beer).

I watched the snow tonight fall in thick sheets from the sky, and was bowed over by the magnitude of a storm. And I looked at those flakes, falling by themselves, and I felt just a hint of loneliness because are we, as human beings, so different from those falling snowflakes? I am in this body and in this physical space and there is often so much distance, even between myself and the people I love most on the planet. But then I remember that none of us is actually enduring alone, are we? We are just one of a dizzying multitude; we bump and collide and fall, gracefully and randomly and magnificently as we descend toward the surface. 

There was a time when we fell together, so imperceptibly close that it was unclear if we were one or two or many. We were sent hurtling at magnificent speeds, carried by the wind toward new destinations and adventures and lives. For a time, we danced with intricate, graceful, and coordinated movement as we cascaded down, down, down. 

It struck me this evening that the beauty of the storm is never tied to the progression of any solitary snowflake, is it?  The beauty of a night like tonight is inextricably tied to the sum of the dizzying and intricate coordination of the entire mass as it descends gracefully and invariably toward the surface of the Earth, making contact, brushing, and spinning all together again and again and again over and over until it settles peacefully and irrevocably under the crooked branches of an old oak tree.

Kintsukuroi

The anxiety is new, since the beginning of the pandemic. But before the world shut down on March 13th, I had just recently put Arvo down, I was taking on additional hours at work to make ends meet (for our family and my husband's family), and I was juggling the responsibilities of motherhood with three young children. 

A month before we came to understand that the Covid-19 was here to stay and was dangerous, I took a new role which took me further away from direct patient care (my absolute favorite thing about my job) and moved me into a more isolated administrative role where a lot of my work can be done from a quiet office. My life felt chaotic and challenging prior to March and those feelings only spiraled when restaurants and gyms closed and spending time with my older parents began to feel dangerous. What was an initially brief dance with mental health issues became a more permanent main-stay in my life. I don't think my experience is in any way unique or novel, but my struggles have, somehow, surprised me (Aren't I stronger than this? Haven't I dealt with more difficult things in the past? Why can't I simply choose to feel better?).

For me, anxiety is a frenetic and manic state. My mind turns on and it sits on one puzzle (in the last year, it's mostly been my job and how I can do things better) and it doesn't stop. The thoughts churn and scenarios present themselves and it doesn't stop until I am absolutely an exhausted puddle of once-recognizable-human-matter. I almost always only fall back asleep when I am simply too exhausted to do anything else and it is, generally, only an hour or two before my alarm would go off, anyway. During the day, I stay busy enough that I can mostly ignore the spinning. It is at night, in the most lonely hours, that my mind prods me awake. Having slept off the worst of the exhaustion, it gets to work solving the issues I hadn't dealt with during the day and also makes up stories and scenarios and fears that would feel preposterous in the light of day. 

I have tried almost every solution imaginable. And the only thing that has worked, thus far, is returning to words. Returning to quiet time with a blank page and a blank check in terms of the things that I need to write. And trust me wholly when I say that I need this space. It is a place to calibrate. A place to release. It is quiet here and there is room to be so very imperfect and so vulnerable and so shattered.

This has been hard and I am tired. Are you? Are you sick of the locked doors of your favorite restaurants and businesses? Are you sick to death of watching those around you lose their livelihoods and others abruptly lose family members to this illness? Are you mourning the loss of someone, still processing their premature absence at your dinner table?

I am weary of the death and the fighting over masks and the actual insanity of not believing science. I am tired of behaving as though the five hundred thousand people who have died are statistically insignificant, as though their (preventable) deaths are a small thing. Death is never small. And absence is always irrevocably full.

I am tired of being afraid of killing those around me if I happen to be an asymptomatic carrier. I am sick of wondering, every time I come home from clinic, if this is the time I infect my loved ones and someone I care about is damaged, irreparably from infection. Or worse, if this is the day I infect someone I love and they don't recover. I cannot venture too far into this possibility without recoiling utterly and wholly into the anxious puddle I described above.

I remember early on there was a lot of texting with loved ones. There were a lot of check-ins, especially with my other mama friends. "Are you okay?" we'd ask. We would share tricks for keeping kids busy inside with the school year effectively canceled. We'd applaud one another over our ingenuity. And then a month, two months, more months passed and those threads simply stopped. Because you can only be brave for so long. Eventually, acceptance comes, but it is acceptance of a foreign and altered world, one in which we all became something just a little bit different than we were prior. More resilient (absolutely), occasionally sadder (certainly), awaking in the middle of the night with heightened anxiety and sleeplessness (raising my hand).

I have been so lonely through this and fear has cozied up close, whispering at first the worst case scenarios (a sneeze in the grocery store? drop the groceries and run!) and now, reminding me that the fundamental fabric of our society and who we think we are has been altered irrevocably. Our children will not be the same. We will not be the same. Many, many things we loved before this time will mutate into something else and others will cease to exist entirely.

And yet, another whisper joins the one that prods me awake in the night. It reminds me (it is so quiet, can you hear it?) that the world is infinitely beautiful and valuable and complex. It speaks of that sparkling snow and those waves headed toward the shore and the stars which still glimmer with alarming intensity overhead. It speaks of resilience and newfound kindness, of empathy and joy, of quiet days spent with family, of forced connection and a return to writing after years of silence.

The nights of anxiety have decreased and I no longer look backward at the past with the gaze of a caged animal. I will be okay. We will all be okay. Everything will be different, but different is not bad. Many things have broken, but broken is also not bad.

There is a Japanese art form named Kintsukuroi in which an artist repairs broken pottery with a mixture of powdered gold. The idea of the art is that a fracture is not something to hide. Instead, the repair highlights that broken things can be made more valuable, more beautiful, and more complex. In the last twelve months, we have all shattered. But we are, I think, in the process of finding each of our parts, of mending and cementing and healing the jagged edges. And for many of us, the version we become has limitless potential to transform us into something more beautiful, valuable and interesting. We have an opportunity to recreate ourselves as something more empathic, kind, and patient. To remember, perhaps, that even in trauma and anxiety and the depths of sorrow, we are something truly miraculous to behold.

None of This Is Bad

Today we spoke on the phone. And before I knew it, ninety minutes had passed. When it is you and I, it is always this way. My heart felt lighter and kinder and I felt braver afterward. You are and always will be one of the waves I have enjoyed most in this life.

I met up with a neighbor who is ta newer adult-friend (we've only known one another three years), but who feels like someone I have known decades. Her kids and our kids are similar enough that we are allowed some peace. And when it is she and I, I can be off-color and ugly and perfectly myself and it feels entirely normal to be precisely who I am.

I walked, of course, and the snow was still perfect and white and reflected the light of the sun. The storm had ceased, but the world was all sparkle. Days like today transport me, just a bit, somewhere entirely different. It is a reminder that the place we live is already overflowing with magic, despite the infinite ways we normalize wonder.

I spent the afternoon prepping vegetables and perfecting a sauce and making some kind of lasagna concoction that was delicious. My kids picked at it and were not brave enough to say they hated it. I ate it until my stomach hurt. It is a luxury to have time to linger over a dish and to experiment with ingredients and to create a meal because it is joyful and grounding and lovely to demonstrate one's love in this way.

And I lingered today on all of the people I have loved in my life and all the different kinds of love I've known. I have known the kind of closeness and kinship that comes from years and years of proximity, devotion, and loyalty. I've fallen out with childhood friends, only to establish a connection again in adulthood. I've known friends who were lovers who disappeared from my life entirely and others who went back to being friends again. And I have loved in an incapacitating way my brothers and my parents and my dearest aunts and uncles and cousins. I have, I think, even loved those who are no longer here despite never making their acquaintance. It is the drum beat of their lives that echoes, even now, in every step I take and choice I make.

I thought today about the way that love changes over decades and, particularly, when that love is tied to one person. We are so obsessed with love at its inception. The stage where lust is at its peak and what the viewers really want to see is some absurdly physical supernova joining of two more-than-average attractive people. There are not a great many love stories about the kind of love that lasts or what that requires of a person because, frankly, it is a drab and dull prospect to dissect. What I do know is that it requires devotion, dedication, and patience. And I also know it requires a recognition that love is not stagnant and that it comes with phases of perfection and peace and phases of deterioration and boredom and then a subsequent rebuilding.

And I know that the phases that allow it to last are not possible for everyone. Perhaps because the two people involved don't both want to change or, sometimes, because they happen to walk oppositional paths. Or, more painfully, because a betrayal has been too great and true healing and communion can never exist again. And, sometimes, I think things end because humans are endlessly complex and it is impossible to predict who or where or how any one person will be a day from today, let alone decades into the future.

It seems to me that a true love-match requires an enormous degree of resilience and commitment and two people who are exceptionally malleable and open to being molded by the inevitable erosion of time. Add to that equation an enormous amount of kindness, empathy, and compassion. But above all else, add a distasteful and shocking amount of luck to that equation.

I think we think of love as fixed, somehow. When in actuality, it would be good to think of it as an ever-changing amalgam of forces. And I think it is time we stop blaming ourselves and others when the fairy-tale story of the supernova of attractive-looking people isn't quite the narrative we end up with forever. People are endlessly complicated and complex and messy. And because love involves two such individuals encountering and battling their own set of challenges and difficulties, it is inevitable that reality would differ more than just a bit with the supernova hollywood has sold.

You are allowed to be messy. You are imperfect. I am, too. But I love you, anyway. All of you. And besides, this right here is just a different way for the water to be for a little while. And truly, none of this is bad (for reference, you really MUST watch the Chidi clip I keep directing everyone and their mother to watch; Chidi's Wave Returns to the Ocean).

Arvo

I put Arvo to sleep in December of 2019. I got him when I was twenty two and preparing to move to the Navajo reservation to teach in a remote location where teacher housing was actually built next to the school because it was so rural. My dearest friend, Meghan, was equally obsessed with dogs and went with me to the Dumb Friends League to look for pups to adopt. She chose an obese labrador the volunteers fondly named Oprah. My first and second and third choices were adopted before I knew what was happening and I was left with one last walk-through to see if any of the other dogs appealed to me.

I hadn't noticed Arvo at first because he wasn't jumping or barking or begging for attention like the other animals. He lay quietly on the floor, peering out with wise, brown eyes. He was too skinny. And he had the markings of a rottweiler, though he was too slender and his ears were too long and floppy to be related to the breed. We requested he be brought to a visitation room where he and I met. I pet him and sat with him on the floor and we peered at each other. Meeting Arvo, before he had decided to love you, was a little unimpressive. He was a big, big dog (weighing 75 pounds with long hound-dog legs and an amazingly athletic build), but he was very, very standoffish.

I left the room temporarily to meet another of the dogs who was a younger pup with a feisty personality who was ecstatic to be around a human. I was completely indecisive about which of the dogs was the right choice for me. But when I returned to the room where my mom waited with Arvo, she said he had cried as soon as I left the room. He had whimpered and whined and laid down again. And that was the beginning of one of the great love stories of my life.

The magnitude of grief I felt at his passing was something visceral and raw and ugly; it still washes over me in moments of deep despair and sadness and inexplicable bouts of crying. This is especially true when I am out in nature, walking, and I think about how much he would love to be out there with me. I always joked that I was not his master; he and I had come to an agreement that as long as I took him out into large swaths of land where he could smell and run and hunt as close to daily as possible, he would stick around and offer me company.

And he did stick around and he was, always, the best company.

I thought of him a few days ago when I went walking and it was -8 degrees. It was the sort of weather that brought every molecule of Arvo's body alive. His thick, rough coat finally felt useful in the weather and the smell of the rabbits and other prey his nose was so attuned to were easier to track in the fresh snow. Even as he aged, when we went out in cold weather, he was the most at ease and at peace.

Though I like the idea of living for a bit longer, I detest the idea of being here without him. He had ears that felt like silk and he always smelled of the Earth (even if he had just been given a bath). He had no interest in being anyone's pet, but he was fiercely loyal to the humans he ultimately called friend (which, by the end of his life, was almost everyone with a hand). He was next to me every minute he possibly could--even after it became evident how much his old joints ached and how difficult things like eating and drinking had become--until his very last breath.

As they injected the medicine that would make all of his aches and pains numb and go away, I reminded him of the bunnies he had chased on the reservation, of the eight-foot fences he had leaped over, and of the coyotes he had driven mad on some of our hikes. I apologized for the years he was neglected when we had young babies and I told him that I hoped he would wait for me in the great beyond.

If there is a place for me after this life, I like to imagine he will be waiting. Because it was always, always a rule that regardless of where life took me, he took care of me every bit as much as I took care of him. And if there is a place where he has gone, where his energy still exists, there's substantially less to mourn in leaving this world; wherever he and I went, as long as he was with me, I was completely and entirely home.

And because these thoughts wouldn't be complete without The Good Place (which, aptly, features my favorite song by Arvo Part whom Arvo was named after):

Chidi's Wave Returns to the Ocean

Endings

Life is so full of endings, isn't it? The endings in my life have nearly always felt catastrophic, have pulled me to my knees, awash with sorrow and despair, drowning in the feeling that a thing I cherished is gone. And this is especially true, I think, when a thing ends which we mistake as a fundamental piece of our identity.

When my first college relationship ended, I was annihilated. I spent an entire summer scheming how to win back the person and mourned, to some extent, for much of the following year. And yet, the end of that college relationship provided the opportunity to explore lots of other people and personalities; it opened me to knowing others in a more intimate and open way. After the end, I traveled the world and whispered into the ears of near-strangers my greatest hopes and dreams and desires and fears. I stayed up late in the night exploring my body and his body and our bodies together. I was open to adventure and to explore and to fall in lust and love and all of the feelings in between those two. And ultimately, when I did find a person with whom I wanted to spend a long, long time, I was better for having been broken. I was wiser and gentler and more confident. I knew my own body and the things it likes and doesn't and I knew the joy of exploring someone else's until the sun rises. And oh the people and the friends and the places I would have missed out on had that first love worked. It is a bit of judo, isn't it, that a thing that initially threatens to shatter us irreparably is actually a gift? It is a gift of opportunity, one that opens the entirety of the world to us if we are willing to embrace that possibility (and perhaps, I should clarify, when we are willing to embrace that opportunity because that broken period can last and last and last with no clear ends in sight).

And so it is such with every great ending of my life, that there has been deep, spine-shaking grief and mourning and devastation. There is always darkness and a sense that the way forward is no longer clear. To have one thing killed which means everything makes the entire world feel as though it will cease and turns things that used to elicit joy and fondness to things utterly devoid of meaning.

Yet, on the other side of that darkness is a life we never could dare have dreamed. After moves in geography, there are new relationships which change, challenge, and redefine you. At the end of identity-defining jobs, there will be new opportunities and pieces of yourself you've kept quiet for untold years that will begin to re-emerge and remind you of who you were before, the person who has existed (always) underneath. And in the wake of terrible, catastrophic personal loss, there is more love and opportunity and roads ahead than any of us dare dream.

It is a bit of judo, I think, that the things we find the most painful and dread in the small hours of the night are actually the same life-defining events which carve, define, and create us. It is the resilience and the grit required to find a new way, to extend beyond the borders of our own comfort, that we come to settle, yet again, in some new definition of normal.

And so, in the dead of the night, when my own life feels like it is teetering on the edge of collapse, I try (try, try, try) to remind myself that this is all normal. The dawn has always come and night only lasts so long.

The Snow

 

The snow finally started falling here after days of weathermen telling us to anticipate its arrival. Storms where the snow falls in blankets from the clouds still have the power to fill me with child-like glee and contentedness. There is something about sitting at the very base of the mountains and the accumulation of moisture which sits, seemingly forever, above the mountains before dumping sheets and sheets of puffy white flakes on the houses below. There is a calm and a peace and a reset to its arrival that I will always relish. I always wish, of course, that the storm will result in four feet of accumulation and will utterly shut life as we know it down because, up until the last year, those pauses from ordinary have always felt like an allowance for the entirety of our society to take a deep breath and reflect.

Almost a year ago the entirety of the world was forced to take a time out, but this one didn't end when the streets were plowed enough to allow for traffic. This one has yet to end. And I don't think the world that existed prior to March 13th is even a possibility anymore. I think we are about to encounter and create a new one, with different rules around infection and proximity and hygiene, but also around social justice and the obligations of a government to its people and, I hope, a new perspective on the value of life and human compassion. I fundamentally believe that the world we are about to create has limitless potential and that the hardest lessons of all our lives hold some of the most valuable lessons.

Resilience. Fear. Strength. Community. Family. Privilege. Hardship. Depression. Anxiety. Sleeplessness. Hope. Grace. Faith. Obligation. Grit. These are the words that have defined my last year. They are words that I've had to consider in a deeper way than ever before because of what the last eleven months asked of me and took from me and forced me to confront. And I hope, in a guttural way, that others have also been considering these words which have been seemingly omnipresent in daily life over the last year.

I am something of a naturalist in that I fundamentally believe if we pay attention there is much to be learned (but mostly to remember) about ourselves in the plants and animals and trees that surround us. I think one of the things about snow that I find so wonderful is the forced pause and then the fresh-start of it all. The world is unmarked and unmarred and it is so very, very quiet in the middle. Before you return to your normal activity, it's as if the entire world is taking a deep breath not of its own volition but because it simply must. 

We find ourselves one year into a deadly and life-altering pandemic in the middle of a protracted and traumatic great pause. We are living the middle of that enormous breath. We are here, now, and present in this opportunity to peer in the mirror and look at the face that gazes back. 

Have we given one another all the things owed? Have we cared for one another while meditating, constantly, on one another's humanity and inherent value and beauty? Have we treated loved ones with whom things have been troubled with care and compassion? Have we been gentle with ourselves and with nature and with those around us, even when the chasm of difference can feel unscalable?

And perhaps most importantly: have you been gentle with yourself? Have you dared peer into that living, beating, exalting heart of yours and asked yourself about the darkest hurts and gazed upon them with courage and determination to drag them into the light, no matter the pain or discomfort? Have you forgiven yourself your sins? Have you afforded yourself the infinite grace of being human and imperfect and ever-wanting? Have you stopped in the dark of the night and screamed at your spinning mind to cease and held yourself in an embrace of self-love that is your due as a breathing, fighting, human who has been battling their way to the surface for the last twelve months? 

We are living through the middle of a truly great pause and we each have a decision about what our lives and the life for those around us will look like afterward. Part of the joy of snow is the limitless potential of that afterward. Each flake is perfectly placed on enormous open sheets of undisturbed white. As far as the eye can see, everything appears to exist precisely as it should, with each flake landing precisely in a spot where it is both a part of the whole and is also everything on its own. 

And this is the truth that can be hard to embrace because life can be so very, very hard. You (yes, you, sitting exactly where you are) are a part of this infinite picture and in the middle of this great pause and you, along with the rest of us human beings, have some very large decisions to make about where we are headed and how we will think about important questions like how much we owe to one another and how much we want to care for one another and how much humanity we see in the other even when the other is something we have vilified for a long, long time.

We have questions to answer about how much grace we will offer ourselves and how many sins we are worthy of forgiving (it's a trick question because the answer is all of them). And we have work to do to help those around us as we all pick up the pieces after this great, long breath.

This great storm, this one that has brought us to our knees, offers us all the opportunity to be more kind, more loving, and more generous than we were before. It offers us a moment to recreate and redefine the lives we have made and the society we have constructed.

I still don't know, exactly, what I will look like after the last flake has fallen, but I sincerely hope it is a rendition of myself that is a little softer, a little kinder, and a little more forgiving. I hope that I carve time into my life for friends who have moved far away and family I have neglected for far too long. I hope that I care more deeply for those around me who are struggling and that I embrace community and aim to incorporate all of humanity into my concept of who is included in that tribe. I hope I confront the ugliest parts of myself head on and embrace grace for the moments where I fall short (infinitely short) of the mark. I hope I love more, more, more and exude that in every interaction and in every moment for the days I have remaining. And because I know that I will not, I hope that I never stop trying. I hope that I climb, ceaselessly and tirelessly up, up, up and run like hell from complacency and apathy.

I hope that I have loved you enough and that I will love you enough. I hope that you have known that love in every breath and heart beat and song in your body. And when this storm is over, truly over, I hope that you'll bundle up and join me as the last of that breath is exhaled and we can relish the storm's end and the beginning of something entirely new. An entirely new that you and me and you have the opportunity to imagine.

I Have Loved It All

Today, there were skaters on the pond. They had shoveled away the snow and left only the smooth, glistening surface of the ice. And my adult response was,"Holy shit, those idiots are going to fall in!" But as I walked around the pond and I watched, I felt a childish joy bubbling to the surface. They were laughing. And skating backwards. And twirling while holding hands. They had created such joy. Their laughter echoed as I walked and I couldn't help but love everything about them and that morning and their ridiculous ice skates and their dogs running around and barking at their heels.

I wondered at the last time I had done something solely for the purpose of eliciting joy. Something as simple as dusting off a pond and throwing on some skates and being extremely present.

In college I nailed a book I deplored to our living room wall out of spite, but also because it was a hilariously vindictive act of judgment on the author. We had people over for pretzels and jug-wine and terrible singing. We filled one friend's room full of balloons on her birthday and filled another's--on a consistent basis--with new-car-spray. 

I sat in an empty music building attempting to master a Chopin that was far too hard for me because nailing the difficult passages brought me such satisfaction, such pure joy. I chose to go to Kenya and to teach on the reservation and to go back to school to pursue a degree in science because the world felt like a place worth exploring, a place where mystery lurked behind every corner.

A dearest friend of mine recently sent me this poem: https://poets.org/poem/will-you

There are many things about this poem that I still mull over, but these lines, in particular, stuck with me:

...oh come on now, suck it up.

That’s what I said to my children.
Suck what up? my daughter asked,

and, because she is so young, I told her
I didn’t know and never mind, and she took

that for an answer. My children are so young
when I turn off the radio as the news turns

to counting the dead or naming the act,
they aren’t even suspicious. My children

are so young they cannot imagine a world
like the one they live in. Their God is still

a real God, a whole God, a God made wholly
of actions. And I think they think I work

for that God. And I know they will someday soon
see everything and they will know about

everything and they will no longer take
never mind for an answer. 

After watching the skaters this morning, I couldn't help but wonder if maybe the adults in the room have the entire thing backward. It strikes me as distinctly possible that the God of children is closer to any God invented by any of the broken adults who have the hubris to invent a doctrine for other men to follow. Part of what's discussed in the poem is the loss of innocence, but more than that, there's a sense that growing up leads to some kind of learning that alters everything, that more knowing means coming to understand the world is filled with chaos and bad things and the names of the dead and things we would rather not consider too deeply and heavy silences and insomnia and the slow death of infinite, small moments of beauty.

And while I think that is partially true, while I think she's not wrong, I couldn't help but wonder while watching two adult humans frolicking on a pond like children if it isn't the children who have more of it right and the adults who are just a tiny bit broken? 

I have forgotten so much. I have lost so much. I haven't laughed close to peeing-my-pants in close to a decade. I polite laugh far too often. I scroll through my phone while my children ask me questions because numb is easier than feeling. I haven't traveled to a country with such a foreign culture that I have felt internally uncomfortable with my concept of reality in longer than a decade. I have found far too much comfort and ease in routine and consistency and reliability and I have found--much to my own horror--an ease accepting my version of reality without question, without considering what privilege or experience or perspective brought me to that specific conclusion.

But maybe that's the thing our children haven't forgotten? They remember the spark of joy and the pleasure of deep, raw laughter. They haven't forgotten the joy of spreading one's limbs to create a snow angel or of drawing a valentine to give to the new kid in class who doesn't have friends yet. Our children still belong to one another; they haven't lived so long that they have forgotten that our true strength and identity and beauty lies in the fact that we are all, in every moment, simply a fragment of humanity that is better and stronger and more able when we find ourselves together. And more specifically, when we find ourselves caring for one another.

They remember the power of song and story and mystery. They remember the joy of a newly discovered friendship. They believe still in powers unseen and they feel, viscerally, the low drum beat of their humanity that connects them to every other living thing on the planet.

This morning, while I walked around that lake, I could remember, too. We are here to be joyful. We are here to love. You belong to me and I to you and that has always been the only truth. Everything else is noise and distraction and a dead end. I am so glad you are here with me. I love you.

The Hoarfrost

I wake up frequently these days. Usually between two and three in the morning. I lay there for hours and repeat over and over the things I need to do or, most hauntingly, the things I should have said but didn't or the kindnesses I overlooked or didn't respond to appropriately. I think about the people I miss and the moments which have fully passed and will never return. I think about my children and am haunted at the world they will inherit; I wonder if this childhood will be enough to equip them with the courage and the skills and the peace-of-mind required not simply to exist but to actually thrive. I hope, to my very marrow, that I am not breaking them. I wonder if all parents break their children a little bit, despite their best intentions. I do not want to break my children. And yet, at three am, I am powerless to do anything but mull over all the missed cuddles or to fixate on the moments I lost my temper or to think about the way working all these hours may be shaping them or their view of my own priorities.

And it is at three in the morning, so very far from sunset and so very long until sunrise that weird pieces of art stick in my mind and I mull them over and the meaning they have now in my life, at this later stage, when I am not young anymore but not fully middle-aged. 

Last night, I woke up thinking about Love Actually, which is not a movie that should wake you up in the middle of the night. There's a scene where Emma Thompson, in the full power of her actress earnestness turns to a husband she has recently discovered is cheating and asks, "Would you stay, knowing life would always be a little bit worse?" Her courage in that moment is startling. She should be hitting him and throwing things and burning the roof down. And yet, she doesn't. She simply wonders at the fact that what he has done will alter things permanently and it is the loss of the way things were which causes her to grieve. It is a mourning for a quality of life her husband's actions have wholly and utterly extinguished.

This scene sticks in my mind, because isn't it the way of things that we are all constantly asked to stay, knowing that some things will always be a little bit worse? I think my mom sensed a tide changing when my oldest brother went to college. She wept and wept and wept, not as though her oldest son was on his way to college, but as a mother grieving for the end of an entire chapter of life. And that really was the end of our five-person family unit. Nothing was ever the same after he had gone because there was always an empty seat at the table and things were always, just very marginally, a little bit worse. His absence was palpable, even in the most joyous moments.

One of the dearest and best friends of my life mourned similarly at the end of our college career. I was just raw excitement and eagerness for my next step; I was ready to leave campus and to enter the world of teaching and to move to a new state. I remember her sadness and not fully grasping it in that moment. But I understand now in a way that wounds me deeply. What she saw and knew and felt with a maturity I could only hope to have over a decade later is that geography and relationships and years would come between us and the moments of living a door away from one another were likely gone forever. She saw the changing tide and did her best to prepare and to cherish the fleeting moments which remained. I flew, glibly, without a thought for the way that the wind and the rain and the ice and snow chisel us slowly and gradually and indelibly.

I am able to contextualize this a bit now. These changes, these small things occur with the consistent flow of a river over thousands of years, except now I do not fly courageously and without a second thought into the future. Now, this many years into life, I can sense the changes and these are the things that knock on my door in the darkest night. My oldest child is often okay sitting many feet away from me and has utterly lost the instinct to reach out and touch my arm as we watch a movie. My son no longer crawls into my bed with an eagerness to fold into my body (the same body that only four years ago felt like his body) in the way he did when he was younger. My lingering, meandering, early days of motherhood are passing into ones where I can share art and movies and ideas and jokes but there is a certain intimacy left behind; there is a quiet to our lives we will never revisit or regain. The only way is forward and in that direction lies independence and separation and growth and challenge and, ultimately, just me, me, me, me, me without the little bodies to which I have grown so accustomed.

The weight of the passage of years feels so heavy in the depth of the night. The lovers I so fully left behind, whose lips I'll know only in memory and in fleeting fancy of bad jokes in hostels or the intimacy of overly-warmed dorm rooms. The friends who knew me the minute we shared the same space, who made foreign places feel immediately like home. My grandparents and my older relatives whose stories I am less and less likely to hear again and whose comfort I have come to rely on for stability as I navigate adulthood. The season of youth, where your skin and your body and your damn sleep work exactly as they should; I feel its creep slowly, slowly, slowly toward middle age and I mourn, prematurely, my physicality and a body which works precisely as it should and with a strength and resilience and flexibility upon which I have very much grown accustomed but know will not always be a guarantee.

Would you stay? Knowing that things will always be a little worse?

And yet, at this precipice of unknowing with enough loss behind me to understand the potential depth of the crevasse of grief, there is the knock, knock, knock of the things that lie ahead. Of the people and the animals and the world I have yet to know. Listen quietly now. Can you hear it? The leaves of spring vibrate silently beneath the soil and bits of my soul, immersed deeply in strangers I have yet to know, await our acquaintance. There will be moments of great joy. Moments of celebration. There are whispers of love, love, love which wait eagerly for the quiet, intimate moments between familiar lovers, for the wedding celebration of a friend maintained (improbably) over decades, and the slow healing of the soul after a year of despair and deep grief.

I woke up yesterday to a bitter cold. A hoarfrost descended overnight and turned the familiar world into  fairy tale. In the quiet hours of the morning, I took the dog for a run on a trail I have visited almost daily since we moved here. And yet, that world and that trail upon which I have nearly every rock memorized, was something new. The world I had previously memorized was new and imbued with potential, a reminder that growth and rebirth and reinvention are as intricately tied to the passage of time as loss and grief. There is still joy, the air hummed, and there are new projects to pursue. You are still here, it said, and there is much, much to be done.

I Am Often Broken

“Will they let you in for the delivery?” I ask. 

“Right now, they have a one person per delivery rule, so I should be allowed in. Because we’ve been in quarantine, though, we just don’t know what to do with Levi,” my brother responds. 

There is a pregnant pause. 

“I wish I could be there. I so desperately wanted to be there,” I say, daring go no further, feeling my courage and my silent fortitude crumble. Another silence. “I want more than anything to meet him.”

Another pause. A long silence filled with everything. Quick goodbyes and an unexpected fracturing. 

We say goodbye and I lean over on the hard stone of our kitchen counter and moan something guttural and instinctual and frightening, tears pouring from my eyes. My three children and husband are outside playing and I find myself alone and shattered and wholly surprised. I knew this was hard, but I did not know that I was broken. 

I did not know that missing my newest nephew’s birth would break me, that the idea of not playing with Levi as his parents went to the hospital or being unable to look into the new eyes of his brother held such a threat of drowning. It was a luxury, celebrating life and death. It was such a human thing, showing up. It was one of the infinite things we took for granted in our pre-Covid lives, that we could choose to be present. 

The world shut down and I complied. I stopped attending a community-based gym, I donned a mask like a religious relic, and I kept my children safely secluded in our home as much as possible. I stockpiled sources of protein in case the food supply shattered. I digested news, I listened to epidemiologists, I prepared, prepared, prepared, and did everything I could to control a world that was rotating off-axis. The world was melting, but I was in a frenzy of motion, raising a roof and walls against disaster, shielding myself and my family from all conceivable catastrophe. 

I wiped the tears from my eyes and noted inwardly that I was not okay. It was the first time in four months of quarantine that I acknowledged the pandemic was taking its toll. The only way through this year has been to place my eyes only marginally ahead, to focus on the present, to move forward, forward, forward without hesitation. Speaking with my brother was the first moment in months that I acknowledged the depth of my grief, that I paused to allow, for a moment, that this deep, deep sense of loss is something I will carry and process and work through for years to come. 

We have all lost so much and so many. So many lives cut short, so many stories untold. So many weddings have happened with three in a room and hundreds watching on laptops from living rooms around the world. Babies have born and pregnancies have been announced over Facetime. The birthday parties and graduations of children have been moved from public parks and backyards to socially-distanced, decorated car parades in which the most raucous exclamation available is a long honk of the horn and the blasting of loud music as one family-unit passes the home of the graduate, one-at-a-time with no potential spread or contact. Typical social gatherings have been moved to Zoom, a media that allows contact but feels hollow, a facsimile of the true delight in mutual human experience. 

Our opportunities for physical connection have disappeared. Meeting a new parent in a park, I say, “I’m Theresa,” and reach my hand out to shake before casually smiling like I’m going to tell a really phenomenal joke and saying, “Oh yeah, we can’t do that anymore, can we?” 

Moments in which hugs were the norm are now laced with the joy of greeting and the moment afterward, in which—in a pre-Covid world—an embrace would have followed. Casual encounters with a coffee barista or a stranger in the supermarket are laced with challenging new facial decryption; was the person angry with me or frightened of Covid when our carts nearly collided in an aisle? Were the creases around the eyes ire or a small, carefully hidden smile behind a mask? I stare into the eyes of others at the grocery store and I whisper fervent prayers that the most hollow-eyed and glossy amongst these strangers is okay. I have never before, while completing my shopping list, felt so compulsively inclined to ask strangers around me if they are okay, while conversely feeling so incapable of instigating the conversation. 

The elderly have been placed into hospice and visitors have been barred. The ill have been transferred to ICUs with their only human connection the eyes of a weary nurse offering empathy through a gown and face-shield. Families have said goodbyes over six inch screens and funerals have been live streamed or delayed until proper mourning is possible. We live on crumbs of human connection, on mere morsels of a sense that we belong to one another or that we belong at all. 

I broke a hundred times this year, mostly in ways wholly uninspiring. The look in the eyes of my senior mother when my two-year-old daughter didn’t know to call her Nana or when my six-year-old fell and she couldn’t offer a hug of solace. The emptiness in my father’s eyes when he realized, with overwhelming gravity, that the thing he looks forward to most, the thing he talks about year round would not come to fruition; my out-of-state brothers and their families would not return this year, the collective, crazy lot of our family would not reconvene for an indeterminate amount of time. Chatting on the phone with my aunt and, in a moment of clarity, announcing that I was so, so desperately and bone-achingly lonely. The realization that what I really, really want is someone else, just for a moment, to hold some of the weight of the world having altered dramatically overnight (but who do you lean on when the world is melting, transforming, and mutating before the eyes of the collective?). 

I mourned for the loss of a normal school experience for my children, for the absence of play dates and park visits and other parents to complain about the tediousness of these child-filled days. I mourned the impromptu connections made with people I would never meet again. The grace of touching another person’s hand, of offering a hug to a stranger I had not met before but with whom I found, inconceivably, an undeniable connection. I yearned desperately for the intimacy of hugging a patient scared about the potential of a bad diagnosis or the lonely new widower who found the dark, peaceful nature of the exam room a cathartic place to be open and honest and vulnerable in a way they previously had not. 

I have yearned with an improper hunger for the stories of those around me. To collect their world travels and their love stories and their worldview as a way to live a life greater than the one bequeathed me. I have missed nights with friends, staying up too late reminiscing about the people we thought we would become at twenty, staying up and consuming far too much liquor for a person newly-admitted into middle age. Knowing and sharing stories is such an indulgence, such an intimacy. It is another casualty of this new world we wake up in where the only story televised is the one playing on repeat behind our own eyelids, that of the dishes and vacuuming and the missed birthdays and the work that doesn’t feel important anymore and the hollowness of our own company 

I have missed the way humans ceaselessly fill me with surprise and delight. I have missed chance encounters at the cash register, small talk simply to remind myself or another that we are floating on this fast-flying rock together. I mourn the opportunity to lock eyes and smile with a new college student, provide some comfort to a human who is feeling lonely and afraid in the first days of their freshman semester and longing desperately to know that in a world of unfamiliar things, humanity itself is an object of familiarity. I have missed santa at the mall and neighborhood block parties and sitting in a dark theater, watching the plot of a movie and sinking wholly and deeply into someone else’s painted version of reality. It is an irony, really, that we have never needed the diversion of the great arts more than we do now and yet, they line up in a long line of all the things Covid has led dangerously close to extinction. 

The last ten months have shattered me, have fractured the pieces of self I once thought impregnable. I have found myself weak and lonely and desperately flawed. I have lost patience with the people I love the most and my temper with strangers in a way that fills me with deep regret, shame, and remorse. There have been hours in which I have found myself unfamiliar, in which I have wondered if I have ever known myself at all in thirty-five years. 

And yet, a small voice in my mind reminds me that in every collapse there is the opportunity to rebuild. And in that conversation in which I wished that someone, anyone, could simply take care of things for a while, my dearest Aunt who understands the world far more than I ever will, reminded me that there is also opportunity in darkness. There is resilience and adaptability and courage we otherwise do not call upon. There can be new fonts of gratitude and recognition of the numerous ways our lives are filled with good fortune (there is food on the table, we are healthy, and we do have a warm home in which to shelter this storm). There is reason for optimism in the generosity so many have shown and in the small, innumerable kindnesses and movement forward humans have exhibited since March 13th. There is, in each of us, the ability to sustain, grow, and adapt with an unpredictable world and to allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to ask for help, and to admit that this new world is scary and overwhelming and that we are not okay. 

I am not okay. I am often broken. How are you?