BITTERSWEET

You know how they say that at the moment of your death, your life flashes before your eyes? Well, it seems to me that as we get older this begins to happen on a smaller scale. Now that much more of my life is behind me than ahead of me, I often find memories of the past intruding on my days. 

I will be taking a walk or pruning roses, when I will suddenly have an image of my teenaged self heading to the movies with my best friend to see A Hard Day's Night; or my 20-year-old self, sitting under a tree with a boy; or my 30-something self, composing a short story on a typewriter; or my 40-something self, hugging a young daughter; or my 50-something self, admiring my husband, with his dress-shirt sleeves rolled up.  Or I am sitting in a college classroom, bursting with the love of literature, imagining my life as a writer; or celebrating the birth of a daughter; or hunched over my computer, rushing to meet a deadline at work.

You get the idea.

The memory will be sharp, as if it were a photo lit by a flash. Like a sunset, it will linger for a few moments, and then it will be gone, leaving me with whatever it was I was doing before the memory filled my inner eye.**

This didn’t happen in my early and middle years, when the present crowded out most of the past, most of the time. But, now, memories are everywhere.  I will spend time with a granddaughter, and suddenly have an image of that granddaughter's mother as a baby.  I will start to read a book and remember another book.  

 

And, often, these days, I will see a face - on TV or on the street, anywhere, really - and be reminded of another face. I guess this makes sense.  There can only be so many variations on faces. The most startling moment of this sort occurred last week when I saw a picture of our new Congresswoman, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, on the front page of our paper, and did a double take. Viewing her face in profile, I thought it was a picture of me. Let me hasten to add that Marie is 34. I am not 34, but I saw a young me in the photo.  I sent the picture to a few people who knew me when, and found that my reaction was shared. It was very unsettling.  (The photo, not their reaction. Sometimes I will watch a TV show or movie from years or decades ago and wonder what it is like for the actors to see themselves moving about in their younger incarnations.) 

 

And then there are the times when memories or faces don't intrude, when I actually invite them, as when I’m trying to fall asleep at night and I do what I call watching home movies. I will pick a moment in my life and call up scenes from that time and just hang out there for a while. 

 

And sometimes my memories feel like a deck of tarot cards that I can spread out on a table, picking up a few and pondering what they have to tell me. Was that a good decision?  Would I make that choice again?  How much would I give to relive that day? How does a particular memory inform a decision I must make today?

 

At times, memories bring me great joy and, at times, they bring regret or longing. Not too much regret though.  Of, course, there are things I profoundly wish I hadn’t done or had done differently, but if I were to undo any decision from my past, everything that followed would collapse.  Most importantly, I would not have the family and friends that surround me.  There would be a different family and group of friends, but this is inconceivable. And, so, I have learned to, mostly, accept my past.

 

Finally, there is this.  The older I get, the more the past and present seem to overlap and unspool at the same time. I am grateful to have lived long enough to have such a wealth of memories weaving through my present. 

 

And you, who read this post, may your regrets be few, and may your memories, however fleeting, bring you joy and peace. 

 

 ** Yes, I have written before about the intrusion of memories. https://woacanotes.blogspot.com/2019/09/fire-and-rain-on-time-travel-and.html   I guess I had more to say on the subject. 

 

 

 

LIVING WITH MYSTERY - WALKING IN WONDER

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about mystery.  In particular, I have been thinking about what the Irish mystic and poet John O’Donohue called “the mystery of being here.”

And, because I have three baby granddaughters, born within six months of each other, I have also been thinking about the fact that when we are very young, we simply accept the circumstances into which we are born – the shape and size and feel of our parents and others who care for us; the four walls of our home; the toys on our floor.  There are tasks to attend to – we must learn to sit up, to crawl, to walk, to talk.  These tasks are all-consuming.  The present is all there is.  

At this stage, as far as I know, we aren’t capable of thinking about the mystery of being here; we are, instead, experiencing the wonder of being here.  Each new thing or person we encounter is an amazement.  We are dazzled.

And then at some point the questions begin.  First come the answerable questions (even if one must resort to Google), such as:

Why is the sky blue?

What is snow?

Then come answerable questions that require a bit of finesse.   Here are a couple asked by a daughter of mine before age four:

How did I get out of the baby tummy?

How did I get into the baby tummy?

(I did answer these honestly.)

Then come the questions asked just before bedtime, when you really want to go to sleep.  Here is a further sample from a daughter, aged maybe 12:  What was the Vietnam war about, anyway?

And, eventually, along come the cosmic questions:

Where did we come from?

Why are we here?

Why do we suffer?

Why do we die

What happens when we die?

At first the cosmic questions take up a lot of space, at least, for me, they did.  But here’s the thing -- the older I get, the more comfortable I am with mystery, the more willing I am to accept the questions as being unanswerable.  

I am deeply perplexed by claims to certain answers to any of these questions.  I do not understand such certainty.  Where does it come from?  The poet Mary Oliver speaks for me on this subject:

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous

 to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the

 mouths of the lambs.

How rivers and stones are forever

In allegiance with gravity

 while we ourselves dream of rising.

How two hands touch and the bonds will 

 never be broken

How people come, from delight or the 

 scars of damage,

to the comfort of a poem.

 

Let me keep my distance, always, from those 

 who think they have the answers.

 

Let me keep company always with those who say 

 "Look!" and laugh in astonishment, 

 and bow their heads.

 

It’s true, I do have some intuitions about the cosmic questions; you might even say I have faith in my intuitions.  Still, I do not lay claim to any certainties.  And I have no interest in trying to convince anyone that my intuitions are correct.  (Let me add that I am as uncomfortable with atheistic certainty—what I call unholier than thou – as I am with religious certainty.)  

 

A number of years ago, I read the book Leaving Church:  A Memoir of Faith by the Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor.  She recounted that several of her parishioners had come to her, struggling with questions of belief, and she began to realize that she was more interested in beholding than believing.

 

Beholding.  I like that word.  It allows for mystery.  It allows for wonder.  

 

Here's the thing about certainty; it cuts off curiosity at its knees.  Certainty is a hardening of our ideas, a shutting down of the possibility that there is another way of looking at things.  Acceptance of mystery allows for curiosity, for expansiveness, for taking in new ideas, for the possibility of harkening back to the wonder of our earliest years. 

 

I return to the wisdom of John O’ Donohue:

 

Awaken to the mystery of being here 

and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence. 

Have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.

Receive encouragement when new frontiers beckon. 

Respond to the call of your gift and the courage to follow its           path...

May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul. 

May you take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention...

May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.

  

As we begin this new year, may we each awaken to, and accept, the mystery of being here.  And may we, with O'Donohue and my granddaughters, behold all that is around us “as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.”

                                   Photo by Guillermo Ferla on Unsplash