(This is something I submitted to a magazine; unfortunately it never made it to print...so it has found it's place in the blogosphere)
I have lived 29 years. Twenty nine years of weathering the variable climate that is life. Twenty nine years and, though I can’t recall exactly when, somewhere along the way I must have grown up. As I was standing in line at the pharmacy, all of a sudden it hit me: When in the world did I become an adult?
It’s not a question that warrants an answer, but it is a pretty remarkable thing to suddenly feel the weight of your years. Because we pass our days inside ourselves, peering through our own private window into the world. And it’s so easy to get trapped here. We carry whole universes within us as we brush past one another to read the back of a jar of peanut butter.
And then as suddenly as you turn the corner into your apartment with a handful of groceries, as soon as you see it written on his face that the news is not good, the moment he tells you there are three tumors pushing against his lungs…stage two…lymphoma…more tests… In the briefest moment - a speck of dust on the corridor of your lifetime – everything has changed. Your husband has cancer.
The strange thing about being hit with the enormity of cancer and all its repercussions is that the world still turns. Life goes on. Time moves forward and days pass. Things are exactly as they always have been, yet the ground beneath us has shifted. Privately our lives have been forever stained. In a sense it is disquieting to walk into a world that is blinded by the rhythm of the status quo. It feels that this enormous change in our lives should be causing a ripple. Our distressed hearts and their battle wounds should be visible.
But I don’t need to prove my broken heart. The world is an endless net of broken hearts. Everyone is going through something. Each one of your lives is a language I do not know. Yet we are all made of the same compelling thread. It is the act of living that unravels the mystery.
It’s hard to believe when we are hurting, angry, in pain, that all we ever need is before us, around us, within us. But I see now that it’s true. I look at Angelo and know this is true. I know it is true when I come home to him every day and fall sweetly into the miracle of his presence.
Many people have asked how we are dealing or how we've stayed strong. Day by day we learn how to deal. We put one foot in front of the other. We wake up in the morning and do life. We love each other every moment of every day and with the ferocity of all that we were made of. We laugh. We learn that no amount of thinking can eliminate the pain (and wonder) that comes with living. We discover that (the ultimate cliché) life is precious. And impermanent.
I marvel at Angelo’s strength. He is inexorably powerful, so much larger than his body. Yes, chemo was wretched, but he faced it squarely and kicked its ass right back. Ultimately, it is not the tissue of our humanity that defeats us, and Angelo bravely lives from the deep resources of heart and spirit and gratitude. He lives from the center of the seed of spirit that connects us all together, one and the same.
I draw from Angelo’s strength. He is so much stronger than his twenty nine years. And as I look back on mine, I wonder if perhaps, while standing in line at the pharmacy waiting to refill yet another prescription, I wasn’t peering through my own private window into adulthood. Perhaps I wasn’t feeling the weight of my years, but rather the magnitude of new beginnings. For even now, in all of our uncertainties, heartache, and unexpected moments of joy, I can’t help but feel that this sense of growing up is the hour of grace when all things gather and distill to create the rest of our lives.
Tuesday, November 17
Friday, November 13
Alphabet Soup
I enjoy words. I delight in them actually. Every word is an entire little colony of letters, strung together to make a collective sound with a precise meaning. Each letter has a particular shape that dictates its pronunciation, directing our mouths into an exact configuration which makes a consequent noise. Put next to one another, letters miraculously form units of language – vowels and consonants dancing together harmoniously. Each letter has a place and a purpose, and in synthesis a word is born.
A word - a string of symbols that communicates a thought, an emotion, an object, anything – is a marvel. Every word is a tiny multidimensional universe of expression. A “pot” isn’t just a physical object in the material realm. It’s alive. It lives in sight, touch, sound, smell. I take it and give it a taste, swirl it around in my mind like a sip of wine lingering on my tongue. In a moment, it is smooth and glossy and cold, collecting snow outside in the grass, a pool of frozen soup collecting in its basin. In another it sits inside a window sill atop a book, dry and cracked, teetering sidewise, spilling soil onto the floor.
Words are so powerful. And they are instruments of our creation. They are channels to communicate what is inside out, manifestations of our inner worlds. They are what we have to bridge the enormous gap that separates us as individuals, and they unearth the intimacy that binds us all as kin. Words are magical really. And they’re ours for the taking. In bounty. For free! So roll up your sleeves and start your creating. Spill them out, whip them up, stir them around. Take a taste. In fact, take two. No matter how you slice it, they’re delicious!
A word - a string of symbols that communicates a thought, an emotion, an object, anything – is a marvel. Every word is a tiny multidimensional universe of expression. A “pot” isn’t just a physical object in the material realm. It’s alive. It lives in sight, touch, sound, smell. I take it and give it a taste, swirl it around in my mind like a sip of wine lingering on my tongue. In a moment, it is smooth and glossy and cold, collecting snow outside in the grass, a pool of frozen soup collecting in its basin. In another it sits inside a window sill atop a book, dry and cracked, teetering sidewise, spilling soil onto the floor.
Words are so powerful. And they are instruments of our creation. They are channels to communicate what is inside out, manifestations of our inner worlds. They are what we have to bridge the enormous gap that separates us as individuals, and they unearth the intimacy that binds us all as kin. Words are magical really. And they’re ours for the taking. In bounty. For free! So roll up your sleeves and start your creating. Spill them out, whip them up, stir them around. Take a taste. In fact, take two. No matter how you slice it, they’re delicious!
Tuesday, November 10
Winter Song
I declare it is officially winter. Daylight seeps stealthily from the sky, quieted by the steely chill of night’s early arrival. The air is heavy and wet and leaden with a slow sense of departure. Darkness slips shadows around the sun. It’s easy to sink into the weight of winter’s sorrow. It seems natural. Time slows. Quiet settles with the cold.
I want to curl up inside the warm belly of childhood rememberings. I miss the way life floated carelessly, weightlessly and with abandon. I miss the damp carpet smell of my basement and the way the cold stucco walls felt against my skin. I miss the sweet little vases my mom filled with lily of the valley, a few stems plucked from the backyard then tucked into corners of the house – on a bedside table, in the windowsill of the bathroom. I miss the way our kitchen felt at the end of the night as we turned off the lights to go upstairs, the lingering smell of dinner and the day's activities settling into the stillness as our house descended into sleep. And the muffled sound of my parents voices, their closet rolling open and closed through the wall as I drifted off.
Life is impermanent. Damn that’s scary. The sky darkens, earth freezes, leaves fall from the trees, flowers wilt into the ground. Time keeps moving. We’re getting older. There is no evading this. It is so easy to get stuck here, swallowed up by it, settling into the void, cozying up to it like an old friend. Ah yes, sweet sorrow, I know you well. The weight of this burden is heavy.
How to rise above? We have to look outside ourselves and let the energies of life stir their counterparts within. We have to look to the darkened sky that will soon glow blue; the frozen earth that will melt and warm with the sun; the wilted flowers and leaves that crumble into the soil and bloom again come spring. We have to listen to the rhythm of life’s pulse; it is endlessly in cycle. We too are endlessly in cycle. We rise and fall, pick ourselves up and stumble again.
It is life's symphony, always in chorus, perpetually in motion. We need to learn to let the melody carry us, no matter how dark or dismal or cold it seems. Don't judge it. Just listen. Breathe. Let it go. You are never alone. All that you are made of beats in rhythm with the sun and the moon and the sky. Your spirit dances with the wind and the stars and the branches of the trees. Breathe into it. Quiet your mind. Be at peace, and wait for the season to change.
I want to curl up inside the warm belly of childhood rememberings. I miss the way life floated carelessly, weightlessly and with abandon. I miss the damp carpet smell of my basement and the way the cold stucco walls felt against my skin. I miss the sweet little vases my mom filled with lily of the valley, a few stems plucked from the backyard then tucked into corners of the house – on a bedside table, in the windowsill of the bathroom. I miss the way our kitchen felt at the end of the night as we turned off the lights to go upstairs, the lingering smell of dinner and the day's activities settling into the stillness as our house descended into sleep. And the muffled sound of my parents voices, their closet rolling open and closed through the wall as I drifted off.
Life is impermanent. Damn that’s scary. The sky darkens, earth freezes, leaves fall from the trees, flowers wilt into the ground. Time keeps moving. We’re getting older. There is no evading this. It is so easy to get stuck here, swallowed up by it, settling into the void, cozying up to it like an old friend. Ah yes, sweet sorrow, I know you well. The weight of this burden is heavy.
How to rise above? We have to look outside ourselves and let the energies of life stir their counterparts within. We have to look to the darkened sky that will soon glow blue; the frozen earth that will melt and warm with the sun; the wilted flowers and leaves that crumble into the soil and bloom again come spring. We have to listen to the rhythm of life’s pulse; it is endlessly in cycle. We too are endlessly in cycle. We rise and fall, pick ourselves up and stumble again.
It is life's symphony, always in chorus, perpetually in motion. We need to learn to let the melody carry us, no matter how dark or dismal or cold it seems. Don't judge it. Just listen. Breathe. Let it go. You are never alone. All that you are made of beats in rhythm with the sun and the moon and the sky. Your spirit dances with the wind and the stars and the branches of the trees. Breathe into it. Quiet your mind. Be at peace, and wait for the season to change.
Friday, November 6
For Bruce...
Dear Cancer,
It would be easy just to say I hate you. You have once again made yourself welcome where you are not welcome, and it would be easy just to say I hate you. But hatred is transitory, a feeling, a state of mind; it waxes and wanes and leaves blistering fury in its wake. I have no place for fury here. I am done with the wrath that is born from questions without answers, effects without a cause.
Tonight, instead of fueling the fire you breathe into my heart, I will breathe light into yours. I will gather all of the love and all of the goodness, all of the lyrics from all of the melodies of God’s creation, the sweet rhythm that is the ebb and flow of living, and I will sing you into your grave.
On behalf of all of the lives you have taken, all of the spirits you have broken, for all of the heartache, the grief, the confusion and fear, for leaving us in the dark, for leading us in circles, for each and every tear for each and every person that has cursed your name in the middle of the night, in the light of day, to God and into the empty void, I will not ask. I am telling. United, we are stronger. We are stronger, and hear me now:
You. Will. Not. Win.
Say Goodbye,
Leah
It would be easy just to say I hate you. You have once again made yourself welcome where you are not welcome, and it would be easy just to say I hate you. But hatred is transitory, a feeling, a state of mind; it waxes and wanes and leaves blistering fury in its wake. I have no place for fury here. I am done with the wrath that is born from questions without answers, effects without a cause.
Tonight, instead of fueling the fire you breathe into my heart, I will breathe light into yours. I will gather all of the love and all of the goodness, all of the lyrics from all of the melodies of God’s creation, the sweet rhythm that is the ebb and flow of living, and I will sing you into your grave.
On behalf of all of the lives you have taken, all of the spirits you have broken, for all of the heartache, the grief, the confusion and fear, for leaving us in the dark, for leading us in circles, for each and every tear for each and every person that has cursed your name in the middle of the night, in the light of day, to God and into the empty void, I will not ask. I am telling. United, we are stronger. We are stronger, and hear me now:
You. Will. Not. Win.
Say Goodbye,
Leah
Tuesday, November 3
Glass Globe of Butterflies on a Tuesday Afternoon
I apologize in advance for those of you who have heard this story. And to those of you who are sick to death of hearing me profess my undying love for my husband, best you sign off now. Because on a day like today, a Tuesday, feeling uninspired, stuck inside as the afternoon looms ahead and the fog rolls in, the only thing I want to do is think of him.
The truth is, my life – my real life – started when a man walked into it, a handsome stranger in a starched white collared shirt. He’d stood dark-eyed and half smiling in the doorway of the Starbucks “on the hill." I won’t indulge all details of our courtship. I’ll leave the gushy stuff for another dull wintery Tuesday. But for now, as I’m peering into the corners of my mind upon the ever-whirring light of love, I will share just one small memory, a moment really - one that I revisit over and over again.
It was our first date. Angelo picked me up, in that white bmw. I got into the car, and there he was, sitting right next to me. He was wearing a white collarless shirt and he smelled like heaven. I won’t gush about his appearance, except to say that he was beautiful in the way certain handcrafted wooden objects are beautiful – so seamless, smooth, lustrous, so fully realized and self-contained that it only strikes you seconds later and with the force of a lightning bolt: “Oh my God, that’s a chair!” At which point, you sit down and want to stay forever.
Our conversation was convivial, both of us making gifts to each other of little inane stories, shining them up and handing them over. We didn’t drag out our secret souls to dance around naked, just offered slight glimpses into the interior, colorful postcards from the lands of Leah and Angelo. It was all we needed. It was the beginning of the beginning of the only thing we would ever need. The universe shifted the moment he walked towards me for his 7-pump chai latte. The magic began the moment I set foot in the car. All of my moments had led up to this moment.
It may seem trivial, this small account, our love story. But it’s everything. It’s the only thing. And I hold it next to my heart like a glass globe full of butterflies, alive always, fluttering just beneath the surface, ready to inspire...for a rainy day, or even just a gloomy Tuesday afternoon.
The truth is, my life – my real life – started when a man walked into it, a handsome stranger in a starched white collared shirt. He’d stood dark-eyed and half smiling in the doorway of the Starbucks “on the hill." I won’t indulge all details of our courtship. I’ll leave the gushy stuff for another dull wintery Tuesday. But for now, as I’m peering into the corners of my mind upon the ever-whirring light of love, I will share just one small memory, a moment really - one that I revisit over and over again.
It was our first date. Angelo picked me up, in that white bmw. I got into the car, and there he was, sitting right next to me. He was wearing a white collarless shirt and he smelled like heaven. I won’t gush about his appearance, except to say that he was beautiful in the way certain handcrafted wooden objects are beautiful – so seamless, smooth, lustrous, so fully realized and self-contained that it only strikes you seconds later and with the force of a lightning bolt: “Oh my God, that’s a chair!” At which point, you sit down and want to stay forever.
Our conversation was convivial, both of us making gifts to each other of little inane stories, shining them up and handing them over. We didn’t drag out our secret souls to dance around naked, just offered slight glimpses into the interior, colorful postcards from the lands of Leah and Angelo. It was all we needed. It was the beginning of the beginning of the only thing we would ever need. The universe shifted the moment he walked towards me for his 7-pump chai latte. The magic began the moment I set foot in the car. All of my moments had led up to this moment.
It may seem trivial, this small account, our love story. But it’s everything. It’s the only thing. And I hold it next to my heart like a glass globe full of butterflies, alive always, fluttering just beneath the surface, ready to inspire...for a rainy day, or even just a gloomy Tuesday afternoon.
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