Hey there

I continue to revel in the unexpected inner brightness that had me up and alert at 5 am this morning and has not dropped me yet.

The first hour of my morning I spent snuggled in my bedroom beneath the warm halo of light from my bedside lamp, reading "Emily Climbs" and drinking a mug of Starbucks Christmas blend (rediscovered in the depths of my freezer a few days ago and hoarded until just such an occasion). Or rather rereading "Emily Climbs" and reading unexpected little character sketches of my younger self in those familiar pages. Younger Me kept popping up as I read: Younger Me with her huge round glasses and long bushy hair, reading late at night by the crack of light from the bedroom door, moony and clueless, prone (like Emily) to italics and wordspendthriftery, earnestly bent in her most secret heart on pursuing the "Alpine Path." Crushing rather shamelessly on Teddy Kent (who remains a dreamboat to this very day).

After that pleasant little reunion, I just had to grin at my not-so-grown-up-self in the mirror later that hour. The reflection that greeted me--glasses winking in the light, long brown hair disheveled--was oh so friendly and familiar.

Bless her little daydreamy heart.

my curvaceous moment

Every time I venture outside (usually carrying a harvest of overripe trashbags, their plastic stems clenched in my cold hands), my heart reacts to today's beauty the way I've seen the thick patch of ice on the cement beneath my feet respond to sunlight.

You've seen what ice does when stricken by light. That is how it is for me this afternoon: that inexplicable arresting shimmy of color and glow that flares in my chest at the moment of kindling and then holds, steady and alive, until the attention wavers or the sun departs.

It's an ovation inevitable as a reflex, as natural and irrepressible as ice in the sun. As vital and insignificant as that.

Remember how Mary Oliver speaks of words as "the responses to the thousand curvaceous moments"? I'm pretty sure that this is the sort of thing she had in mind.

remembering

One of the aspects of my humanity I take most for granted is my ability to remember. What a marvel it is that my 5'11'' 165 lb frame manages to find storage space for my life's chronicles: moment of birth till the constant succession of "nows" that are steadily elapsing. And beyond, if I think about it more deeply.

Some of these records I will never be able to visit: the ones the precede the formation of my words and ideas, like my birth and my first few years of life. But they are there, I am told, making frequent imperceptible contributions to the way I think and behave, the personality I develop.

They exist alongside the records that I do have access to, the ones that warp and blur as they are transmuted through Time's altering medium, continuing to exist only at the cost of their integrity and completeness. The ones that take me by surprise--evoked by some external stimulus: a slant of light, a certain fragrance, a familiar name uttered in a crowd. Also, the ones that are deliberately trotted out in the context of friendship or family: the inside joke, the wistful anecdote, the enthusiastic "I remember when...!"

I have memories that predate my own existence, memories that have been transmitted to me by parents and loved ones and teachers. These include stories about my ancestry, or about world events dating back to Adam and Eve. I carry around with me a memory of the time poor King Harold got an arrow in the eye at the Battle of Hastings, and a memory of the time my Opa jumped ship and became an illegal alien on American soil.

As I go about my daily routines, I am constantly sifting through these memories, being entertained by them, dredging them up to help me cope with all brands of situations, reliving the wafts of emotion that they diffuse into my inner atmosphere. It's miraculous. These fragile, surreal memories are a part of my composition and function as much as veins and arteries, bones and organs--an idea that disturbs me. I take measures to protect them, embalming them in joural entries and blogposts, conveying them to friends and family members for safekeeping. Yet all the while, I am aware that these measures also inevitably distort and weaken them.

Of course, the poverty of my own articulation strikes me when I am reminded (ha!) of these words by Marilynne Robinson in Gilead: "This life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing, I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve."

Also, this quote from Harriet Doerr's Stones For Ibarra. "Memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit."

And yet again, I am brought back to considering the fragility and finity of my human existence. Also, its resilience, its persistence. Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

I love Faulkner. Without my conscious involvement, he guides my mind to make associative connections that gradually expose all the textures and emotions of the story he is telling. I start reading, absorbing, not quite "getting" the words...and then suddenly it is there: I know what is going on, and I am personally involved, intimately concerned with the characters.

How is he able to work that kind of magic with the same old words we use every day? It thrills me.

comfort food

I am always in the mood for Madeleine L'Engle.

Yesterday I was feeling crabby and tired. My work day had been trying, and I'd parted from a significant amount of money that evening when I ransomed my car from the auto shop. Janie had shredded one of my Buechner books and torn the binding off my current journal by the time I returned home. Our kitchen was a mess, and our fitful heater was back on its emergency setting and doing a less than stellar job of warming the drafty house. When the house is a mess it seems colder anyway, because it lacks the cozy factor.

All of these conditions combined to bring out the worst in me. To combat them, I knew I needed a reliable fix-me-up, and fast.

So: I fixed a pot of coffee and some stovetop cream of wheat, and I picked up Meet the Austins by Madeleine L'Engle: the comfort food of literature.

It is rich, harboring all the "sound and fury" of a teeming household: rowdy dinners, tumbly bedtimes, homework, chores, television, bicycles. All of this homespun content is handled deftly, in a way that reveals good parenting and childhood epiphanies while managing to avoid the trap of sanctimoniousness or sentimentality, most of the time. It is utterly engrossing without relying on glamor or spectacle. And it has moments of hilarity.

Basically, it reminds me of all the reasons being a human being is so wonderful: fellowship, family, creature comforts, laughter, engaging with life and death and beauty and pain in the setting of ordinary life.

It was the novel version of this poem by Barbara Crooker:

Ordinary Life

This was a day when nothing happened,

the children went off to school

without a murmur, remembering

their books, lunches, gloves.

All morning, the baby and I built block stacks

in the squares of light on the floor.

And lunch blended into naptime,

I cleaned out kitchen cupboards,

one of those jobs that never gets done,

then sat in a circle of sunlight

and drank ginger tea,

watched the birds at the feeder

jostle over lunch’s little scraps.

A pheasant strutted from the hedgerow,

preened and flashed his jeweled head.

Now a chicken roasts in the pan,

and the children return,

the murmur of their stories dappling the air.

I peel carrots and potatoes without paring my thumb.

We listen together for your wheels on the drive.

Grace before bread.

And at the table, actual conversation,

no bickering or pokes.

And then, the drift into homework.

The baby goes to his cars, drives them

along the sofa’s ridges and hills.

Leaning by the counter, we steal a long slow kiss,

tasting of coffee and cream.

The chicken’s diminished to skin & skeleton,

the moon to a comma, a sliver of white,

but this has been a day of grace

in the dead of winter,

the hard knuckle of the year,

a day that unwrapped itself

like an unexpected gift,

and the stars turn on,

order themselves

into the winter night.

Now, don't you feel good?

These days,

I am...

1. Learning Italian! Thanks to a generous loan of some audio CDs and workbooks from Vowsh, I have a plan that will get me here all the sooner. Rolling basic phrases off my tongue makes this treasured aspiration seem so much more tangible and near.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/cgoulao/3594151487/

2. Laying the groundwork for my transfer, hopefully this summer, to a less expensive school where I can complete my degree and get off this mountain. It may not be THE wisest move, but I'm standing by it. Any change is improvement, at this point--I'm that restless.

3. Reading a book a week. So far, since January, I've knocked out The Brothers Karamazov, The Whimsical Christian, The Power and the Glory, Auralia's Colors, Consider This Senora, and Ethan Frome. This practice has done me so much good already, stimulating my mind and heart. Reminding me of important things. Holding me back in the best sense possible.

Lately--in case you haven't already sensed this--I've been feeling like a bottled-up reservoir of recklessness, corked by coffee and routine and my own harassed super-ego. Hopefully doing these things will take the edge off of my fretfulness.

At any rate, they are making me feel a bit less adrift in my own life.

Thursday. My haggard mind is doing its best this morning, but keeps losing focus. The dense fog cosying around my psyche is unsettling. I cannot count the number of times I've found myself standing slackly in the middle of a room, or regarding a paper towel dispenser with almost utter blankness. "Almost utter blankness" is so much worse than "utter blankness." It's that niggling tooth, that word on the tip of the tongue, that vague deja-vu sensation all rolled into a feeling that is distinctly less than the sum of its parts.

I finished reading Greene's "The Power and the Glory" yesterday, and have been gnawing on it in my mind ever since. The priest even made it into my dreams last night, begging me for a place to stay the night. I was in character as Sara, the protagonist of Harriet Doerr's "Consider This, Signora," and was very afraid that my ex would appear and get the wrong impression, especially if he saw the wine I was thoughtfully procuring for my fugitive. For some reason it never entered my mind to fear the wrath of the lieutenant dogging my winebibbing refugee.

All dreaming aside, it was a book brutally faithful to portraying the dark side of the glamor of the Christian faith (the side nearer to apostasy than hypocrisy), and to revealing how the dark side is often, in the that paradoxical cliche, closer to the light than the glamorous side (which is nearer to hypocrisy than apostasy). The priest experiences a terrible fall from grace, finds himself both metaphorically and literally in the same camp as the publicans and sinners, and is forced to recognize the crippling extent of his depravity. It contrasts the petty compromises and complacencies of his prior comfortable existence to the state of mortal sin--drankenness and fornication--that shadows his current existence. In his journey down the slippery slope, the father learns how to love by learning more and more personally about the nature of sin. While he never overcomes his terror of death, he at length does choose it over the safety and hypocrisy of life in a new country.

The novel reminded me that the most important thing in life is to strive after holiness, even though that path is never the easy one. Even though the choices that face me will often seem small and innocuous enough in themselves, whenever I choose the lesser good I am choosing wrongly.

And when I fail (as inevitably I will), the novel reminded me that the plan and providence of God are much vaster than I can dream, and will make everything right in the end.

It was the most discouraging bit of encouragement I have read in a very long time.

"Waste"

I know a man who loved his bird so much
He paid a tidy fortune for its cage.

Why is my regret for Juliet
So different from the way I feel about the way this parrot died,
Poisoned by the toxic grain of costly bars?

I can see the humor in the stunts Death pulls
So long as they are distant from myself.

Until I see the man who stares,

guilt-wracked as Juliet, upon

The lifeless fruit of his propitious planning.

weekend

Last Friday, yet another snowstorm descended upon the area that Al Roker has designated "my neck of the woods." Earlier that morning, I had skipped out of my front door wearing only a light spring fleece over my short sleeved shirt, expecting yet another day of unseemly warmth. Three hours later, my boss was shooing me back to the shelter of home, where I watched out the window as God shook snow over tree limbs and shingles, smoothed the knotted ridges of the tire-scarred driveway, and delighted my mind with notions of angels.

Over the course of the ensuing snowbound weekend, I did my inner compass proud and never once got lost during my frequent rambles through the transfigured woods and trails--unless, that is, you count getting lost in thought, in which case I was jubilantly adrift for hours at a stretch. I firmly believe that getting lost is the best way to know your way around a territory, whether the terrrain you cover be geographical or intellectual. The past few days of wondering through the weathers of my inner wilderness have been quite productive, cartographically speaking. I covered a lot of ground, and always found my way home by the time I'd curled my fingers around a hot ceramic mug and made small talk with the nearest house mate.

Never underestimate the transformative power of a winter snow.