quiet in the silence

A thick falling snow always quiets the world. Even the howls of wind outside are muffled. This is our fourth or fifth, actually I don't remember how many at this point, blizzard of this winter. I am up early - well not actually. It is 7am and I was up a little before 6am. That has been my normal ever since my son started sleeping through the night. Up until he turned two, he was up at around 5am every day...and so was I. Now he is sleeping a bit longer, usually closer to 6am. But today he is asleep, along with my mother, and the house spread with quiet.

It must have been a long time since I have immersed myself in quiet. This uninterrupted, unbroken morning comes as such a relief, and yet a foreign one. I am so distanced from my former self, the one who moved through the world but not of it, for days, weeks at a time. I remember quite vividly my sorrowful year at a prestigious, yet isolated college in the northern hinterlands of New England. Yes, full of sorrow, and the interiority of loss built an enclosed space around me. I walked around as if in a tomb, going for days without speaking a word or interacting with another human being. When you step apart from the world, mute, everything does become quiet. Yet sorrow for what? There was no particular reason, no particular event. There was one boy with whom I had been close who was struggling with his own depression; he had withdrawn from the world and from me. But was that enough to cause the extreme sort of removal that I myself had initiated?

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I wrote the above two paragraphs two or three years ago when quiet was indeed a rarity. Now I sit, once again, worlds apart from a past me, under the weight of silence. My now 6-year old is spending his first weekend away from me with his father under a court order which came on abruptly and painfully. It is not truly silent - as usual, I hear the cars pass on the state highway outside our house; the air conditioner buzzes on and off; the hum of heat rising into the day vibrates itself through the closed windows; robins and chickadees sing their morning rounds.

No, it is the silence of oblivion, of absence, of what is but is not. I do not know this world without my son bumping around in his room when he wakes and then calling mellifluously down the stairs "Mommy?" It is the silence of you wake up and there you are, still alive, yet without all that you would call life.

I may seem melodramatic. Perhaps I am. The emotional anguish is the moment, though, building outward to fill the silence. I have twinges of what it would be like to lose a child. Their toys and papers from school and small pieces of string and tiny clothing all around, underfoot, within view...their voice never in earshot, the amplitude of their calls and laughter displacing none of your space. The composer Samuel Barber is quoted in an article in The New York Times (Oct. 3, 1971) as saying that "I can also tell you that one of the physical nurturing components that make my music sound as it does as that I live mostly in the country. I like being surrounded by nature. I have always believed I need a circumference of silence." In his case, he is filling the silence with music. The space of silence to create. The roundness of the shape of his silence embraces him and opens up, circling around from end to beginning, like the earth or the solar system. My silence is not a circumference unless it is a noose. The weight of silence already bursting with creation missing, with space like sky to atmospherically echo all you no longer have.

I wrote some untranslatable notes from my previously unfinished post - the weight of future pain, that of being a spectator...something about the recognition of my struggle making me feel a sense of loss. Oh me me me. The old me could entirely fill the silence with my own pain. The current me can too, yet now the pain feels valid, feels equally external and connected as it does interiorized whereas my sense of my older ineffable sorrow feels Werther-like, manufactured in order to romanticize the space of sorrow itself. The child I grew inside my body is gone - it is easy to pinpoint the silence now.

I admit that I was jealous of others' silence once. I wrote years ago: "It is so quiet this morning that I can hear others - my bachelor friend painting all weekend in one of the previous blizzards, the scratch of the brush on the canvas, the struggle of his self-expression, the space of making and doing, the sound of me making silence in his presence. And now they begin to destroy the quiet: my son coughing, the water rushing through the pipes, the floor creaking with the weight of my mother's footfalls upstairs." Now it is the silence that destroys. Friends have recommended I take its offerings, hold its hand again, let my own voice pulsate its thickened air. Can you find yourself amidst silence?

There is a room in Minneapolis which has taken the title of 'the quietest place on earth.' Away from the notifications, the headphones, the outside tainted by traffic, airplanes, and leaf blowers, the anechoic chamber allows for a space where noise is measured in negative decibel levels. Though some find the deactivation the room enables therapeutic, others become anxious or disoriented in less than an hour. If noise has been identified as a threat by the World Health Organization, why am I so terrified of the silence?

Steve Orfield who is the president of Orfield Laboratories explains: "Silence is the ability to step out of the world and to be passive." When you take away all of the noise, all of the stimulus, what returns is the opportunity for one to clarify oneself. This 'stepping into myself' is the silence I am afraid of, the silence that hurts. It is the me that is afraid of losing my son's need for me. It is the me that is not yet sure what I am again without constantly being a mother. It is the me who is so used to giving and interrupting myself that I am unacquainted with who I have become. It is the me ready to continue pouring me into every open glass rather than submerge into my own bath, feel the cool of the water on my soul, and begin to swim again. "The highest order thing we can give ourselves, we already own." In this case, Mr. Orfield means peace. For me, I am going to try to sit with the quiet in the silence, because it is the quiet of my own sorrow...once as again. It is the quiet of my fears and my deepest love. The gift of knowing myself is terrifying. I once sought it constantly and it was more terrifying then...because I could never find it; I could never nail it down. I am ultimately unknowable even to myself, a shifting, raw movement within the silence. I am not my son. I am not only his mother. I am sorrow, I am silence, and I am the noise, the voice I can make and the one that might be able to encompass the opposite poles of gentle and powerful. As Jason Rosenthal writes in his piece, "My Wife Said You Want to Marry Me," "loss is loss is loss" and when those of us prepare our loved ones for it in a way that invites new life, they can use that empty space to write a new story. As I prepare my son for a life that doesn't always include me, and prepare him with gentleness, support, and encouragement, my new story begins.

out of order

In a machine world, things break. They break and, because there are only specialized people who can fix them, they sit in said broken state, 'out of order.' There will be a sign, sometimes formal, sometimes hastily written by management, usually with a warning or apology - 'caution' or 'sorry'... but sometimes just the obvious, 'notice.' Yes we do.

But this was the secondary thought I had of the phrase. It first came into my head because of my life, the way my life has been out of order. I had a child before getting married. My career life is not stable and I am in the middle of my life. In fact, it feels as if I am at the beginning, fighting my way in, yet I feel way too old and experienced for that.

Is there something fundamentally dysfunctional about my life? Or is it just that there are never good moments for life to happen and sometimes, they can derail other parts of your life? I long for the more proper order - the job that leads forward, the romance, the honeymoon period, the announced and celebrated wedding, the children that come a few years later, two to three years apart, and then the onward march towards...towards what? Do I want this? Did I ever? Is it just the chasm between the order of others and the muddled nature of my life, my being my soul that echoes with constant vibration?

I don't know that I want the right order. I may carry less pain, it is true, but I also don't think I would reflect as much on life or have as much drive to leave behind a mark. The question remains though, with all that is out of order in my life, am I broken? If so, to whom should I apologize?

I rejoined my childhood church about a year ago. I did it completely for my son. I wanted to offer him the awareness of religion and more, the possibility of a supportive community if he so chooses it in the future. He has become attached, it is true, but the more I went, the more it began to take on a shape and a meaning for me. I took the time to sit with my thoughts...with the painful ones that I was so often pushing away. I began to think about what it would mean in practice to forgive those who have caused me the greatest pain. And the strangest thing started to happen. People started to reach out to me. One of the pastors invited me to join an Ekklesia group during Lent for parents with younger children. I never involve myself in things like that. But something has changed about me this year. With the losing of my job, my son getting sick with a sudden medical condition, and his father suddenly fighting for custody out of the blue, I have broken irreparably. With all the new cracks now showing, I am letting people in more.

There is a Japanese practice called kintsugi. Rather than throwing away a broken bowl or vase, it is repaired using liquid gold, thus highlighting the scars of the piece. The metaphorical suggestions are legion: to be broken is not to be useless, value can be added through breaking, scars create beauty in a wholeness built through resilience. What I have been presenting to others this past year is my brokenness...and I have found more genuine connection with others than ever before.

I revise my earlier question. I quite certainly know that I never wanted the right order of life. I railed against choosing a well-worn career path and falling in line with the established footprints. I felt such a life to be empty of meaning...whatever that was. I felt that, if I were to choose that path, I would die a little on each step. I never had dreams of a big wedding or even of having children. And I did choose otherwise. I wandered my way through my twenties, pushing away from my family in the only way I knew how - through distance and career possibilities of which they had little to no knowledge. I could be a field biologist. Or an environmental lawyer. Or an anthropology professor. These things I could own. They would be my footprints alone. Alone in the wilderness. I simultaneously pushed away from most human connections, thinking and feeling that I was not yet 'perfect' enough. In hindsight, I can see that, as much as I struggled against the conventions of society, they still defined my sense of identity and success. And my willingness to open up and engage.

But I did dream of someone finally seeing my "pilgrim soul," "the sorrows of my changing face" as Yeats once wrote. But everywhere I went to make my new footprints, I found myself and my struggles. As I have aged, I have often second-guessed my own choices - to attend painting school in France, for example, when I could have been making my way through law school into a secure career. I kept a journal at the time, though, and I see myself working through so many difficult issues. On Wednesday, February 14, 2001 (ironically), I wrote: "How strange a thing is happiness. I don't even know if I know what it is - sometimes it feels like I can barely tickle it with my fingertips and that's an incredible feeling. But here I am - at painting school in Provence...and everyone from back home tells me how jealous they are of me, how lucky I am to be here, and how happy I must be. Happy? I certainly realize and acknowledge that I am unusually lucky to have the luxuries of money and time to be able to come here. That is undeniable...but happy? No, it is hard being here - every day is trying just in the sense of needing to speak a different language or having to live in a family and culture that isn't yours...And, of course, people who say they are jealous never think of these everyday realities...but more that that even, they don't realize that when you have an experience like this that is so foreign to everything you know that you - or at least I do - spend so much of my time searching and re-searching my values, my goals, my being, my soul. God, these thoughts occupy my mind all day - and it's exhausting...and you also feel really lonely a lot - not terrible, painful, crying lonely, but just alone - that no one really knows you."

When I am able to put my current self back into the mind of my younger self, I feel much more compassion. Oh dear sweet self and your struggles. And how you wanted to figure all of life out before living it. I once had a professor who must have sensed some of himself in me who told me a story of how when he was attending UC, Berkeley he used to go sit on some rocks above the ocean and hope he could think through all the answers...and then one day he realized he just needed to act and figure it out as he went along. Similarly, Leslie Jamison has written of an alternative to the modern notion that our lives must be shaped by and built upon deep insight about the 'self.' She writes: "I'd come to worship self-awareness...[this] brand of secular humanism [urging us to] Know thyself, and act accordingly. [But] what if you reversed this? Act, and know thyself differently."

We live in a human world. Machines may break and be done for, but we live...often in the mud...usually breaking once, twice...perhaps a whole host of times. Some of us break more than others. I recall reading in Tobias Wolff's In Pharaoh's Army that he originally joined the army so that he could have as many experiences in life as possible...because that was the way he felt he could become a truly good writer. From my early twenties when I read that, until recently, that was my feeling too. I felt brave enough, strong enough...and I felt experiences would give me the most human experience possible. Now, on the other side of abortions and abuse and loss and estrangement from family and financial struggles, my feelings have changed. I feel guilty and naive for ever asking for so much experience. I would now like a bit less. Because there can be so many cracks that you don't even know where to begin with the bowl.

The fact remains, I don't want to be a perfect bowl. Those pieces of china sit idly in a cupboard missing out on life. I don't want to break into dust either. My 'out of order-ness' are the cracks in my bowl. You don't need to be cautious around me or sorry. You should take notice, as should we all. But I will stand in front of you with my cracks glued back together in gold in order to ask you how you are, how you really are. And you can tell me, in no particular order.