The Wind at our Backs

This Christmas Eve, I ran the hills around my house. It was bizarrely warm out- 60 degrees- as it has been many days these last two months. It is the warmest, most snowless winter on record for Buffalo, and has been warm enough that the fallow farmland is now sprouting emerald green shoots of grass as far as the eye can see. It looks and smells exactly like a perfect spring day with the glaring exception that the sun is hanging in the wrong corner of the sky and casting far too mellow a glow across the landscape to which it is awkwardly married.

I found myself thinking of friends who had told me in recent months that they could not endure another Buffalo winter. For while most people who live here love something about the snow, even if they tire of it by February's gracefully short end, there are those few who begin to brace themselves against our long white season as soon as fall comes, as if bracing for an assault. On their account, I thought, "This one's for you."

I also found myself surprised yet again by the fact that on my way east down 20A, it felt for all the world like a perfectly windless day, but then when I turned 180 degrees and headed westward and homeward, the wind was quite formidable against me. And how funny it is that the wind gets no credit when it is at our backs, quietly aiding our efforts. We only notice it when it hinders us.


So it is with most things: that which is gracious or harmonious with our efforts and desires, we quickly assimilate into our own sense of efficacy. While we may initially acknowledge it a gift, we somehow begin to credit ourselves with it over time. Only when that assistance is taken away can we see how dramatically it added to what we ourselves produced. Perhaps it helps us to take ownership of all that propels us forward; paying too much tribute to outside helpful forces may strip us of a sense of efficacy that builds on itself until we truly are contributing much more to our own success. But I suspect this is a fallacy, that an abiding awareness of our limitations combined with deep gratitude that we are nevertheless able to do more than we ought, can give us much more.

Anticipation Conflation

The other day I started a round of antibiotics and I keep not being able to remember if I took my last dose. I'm worried about forgetting to take one so it comes to mind often, and I go so far as imagining taking one before I actually do. Then the act of taking one is so quick that somehow the memory of taking a pill gets collapsed into the memory of anticipating taking it, such that I can't remember, five minutes later, whether I took a pill or whether I just imagined I did; I keep having to count how many are left.

That phenomenon, so concrete in the pill example, because the anticipated action is so brief and thus easy to forget, is a fascinating one and makes me wonder how much of our memories of actual events in our history are at least partially conflated with our memory of our anticipation leading up to the event, in which we imagined, perhaps many times, if we were excited or nervous, what the event would be like. It seems like an easy way for details to become shuffled, in retrospect.

I think particularly of the potent memories of childhood Christmases and wonder how much I am remembering those magical mornings themselves, versus the days and weeks leading up to Christmas, which were filled with anticipation and wonder.

When we greatly anticipate a thing, the thing itself becomes the culmination of all our imaginings, is but the top layer adorning a stack of imagined versions of the event itself. But we forget this when we recall it; we remember it as a single thing rather than the many that it is.

Standing Still

Corn cut off at the stalk and golden, broken,
Studs the grasses of the autumn afternoon.
Its hollow reeds are whistling thin
Beneath the windmills' constant whir.
Complacent as a teenager, not doing anything
But standing still. I'm standing still.

Kitty & Dog

Every night for the past few weeks, Natalie has been asking me to play Kitty & Dog with her, where I pretend to be a cat and she pretends to be a dog. We crawl around the floor on our hands and knees for a half hour before she goes to bed, pretending to lap water from a bowl, curl up and sleep on the ground, and play with a ball. Sometimes it gets more complicated than that, like when we write each other letters about our vacations and put them in each others' "mailbox," and read them aloud to each other. Or sometimes she says, "OK, now you be my person," and I take her to the "park" to play fetch. (We actually do play fetch).

I have been surprised at how much I have come to look forward to this game each night. of course, I have the normal adult reluctance (though much less so now than when we first started this)-- the feeling we so often have of trying to put kids off, of trying to make them happy entertaining themselves for five more minutes while we finish another chore, the feeling of urgency to complete our own list of chores (which honestly do need to get done).

But there is time for this. I've been overcome with the realization that when I get down on all-fours with my five year old, I enter into her world. It's this fantastical place existing just on the other side of a veil from the world in which I'm forever completing tasks, and she's extending me an invitation, and by some miracle, when I say yes, I am allowed to enter in. It saddens me to think of how often I refuse, because what she's really asking me is, "Will you be with me, in this moment, right now?"

It's only when we are playing together that I experience her personality in its fullness, and strangely, once I cross that threshold into her world, all of the urgency of my own world melts away, and I realize that I'm engaged in the most important activity I could possibly be doing. (And it relieves my stress).

I think that we all, as children, naturally know how to invite people into our world, but that it's a skill many of us lose as we grow older. Natalie has reminded me of how to open that door of Self to usher others in, and there's nothing better than a shared activity to make it happen.

The other night when we were playing Kitty & Dog, she suggested, "OK, let's pretend that you're Mother and I'm Natalie and we're playing together." She didn't want to crawl around on the floor any more but she wanted me to stay in her world. So I did. If she had said that to me when we weren't already playing Kitty & Dog, I don't think I would have understood. But I did. I am learning, slowly.

Control and Freedom

When something we care about is outside of our control, we often force something else which we can control to act as a proxy for that thing. My husband observed early on in our marriage that when I was upset about something, I would wash dishes. A sink full of dirty dishes was never the thing that was upsetting me, but cleaning them up really did make me feel better because it was something that I could control; I couldn't immediately solve the bigger problems in my life but I could at least put my house into order.

I do something similar with running races. What I care most about is running as fast as I can for a sustained period, but there is no clear way to measure my success at that effort other than a nebulous sense of how I feel. So instead I monitor other closely related things which are easier to control and measure, such as how many steps I am taking per minute, and how many steps I take with each inhalation and exhalation. I focus on what I can control and quantify, and stand these things in the stead of that which is outside of my control.

Our sense of control over our lives, over our ability to obtain what we need, is the constant work of our minds. We are always busy with the energy of that task, however subtly. Sometimes that effort reaches our direct consciousness, often when we fear loss of control. The use of proxies, of substituting something we can control for something we cannot, is just one of many ways that we maintain the illusion of control. We are desperate to maintain it.

But while the mind toils to control things, our hearts crave the opposite of control-- freedom. I love the Christian concept that love cannot exist without free will, that the God who created all things and could have chosen to maintain control over all of creation nevertheless created human beings who are able to choose not to love-- which is another way of saying that human beings can love. Any attempt to control love ends it. It can only be given and accepted, never required.

Last weekend I spent some time running alone in a cemetery to warm up before a race. I kept my pace slow, and focused on my form. I watched several docile geese tottering silently out of my path as I approached, and deer springing noisily around in the distance in their fright. As I rounded a corner near the back of the grave yard, I came face to face with a wall of tall grain swaying quietly just beyond the path, with their heavy heads drowsing in the wind. They all moved as one, like dancers. They seemed to radiate love with their movement, and it struck me that all things in this world, anything to which life has been given, is full of love. It lives in the tall grasses as much as it lives in me. We all draw our graceful movements from the same source-- from life, love. They are one. We all are one.

I felt relieved of some wrong notion of love, some feeling that love comes in limited quantities, that it must or even can be earned, that it could ever be withheld. Nobody can deprive us of love because it is in our breath. No one can take it away because it is everywhere-- in each blade of grass, in the geese, the deer. It is the force that sustains the world. When someone important fails us, love is nevertheless available to us in abundance, because the person who hurt us was never the source of love anyway. They were just one conduit and there are many. Ultimately the only way to cut ourselves off from the experience of this great love is to exercise our free will to refuse it. We can insist upon receiving it from a certain source, while closing ourselves off to its million other manifestations.  Love is in all things; it is only ours to be open to it. This is always a choice that we have.

The Canopy of Conversation

When we are small, a canopy of conversation spreads above our heads. Before we can speak it is a part of our environment, like the trees rustling in the forest when we walk. The texture of voices and the emotion they contain inform our sensibilities long before we begin to decipher that other layer of language, that which we impose upon words and call meaning. But there is another sense in which language has meaning, apart from even the words themselves, and this other form of meaning teaches us just as much. Sometimes words obscure those other meanings and become like clouds covering over that sky spread above us.

As we grow taller, we begin to poke our noses into that canopy, begin trying the words in our own mouths: we engage. And after adulthood we have so few new occasions to experience that sensation again, of finding a new world of language. I think that is why I enjoy the ladies' locker room at the gym so much. I go midday, to change before I go on a run outdoors on my lunch break, most days of the week. At that hour, I am by far the youngest person there, in my mid-30s. Everyone else is 70 at least, and they come every day in large groups to take fitness classes in the pool. They all know each other and the place is filled with mirth. (In fact, just the other day one of the women forgot her underwear so a whole group of the ladies decided to go commando with her!)

But mostly what I overhear is conversations about visiting their grown children in other states and trying not to impose; who they hired to do their yard work; things their doctors told them. One woman brought in a quilt she had made to show her friends one day. There's a rich social environment there that I want to be a part of-- not now, but some day. I want to be the kind of person who behaves that way when I'm 80-- someone who's still meaningfully connected and engaged, thoughtful and open. I guess I am at least in the right place.

I have the feeling, when I am around them, of being a child again in a grown up world that I am not yet ready to access or even to fully understand, but one that I hope to gain the language for one day. It's a precious thing, at 36, to be able to feel that way. It reminds me of running around extended family members' houses on holidays playing games with other children while the grown ups cooked the meal-- feeling carefree and surrounded by the ones who are carrying the real weight of existence, because they are a head taller than I am, rustling above me, forming the shape of the larger world around me. One day I hope to be one of the few left looking out above the forest canopy and still shaking my leaves with laughter while the children run around my feet.

Do Not Grudge Her

Do not grudge a woman her quiet imitation of a flower,
Though you may say it's only a daisy, and how obviously
She's tripping over metaphors.

Maybe she never knew how to open her face like that
And honor the sun with her simplicity,
Without holding a thousand small intentions in reserve.

And maybe she's never known the art of holding her own space
Without her silence turning into acquiescence,
Trusting the slender stalk of her being

To waft her fragrance out across the field grasses
She towers over, wondering when the wind
Will come to stir her essence up

With others now that she has learned how to be still,
To bend and open.
Do not grudge her all the beauty of her silence.