37days

Poets help us wish harder

Breathe-in experience,
Breathe-out poetry.
-Muriel Rukeyser

I fervently pledged as a teenager that I would always remember how I felt then, that when I became a parent, I would remember what life was like then, what mattered then, what I worried about and laughed at then,  and what I cried over then. I could not possibly ever forget. I would remember.

But I don’t remember. Not really.

I don’t. As much as I never thought I would lose it, I did. I lost that perspective of life in my teens, having convinced myself that the worries of those years are just trivial child’s play compared to the joys of mortgages, dysfunctional bosses, deciphering cell phone plans, and reducing my carbon footprint. But those worries are not more important, not more meaningful, not more real, not when you are fifteen.

My wish for you, Emma—and for every teenager—is safe passage. Let me carry what I can of your heavy load, and let me know when to let you carry those big boxes yourself. Perhaps in those moments I will simply run a slight distance ahead like a palace courtier just to sweep pebbles and stray tree branches out of your way, or to open a door for you while you struggle to balance the heavy load, something. Some small gesture, not too conspicuous. In rare moments, let’s both put down our heavy cargo and rest for awhile.

Poetry helps us wish harder.

The Writer

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

-Richard Wilbur

[thanks once more to Lee Hancock for sending this poem]

Heart unlovable people

Love means to love that which is unlovable, or it is no virtue at all. G.K. Chesterton

Ah, Valentine's Day.

In the midst of the hearts and doilies and hand-rolled truffles made from rare Bolivian cocoa nibs with hot hot Argentinian chili powder and Australian wood opal rings from the Spirit of the Earth in Santa Fe and trips to Paris for the weekend (yeah, right) and small plastic vases shaped suspiciously and beautifully like Ivory dish soap bottles colored by the hand of a four-year-old and chocolates in the shape of bagpipes shipped for exorbitant sums from Scotland because a certain teenager has a certain BOYFRIEND who plays the pipes--in the midst of all that heartfulness, let's remember to love unlovable people, too.

It's so easy to love the lovable ones. And so much harder to love the unlovable ones.

This month, the fabulous Skirt! magazine has published one of my earlier essays to remind us to do just that. Who are the unlovable people in your life? How would loving them change them? More importantly, how would it change you? Love on.

[wonderful replica of a human heart made from tiny little Valentine heart candies, from here]

What would love do?

Sometimes we get the message we need. Reading zena musings this morning, I found Carla's link to this: What would love do? It was written for me. And, perhaps, for you?

[perhaps a knitted heart is the perfect image for this message, considering the ways in which knitting can ravel, or not. Image from here]

Becoming Larger Than Our Skin Allows

And no, that title isn't a reference to overeating.

In the U.S., today is Thanksgiving Day (and my friend Karrie Manson's birthday, so a shout out to her for being so powerful that the nation stops when she ages). This year, I'm not spending Thanksgiving at a long table full of vegan alternatives to turkey, but hunched over a computer screen like a madwoman, panicked at my book deadline next week and snarking at my family when they breathe too loudly. What was I thinking?, I'll be thinking, in one of those beautiful infinite regresses of thinking, the fear that emerges from finality, essays congealed into book form.

Soon, I'm sure I'll give in to the overwhelming urge to eat cranberry sauce from a can, as detailed last year this time on 37days,and will pop the Tofurky into the oven. But not before being thankful, and deeply so, for all of you who come here and read my few words and email and comment and hold me up when I'm falling. My deepest thanks.

My glorious friend Sid Jordan sent a Thanksgiving message this morning that I'd like to share with you this fine day. Let us lift each other up.

Becoming Larger Than Our Skin Allows

We seek metaphors
To describe our friendships
But alas, even these fall short of our true emotions
So we joke, tell stories, and hold each other
Accepting the inner weaving of our connections
As part of the evolving tapestry of our lives

What is amazing to me
Is how little it takes to impact another human being
In profound and deep ways
Simply by being present
By witnessing each others stories
By honoring each others thoughts and feelings

It is physically possible to lift each other up
And hold each other under a starlit sky
Enough to feel the power of the universe enfold us
Wrapping us up with simultaneous feelings of love and immensity
Yes, we are only a speck in the whole of things
Yet, our love mingled with the love of others
Is more immense than we can ever intellectually know

Our ability to tap into the collective energy of the world
Allows us to transcend our language
Each of us becoming larger than our skin allows
Each of us finding power
From the source of our humility and awe
But mostly from each other
As our hands work to lift each other higher

-Doc Klein

Wear a candle on your head

“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.” -WH Auden, 1907

A few years ago one December, as I prepared to leave for a business trip, my husband John (aka Kurt Vonnegut’s Mr. Brilliant) went into the basement to install insulation beneath the kitchen floor in our 100-year-old chilly house.

Searching the dryer for my missing sock (always the missing sock, never the missing ascot, a phenomenon that for years I’ve blamed on plate tectonics, but I digress), I heard from downstairs an animal noise, a groan, a cry of sudden shock at the pain, of mortality and surprise, of anguish and hurt. I thought John had stapled his hand to the beam or was impaled on a rake or something bloody and bone-chilling and nauseating like that—good imaginations for regrettable gore run in my family; after a brief moment in which I took stock of my personal constitution and tolerance for blood and guts, I ran downstairs, afraid of what I would find.

Open your hand

“To receive everything, one must open one's hands and give.” –Taisen Deshimaru

“If my hands are fully occupied in holding on to something, I can neither give nor receive.”  -Dorothee Solle

One of the wisest people I know is a man named Eliav Zakay from Israel, CEO of a national youth leadership program there and formerly with the Israel Defense Force Leadership Development School.

Break stride

"We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are." -Anais Nin

Coming home from Chicago two weeks ago, I was struck irretrievably ill in the cab on the way to the airport, that kind of I’ve- eaten- an- alien- food- poisoning- I’m- unable- to- stop- shaking nauseous kind of ill, the sort where you focus all your attention on staying upright, in which not vomiting becomes the only measure of success you can muster. An immediate, swift, and unstoppable sick that--like a train in a tunnel--just keeps barreling toward the light of day.

Replace "they" with "we" with "I"

We all believe in equality, as long as it is equality with our superiors.

What is the tipping point?

I’ve long been fascinated by the fact that our Social Contract works—that people stop at four-way stop signs and allow the person to their right to move first, creating a sweet dance of understanding and civility. By the fact that social anarchy doesn’t occur more often at Labor Day Sales, by the fact that people generally queue in straight lines and take turns to buy their Big Macs, that we muster the wherewithal to tell people when they have spinach stuck between their teeth, and that we are a nation of givers and volunteers.

Burn those jeans

“A lot of disappointed people have been left standing on the street corner waiting for the bus marked Perfection.” - Donald Kennedy

Since leaving Freedom High School on Independence Boulevard with its (subtle) school colors of red, white, and blue and its aptly named football team (The Patriots, of course), I’ve carried a certain pair of pants around with me everywhere I’ve gone, like a pet Chihuahua in a diamond collar, a dangly gold charm, a passport, a ball and chain.

Hand one another along

 

“Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee, and do not try to make the universe a blind alley.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you read last week’s 37days, you’ll know that my older daughter is at summer camp for almost 6 weeks. And if last summer is any indication, I’ll bet you a year’s worth of Gerber daisies delivered in tall cylindrical vases on the first day of every month that I’ll receive 2 letters of approximately 12 words each from her while she’s there. Not that I’m counting, of course, because that would be to quantify that which is unquantifiable, make tangible the intangible, hold her hostage to word count as if syllables equaled love, blah, blah, blah. I’ll just pretend she’s an accomplished (though as of yet undiscovered) Haiku artist, packing a whole expansive universe of meaning and devotion and unlimited love into 17 significant syllables.