Continually Make Anew

It didn't really dawn on me this morning as I drove down Hope street, D riding shotgun, talking about the election, basketball, his high marks at his last camp in "intangibles (hustle, coachability, attitude). Nor did it occur to me as I sat having coffee with a new colleague, touching on the rituals of our wedding day, what it meant to us, where the ideas came from, far and wide.

But now it's hit me, 14 years ago today I got married to someone I loved very much, still do in ways that I never thought imaginable at the tail end of a sad and hearbreaking divorce, so many years of trying under our belts. In those years, we faced so many obstacles: moving, changing careers, birth of children, sickness, death -- so many of life's challenges (and joys) hitting us pretty much year over year, some level of chaos or disruption being a constant. Looking back at the end of our divorce, it felt like our relationship may never have had a chance to even settle in, much less thrive in the way that it was intended to.

But now, another move, another sickness, more career changes, a little more chaos down the road, it occurs to me that in the chaos might live some of the thriving. I am not always quite sure how we are doing it, but we are good. We have beautiful children and a life that we have chosen to live amicably. We are thoughtful of each other and, in some ways, more thoughtful of the ways that remarks or arguments land than we were when we were married. These days, it seems we can breathe and step back and apologize, because it's good ground we are on and neither of us wants to ruin it. Our children are thriving in the space we are able to hold, for this time and in this moment.

I would be lying if I said it was always this easy, or there weren't days that I look at families walking together with a twinge of envy, or if I wasn't worried that the permanent addition of new people to the mix will disrupt this good balance or if I didn't acknowledge how it's weird and hard to understand how to be in this space with a former partner when my normal course of action in breakups is to exit and not return.

But it's the remaking and continually making anew that is the path here, no other choice if we want our children to be at their best, no other choice if we want the one we said yes to so many years ago to live their life happy in our world as it exists now. Because, if we are lucky, we are always each other's, in an altogether different way and in a different space, sitting at weddings and births, shouldering emergencies or loss, opposite one another on the journey of parenthood for as long as life lets us be.

Made manifest

Today the men came to rip out the kitchen, next week the bathrooms, weeks after that the not-original built-ins and flooring. This shit is getting real, for real, now. Minutes after I took this picture, I saw one of my realtors on the street outside. "Come back and see what we are doing!" I called to him. "Oh my, go slow on that remodel, Fran!" he counseled back. "HA! This is go big or go home time, Ralph!" was my gleeful response.

And it was gleeful. All of the anxiety over the enormous amount of money I'm spending, whether I'll be in this home forever, what it all means to this time in my life had been burned away in that minute.

This is my vision, my brain reminded me.

My big, beautiful life, the home I wrote about back in June when I laid out my vision for my future. And that vision encompassed life and home and work and relationships. It is coming true in ways big and small that I haven't focused on, but have become manifest just for the sheer fact that I have articulated them. It's all in motion, big and huge and becoming. I can feel it.

Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is to override the intellect and go with your heart. Sometimes the bravest answer is "yes", or "no" or "not this" or "hmm, let me consider that". Sometimes the decision trees are not enough, that the downward cascade of the worst case scenario is not going to save you from hurt or sadness or tragedy. Sometimes you have to run in front of the good thing to make sure you catch it. Sometimes what you think is a good thing only exists to teach you more about who you are and how gracefully you can let go of things that are not meant for you. And bless them, and say "thank you" for the lesson.

Late night last night, I got some great wisdom from a new friend about creating the life you want to live. He said that he believes that you attract good things by living the good things: to attract depth, you have to be vulnerable to going under; to attract partnership, you have to get past the need to manage the situation; to walk the path with others, you have to be comfortable with the ambiguity; to create a difference in someone's life, you have to know yourself in all of your sticky messy-ness first.

He also said that knowing the difference between suffering through an untenable situation and the life you are destined to have is having a sense of what this big beautiful life would feel like well lived.

What would that big beautiful life look like?
How would that make you feel?
Who and what exists with you in that space?
How will you continue to grow?
How will you help to make this life you've envisioned manifest?

And why are you waiting even a moment to begin?

Love makes space for everyone’s happiness.

This is a piece I wrote during my #lentinseptember days.
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I have struggled immensely over the years to come to terms with my mother’s decision not to marry again after my dad died. She not only didn’t remarry, but also didn’t date anyone. For years when I was a child, I thought this was because she loved my father so much that she couldn’t bring herself to be with someone else, that this was the essence of true and abiding love, a love that I should search for as an adult. As I grew older, I began to understand how complex having your partner die can be. I think my mother was afraid to extend herself again, afraid of losing someone again (as her mother had), afraid of rejection, afraid of what life like might be like on the other side of this immense fear. And, in addition to this incapacitating fear (and this has been true for my two friends who have been widowed), some people would not let my father die. People shared their condolences on an annual basis, remembered the anniversary of his death, sent her cards on his birthday. She was, in their minds, married to my father forever and therefore, in some small way, in her mind she was beholden to that narrative. My best friend brought this home for me when she told me about her own experience of having to leave friendships because all her friends ever wanted to talk about was her husband and how much they missed him and wished he were there. She had ceased to be a young and vibrant spirit in their eyes and was, instead, the memory of husband she’d lost. I think this, in some ways, is because people want to believe in endless love, true love, love that lasts a lifetime and beyond. That they themselves are worthy of that undying love, that they themselves may be loved in that way.

And, in reality, that love may exist and it may never die, but that does not mean that life does not move forward into different narratives. Nothing replaces that love, but beauty and vibrancy and life get added in the form of new love. It is impossible to unlearn anything in our brain, we only add new learning and experiences to it. And so goes our heart.

I remember when my friend and I sat at the coffee shop in those fragile days after her husband’s funeral, discussing what life was like now and what her future may hold. “What if I wanted to be buried with him and I get married to someone else?” she said, her tiny, grief-wasted frame leaning across the table. “What if he was my one true love? How will that next person feel?” I remember telling her that I thought this was a normal part of grief, and that her life and the end of her story were hers to write, and that story included resting with whomever she wanted to rest with, that the next man in her life would understand. People who love you have a wide berth of forgiveness of emotion, nostalgia. They understand love and loss, or they do if you’ve attracted the right human. They take what has happened as part of your living story and love all parts of you. 

From my own experience, I know there is a tremendous weight on a child whose parent does not move forward in her/his life. It creates unrealistic expectations of love and commitment that likely will be unmatched with her/his future partners. It also makes that child feel guilty at the sacrifice that the parent offered, should that child feel less compelled to be so completely self-sacrificing as a parent his or herself. In some ways, it’s a perpetuation of guilt and shame. My mom sacrificed so much by doing X, I should be able to... It’s always felt hard and raw and not reciprocal to me. It feels like too much that’s been given, a sacrifice too great. It’s fear and avoidance and nakedness cloaked in love, but it’s not love alone. Love makes space for everyone’s happiness.

Emerging Fullness, in the Deluge

MR. O'DONOHUE*: Well, I think that the threshold, if you go back to the etymology of the word "threshold," it comes from "threshing," which is to separate the grain from the husk. So the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness. And I think there are huge thresholds in every life. I mean, I think, you know that, for instance, I'd like to give a very simple example of it is, that if you are in the middle of your life in a busy evening, 50 things to do and you get a phone call that somebody you love is suddenly dying. Takes 10 seconds to communicate that information, but when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world. Because suddenly everything that seems so important before is all gone and now you are thinking of this. So the given world that we think is there and the solid ground we are on is so tentative. And I think a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit, and I think that very often how we cross is the key thing.

MS. TIPPETT: And where is — where is beauty in that?

MR. O'DONOHUE: Where beauty is — I think is beauty — beauty isn't all about just nice, loveliness like. Beauty is about more rounded substantial becoming. And I think when we cross a new threshold that if we cross worthily, what we do is we heal the patterns of repetition that were in us that had us caught somewhere. And in our crossing then we cross on to new ground where we just don't repeat what we've been through in the last place we were. So I think beauty in that sense is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.
* http://www.onbeing.org/program/inner-landscape-beauty/transcript/1125

Today I walked back through church doors that I hadn't crossed in ten years, my return prompted by something John O'Donohue said about community and christianity and this great understanding of beauty and thresholds and moving into "more critical and challenging and worthy of fullness." The decision to stop attending church was as frivolous as my starting: I began going to the Unitarian church when I was 24, having finally found a spiritual home and I left because we moved to a new city and the feeling of loss was too deep, too disconnected upon return for me to feel comfortable. In short, because I had lost I denied the very thing that would have likely helped me to heal, connect, and grow. I've been journeying around in an array of seeking in the past year, all sorts of hooey and loveliness and unknown that I myself don't know if I believe, but I've been looking for a map, hanging my heart on trying to divine how things will unfold, reaching back to work through hard things and looking forward to predict the future. Who knows if any of it is true, but it's something to think through and that in itself is valuable.

These days, the season of thresholds feels like it's coming to an end, after years of disarray and change and heartbreaking loss and difficulty, it feels like life is settling out. And yet, it's not. We fool ourselves with that thinking of calm, that chaos isn't balling itself up for another go at our lives. It's instructive that way, the call in the wee hours that a friend needs our love or that someone is leaving our life or that we ourselves just find us dragged behind the black dog of depression for even one day, knees skinned and tender, grown unused to the sudden tumble. 

But what I've learned instead is not to fight the chaos and the change and the strife and the difficulty, but to live in the experience of it. When David was about to be born, I took a number of hypno-birthing classes so that I could hopefully remove myself from the pain of his delivery by envisioning a happier place somewhere sacred and beyond (with chocolate babka, but that's another story). But the truth was that I couldn't remove myself from where my body was, that only by reaching into the intensity and depth of that physical pain could I get through it. 

And so I'm beginning to understand that that's what all of this is about, the transitions and waiting for life to calm down and even out and not feel like I'm deflecting lasers with my light saber. The truth is being in it, with whoever needs it, with myself clear about my own needs, with a sense of community that is big and robust and purposeful, with love and gratitude and sadness and the whole gamut of it all, is the beauty of life. Alive and giving, alive and conscious, alive and intentional. But alive and in it and not afraid and not tired and not waiting for life to begin anew, easier and more simple. 

Because we are complex creatures living in a complex world. If you are going to engage, it gets messy. Put your boots on and get to work. Meet these times worthily, so as O'Donohue notes, "what we do is we heal the patterns of repetition that were in us that had us caught somewhere. And in our crossing then we cross on to new ground where we just don't repeat what we've been through in the last place we were. So I think beauty in that sense is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life."

  

Distance (Part II)

For T. L. and K. R. especially.

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It hits you when you open boxes, digging through things that have meaning so essential to who you are and where you have been: letters of kindness from past lovers mixed in with transcripts from years of college where you didn’t give a fuck; paintings that hung in your grandmother’s home that your small-person’s eyes thought were magical; the honest and intentional letter your now ex-husband wrote as homework for the last hopeful stint of marital therapy that you wish you could unpack a little more now; the heartfelt cards your kids made on your last day of chemo that tell their own story of worry; your mother’s St. Gerard prayer card that hung on her bathroom mirror every day of her journey of motherhood.

You are thousands of miles from many of these experiences; time and physical distance and a long journey of letting muddy water settle into clear has brought you to a new space in a city full of its own personal mark on your life, in a beautiful new home that already feels like the right space for your spirit. And these things make you think of a metaphor that your mentor gave you years ago when you worked in a domestic violence organization. She said “The thing is, Fran, that when you are in the middle of something traumatic, hard, unavoidable in life it’s like you are in a house on fire and you are nattering around trying to decide what to carry out with you. You’re thinking ‘Should I take Auntie Harryette’s doily? Or what about these twist-ties? Where is my juicer?’, all while the house is burning around you until someone finally pulls you out of the house and sits you on the curb across the street. It’s only then, wrapped in a blanket and with the oxygen mask on your face do you realize how things were and how, by anyone's measure, you could have not survived it all, but by the grace of whatever moves things* and people who helped you out, you did.”

Today you are sitting in your new home, in the grey sunlight shifting through the windows of your new favorite spot, listening to the songs friends gave you for the journey here. And you are sifting through these many years of so many things, so much loss, so much love, so many good people that have put their arm around you and guided you to a safer place. And it’s this distance, close enough to remember but far away enough to have perspective on, that allows you to feel the full force of gratitude, of loss, of appreciation, of duty, of remaking, of love and to sit weeping at the weight of it all and in appreciation of the opening that has happened in your life that means the next chapter. That it’s not sifting through the ashes to find what is left, but rather the blessing of the spaces and people that were and are no more, to ritualize the memory and to move forward powerfully, happily, with courage, without anger and into a new life of your own creating. And you are so thankful at this moment for this moment. And you are so acutely aware of friends who need that arm around their shoulders to get them out of their own burning houses. And that’s what it’s all about, this remaking of love and kindredness, of your people, of accepting and receiving love when you can't see what you need but just trusting that others can help guide you. And realizing the path was the path in just the way it had to be.** 

It’s beautiful and hopeful and quite different than anything you've ever felt in your entire life. And you are grateful beyond measure, your heart welling and brimming in its fullness. Amen.

*Jan probably said “God” here, but my father always said never ruin a good story for lack of facts.

**I also remember so vividly a FB post from my friend Lee which recalled a moment when she was lying on her bed so ensconced in emotion and feeling that all of the shit she'd been through had been worth it. I think this feeling is similar. I have held on to that post for so long, Lee, and wish I had the exact quote. Thank you for giving life to it.

Interior: On Writing

I struggle with this idea of writing. There is a part of my heart that loves it, that loves the release that I feel when I put together something that resonates with me, with others, brings others to tears or laughter or whatever it is. I feel like sometimes this will be my mark if everything falls into the shitter and I leave this earth earlier than anticipated, something for my kids and my friends to hold onto. 

And there is another part of my heart that understands the weird precarious nature of writing, the part that doubts that what I do is useful to anyone that doesn’t know me, that pieces are touching because the people that read them are people who already love me, and that for those people it’s like reading a piece torn from a diary from which you can identify parts and pieces that make sense. But I wonder, really, if these things I trace onto the paper make a difference to anyone outside of the circle of my friends who hold me and my experiences close. I’ve had amazing feedback from people that I have loved and I’ve been really wounded by people I have loved not giving me any feedback. It’s an interesting and tender spot that I don’t want to care about, but I do.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, wondering if that is why I have chosen the rapid-blogging format I use (I don’t know if this is such a thing or if I made it up, but this it’s writing all in one shot, less-than-miniscule-to-zero revisions before posting, get it out and get it up style). If I do it quickly, nobody can remark on the quality. If there are no revisions, I can blow off any mistakes or feedback. If I don’t put in the effort and if I only rely on the whim of the moment, I can’t be expected to be serious about this in any real way. In short, I avoid all of the conflict of criticism or the reality of feedback by being 13 again. My mother would laugh out loud at that idea.

So I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I’ve been thinking that I still only really want to write to get things out that I notice, that I love just writing thinking that people I know on Facebook will read it, that I am not a “writer” and I have no aspirations to make this any more than it is. But I need to take this to another level, maybe work in a longer format or build in revisions or begin to take things out of this stream-of-conciousness format that it lives in (as I am typing now) and into something more coherent and cohesive. There is part of me that loves things raw and I have experienced my friends transitioning their gifts from raw talent to tutored and trained talent with mentorship and help and sometimes the transition is rough. I’m not sure what it means to lose your edge and some of the authenticity either. Maybe I’m trying to convince myself already that this is not a good idea, so I’m going to say it before I back away from it completely… I think when I get to Providence, I am going to find a writing coach.

There, I said it.

Now I have to do it. Or come up with a really freaking good reason why not to (which may be, well, I’m not writing coach material).

So wish me luck, friends. I’m peering beyond the edge on this one.

Memory Kit

Gran's mushrooms cooking in butter

Mom's scent
The feel of a cheek on my cheek that lingers after a hug goodbye

My mind has been on this idea that Andy Warhol had about his cabinet of scents. He'd wear a scent for three months, then force himself to stop wearing it and would put it away in a special cabinet so when he smelled it again, he would remember things that happened in that three month period of time.

A little body warm and curled to mine

The view of Seattle coming over I-5 in the breaking light

Hunter waiving goodbye, basketball tucked under his arm

Three months. I can't imagine even being able to pinpoint things in such a short period of time. Another thing I've been pondering is this idea of memory, particularly sensorial memory and how it fades over time and what could be done to keep it. Smells, skinfeels, tastes, visual snapshots. Like the movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" but collapsed into a life museum where you could sit and visit. It would be a blessing and a curse, something that would keep you so mired in the past, like an addict almost. This may be why memory fades, because our heart and mind cannot bear the rawness of the feelings that we experience in those moments. Or, perhaps, constant access to those moments would tend to erode the impact of the feeling of these experiences when they come upon us suddenly. On one end, it's a soft blanket. On the other, it's a meth addiction. You could have your own little kit of memories, a set up that would put you under, just for a minute.

The smell of scotch and water

The feel of Ava's warm, newly born body on my chest

Dew-kissed sunrise over rust-colored earth

And then there's the difference between the memory as it was and the memory as you remember it. Which would you want, if there was a difference? Would you include shitty memories like the vomity smell of saline that they used to clear your port or the smell of incense that made you nauseous at your brother's funeral? 

I think you would have to lock these away too, happen upon them from time to time like the disgusting buttered popcorn jelly bellies that sneak into your handful of yumminess. Then the kit becomes real, a record that reminds you that life is not meant to be lived in perfection, that you survive and make it through. Triggers, these are all triggers and for some it would be a nightmare while others it would help them heal and thrive. 

What memories would I put in my kit if I only had 25 spaces to fill? 10? 5? What experiences would I carry with me? What is essential to what has made me? What is worth remembering and what is worth letting go?