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This weekend Marshall and I drove to Murfreesboro so I could workshop an essay with Katie Gray. And have fun at Busby Hollow. When we walked into the house it was deserted, but music was solemnly wandering through the kitchen, and a trail of flowers across the floor was leading into the living room. It was lit up like a prism with candles and flowers, and in the middle of the room was a table loaded with wine and cheese and fruit. I try to avoid surprises, in my life, but Marshall knows this. And doesn’t allow. Instead, he gives me a letter he wrote to me last year and never sent, he follows his brother’s advice and gets on one knee, he asks me for the last time. I am growing up, for sure.
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.
You walk in and out of storms, that’s all. There doesn’t seem to be a language for the present time, for today or for yesterday, or tomorrow.
I’m learning to talk about my college years, three or five years ago, and that rests on me like a weight, comforting, like the wrist tied to the end of a balloon. Of course, my mood swings, or these microbursts I keep entering and exiting, are about my frustration with not knowing how to understand the current time. The revelation is that today is unknowable because it’s not yet formed; it’s still forming. I listen to The Innocence Mission’s “I Haven’t Seen This Day Before” six hundred times in a row and cry my eyes out because it’s true, I don’t know what’s happening, because it’s not done happening. I’m so stormily at peace with this, so peacefully at storm.
My birthday enters the past, I leave it and enter the future. I’ve lived, as far as I know, 25 years.
My little sister opens her heart to me like a flower and I am struck inwardly, all my nerves and synapses vibrating with the blow, this surprise of joy. Haven’t I been living like the world didn’t hold surprises of joy anymore? My little brother is becoming a man and I am struck inwardly. For my birthday, Marshall’s mother gave me her first sewing machine, the one she sewed her wedding dress on, and I’m struck like a key, like a bell.
I discover that my smallest gestures and words, even the places I walk and my movements in secret are held in the mind of God. I discover that my solitary walks in childhood were watched, that my expressions are noticed even now, every word I write is read by God, every ache or shudder is seen, and read, by the watchful eye of God, and kept in the secret place, to be understood in a later time. I feel the truth of this.
The day after my birthday, I went to Cherokee Park and watched the sun move toward the horizon. The grass spread green and viral to the river, glistening like a beach in the Emerald City. I couldn’t believe that I was allowed to live, for how little I had to show for my 25 years. Scars. Fear. Some organized rows of books, some organized beds of flowers, some essays on gender theory and neo-formalism. Some poems, some gestures of kindness, some irreparable harm. I drove away in a daze, the benediction of the beauty of the world having such power to awaken hope. The beauty of the world corresponding directly to the beauty of God.
“If I could I would break into flower, if I could I would no longer be barren. [...] Oh mourning dove, we’ll go up to my roof. Oh mourning dove, we’ll go into the sky. This day is filling up my room, is coming through my door. Oh, I have not seen this day before.” from Birds of My Neighborhood
I knew on the drive home from work that I needed to go to the mountains. So, I came. Not far from the Elijah Loop trail off the Cades Cove loop, I took my books and Josh’s camp chair and walked down from the road and off to the right, skirting a wooded rise through grass up to my shoulders.
I found a big barn with a tin roof, no walls, and a wind blowing through. Wasps and swallows were nesting in the wooden rafters, and all the space between the four rows of crooked wooden poles was full of solitude and the busy hum of wild places. I wandered around for a while and then sat down just outside the barn to write … I must have been completely absorbed by swatting at the gnats hovering around my face, because (after being aware almost to paranoia of any wildlife) I heard a rustling, and thirty yards behind me was a black bear the size of an upright piano and three cubs scampering up trees beside her.
Now, being a native East Tennessean, and having visited the Smoky Mountains at least twice a year since my birth, and having developed a great love for this park in spite of tourism and bear attacks — I mean my mom’s family has only recently moved away from the foothills of the Smokies for heaven’s sake — in spite of all this, the file in my cerebral library entitled “What to do when a mama bear is in your face” is disturbingly empty. This bear was obviously interested in me, sniffing the air and even rearing up to get a better look at me in my chair, but I was too far away to just throw myself on the ground and play dead, right? Surely this was only the modus operandi for angry or actually approaching bears.
So, since the cubs were scared enough to climb trees, and she was calm enough to be waiting for me to do something, I figured it was time to go. I also figured that folding up the chair and taking it back with me could be rather fatally punctilious. Articles reading “Woman was seen running with a large bag and folding camp chair when the bear caught up to her” kept popping in my mind like bubbles, and who wants their brutal mauling to be even slightly humorous, so I picked up my bag and without making eye contact walked not-too-fast out toward the clearing and up around the rise toward the parking lot. Sans chair. I feel, under the circumstances, Josh will forgive me. It took the rest of the loop to wash out that adrenaline, but the inner jerk and flash of wonder has stayed with me.
On my way back I stopped at Thunderhead Perk and am here now at a window table, surrounded by log walls, jars of local honey, quilts, and black-and-white prints of Smokies scenery. The Avett Brothers keep coming on. There seems to be, if it can be believed, a hummingbird on the feeder outside the window.
I wonder if the time will ever come when I lose the genes that tie me to these mountains, the wild places and wild bears, the danger and the beauty. I keep wanting to draw lines between this place I have inherited and my actual genes, in my mind. Since I’ve had ovarian cancer and my grandmother died of breast cancer, there’s a possibility that I may have a damaged set of genes somewhere that’s predisposed me to cancers of the female system … thoughts of inherited damage, of irreparable things, and of slow-growing disease drift in and out.
Today I feel like I’ve been washed out of all the terrible anxieties and led into a quiet place. Surely if I can be broken into by reality like this, so unexpectedly, I have a lot to hope for.
On Saturday, I went to my first yoga class ever. I’m not comparing myself to the other people in the class, of course. But I was brilliant. Considering. I don’t mind letting myself feel pretty good about it. I’m super weak, so I sweated and shook and (because I never had physical therapy after my abdominal surgery last year) WHOMPED down on my mat during several stomach-intensive poses, but I held my own and felt like a deer or gazelle, or a blue-tick hound, light and tense and lovely. Yoga seems to honor the body so much, flexing and straightening the joints and muscles with respect, dignity.
This instructor did the cooling off / calming down thing at the end, saying that gravity pulls us to the earth, and that God pulls us to Himself. That we should let ourselves be pulled toward God. I laid on my back and watched the clouds culling by through the skylights, the occasional bird chasing past. This bodes well. This entire weekend, indeed, has boded well.
I went with Marshall, Carla, and Josh to Big Ed’s on Friday night, for Courtney’s birthday. The four of us ate two large pizzas and drank two pitchers of beer. Drove away singing and v. jolly. Carla came over and helped me and Amanda do a dinner party on Saturday night — had the neighbors over, Luke and Jordan and Lincoln, several others from several places — and it was a revelation to cook for people, to entertain. Amanda, I’ve discovered, is a natural-born hostess, bringing different kinds of people together and making them talk to each other, making them feel Invited and Welcome. I loved that our porch is becoming a living-space again, holding furniture and shoes and plants and people. I love our new neighbors, and I love Carla, and I love Amanda, and I pondered these things while I escaped for a while into the kitchen to do dishes. Washing wine glasses, stacks of plates, wondering whether the tides are turning in my life.
After everybody left, we stayed up SO LATE talking. About marriage, sex, community, friendship, and so many things, all gravitating in a strong centered pull toward God, what He is doing in our v. v. current lives. I said (lots of things, but particularly) that yes, I DO believe, now, what I’ve been telling God I believe, about my future not being shit. We talked about faith, about the power of prayer, and I’m reminded (again again again) that prayer is one of my hugest responsibilities, and one of my most significant callings. Talked about new friends, new ideas on “community,” things God is obviously orchestrating, and how it feels to have the Next Thing promised, and hear it coming.
I’m working about 60 hours this week, but I’m in the air over the East Coast and next to my honey on Saturday at 7:30am.
I just bough $42′s worth of pack film that may not make it to me before we leave. What then???? 35mm, then. And EE100 Special’s of Knoxville life. It’s about time that happened, anyway. The last photos I took on that camera were from college days, in Nashville and Cullman and New Orleans. It’s a new chapter of life. I must document it, in 3.25 x 4.25 instant photos w/white borders.
God is pulling me toward Himself; Marshall, too. We will think about this, walking around on tiled floors, this week, on asphalt and hardwood and grass, and will think about it while we’re in a long aluminum tube soaring thousands of feet in the air, escaping gravity with an equal and opposite force, chasing something past the clouds. I expect to be surprised with what’s coming next, and I’m expecting to be changed. So. There you have it.
I’ve realized this morning that God’s promises live outside of my hopes in them or despair of them. It’s a revelation … for someone with shit for brains. Apparently the power of God exists without reference to anything but God, and that is saving my life, today. In an extremely, tangibly real sense, I’m knowing the healing of his nearness. So, my broken legs and broken skin are coming together, cytolysis averted again.
The petals are whipping off the trees in white flurries, leaving the small green leaves, so thin that the sun lights them from above like tiny fluorescent lights. Like a thousand small green moons. He is risen, indeed.
It’s snowing, like they said it would, trickling through the air with hurried thoughts. It almost looks like salt or white sand, dusting the walkways and stumps, no warmth about it, no insulation. I raise an eyebrow, because some warmth has come back to my soul and I don’t feel like that anymore, like a single crystal of snow alone on the way down and alone on the ground. Sometimes you have to throw a tantrum before whatever dam will finally break in you and you ask for a lot of help, which I did, and a lot of help has come to me.
Being with someone, in life, not being allowed to hide things, is good. I’m full of fears, not just small ones but large ones, ones that sit and wait until their time comes to haunt me, which might be only once a year, or even less often. Being with Marshall means that my grinding dysfunction is obvious, obvious in its sadness & suffering and obvious in its tacit desire to ruin every relationship I enter. Not being able to kind of whisk it away in corners or hide for a while before it goes back in the closet is illuminating to him, to me, the most shocking discovery being this: that it isn’t going to kill me.
It’s a revelation, that admitting my abject poverty of soul isn’t going to end my life as I know it, and it isn’t going to make all my nightmares come true. Last night we sat in the car for an hour and hashed it out, hung on by the skin of our teeth, then by the grace of God, then were lifted by the grace of God, then carried. All because God cares for us to understand how He understands the world, how He understands us. Yes, “this knowledge is too wonderful for me.”
I put together a couple of late Christmas presents this morning while listening to a mix cd that Lauren made for me, seventeen tracks of Sarah Watkins, Regina Spektor, Nico, Brandi Carlile, Mississippi blues and an unbelievable Avett Brothers song, which (like most Avett Brothers songs) I hadn’t heard.
The snow’s still coming, just like they said, and it’s softening now. You should see it somehow clinging to dotted lines of frost on the car windows, small shelves of snow. I want to be soft, and with a fire inside me. It seems possible, today, and I’m more thankful than I can say.
“Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!” (28).
…
“You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, that cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them” (33-34).
…
“Sex is difficult; yes. But they are difficult things that were laid upon us; almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious. … Men have made even eating into something else: want on the one hand, excess upon the other have obscured the distinctness of this necessity, and all the deep, simple urgencies in which life renews itself have become similarly obscured. But the individual…can remind himself that all beauty in animals and plants is a quiet enduring form of love and desire, and he can see animals, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and increasing and growing not out of physical delight, not out of physical suffering, [but] bending to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain and more powerful than will and withstanding” (34-36).
This morning as I opened my front door to charge off into the day, I saw two cardboard boxes on our welcome mat, no names or signs, but filled with food. One box had a half gallon of orange juice, a pint of half & half, a lb of strawberries, a pint of Green’s Amber Ale, a huge bag of lentils, smaller bags of pumpkin seeds, almonds and cashews, a box of Annie’s macaroni mix, two boxes of Luna’s and Lärabar energy bars, a can of coconut milk, two lbs of basmati rice, what seems to be about two/three lbs of “Farmer’s Cheese,” and single cans of garbanzo beans, great northern beans, cannellini, kidney beans, salad beans and “soup beans.” The other box held bags of eight Pink Lady apples, seven yellow onions, ten new potatoes, two honeycrisp apples, one green pear and two red pears and a smallish orange gourd of some sort.
This at a time when I needed it. Yesterday I was thinking about how it felt impossible to eat well, because stocking up a pantry is expensive at the outset, and about all I have right now is flour. So someone brings all this food, and my first impulse is to run around the neighborhood asking “did you bring this?” Because a) I don’t deserve it, and b) I feel a tiny nudge of outrage when I’d prepared myself to be overlooked and suddenly it’s obvious that I am noticed. Isn’t it strange that I can be upset with God at allowing me to be poor and then upset when it becomes clear that all my wanderings are only inside His garden.
I put it all on the couch with a sign for Claire and Brittany (“Girls! Look!!”) and left the house, crossing the street in a river of golden air. After all our rain, the piercingly blue mornings are visiting us in East Tennessee and as I got to my car I noticed it was covered in tiny white fuzzy aphids. In dry seasons of the soul, every grace seems stranger than possible, but when I am awakening I am not surprised to find that living flakes of snow have slept on my car all night long. I am not surprised to find their legs and backs like ice crystals and like cotton.
Walking downtown, then, from free parking in the Old City up to Coffee & Chocolate, I pass an old man combing his long beard and another man who nods and says “what’s happenin’ sister.”
You look back on past days with nostalgia, realizing that a certain year in which you pinched and scraped, or cried a lot, maybe every night, was the year you went the most places and lived the most deeply. You remember it and wish you’d realized its depth of color at the time. This morning, walking down Gay Street, I did this. It was partly the fall morning, partly all the colors and the extravagant gift on the doorstep, partly the moving toward grad school and partly having Marshall as a dearest friend, all this, wading through it like I’d escaped the mental hospital and was wandering through a Narnian wood. Via wardrobe. I believe in wardrobes, you know.
If I can start expecting the world to be closed to me and then get a huge box of clothes in the mail from KG & Emily, boxes of food on the doorstep, a free bus ticket to Nashville to see Mary Oliver & my Great Friends, letters and checks here and there from unexpected quarters at unexpected times, then it seems I will have to keep turning. And by turning, I mean turning on my axis or on my stem, following my new understanding of the working of the universe like I am turning my leaves to the sun. Turning as in turning into the person that is turning into the right kind of person, the kind that is able to expect miracles every day, and is not surprised to find them, not surprised to have to wait for them either because of the certainty that they are there, the certainty that I will find them if they are ready to be found.
