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All trees are blooming along my street. All windchimes are chiming, also all birds are singing. The front porch is now lovely in the morning and I’ve put up a curtain so the sun isn’t too hot on my face while I’m trying to read. Why is it so hard to maintain stability. Someone who hurt you a long time ago appears on facebook and has photos with laughing people on beaches and riding in boats with rays of sunshine filtering through their hair. You take them off your news feed. Suddenly the blooms and the windchimes and the small red finch that perched on your fairy lights for twenty seconds matters less than the possibility that you are living the wrong life, that you are withering while others are thriving. That all accusations were correct.
If all goes well, you will have compassion on yourself. You will allow mercy to enter your heart, which means allowing yourself to live, and believing that you are living the right life. As if someone had examined everything and at length looked up at you and said, ‘Alright, you’re doing fine, go ahead.’
I have to tell myself: The life you’re living is the only one that matters. There was never an infinite number of possible lives; there were only ever a few, and of those only a very few were probable. The one you’re in now belongs to you, and you are powerful within it.
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.
People are multitude in their variety. There is the meeting of three earnest people at the table over there, long black leather coat and houndstooth scarf, the tight gray jeans and infinitely chic sweep of hair over the forehead, big brash Guess snakeskin bag, red converse sneakers. They are leaning on the table or leaning back in their chairs, alternately, talking about what awesome things they’re going to do once they get back to the City, maybe. This is the kind of slick scruffiness you don’t often see in our town. And there goes the guy who ducks his head and smiles, wearing the awful old running shoes and the tweed blazer with elbow patches. I’ve come here to Coffee & Chocolate from the library and the post office. I’ve been reading The Brothers Karamazov and thinking about how easy it is to love humanity, and how hard it is to love a person. Because I’m loving all these strange and beautiful people, and worried about going to work tonight.
Knoxville now has a street paper, and I bought a copy. I want this to be a success. Everybody should buy The Amplifier.
As I’m filling out my application to UTK I’m realizing that I have lame-sounding jobs. In reality, they are so far from lame. I’m a caretaker, which means I have a friend that I spend 17 hours a week with, who loves me and makes me laugh, whose life is cracking but whose spirit is almost unnervingly whole. I get to do that. I clean houses, which means I have a friend that I see once a week and help with things she can’t do, on account of her health. She tells me about how she hates being dependent and how she loved learning to cook during her years in New Orleans, and we put our heads together about so many things. On paper, on a paper being sent to UT in a priority mail flat-rate envelope, that looks stupid. Oh well. There’s not much I can do about that. Best I can do is remember real values, which is the perennial struggle of the human being in general. Especially the follower of Christ, right? This morning I was crabbed into a corner of my teal armchair and realized that the God of the universe is larger and kinder than I understood. Leaves opened and my life is changed again. Thank God.
Another thing I wanted to hear myself say was that it’s odd how working (again) toward a concrete thing (such as graduate school) makes me feel different. Like I have opened a window and here’s an eddy of fresh air. There are other concrete things I’m working toward, of course, like a wedding and a trip to Europe in the summer of 2012, like publication of my writings, like a new car, like a series of quilts, but none of the above have deadlines. That I can see, anyway. But here’s a deadline, and if I miss it, nobody’s going to feel bad and extend it for me. Something is so enlivening about it.
When Marshall and I met K. Woodhull to talk about potential pre-marital counseling a couple weeks ago, we ended up talking a lot about how Marshall and I both need (need) to have a purpose or goal, something in the future to work toward. Or we both get so effing depressed. I think one of the biggest things in our life is going to be finding and pursuing those goals, and knowing that is empowering. Working toward grad school, even if it’s a bad idea, even if it’s impossible, is empowering. I’m searching out my own heart, here. Being taught. Thank God.
I found the notebook I took on the Out-West Roadtrip of 2008. Someone (seems like it was a professor, Dana or Matt) had challenged me to write in these three weeks of adventure, and I tried to write quite a bit of poetry as well as prose. I remember feeling like all the poems I wrote on the road were these pathetic gimps who should never see the light of day, but as I was flipping through this notebook, the sights and sounds of that time came flooding back, as of course they would. This was the freefalling time between college graduation and the crashing-in of plan destroying events. At this time, streaking across Death Valley, wandering among southwestern petroglyphs, rising and falling across the Cascades and the plains, I was both carrying a cancerous tumor and walking unknowingly toward a man named Marshall.
At any rate, this is a poem I wrote in Portland, both having to do with a particular lost relationship and with lost investments in general. It seemed fit, and still seems fit.
. . . . .
I am concerned with waste.
What, for example
has become of the paper birds, folded
from my birth certificate and the first and last
pages of the journal of my travels?
Where went every cotton heart
sewn with my hair and stuffed with down,
what became of the tiny terrariums
made of medicine bottles, mosses, rooting
maple sprouts and real toads
from the wet places in my yard?
I sent every one away
to a safe deposit box
that I suddenly discover has been burned
in its bank, and is filled
with ashes.
‘”We don’t have centuries of educated, autonomous female role models to imitate (there were no women quite like us until very recently), so nobody has given us a map. So let’s just anticipate that we (all of us) will disappoint ourselves somehow in the decade to come. Go ahead and let it happen. Let somebody else be a better mother than you for one afternoon. Let somebody else go to art school. Let somebody else have a happy marriage, while you foolishly pick the wrong guy. (Hell, I’ve done it; it’s survivable.) While you’re at it, take the wrong job. Move to the wrong city.
‘”This is what we all must learn to do, for this is how maps get charted – by taking wrong turns that lead to surprising passageways that open into spectacularly unexpected new worlds. Fall flat on your face if you must, but please, for the sake of us all, do not stop. Map your own life.”‘
“—This was on the blog of a friend of an acquaintance. Somebody I do not know, but whose writing I like. The quote, though, is something she read in a magazine. Sometimes I waste time reading blogs, but oh MAN do I read some good, helpful, life-saving, encouraging stuff sometimes. [...]
“Anyway, this is so much in the same spirit and vein of separate conversations I´ve been having with all of you that I thought I´d share it–something I think we all need, in this difficult time of life, hard days, long nights, and for ever. I love it! Make mistakes! Fall down! Do something stupid and regrettable! Make the blind choice! But KEEP MOVING…don´t stay still. Don´t become paralyzed by cowardice and fear, afraid of being judged, afraid of failure, afraid of being yourself and letting others know you, afraid of becoming attached and letting others attach themselves to you. Don´t let timidity and insecurities and doubt corrode your soul and keep you living smallishly.
“All of you, every single one of you, is fabulous and a sparkling gem and wicked smart and beautiful and powerful. All of us are admired, respected, and deeply loved. Also sometimes profoundly lonely. I think there´s a fear at the realization of our strength and potential…of wasting it, letting others down, maybe overcome by all the possibilities and directions, or the confession of desiring to seek greatness in small, invisible, private ways that the world doesn´t readily appreciate/ understand.
“…do what you want to do, and do what you are. Express (on paper, via teaching, in love, in excellence, with things you grow and make) the cries and delights of your soul…and you will be doing good work, and this will be a good thing for the world.”
This in an email from a dear friend … it was so great I had to share.
