Sometimes it is easy to forget who is underneath these pads. Once dressed, they emerge from the locker room with a swagger that suggests gladiators, warriors heading off to battle. But then, the game over, sweaty and stripped down, their sweetness emerges again, those cheeks, that shy gait, the silly jokes, the awkward way they talk about girls.
They are standing on a bridge between boyhood and manhood. They try on toughness along with their pads and then leave it in the locker room, trading it for bubble gum and hockey cards and bright neon green bouncy balls. Hockey gives them a space where they can walk easily between these worlds, at once little boy and tough man, protector.
Max’s hockey team, The Ice Warriors, has had an amazing season which has taught both of us a tremendous amount and offered us many gifts. On Saturday they will be playing in the championship game against a team that has become their arch -rivals: the Penguins to their Capitals, the Yankees to their Redsox, the Ravens to their Steelers, the Jets to their Patriots, the Kiwis to their Kangaroos…you get the point. Calling on all Soul Sisters to send positive energy our way…
The gift on the sidewalk outside the coffeeshop
There comes a time when it is abundantly clear that compassion not ambition is what is needed. There are moments when we gather in small and big numbers to pledge that nurture trumps success and kindness trumps victory. When we realize that giving up and giving in or simply giving, with loving arms open, is the only way forward.
These moments go best with coffee, good coffee, although they are also perfectly paired with tea, or wine or chocolate chip cookies or for that matter water too. Anything that can be shared, given freely, an offering of sorts to seal the deal we make, the promise to be a healing presence in the world. In this space we ask (perhaps for the thousandth time), “What would shift if I adopted love (not defensiveness, or pride or jealousy or fear) as my mantle?” We ask, “How would it be if we recognized the sameness in our humanity? How would everything change? What would it mean?
When we are awake to these moments, when we are conscious about what they mean for the world, if we keep our eyes open, we are often rewarded by a little sign, a sweet treat that tells us that the Universe conspires with us. An inside joke or perhaps a burning bush, a reminder that yes…Love is the only way forward.
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.
Mary Oliver
Every Wednesday night, more or less, for the past few years have been guitar night–when Jeff comes over and when we pour wine and laugh and talk hockey and politics and and play our guitars. We often start with a lesson and then we play some together just for kicks–the songs I love to sing. And then as the night grows old (and I grow sleepy) my friend plays for me as I curl up on the couch and delight in homemade music. Sometimes I sing, and every now and then I dance, but mostly I just listen.
Witnessing a song being born can make my breath catch and cracks me open. “Play me something new” I always insist. When we first met, Jeff played me old standards, but I quickly demanded to hear his originals–the ones he rarely played out. Now, if I am lucky I will hear a song that he wrote just that morning. Tender or wistful songs that offer me a glimpse into a part of my friend’s heart I hadn’t yet known.
When I got my camera, I knew that I wanted to take pictures of my favorite people’s hands, going the things I love to see them do. Yet, I was shy taking out my camera to capture his hands as he played for me that night. I who write or do my art in the safety of solitude, I was confronted with the rawness and vulnerability of creating in front of someone else. Suddenly, in the simple act of raising the camera to my eye, I understood the level of courage it takes to share a new song and in that moment almost drowned in gratitude for what happens in my living room each Wednesday night.
Some days are harder than most, the days when even the most simple of tasks weigh heavy and it is as though the entire universe has dug in its heels and says NO! Days when disappointment and frustration is palpable and progress is laughable. When everything feels impossible. On those days there is only surrender.
And then, sometimes, in the silence that follows the giving up, there are quiet whispers that promise a way forward, or at least change of some sort. Perhaps its an idea, more often its a flower, or a bird song, or the kindness of the guy at the mechanic who is more upset than I that I still have no windshield wipers and the rain is coming…Something that holds me gently and suggests a step in a new direction, or maybe just another breath.
So often, however, I don’t hear the wisdom through the silence but instead am wailing and gnashing my teeth at the unfairness, consumed by my own despair over the endless spinning. The pushing and the wailing both feel so noble but they are no more than an exercise in exhaustion.
I am learning sometimes that giving up and giving in is the wisest of moves. Ironically, it is the only thing that allows me to conserve the energy I need to keep on keeping on.
I don’t know how to teach my son stamina–how to teach him to keep moving forward when the winds of life are pushing back, sweeping sand into his eyes. So much easier it is to sink into the ground, on knees, crumple into a heap, or lay in a position of rest with face to the sun, like a cat with her belly exposed and the sunbeam warm. Is there wisdom in that place of laying down? More wisdom than in the pushing forward against the wind to no avail. What can be learned in that place?
Are we really weak when we admit we can’t go on? Or are we strong to admit that now is not the time to push forward anymore.
Luscious and succulent and dripping with juice. These peaches were tremendous. We ate our fill in the fields and then made a peach and blackberry crumble for dessert that night. All week we ate peaches, sweet and dripping as well as plums of all sizes and colors.
I picked these stone fruits with my dear friend Kaiya and our kids on a farm not far from her house at the height of last summer. The older kids climbed trees to get the best of the crop until they were chased out by the farm workers. The little one handed me the fruit, offering sweetness so naturally. “Abundance is yours” he seemed to say as I began to stagger underneath the weight of all those peaches we picked. Here–yours for the asking.
We had spent the day at the beach–a crazy day with waves so hard they could dislocate your shoulder if they threw you just right. We spent the day on an endless expanse of white flying kites and looking for wild horses. We wanted to go home but we were hungry and the boardwalk was close by. The sparkling arcade lights which started to twinkle as the long day gave in to night captivated this boy and made me hold on far longer than I ever expected to.
When I took these photos I was so fully aware that Max had turned a corner his life. I saw he was no longer the baby I wished him to be. The changes of the last year felt palpable and sudden. On the cusp of turning nine he was fully a big kid now, no longer the little babe I had once rocked. Be-freckled and strong in limb. A little unsure. A bit tentative and awkward. Starting to grapple with the what it means to make the world his own.
Max in a thoughtful moment at hockey practice, early in the season
This past summer, I was in a bit of a fog. It was so easy to look at my life and see what was missing–or rather, how it didn’t match up against all the expectations and dreams I had built up. Even as I wrote endlessly about being in the present, I felt the future tugging at me and taunting me with visions of how what I had just wasn’t enough, how we hadn’t yet arrived, how everything was supposed to be different at this point in my story.
I have always had a hard time with staying here in this moment. Even as a little girl I spent many hours daydreaming about a better life, the life I would lead some day. In some versions of those dreams, I was rescued. In other versions of those dreams, I stumbled upon luck and fortune. In still more versions I myself had moved mountains to create the change. But the common theme was always a change, something different, something other. Now, in the tough times, when life is hard, it feels so easy to console myself with imagining the future–simpler, brighter. Things will get better I tell myself–and I dream it in technicolor.
But there is a problem with this and we all know what it is. Life rarely goes as we plan it and disappointment is inevitable. And while I sit dreaming of an imaginary life, my real life slips by with little notice.
Which brings me to this summer. I was stumbling along, a prisoner of my own discontent. Surely, I would grumble, it was time that I would be rewarded for doing my soul work, for the pain and suffering I endured through my divorce. Surely life was going to get better than THIS…this mundane, difficult, stressful, day in and out slog. And truth is, I hated myself for thinking that way because I knew that I would one day miss that slog. Because even while I complained I saw out of the corner of my eye that it was full of tender kisses, a boy growing up, dear friends blossoming, kindnesses and sorrows too poignant to miss. But there I sat grumbling. I knew I was missing my life by wishing it away to be replaced by a better “someday” and worse still I would catch myself and beat myself up for my lack of gratitude– suffer over my own suffering. It was exhausting.
It was one day in July when I was lying on the acupuncture table, contemplating this crazy space I occupied. Even as my mind wandered I kept bringing it to my breath, to the play of the light against the crystals hanging from the ceiling above me, desperate for a way to ground myself to the present. And it was then, the wisdom bubbled up–at first a whisper and then more of a roar. “You just need to learn how to see”. And I seemed to know, even then, that what I needed was a creative practice that would force me out of contemplation and rumination and into the act of pure observation.
It was not more than a week later that I bought my camera, my first REAL camera. And I began a practice of looking through my lens for no other reason than to simply see. As a beginner photographer I need to pay complete attention to what I am doing. I cannot go on autopilot–every thing is new and requires attention. And attention, I am learning over and over again is nothing short of love. When I lift that camera to my eye I am immersed in details I never bothered to register before: the light, the contrast, the depth of field, the speed, the way that everything changes in a second–one second boldness in her eyes, the next moment fear. Take too long and you might miss it. Taking photos of things I love has helped me to pay attention to them in ways I never have before and it is grounding me, and breaking me open. It has been a creative and spiritual practice.
For the last several months, I have been struggling with what to do here on this blog. It seems as though all the stories I wanted to tell have told themselves. Other stories I have are still too raw or tender or unformed to tell. I had once upon a time imagined a story arc I would hope would play out here, a narrative that would provide adventure, excitement and lots of rich material for writing. But life plays out differently and those stories are not. I have been wordless, something which has been both a relief and a source of deep pain.
Instead, my creative life has looked like this: Me with my camera, living my life, stopping to breathe and relish. My camera has been a tool, like my sitting practice, helping me to hold all that I love about my life RIGHT NOW in front of my own eyes. At hockey practice, or work, at the Max’s school or in the park, at coffee with a friend or a community dinner I may be taking photos and learning to see my life, not as I hoped it would be but isn’t but exactly as it is–sparkling, hopeful, tender, sad, joyful, messy but beautiful and fleeting and mine.
I feel somewhat tender and shy about sharing my photos more broadly. As a lover of photography, I am aware of all the technical ways my photos fall short. I recently showed some of my favorites to a good friend who is a gifted photographer and a pro. And so like a little girl wobbling along on her first two wheeler I am practicing so many things at once: balance, observation, movement, creativity and most importantly love. She was encouraging and kind. “Keep going” she said. “You are doing it!”
I showed up today, hoping to write but realized that my stories flow from these photos now. I have little to say that is new. Instead, these tender shots are the only story I have to tell now. So we will be doing something different for a few weeks here. Its time to start sharing what I have seen, what I love, what is mine to cherish in this miraculous moment unfolding. And maybe the words will come, but if they don’t we can sit in silence together and marvel at how exquisitely life loves us.
I have one of these cool journals. A ten year journal where you have just 4 lines to capture the essence of the day. It is laid out so that on one page one can see what happened on the same day over a period of ten years. February 19, 2009…February 19, 2010…February 19, 2011. After writing the days news yesterday, I looked back over the last three years and sighed. “Nothing’s changed,” I shrugged. Reports of ice time and Caps games and playdates. Same problems, same sadnesses, same simple pleasures that stitched together a day. I grumpily closed my journal and turned over to turn out the light, murmuring about the lack of movement in our simple little life.
But the simple fact is everything changes. All the time. The sameness is just an illusion, a cheap trick. But all it takes is a shimmering ray of sunlight to break the trance.
In the last 3 months, this boy has grown an inch. He’s made friends this year, who don’t live so close to home, on the other side of the county. The first night that he is over there, it is as though he is half a world away. These changes snuck up on me when I wasn’t looking, slowly bit by bit, the way the baby fat disappeared leaving a lean young man at the dinner table doing his homework. Subtle.
Someone I love who was very sick got well, and another person I love who was well got very sick. These things happen, like that, a bomb dropped, a miracle. Sudden.
Jobs change. Addresses change. Adventures arise when we least expect them. People leave. Others come. Some stick around for now. And every now and then we are struck with a remarkable moment of pure laughter and love.
Pay attention to this moment, girl, for all that it brought, tinged with joy or sorrow or maybe both, all it brought is about to slip away. You can try and hold onto it but it will only make you cry when it pulls away from your desperate grasp. Because it will. Are you going to waste this moment here trying to hold onto something that has gone? This is the way we miss our life. We can miss it without even noticing that we are missing it. We can miss it by grieving that we missed it.
A wise teacher once told me that letting go of every breath is the most basic act of faith. The exhalation does not come with a guarantee in writing that if we let go of this air there will be enough to breathe next time and yet we breathe. We are already so practiced in the act of faith. We have been faithful since birth, since the first time we breathed out without knowing if we would ever fill our lungs again.
This is a good thing, because I need that sort of faith to loosen my grasp on the moment and to let it go without knowing what comes next, without worry, without fear, without expectations. All those things get in the way of paying attention. Quick sink in and let it wash over you and bathe it with its warm warm light before it goes again with the exhalation, whoosh…
A couple of weeks ago now (it feels like a lifetime), Max and I were stuck in a terrible snowstorm. It was the kind of snowstorm that brings down trees and turns DC roads into a mess. Like everyone else, we left the office early, but it wasn’t early enough. By the time we hit the roads, traffic was at a virtual standstill. My normal 25 minute commute lasted almost 6 hours.
But the point at which we arrived home is the end of the story. What is more fascinating is what happened in between.
For the first hour it felt like an adventure. We were moving along at a snail’s pace but we were certain we would make it home for dinner time. I dreamt of what I would cook and was comforted by the fire I would start, the cup of tea I would make within minutes of our arrival.
In the second hour, we started to get a bit itchy, but were certain that we would make it home for the Caps game on TV. The cup of tea turned into a glass of wine. I would need it after all this stop and go.
In the third hour it was clear that we would miss the start of the game, and that dinner would in fact be a long ways away. All the dreaming of tea and wine had made me thirsty. Max had fallen asleep in the car and everything on the radio began to feel old. We had moved barely 10 feet. I began to think we would be there all night. It was then that irritation and restlessness started to set in. Suddenly I was flooded with visions of being home in front of a warm cozy fire, a smooth glass of wine in my hand, the Caps game on the big TV and I wanted to scream and lay on my horn as though that would make the seas part. As I sat uncomfortably, munching on a donut that Max had earlier scavenged from the crevices of the back seat, misery snuck into the passenger seat and taunted me. “You’re not home” it whined. “This is miserable.”
And then something happened that saved me. I learned that the power was out at home.
Transformers had blown and the entire neighborhood was out. The house was cold and dark. There would be no tea, no Caps game, no warm dinner. All my visions of what could have been went up in smoke and I suddenly saw my situation much more clearly.
I was warm. There was an interesting story on the radio. Max was dozing in and out, but relatively content snuggled up in a sleeping back in the back seat. When he woke up from his naps we chatted about things we rarely had time to talk about. While we didn’t have a full tank, we had plenty of gas. The woman in the car in front of me was chatty and kind and together we were moving the branches that fell in our path. The man in the car crawling along in the right hand lane was patient and funny and compassionate, checking in on Max. We could melt snow for water. The stale donuts in the back of the car had filled us up. There was in fact, nothing truly miserable about our situation.
Somewhere in between hour four and five, I had one of those epiphanies that make me feel so naive, like a too-smart schoolgirl, stung by the simplest of lessons she had missed. Rarely does my suffering arise from my life’s circumstances. It is not what my life is that causes me pain. More often than not, when I suffer, it it caused by my disappointment about what my life is not. After all these years, that teaching had never sunk in so profoundly, but rather it had floated about on the surface of my intellect. But suddenly, in the midst of that thick wet snow that promised to hold us hostage, a switch was flipped and I could no longer deny it.
As I turned off the traffic filled road and onto a snow choked side street, I breathed into the reality that we were Ok, more than OK in fact. And while I had no idea of what would happen next I was certain that everything seems to change, even if its slowly.
With the newness of my understanding settling, I felt a bit sheepish and even a bit childish in my complete lack of understanding. All these years, even as I had talked the talk about non-attachment, I find I wound the tendrils of my happiness firmly around visions of some false future and then whine when its somehow different.
Its a habit, a very hard one to break.
I am being gentle with myself now. It takes a lot of courage to admit that most of my pain and misery is truly just an illusion. I have nursed my suffering so for so many years. As I tended my own wounds I felt, I don’t know…. Complete. Worldly. Complex. Deep.
Thats not to say that my pain wasn’t real. Just that not all of it was necessary. And while there is grief that will be unavoidable, real sorrows and feelings of loss, I can save myself from a whole lot of manufactured hurt if I dare. I’d like to think there is infinite value in being able to see behind the veil of my own disappointment into the richness of my own magnificent life.
