Like trying to hold a snowflake

This is a quote from the writer Ruth Ozeki, which I snatched from a Q&A with her over here.

"There’s something about the idea of writing, and thinking about writing as a form of prayer — the way as a writer you call out into the world and throw your words into the world. You’re not praying to a god, but you’re almost conjuring a reader to arrive. That’s what books do, they’re an invitation to readers."

She wrote "A Tale for the Time Being," which I am reading right now. It is wonderful. Consider this, which is in the voice of a teenage girl in Japan, writing in her diary:

"Then is the opposite of now. So saying now obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn't. It's like the word is committing suicide or something. So then I'd start making it shorter...now, ow, oh, o...until it was just a bunch of little grunting sounds and not even a word at all. It was hopeless, like trying to hold a snowflake on your tongue or a soap bubble between your fingertips. Catching it destroys it, and I felt like I was disappearing, too."

You're okay.

I have never loved someone
The way I love you
I have never seen a smile
Like yours
And if you grow up to be king or clown or pauper
I will say you are my favorite one in town
I have never held a hand
So soft and sacred
When I hear your laugh I know heaven's key
And when I grow to be a poppy in the graveyard
I will send you all my love upon the breeze
And if the breeze won't blow your way
I will be the sun
And if the sun won't shine your way
I will be the rain
And if the rain won't wash away
All your aches and pains
I will find some other way
To tell you you're okay
You're okay
You're okay
You're okay
You're okay
You're okay
You're okay

Bellwether

I ball my fist and clench my teeth, willing the burst of frustration back down my throat. "Come on guys," I say tersely. "Time to get dressed."

The clock is marching forward.

We are running late, later, so late now.

It finally bursts out. "COME ON! YOU NEED TO GET DRESSED!" I yell. Please know that the caps-lock doesn't really convey the force of those words, the volume, the seething frustration. The girls immediately feel it, shoulders bunched, brows furrowed. I see Violet try not to cry. I see Madeleine stop and scowl. "You don't have to yell," she scolds me. "Nobody likes to be yelled at, you know."

"You don't listen until I yell," I insist. "I've asked you nicely to get going a thousand times this morning, but you didn't get moving until I yelled." I'm not yelling now, but still loud. "You guys never listen!"

This isn't true. But right now it feels like the truest thing. The yelling feels justified. How else am I going to get them out the door? This is their fault. Not mine. I'm so frustrated now that I am using more force with everything, dropping their backpacks onto the table with a thud, thunking cabinet doors shut, tossing their shoes down on the floor in front of them.

Eventually we do get out the door. We are not late to school.

Later on the playground, I find out that Violet balled her little hand into a fist and swung it into another boy's face. She pushed a kid later during PE.

"We're not violent and she's not exposed to violence," I tell her teacher on the phone that afternoon. "I just can't understand why that's her first reaction."

I hang up and try not to cry. Guilt covers me like a heavy cloak, but I am not sure why.

When I talk to Violet about it, all she can say is that she just got frustrated. She just couldn't handle it. I ask how it feels when she's frustrated and she says she doesn't know. "Do you feel tight inside, like something is all clenched up like a fist? Does your heart speed up?" Violet says she doesn't know.

I talk to her about the idea of keeping a calm heart. How important that is.

I start to feel like a hypocrite.

The next morning I resolve not to yell at the girls when they're getting ready. I decide that being late is a natural consequence for their dawdling. Maybe a tardy slip will convince them to listen to me when they're getting ready in the morning.

I don't yell. The girls get dressed on their own. We get to school, and while we get there later than I would like, we are not late.

The next morning, I do not yell. The girls get dressed on their own. We get to school and we are not late.

We do it again the next morning.

And the next.

This morning, Madeleine said, "I'm glad you aren't yelling anymore." I glance at the clock. We are going to get to school later than I want, but my heart is calm. I smile at her. "Me, too, kid."

A clasped grasshopper, a letting go.

I can imagine his hand around her wrist, just below the fist, how he'd have to shake it to get her fingers to loosen their grip on the grasshopper she rescued from the playground. I can see how she'd respond to that, the utter dismay, the frantic worry as she scrambles to pick the grasshopper up again. And I can feel it, a sudden, horrible lurch, when he picks up his foot and stomps the grasshopper flat before she can save it again.

"I tried not to cry," she tells me, trying to keep it together even now. "I tried to keep my emotions in check, but I just couldn't do it."

My Violet is full-to-bursting with emotion, always, and the kids at school are well aware of it by now. And this one boy has been using it to his advantage, pulling and prodding, always looking for a reaction from her. We've told her many times that if it's the reaction he's after, she's going to have to work at not reacting. He'll eventually get bored with it, we reasoned. Still, how is a 6-year-old girl, so excited about catching a grasshopper, supposed to hold her reaction in when a boy very deliberately and very cruelly kills it right in front of her?

"Oh, Violet," I say. "I don't blame you at all. I would have cried, too. When sad things happen, it makes sense to cry."

When I got back to work I jotted off an outraged email to her teacher. This has to stop, my email said. No more of this, it said.  

Help her because I can't be there to do it, was what it said somewhere underneath those words. The world is ugly and I can't always protect her, is what it said even further down. Help.

There is a certain prevalent belief these days that it's hard to be a person in the world, and that the sooner kids toughen up and learn that, the better. That it's not a parent's job to protect their children from grasshopper-smashers on the playground. That I'm not doing her any favors by intervening or offering shelter in some way.

I wonder about this mentality. This curl-up-and-accept-it mindset, this shoulder-shrug of a worldview. Do I want her to look out at the great wild world and feel it like she felt that boy's fingers on her wrist? To understand that the desperate and helpless feeling of being forced to let go of something precious is just a part of life?

No. She is six. Only six. For her, the world can still be loveliness and hope and good people who care even about the smallest of lives. It should be. It's hard to be a person in the world, sure, but maybe that's because we've stopped advocating for kindness. The world is a fight for the hearts of things, even a grasshopper's heart. Sometimes especially that.

And I kiss you on the ground in a cornfield at night

This is what I might whisper in the rain
Come over and nap with me, I want you
I sleep like a raccoon in you
I sleep in you like I am a raccoon somewhere
Do you ever want to climb into a birch tree with me
Somewhere in the bottom of the rain I want you

Pay attention to the beautiful world.

Something about this guy's intensity just makes me tired, and isn't that kind of sad? Everything exhausts me, maybe especially the internet. He sees it as this magical tool, this miracle of communication that can be used to spread beauty and love and light to people all over the world. What a lovely idea.

"You get to be a part of people's lives on such a crazy level. This is the dream. This is the dream for poets. For somebody who feels, somebody who has something to communicate. This is the dream."

Alabaster light.

first

she was not part of the perfect shell for long
she, separated form from being,
shone in the low light like the nostalgia of a porcelain sink
and still no one said a word. No one said
you did this. just look at what you did.
they worked like they do this every day,
like they do not wear crowns of cold gold
and serve divinity, like they do not
turn the cogs of a functioning miracle.

she said look, look, into the lights
and I brought her to my shoulder and saw --
that I did not know anything,
how to be or stay or where I had been
or where I was going

disoriented, she and I felt
how we were culled and cleaved
and brought back together

she slept and my chest split,
and alabaster light spilled out -- mine, mine, I murmured --
but it was not mine anymore.

But I'm a kid like everyone else.

I jumped right into a no good, very bad, horrible day today. I was in a mood, the kids were bickering, they weren't listening or getting ready when I told them to. I didn't sleep much last night, I was hungry, I had no coffee. There was a dead RAT on my bedroom floor and two lurking cats sniffing around it, looking proud and predatory, and that is not a pleasant thing to wake up to at all.

So when the kids started fighting over a BRUSH, when we have three other brushes they could use to brush their hair (not to mention that one kid had already brushed her hair, so what did she need the brush for?), I yell-roared "STOP IT!" And I did it on purpose. I actually wanted to see them freeze. I wanted to freak them out. Because it seemed like, at that moment, the only way to get them to stop fighting and actually listen to me.

It worked like a charm. Violet sat down and cried and Madeleine ran from the room, sobbing, "You shouldn't have done that! You shouldn't have yelled like that!" And she went to be in her room. And I felt that black cloud that was floating above my head descend and take firm hold and I haven't shaken it so far.

On the way to school in the dark, pouring rain, I played rain music. Damien Jurado's "Museum of Flight," Boxer Rebellion's "Diamonds," Bahama's "Lost in the Light," and Family of the Year's "Hero." And they all matched my mood so well:

From "Museum of Flight"
What did I learn/It's not that easy/When you get burned/And go on burning bright

From "Diamonds"
I'm no good next to diamonds/when they're too close I start to fade/Are you angry with me now/Are you angry 'cause I'm to blame?

From "Lost in the Light"
After so many words/Still nothing's heard/Don't know what we should do

And that brings me to "Hero," which not only matched my mood, it reduced me to the ugly cry. (Quiet and brief, so the girls didn't know.)
Let me go/I don't want to be your hero/I don't want to be the big man/I just want to fight like everyone else/Your masquerade/I don't want to be a part of your parade/Everyone deserves a chance to/Fight like everyone else

In the song, he's talking more about a man who's working at fulfilling the "American dream" for the sake of his family and about how hard that is -- but can't everyone relate to this? Responsibilities get hard and they weigh on you and you don't want to do it. You want to give up and just not care anymore.

And maybe you need that for yourself, just for a minute. Before you yell at your kids in the morning for fighting over a brush.

Three ways of climbing.

1.
You can go fast and mostly hands-free, running ahead from the group. On the more level services you will nearly fly, lean legs strong and confident, arms to your sides like you've forgotten about them. Sometimes you fall, and when you do, you take it as a personal affront. You trusted the ground and it betrayed you. Your knee is bloody. Stinkin' owie! You can't defeat me! you'll shout. Then you pick yourself up and you continue. When it's time to ascend, your feet will find purchase easily and you will pull yourself up, arms working in perfect tandem with your legs. The strength in those small arms will astound anyone watching. Up, up, up, you'll go. You'll disappear from sight. Where are you? you'll hear us call. And for a small second you won't answer, reveling in the distance between you and those voices. Right here, you'll finally answer, and wait for the footfall to tell you that we're getting closer. And then you're gone again.

2.
You can go slow, head down as you watch where your feet land. You will try to stick close to someone. On the more level surfaces, you'll run ahead in bursts of energy, your legs and arms flailing in an uncoordinated fashion but propelling you forward nonetheless. Your swiftness will astound us when you do this. Sometimes you fall, and when you do, you take it as a personal affront. Sometimes you will scream and cry, fat tears swelling from your eyes as you race to us for comfort. Sometimes you'll shake it off. You'll say to us in a wobbly voice, eyes bright and looking for approval, I didn't even cry! I just got right back up. When you do that, we'll high-five you. And when it's time to ascend you will consider every place your feet could go and sometimes you will pick the wrong place. You'll stand there, aware that your other foot has nowhere to go. You'll reconfigure. You'll try to pull yourself up, but sometimes you'll need help. I love climbing, you'll say to us. I'm glad, we'll say back, and we are: You are so determined and focused to do this thing that isn't so easy for you.

3.
You can walk behind everybody, head down, thinking of all the things you still have to do before the day is through. Your feet will hurt, so you will pause, then take wincing steps up and down the rocks. You can be hesitant in a climb, unsure, a little mad that you are doing this at all. When it's time to ascend, you can choose not to go the places everyone else is going because you've decided climbing is not for you. You don't like the feeling of heaving your weight up level after level. You can opt out of exploring that crevice, assuming you won't fit, dragging your sense of adventure limply behind you. You can give up before you even start. You can wilt in the heat. You can feel relieved that you are finally heading back to the car. You might as well not go at all.

I'll help you out.

Beasts.

The door thumps like there is a raging beast behind it, and tonight there is. In a matter of moments she morphed into something else, a hunched animal, all claws and screams and wild, brute force. She picks words as big as boulders and hurls them as hard as she can. We duck and dodge. We shut the door and hold it shut. We try to tame the beast, but despite having birthed the beast ourselves, we are no beast-tamers. THIS ISN'T TEACHING ME ANYTHING roars the beast and we try on our smallest, most useless voices. Calm and quiet, we remind her, but she can't hear us over her screams, or she chooses not to. PLEASE I'LL DO ANYTHING I'LL DO ANYTHING I'LL CALM DOWN IF YOU'LL OPEN THE DOOR. But we can't unlock the door because we have already told her she has to calm down first. That she needs to do this. For herself. Because it's a skill she should have by now, to reverse the onset of the beast. To bring herself back to normal.

Later, the reverse. She's curled into a small ball in her bed, burrowed under the blankets. She's talking in the smallest of voices, and hers is particularly useful. I'm afraid I won't be a good parent because my parents aren't teaching me the right things, she says. I wish I was a different person, she says. I wish I could be a calm person, she says.

I wish I was never born, she says.

I wish I could say I knew what words to say then. That they were right there in my pocket the whole time. That they were hiding behind my ear like a shiny coin. Instead of the tired goodbye. Instead of shutting the door.

You have to be in this world, I would have said, because what would the world do without you? Magic, I would say, is all around you. I would say: You are the very existence of magic.

I would say: You are everything.

I would say: We are all beasts, sometimes.

The magic of the universe and the first day of school.

In the polished corridors that smell like new things and nostalgia, sharpened pencils and chalk dust, the stars are flinging themselves forward with the kind of reckless abandon usually reserved for pinballs and bumper cars. Those bright, shiny points of light guide you from the crowd into the crowd and out of the crowd, and you follow them like a smitten moth, your old wings fluttering and brushing a trail of dust and shoe prints. You're this tired, quiet thing and you're feeling this feeling that comes on in a sudden burst, the kind of feeling that stretches an absurd smile across your face. Following your fate, those pinging points of light, and it's a funny kind of hope and doom you're chasing: Life at its essence, some kind of brilliant eternity, and your own looming lack of it. You're just holding onto the tail of a comet, chasing down stars as best you can. But wait, little star, let me tie your shoe. But wait, little star, just a quick hug.

These stars won't wait. These stars laugh and gasp out of your reach, these stars are rocketing forward at a breathtaking pace. They're taking your breath and turning you inside out. The cosmic forces are working for you. The cosmic forces are working against you.

There is a moment outside her classroom door where you see her hesitate, looking at the little lights so much like hers pulsing in chairs and around lockers. You see the pause, the interstellar scintillation, before she plunges forward to join the rest of them.

You head down the hall with your heart orbiting Mars.

The stars aren't yours, but the stars never are. They belong up in the wide-open sky, in the glittering, smiling mouth of the universe.

I leave the lights on.

I've seen this bounced around all over the internet lately and avoided watching it for exactly that reason. But then I did watch it and it knocked me dead.

Deciding to be brave.

I haven't decided if my old journals and notebooks are an embarrassment or an embarrassment of riches. I flipped through them the other day and was actually surprised by my teenage self. The first is that I was kind of an a-hole about certain things. The second is that I was so, so lonely.

The third is that I don't really seem to have changed a bit. I mean, I've certainly grown and gained maturity. But some of the deep-down, this-is-who-I-am sentiments are exactly the same. In an entry dated January 26, 1994, I complained of feeling stuck. Mired in a routine where nothing changes. In another entry I just wished something great would happen to me. Something dramatic and wonderful. In another I said I wanted to wake up to a raging thunderstorm or even an earthquake, because it would match my mood -- which would somehow be very comforting. (Dramatic? Me?)

I read the January 26 entry to my husband and he immediately commented on the similarity between old-me and present-day me. I could only stare at the page for a moment, agreeing, wondering how I felt about that. At the time, I decided to laugh -- because, come on, that's funny. Funny-ish. But then, I don't know, now that I've given it some time I am struck mostly by the fear that underpinned every single thing I wrote in those notebooks. I lived in a small world. I was afraid to reach out, to do more. I was scared of who I was or who I was supposed to be. And you expect that from a teenager, I think, but from a grown up lady?

Not ideal.

Driving to work this morning, feeling that familiar sense of dread rising up in my chest, I stubbornly pushed it away. I listened to Walk the Moon sing, "I can lift a car up all by myself" and thought about strength and the strength in bravery. Because, for me, it is an act of bravery to believe in joy. To lean toward the light instead of cowering in the shadows.

Bright sunlight, falling rain.

Here is the trick. The trick is to remember to notice things. The trick is to notice and be there. There, in the place and the moment you're noticing. I knew driving home yesterday that the rain was coming. I could smell it before I could see it off in the distance, all heavy gray and the searing slap of lightning. The promise of thunder. I slept and was pulled from sleep by insistent rain. This morning the hot, wet air. On the way into the building, a hazy rising light through the spaces between leaves, punctuated drips from rain-heavy leaves. Each little drop catching the light, a bright spark there and gone like a dawn's version of a shooting star. A miracle of sorts. I felt it rise in my chest like a secret wish, so I did. Let me remember to see this again and again. Bright sunlight, falling rain. Nothing is more perfect.

Iceland for the win AGAIN.

Declaration of being.

I am well-formed.
Consider my limbs:
they are legs with feet and toes,
and if they were broken or missing,
still I'd be well-formed.
And my arms. I have two, with hands and fingers,
and if I had one arm or no fingers, still I'd be well-formed.
And my head is definitely head-shaped,
and I am reasonably sure there is a brain in there.
It pumps thoughts and signals, it sends and receives,
and it moves the arms and legs and keeps me living.
If my brain was half a brain or my head
had indentations, still I'd be well-formed, for
I excel at this, being a person.
And you and you and you do, too, we all do.
No one fails at being a person.

And still, and yet,
the number on the scale, the hair I must remove,
the clothes I must wear, the shoes,
my ruddy skin, the age spot,
the glasses that slip down my nose
the sweat seeps through my dress
the throbbing ankle
the aching tired
the

the

ugly humanness of me

is all I see.

Consider beauty:
Burnished limbs, long and lean,
straight rows of white teeth, the perpetual smile,
the eyes that never look tired.
The beautiful dress, the flawless accessories.

I am not that beauty.
But I am.

I am

this beauty

:::

(This was inspired by a line from Neil Gaiman's book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. A character says to another something like -- or maybe exactly -- "No one fails at being a person." And it really stayed with me. Clearly.)

What a world.

The ribbon snake looked so pretty swimming through the water, my daughter tells me. She waits for me to respond. I hadn't seen it, actually, but I immediately got a picture in my head: the thick, marshy water dotted with green algae, the ghostly-white snapping turtle fading in and out of sight in the dark depths, and the ribbon snake, with its bright yellow stripes, waving rapidly through the green algae.

"Mmm-hmm," I agree absently. How remarkable, I am thinking, that a full 24-hours later, a day filled with heat and hiking, raptor sightings and baby alligators and green tree frogs, it is the image of the snake sluicing through the water that has stuck with her. When she reflects on her memories of the weekend, it is that sinuous winding that surfaces. How remarkable, I am thinking, that my daughter can recognize the beauty in that.

///


For some reason, it was the old farmhouse that floored me. I could feel it building past the white snake and the hawks swooping in the aviary. It was definitely surging when I scoured the green bog for a sign of an alligator. Water burbled here and there and the water swirled in satisfying patterns through the algae. We didn't see an alligator, but it felt like enough, the searching for one. The mere idea that we were in an area where alligators lurked -- that one could surface at any moment. At the interpretive building, an old woman knitted lace and talked to Wayland about her own grandmother. This old woman, what a delight, knitting among the aquariums around her -- baby alligators and softshell turtles and frogs and snakes all slow and resting after mealtime. These were all wonderful.

But as we walked past the overripe vegetable garden and the pond with boats stacked to the side, we saw the house: light blue, surrounded by an old wooden fence with bits of vines and purple flower bursting through, I could not contain myself. The gently decaying house filled with books dating back to the 1920s and daguerreotype photos and a typewriter that made the air tremble in want for the sound of clacking keys.

Such wonder.

We left the house and came upon a trail that led to bison resting against a chain-link fence. As we watched, one leaned into a tree a chuffed and snorted as it scratched its neck against the bark. It huffed, it's obsidian eyes trained on us, nostrils flaring. Its head was as big as my torso, its eyes so soft and unfathomable.

///

Her bracelets catch the sun as she climbs the wooden rail surrounding the swampy overlook, hoping to catch a glimpse of an alligator gliding in the murky depths. Her hair dips forward, braided with light and warmth. Her skirt floats around her legs. Madeleine has run ahead, tired of looking for alligators, but Violet is entranced and settled. We are quiet for a long moment.

"What's that?" I ask, and point to a spot in the water that's swirling through the green, seemingly separate from the wind's gentle push. Bubbles rise to the surface. "Is something in there?"

Violet leaps back from her perch and climbs up next to me, so she can get a better view. We watch the bubbles, the swirls. I begin to think it's nothing, but Violet is sure. "I bet it's an alligator," she says. "That's got to be an alligator."

///

On the drive home from the trip, I read the wikipedia entry for nihilism out loud to my husband. The long road from Houston to home stretches on and on. It is hot and we're tired and we're working against the clock as it's Sunday and we both have work in the morning.

We read about Neitzsche and Kierkegaard and moral nihilism and Wayland says he pretty much agrees with nihilism. That the world is without meaning, that there is no universal truth. That we are all bound by our own perspectives.

I am against it immediately, but it's a gut reaction. I want to say that the search for meaning is what gives life meaning. That it's something we all do, every single one of us, from the moment we're born. That when we're babies, we work with what we have: our mothers and our fathers and the immediate comfort of food and unconditional love. As we grow and the world gets larger, meaning grows with it. We find meaning everywhere. We find meaning without trying. The drug addict searches for meaning and finds it there in drugs -- though that is empty and unstable -- the deeply religious person looks for meaning and finds it in God -- which can be as deep and consistent as anything else.

And if it's the search for meaning that's universal, then what a world we live in. A veritable playground of things surround us everyday that can give depth and texture and purpose to our lives. This pad of paper. This keyboard. The words, always the words. And that day that Wayland and I had our discussion about nihilism, how fitting that we spent the day the way that we did. The bison's eyes, the old keyboard, the burbling swirls of water in the marsh, the slender curve of a snake furrowing through water.

(It's really the end that gets me.)

A Blessing
James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Wait for summertime.

Well, that's it. Here it is. I've hit my happy peak for the day. This is so, so great.

Seeing more than you care to say.

You girdled sorrow.

(St. Joseph Pier Lighthouse in Michigan, frozen after a winter storm in 2010.)

It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.

Pilot’s dread, fury of a blind diver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!

In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!

-- From "The Song of Despair" by Pablo Neruda

That's hard for me to do.

Heat hangs limply on summer's rusty old hook, and you can feel it in the house, a kind of dead weight slapping against the wall with the turn of an old fan. It's hard to be in this heat, reduced to a kind of human existence defined in its simplest terms: human, existing. Eventually sleep is the only logical option, because what else would you do, and you curl up into the too-small loveseat and wait for the heat of the day to finally dissipate, and it does, just enough to sleep fitfully until a yowling cat wakes you up with restless needle paws.

Gah, the horrible effort it is to pull yourself up from that couch in the morning, even while the air is blessedly cool for now. Your eyelids scratch against your eyes, crusty with the allergies aggravated by the dust kicked up by all the whirling fan blades. Somewhere down the hall your children are sleeping in an icy blast of a room cooled by a window air conditioning unit. Your husband is sleeping on the other couch, a fan pointed directly at his face.

And now work. You go and you try to pull forward and feel some terrible force pulling in the opposite direction, and you spend all day grinding against that force, never really getting anywhere and getting worn out in the process. And then you go home. To that warm, awful house.

It will cost you thousands of dollars to fix this air problem. Dollars you don't have in a home you have trouble with. So you jump into the work and grind away and you never really get anywhere, do you.

Do you.

This has not been a lovely week, not at all. But here you go: Your daughter spontaneously kissed you last night, once on the arm. She never kisses -- despises kisses -- and she kissed you. And she said, "That's hard for me to do," in a small voice. And who cares about any of the rest. Who cares, who cares.

We've got no money but we've got heart

This song has long been a favorite at our house. I just found this live acoustic version and just look how happy that guy is while he's singing.

Great beginnings

Blue foxes are so curiously like stones that it is a matter for wonder. When they lie beside them in winter there is no hope of telling them apart from the rocks themselves; indeed, they're far trickier than white foxes, which always cast a shadow or look yellow like the snow.
-- From The Blue Fox by Sjon

On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones.
-- From A Constellation of a Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her parents' house, where she washed the same pink-and-yellow teacups and matching gravy boats every day, slept on the same embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog. Because she had been born in May, and because she had a mole on her left cheek, and because her feet were very large and ungainly, the Green Wind took pity on her and flew to her window one evening just after her twelfth birthday.
-- From The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland on a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne Valente

Once upon a time, a girl named September had a secret. Now, secrets are delicate things. They can fill you up with sweetness and leave you like a cat who has found a particularly fat sparrow to eat and did not get clawed or bitten even once while she was about it. But they can also get stuck inside you, and very slowly boil up your bones for their bitter soup.

-- From The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne Valente

It began with my father not wanting to see the Last Rabbit and ended up with my being eaten by a carnivorous plant.

-- From Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

You are the broken world and the act of changing it.

"So here’s the thing about changing the world. It turns out that’s not even the question, because you don’t have a choice. You are going to change the world, because that is actually what the world is. You do not pass through this life, it passes through you. You experience it, you interpret it, you act, and then it is different. That happens constantly. You are changing the world. You always have been, and now, it becomes real on a level that it hasn’t been before.

And that’s why I’ve been talking only about you and the tension within you, because you are—not in a clichéd sense, but in a weirdly literal sense—the future. After you walk up here and walk back down, you’re going to be the present. You will be the broken world and the act of changing it, in a way that you haven’t been before. You will be so many things, and the one thing that I wish I’d known and want to say is, don’t just be yourself. Be all of yourselves. Don’t just live. Be that other thing connected to death. Be life. Live all of your life. Understand it, see it, appreciate it. And have fun."

(From Joss Whedon's commencement address at Wesleyan University)

Everything I love is out to sea.

"It's so clear that our afterlife is how we are to the people around us: how we raise our children, how we are to our loved ones and friends. How we treat each other is how we affect life beyond our personal and specific and very small existence. The idea that it's just us, it's just us, and that's all there is, is true -- that one we know is true. The rest is hypothetical maybes. Why don't we act accordingly? How we affect each other is the real religion." -- Matt Berninger, here.

to return to the river
is easier than you'd think
the green water rises up to drape your shoulders
and with little fanfare pull you under

you'd let go of breath so quickly.
it would become the breath of all things.

and in the bottom of the water
you'd tend the reedy garden of
pebbles, plants, fish, and trash

with your moon-white hands extended,
more graceful than on land.

The obvious, most important realities are often the hardest to see and talk about.

"If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who or what is really important...if you want to operate on your default settings, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be in your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow consumer hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred. On fire with the same force that made the stars. Love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down."

So sing your song I'm listening out where the stars are glistening

Oh my gosh, this video has me crying. Sometimes the world (the whole entire UNIVERSE) is just completely and undeniably wonderful.


[UPDATE] I think this article in Time Magazine explains it perfectly well: "It’s about transcendence, it’s about experience, it’s about going to a place where otherworldly is a literal term, where you see things that are otherwise utterly impossible to see, where the simple rules of physics don’t even apply the same way. That place is both excruciatingly close — just beyond an onionskin of atmosphere — and unreachably distant. All of Hadfield’s videos capture that idea in one way or another, but the last one, which combines the alien nature of the place he was living at the time with the deeply personal power of a song that has private associations for anyone who’s familiar with it, was a masterstroke. It mainlined meaning directly into our emotional centers. Whether you care about space or not, once you watch Hadfield’s video, you’re very glad that humanity as a whole — and Hadfield in particular — can go there."

The "last one" the author references is Hadfield's cover of Bowie's "Space Oddity."

How am I gonna pick up all these stars, I said

I got to see James Wallace and the Naked Light last night in Fort Worth, and oh, they were tremendous. Here's their video for "To the River," which is beautiful.

"Death may not be the end, but it's no excuse for denying life."

This Russia Today interview with Brian May is so, so interesting. I want journalism to be more like this in America.

Audacious

When you scream, you test your volume. Higher and higher you go until someone responds. You do it on purpose. I know because once when I asked why you screamed so loudly, you said, "I want to make sure you know I'm upset."

You are all too aware of how big the world is. You've recognized its shadows and you know that things can lurk in there. But you, at 5, don't know what those things are just yet, so you hold on to things you do know about. Zombies. They loom at every turn. When you sit in your room you have to face the doorway so that the zombies can't sneak up on you. When you sleep, you wrap a blanket over your head to keep the zombie dreams out.

I can reassure you that they aren't real, but that's pointless. You know they aren't real, but the bad things still skulk -- you know they do -- and since you don't have a name for it, you use the only one you have. Zombies, zombies, zombies.

You find comfort in the familiar. You want to watch the same movies and TV shows over and over again. The idea of watching a new movie is met with flat rejection because the unknown aspect freaks you out. Except, for some reason, when we were watching the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader. You wandered in when it was high drama time. The heroes were battling a massive sea monster. You stared, wide-eyed, as I explained about suspense and its function in movies. "Movies always want you to feel suspense because it keeps you watching. And they do that so that when it all works out, you can feel a big sense of relief. The more suspense, the bigger your relief when it all works out. And everyone likes that feeling. Watch; you'll see." And this made perfect sense to you. You watched the whole thing and asked to watch it again, "but just the end part."

Reason and logic are your favorite things. If I can explain anything to you well enough, you will sit and consider it for the longest time. You are eager to soak up new information, and you remember things so easily. You are an avid reader already, and you love it like I always did and still do. Every night you ask to read in bed, and even if it's late or way past your bedtime, I can never say no. The other night you were reading "Fish Out of Water" -- a 64 page book! -- and I was surprised at how easily you took on the word "cellar." How quickly you pulled that word up when you encountered it again on the next page.

When you laugh you put your whole self into it. Your eyes crinkle at the corners and they are impossibly light then. Your cheeks crease into dimples and your body shakes. Your face is transformed into a paroxysm of joy and it's a joy that puts any other joy in the world to shame. You have the quirkiest sense of humor, venturing all the way over into inappropriate at times. When you think something is funny you expect everyone to get the joke, and if they don't, you repeat it louder. And I've never asked why, but if I did I bet you would say, "I want you to make sure you know that it's funny."

It is so easy to hurt your feelings and then sometimes you are impenetrable. Your sister is a good litmus for this. Sometimes she comes at you with every ill intention she can muster and you will dissolve and wail and screech with sorrow. Sometimes you lash out physically and grab or pinch or pull. And sometimes you retreat, blanking her out altogether. Sometimes you just wrap her in a giant hug and kiss her firmly anywhere your lips can find purchase.

You love fiercely and concentrate that love mostly on one person. You leave little room for anyone else in that love. It's easy for me to be OK with this because right now most of that love is for me. You fold yourself into my arms and wrap your own arms around me and hug back right and proper. You will throw yourself at my stomach just to plant an aggressive punch of a kiss there. You love, you love, you love. With everything you've got.

Oh, you bright light, you unfathomable child. You are a collection of galaxies, you are the entire universe. Your heart is chaos and creation. Sometimes I worry that I don't write about you enough, that I'm always focusing on your sister, but this is why. Who can begin to reason such an awesome force? Scientists could devote years to it. And me? I'm just your mother, so utterly gobsmacked by the reality of you that I'm (mostly) incapable of putting words to it.

Some lessons.

We're nature girls, my daughters say -- and they are -- but even they can't comprehend the baby copperhead snake split in half on the sidewalk. "Did an animal do that?" Madeleine wants to know, and I say, No, it was a person. "Why?!" She wants to know, outrage coloring her 6-year-old voice, still small but in the process of changing, right now and all the time, into something more world weary, something more in-the-know. Probably because they were scared, I say, hands in the air, a shrug.

This is nature, too, I want to explain. Humans will do all kinds of brutal, unnecessary things in the name of fear. Like what, they will ask, and I will say, Like killing a snake. Like hurting each other. Like all kinds of terrible things.

Madeleine is hands-on-hips furious, glaring up at me. Violet is crumpled-knees curious on the sidewalk, watching ants crawl over the snake's split carcass. "That snake wouldn't have hurt anyone," Madeleine says, gesturing down at the snake. "They should've just left it alone!"

I know, I know, I say. It's really terrible.

In my memory of this the trees are so green in the light that they glow. Cicadas buzz in the trees and mosquitoes bite and bite and bite. It must have been hot, late spring in Texas. We keep walking and Madeleine chases lizards. Violet meanders. I don't give the girls that lesson about nature, about human nature, but I believe they learned it anyway. It will come burbling to the surface one day when they are older, unbidden. And when it does I hope they'll remember: Probably because they were scared, and it will be that little bit of empathy they'll need to remember how to be good people in the world.

That big snow cone truck in the sky.

Somehow it never seems completely dark in Madeleine's room. Part of that is the nightlight shaped like a snail that sits at the corner of her bed and casts warm light in a halo around her pillow. But there is more to light than its very existence. There is also the intangible brightness that comes from the life in her room, the leopard gecko hunting crickets in its tank, the pet rat rustling in its bedding, the ball python exploring its confines, looking for escape. Their noise lends credence to the idea that her room is a safe place. Comfort somehow illuminated without the help of light.

And there is also the intangible brightness that comes from my daughter, nestled into my shoulder and burrowed under the covers. She picks nighttime to talk about the Big Things, and tonight's topic is one of the Super Big Things. "Mom," she begins, kicking her feet a little as she arranges the covers just so. "Logan at school said he believes in God. And I told him there isn't a God, and he said, 'You don't believe in God?' And some other people said I was wrong. And they said there is a God! But I'm not wrong, right?"

"Well," I hedge, considering my response. Not for the first time I wish I had something solid to tell her, something steady and sure she can hold on to. "I don't really know if you're wrong or right," I finally tell her, cursing my own lack of a clear belief system. "I have no idea if there is a God or not."

"But you don't believe in God, right?" She is drawing this from a talk we had ages ago, where I thought I had been careful to say whether I did or didn't believe. And No, I don't, is the thought that burbles up now in my mind just as it did then, unbidden, and just as quickly my mind sends it back down. This feels like a deeply treasonous thing to think, much less to say. Almost immediately I am thinking of my mother, who sent my sister and I to church sporadically when we were younger. I am thinking of the Bible camp she sent me to when I was younger. I am thinking of my mom on the phone earlier in the week, imploring me to take my girls to church on Easter, to teach them the real meaning of the holiday. To say I don't believe in God is to reject something intrinsic to how I define my mother. It is to let her down immeasurably.

Before I can answer, Madeleine is speaking again. "What?" She scoffs. "Do I think there is some big man up in the sky who will take me up to the clouds with his big old hand and take me to the snow cone truck up there?"

"Snow cone truck?" I ask, and Madeleine giggles. "Yeah! What? Am I going to eat clouds? I don't believe in that. I don't believe there is a big castle up in the clouds." She is impassioned, gesturing with her hands now. "I don't believe it because I can't see it," she says. "It doesn't make sense to me because you can't even see that!"

"You believe in fairies and you've never seen one," I point out. "What about the tooth fairy?"

"Yeah, but I've seen the stuff that the tooth fairy leaves me," she says. "It's hard to explain, because I haven't seen a fairy, but I know they're there because you see their stuff sometimes. Like the glitter in the backyard and the fairy steps and the money under my pillow and stuff."

I suppress a wince, because these things -- these things are things I have fostered. Sprinkling glitter in the backyard because I know when the girls find it they will be delighted that magic was left there. Calling the fungus jutting out like steps from the trunk of a tree "fairy steps." Writing tiny notes from the tooth fairy thanking the girls for taking such good care of their teeth. I have fostered in them a belief in magic but not a belief in anything spiritual.

"That makes sense," I say carefully. "But some people say that life itself is proof enough of God. Someone could look at a snake winding through the grass and say, 'Look at that amazing creature! Only an amazing God could create something like that.' Or they might look at a beautiful sunset and just feel really glad that there is a God who would make something so lovely."

Mad considers this. "No," she finally says. "That stuff is just nature."

I don't argue this point because I mostly agree with her. And all the while my mind has been grappling for the proper way to frame all this for her. I've got mostly nothing. Except this: "I think the thing about God is that it doesn't really matter," I say. "All that really matters is that you're a good person in the world. So at the end of everything, when you're very, very old and it's time for you to die, you can die knowing that you were good for the world. That you always tried to do good things. And if there is a God, great. He'll be very happy. And if there isn't, then awesome. Because you and the people in your life will be happy -- because you were good to the people you loved."

"Yeah," Mad says immediately, as though this is something she's thought of before."But why do people even believe in God? It doesn't even make sense!"

And now I am thinking of Bible camp again, how I was inexplicably moved to tears at the evening service on the last day, when all the kids joined hands and sang in unison, "Jesus, lamb of God, worthy is thy name." I am thinking of the things people say and do to each other in the name of God. I am thinking of my cousins, devout Christians, who do their own thing and radiate goodness. How great it is for them to have that foundation. I am thinking of my own husband, who says he believes in God. "Mad, your dad believes in God," I tell her. "It makes sense to him."

"But not to us, right?" She says. "We don't believe in God. Maybe if we see him, then we can believe in him."

So now we're talking about faith. And we're talking about nature and we're talking about beliefs and values and it is 9 p.m. and she should be asleep already. And besides. Besides. I don't know the answers. Until I have something real, something concrete to give her -- straight from my heart, something I believe with all of my entire soul -- then I will at least have something she can hold on to. Until then, I have nothing but uncertainty to offer.

I believe in you, I think before I tell her we'll have to talk more about this later. I believe in this -- as I give her a hug goodnight. I believe that this life is pretty awesome -- as she snuggles closer and shuts her eyes. We are ensconced in the glow of her nightlight. And in the other light, too -- the way the sounds of her pets warm up the darkness and turn it into something safer, somehow. This isn't too far from the nature of faith, I realize. Recognizing the light of life in the darkness. Resting in a moment. Asking questions, filled with love. Maybe here and now is our greater power. I want to tell her this in a way she'll understand, but the best I can do is kiss her forehead and tell her I love her.

A 7-Year-Old Digs Up Her Dead Pet Mouse

She uncovers death in the backyard
because she misses life, the uncomplicated truth
of a small mouse burrowing into the whorls of her hair.

It looks just the same.
She brushes the dirt from its body and regards it,
considers how life becomes death all at once,
wonders at it, how she can hold both
in the palm of her hand.

This is so small it's almost
nothing. So large it's almost everything.
But she doesn't have the words for it, only
the weight of a body, the lightness of death, the heaviness
of love snapping and popping with nowhere
to make a connection.

She returns it to the earth. She piles the dirt on,
tamps it down, and goes in to wash her hands.
Her thoughts are curiously quiet for now.
There is a sense she's done something huge,
but she doesn't really know what it is.

The ghost of a song whispers in her head:
You're in my heart,
You're in my heart,
and she feels a lurch there. A secret something.
A tender hurt. But she doesn't have the words for this, either,
only everything, all this, this whole world.
It's too big, this, and so. So she will
go and ask her mother
for a piece of chocolate cake.

Slow, slow, you want to call.

You used to sit near an open window, a tattered pink spiral notebook open on the bed. You'd breathe in the scent of wet rain on rusted window screens and imagine that the breeze sliding through was a promise of something. And it was, the breeze soaked in moon and drenched in starlight, a promise you could feel in the knotted hollows of your bones, look how big the world is. It felt like yours, sitting there, pen in hand and your thoughts lifting up and up and up and out, ballooning into something tangible. These real, important thoughts, nothing more and nothing less than your fingers on the screen, your hand around the pen, the spiral spine of your notebook marking your arm with lines when you leaned forward, the pen, always the pen, the bubble-swirl of letters. You contained your breathless teenage stupid awestruck brilliant small looming pinprick specific peaceful wondrous ideas in the lines and loops of letters. Your heart raced. The world, oh, the entire world. You were it and it was you and you had some strange sense of entitlement when you wrote it all down. My world! My whole entire world!

And today you are less and not much more, the knotted hollows of your bones are filled too much with an aching worry, an ever-present concern for the state of things. You are always worrying about the state of things, and when you are not worrying about the state of things you are too silent. Too silent because you've retreated, working over a raw anger and hiding. You feel a sharp absence in the inside corner of your elbow, where you keep the memory of rain on screens and a feeling that the world could be yours if you found the right words to say it. You find wonder sometimes in the giggle gasp of your children laughing or the way light tiptoes its way through trees sometimes in the early morning, touching leaves and crossing distances in a way that comes close to meaningful. You are slower and you distrust too much joy. Joy is a two-faced harridan who offers warmth at one turn and goes cold too quickly. And your heart races, but not for the world, oh, the entire world. It races because you can sense in a curious way that you never did before, how quickly everything is rushing by. Slow, slow! You want to call. You want to grasp time's racing feet and drag it back to you by the ankles. You want to bloody its face and kick it into submission. But you watch it go instead, and you whisper. Every second murmurs. My world. My whole entire world.

No word or collection of words.

On a whim I called an old friend. She wanted to know if I was still writing. I write every day at my job, but that's not what she meant. "For fun." The fun kind. I struggled to explain. How exhausted I feel when I read a poem or language that feels overly fluffy. Language for the sake of language. Authors in love with their own voices. How it's been awhile since I read anything that startled my eyes open, that made the pulse of blood in my veins zing. Anything that made the cells of my skin dance. And how, oh, that feeling is times 100 when I try to write something of my own. I ache for clarity, for words that say what is real and still make you feel.

I want to write something and surprise myself. I want better words, a new language. I want to type out a binary message with the simplest of words. I want to define the essence of things.

And I do. I know the essence of things. I know the essence of all the things. It's a singer who sings, "And the shadows skip like sharks through the gasps of air between them." It's women and magic and clothes and dancing. It's color and joy and creation, it's my daughter's white blanket and my other daughter's headbands. It's the void between all of those things. The great, gaping blackness between scary, wonderful bursts of light. It's falling and flying and -- being. It's just being. Who has words for that? No word or collection of words is ever enough.

Light/Dark

"Okay, mom," she says agreeably when I request something of her. She takes it in stride and it's telling that this is remarkable. Wayland and I catch eyes and can't help but smile. "Progress," he mouths at me, and I nod quickly so she doesn't see.

::

The next morning I lean in to help her with her high top shoes and she's still furious, beyond furious, because I insisted she take her own nightgown off earlier. Before I can move she's hit me in the face, hard, screaming, "I HATE YOU! I WISH I DIDN'T HAVE A STUPID STINKING MOTHER!" And I grab the blanket in her lap, clenched fists, overcome with the urge to lash out back at her, to hit and scream and lose control as she has.

Instead, I drop the blanket and leave the room. She's screaming, "SORRY! I'M SORRY, MAMA!!!! I SAID I'M SORRY!" I take a breath, two breaths, three breaths, more breaths, until the hammering of my heart is softer. I come back and calmly resume helping her with her shoes. She is sobbing into her blanket. "I said I was sorry!" She is wailing. "Why won't you accept my apology?" When I try to explain that I have accepted her apology, but one doesn't just get happy as soon as soon as they hear an apology after they've been hit in the face. Before I can get this out, before I can make sure she at least hears the message, she screams "STOP IT! WHY ARE YOU STILL MAD AT ME?" While I'm trying to explain. She just wants it to go away.

::

Still, last night, back to last night. She is calm and agreeable and REASONABLE, even. "When I say that mean stuff, like I hate you and stupid and stinking, it feels like I'm lying," she tells Wayland. "Even while I'm saying it, it feels like I'm lying."

She is snuggled against Wayland's shoulder. Her eyes are alight with an easy happiness.

This is what I hold onto. More light than dark.

The weight of something dazzling.

I see the word "stardust" somewhere and I want to write it. I want to scoop up handfuls of gold glitter and feel the weight of it in my hand before I toss it to the wind. I want to see the air shimmer. But the truth is I'm miles from stardust sitting at a desk in a basement, surrounded by stark white walls.

 I have told myself since the new year dawned that I will just try this year. And that's it. I have cataloged again and again over the course of last year where things feel like they are lacking. And I also spent the better part of last year just noticing that. Hey, wow, these things are just not working. The factors of my life are aligning in a displeasing way. Just look at that. With the kind of strange awed wonder that someone has when they're taking in an incomprehensible mess. It's the equivalent of being told to clean your terribly messy room when you're a kid. You just don't even know where to start. So you shut the door and pretend it's not there. Until your mom comes in. Hey, make the bed, she says, then pile stuff on there. Once your floor is clean, you'll feel better, and the mess is central there. Then you can start organizing. And that's what you do, and hey, she's right. That was easier than you thought it would be.

Working your way through a messy life is another story, of course. There's no tangible thing to look at, to organize. But the boiled-down message from my mom isn't really "start with the bed," it's just "jump in and do it, you have to start somewhere, just do it already." Jump. Start. Do.

And so I will let that be the tone for the year, and strike the word "hopefully" from that phrase because so much apathy rests in the idea of hopeful. Instead I'll suck in a breath and roll up my sleeves and just get started. From here the air is dry and plain and the walls are blah but action breeds miracles when you really take a close look. Action breeds miracles and there it is, and you do and do and do until you've got it, the stardust, the weight of something dazzling in your hands.

When going back means moving forward.

I said goodbye to the girls this morning and walked out of their school, feeling heavy with a peculiar kind of grief. I said goodbye to the girls and I did not say hello to Madeleine's first grade teachers. We didn't even make a right-hand turn down the hall where her classes were held. Didn't even tour past the room where I'd had several meetings with her teachers, worriedly scanning the notes I'd scrawled before driving to the school, nervously tracing over knuckles with fingertips, leaning back and trying to find the right combination of words that would tell them: I'm worried. Help Madeleine. What can I do? What is going to happen to her?

I said goodbye to Violet and I said goodbye to Madeleine and as I left the school I said goodbye to an old reality, some random fact about my daughter that somehow became a part of who I was. Mad was a first grader, now she's a kindergartner. Goodbye, first grade. Goodbye some odd idea of supposed to be.

It's good, great, wonderful that we were able to make this move for her. I feel pretty certain that this was the best thing we could do for her, things being what they are, but it doesn't make it hurt any less, shelving some idea of progress, coming to terms with the idea that Madeleine's peer group is a bit ahead of her. That we'll need to go back to move forward.

Because if motherhood has taught me anything, it's that progress isn't linear. Growth doesn't happen in an unceasing forward line. Growth is stops and starts, retracing steps and reconfiguring plans. Growth is a lurching heart on the way out of your kids' school building, your daughter's big eyes and thoughtful frown as she stares out of the car window, taking measure of what's to come, her palm in your palm and a gentle squeeze goodbye.

Now, now now.

The road stretches on and on, slicing thick through piles of old snow. Cold wind bites the car and we blast warm air at ourselves from the inside. We've been in the car for six hours now and we're not even halfway there. And that's okay. Of course it's okay. In the backseat my daughters are sleeping, little pulses of warmth and love. My husband at the helm. And for the briefest of moments I feel the gears and cogs of time align themselves around me. I'm there at the center and I can see so clearly where I stand, when I stand: now, now, now. This is happy. And just as I recognize it, it passes, and I'm sucked back through the cogs: forward, forward, forward.