To My Friends, of Whom I am Thinking:

Thoughts on the Possibility

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.

Something Beautiful

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.

Here in Townsend

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.

Another Full Circle Moment

As I was out in the garden today, hearing — not to be too dramatic — the sound of my life slipping away, I remembered that song Matthew Perryman Jones sings, By Way of Sorrow, that song I listened to throughout high school and part of college, that one that gave me more comfort than I found (sometimes) in the gospels.  I started singing it to myself, and looked up the lyrics when I came back inside …

Julie Miller (never heard of her before now) wrote & recorded this song on the album Blue Pony, in 1997, and who should be singing harmony in the background and then taking a verse on her own but Karen Peris?  Another person whose voice and songs have been stronger to me than my own heart (sometimes), the writer and singer of The Innocence Mission.

Today when I needed so much to see something, I have seen it.

I Hope All Things

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.

June 9

We’re walking around taking showers and eating toast
with coffee cups in our hands, when oh, is that thunder?
and the sky splits open and the gutters filled with leaves
and maple seedlings creak, drip, the day-old petals
are rained off the roses.  I open my window and listen to
O Mio Babbino Caro, working on journals, because I
miss the part of myself that made journals, and maybe

revisiting places has power after all.  Grasses and tomato
leaves bobbing with the raindrops, these windows looking
out into the world, the winds and clouds of my secret life
blowing past them, oh the commas, oh the hands and

voices.  Someday I’ll look back on myself now and think,
how different I was then.  Someday something inside me
will wake up and grow wings, I hear it stirring and I’m so
afraid of it and want it so much that I’ve already given up
on life without it.  I want to write the way Chloe sings,

these songs she writes on the walls of her secret room
inside her secret house in her secret country.  If I wanted
to bring out my secrets one by one, like I used to, how
would I be changed?  Lately I can only think of how much
I need to write, but I don’t know what to write or when or

where, at night I walk corridors of closed doors and when
she says, “I hear doors opening all night through” the
things trying to grow give another push and I feel what
you felt the last time you said, I feel, but couldn’t say

anything else.  If I’m doing anything, it’s writing my
words to the Lord on pieces of colored cloth and hanging
them from my windows, because surely He hears even
while the clouds are low and the water is coming down
heavy in sheets, finding roots and tunnels and filling
the water table, under there in the secret country.

Shortlist

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.

When

One thing about being so busy is not getting to eat, and by that I mean not getting to think about food, look through recipes, spend afternoons on rising bread or putting together stuff like potato salad or black bean chip dip.  I think about food sometimes, always with wist (frittatas and curries and gyros), and then do not make anything.  Remember instead those other things I have to do, and work on them.

Being forced to tell God exactly what you think is a good thing.  Even if it’s “You have shit plans for me.  Your plans are a load.”  Which is what I said, this morning.  I feel a little better.

As if You Were My Confessor and I Was in the Booth

Today is about admission (and I believe that days are about things, if I can pay attention), my admission to myself and the Lord — the only two for whom it matters supremely — that I’m bankrupt.  If flowers

are growing in the garden of my life it is because they’ve been charmed to repel my wintry winds and all my neglect, all my destructive tendencies, because they were the planting of God.  I can’t find any other reason they’d still be blooming, and I admit this with a clear heart.

I’m destructive, ultimately, and when I read Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, “so I take pleasure in infirmities, reproaches, in needs, persecutions, distresses, for Christ’s sake, since when I am weak, then I am strong,” something enters my mind, that admission of failure can be admission into a new arena, a place where I don’t expect great things of myself, but expect all things from God.

——————

My white-haired neighbors — the only ones on the street who care to paint their house — always feed the squirrels and birds in winter.  They throw handfuls of bread or seeds on the stump of the hemlock that was cut down last year, cut up and lowered in chunks by ropes and pulleys, gingerly.  This morning a feast of corn on the stump has drawn the usual crowd of jays, doves, cardinals, and sparrows, but also

a towhee, a single black and red bird with white stripes underneath and on his wings.  Lovely, that poverty is not shameful to the birds, who spend most of their days resting their weight on the air.

Someday I will know what it’s like to fly, and by that I mean I’ll know what it’s like to lean forward and spring into the void, finding the molecules supporting me paradoxically because I will have decided fully to let the one who feeds the birds of the air feed me.  Or, more likely, someday I’ll see I have been in the air and didn’t realize it.  I hope I’m working toward that.  All this weakness coming out.