the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush
On the outside, our lives are so vulnerable to transience, sometimes we experience our days as so fleeting. Regardless of the contents of each day, our days of tremendous sadness, when someone dies, when we are leveled by the actions of our country, our days of beauty, when we revel in our newborn's face, the location of intimacy, each day empties and vanishes, and our time on earth unspools. That which seems to pass, though, is transfigured. Sometimes, that past time is transfigured and housed in the temple of memory.
I thought of this yesterday when I came back to a weeping Elijah, in his bed in the just dark time of nine o'clock, an hour after he had been kissed and left to find his way to sleep. He had dreamed something hard and his head hurt, and I tucked him in again and patted his back. He relaxed and he turned onto his back, his arms crossed behind his head. Be still my heart. When Elijah was still inside of me, he was pushed into a corner of my womb and his arms ended up crossed that way for the last few weeks before he was born--when he emerged, a surprise at 35 weeks, he often went back to that pose because his muscles were used to it. He looked like a tiny little old man at the beach, his arms crossed behind his head, his thin legs akimbo, his eyes shut tightly. His six year old body--lean and pale--still remembers his time in this world before he arrived.
Sometimes that past time is transfigured and housed as trauma. Many of our bodies carry the haunting trace lines of trauma. There is a school of thought, what a wonderful phrase--an intellectual tradition, a convention, a kind of thinking that coalesces around certain people, like Heidegger, or places, like the Chicago school of architecture. It's nothing like a school of fish, except that perhaps it's safer to swim in these schools, instead of being lonely iconoclasts or vulnerable stray sardines. There's a school of thought about trauma and cancer, and I'm not thinking exactly of the direction of trauma into cancer, although that's interesting too. There is, in fact, some research out there suggesting that the experience of a traumatizing and emotionally damaging event occurs roughly two years before getting a cancer diagnosis, and there is more information that links chronic stress and cancer. That line of thought hurts my heart and makes me feel responsible for my cancer, as if only I had managed my stress better, I would not have cancer. That could be a truth, but it's no longer a useful truth. I have it now.
The other school is the cancer running towards trauma school, the idea being that there is a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome linked to cancer because of the feelings of shock, fear, helplessness and horror that are endemic to getting a cancer diagnosis and then living with the disease and the treatment, which can be its own kind of trouble. This idea wearies me--it almost seems too much to bear, although, sometimes, looking around at the exhausted faces of my fellow travelers in my support group, it seems to have some truth in it. The handbook at my oncologist's office says that the following are normal reactions to finding out you have cancer: repeated frightening thoughts, being distracted or overexcited, having trouble sleeping, and feeling detached from oneself or reality.
I couldn't feel more attached to reality than I am these days--I feel absolutely head over heels in love with the world, despite its terribleness. I drink in the summer landscape--the deepest green of these full trees and the yellow wildflowers--the tenderness of Elijah's face, the half moon last night blessing Kyle and I as we played with the dog in the dark. The eye is always drawn to the shapes of things--I am consoled by the shape of the moon itself, my son's eyes. And for me, the underworld of nature has a particular provenance--last night after Kyle went in to check on the sleeping boys, I took the dog on leash down the darkening road and he was afraid again. The seams between our world and the underworld were unraveling, and it seemed possible that fairies were twinkling about in some way that irritated the dog and was barely visible to me. Nonetheless, the lush night sheltered my very soul. I think this sense of belonging to the world can coexist with the traumas that are also my body's memories. I'm a woman in her early fifties--how could I not have secret traumas under lock and key, cancer or no?
I don't have trouble sleeping. I have trouble dreaming. My body remembers a time when I didn't have cancer, and cruelly, most often when I sleep during the day, I dream that it's all a dream. In the dozen variations of this dream, as I rush back into my body and the day into which I am knit, I suddenly know the cancer was just a dream, that's all, and here I am, Dorothy, back in Carlisle, whole, my body ready for another fifty years. And then, I wake, and I feel my shorn head, or I see that I am sleeping in my special bed which angles to help me in and out, and oh, the heaviness in my heart as I realize it was no dream.
These days vanish, but I cannot wander out of them into health. As Macbeth says, "And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle/ Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That strut and fret his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more./ It is a tale/Told by an Idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing." I love the lines--full of sound and fury, signifying nothing but I don't believe Macbeth in the least.
Pascal said that in a difficult time, you should always keep something beautiful in your heart.
Frank Wilczek, a Nobel physicist at MIT wrote A Beautiful Question, a long meditation on the question: Does the world embody beautiful ideas and his answer, yes, is based in physics. He says "Having tasted beauty at the heart of the world, we hunger for more. In this quest there is, I think, no more promising guide than beauty itself."
The Welsh poet R.S. Thomas wrote a poem called "The Bright Field."
I have seen the light break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great prize, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush. To a brightness
that seems as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
Possibility, the possibility that the whisper in the bushes is God, is magic, is fairies, is the secret heart of the time we keep. The buddhist principle that we only have this present moment is true and yet. The temple of memory lives in my body, and I have time to be still now that I am sick and it has allowed me to inhabit my present time in a way that is so rich that my days seem to last years, sometimes.
I am alone now more than I have ever been. I miss talking with my friends and the bustle of problem solving at work, sometimes immensely, but the loneliness I felt over the winter has fallen away in the summer. My fears are easy to find. I know that what I am afraid of is leaving all this, of losing all this beauty, and don't let me overstate it--there are moments of exhaustion, and real worry about my children and my sister's children and my parents, and I worry about money every single day, which I sometimes picture almost as a small dark beast that lives with me which will disappear, with me, precisely and only when I die---but if I think too much about leaving all this, my heart will start to ache and my anxiety can swallow up whole evenings if I let it out into the night. Let's put it this way. I can't be grateful for cancer, but I can be grateful for every moment of my life with cancer.
Elijah fell back asleep. The dog, too, was pacified with a long drink of water after the walk and went peaceably to bed. Kyle stayed up late looking at her baseball cards and fretting over the news which makes a mockery of my dreams and fears because I sleep every night in my lovely home, with my children in the nearby bedroom, or available in the night with a backlit text. My parents took the late plane back from Colorado and came for supper the next night and we had tandoori chicken and James Beard's tomato pie. My eldest daughter is considering her options wisely. My youngest daughter shone today with the smallest gesture of love for her great-aunt, which became in an instant, a treasure. My oldest son came home safely from the west and devoured a leftover bacon sandwich. My second eldest son will be here before June closes out. My nephew at the edge of adulthood came to stay for the day and played wild tag with the twins at the trampoline park. I don't know what I will dream tonight, but I believe I have another night of dreaming in me, and for that, for all that, I am grateful.
I thought of this yesterday when I came back to a weeping Elijah, in his bed in the just dark time of nine o'clock, an hour after he had been kissed and left to find his way to sleep. He had dreamed something hard and his head hurt, and I tucked him in again and patted his back. He relaxed and he turned onto his back, his arms crossed behind his head. Be still my heart. When Elijah was still inside of me, he was pushed into a corner of my womb and his arms ended up crossed that way for the last few weeks before he was born--when he emerged, a surprise at 35 weeks, he often went back to that pose because his muscles were used to it. He looked like a tiny little old man at the beach, his arms crossed behind his head, his thin legs akimbo, his eyes shut tightly. His six year old body--lean and pale--still remembers his time in this world before he arrived.
Sometimes that past time is transfigured and housed as trauma. Many of our bodies carry the haunting trace lines of trauma. There is a school of thought, what a wonderful phrase--an intellectual tradition, a convention, a kind of thinking that coalesces around certain people, like Heidegger, or places, like the Chicago school of architecture. It's nothing like a school of fish, except that perhaps it's safer to swim in these schools, instead of being lonely iconoclasts or vulnerable stray sardines. There's a school of thought about trauma and cancer, and I'm not thinking exactly of the direction of trauma into cancer, although that's interesting too. There is, in fact, some research out there suggesting that the experience of a traumatizing and emotionally damaging event occurs roughly two years before getting a cancer diagnosis, and there is more information that links chronic stress and cancer. That line of thought hurts my heart and makes me feel responsible for my cancer, as if only I had managed my stress better, I would not have cancer. That could be a truth, but it's no longer a useful truth. I have it now.
The other school is the cancer running towards trauma school, the idea being that there is a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome linked to cancer because of the feelings of shock, fear, helplessness and horror that are endemic to getting a cancer diagnosis and then living with the disease and the treatment, which can be its own kind of trouble. This idea wearies me--it almost seems too much to bear, although, sometimes, looking around at the exhausted faces of my fellow travelers in my support group, it seems to have some truth in it. The handbook at my oncologist's office says that the following are normal reactions to finding out you have cancer: repeated frightening thoughts, being distracted or overexcited, having trouble sleeping, and feeling detached from oneself or reality.
I couldn't feel more attached to reality than I am these days--I feel absolutely head over heels in love with the world, despite its terribleness. I drink in the summer landscape--the deepest green of these full trees and the yellow wildflowers--the tenderness of Elijah's face, the half moon last night blessing Kyle and I as we played with the dog in the dark. The eye is always drawn to the shapes of things--I am consoled by the shape of the moon itself, my son's eyes. And for me, the underworld of nature has a particular provenance--last night after Kyle went in to check on the sleeping boys, I took the dog on leash down the darkening road and he was afraid again. The seams between our world and the underworld were unraveling, and it seemed possible that fairies were twinkling about in some way that irritated the dog and was barely visible to me. Nonetheless, the lush night sheltered my very soul. I think this sense of belonging to the world can coexist with the traumas that are also my body's memories. I'm a woman in her early fifties--how could I not have secret traumas under lock and key, cancer or no?
I don't have trouble sleeping. I have trouble dreaming. My body remembers a time when I didn't have cancer, and cruelly, most often when I sleep during the day, I dream that it's all a dream. In the dozen variations of this dream, as I rush back into my body and the day into which I am knit, I suddenly know the cancer was just a dream, that's all, and here I am, Dorothy, back in Carlisle, whole, my body ready for another fifty years. And then, I wake, and I feel my shorn head, or I see that I am sleeping in my special bed which angles to help me in and out, and oh, the heaviness in my heart as I realize it was no dream.
These days vanish, but I cannot wander out of them into health. As Macbeth says, "And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle/ Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That strut and fret his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more./ It is a tale/Told by an Idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing." I love the lines--full of sound and fury, signifying nothing but I don't believe Macbeth in the least.
Pascal said that in a difficult time, you should always keep something beautiful in your heart.
Frank Wilczek, a Nobel physicist at MIT wrote A Beautiful Question, a long meditation on the question: Does the world embody beautiful ideas and his answer, yes, is based in physics. He says "Having tasted beauty at the heart of the world, we hunger for more. In this quest there is, I think, no more promising guide than beauty itself."
The Welsh poet R.S. Thomas wrote a poem called "The Bright Field."
I have seen the light break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great prize, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush. To a brightness
that seems as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
Possibility, the possibility that the whisper in the bushes is God, is magic, is fairies, is the secret heart of the time we keep. The buddhist principle that we only have this present moment is true and yet. The temple of memory lives in my body, and I have time to be still now that I am sick and it has allowed me to inhabit my present time in a way that is so rich that my days seem to last years, sometimes.
I am alone now more than I have ever been. I miss talking with my friends and the bustle of problem solving at work, sometimes immensely, but the loneliness I felt over the winter has fallen away in the summer. My fears are easy to find. I know that what I am afraid of is leaving all this, of losing all this beauty, and don't let me overstate it--there are moments of exhaustion, and real worry about my children and my sister's children and my parents, and I worry about money every single day, which I sometimes picture almost as a small dark beast that lives with me which will disappear, with me, precisely and only when I die---but if I think too much about leaving all this, my heart will start to ache and my anxiety can swallow up whole evenings if I let it out into the night. Let's put it this way. I can't be grateful for cancer, but I can be grateful for every moment of my life with cancer.
Elijah fell back asleep. The dog, too, was pacified with a long drink of water after the walk and went peaceably to bed. Kyle stayed up late looking at her baseball cards and fretting over the news which makes a mockery of my dreams and fears because I sleep every night in my lovely home, with my children in the nearby bedroom, or available in the night with a backlit text. My parents took the late plane back from Colorado and came for supper the next night and we had tandoori chicken and James Beard's tomato pie. My eldest daughter is considering her options wisely. My youngest daughter shone today with the smallest gesture of love for her great-aunt, which became in an instant, a treasure. My oldest son came home safely from the west and devoured a leftover bacon sandwich. My second eldest son will be here before June closes out. My nephew at the edge of adulthood came to stay for the day and played wild tag with the twins at the trampoline park. I don't know what I will dream tonight, but I believe I have another night of dreaming in me, and for that, for all that, I am grateful.
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