This morning as I microwaved another cup of coffee for myself and listened halfheartedly to Raising Sand while my eyes trailed my neighbor to her car, I caught a glimpse of myself in my own mind's eye: a smoky phantom superimposed over a vivid kaleidescope of images from the books I'd immersed myself in. Last week, I read a thrilling fantasy adventure story (The Blue Sword), a heartbreakingly epic family saga (East of Eden), and a terse memoir of grief (The Year of Magical Thinking). The week before, it was a sweet nosegay of a novel (The Enchanted April), a dark romance (The House of the Seven Gables), a stark and sorrowful tale of a dying small town (The Plague of Doves), a humorously poignant love story (Lives of the Saints) and a delightfully absorbing satiric fantasy (Going Postal). I could go on. Another series of weeks like the ones I've just experienced, and I'll be donning my armor and setting forth in search of windmills to joust.
When I speak with friends about the delights of reading, I always mention that books have the power to deepen and enrich one's quality of life...but I must confess that of late that has not been true for me. Rather, I have engaged in a parisitic relationship with the books I've been reading by permitting them to sap the vast majority of my time and energy. I've grown dependent on books, have been using them as a means to escape my life rather than a means to understand my life better.
For this reason, I am imposing some limitations on my literary consumption. I am going to let my reading affect my life by having a life that is subject to being affected...which means doing less reading and more living. One hour a day of pleasure reading is plenty, and leaves me (factoring in eight hours of sleep) thirteen hours in which to be present, three-dimensional, and mutable in this three-dimensional mutable beautiful earth.
Already I'm beginning to feel more substantial.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Scrap looked up at the pine trees motionless among stars. Beauty made you love, and love made you beautiful...
She pulled her wrap closer round her with a gesture of defence, of keeping out and off. She didn't want to grow sentimental. Difficult not to, here: the marvellous night stole in through all one's chinks, and brought in with it, whether one wanted them or not, enormous feelings--feelings one couldn't manage, great things about death and time and waste; glorious and devastating things, magnificent and bleak, at once rapture and terror and immense, heart-cleaving longing. She felt small and dreadfully alone. She felt uncovered and defenceless. Instinctively she pulled her wrap closer. With this thing of chiffon she tried to protect herself from the eternities.
excerpt, The Enchanted April (Elizabeth Von Arnim)
She pulled her wrap closer round her with a gesture of defence, of keeping out and off. She didn't want to grow sentimental. Difficult not to, here: the marvellous night stole in through all one's chinks, and brought in with it, whether one wanted them or not, enormous feelings--feelings one couldn't manage, great things about death and time and waste; glorious and devastating things, magnificent and bleak, at once rapture and terror and immense, heart-cleaving longing. She felt small and dreadfully alone. She felt uncovered and defenceless. Instinctively she pulled her wrap closer. With this thing of chiffon she tried to protect herself from the eternities.
excerpt, The Enchanted April (Elizabeth Von Arnim)
Monday, September 06, 2010
presence of mind
The ferns outside my window are spreading their green vertebrae out towards the sun-gilded breeze this morning, looking as beautific as ferns are capable of looking. This day is beautific. I am sitting at my kitchen table and soaking up the mingled accords of cleanliness (bleach and Windex), sumptuousness (coffee in the pot and an apple cinnamon coffee cake cooling on the counter), and clean mountain air. My dishwasher is running, I'm eyeing one of the peaches nestled in a bowl on my kitchen table with undisguised intent, and Rosie Thomas is singing about October.
Earlier today, I visited the grocery store and stocked my refrigerator and cupboards with abundant food in eager anticipation of the advent of two very dear friends, who arrive tomorrow for a small reunion. Later on, I'll finish my preparations by running a few loads of laundry, cleaning the bathroom, and readying the spare mattress. For now, though, I'm pausing to be still and attentive in this gentle light.
I was listening to NPR yesterday while I fixed myself a pizza after church. Every Sunday afternoon the station has a show about some aspect of spirituality, which involves interviewing spiritual people and asking them to divulge their secrets. Of late the majority of these interviews have focused on the Buddhist path to enlightenment, and I am enjoying learning more about this particular approach to life. The most valuable concept that I have taken from these interviews is the concept of being present to your own life.
My inclination is to withdraw into my own consciousness and live a shadow life, in my brain and imagination. I'm particularly prone to this brand of escapism when I am feeling pressured or upset, but it also strikes when I'm simply bored with my routines. Thanks to NPR and a few wonderful books (as always, Mary Oliver, along with Robert Hass, Kathleen Norris, and Thoreau) I have realized that in so doing I am despising the day of small things and cheating myself of a rich life: a life in the body as well as the spirit, in time as well as eternity.
I really don't know how best to hold myself at bay, so to speak, and live a physically present life while also managing to live a metaphysically present life. By nature I veer into extremes. But I know things that help me. I know that certain activities stimulate both my body and spirit at once. Beautiful mountain jogs come to mind most powerfully. Also: listening to the radio while fixing food, running through my Italian CDs while cleaning house, holding a cup of coffee while reading a good book. Blogging while savoring a tidy fragrant kitchen.
L'Engle talks about being ontological, how impossible it is, and yet how fleetingly ineffable those moments of near-ontology are. Mary Oliver talks about being attentive and corporeal as a sort of prayer. I don't know how to be ontological, I don't really know how to be a prayer, but I am willing to try to be present in body and mind. I'm willing to try to love this life.
On a beautific day like today, it seems almost easy.
Earlier today, I visited the grocery store and stocked my refrigerator and cupboards with abundant food in eager anticipation of the advent of two very dear friends, who arrive tomorrow for a small reunion. Later on, I'll finish my preparations by running a few loads of laundry, cleaning the bathroom, and readying the spare mattress. For now, though, I'm pausing to be still and attentive in this gentle light.
I was listening to NPR yesterday while I fixed myself a pizza after church. Every Sunday afternoon the station has a show about some aspect of spirituality, which involves interviewing spiritual people and asking them to divulge their secrets. Of late the majority of these interviews have focused on the Buddhist path to enlightenment, and I am enjoying learning more about this particular approach to life. The most valuable concept that I have taken from these interviews is the concept of being present to your own life.
My inclination is to withdraw into my own consciousness and live a shadow life, in my brain and imagination. I'm particularly prone to this brand of escapism when I am feeling pressured or upset, but it also strikes when I'm simply bored with my routines. Thanks to NPR and a few wonderful books (as always, Mary Oliver, along with Robert Hass, Kathleen Norris, and Thoreau) I have realized that in so doing I am despising the day of small things and cheating myself of a rich life: a life in the body as well as the spirit, in time as well as eternity.
I really don't know how best to hold myself at bay, so to speak, and live a physically present life while also managing to live a metaphysically present life. By nature I veer into extremes. But I know things that help me. I know that certain activities stimulate both my body and spirit at once. Beautiful mountain jogs come to mind most powerfully. Also: listening to the radio while fixing food, running through my Italian CDs while cleaning house, holding a cup of coffee while reading a good book. Blogging while savoring a tidy fragrant kitchen.
L'Engle talks about being ontological, how impossible it is, and yet how fleetingly ineffable those moments of near-ontology are. Mary Oliver talks about being attentive and corporeal as a sort of prayer. I don't know how to be ontological, I don't really know how to be a prayer, but I am willing to try to be present in body and mind. I'm willing to try to love this life.
On a beautific day like today, it seems almost easy.
Friday, September 03, 2010
Friday afternoon, September
Autumn approaches. (Delicious autumn, to thee my very soul is wed!)
Although daytime temperatures still leap towards 100 degrees they rarely make it past 95. I think the mornings (lovely, cool, sixty-degree mornings) are holding them back. On my runs, I encounter trees garlanded with crimson poison ivy. Up by the Craven House one flirtatious maple has already turned a becomingly rusty shade of red.
My thoughts often turn singsong to the cadence of Hopkins' "Spring and Fall, to a Young Child." Margaret, are you grieving over golden-grove unleaving? Death, that blight man was born for, has come again to court someone near to me, as he did almost two years ago this season. I find myself gathering all of the emptiness in my heart and kindling it with prayer, watching the bitter incense waft heavenward. It's a miracle, in a way: something so dense and acrid curling from an altar heaped with all my vacancy. Afterwards I feel listerine relief, bracing and mentholated, rush through me for awhile.
I am not necessarily immersed in sadness, as the above paragraph perhaps may suggest. Rather, I feel like sorrow has been a sort of lens slipped over my perspective, sharpening everything to a degree of poignancy that I haven't felt for awhile. I am even grateful for the new keenness it has given me.
This sorrow was written, too. Now as it is unfolding, I am given my usual under-appreciated freedom, that gift that I constantly forget that I possess: to choose how to respond.
Although daytime temperatures still leap towards 100 degrees they rarely make it past 95. I think the mornings (lovely, cool, sixty-degree mornings) are holding them back. On my runs, I encounter trees garlanded with crimson poison ivy. Up by the Craven House one flirtatious maple has already turned a becomingly rusty shade of red.
My thoughts often turn singsong to the cadence of Hopkins' "Spring and Fall, to a Young Child." Margaret, are you grieving over golden-grove unleaving? Death, that blight man was born for, has come again to court someone near to me, as he did almost two years ago this season. I find myself gathering all of the emptiness in my heart and kindling it with prayer, watching the bitter incense waft heavenward. It's a miracle, in a way: something so dense and acrid curling from an altar heaped with all my vacancy. Afterwards I feel listerine relief, bracing and mentholated, rush through me for awhile.
I am not necessarily immersed in sadness, as the above paragraph perhaps may suggest. Rather, I feel like sorrow has been a sort of lens slipped over my perspective, sharpening everything to a degree of poignancy that I haven't felt for awhile. I am even grateful for the new keenness it has given me.
This sorrow was written, too. Now as it is unfolding, I am given my usual under-appreciated freedom, that gift that I constantly forget that I possess: to choose how to respond.
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