I make several lists each week, which give me the deceptive glow of organization. At least half of the lists I create are promptly lost in the abyss of my schoolbag or crumpled with receipts on my dresser. Still, I think it is useful and pleasing to create mental files.
Right now, I want to make a list of good things. There are always so many, and I rarely count them. Here are a few from the past two days:
I travelled around Europe this summer for eighteen days by myself. Well, that is to say, I went there by myself and came back by myself, but in the interim I spent all but a few moments with Lonette (from South Africa),David and Susan (from DC),
Liz and Lester (from Australia),
and Philip (from Texas)... and about thirty other people. We spent hundreds of hours, I should think, on a bus together.
At Heathrow, I wrote in my journal,
Strange to think that for $1000, I can transport myself almost anywhere in the world, and can be there in under a day... You know, I'm rather proud of myself -- finances aside -- for dreaming of what I might want to do this summer, researching it, and making it happen. I suppose few would take such a leap solo.
In Brussels,
Then we found infinite little chocolates and waffles (glaces), topped with vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, and chocolate ganache. Heavenly. Really. Worth the trip alone. Then we sat down on a sidewalk just off the Grand Place (loveliest square I've ever seen, gilded, with such overwhelmingly intricate carving that you want to collapse, fall to your knees and weep with the force of it all -- all the brilliance and creative energy and skill and hope.) We watched another string trio playing classical music on the sidewalk opposite, while slight Asian women joined the throngs who ran their hands (sensuously) along the polished statue of a saint, a man who tried to save Russian villages by importing chickens (I think), Okay, so the story is muddled a bit. Anyway, it was a perfect moment. Really perfect. So rare in this life, these.
Thus I enter the second decade of this millennium: unceremoniously, sprawled flat on my stomach, sleepy and catlike before the fireplace at my aunt’s house (with errant bits of firewood jabbing irregular pink indentations into the skin beneath my jeans), willfully closing my eyes and ears to the tedious countdown of Carson Daly, surrounded not by friends or music or wine, but by curly-haired children and knitting grandparents and sparkling white juice (because red might stain the carpet).
This is also the year of my third decade, and every conversation I begin with old friends seems to acknowledge this specter bearing down, undecided about how to relate to such an occasion. We scan the pages of popular magazines, more interested in ages than in formalwear. Alexis Bledel is 29? If we’re the same age as Rory Gilmore, all is not lost. But we are not, we conclude, as we expected. Not at all. Even for those who pictured themselves married with children and find themselves acknowledging that this womanhood feels differently than any might have guessed… it feels. Perhaps the internal life of these years could not have been anticipated, nuanced weft to the fabric of reality which for me finds voice better now in Anne Sexton than in Ann Kiemel. So much of that exuberant faith-infused girlishness has been eroded by something wistful that stands on the plain unforgiving ground of questions.
I seek answers to so many questions; I try to chase after them, as if Great Truth might be found in a Viennese pastry shop or a Parisian burlesque, hiding in darkened temples along the Trans-Siberian railway, or even in an admirable Boston charter. There are truths here, yes. Still, many of the answers I long for are slippery ones, stamped softly on my own heart, but which take evasive action when I try to claim them too casually. I still puzzle around, Who or what am I? What and why is my womanhood, if it is not wife and mother? What of my own destiny do I carry along with me in my brain, my memory, my stubborn hair, my small hands, my place before the fire?
I try to read the runes of home videos – giggling five-year old nonsense rhymes with my brother, blocking his access to the trampoline, claiming I only want it for “a hundred more minutes,” and the tall, braided girl who curled up and wiggled loose teeth on her quiet twinkling bearded grandfather’s lap long after her body failed to fit. Petulance, affection, fearlessness. I cringe to watch my eleven-year old self, ashamed as I was at my height and roundness, trying to deflect attention from the hips that filled out hand-me-down stonewashed pleats by perming my bangs, walking carefully, softly. I watch my gentleness, and I read the shame of my sex beneath it. “You were always a lady,” my mother tells me.
A lady, she says, though was I not so often jealous of the solitude and competence that seemed available only to men?
Home videos tell such an uneven tale, patchy ordinary moments pieced into holy peculiarity… the past delivered up as a beautiful foreign film with no subtitles.
My body whispers stories, too. My hands are my mother’s. Though I smooth their planes with shea butter each day, by noon a thousand distinct skin trapezoids peer up at me. I could paint them large, in bright colors and plaster my walls with the perplexing geometry of a personalized mid-century modern. My no-nonsense knuckles, broad on child-sized fingers, make the hands look sturdier and more practical than they are, good for dishes and kneading. I can close my eyes and flash a thousand screens of my mother standing in front of our kitchen sink, speaking words that memory fuses… about pie crust, perhaps, or practicing the piano, or waiting, waiting, having faith that someone special might come along. Yes, I have my mother’s hands, and her fingernails -- round inverted gumdrops, flat on their beds and long, long. I scale their gentle ridges, playing each smooth moon against its cousins. I can close my eyes and trace the graceful lines my mother’s long nails drew down my back as I lay on my stomach in bed so many childhood nights...that calm, blissful moment of connection after the night’s story had closed and before the evening prayer. Delicate strokes from the beautiful nails on her practical mother hand. I am here with you, they said to me.
I do not know what meaning I should make of it all, how these fragments tell me of what is and may be. But I do know this: so often I still find myself with my arms curled beneath me, flat on my stomach in the space between the story and prayer, back exposed, with my mother's fingernails fixed on my own hands now, ready.
"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." (script in a banner extending from my right arm down to my right hip... with a banner and olive branches - connoting both peace and plenty - surrounding the text)
Julian of Norwich (c. November 8, 1342 – c. 1416) is thought of as one of the greatest English mystics. Little is known of her life aside from her writings. Even her name is uncertain, the name "Julian" coming from the Church of St Julian in Norwich, where she was an anchoress (a type of hermit living in a cell attached to the church, engaged in contemplative prayer). At the age of 30, suffering from a severe illness and believing she was on her deathbed, Julian had a series of intense visions of Jesus Christ. (They ended by the time she overcame her illness on May 13, 1373.) She recorded these visions soon after having them, and then again twenty years later in far more theological depth. They are the source of her major work, called Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love (circa 1393). This is believed to be the first book written by a woman in the English language. Julian became well known throughout England as a spiritual authority...
Although she lived in a time of turmoil, Julian's theology was optimistic, speaking of God's love in terms of joy and compassion as opposed to law and duty. For Julian, suffering was not a punishment that God inflicted, as was the common understanding. She believed that God loved and wanted to save everyone. Popular theology magnified by current events including the Black Death and a series of peasant revolts assumed that God was punishing the wicked. In response, Julian suggested a far more merciful theology, which some say leaned towards universal salvation. Because she believed that behind the reality of hell is yet a greater mystery of God's love, she has also been referred to in modern times as a proto-universalist, though she herself never actually claimed more than hope that all might be saved...
As part of her differing view of God as compassionate and loving, she wrote of the Trinity in domestic terms and compares Jesus to a mother who is wise, loving, and merciful...
Her great saying, "…All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well", reflects this theology. It is also one of the most individually famous lines in all of Catholic theological writing, and certainly one of the most well-known phrases of the literature of her era.
One of my favorite times to be a teacher at MATCH is when I'm allowed to chaperone the class trips to Barnes & Noble. Because of a grant, we're able to buy students a book or two every month... any book they want, really. I do, however, stipulate that if I open up to the middle and find something that "would embarrass my grandmother," they need to find a different book.
Apparently, some of my students' grandmothers would approve of books like "Eat, Play, F#@k."
Fortunately, Grandmas Marilyn and Caley are not so permissive.
This week, a travelling slam poet, a suave twenty-two year old man of color visited the tenth grade English classes this week. I watched boys attempt to hide goosebumps and girls dab away tears.
About a third of the sophomores chose books of poetry this week at B&N. Notably, Tayon, Travis, and Kamari found themselves:
Hmm... it seems they've learned something after all. I raised my eyebrow and told them to use their powers wisely.
David and Susan (from DC),
