I love the pause between day and night, the blush of color up the sky, lights coming on in houses, the hush as the curtain falls on our daily drama. Coming home tonight with groceries after a yoga class, I felt all my blessings pour over me at once. Food in the house, a hot shower, magazines in the mailbox, messages on the phone from friends, a glass of prosecco, clean sheets and soft pajamas. I’ve done nothing to deserve it, and in these parlous times, I know life can change on a dime. I produce a magazine that’s not a necessity (although I think it makes life sweeter), and I could have to take a pay cut. I could lose my job and not find another. I could lose my house and have to move in with one of my daughters (poor girls!). A meteor could fall on my neighborhood, aliens could abduct me and make me do laundry on another planet, and the economy could stay stuck on “It Sucks” indefinitely. But this Now is all we’re guaranteed, and tonight my mantra is Now.
Archive for ‘Nowness’
Beautiful World
February 18th, 2009Then and Now
January 25th, 2009
My little girl is all grown up now, a Fulbright Scholar finishing her Ph.D., going on job interviews. Her older sister managed to get a degree in psychology while raising three children. Their brother struggles to make a living and be a good dad. I worry and wonder what will happen to them in this crazy, new Mad Max economic world we have crashed landed on. With Obama’s election, I think America is growing up at last–just like my little ones. But adulthood, for countries and children, is not without growing pains. For so many decades, we believed that all we had to do was work hard and dream big and we would be rewarded. We would pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. We would find work that fulfilled us emotionally as well as financially. We would qualify for mortgages and get raises. We would have flat screen tvs and happy endings. But it’s not that simple now, for Obama or our kids or us. Still, daily life goes on, and we wake up and try to keep our balance as the ground shifts so violently beneath us. I look at photos of my grandparents and remind myself that these dirt-poor farmers, small town merchants and isolated share croppers were simply working to survive, to get a bit ahead, to put food on the table and keep their families intact. No health insurance then or pension plans. For my mother, growing up poor during the Depression meant a lifelong memory of endless meals of dried beans and potatoes. I want to be as strong as my ancestors in adversity, and I don’t want to sit and pine for better times, for the stock market to rebound, for all my easy comforts and little luxuries to return. Like everyone else, I worry about losing my job, losing my health insurance, taking a paycut, cutting back. But I hope I will be mindful that every minute is precious even when it’s edgy and sharp with less security, more fear, attacks of panic–in fact, maybe precisely because of that.
The View I’m Craving
December 3rd, 2008
Lately I find myself thinking a lot about living in the country. I fantasize about a cabin in the mountains, a farm at the end of a gravel road, a cottage on a lake. To throw open a window and look out on moonlight and mist, to be able to hear silence instead of sirens and static. It’s fairly preposterous, because dark nights alone in the mountains would probably make me obsess about serial murderers, and I can’t make anything grow, so I would starve to death on a farm. But I think it’s important to pay attention to odd, extravagant cravings of the soul because it may mean you’re pregnant with a desire that needs to be born. In my case, I suspect I need to make more time to be alone without distractions, and I’m so undisciplined that the only way I can force myself to do that is to remove myself physically, to enter a convent of the mind. In the course of daily life and work, it’s so much easier to fritter away my time than it is to focus my mind. There are ideas for projects that I toy with but never follow through on, creative itches that I scratch by watching television or snacking or talking on the phone instead of sitting at the computer or opening a sketchbook or signing up for a class. My daughter thinks it’s a case of attention-deficit — I’m so impatient and incapable of being in the present moment that I unbuckle my seat belt half a block from home just to be ready to get out of the car– but I suspect it’s more like having a slothful spirit. Could I be rehabilitated by putting myself in solitary confinement?
Missing the Music
November 22nd, 2008
It was so cold in the old city of Prague on the Sunday afternoon I took this photo that it makes me shiver to remember it, but walking through the narrow, winding streets, turning a corner and coming upon someone playing a violin was like being in a fairytale. And every day, I went out into winter with the friend I was visiting — bundled, layered, walking and taking the tram, watching my breath make clouds in the air, stopping for wine or coffee, unlayering, bundling back up, taking photos of snow falling. I leaned into the cold, accepted it, lived it. Today at home in Charleston, it’s 48 degrees, nothing approaching that week in Prague, but I am flinching from the cold, recoiling, running home to escape it. Instead of walking through my neighborhood or in the downtown city streets, I layer on pajamas, fuzzy socks, a long-sleeved tshirt under an old cashmere sweater. If I were in a fairytale, it would be about a woman who turns into a bear at the first frost. When Persephone goes underground and everything on earth is waiting and storing energy for the spring, why can’t I embrace all the lovely bare, spare planes of her winter face? Why don’t I expect a violinist around every corner in my own hometown?
“Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?”
October 19th, 2008
That’s the title of the poem I read today by Mary Oliver. It’s about not living life at a safe distance, about being present right now, here, this instant to this world, this neigborhood, this street, this leaf in front of your face. I took this photo (oops, a kind of distancing in itself) on my walk today down to an old burned-out bridge that has been turned into a kind of park/promenade that stops halfway across the water. The sun was out but the breeze had a cool serrated edge, warning that winter is coming winter is coming. I passed people walking dogs and fishing, sails bellied out like laundry, marsh opening into a view of the Intracoastal Waterway and the harbor, a few white clouds on a clean blue sky. All of us in a little snowglobe without snow, a Sunday afternoon bubble of timelessness.
Ground Level
October 8th, 2008
For a clumsy non-athlete, I’ve spent a lot of time lately dreaming about kayaking. I love the way it puts me on eye-level with the earth–it’s like coming home. Instead of walking around all day in a two-legged hurry to get from the car to the coffee shop or the grocery to the car, toting bags or clicking my keys to open the door from yards away, I’m swaddled in a womb-like craft, drifting along among ducks, egrets and fish, listening to the pop and suck of water in the mud instead of an iPod strapped to my arm. For a couple of hours, my ego gets
Botoxed by beauty and the sheer absurdity of trying to work my little will on the world. Maybe if you’re a competitive kayaker, all of the above is null and void, but I go onto the water to get rid of my self, to be blessed by the sky, the marsh hens, the drone of a plane overhead that mirrors the buzz of insects in the marsh, by the rhythm of the creek that irons out all the creased and wrinkled places created by living in an upright world. I only wish I could learn how to carry that peace with me when the boats have been put away, but I forget so easily and before I know it, I’m going crazy over all the things that two-leggeds think are life-and-death important: the extra 10 pounds I can’t lose, the billing problems at work, the font that is all WRONG, Sarah Palin, a deadline I might miss, the boots I can’t afford, the book I never wrote. Today in yoga, the teacher “wrenched” my stiff frozen shoulders into a semblance of alignment, and I realized that I need someone or something to do that to my soul on a regular basis because I can’t spend my life in a kayak!
Bridge to Monday
October 5th, 2008
After a peaceful Sunday–walking on the beach with a friend, hanging artwork, drinking prosecco at lunchtime, deadheading the roses, giving the porch Buddha a bath, dinner with another friend–I have to turn my psyche toward Monday and head over this bridge to work. In my yard, there’s a flock of African sunflowers playing host to passing butterflies and just being there for the time allotted to their blooming. I’m going to try to go to work tomorrow in a sunflower state of mind. I’m going to try not to dwell on bailouts, leaky 401ks, vanishing retirement funds, an economy that’s going down the drain and might take my job with it. I’m going to try and remember that when I had no money I was the most creative. That when my office was furnished with a crooked press-board desk and no fancy journals, I wrote like a woman on fire. That when I was poor, I never lost hope or stopped having fun. One life. Live it like a sunflower. Wait for butterflies. Cross the Bridge to Somewhere.
Little Heavens
September 24th, 2008
One of my favorite books is Wind in the Willows, and even though I’m a nonswimmer who fears water, like Rat and Mole, I love messing about in a little boat. Yesterday after work, a friend and I launched kayaks into a tidal creek that runs behind her house and paddled out to the Intracoastal Waterway as the sun was going down. Being at eye level with the marsh grass, gliding across the silky surface, was meditation on the move. Coming back in against a strong muscular tide with the sunset leaving a neon red trail on the water behind us engaged every part of my body and mind. Almost home, I rested my paddle and rocked gently on the wavelets like a baby Moses adrift among the reeds. For a whole hour, I’d settled into my place in the physical world, surrendered to it, been cradled by it. For a whole hour, I wasn’t just a big giant head thinking my way through the day. When we pulled the kayaks up on the bank, my friend pointed out a small brass plaque fixed to a nearby rock. It was in honor of a longtime resident of the island, placed there by his family after his death. It was engraved with his name and the line, “Because he loved this creek.” I thought how blessed it would be to have your ashes scattered near your home, near all you cherished about being alive, leaving behind a simple, almost secret, love letter to the world.
Sweet
August 29th, 2008
This is what a 3-day weekend looks like. I want to fall into it and roll around like a drunken bumblebee. But when I’m faced with the reality of three whole days away from work, I get confused and overwhelmed. What should I do first? Make a list of course: Get a massage; stock up on mysteries at Barnes and Noble for the weekend; make a collage; start a novel; clean the refrigerator (what the hell is that smell?); balance the checkbook; lose weight; make marinara sauce from scratch…and so on. So far I’ve stared out the window at the dead basil plant and recycling bins full of #1 plastic take out cartons and empty wine bottles (are the neighbors counting?). I will get to all that stuff on my list soon, I swear, but first I have to read the new People magazine and overeat. Tomorrow–brave new weekend. I will get up, exercise and make pasta from scratch–or buy it at the Farmer’s Market. If I can get out of my pajamas.
Tuning In
July 12th, 2008
I’ve been thinking lately about those thin places in life where what-was and what-is mingle and commune. Sometimes when I’m airborne, I feel transparent or porous, as if the ghosts of people in my life who have died or disappeared or faded through distance fly right through me and are very very present. Maybe the sense of my own mortality is more heightened when I’m in a plane or maybe the protective coating of daily-ness falls away when I’m neither here nor there, and I’m more open to the ethereal, to the unseen, to what has been knocking at my consciousness but couldn’t be heard through the static on Radio Me.
