Overheard in my morning pages…

July 19th, 2007

I listened yesterday happily to a Fresh Air interview with Natasha Tretheway, Pulitzer-winning poet whose experience was biracial and losing her mother at 18 when her stepfather murdered her, and the questions and answers were both so unflinching, the questions we want to ask but fear are not polite… a good interview. But uncomfortable, in the sort of slamming up against the frailty of our mortal boundaries, that happens with violent death. How thin is the bone protecting our defenseless brains! the integrity of the tubes of blood coursing through our bodies, the tireless pumping of the muscle that is heart: it all seems so improbable and terrifyiing to rely upon. Even the hardened atheist materialists among us breathe faith that all of the complicated chemistry of metabolism should happen without us worrying about it or even understanding it, that the cells in our body should get the message to be fruitful and multiply, and then stop multiplying at the tight time. That the atoms supporting our weight should cohere, so we don’t go plummeting through the center of the planet, catapulted out the other side. It is only by faith that we not hear the crunch of realizing a mistake too late, falling, disjointed, until impact, the sudden anticipated and surprising stop, the spreading warmth and looseness in the joints of adrenalin alerting us we’ve crossed a line we cannot cross back. Mortality scares me, and I challenge myself to stand unflinching and face it, that my whole universe is knit on the successful electrical impulse through a handful of nervous systems telling diaphragms to keep sucking air, hearts to keep the blood coursing. And sometimes faith is willed blindness, too. An artistic license granted the illusion of seamlessness, this breath and the next, a sigh , an unpleasant smell of decay coming in my bedroom window behind the scent of a tree blossoming.

Oh, dear unreliable, impermanence is not just for loversl I hold myself back from writing more in the comments of your blog and less in my own about the way life feels like a kaleidoscope and just when all of the colors and bits seem to be arrayed in a most pleasing design, someone has to go and shake it, and how bitterly I regret not being able to make the world grind to halt so we could all mourn time gone by. We should use Memorial day not to honor just fallen soldiers, but the teacher you had a crush on and mutely fumbled, never adequately expressing the gratitude you felt. The senior person at your first real non-retail/non fast food job who took a mentorly interest, explaining things and being kind even when pressed of time, who would have been uncomfortable, no, mortified, by an attempt to express your appreciation. All those friends from summer camp, the chemistry that existed during one bright moment and could never exist the same way again. Your youth. Gone, gone, gone. Somehow we do keep recognizing when a time has come and it is right to move on, that staying in one place does not stave off loneliness, that of all the joys of the cherished mentor, there is the bittersweet realization that you have outgrown that relationship, that need, and must go hurtling meteorically away from it. Or sometimes with a lot less drama, a quiet lunch or a Kit Kat bar.

Faith is that real connections do not just go away, that six states away your best friend can call and you can talk for hours about nothing in particular, faith is that your new situation is going to surprise you and you are going to surprise yourself. Faith is that if you stop pretending you can staunch impermanence or mortality, steel yourself and confront it, there will be relief and you will be able embrace the thing that is permanent, carried deep within yourself.