Turning again
and again
towards the empty place
fails to bring it any closer
any faster
Tag: acceptance
94. Things I Can Whisper: Become, Surrender
I do my work. I do my best to make the small decisions well, and I try not to hunger for the great things, for the deeper explanations. For I am sentenced to keep watch over this small patch of earth, to judge its miseries and tell its stories. That’s who I am.
– From The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
38. Things I Can Entwine: Tendril, Light
This time in 2014, our faculty voted to merge with another university department. So began the Year of Pain. We forced ourselves together, cracking open cultures, grafting extremities onto an unformed core.
The fertilization plucked a thread in me. A quickening pulse, a sudden expansion (which, from another angle, is simply an unraveling).
Into that opening bloomed one opportunity after another. Phototropic absent intention, each one reached towards fervor and fed on indiscriminate impulse.
I invited them all in.
When someone needed to design and lead a graduate policy writing seminar, I drafted a syllabus.
When someone needed to mentor two doctoral TAs in teaching practice, I took them on.
When someone needed to contribute an academic affairs article for the October issue, I sharpened my pencil.
When someone needed to present at the conference, I submitted the proposal.
When someone needed to teach a semester-long course in pedagogy to visiting Chinese professors, I rearranged my fall schedule.
When someone needed to administer a dean search, I opened the hood.
When someone needed to support all the students from two additional PhD programs because mergers mean more, I signed the job description.
Twelve months. All of this in one cycle around the sun.
This week, my supervisor handed me a piece of paper. A note. A pay increase. She also copied me on the discussion of which office I’ll be using when I work half of each week from the campus that is 12 minutes from my house rather than 45.
With all of this dizzying good news, you’d think when they let us out at 2:00pm on the Friday of a holiday weekend, I’d skip off to happy hour with friends.
Instead, I sag against my kitchen counter and burst into tears.
So weary. My everything — spinning head and sleep-starved body and stretched-thin days with my boy — all of it worn out. Yes, shorter commute, larger paycheck. Also yes, more learning, more pivoting, more work, more life.
More life indeed.
My only life.
I push off from the counter and throw back a glass of cold water. All that need is still gunning for me on the other side of the door. Its knock is insistent. No, it will not come in. I walk from the kitchen and turn Blues BBQ up loud enough to drown out the drumbeat of 40 years of mistakes.
And one year of overcorrecting. One Year of Pain.
I fit the battery into the drill and open holes in the bottoms of half a dozen plastic containers.
Then I step onto the balcony and plunge my hands into the soil.
The sage seedlings have started to unfurl, as have tiny pops of mint. The dill fans its lace as the sky moves. I lift them all into larger pots, deadhead the geraniums, pull feathery spiderwebs from cilantro already gone to seed.
Everything leans in one direction. The sun, such a piper. I rotate buckets and wedge the smaller ones in up front. The spinach is almost too leafy now and will need to go either into a larger pot or into my breakfast. As I water the hanging boxes, the clean scent of lemon verbena wraps itself around the Thai basil’s purple spines.
The lavender is the only seed that hasn’t taken. A mold furs black soil in two tiny pudding cups.That flower decided against trying in a climate too alien.
Maybe it lacked the strength to emerge from a wish for its remembered home.
The snow peas and sugar snaps are lush now, their tresses spilling over the concrete lip of the balcony. I bend and tear the creepers from one another as gently as I can. I wind them around the railing and hope the wind leaves them be.
What must they make of this strange place, up so far from the earth? Do they know this is it?
Do they understand that from here, they grow?
From here, and nowhere else?
The Things I Can
Follow the The Things I Can Adventure
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
I was at a Dead show the first time I heard it. 16 years old. A circle formed at the edge of the stadium’s corridor during the drums-and-space jam. Undeterred by the revved-up traffic and whirling skirts, that circle was a solid, swaying knot. All twenty or so human links weaved in and around each other. I heard the voices in unison and asked a woman dancing nearby what they were saying. “Serenity Prayer,” she said. She repeated it for me.
Was it an invocation? Some kind of magic spell? It must have been if it managed to help a bunch of folks in recovery navigate the rainbow pharmacopeia that trailed the band in its transcontinental wanderings. Somewhere along the way, I memorized that prayer without intending to. It is now such a part of my cultural vocabulary that it’s as firmly planted as the opening of the Gettysburg Address and the entirety of Frost’s “Two Roads Diverged.” In fact, it barely registers anymore.
How deep do these lines run? Do they stay safely entombed or do they erode? It has to be a matter of practice.
Sometimes, it’s a matter of the right trigger. Continue reading “The Things I Can”
Done Enough
It starts to rain at midnight.
A spider takes refuge in the corner
by the window. Water is the last thing
We need around here.
I stack plates in the dishwasher
To make room
For sleep.
My visitor at the edge
Of the curtain near the bed
Seems neither moved by the arrival
Of tomorrow nor compelled to spin past
The threshold just to catch
The taillights of a south bound
Day dissolving into the horizon line.
Bug Bites: Zen and the Angry Child
You mustn’t suppose
I never mingle in the world
Of humankind —
It’s simply that I prefer
To enjoy myself alone.
– Ryokan
Into the morning blue he wakes as dark-eyed as when he greeted night. He hurls himself at me, his hair like snapdragon stalks unpruned along the fence of his fury.
“Idiot,” he grumbles. I am at a loss. First I tell him if he’s old enough to use that word, then he’s old enough to make his own breakfast. Then I change course. Thorns will not be the texture of our day. I slide from the bed and crawl across the carpet to my splayed and scowling son. Right up close, I say, “I love you, baby, and you love me. I always know it.” I wrap my arms around him and tickle his sides. As he wrenches himself away, he bites back the smile I catch peeking. “Even if you don’t feel it right this minute, I know you love me.”
“No I DON’T.” Cold simmer cuts up from under the blonde cloak shadowing his gaze.
When he was two, he declared himself a girl. Rainbows on his underwear. Sequins in his hair. His third and fourth birthdays were pink crowns and princess cake. In his fifth year, he shed the tutu and snapped on a fist. He has not unclenched it since, except in moments belly-flat on the floor or twined sticky into me. Moments when he forgets.
While the oatmeal simmers under its skin of sugared cinnamon, he arranges a dinosaur jungle on the floor. The T-Rex pounds at the lesser beasts. A barrage of high-impact explosions upends all the palm trees leaving half a dozen herbivores strewn across the killing field.
I watch him wander into the tangled garden of his imagination and take corners I can’t see. I tiptoe to the edge and consider joining him there. Does he need the company of others, of playmates, of me? My only child turns away and blazes a trail alone among his hedgerows. Is it labyrinth or maze? He is not reluctant to find his own way in. I wonder what, if anything, compels him to follow the thread back out again.
Returning home at the end of day, we trip our way to bed after fighting over dishes, teeth, bath. It is time to surrender to routine. Both of us need to waltz our way back to a rocking gait that smooths the friction at the edges where we meet. Three books. Three songs. Every night for six years.
He has a fairy blanket on the bed. It is the last vestige. He keeps it close even in the August swelter. With Tinkerbell bunched at our feet, we read Zen Shorts for the 400th time.
“Mommy, why is this book called that?”
“Well, the three stories Stillwater tells all come from Zen. And they’re all short.”
“What’s Zen?”
Oh geez.
“I guess it’s a way of living. It’s very old. Thousands of years, maybe? It has to do with making quiet places inside your mind and body.”
He twists away from me. Restless, ever moving. He is all proboscis and fire ant. A cement mixer. A quicksand man. I have had to learn to test my footing before every step. “You know how we talk about breathing when you’re wound up? Or when I heat up? Zen is about getting still. Like Stillwater in the book. Then you can accept things without needing them to be different.”
Zen Cliff’s Notes. Am I close? He’s humming and tapping his fingers in a pattern along the wall. I touch the edge of his leg just enough to make contact but not enough to capture his attention and raise his inevitable ire. “Even when there’s craziness all around you, even if a robber comes into your house or people say mean things, you stay peaceful inside yourself.”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay.”
“It’s not just for kids,” I tell him. “Here.” I get up and go find the book of Zen poems a friend gave me back when time to play with meditation was there for the taking. Or rather, when we chose to see abundance in a clock face rather than just its pinching glare.
I open to Ryokan.
Here are the ruins of the cottage where I once hid myself.
“Okay, whatever. That’s enough,” he tells me. The gold ribbon marking the page hides down in the spine. He pulls it away and trails it down over the back. “Now you’ve lost your place,” he tells me.
“Good,” I say. “I was hoping for that. Now I can start at the next place.” I leave the ribbon free and close the cover. The cottage is far behind me. I am alone on my unmarked path but also tangled at the root with a boy whose opening is his own to burn or tend.
“Are you mad?” His grin crouches in the dry weeds. His eyes cut a path to me. He is ready to pounce.
“No, baby. I’m nowhere close to mad. I’m happy to be here with you, exactly like this.” I set the poems on the floor and open my voice for the first song.
Give Up
The place the gaze lands
is in one’s control
as is learning everything
within reach
about this here and that
just beyond.
So is what goes into the mouth
and
what comes out,
the tenor, the grip, the sharpness
of the blade
with which truth is pared.
The fall
onto knees. The plea
and forgiveness.
The bedtime. The book.
The lyrics and even the tune.
Action, stillness
and the flavor of silence.
What is given
away, what is squandered on trinkets,
what is stashed
in the cellar
and forgotten.
Yes
even forgetting.
But not what was buried there before,
no
that is not within one’s control.
Neither the place where the gaze begins
nor the native tongue. Not what is offered
up, how much, and by whom.
Not what goes into his mouth
nor what comes out. Not the shot fired,
its teeth and velocity.
Not geometry. Not ancestry.
Not gravity or the callous arc of cosmic debris.
Not sleep or dreams, the weight of the day,
the insistence of hunger, the volume
of the neighbors. Not the child’s preference
for something entirely different or the echo
of aching for something
entirely gone. The imbalance of desire.
Not the first frost.
Not the one who arrives
or the one who won’t go. Not the departure
of faith.
Not secret worlds.
Not the keeping
of words
or the end of needing
them.
Happy 100 Days: 54
Wants: Ice Cream, Popsicle, Jellybeans
The seller accepts my offer over all the others. Even cash from investors, higher bids from FHA borrowers, and promises of covering closing costs do not beat me out. It is a strong offer with 20% down, but the letter my realtor writes is the golden ticket. She paints a picture of Bug and me, growing up together there in that exact corner of the planet.
The record kicks up to 78 rpm. The lyrics are a high frequency tumult. The homeowner, gun shy because her last two buyers had their financing fall through at the 11th hour, is in a kerfuffle. She has something else waiting, it seems. This has taken her months longer than the overheated market promised. She wants the sale to be settled by the first week of December and to be moved out by the holidays.
Push, push, push. I take a breath and tell my realtor I’m sorry, but everyone will have to wait. I need to sit with this possibility for a day or two and let it work its way through my bloodstream. I also have to finish up my week at the office, pick up my son from school, and get some sleep. The homeowner needs an answer yesterday. I understand she is frantic, but she will have to wait a few more tomorrows. If she wants fast, an investor will fork over $200 grand in cash and then lease the place out to the next sucker who will pay twice the mortgage in rent. I don’t say this, of course. I just remind myself to be kind yet firm.
I am in a kerfuffle my own self. Buy now and take on the cost of the commute? Hold out for that phantom place closer to Tee and my work with half the square footage for a mere $40,000 more, all while risking losing out on these bargain-basement interest rates?
Between idealism and practicality, how does a person hit the sweet spot?
This place is cozy and light. It has big bedrooms, a fireplace, a yard with promise. It is on a bus line with transportation to my metro stop. It is near the Korean Spa that I love. It is walking distance to a supermarket, a library, and a park.
The living room is so narrow, I whine to myself. I want a place closer to the metro. Something with woods nearby. A basement. A guest room.
I slow down and consider what this new life is teaching me. Hell, my six-year-old has this stuff figured out already. Have I not learned anything in the past two years?
Wants: Acres of open land. A toolshed and workshop. A ten-minute walk to the office. A basement dance studio.
Needs: A safe neighborhood. A quiet bedroom. A reliable way to get to work. A place for my son to learn, play, and grow.
Back and forth in myself, the longing for what is not (yet) within reach swings and clangs. The wanting makes me curl my lip at this beautiful opportunity to fulfill my family’s needs.
Between spoiled and growing up, how does a person hit the sweet spot?
We have the inspection scheduled for Thursday. She was pushing for Tuesday, but both the inspector and I carved out a few more days. Once we are finished digging around under the carpets and behind the hot water heater, I will have three days to make a decision. Barring any issues in financing, I could be on my way to home ownership by Thanksgiving.
Seven months ago, I was still sure that I was trapped in dire financial straits with no ladder in sight. The era of staying at home with Bug, following Tee’s vague career trajectory from one time zone to the next, and eventually divorcing had reduced my financial and professional foundation to rubble. I clung to an image of myself hefting one broken stone at a time back onto something resembling a wall with no blueprint in hand and all the pieces on the brink of toppling again.
That was not what was happening, of course. Six months ago, I began to realize that the story I was telling myself was doing a better job holding me back than my circumstances were:
If my paycheck is sufficient to support Bug and me in our own place, I might actually have to get off my frightened ass and make the leap. I claim I ache for a home. A Place of Our Own is my official Red Ryder carbon action 200 shot range model air rifle. But maybe I don’t entirely trust myself to manage alone. If I wake up to find that possibility under the tree, will I shoot my eye out? Having enough would, after all, mean the end of this recuperative chapter in the suffocating security of my parents’ nest. Might it be that the truth of my terror is not in being stuck but in becoming unstuck?
And so. The bank agrees to loan me many thousands of dollars, my department pushes through a small raise, the realtor helps me squeeze into the two-day window when my crush of a house is back on the market, and BOOM!
The seller accepts my offer.
Wants: Ice Cream, popsicles, jellybeans. Gingerbread cottages. White knights. Happily ever after.
Needs: Water, trees, shelter.
Home.
Happy 100 Days: 84
Some days, happy is not a feeling. It is taking a blowtorch to the invasive species. It is burning off the tangle that has choked off the native leaf. Remember those parasitic cuttings you pushed into your soil when you did not know better? Remember when the blossoms made you stupid and the fragrance made you swoon?
Remember the beautiful lie?
Those fine tendrils have twisted into steel coils. You see now, can’t you? How it happens?
Your folly then can be forgiven. Your devotion now cannot.
Some days, happy is not a bouquet. Some days, it is the making way.
It is the slash and burn.
And so, the purge.
(In the absence of a conflagration, an industrial shredder will do.)
Some days, happy is not a state of being. It is a trowel and a bucket of wet cement. It is an intention. A slog, even.
Some days, you are down below the frost line, down at the foundation only just dug, cramming blocks against the cold mud and plastering them into place. You are following the plumb line. You haven’t seen the sun in days.
You do not need to look up. It is still there. Trust me. It will be there again. But now, you are building a floor. You are making your shelter. You are climbing towards the sky.
Some days, happy is not.
And yet, you still find a box full of tools right there at your feet, and your hands are still at work, and the ground still holds.
Some days, the evidence suggests otherwise. But yes. The ground holds.
Happy 100 Days: 88
At the end of a long Friday at the end of a long week, I am missing my son’s birthday dinner because I have to work late. This is really okay, I keep telling myself, because I took him out to breakfast at Bob Evans and walked him to school myself. We carried the brownies for snack time in a hand-painted shoe-box. I will see him for a few hours on Saturday, and I have taken the day off on Monday because his school is out even though my university is not. And we were up late and up early, and then there is the actual swimming-pool birthday party next weekend, and and and.
But it is 3:50pm on the Friday of my son’s birthday, and I am upstairs in the windowless meeting room rolling around pre-fab tables to prepare for a series of presentations by doctoral students on public policy research.
This is my job. I love my job. I love my doctoral students, and I am curious about their passions, even when they start growing breathless over things like “financial liberalization in emerging market economies and international capital flows.” Yes, even that.
Several times in any given month, I seat myself in a room like this and drink from the information fire-hose. Sometimes it is a dissertation proposal. Sometimes it is an actual dissertation defense, the candidate as crisp and polished as a new apple but damp at the temples and speaking too fast. At weekly brown-bag lectures, faculty members talk about their projects. Peppered throughout the year are seminars by visiting professors, mini-conferences, and workshops like these where budding scholars present current research in a faux-conference setting in order to prepare for the real thing.
This program does a fine job expanding analytic capabilities and policy expertise, but most of the PhD students are just sort of expected to figure out how to present. Some are further along the curve than others. I have been wowed by a couple of rising stars who have employed both art and editing to design trim presentations with moments of humor woven into tightly organized structures. Most, however, cram 197 words on a slide, whisper and “um” through 25 uninterrupted minutes, and slog through table after table swimming with microscopic bits of data. Without a hair of irony, they refer to the endogeneity vs. the exogeneity of their various stochastic models, and their committee members let them get away with this gobbedly-gook. Everyone in the room, it is assumed, understands this language (where do you think the students learned it?) and anyway, the rest of the feeble-minded masses can just sit in the back and smile pretty.
At most of these things, I try to pay attention to the presentation itself. Masters degree notwithstanding, I usually only kind sorta comprehend the first and last quarters of each presentation. The middle chunk? The part that starts when the chi-squared flashes up on the screen? That’s where my bulb dims. So, I shift gears and attend to the presenter’s tone, body language, slides, tempo. The topic is beyond me, but I hope to give the student decent feedback on areas of strength and potential improvement. I am a quasi advisor, after all, so it’s nice to have something about which to advise when the best I can offer on the subject matter is, “Love how you had both an independent and a dependent variable! Super cool!”
So now it’s 4:00pm on the Friday of my son’s birthday and we are starting late because a few faculty members who had volunteered to provide feedback are not here yet. The students are here. More show up to support their peers (At 4:00pm! On a sunny, 81-degree Friday!), then more, until almost every chair in the room is taken, and professors keep sneaking in and grabbing the coveted back-row seats. We all finish our supermarket cookies and settle in.
The first presenter begins.
And she is good.
I mean it. Good! Her topic is fascinating. She is a stronger speaker than when she started the program a year ago. Her research explores the relationship between childhood obesity and participation in certain kinds of leisure physical activity. Specifically, she asks whether spatially expansive activities (she explains, God bless her, that this means things that need lots of room to do, like soccer on a field) are more significantly correlated to low body mass than, say, activities like playing Wii, jumping rope, or even recreational swimming.
Relevant! Easy to follow! Her data, though problematic in ways that the peanut gallery discusses with her, are clear. She actually takes time to explain them. She even had the foresight to keep the research questions simple enough to tackle in a 20-minute presentation.
It is 4:35pm on the Friday of my son’s birthday. After a short break, the next presenter begins. I take a breath and prepare to busy myself with my to-do list. My list does not stand a chance. Another fascinating topic. This one is about land use in Lahore, Pakistan. He has big maps illustrating population growth in the developing world, and I learn all sorts of things about suburban sprawl, corruption, and the history of colonization.
By the third, presentation, I have stopped watching the clock. This one tracks the policy implications of the de-institutionalization of people with intellectual disabilities in Virginia. This, in a state with active institutions 40 years after the Supreme Court case that was supposed to do away with such approaches to the special needs population? Curious! Appalling! So much more to explore!
It is 5:35pm on the Friday of my son’s birthday. I have a heap of questions to ask every presenter, and we have to cut off discussion because half a dozen hands hover in the air, people are sitting forward in their seats, and we were supposed to be done five minutes ago. I help one of the student organizers pack up the equipment. “This was really so good,” I tell her. “This was the first one of these I’ve been to. . .” I stop, realizing I’m not sure how to say it without insulting the entire student body.
“Where all three presentation were actually interesting? I know!” She says, laughing. We fold up the cords and tuck them away. “Usually once the equations come up, I’m a goner,” she tells me sotto voce. “I know I’m supposed to understand that stuff, but boy, it’s nice to hear a presentation that doesn’t take so much work to follow.”
We grin together. She actually had to get a half-decent score on the GREs to get into this program, and I know she has received high grades in her statistics courses so far. It’s comforting to know the bright people I revere occasionally feel like dimwits.
It is 5:45pm on the Friday of my son’s birthday, and I explode out onto the sunny plaza and stride to the metro. On the ride home, I give myself the delicious pleasure of reading a Jonathan Lethem short story in a rumpled New Yorker I found in my office. I have missed my son’s birthday dinner, but traffic smiles on me and I catch Bug at home a few minutes before his dad comes to pick him up. We open the last of the presents. We cuddle on the couch and read a sweet little Patricia Polacco book called Mrs. Katz and Tush. Larnell shares a Kugel with Mrs. Katz who is alone on Passover after her Myron dies. (“My Myron,” she sighs. “What a person.”)
It is six years to the day after my son pushed his way into the world. Life looks absolutely nothing like I imagined it would. That night, someone dropped onto my naked chest a real boy. I felt him land there, that complete and living human, and I whispered, “Welcome to the world, little guy.”
The world, you know. Such as it is.
It is 10:40pm on the Friday of my son’s birthday, and I am alone in the spare room of my parent’s house. The night may not be as sweet as I expected, but oh, how rich the flavor.
Shannon E. Williams 