A Storm

“Given so few clues —
we bow to what is gone
what continues to grow”

Those lines conclude a beautiful poem called “Morning Birds” by my friend Naomi Shihab Nye. I share them here because I’ve been thinking so much lately about the gone-ness of beloved people and once familiar things, the regrets that haunt me, and the many questions left unanswered.

The other night, there was a storm. I’m not referring to a storm outside, but a storm in my head. It was blue and bleak, and all of my anxieties, fears, and sorrows swirled about. I lay in bed and hosted the usual ghosts, replayed mistakes and missteps both recent and long ago, then shifted to a larger canvas, reaching for my phone to doom-scroll, soon in the full throes of nausea and disbelief about the current reign of lunacy. As I watched morning come across the mountains in its veil of fog, I conjured up a mental to-do list, and hoped a cup of coffee might snap me back into a more constructive mode.

Hope is my religion, as I have often said, and I consistently advocate license to be happy now and then. So these nighttime squalls are fundamentally discordant. My usual state is amazement and gratitude for my own implausible and bountiful life, and I try my best to bear witness, document, find meaning, maybe even make things a little better if I can.

I guess you can say I try hard.

Try hard? What does that even mean?

About thirty years ago, confronted with a crisis at work, family problems, and the usual challenges of being forty-something years of age, in the middle of a busy life that galloped along in a blur sometimes, I went to a psychologist for counseling. He was in the habit of writing notes on lined yellow paper to hand me at the end of each session, sort of a summary of what we had discussed, and follow-up cues. I still have the last little note he handed me, and this is what it says:

1) Have time with Monte and Miranda

2) Be accessible

3) Experience life without a Biblical theme

4) Be happy—enjoy!

5) New job

6) Lessen your sense of responsibility. Lighten up!

Nowadays, it’s difficult to have time with Miranda, who lives in England with her husband and two children, but this belated suggestion is a good reminder to appreciate the dear ones in front of me in any given moment. Fortunately, Monte is still around, and by and large, he’s used to my quirks and foibles, but I know there are behaviors I can work on.

Number 5, “New job” referred to the teaching position I was about to begin at Dunn Middle School, which turned out to be a lovely chapter of my life.

But with regards to experiencing life without a Biblical theme, lessening my sense of responsibility, and lightening up…I may be a lost cause.  I think that brings us back to “trying hard”.

I am trying.

“Yes,” Monte would say, “You’re very trying.”       

I suppose I have survivor guilt, because people dear to me, long gone, were given so little, and I have never felt that I did enough to help them, and that haunts me. Meanwhile, it is impossible to ignore the terrible sufferings of others in the world today or the unprecedented threat to our own way of life.

And so, despite my therapist’s admonition to lessen my sense of responsibility and lighten up, I haul around a heavy heart, seeking to somehow reconcile the ceaseless dichotomy of wonder and grief. I do my best to navigate the inconsistencies and inequities without self-loathing, and I try to hush my noisy failures, for they cannot be undone.

And I look to this moment, in which I truly feel called upon to be fully present, bearing witness, giving voice and doing something, even if my contribution is miniscule.

I admit I am bewildered. But once again, a poet helps me. Now it is Wendell Berry who speaks:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

And the brilliant writer George Saunders advises:

“Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die.”

So maybe I am on the right path after all.

When I was a little girl, I saw the moon through the window of a neighbor’s house in Brooklyn. It was a house whose kitchen emanated unfamiliar smells, a house whose dog jumped up on me and nearly knocked me over, a house whose grown-ups were not fond of me—somehow, I could tell. But I glimpsed the benevolent moon, with its snowy face, and it winked at me through the window, like an accomplice.  

I’ve always been lucky like that. In the city of my childhood, glassy storefronts glared and gleamed in sunlight, and there were flecks of diamonds embedded in the sidewalk. There was a fancy boathouse in the park and I sat by the lake with my brother eating Cracker Jacks, and a burst of a breeze sent fragrant blossoms snowing, and I knew intuitively that magic was involved in the composition of the world.

Last week, I had the honor of speaking before a gathering in the sanctuary of a local church, and my friends performed music, and poetry, and theater. It was a celebration of community, an affirmation of decency and hope, and it was clear in the aftermath that people thirst for this. So even in our confusion, let us not make the mistake of thinking we have to go it alone.

Today, I see the mountains shining and the symphonic majesty of old oak trees, and I don’t know why I am so fortunate as to be here for the brief duration of my life, but I won’t let the storm take me away.