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Tonight I downloaded a free DVD player and watched The Royal Tenenbaums. I hadn’t seen this movie in years, and its immersion in a specific period of time in my life meant, of course, that it brought some very old thoughts and emotions to the surface. When I was watching this movie for the first and seventh and eightieth time, I was at college, my friends’ marriage was dying, and I was as alone as I have ever felt in my life. The despair in Richie’s eyes was most familiar. I used to lie on my stomach on the cool gray tiles of my dorm room and make slicks of tears.
The characters in this movie are all — and this was my favorite metaphor — walking on broken legs, and I spent some/enough days feeling like I was walking on broken legs, too. Wow. The huge presence of sadness, and the strange beauty that supports the sadness so you can walk all inside it, were, just as God was, closer to me than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet. I wrote papers, too, rode my bike to coffee shops and went to parties and Sacred Harp singings and talked to my mom on the phone, but the predominant tone of most of my junior and senior years at college was this dark room with shafts of light falling in like the play of light and shadow in water.
I’ve been mostly happy, for a while, now. What a revelation, is happiness. What a ray of light, is Marshall. The long loyalty, the kiss, the lashes on the cheek, the knowing glance, the shock of mutual vulnerability. But the beauty of happiness, even mostly-happiness, is of a different sort than the beauty of sadness, and we are to suppose that each sort is only a facet of a unified beauty, who is God. I believed this then, and I believe it now. How strange to remember all those nights and days, now, when I’ve been watching a different sun set and rise on my days. I’m relieved to find that I have so much compassion for myself, in that time.
Maybe this time, with its particular character that I haven’t fully understood, will come to a close as every other time has. Maybe the broken bones of this time (of course there are some) will be set in five years, the way the bones of five years ago are being set, now. God is teaching me how to have compassion (and patience) for the present time, I think. I’m such an emotional paraplegic of course but I am, I think, learning this.
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’m having tea in my room with a granola bar and brownies, at noon. If this sounds strange it’s because it is.
The neighbors asked us at the last minute if we wanted to ride up to Bloomington with them to see Mumford & Sons, and I decided within a few seconds that the answer was yes, so I talked Marshall into it, and we went. Got a little scalped on tickets, but that was ok. The five of us squashed into Aaron’s four-door Camry and traded stories all the way there (six hours), bit our nails and strained forward in our seats when we hit severe weather just outside of Bloomington, and walked to the Bluebird with about ten minutes to spare with the clouds breaking behind us into a golden sunset, and a double-arced rainbow in front.
And Mumford & Sons are great. Some of their songs are so anthem-like, we cried, right there at the edge of that huge standing crowd. (Everyone singing along, even us, everyone pumping their fists and closing their eyes very tightly.) If I had even an extra dollar, I would buy their album, even one extra dollar, or fifty cents. These are the cries of the heart, and we feel it.
So we left and drove home, switching out drivers twice, and got home at 7:00am. We laid down and slept for a strange two hours, Marshall went to work, I slept for one more hour, and then got up. Looked for my keys (lost, oh gosh), made tea, leaning in and out of shades of anxiety, ate brownies, and am now having a moment where I’m prying my fingers off my life and trying to give myself room to just live peacefully for a moment.
If I can learn anything from yesterday, it’s that life is bigger than I thought it was yesterday morning. Maybe I can’t decide whether I’m living in glass paperweight or a grass house on a windy plain somewhere, but I can put off that decision for another day. God puts a hand inside my life, and it’s as simple as new friends taking me to hear music in another city. I needed those songs, and I think I needed the kindness of those people. I needed to sneak off and have a burger with Marshall, to talk over the sad and happy shifts in community, talk over what it means to love, and how it may be that God is moving.
I hope today becomes rich with flowering realizations. I hope today fills with light and memory. I hope all things.
1. My friend/boss Katie’s son died over the weekend, and the idea of loss bloomed into a more fully-fleshed reality of loss as I ran errands today. Returning a book to the library, crying at the stoplights, wondering why we can’t say goodbye to ones we loved, like the animals seem to do so easily. At the stop signs, seeing the sky flat as a trapdoor into the next universe, the Lost Property Cupboard, the place where all lost things are kept until we come with the key. And we are coming with the key, coming.
2. The next year as a year-at-school is lost, churning up the possibilities of a year-of-new-connections. At the Old North Abbey cookout last night, we discovered the relief of finding gentle people, finding friends, and left as the sun went down, fireflies glimmering in the bushes. Mary is a poet, and I have needed one. Maybe she is someone I need, just as Josh B may be someone Marshall needs. Just as we all are people we all need. In my mind I extrapolate the tiniest of hesitant ties among us, flashing with the gentleness of firelies.
3. If something would change, I would become an unblocked artist. Reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, images of energy sent hurling from the tips of wands come to mind. Reading the New Testament, images of the fully-human Christ fully risen come to mind. If something would change, I would become an unblocked artist.
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.
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.
I left JP’s this morning in the cold clear blue, sunlight glancing off the snow like arrows. I’m caring for her three nights a week for several weeks and this means staying in her guest bedroom, filling up her insulin syringe, coming like a shot when she calls in the night, listening mostly to her self-deprecating humor, unselfconscious wisdom. This woman is becoming dear to me, and when I told her that I was going to show proof of (decreased) income to Interfaith today, hoping they wouldn’t kick me out of the program, she said ok, oh honey I know that’s hard stuff, I’ll pray for you today I really will. When I got to Interfaith and handed over the two Ackermann check stubs and the copies of the two most recent G checks, the lady told me that I still qualified … by three bucks. I make $503 a month, now. You can’t make less than $500/mo. to stay in the program. This change of income had been a worry, but a small one, since I haven’t had room to doubt, these past months, that I’m going to make it. That my finances are going to make it, my body is going to make it, that I’m going to make it. After this I pulled into the Regions parking lot and waited with the other riffraff for the bank to open, deposited checks, and drove home under this sky, the cold clear blue.
I’ve forgotten what it was like to ponder death, or the unexpected. But unexpectedly I keep my insurance, unexpectedly I make so much money that I can think about spending it (instead of paying it), unexpectedly I’m friends with an eighty-year-old woman who takes Darvocet (my old friend!) and is slowly leaving life, whose life has been larger than I can ever understand, who told me tonight after I put her to bed that she loved me.
My life has changed so much in a year. Of course, the only thing about life that you can be sure of is that you never know what will happen, and letting go of what’s passing (I could call this “growing up”) and trying to not be afraid of what may be coming … is a new way to live, for me. The uncertainty of cancer & recurrence is like the uncertainty of relationships, all their inexplicable webs of pain and the inexplicable entrance of forgiveness, which in turn is like the uncertainty of bonds, to places or people or whatnot. I’m thinking about all this. How I never thought I’d get cancer, never thought I’d leave East Tennessee again, never thought anybody would stick around long enough to thank me “for being fragile,” and when I said “why the f-ing hell would you be thankful for that,” to say “I love you.” He said that. As if fragility had honor, as if I had honor.
After a lot of thought, today, I’ve decided I’m up for it. I know — the recklessness of it — but today I’m up for life. Which means of course, I’m up for suffering. I’m up for learning to be as patient as JP with the length of life. Since it is so very long, so long, so long. This after watching the mourning doves crowding the seed/breadcrumbs/wildlife feast the neighbors left out this morning. The towhee came back, too, isn’t it strange? No sparrows or titmice or chickadees? Just the doves, the towhee, and a female cardinal. Anyways sorry blah blah, but they milled around with the snow sparkling around them while I read about the older brother in the Prodigal Son story, I watched them and thought about my total frustration with my lack of fatted calf party, my reluctance to believe that I have the sort of honor that would make God say to me “you are always with me.” Somehow I am with God and He is bringing so much change to me. Humbling me & stuff. Which, as Mom said, is a gift, a sign of favor. I have wanted to be favored …
My twelve-month visit to my gynecological oncologist, though brief, was brief. Meaning, he under-charged me again (this time lower than last time) and my weight and blood pressure are “text-book perfect,” but I forgot I had to have another pap smear and (though I thought I was getting out of it) another ultrasound. Part of me is disappointed, because I just finished paying off my pathology bill and wanted to feel good about that for a while, but part of me wants the gravity of these things. I had cancer, and I want to remember it, I want it to not fade away and become unreal. Is it strange that I want to celebrate being alive by going back to the places where I was so afraid, going back to the same offices and procedures but with the knowledge that life is still as fragile as it was, but also still as rescued? Thoughts.
from uneviolenteenvie
you can do anything you want, but not everything,
and you’re the kind who can’t do anything
if you can’t do everything, because every one of
those things has the weight of the entire earth and losing
one thing is like losing them all. you feel like things
are so inextricable, so interwoven that to pull one string
is invariably to unravel and to kill one bird is to kill
the entire row, roosting in the house like dreaming
children. when is the question, not whether,
of course, but you can get tired of asking
it even so. when will my time of recovery begin
to make sense, begin to pull into the distance,
begin to merge into a single profound point or
epiphany that I can wind up in threads and
finally understand when I hold it, when it is self-
contained and has pulled its fibers out of everything
else and wrapped them around itself on purpose.
this must have something to do with God. who
is either to do the work, or me, or maybe the work
will do itself as I’m getting up in the morning
and thinking about wisdom and what it would mean
to be wise, what it would mean to know how
to do all this. I guess I don’t believe that. I
guess all my chaos and all the blind intention
of the natural order are held together
by something, I guess Julian is right about
the hazelnut and about love and I guess
I’m being held together by something like that.
