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Two years ago I was host to a cancerous tumor, which grew to the size of a grapefruit before I noticed it, and was quite a bit bigger by the time I was rolled into surgery and they cut it out, perfectly round, perfectly contained. I carry on my body the memory of this: a pink, nine-inch scar. The emotional memory, the waves on the water, carry themselves throughout intervening months and recreate themselves in each year’s language.
Last month, for example, the radiologist who did my yearly check-up ultrasound told me as he turned from the huge white computer that he saw a fair-sized cyst on my (only remaining) ovary, with “debris” in it. It could be anything, like a hemorrhagic cyst, normal, go away on its own, but since I had a history of malignant tumors, he was sure my doctor would want to follow up next month. You can probably imagine me saying thank you, walking back into the long hall, field of vision a diffuse blanket of vague perception. Sensing my way back to the car, back to the interstate, back to my house. But this is my life, now.
In the next week, telling Marshall and my mom, I realized that an awareness of illness, or infertility, or the mortality that all of these unavoidably imply, is a much more peaceful house guest than I had thought. Maybe I’m too young and too healthy to have a right to say that, but — maybe not. Because I lived January with prescience, weighing all possible ends, and still knew so much joy.
For example, Marshall and I are writing a check and signing papers this week to reserve Ijams Nature Center as a wedding site. For example, Marshall’s gentleness and unbending loyalty is teaching me things I never knew about love. For example, true vulnerability and trust are making us new people, and we’re already walking over black chasms on a rope bridge. No risk = no glory. We’re presupposing. Visions of Aslan and the letters of Rilke rise up in our dreams and we awaken to snow falling, in long straight crystals or great cattail-fluff flakes.
For example, Dr. MacDonald sat us down in the office yesterday, shook our hands, and said congratulations on some good news — the ultrasound images were clear of anything worrisome. So we took a cloud down to the first floor, a connecting cloud to the car, and a cloud to Carabba’s, where we had an extreme amount of incredible food at 4:00pm.
The question of identity is such a conundrum, to me, in the context of a marriage/intimate relationship. I spent 23 years building libraries and collections and small masterpieces, deciding what I loved and where I loved it most and how I could weave it all into my present living most richly. Before I met Marshall, I had shelves of poetry and fiction, wooden boxes filled with colored broken glass and British pounds, so many albums of requiems and aves and salve reginas. The mysterious blending of our lives over the past two years hasn’t seen the loss of any of these things, like it so easily could have if we had been reckless, but they have shifted and died down in some places in order to shoot up in others. His loves have charged into my heart and I make room. We meet each other’s loves and silently, almost without realizing it, are building a new identity from the two worlds. Who is that person that we are becoming?
I put on my John Rutter collection of sacred choral music this morning and found in it the stillness I’ve been wanting. The kind I used to find every morning before I came back to Knoxville and embarked on the rest of my life. This is as much a part of me as my bones, this need for and love of the still place of this music. And the surprise of this rediscovery isn’t frightening — I’m not afraid that I’m accidentally losing parts of myself as I grow deeper into this relationship — it seems only like another signpost on the road of any relationship. A warning that the road forks, ahead.
Every day I have an opportunity to become more fully myself, or not. Become distracted, stay distracted, live outside of my body. Always seeing, never understanding. Or not: put off anxiety and walk through the curtain. For me, this is dropping my cyclical rhythms of guilt and unassigned fear, opening my hands, and turning up my forearms, to God. It is breathtaking that I am set back more fully into the seat of myself, here. And I’ll add that when I’m talking about “myself,” here, and everywhere, I mean something much less like an ego and much more like an understanding of my purpose and position as a living person. Which, maybe that’s what an ego is. I should know what an ego is. Huh. Well.
At any rate, I find more and more that Rilke’s wisdom is truth. As is Fred Rogers’, but I don’t have any of his books (has he written books?). This is from Letter 7:
“But in this young people err so often and so grievously: that they (in whose nature it lies to have no patience) cast themselves upon each other, when love takes possession of them, scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their untidiness, disorder, confusion….And then what? What is life to do with this heap of half-battered existence which they call their common living and which they would gladly call their happiness, if it were possible, and their future? Thus each loses the other and many others, that were yet to come. And loses the expanses and the possibilities, exchanges the approach and flight of gentle, divining things for an unfruitful perplexity out of which nothing can come, nothing save a little disgust, disillusionment and poverty… but how should they, who have already flung themselves together and no longer mark off and distinguish themselves from each other, who therefore no longer possess individuality of their own, be able to find a way out of themselves, out of the depth of their already shattered solitude?”
As my and Marshall’s new life is coming up out of the earth or the water, I find as many warnings as I do beautiful things. It’s all barely comprehensible. Which is why I need wisdom, and to sit still in the room of my soul. The push and pull of growing into a new sort of being seems like a mechanism as automatic and unconscious as the simple growth of spring flowers … but no, it has to be tended. The wisdom of Rilke is really the wisdom of Jesus, telling a crowd about the man who built his house on a bed of stone.
by Alyssa
I haven’t done a ‘Bible study’ in ages, having developed a strong distaste for them somewhere in my past, but I signed on to a study of John that my mom was doing with two other girls because the title of the study was from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and there were quotes from Beuchner, Rilke, Eliot, Lewis, Augustine, Chesterton, L’Engle, and others whose writings I have loved and lived by inside it. It’s been a series of small revelations, just like a study of a gospel must be, and the question we are contemplating this week, “Woman, why are you weeping?” is ringing a nearby bell, so near.
In John, after the resurrection, Peter and “the other disciple” ran to the tomb to see if what Mary saw was right (door wide open, no body inside). After they saw what they came to see, they wandered back and left Mary there, “outside the tomb, weeping.” At some point Jesus is there, having walked around or having gone and come back in the guise of man or light or wind or whatnot else, and looks like the sort of person that lives in backgrounds (gardener). He asks, “Woman, why are you weeping?”
Up to this point, Jesus’ question felt shallow to me, almost like he walked up behind her and said, “Guess who!” A conversation-starter, meant to arouse her curiosity — self-concerned, self-revealing. As I’m reading through all the excerpts and answering all the irritating questions, though, this act & these words are turning from shadow into shades of light. It’s beginning to seem as weighty and selfless as any other word from the mouth of Christ, like the words of Aslan when he was still shrouded in darkness, walking beside an ignorant Shasta in A Horse and His Boy (Lewis): “Tell me your sorrows.”
That a hugely powerful being could concern itself with our language, our opening our mouths to say what’s so terribly the matter, is incredible. Jesus is tortured and killed by a frenzied mob, and comes to meet Mary to ask her to tell him her grief. As if that act were a catalyst for her healing, awakening, richer being. As if that were the point, the primary concern.
As a writer, I spend vast amounts of time considering my own griefs and trying to organize them into some kind of coherence, some kind of orderly expression, something that makes sense. Ever since I read Aslan’s question to Shasta, years ago, I’ve hesitantly come forward with my own sorrows, hoping it was ok, and have met with the kind of grace that I didn’t recognize in the small story of Risen Christ and Mary the prostitute … until now. I don’t know how this all can be true, but it may be. I’m entertaining (wildest) hopes.
I have been invited into a writing group with two very gifted poets at the small church I’ve been attending, and I am (again) changed. Perhaps more than anything else, I am a writer, and going to college and entering an academic and creative atmosphere like the one in and around Lipscomb’s English department was a powerful catalyst in my development as a thinker, poet, observer, essayist. Graduation sent me in a bee-line toward graduate school, cancer put me in a tail-spin and the year of recovery has seen me slowly entering a new season of life that includes love, a new understanding of commitment, and, more recently, a new creative community.
It’s grand. It’s a rush. It’s more exciting than I can say to come back into an awareness of the honor of poetry, and writing in general. I’ve always understood writing to be a high calling, but I left most of my friends who understand this in a profound, first-hand, experiential sense, behind in Nashville. Or in Colombia. Or in Mississippi. Meeting this morning for the second time with Mary and Austin (who, serendipitously, or providentially, was part of that Nashville creative community for a brief while!) is gathering up so many of those loose ends I left hanging.
1. Hummingbirds have discovered my hummingbird feeder, and also the red trumpet vine climbing up the pillar on my back porch. They hover and hum and buzz off like bullets.
2. Katie Gray is a my great good friend, and her visit reminded me. It’s hard to find a friend, but you keep hoping and looking because when it comes to you, it comes like the first days of spring, or the first days of fall. We’ve only been friends for a few years, but already we have grown beyond the women we were, and are now the women we are, together. I’m rich beyond words.
3. The garden is dying back, and I’ve killed Marshall’s rosemary, the one I was babysitting. Eff. But this means that the back yard is in transition, and it’s kind of exciting to think about what its life will be through the fall and winter … return of the fire-pit?
4. Jordan said we couldn’t talk about a wedding until we were engaged, but I don’t know! I want to talk about things like, where it would be, if it were to happen! And who exactly would be involved! And what kind of wine exactly we should get!
5. The little white bird chimes that Katie J. brought me from Colombia are so lovely in the breeze. Chinkling and tinging and falling in so perfectly with all the other small & thrilled sounds that are settling on the day.
6. I’m playing tennis, now, and riding bikes, and making a quilt. And fighting powerful urges to tell everyone about how awesome I am at these things. (Succumbed!)
7. Seven is the mystical number. I’m meeting the changes of the season with a lot of excitement, and a little anxiety. My older sister is getting married, a younger sister is starting college, and another younger sister is considering moving to California for a while. In an effort to get reins on the changes, I’ve written lists, hoping each bulleted entry will tie it to a more solid ground. I make goals, I check off goals, I journal and write poems and run through the days with each unremembered and unrecorded possibility flowing behind me like smoke. After a long spring and summer of false starts and aborted attempts, it feels like a bridge is unrolling before me.
8. And eight is divisible by four, which is the number of days Marshall and I will be camping out in Winfield, listening to bluegrass and Irish folk and flatpicker-virtuosos, in a few days. We got a blow-up sleeping pad for me yesterday, and with that dazzlingly luxuriant possession we are launching ourselves into the heart of camping weather, into the Smokies and the Blue Ridge Mountains and a cramped campsite in the center of the Walnut Valley Festival land-rush.
The entire world is so full of beautiful things. Today I renewed my car tags and wrote a check because there wasn’t enough to cover it in my checking account, and when I got into my car to drive home, it wouldn’t start. It means something that I called my dad and he came out immediately, roll started it and took it back home with him to look at, even though he already had stuff to do today.
Yesterday on my way home I had one of those “I’m alive!” moments and went to the Disc Exchange just to see if they had any Innocence Mission on vinyl (the only thing I have to play music on in my room is a laptop with lousy speakers and a record player), and came out with Iron & Wine’s Our Endless Numbered Days and the Fleet Foxes album with the Bruegel painting on the cover. $30. It was insane, and I knew it, but I did it anyway. And now I’m listening to the vast and stony and warm layers of all of these Fleet Foxes songs, all of them, and trying to hold ideas of money and enoughness and notenoughness in one hand, and the strange beauty of the world in the other.
Sometimes even the songs that sound like canyons and huge underground lakes make a room around you, a small room. This is how these songs are, to me. The window is open just enough to let in the smell of earth, some long needles of sunlight, and the sonic disturbances of life. You get the feeling that these are all you need, all you need for the rest of your life is this album and this chair, and for that door to be closed.
Balance, the search for. Which encyclopedia? Because I needed so much to go camping this weekend, and now I don’t have money for gas, or a car. The list of things to take with me lies long in the pages of my journal, so happy and bulleted and dreamed-over (this is what I do at work). It’s gonna break my heart to tell it that I’m not going.
…having cave days again. includes being sick, reading a lot (a lot), listening to music, putting things in order. I wonder if making friends will ever be easy for me.
now, I’m housesitting, and the kitten is climbing the back of my rungback chair, then climbing my knee. you know, with claws! and I watched the day go by, processions of grim clouds and then sky, clouds, sky, rain, all the while remembering my love for the song, “Oh Do Not Fly Away,” Innocence Mission.
oh I love these still, open places. a gang of swallows prowls the backyard, nesting, swooping, nesting, swooping.
There’s not a much better morning than the one you live at the end of February, when you fill your French press with boiling water, bring it into your small blue room, see the last efforts of a waning winter in feathery snow, coming down. Having just taken a shower, and put your hands in the pockets of your robe. This is the snowiest winter in my recent memory, and the longest, and knowing it is almost spring gives this morning’s snowfall the room to be still so welcome. And it comes down like the snow in anyone’s mother’s snowglobe, slow, as if it were falling through water.
Yesterday Katie Gray sent me the nicest box of cast-off clothes yet. I can hardly believe this is stuff she just “cleaned out of her closet” — I guess this is what happens to your closet when you live in NYC — but I am now the rather overawed owner of clothes that are almost too cool for me: a red Jordache raincoat (remember Jordache?) with horse heads on the lining, red hoodies, and a flouncy pink dress that either belongs in the “Intimates” section of a department store or on the cover of Anthropologie. There are gloves, leggings, tights, and a bikini that is exactly the kind of bikini I would wear if I were to wear one. And — this is a big deal — I may stop being awkward about my scar this summer and just wear a bikini.
Yesterday was the first time in a month that I’ve not had to work all day Wednesday for JP, and I celebrated the time off by not doing any work. I needed it. I’m saving again for the first time in fourteen months, but am letting myself get exhausted (evidenced in part by no blogs), and I know better than that. I’m fucking old enough. I know better. I really consider rest … a good work. Even though I have to remind myelf that all the time. And yesterday, even without KG’s box, was incredibly restful. I read, too, joy of joys. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has me completely engrossed — somehow I’m always thinking about The Ministry and the Unspeakables and Occlumency and Snape’s childhood et cetera when I’m not reading about them. This million-page book could be another thousand pages and I wouldn’t complain.
The seeds are germinating, more seeds are coming in the mail, the amaryllis is dying of some strange red rot, and the orchids are wintering away.
