Category: humanity.

the tender movement of time and space

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maya was down a few weeks ago with a scratchy throat, so i made her the hot toddy we had growing up when our throats were sore. maya doesn’t remember having had it, which is strange as it is a soothing mix of raw apple cider vinegar, hot water and honey that i drink even when i’m not sick. maya loved it and from the kitchen i said yes, me too, as she brought her empty cup to be rinsed. reaching to take it, the room zoomed and tilted for a quick second and suddenly i was back in my childhood home, sinking deep in to the orange sofa under the sick-comforter, my dad stirring honey in to a mug, i love lucy reruns on the tv.

those triggers, of smell, or sound, or an unearthed remembrance – that pull us completely out of our present and in to an encapsulated set of moments that exist only in our memories and our heart – never fail to blindside me in their astonishing, exacting, just-as-it-was-ness. i felt my dad as though he were in the room, so deeply, and i thought you’re here, you’re still here, i will always find you if i need to. thoughts of him are of course always quietly in the back of my mind, but there are those more powerful moments when out of nowhere i feel or sense him. in the morning shadow on my studio wall, sparkling in the dust motes when the sun hits them just so, his voice somehow intermingled with the johnny cash song pouring from a car radio next to me at the stoplight. the quiet ache of missing him and my loneliness for him doesn’t ever really go away; it just shifts like gears between low and high. for my sister it is the same, for however bullish and egotistical and unsolicited-advice-yielding as he could be, my father loved us, and all of his family, to the moon, and was available always for a hug, a long conversation, a dirty joke, a dirty martini. his death, almost eight years ago, was my first great loss outside of a few flattening heartbreaks and some moments i would pay to revisit or re-do. i’ve lost friends and loves, but saying goodbye to my father so unexpectedly and suddenly knocked the wind from my body, and it never came back in quite the same way.

it was the first time that i remember thinking, okay, so these are the moments. the crystalline, gorgeous, painful moments being a human on this planet means all of us will experience at some point. for many of us they float a sky length away and don’t enter our younger psyche except as something that will happen later, well beyond the consuming thoughts of love, accrual, sex, success, family, failure and joy that shape our opening decades. these sorts of preoccupations are natural as we brightly rule our singular and unique kingdoms while we’re here. but here’s the thing. for all of the intense focus on self instead of the collective or the community, we are here, taking up space and oxygen for a mere breath of time as it extends from the past, sits for what to us is a lifetime but to the universe is just an eyeblink, before continuing on to a billion different futures. time does seem to speed up, acutely so when we acknowledge at some point in our middle lives that there is less of it in front of us, and its movement, its perpetual march, and the spaces we create within it, are so fleeting and tender.

here, in the last years of my fifties, at a time when the sky seems to be falling, and a global chill descends upon most of us who are paying attention to what is happening in the world, i work harder than ever to create beauty. I could outline the gloom (and its possible cures) that exists currently, and i have tried, for my daughter, to do just that; to assuage her anxiety and alarm at what she and her generation are privy to politically and environmentally on a global scale every single day. we talk about weather patterns more disrupted than we’ve witnessed in our lifetimes due to climate change. populism and nationalism on the rise. atrocities of war taking place in ways we hoped and trusted would never happen again. consumption and waste and planet-choking materials filling our waterways, our atmosphere, impacting our bodies and animal, plant and sea life in every stretch of land here. my daughter is 20, and wonders constantly where things will be in 10, 15, 25 years. i look for answers, because that is my job as her parent, and her friend. and though we discuss and explore and share what we’re both seeing online and outside our door, and how much overwhelm we feel, i stay away from telling her, this is how it has been for millennium. wars have raged, over land and religion and money. borders have been marked and walls have been built. humanity has taken what they need when they need it. tragically, the speed and scope of how much we need as the earth’s population grows, and the tools and technology available to us to fill our endless hunger, means we have tipped the scales to an extent we may not be able to come back from.

i have searched to understand why i hesitate to point out humanity’s failings to maya. i have come to realize that although i feel deep pain and bewilderment when i look past my one little life and see the mess out there beyond my own horizon, i am at the very same time still enchanted with the magic that is this planet. much more so than i when i was younger, and self-immersed, and trusting blindly that the earth will keep turning and endings will mostly be good. from a more seasoned viewpoint over here, those preoccupations diminish in significance, replaced with the truths and absolutes of this rotating sphere of life, which are dazzling. it is astonishing to learn how earth continues to live and support all living things after millions and millions of years. astonishing to acknowledge the finite and delicate recipe that must be maintained to sustain that life. astonishing to witness, even in our brief time here, her constant evolution, her inherent nature to create balance, her tenacity and power. and most importantly, to realize how desperately she needs our care.

if you watched the nova series ‘the planets’, at one point you saw a linear diagram of the planets and our sun aligned by size. it was stunning to take in how tiny our planet is, and as ridiculous as it sounds, seeing earth, in the context of and dwarfed by a vast universe and its other enormous planets, brought a sort of calm and acceptance that would seem counterintuitive upon realizing our infinitesimal position in a very big picture. feeling that smallness was a sort of instant wakeup call that my time here, in my little house, in my lovely beach town, in this state, this country, this continent, on this planet, is only as big and significant as i make it, as any of us make it. and what i know is that the biggest bigness any of us will feel and create here, is fueled by loving and caring for each other.

and so this is what i choose to give to my daughter. to move from the very big picture which can be overwhelming in its doom and gloom, to the smaller pictures that make up our lives. to embrace what is so essentially human about the human race. so much of it has to do with ritual, and tradition, and comfort. those moments we carve out amongst the chaos to embrace stillness and sit in beauty. an evening walk. curling up with a book and a pot of hot tea. setting the holiday table for those who will come to celebrate. the warmth of wrapping your hands around a steaming cup of coffee. singing full out to the car radio with the windows down. being with the people we adore as much as we are able. dancing in the kitchen with a pal to motown while chopping tomatoes for the spaghetti sauce. choosing grace, and graciousness. being with animals, and spending time outside, among the trees. maya pushes back about the imbalances in the universe and how she is to embrace all of the beauty and warmth i’ve tried to bring to her as though those imbalances don’t exist. i remind her, they are man-made, and as such, must be man-unmade. how to do that mom, she asks. and i can only say, be true, be kind. have a light footstep on this planet. be present, and notice where there is need. keep your eyes open to others who are hurting, but describe boundaries to protect your tender heart. have integrity. love well, and deeply. live well, and deeply.

in a week my best friend, the one i have adored and cherished since the moment we met at 17, will arrive from amsterdam to soak up some sunshine and my family’s love of her for a deliciously long set of days. i’m not sure what we will do during that time, but i know we will have morning coffee and evening cocktails, and that the spaces in between will be perfect and imperfect and possibly even tough a few times as we lead such different lives, so many miles away from each other, and will adjust to being together. i will look in to her face and she into mine, and we will see things we haven’t seen before; wisdom, sadness, a new wrinkle or two, a spot or freckle that wasn’t there last time, a fresh inlet or outlet of happiness. and there too will be all of the moments our lives have intersected, our memories spanning decades close by or at a great distance. and signe’s face, the one i love so much, will be as beautiful as it was the day we first noticed each other at a language camp in central holland 41 years ago.

and when signe is gone, and it is just me and maya sitting at the table having coffee together, i will tell her, this is why. why we stay. and persist. and foster hope. for the people we love, for the deep tears and hysterical laughter. for the gorgeousness of good food and the comfort of your favorite old sweater. for seeing the lilt of your true love’s wrist a thousand times and breathing in their scent when they lean in to kiss you. for family and friends, how we nourish their souls and they ours. how one day maya, you will get on a plane, move through time and space to arrive elsewhere, walk through a few doors, and see in front of you a face you recognize, have longed for, and a love that spans everything, and makes it all make sense.

simplicity

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when i was ten or eleven, my best friend megan’s birthday meant spending a day at magic mountain for the first time. there were a handful of us there to celebrate, megan and i wore matching osh kosh b’gosh overalls and i had my silver hoop earrings on, having finally had my ears pierced for my birthday six months earlier. we rode every ride we could, standing in line for roller coasters and twisters and rides that spun you around. it was exhilarating, and i remember later that night, back home and in bed, still feeling the plunge of the roller coaster, the fear as we rounded a corner and it felt the car would fly from the track, the adrenaline and thrill and terror of it all. i was dizzy and exhausted, sinking in to the familiarity of home while hanging on to the rush of the day behind me.

it is a similar sort of ride my family has been on, with all the measured ascents, crazy curves, and blinding plummets of a roller coaster. my sister and i spent a small and intense set of years doing what we could for my father as he sat at the edge of alzheimer’s and dementia. since losing him almost three years ago, we have jumped through hundreds of hoops as our gorgeous mother has faced her own set of health scares, surrendered in to retirement, and let go of her house, her bird’s eye view of the glorious mountains we grew up with, and her community. just to be close to us. she always wanted to live near the ocean; after crossing 3 billion t’s and dotting 2 billion i’s, we have, at very long last, been able to help her do just that, and she is now settling in to her freshly remodeled, cozy little house a long road or two from us.

i spend a fair amount of time thinking about gratitude, and responsibility. i suppose that’s because life, for the most part anyway, feels like a gift. and though i look around and see the utter and profound mess that is our world currently, i am still so grateful for the beauty of nature and of human kind, and the fact that i am one teeny participant in both for the blip of time that i get to be here. this particular blip of time in the united states the past two years has had me daunted and incredulous, and i have posted several times in different social media locales about how hard it is to explain the how’s and why’s to my daughter. the one who is 15.5 and angsty and angry and takes every single thing i say with a grand measure of disdain and even though she trusts me doesn’t trust me at all and somehow thinks my brain fell out of my head at the exact moment she hit puberty.

this push/pull has been a part of our vernacular for some time now. its preface is most often exasperation, annoyance, anger and in a final sweep before i am given up on entirely, the eyeroll. you know the one: it starts low, moves dramatically toward an upper corner, and is commonly accompanied by a sigh that could knock a root beer bottle from a fence post. following may be a door slam, the pitch of a book, or just recently, an f bomb falling squarely at my feet like a broken satellite as i looked down incredulously and then back up again in to the face of my daughter, surrounded by students, and parents, and school staff, right at the start of her high school open house. all i kept thinking was, wasn’t she just starting kindergarten? and also, if i twinkle my nose, could i maybe disappear?

back then, before our collective mother-daughter innocence was lost and her adoration of me was immense and unmovable, i wrote often in that other blog of maya’s tenderness, that cake batter smell that seemed to emanate from her very pores, and her linguistic acrobatics. maya is a deeply intelligent and complex child, and parenting her has put me on a path that has shown me i have more tenacity and patience and insight than i ever knew, or maybe just that i am a mom who loves my daughter with every fiber of my being. i have been taught again and again by maya in those exact moments i have been working to imbue her life with whatever knowledge my humble experiences may provide her. as much as i would like to think that as a mama my role is to teach her more than she is able to teach me, the truth is, we have been learning alongside each other for fifteen years now, and the playing field is probably pretty even. i am a better person for having parented maya; i hope one day she will be able to say she is a better person for having been guided and loved by me.

but until that happens, we are here, in the land of all things teen: anxiety, passion, insecurity, dread, bliss, possibility. the sway and rhythm of this dance are things i well remember from my own adolescent years trying to figure out who i was, how things worked, where the pieces connected. but my god that world – and it really wasn’t all that long ago, relatively speaking – would be utterly incomprehensible to my girl given the world she moves through, one that is both so big and so small all at the same time.

navigating my fifteen year old existence meant moving through a landscape fraught with emotional land mines, and those times were simpler. not easier, necessarily, but certainly not so nuanced (read: buried) by a vast and still unfathomable accessibility to images and ideas and perversions in numbers that sit comfortably in the millions. tens of millions. with just a keystroke or three, on phone or tablet or laptop, our kids literally have the ability to find anything. giving maya a mobile phone just before she started middle school shifted her dynamic in the world, and it shifted our collective dynamic as a family. it was a necessary evil we felt we couldn’t avoid – we wanted her to be able to reach us whenever she needed to as she left the tiny campus of her primary school behind and found more autonomy. but that little device in her backpack threw her in to a world of careless connectedness that i find incredibly unhealthy, and i long for the days when a cup of tea and a book were enough to make us both happy.

so as i close up the house on this cold and windy 25th of december and prepare to say goodbye to another christmas, and the new year hovers on a very near horizon, i look beyond a rain-splattered window to thoughts of what the path of 2019 will look like. this is my internal abacus, the one that always shows up in times of big transition – the weighing of what to examine and what to embrace, what to strive for and what to blissfully shed, how to live authentically and with kindness.

the distinct path i see is one of simplicity, and necessity. how do i live my fullest life, encourage my child to live hers, and maintain a space for the world at large and all the care that it needs? I’m not sure, and truthfully the idea of it makes me tired. for now, i think that this year, my 53rd, will be about a return to a more simple way of living, for me and my girl. i will work to see with clear eyes, to eat well and get both of us stronger. to create space mentally and physically, spend as much time as possible with a paintbrush in my hand, and less time in front of a screen. i want more rest, and reading, more road trips and walks in search of shells or stones. i want to find a tai chi class, learn how to make a soufflé, get back to rescuing some perfect dogs.

can i affect great change for me and my girl as one year ends and another begins? create clarity and grace and health and find more space for benevolence?

talk may be cheap, but i am going to try.

gratitude

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years ago, a thanksgiving came and went just like this one, and late at night – like now – with hot tea and under a dim drafting table light so as not to wake the husband and sleeping baby, i sat and wrote a thank you letter to share with all of the people i love. it was called this day, and as i recall, came to be written at the end of a day much like today: an ordinary saturday, one graced by a soft, almost-winter sky, filled with chores and tasks and a few simple meals, a few bursts of laughter, and an evening gathering of old friends and new that warmed like brandy and left me a bit awed for their kindness and authenticity.

my landscape is much changed from the one i occupied all those years ago {fourteen, to be exact} but i still feel very much as i did then. then my daughter maya was a little person in a very little world, one in which naps and diapers and pingu the penguinese-speaking penguin ruled our world. life was simple – although maybe that is just retrospect talking – and need based and lonely and impossibly sweet and challenging in its moment-to-moment tininess. motherhood did not come easy to me; i was 38 when maya was born and i had been traveling and living abroad and chasing images at the end of my paintbrush for a very long time. in the set of years before maya arrived – when it was just ricky and me – i was unlearning a traditional art school education, working my ass off, learning to be a designer, taking yoga every other day and rescuing dogs on every street corner i passed it seemed.

and then came maya. collectively we had no idea what we were doing, and singularly i was not prepared for how much of my life would come to a screeching halt as i shifted my focus to this impossibly small person with impossibly big needs. i was overwhelmed, in love, and terrified i would not know the steps to take on this incredibly scary new path. we sold our house and moved back in to the elegant old apartment by the ocean we had lived in. we paid off our debt and downsized. i could throw maya in her stroller and walk anywhere, including the market. i met moms, new ones, who were brilliant and gorgeous and brought creativity and community to my life and my daughter’s. i learned to let go of the me i had always been, and starting thinking and feeling differently about the world, as an us. once you make that shift, turn the corner in to parenthood, it seems impossible to ever go back.

a dozen years have passed since that suspended set of months and years was all i could see stretched around and beyond me. toddlerhood seemed never ending and as i look back i recall hundreds of moments i would give my eyeteeth to return to and experience once again. i see things i would do differently. things i would do the same. people i would wrap my arms around more frequently because they made such an enormous impact on my life and the life of my girl. you all know who you are, and though our paths don’t intersect as they once did when our little ones moved through the days along side of us, you all hold that particular piece of me that can only be described as my most grateful heart.

last week at maya’s high school thanksgiving celebration, family and students and staff gathered in a remarkable place maya gets to go to every day to learn and evolve and find out about who she really is. there were student exhibits and projects to view, and one in particular both struck and stayed with me. in maya’s philosophy class the students recently read and analyzed plato’s allegory of the cave. during the festivities we had a chance to visit a cave students had constructed. our wrists were bound – representing the chains plato’s cave dwellers were restricted by – and a series of blurry shadow images were projected on to the wall in front of us, fodder for what would be a student-led conversation on reality and assumptions after our time in the cave.

one of the questions eventually posed was where a loss or discrepancy may exist between the shadows {our naive construct of the world around us} and our ultimate understanding of the image behind the shadow {that which really exists}. i searched my mind for an experience or situation i could identify in my own life, where object and shadow contradicted the other’s existence, but couldn’t find a single place where a wash of reality had obliterated the nuance of shadow. this is not naivete – i have lost and fought and been knocked down and sideways plenty in my life. but reality – as harsh and glaring and unpalatable as it may be sometimes – has never been able to permanently eclipse the shadows i see. for me, life seems to have always been imbued with an understanding of shadow not as dark, or remote, or unreal. rather, shadow represents possibility, the necessary negative to a positive {or vice versa}, beauty, perception.

i sat on on my beautiful friend anne’s kitchen counter top last night with two women i never see enough of, and watched handfuls of her european friends pour in to the house for her annual post-thanksgiving potluck, food in hand and cheek-kissing everyone, including me. anne was moving between french and spanish and english and dragging me to the dance floor to shake my stuff amongst a dozen people i don’t yet know. the music was just right, candles were lit and shadows were being thrown around the room as everyone danced and played. anne looked at me and exclaimed in her soft accent, “everyone is so beautiful!” and she was right, they truly were. i have to imagine, it was the cadence of the music, the reflection of their swaying bodies and joyful faces, the shadows doing their work.

which brings me back to now, and here, and gratitude. for every sunset being witnessed at the moment the world quiets, there is a sunrise being seen by a world that is just waking. coffee cups lay stacked in the sink waiting for a wash here, while a squeaky clean cup is being pulled from a shelf there, and filled with coffee or tea in a thousand different languages. for love lost, there is a place of opening where love is discovered, and fostered. and for every object that occupies a space in the world, there too is its reflection, in shadow, claiming its own territory, its right to exist. a gift to us that says, see me, as you will, as you need to, as you are.