on the hook

In ballet class a couple of weeks ago, our teacher Nadine was giving some instruction before we began a sequence of tendus at the bar. She emphasized, per usual, that we should draw up in the front and down in the back, that we should imagine a hook right through the top of the skull pulling us upwards. All you have to do is hang on it. She paused and smiled knowingly at us.

Easy, right?

We all smiled back. Oh yeah, sure. Easy. Then she turned her elegant back on us to begin the music.

I like the hook imagery - faintly gruesome as it may be - even better than the invisible cord I was taught to imagine pulling me up nice and tall as a child. I like the heft and gleam of a hook, it's there-ness. I can almost feel it.

In everyday life I twist and contort and otherwise rebel via a thousand embodied objections to the simplicity and space my hook offers. I move as if it isn't there, gently tugging me upwards. I lean into one hip, tired of standing. I tense the muscles of my neck, my shoulders creep up into my ears, I bend my upper spine into the curl of a shepherd's crook to better see my phone. But then, if the stars align, for one hour on Monday mornings I try my best to cooperate with its gracious intentions, which is honestly nearly impossible. Nadine walks by and pushes one shoulder down, draws one hip forward, gently correcting all the crazy asymmetries and tensions my forty-two year old body has acquired. I've come by them all honestly. But still.

I've been meeting with a spiritual director occasionally over the past months and during one of our conversations, I was talking about my children's discomfort with church and God - the very idea of God - since Mike's death. Their religious education was paramount to Mike, and he worried about what would happen after he died. I took offense at this, thinking he didn't trust me to take them to Sunday School and church and continue the traditions we had developed together as a family. We had a fight about it not that long before he died; I felt so hurt that he didn't trust me to parent them in the ways we always had, not to mention that it sounded to me that he suspected I wasn't invested in my own faith. Like I was just going along with things, it didn't really matter that much, and once he was out of the picture I'd ignore the children and take my Sunday mornings back for the secular pleasures of the New York Times and yoga class and brunch.

That's what I heard and felt then, anyway. Now it occurs to me that Mike might have foreseen their hurt and anger and understood that their - and my - relationship to God and faith would necessarily change if he died. Get a lot more complicated, at the very least. I hadn't considered that. I hadn't considered anything about Mike dying while he was still alive, not even in his final hours, because I couldn't bear to.

But damn, Mike could be prescient. Not to mention annoyingly unflinching in the face of difficult realities. And getting anyone to come to church with me these days is downright painful. I don't think forcing will help the situation, so I'm sitting and waiting and feeling very uncomfortable with the unsettled, avoidant relationship my children have with church. I'm imagining Mike's disappointment, and feeling that awful weight, and waiting for the path forward to reveal itself.

I'm also reading the paper and going to yoga and taking the kids to brunch. Which I enjoy.

Anyway, I was bringing this to my spiritual director and she asked me about my own conflicted feelings about God, independent of the kids and Mike. Well, yes. I am very twisted up with this one. I would like Mike's vision and faith. I want security and comfort in my own relationship with God, but some of the time I'm not even confident She exists. Or if She does, what exactly Her relationship to creation is. Or how she might respond to the way I swear over obituaries for people - especially men - who live to be 94 years old. That fucker. Good for him. Hope he enjoyed his legions of great-goddamn-grandchildren. What does God make of that? 

I am sure that I have never stopped yearning for God - wondering and wishing and wanting - but when Gabriel asks me how I can worship a God who "just keeps on smiting you like this" I really don't have a good answer.

My spiritual director pointed out that even if I'm not sure God exists, even if I'm mad at God, even if I feel completely lost, God loves me just as much. You don't have to be or do or think or feel anything in particular, she explained. God isn't withdrawing from you because you have doubts, or because you haven't been able to persuade your kids to go to Sunday School since Mike died, or because you don't pray in a particular way. God loves you fully, completely, without condition.

Oh.

Now sometimes I say a prayer that goes something like thanks for loving me even if I'm not so sure about You.

And I really mean it. I say it with a peaceful, grateful heart. I love it when I realize that something isn't up to me. God's love isn't in my control. Whether I'm aware of it or not, whether I like it or not, God has Her divine outrageous shiny heavenly hooks in me, and they won't suddenly dislodge if I'm pissed off or avoiding church or letting Mike and the kids down on the religious front.

What does that even mean? Not sure. But I like to imagine that underlying connection as I do my ballet hook: there are gestures one can make, an awareness one can cultivate, that might enable a certain ease and strength in hanging on the hook that is always already there anyway. One can participate in hookedness, cooperate, consent, even show gratitude for the endless tugging, and thus create space and possibility and maybe even a lightening of our pain.

Maybe it's all the same hook anyway. When I feel myself tall and broad and wide, when I stand in tadasana fully, I am aware of it as a gesture that embodies receptivity and gratitude. Maybe simply standing up straight it is a way of acknowledging and making space for God's tugging, tireless love. (Funny that standing up straight is so ridiculously hard to do.)

I went to church - by myself - yesterday morning, and one of the readings was about Martha and Mary. Oh man, do I feel uncomfortable when Jesus says Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things. Your sister Mary has the right idea. I become Martha and I want to throw up my hands and say fine Jesus, fine, but who is going to make dinner if we are all sitting at your feet? You're right, I am worried and distracted, but if I'm not, who will get all this shit done? Do you have any children? Do you have any idea how hard it is to get everyone to swimming and soccer and internships and guitar and piano lessons and to pack their lunches and get them to dentist appointments and worry about their social and emotional development and schooling and help them fall asleep when they are scared and make them do a chore now and then and convince them to get over their terror in the water and just learn to swim already?

And have you ever tried doing this kind of thing when your husband is dead, and there's no one to turn to and say this is so hard, what should we do, and you're really sad and lonely, and the buck always and forevermore stops with you and only you?

The priest did a nice job of interpreting the passage in a more inclusive light, citing various writers who believe Jesus is not dismissing Martha's actions but rather showing us that her activity and Mary's receptivity are complementary aspects of a faithful life. Sounds nice, but I can't get around Jesus's words. Mary has the better part. Mary totally wins. Martha feels hurt and put upon and to make it worse she's missing out on the better part.

Oh, Martha. I see you. It's so hard.

But then I thought about the hook. I looked up at the ring of childlike angels painted on the round, high ceiling above the altar - they are rimmed in gold and all alike and appear to be looking kindly down on us humans below, their hands tented in prayer. I imagined them all holding fishing lines between their palms. Fishing lines connected to hooks.

There's that whole I-will-make-you-fishers-of-men bit, and the loaves and fishes etc, but maybe before and beneath any of that we are just a bunch of big fat fish, always already hooked ourselves. Always already loved completely, always already part of something much bigger than whether we are anxious do-ers or dreamy be-ers. Martha and Mary are equally cherished, equally connected. Maybe the most important part of the story is that Jesus is there with them both. When I had that thought, I didn't feel quite so defensive and protective of Martha/myself. I felt a glimmer of my own state of hookedness. Everyone sitting around me, too. Their always-already-no-matter-what-lovedness. And I thought of Mike, and how it didn't make much sense to think death would change a single thing about his - or anyone else's - being beautifully, unconditionally, always and forevermore on the hook.

green time

I would like to see time. 

Beatrice was in the back seat. I glanced at her in the mirror.

Not like seeing the future, I don't mean that. I mean what time is, what it looks like. Maybe it's a kind of ... greenish air.

Oh, yes, I said. I'd like to see that too. Maybe it's like ... water. Something you can't really hold, something that moves.

Maybe.

I sat at a familiar light, resting my hands on top of the steering wheel and enjoying a pleasantly fizzing excitement about where this imaginative, philosophical discussion with my six year old might lead. We were both quiet. My mind started reaching towards the mysteries of time and space, past and present, life and death.

Bea's voice suddenly ruptured the pregnant silence of the minivan. She had a new idea.

Mama, could you play It's Raining Tacos on your phone? Pleeeeeease? Or, wait, I know! Cat Flushing a Toilet!

The moment had already passed, as all do. Then I had to disappoint my girl because if I hear one of those autotuned monstrosities one more time I will have to run away to Australia, where children surely have better taste.

At the end of June, I drove us to North Carolina for a week. We met up with friends in the mountain town that is situated near my beloved UU camp that I went to in the summers growing up. My family spent time there too, as my dad would serve as minister for week-long family camps in between the youth camp sessions my sister and I would attend. I went most summers between age 9 - 17. My Mountain camp friends were precious to me, and many of us exchanged letters during the 50 weeks of the year that we weren't in camp together. I was a counselor the summer after my dad died, in 1996. I visited once more with college friends in the fall of 1997.

And that was it - until a few weeks ago.

We rented a house in the mountains with our friends. The last stretch of the drive seemed interminable. Everything in the car felt sticky. Bits of popcorn and crushed Pringles coated the floor mats. The children had driven each other and me insane after two days of being car-bound. When we finally arrived, I pulled into the gravel parking area, opened the door, and paused, feeling the green mountain air gently and insistently push all the accumulated stress of the drive, the irritation with my children, the uncertainty about where we were, and the worry over whether all of this was a good idea right off my shoulders, my back, my hips. The air passed in and over me and took most of that stuff along with it. I breathed deeply. It smelled exactly right. Like home.

The next day we met up with a dear old family friend at the Mountain. Lee is a folk musician and storyteller who has been river guiding on the Nantahala for forty years. My dad and Lee were particularly close. When I got out of the car at the Mountain and everything looked and felt just as it should, just as it always has, I felt my heart stretching, pushing at my sternum. I stepped with Lee, my children, and our friends out onto a place called Meditation Rock, where one is surrounded by the blue and gray and green mountains, the abundant sky, the spirits of those who came before us, and began to cry. It was so beautiful. I missed my dad.

Lee cried with me. He understood. Kit Howell! What a joy it was to be on Meditation Rock with you.

Our summer travels since Mike died (Vermont, Colorado, New England and New York last summer; North Carolina and New England this summer) are fraught for us. A year ago, I wanted to give my children all the things they couldn't have in the years Mike was sick. Adventure, freedom, travel, new formative experiences in beautiful places. It was hard though; we were still reeling, in pieces, grieving Mike and grieving the family we used to be, uncertain who or what we now were. I thought farflung adventures would help us figure that out, or at least help us to know that we still were a family, albeit deeply broken and diminished.

Did it? I'm not sure. I cried my way through most of those trips. I felt Mike's absence acutely in the places we went that he had loved. Vermont was heart breaking. Our Colorado river trip cracked open my grief in a terrible, scouring way; that canyon was big enough to hold the fathomless sadness coursing through me - and so much more - so it just kept pouring out. I barely slept; the space and the sorrow wouldn't let me. I was grateful to be there, but it wasn't easy (for me, or I suspect, anyone else close to me on that trip).

My last time at the Mountain was in 1997. I fell in love with Mike in 1998. He had never been there; we never visited. I had to acknowledge that I had stayed away from an incredibly special place for many years because Mike wasn't interested in going, and I wasn't interested in pushing the issue. It never even came up; I just knew he didn't want to go - for a number of complicated reasons - so I didn't ask. Last summer that realization would have made me sad, worried about the ways we let each other down in our marriage, but I'm okay with it now. We were imperfect people, doing our best to love each other in our imperfect marriage; certain priorities came to the fore in our shared life while others fell to the side. That's what happens. You build something together; you make choices.

The truth is I was grateful that we'd never been to the Mountain together. I didn't have to feel Mike's absence there in the way I had to in Vermont last summer; this was my place, my family's place, and I was full of relief to return to it, feel it's abiding hold on me. It's something I can bring along into this uncertain, unfolding future with my children. Being there knit the pre-Mike parts of me closer to the post-Mike parts of me. That whole week, seeing old friends and visiting special places, plunging into the shock of cold water at the base of a waterfall, navigating gentle rapids with my children, seeking daily ice cream cones, and sharing it all with friends who were seeing it for the first time tethered me to myself. Time felt like something palpable.

Our marriage was a tree. We sent our roots down into soil that our parents and grandparents and countless others that I will never know prepared for us, soil that our childhoods enriched, that our friendships made fertile. But the tree was us. Mike was my person, and I was his, and maybe this metaphor would work better with some entwined trunks imagery but I'm just going for it: one tree. One life we shared. We grew our careers and homes and children from that place of strength and connection. One's twenties and thirties are so full; in the scant time we each had for ourselves I might go to a yoga class or take a run or see a friend for a drink. Mike would pray or meditate, read a novel, take a walk. But those were the stolen hours, essential yet peripheral. Everything else was directed towards feeding the tree: meals together, plans for the kids, decisions about what to do with the garden and where to take a vacation.

Our tree was very beautiful. Its roots were complex and knotty and overlapping; it's branches were heavy with vibrant green in some seasons, bare and stark in others. The reality of the tree, it's weighty, undeniable aliveness, was never in question. For better and worse it was ours, it was us, it was ever-changing and yet ever-steady. The center we moved from. Even when Mike was sick in bed for days on end, unable to speak, the tree was undiminished.

When Mike died I felt as though our tree had been hit by lightning. The tree where I lived and the tree that was also me was destroyed. I was burnt and hollowed out and ashen. I didn't want to die, but I didn't know who or what I could be now, in this strange disorienting landscape: exposed to the elements, without strong leafy branches overhead.

Being at the Mountain felt like new life sprouting up through cracks in charred, blackened wood. The soil our marriage grew in is still there, still full of life and possibility, and our roots were protected in the darkness. The nurture I soaked up as a young person in North Carolina is still real, and can be part of my life moving forward. What a relief, what a blessing, to be reminded that I don't have to make all this shit up. That moving forward without Mike does not mean leaving the place where our tree flourished; that the same place can surprise me, nurture me, and thus my children, still.

What I - and we - have now is definitely not a tree. It is not even a sapling. But it isn't dead either; there are weird mushrooms clinging to the burnt bark, vibrant wildflowers growing in the ash-enriched soil, and tiny tree shoots here and there. There is a whole world pulsating beneath the surface -  bacteria multiplying, worms tunneling - unseen and mostly unknown even to me. I have no idea what kind of organizing vision is at work here. Who and what and how I am without Mike remain open questions.

But through it all the strange green air of time is moving, making connections above and below, and setting this tender wreckage aglow.