Neither of my children has moved away from me. They come freely to me for hugs and comfort. But I prepare. I remind myself:  They will leave. It’s as inevitable as the date that seems months away and is suddenly here, and then after a night of tearing open packages and putting logs on the fire, of sipping tea and breaking off yet another piece of toffee, it’s gone for another year. Yet unlike Christmases and birthdays and sunny vacations, my son will never be blurry-eyed and eight again. His neck will never smell just like this. Already, I can’t remember his infant scent or the feel of his two-year old hand. They are gone. For this fleetingness, I cry. And try – try perhaps too hard – to be thankful. Because if I can’t be thankful for it, all I am left with is the longing for that which is passing even as I hold it warmly in my arms.

——-

Post-script to last week’s post:  Thank you for your support. I was buoyed, humbled, warmed, and strengthened. Something shitty has happened – but shitty things happen and each one is an opportunity. I believe this.  Not that this was particularly shitty – it just was – but somehow this has reminded me of how when I was really pregnant with Bella and two or even three times a night I’d need to go to the bathroom, which meant sllllowly descending the very steep, rickety steps of the old farmhouse where we lived, grasping onto the hand railing and trying to focus my eyes in the dark, I’d repeat a mantra: “At least we have a toilet; at least we have a toilet…” This would get me to the bathroom without cursing – and sometimes even smiling. I’m not sure what my mantra is now, but I do know that you have all been holding on to my ankles this week, anchoring me so that I don’t fall away  into shame or ablaze into anger. Thank you.

“He was not interested in spirituality as a form of escape. He was training people to become ‘sacred warriors’ — not so that they could do battle with others but so that they could develop the kind of courage one needs to be kind and happy and radically alive in the midst of the world. There is no dry land, he said; there is only fearlessnes, which is to be found in the heart. This is the path to freedom.”

I just re-found across this quote from Elizabeth Lesser describing the Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa. I needed it today. Reading this now, I am tapping into the words RADICALLY ALIVE, FEARLESSNESS, HEART, and FREEDOM. I am remembering the part in me that is feral. I am standing by the ocean, its roar washing over me, drowning out the voice in my head: You are not enough, not enough, not enough…

I had some tough news yesterday – news of a violation of implicit trust, news that someone I’d hoped might be a bigger person is, after all, trying to bring me down. Down into the mud of shame.  I spent all last night down there – sinking far into the muck, believing every last bad thing about myself while also shuddering in disbelief at this person’s cruelty.

Today – cloudy and cold, yes, but a new haircut on my head, a kale and olive salad in my belly that was prepared for me by my sweet partner, a pot of spicy molé chili on the stovetop filling the house with the aroma of pepper and chocolate. Today – I am breathing into my heart center, remembering what I’ve done and where I’ll go. Remembering that this particular muck does not need to be mine.

“Stay in the energy of your path bringing you to who and where you are today. Don’t let this rendition of the past alter your growth from it.” This text message came across the screen of my phone, directly from my friend who is at Kripalu now, that space and place where I grew so much, the place and space in which I connected daily with fearlessness. A place that reminds me — even thousands of miles from it — to be radically alive. Thank you,  Mary. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Swami K. Thank you, Elizabeth Lesser and Chögyam Trungpa.

Increasingly, I see that it’s my attitude toward time that matters most. Can I unwrap this victim mentality? Doing so means ceasing to view time as an obstacle. How much can I let time go altogether? Here is a bramble of thought on time by the Irish poet-philosopher John O’Donohue that resonated. It comes from a podcast with Krista Tippet, thus its rambling nature.

We equate time with space when in actuality time is unshaped. … Expectation creates the future, and the imagination you bring to the new dawn will surprise you and bless you with new things. The actual depth of your approach to a thing will be the thing that coaxes the thing to yield more and bring more. … Time has become the enemy. Stress is a perverted relationship to time. Instead of being the subject of your own time, you’ve become its target and victim. 

O’Donohue goes on to paraphrase the 13th century mystic, Meister Eckhart:  ”‘What should I do?’ is not the question but ‘How should I be?’” It’s the energy, in other words, that you bring to any action that matters.

Bella - then

Yesterday I took a sunny, crisp, mind-clearing walk with a friend. She’s a dancer, a yogi, and the mother of a babbling, amazingly sweet toddler. When I’m with them, I can see myself a few years back with my own children. It’s amazing  how quickly you forget that earlier iteration of your mothering self, but there I was yesterday in my mind’s eye pushing a 19-month old Bella, already well into my pregnancy with Tobey. I am in awe of that younger self’s bravery (or  naivete?) in taking on two kids in such a short period. As we walked, my friend spoke of her own pondering about having another child, a decision she measures against the backdrop of her creative self. After experiencing much frustrating regarding her loss of creative time, she only recently relinquished herself to motherhood, accepting that this is what she is meant to do now during her son’s youngest years — to  mother, to be present for him. But then in the late autumn she had a chance to collaborate with a friend on a dance project-cum-film and she reconnected with the artist in her, a part she’d told herself was alright lying dormant. “No, this is also who I am; this is a big part of me!” she’d realized.

And yet how to do it all? To do it as we’d most like. To be present for our children; to be present for our selves. And, yes, to keep our economic chins above water.

There’s no answer. That’s why I’ve never written a book on the subject of motherhood and creativity, though it was my original intent with this blog. The puzzle is an impossible one if you are trying in our linear fashion to make it all work. It will not work – not if you’re putting the pieces on the table and connecting one into the next. You need to look for another layer – to levitate a layer or hold one layer in your mind’s eye. You need to work on a different plane. Which is why that sense of HOW not WHAT is so paramount.

“Look out in the world, find a woman who is teaching, is single, raising a kid and writing books and book reviews. When you find that person, I want to drink her blood.”

This week I also came across this bit from the Writer’s Almanac regarding the short story writer Lorrie Moore, who hit upon success very young — she had a story published in Seventeen before she was twenty — and then went quiet for a period:  ”Her most recent book is 2009′s A Gate at the Stairs; it was her first book in 11 years, and her first novel in 15. She was busy in the intervening years, even if she wasn’t writing. ‘I was teaching. I got divorced (in 2001). I was a single parent raising my kid alone. Look out in the world, find a woman who is teaching, is single, raising a kid and writing books and book reviews. When you find that person, I want to drink her blood.’”

I laughed and applauded as I read this, the sound of my hands echoing in my quiet dining room. I wanted to drive up to Madison, where I believe Moore lives, and hug her. It was a gift to know that this talented, successful writer could not do it all either. At least not in the usual way, not in the way that the average 21st century American eye discerns successful.

I am scanning my week ahead – a deadline here, a phone meeting there, swim practice and dance lessons and cello and violin – and breathing in a sense of wonder at  myself but also a sense of lightness, a belief that what will get is enough and the rest will wait. I wish I could work entirely without a schedule, eschewing a calendar. And yet as a citizen with others dependent on me and me on them, I can’t quite do this. But can I wink at my calendar? Can I poke it teasingly? Can I forgive myself entirely when I slip up and don’t appear somewhere? This is my attempt at paying attention to the how  more than the what.

“Smile, breathe and go slowly.” 
― Thich Nhat Hanh

This year I want to be slow.

Slow as molasses.
I want to learn patience that was never there,
marvel at dust motes
hear the cat snore and the clock tick.

I want to be slow as Tich Nhat Hanh.
He leads meditation centers, writes a book – sometimes two, sometimes three – a year
and calligraphs hundreds of scrolls,
all while walking like a tortoise, an elephant, an ancient dog.
No where to go, nothing to do.

This year I will be slow
so that I can remember that the so much of what we think we want is actually the source of our unhappiness (as per the rabbi in this podcast),
so that I can read friend’s entire blog posts and visit every link instead of scanning.

Slow food

Slow money

Slow sex

Slow cleaning

Slow driving

Slow parenting.

I asked the Universe for slow and got a chest cold.
I asked the Universe for slow and got a shoulder pain and a crick in my neck.
I asked the Universe for slow and got a 60-degree day in January just meant for an afternoon stroll.

Slowing to mindfully appreciate my world.
Slowing to hear my inner voice and those of the people closest to me.
Slowing to practice patience.
Slowing into grace.

It was all there in one gaze point on one late December evening.

I broke my drishti and shifted to my left leg, re-finding the pale strip whose story was so delightfully unfolding. Just then, a car took a turn and threw my little point of focus into high definition with its headlights. A tree! What I had made out as a yard or two of sidewalk was actually a tree trunk, its upper branches hidden by my limited view out the window.

I smiled. What else do I believe I know and yet am actually blurry-eyed in my perception? What other stories do I tell myself based on “facts” pieced together by my limited senses? And if you’re gazing intently with curiosity and love, does it matter which truth appears?

Last week I was looking for a photo on my camera of my daughter in her new glasses and realized there was a minute-long video that started with the same pose: Bella standing in front of the camera smiling in her magenta specs. I’d taken the photo, but I had no recollection of a video. I clicked on it and wasn’t surprised to hear my son narrating in his best side show barker’s voice, “So this is Bella with her glasses!” while my daughter hammed it up. Typical.

But then you hear a voice nearby, not at all playful or in sync with the video maker and his actress. “Where is my purse?” the voice asks, a tad panicked, a bit annoyed. The camera swoops down to the floor to find me kneeling in front of my bag, searching through it,  no doubt pulling out old grocery lists and yoga class routines — both of which litter my bag – and muttering to myself. Also, I’m sorry to admit, typical.

My anxiety rises and Bella leaves the photo shoot, returning within seconds with the “lost” purse. She is unfazed, as is her brother. This is clearly a common occurrence: lost purse, misplaced keys, spelling words gone awry, one boot vanished. Typical.

What I saw in that video is how hugely distracted I can be. Not in my body. Not in the moment. I didn’t have a clue that someone was filming me (admittedly this is partly because Tobey wields the camera so often that it’s sometimes like living on a reality TV show), or that this comedic moment was occurring right above me.

I often remind myself to enjoy my kids now as we all know how fast it goes. And I often think I do a pretty good job of this. But this little moment, captured now for youtube and beyond, makes me wonder just how often I’m actually very much not here.

May 2012 be the year of coming into my present moment. Solidly. Mindfully. Here.

So here are two things that came to me last week, both via the Writer’s Almanac, both speaking legions about how we spend  time in our short, short lives. Looking at my time – how I spend it, what nourishes me and what depletes, what choices do I have and how can I remember that I made these choices when I’m feeling frustrated with them some time down the line  – is one thing I’m doing during this end of year time.

The first is about Willa Cather. I love the sense that her regular job took too much time away from her writing. Not a child or a partner even, just the rigor of an office. There is truly a romantic notion of time here … and yet lessons/questions about priorities.

Willa Cather worked at McClure’s for five years, but it was stressful work, and she was not writing much of her own fiction. In December of 1908, she got a letter from her mentor, the writer Sarah Orne Jewett. Jewett wrote: “My dear Willa, — I have been thinking about you and hoping that things are going well. I cannot help saying what I think about your writing and its being hindered by such incessant, important, responsible work as you have in your hands now. I do think that it is impossible for you to work so hard and yet have your gifts mature as they should — when one’s first working power has spent itself nothing ever brings it back just the same, and I do wish in my heart that the force of this very year could have gone into three or four stories. [...] I want you to be surer of your backgrounds, — you have your Nebraska life, — a child’s Virginia, and now an intimate knowledge of what we are pleased to call the ‘Bohemia’ of newspaper and magazine-office life. These are uncommon equipment, but you don’t see them yet quite enough from the outside [...] You need to dream your dreams and go on to new and more shining ideals, to be aware of ‘the gleam’ and to follow it; your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices, and all society, all Bohemia; the city, the country — in short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up.”

And then a poem from Jim Harrison. “Throw the furniture out the window and begin sweeping.” Indeed!

Niagra Falls by Annie Leibovitz

“Going to the source.” I’ve been thinking about this phrase ever since reading an article by Annie Leibowitz about her new book, PILGRIMAGE, for which she visited and photographed the homes of some of her favorite artists, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Emily Dickinson, and Ansel Adams, as well as other famous sources (if you can consider a home to be a sort of creative geographical source point), such as Niagra Falls and Freud’s couch. The project is not sexy. It was not, agents and friends told her, money making. But it was what she needed to save herself.

“I was having a tough time,” she writes, “and needed to clear my mind and fill myself up again with what I care about. I have learned over the years how to look after myself and my work, and know that at a certain point it’s good to go off and find a different road. It is a matter of stopping and refuelling, filling yourself up again before you lose all feeling. Bringing yourself back.”

“Where is my source?” I’ve been wondering. Is it a place. A feeling. A stack of books.

I picture a well, cool and deep, seemingly endless, full of fresh water with which to revive and refill. But where is this well?

It exists near the pasture on the back forty of my subconscious.

Last week, my kids were gone. In the silence, I was able to glimpse the well, to feel it out at the boundaries. It exists near the pasture on the back forty of my subconscious.  A sigh of relief:  It’s still there.

This week, my kids are back. My job is hopping and dashing with deadlines. The dishes are encrusted with eggs and hummus. My partner has a look of  mortality on his face. The school board is making shitty decisions. And the well is out of view — round the bend, down the mountain, and lost in some woods. Well? What well? I hope … I trust that I’ll see it again.

Tonight I went to see a really amazing production of Hamlet. The play is abbreviated but so cleverly that I can’t even tell you what’s missing. I’ll be getting out my giant mustard yellow Shakespeare tome tomorrow in order to revisit the original — the book that  has “TOM” written in bubble letters in different colored ballpoint pen on the pages, helping me to remember who I was dating when I took Miriam Gilbert’s Shakespeare class my junior year. Although this production has the barest set design and costumes, it is clever. When Hamlet reminds his mother of her former husband, he does so by showing her an image on a cell phone, then scrolls to the next to show her her current incestuous choice. At one point, annoyed by his “friends,” Hamlet pretend shoots the pistol he ominously carries about and declares “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead!” I chortled out loud at the reference to Tom Stoppard, but then wondered if that line is actually in the original play but so emphasized here that I heard it anew. (Over wine with a playwright friend afterward, she said there were a few embellishments, such as this, for humorous affect.)

At the top of one page he’d jotted LAY-AIR-TEEZ.

The young man next to me, however, did not chortle. In fact, he looked over at me a bit startled, completely unsure as to why this could possibly be funny. He had been furiously writing notes throughout the play, no doubt assigned by a class to provide a blow-by-blow analysis; “Ophelia is distraught.” At the top of one page — probably trying to remember a character’s name that he couldn’t quite decipher — he’d jotted LAY-AIR-TEEZ.

Hamlet was new to him. Entirely fresh. THIS was his source. Katie Consamus, the actor playing the lead (and the reason I was at the play — she is a student at the yoga studio where I teach, and when she told me that she was completing her MFA thesis in the next two weeks in the form of playing the lead in Hamlet, I had to go) will forever be this guy’s source for Hamlet. Hamlet played by a woman. Hamlet in Doc Martens and tight black jeans. The bit with the cell phone — well, I assume he’s smart enough to know that this bit wasn’t in the original, but even still, it will be in his original.

Hearing the actors deliver the lines tonight, it was probably my sixth or seventh time through the play.  In some ways, of course, it’s old. Ancient. Arguably thread bear. “To thine own self be true.” “Brevity is the soul of wit.” “Frailty, thy name is woman.” On and on the lines keep coming like a Casey Kasem New Year’s Eve show. And yet not only are they inarguably genius in that they remain fresh centuries after they were written, but also my hearing of them is, of course, different because I am different from the last time I heard this play. I have kids. I’ve lost my dad. I’m divorced. Different.  There is a speech about living in the moment that I’d never noticed before and another line about every father having seen his father’s death which meant something new to me this time.

We go to the source and the source shifts.

The source is, of course, us. The source for me is my yoga mat. The blank page. The woods. Swimming. Anywhere and any time that I can breathe deeply and dive down into that water. So why do I lose it so quickly in the daily jumble and  mess? And why am I often so sure that if I didn’t have kids, I wouldn’t become so disconnected from it? The fucking annoying and amazing thing is that it’s in our kids. The source, I mean. When they’re making that racket and turning their noses up at the breakfast I just made and UTTERLY forcing any creative thought out of my head … they are the source. I haven’t quite unraveled how this works, but I know that it’s true. As much as they deplete my work and make it hard for me to so much as remember that I have a well within me — that I sit on a goddamn aquafier — they are filling that well.

And the opportunity to visit it, to dip down could come at any time. Don’t count the days when it was there in the past; don’t enjoy thoughts of future visits. Go now. Prepare to bow deeply.

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is ’t to leave betimes? Let be.  ~ Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2

“All of the time giving up could be spent on the things that we have.” ~ lyrics from “Time Is Running Out” by the Parson Red Heads

Sitting in the stands looking down at a small six-lane pool in which my daughter is competing in her first swim meet, I can see her checking the event numbers written on her hand. She got disqualified on her first event when she forgot to put on her goggles and then stopped cold when she hit the water and realized what she was missing. Her next event, the 50 fly, earned her a 5^th place ribbon (they’re a bit more judicious with the ribbons than when I was a kid). Last up—the 100 free.

The morning started early. Earlier even than we’d planned. We got up at 6:00 AM and left the house close to our goal of 6:30. In the dark, cold car, I nestled my cup of steaming team in a safe place and stuck our backpacks in the hatch. “Will it ever get light out?” Bella asked, a bit worried that today it may not. Turning on the car I noticed the clock:  5:36. “Could we possibly be early?” I ventured, thinking through all of the steps – including back to a few weeks ago when I changed Bella’s clock after the time change. That was the clock that had gotten us up just 36 minutes ago.

The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali

“Oh, I had to re-do my clock a little bit ago, and I set it by my watch …. which is wrong,” Bella admitted sheepishly.

I felt a twinge of frustration but also knew that three years ago I would have been upset and ten years ago I would have been pissed. This morning, I very quickly switched to relatively amused. A good thing given what happened next:  I realized that in changing everything from my regular bag to the backpack, I’d forgotten my house keys and we were locked out. I didn’t want to ring the doorbell and wake up everyone inside, so a backup plan emerged. “Let’s go get breakfast.” We headed back to the car but in the darkness I hit the wrong button on my car clicker. Then another wrong button. Enough wrong buttons and my car believed I was trying to steal it. “BLANG BLANG BLANG!!!” The car alarm went off for a full minute before falling silent.

I could just make out my daughter smiling at me through the murky light. “Well, this is getting off to an interesting start,” she laughed.

******

Bella will surely be tired. She has a right to be – she ran a 5K yesterday. It was her fourth one and among her slowest. She’s training for a 10K that she’ll run on Thanksgiving so she’s been running every week with a friend-trainer. She’s intent on doing the race, but speed isn’t her thing. After Saturday’s race when I reminded her of her fastest time – six minutes faster – she was a bit testy with me. “I have my pace and that’s just what I do, ” she said firmly.

Given that swimming is all about times, I wonder how she’ll do with this. What she’s known for the last six months since she started practicing with a team is up and down the lane, a steady-Eddie progression occasionally punctuated by sprinting. I swam as a kid and I loved being part of a team. I loved the way my body felt when I got done with a hard workout. But I didn’t like the tyranny of the clock. Still, I was obsessed with it. Qualifying times were written on the bulletin board above my bed. I knew them by heart and was their slave. Deep down I hate them. Couldn’t we just swim?

“Tick. Tock. You are 45. Your kids are getting older. They’ll be gone before you know it.”

Today — two days after the swim meet — Bella has left for Washington, DC with her brother and dad, who has been in Africa much of the fall and just returned. Following two months of nearly non-stop parenting, my children’s absence is a bit shocking. I’m sitting alone in the house listening to the cat eat his kibbles and the ticking of the clock. “Tick. Tock. You are 45. Your kids are getting older. They’ll be gone before you know it,” the clock says.

On the way to the airport, Bella figured out how to change the time on her wristwatch. She switched it to CDT right then and there even though we pointed out that now it will be off by an hour when she lands on the east coast. She didn’t mind.

She packed with her a few good luck cards for the 10K she’ll be running on Thursday, as well as a new shirt from her running buddy and a locket that was my good luck charm through years of swim meets. “I’ll call you before AND after the race,” she told me as hugged on the airport curb. How long it takes her to run this race clearly doesn’t interest her. That she’s worked toward this goal and will actually do it – with her dad at her side and family to cheer her on – pleases her immensely. Just as it should. Some things are timeless.

Last weekend:  I spent the night at my ex-mother-in-law’s house, in a bed I’ve slept in with each of my children and, of course, with my ex-husband. I remember when she first moved into the house following a long divorce. It’s a cottage, perfectly suited to one person, and though she had mixed feelings, we were happy for her. When we visited there with a baby and a toddler, I — so thankful to have people to look after my kids — escaped and spent an entire day in that bed reading The DaVinci Code. Now, who knows if or when I’ll sleep there again. That she welcomed me and that I wanted to be there was a happy enough occasion in itself.

The night before that:  I shared a room with a dear friend, a woman I met the summer before last at yoga camp. We’d gravitated toward each other within the first few days of the training — two of the few who were over 40 in our dorm room of 22 women. Funny, gregarious, always kind, my friend is Lucille Ball, and I’m, um, well I’m the straight sidekick, for sure. It took maybe a week of knowing her that I told her I loved her. I was that sure that she was and would remain a dear friend – a person who would be in my life for years to come.

We always think this when we love someone. When they’re suited to us. And yet with age we wizen a bit. The forevers of junior high give way to a very long time and then to a sense of knowing someone as long as you can, as long as it serves you both, as long as luck and life hold out.

Short notice. Almost no notice. Gone.

Two days ago:  An email came from another friend, a woman I shared a writing group with for about seven years. She was writing from her new home abroad to tell some of us that a friend of hers who I’d never met but about whom I’d read pages and pages had just died. Pneumonia. Short notice. Almost no notice. Gone.

We know this. It’s always possible. Always around the corner. And yet how nearly impossible it is to know it. Among those who do intimately understand this fleetingness, you can sense it in their energy, like those in Harry Potter who can see the thestrels.

Yesterday:  On that same run, I passed a glaringly red-orange rose, almost trashy in its color. Way too much Joan Rivers, not nearly enough Katherine Hepburn. But it was an amazing flower to be here at all after a few nights when temperatures had been in the upper 30s. All of its siblings had wilted. I ran by it, then stopped and mindfully walked back. Careful not to step on the pansies and other plants, still green, underneath the climbing, thorny rose, I leaned in to smell it. It smelled as it should, not like a grocery store flower, and I inhaled with gratitude.