the hidden place that heals

Over and over by us torn in two,
the god is the hidden place that heals again.
We are sharp-edged, because we want to know,
but he is always scattered and serene.

—Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Sonnets to Orpheus, XVI
Translated from the German by Stephen Mitchell

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It is Bright Wednesday, or at least the dying nub of Bright Wednesday, and I am finally sitting down to write. All day a cool, steady wind passed through the trees out my window. Each time I looked the sky and river changed color as if trying on different outfits: clouds once low and thin above choppy gray water, another moment green and heavy over gold glitter.

It was a productive day, both children (finally) back in school after a lingering spring break. And I finally began preparing for Genevieve's eye surgery for esotropia next week. By prepare I primarily mean prepare myself—I have already spent plenty of time preparing Genevieve. My habit is to focus on getting through all the unpleasantness and anxieties by clenching in and checking out during the difficult moments. I want to be done with it all and take off her bandages and have her eyes see straight. I want the healing well underway. Just like I want to be done with packing and saying goodbyes and sorting the keeps from the throw-aways. I want to plug through without engaging the uncertainties; pit-pat, all squared away. But I'm learning is that while this method might have worked well for me at one point in my life, and may still function OK at times, it certainly isn't helpful for my three-year-old. (And, surprise, surprise, it isn't great help to me either.)

Fear of engaging the present moment in favor of waiting for a more serene future moment is in essence living in fear. This literally means that my back is tense, my neck and shoulders clench, and my derriere is tucked in. I am trying to keep it all together by walking around stiff as a board. And what's more: no one can keep it all together anyway. Not even God. Isn't that what we learn during Holy Week? Today the Redeemer of the world is slapped on the face. Those lines from Holy Friday always catch in my heart. I have to ask myself, was Jesus walking around stiff as a board for thirty years, dreading his crucifixion? Wanting to get this being human thing over and done with? As I recall, he only allowed himself one night of that.

Over and over by us torn in two / the god is the hidden place that heals again. To be broken and feel my brokenness, to sit with uncertainty and accept it—this is part of the goal. But more importantly I am trying shift my focus away from the things I am dreading. To instead regard the whole situation with curiosity and gentleness. To remember that we are having this surgery now because we have an awesome doctor here, a surgeon who is an expert in this procedure. I can't be sure nothing will go wrong, but that small fear is only a small part of a much larger picture. The vast majority of things in my life, and in Geneveive's life, are going incredibly well. I know that hidden place that heals again, I've been there before. Now I just have to trust and live, breathe, through it. To be there—awake—for both of us.

{ p o e t r y  w e d n e s d a y }

photo friday: looking up

© Amber Schley Iragui 2012

© Amber Schley Iragui 2007

© Amber Schley Iragui 2012

© Amber Schley Iragui 2012

I am of the opinion that most artists should not open their mouths. Put more kindly, words are not their talent: I often find when I read about art, especially something that was written by the artist, the art itself loses some power. I had originally written about the photos I'm posting today, but then I deleted the post. It was so boring. Whatever mystery or beauty the photos hold was stripped by my mundane observations. There are exceptions, of course. William Blake and Maira Kalman come to mind. Or Allan Say, the author and illustrator of the beautiful children's book, Grandfather's Journey. 

Next week is Holy Week in the Orthodox Christian tradition, and in that vein I'd like to suggest the concept of bright sadness as the Photo Friday / Holy Friday theme. This phrase can be interpreted any way you'd like, and the photos certainly don't need to show Easter or Holy Week in any way. However, as a point of departure, here is what theologian Alexander Schmemann wrote about bright sadness:

{During Lent} a certain quiet sadness permeates the service: vestments are dark, the services are longer than usual and more monotonous, there is almost no movement,... nothing seems to “happen.” At regular intervals the priest comes out of the sanctuary and reads always the same short prayer, and the whole congregation punctuates every petition of that prayer with prostrations. Thus, for a long time we stand in this monotony—in this quiet sadness.

But then we begin to realize that this very length and monotony are needed if we are to experience the secret and at first unnoticeable “action” of the service in us. Little by little we begin to understand, or rather to feel, that this sadness is indeed “bright,” that a mysterious transformation is about to take place in us. It is as if we were reaching a place to which the noises and the fuss of life, of the street, of all that which usually fills our days and even nights, have no access—a place where they have no power...

Thus, as we experience this mysterious liberation, as we become “light and peaceful,” the monotony and the sadness of the service acquire a new significance, they are transfigured. An inner beauty illumines them like an early ray of the sun which, while it is still dark in the valley, begins to lighten up the top of the mountain.

—taken from Great Lent, published by SVS Press

 

the edginess of the moment and the witnessing presence

It has been miserable for two days, this weather: the kind that makes you want to hunker down and hope the refrigerator is stocked, make soup of whatever the bottom drawers hold. I love rain, I do. But not when it lashes at you, stingy, soaking all of you except maybe your head if it stays tucked closely under the umbrella. And that if the wind doesn't have its way with your umbrella.

And then it is Holy Week. But this week does not feel so holy to me. By some odd twist of fate three doctor appointments converged upon this week, a friend visiting from out of town, a playdate that can't be missed because I want to make friends with this particular hard-to-pin-down mom, and the usual homework assignment for my class. But I can't let my mind wander over to the list of things to do, I'll get up from my computer to add stamps to overdue bills, further packing my grocery list with lines scribbled in along the edges: "get egg dye!" and, "check for Rebecca." It's Holy Week, but it's miserable outside and I'm overbooked. Pascha is coming and I'm fretting.

Out on my errands today, crossing the street in the rain, I thought of something so obvious and simple that you'd think it'd already have etched itself on the inside walls of my consciousness: people are happy because they make the very best of what they already have. Not just in striving to have something better--a job more suited to them, an wider network of friends, a better relationship with their family--but in what they already (yes, oh joy, already) have. It's not that I didn't know this, it's more that it hadn't presented itself as a practice. Something to do, not just to believe.

I waste a lot of brain energy on striving, or anti-striving (which includes private mockery of the New Yorkers I think are striving too ostentatiously). I may get what I want, I may not; but Lord knows I don't need to think about it so much. I read these lines by Pema Chödrön in The Sun's Dog-Eared Page this morning:

"We become less and less able to reside with the even the most fleeting uneasiness or discomfort. We become habituated in reaching for something to ease the edginess of the moment... This is our way to make life predictable. Because we mistake what always results in suffering for what will bring us happiness."

Walking down the street, wind slashing rain across my glasses, I thought about the things I most want to change in my life, and I saw how so often I blame these things directly for my unhappiness, and then I thought about just accepting those things as they are. Not just in word, but in practice. To not ease the "edginess of the moment" by trying to fix them, or assigning blame, but instead to just to let them be. And, correspondingly, to be content--happy even--alongside these things, in spite of them, because of them, regardless of them.

And here, in observance of Poetry Wednesday, and in honor of Holy Week, in honor of the rain that is supposed to end tomorrow, in honor of my mini-epiphany in the middle of a wet city street in Harlem is my poem:

W I T N E S S

Denise Levertov

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.

what I know with my head doesn't help

Sometimes, for a few brief seconds, I can see my life from the outside. I'll be minding my own business, trying to coax Ike into saying his final "goodbye" to the smiling monkey doormat in front of our neighbor's apartment, so we can finally enter the elevator--and then suddenly some part of me is up on the stairwell, looking down at us. The moment comes and goes quickly, gone the second I notice it's happening. But I'm left with the flavor of what it would be like to be outside the small world of my mind. No longer an inhabitant of Wife, Mother, Designer, Tyrant of a Minute Domestic Realm, no longer fighting time and my own anxieties and fears.

Oddly, though, in those moments I don't look at myself and say, "Oh, what a pathetic mess! My God, woman, lose 20 lbs, get something moving with your career, be more assertive, more creative! Really." What I'm left with after these moments is usually a sense of space, of strength, even gratitude. I see the opportunities in front of me and feel, if only for a few minutes, that stepping into them would be simple. I find that I am free from the accordion-like expansion of my list of chores and faults.

It's like a mini-vacation, and I wish I could take one everyday.

And then it occurs to me, since it is Lent and I should be attempting some sort of spiritual life, that this is more or less what prayer offers. And I could do it everyday. Not the nearly-mechanical prayers offered before work, meals, or bed. But the kind of prayer that comes from making space inside myself for God, and surrendering the consequences of such space. Of the joy in what I have right now, instead of pining after a neighborhood we do not yet live in, for local friends I do not yet have, for creative recognition for projects yet incomplete.

I know and yet I do not know. It is the time-honored dilemma: I know with this my head and not my heart. And it's not more knowledge that will make the difference in my life-- dear brain forever whirling around itself--but more prayer. More space for God: God inside me, inside Ike, and even inside the smiling monkey doormat. God is here, now. That's the point. I keep losing sight of God, and correspondingly, of myself.

holy wednesday

pine

sing

reeling

g o d s p e e d

numinous

fling

lent

Yesterday, over tea and chocolate, Xsenia asked me why I haven't been going to church lately, "You're not pulling an Adriel on us? You're not having a faith crisis?" she prodded. Xsenia manages to be both fierce and playful at once.

"No," I replied thoughtfully, "I'm just being lazy."

Nostalgia sipped her tea slowly and said nothing. After a pause, she smiled, "No, Lucy's given up going to church for Lent this year."