Life Isn't a Calendar (an Everyday Essay)

It is not what you first think. There is no effort of will, no firm resolve in the face of this thing called living. There is only paying attention to the quiet each morning, while you hold your cup in the cool air & then that moment you choose to spread your love like a cloth upon the table & invite the whole day in again. ~"Invitation" by Brian Andreas

The Solstice snow has melted a bit since last week, but the world has stayed mostly wintry white. We finally cleared the driveway yesterday and then woke to a new coat this morning. The backyard trees cradle little pillows of fresh snow in the crooks of their bare arms, and the shaggy evergreens bear the heavy snowload with their usual sad dignity. Out on my back deck I can just see the top of the patio umbrella stand peeking above the fluff, and the table, which shouldn't be left out during the winter, looks like a tall brown cake topped with white icing.

The new year lurks around every corner now, whispering invitations to clean, organize, and beautify -- my home, my self, my life. There are closets to clean out, lists to make, exercises to be done, paintings to be hung, vegetables to be eaten, intentions to be set. The new year is a busy time of foraging and plumbing the worlds around and within us. We humans take every chance we get to make meaning and sense of things, and the annual calendar changeover is prime time for these endeavors.

What did the past year bring us? What did it mean? Where are we now? What do we wish for the year ahead?

You're probably pondering the same things.

I'd chosen a group of words as my theme for 2012: harmony, rhythm, flow, alignment. I feel a bit sad now when thinking about these intentions, because I fell short of my expectations. I'm still seeking each one of these. Does that mean 2012 was a bust?

We cleared the driveway yesterday, and today it's covered again. The snow melts a little and falls some more. Eventually spring seeps through the cold and flowers bloom. Rhythm. Cycle. Flow. First one thing and then another, round and round it goes. We don't claim that the summer has failed us when the green leaves turn crimson.

The calendar days are tidy squares lined up in orderly rows, everything numbered to provide a false sense of linearity. It tricks us into thinking life is this way. Choose a word, set an intention, make a goal. Move forward, declare accomplishment. Make another list and tick it off step-by-step. But life is not a calendar or a list or a ladder you can climb rung-by-rung. Life is the ebb and flow of ocean tides, the sunlight and dappled shadow of forest paths, the contrast of white snow on evergreen boughs. Life is the overcast sky of winter that blurs the line between day and night, and the long June days when golden light seeps well into the night. Life is now. It's the driveway that needs shoveling, the dishes that need washing. It's the candles you light, the books you read, the tea you drink, the people you kiss. It's the lists you make and the ones you forget. One step forward, two steps back, and three to the side for good measure.

In three days I'll turn the page to another year, but I'll know that this is just one way of keeping time. There are other ways to make sense of things, to pay attention to what matters.

** ** **

About Everyday Essays: At least a few times a week I jot down notes about something -- usually a small moment, detail, or thought -- that I want to write about. Most of those ideas stay frozen as notes and never bloom into essays. Everyday Essays is my new writing practice to allow some of those notes to move beyond infancy. I've decided to share some of them with you here, even if they're still half-naked or half-baked. The word "essay" (as is almost always noted when the form is discussed) comes from the French verb essayer, which means to try. The essay is a reckoning, a rambling, an exploration, an attempt. Think of these Everyday Essays as freewriting exercises, rough drafts, or the jumbled, interconnected contents of my mind, which may or may not take root and grow into longer (deeper) essays.

Textures (an Everyday Essay)

This post is part of my series called "Everyday Essays." See below for a description of the series, or read other essays here.

Sometimes I wake up with the texture of a dream still wrapped around me. This might last until I take a shower or have my coffee, the sense of all but the most powerful dreams dissipating as I walk around in the daylight. But often when I lie back down at night, the feel of the previous night's dream envelopes me again and it's as though I instantly smell-taste-touch the dream world.

It's impossible to fully explain your dreams to someone else. Maybe you manage to pin down some general plot points or even name the emotion the dream evoked, but you can never truly communicate the heart of a dream, the visceral texture of the world that you created in your sleep.

I keep coming back to that word: texture. It's the best way I can describe this feeling of something that is at once so encompassing and so elusive.

Dreams have textures the way memories do. Lying down might trigger a dream texture, while a certain scent or a piece of music can bring on the texture of memory. Texture itself is a difficult thing to describe unless you and the person you're describing it to have the same referent points. Think of wool, linen, silk, or felt. How would you describe these textures to someone without referring to the material in quetstion? You might use words like wooly, scratchy, silky, or fuzzy, but what does that tell us? What would it tell someone who had never felt any of those fabrics? If I tell you that something feels smooth, would you know what that meant? Both woven cotton and polished granite feel smooth. Besides, how can I ever be sure that you experience the feel of cotton the same way I do?

That's why dreams and memories are so solid in our minds and so flimsy in description: They're composed of textures you can't recreate because no one else has lived inside of your dream or memory.

I've been thinking lately about how music has this textural quality, and not just in the music itself, but in the way it attaches its fibers to the details of your life at a certain time and place, and how all those textures (song + place/time) weave themselves together into something new, a customized fabric for you to wear whenever you hear that song.

When I hear "Raining in Baltimore" by the Counting Crows, I'm always and again a melancholy 18-year-old, and it really is raining -- a slow, misty kind of night rain. (Of course it's so much more than that. It's the ridiculously green grass on the center quad. It's puddles of light underneath lampposts, the smell of old wood in a chapel, and the soft glow-hum of the vending machine at 1:00am, all of it there in Adam Duritz's desperate voice, singing a stilted melody that simultaneously heals and breaks my heart.)

And then there's music that is the soundtrack to memory, even when the music itself may not have been part of the memory. I don't remember hearing David Gray's "White Ladder" album when I lived in England, but whenever I hear it now, especially the song "Babylon," with its traffic lights turning from red to green, I'm right back in Walthamstow, the London borough where I lived for a year after college. I'm standing on the corner of Forest Road by the Bell Pub, waiting to cross the street, reminding myself which way to look because the traffic is opposite what it should be. I may notice that I'm one of the few white people on the street here in a neighborhood with many Pakistani and Indian residents, and suddenly I'm aware of being different in two ways: white and American, a double foreigner. Maybe I'm coming back from the market or from a day in the city, or from my friends' house around the corner, walking back to the YMCA where I live. I pass townhouses with gauzy white curtains, and it's just turning to twilight outside, and the lamps are lighting up those gauzy white windows, turning them rosy and golden, soft and loving, and my loneliness, my feeling of being outside of things, deepens with dusk as I think about all of those people inside those houses, because even if they're not happy families, from out here on the gritty street -- the one in all of London on which you are most likely to get mugged, at least so I once heard -- from here those windows are entryways to homes. And as happy as I am to be here, living abroad for a year, doing volunteer work and having an international adventure, I miss home. But it's deeper than all this, of course. (It always is.) I miss home in a way beyond time and place, for even in my American hometown I've never felt at home. And now, 14 years later and just down the road from that American hometown, David Gray sings it all back to me, brings it all back into focus, even though I don't remember hearing him while I was on British soil. Gray is British, of course, and I think something of that place must have slipped into the texture of his music.

These worlds and memories live inside the texture of songs. i know you have your own worlds and songs, textures to call your own.

I suppose this is one of the reasons I write. I'm trying to weave textures into words so I can share them with you, and also so I can wrap myself up in them again in a new way. This is probably why I'm drawn to meditative and lyric forms of writing, which leads me to write essays in which, as I say, "nothing happens." I love story and narrative, but I'm always running after the texture of things, trying to translate an experience into something you can experience along with me.

** ** **

About Everyday Essays: At least a few times a week I jot down notes about something -- usually a small moment, detail, or thought -- that I want to write about. Most of those ideas stay frozen as notes and never bloom into essays. Everyday Essays is my new writing practice to allow some of those notes to move beyond infancy. I've decided to share some of them with you here, even if they're still half-naked or half-baked. The word "essay" (as is almost always noted when the form is discussed) comes from the French verb essayer, which means to try. The essay is a reckoning, a rambling, an exploration, an attempt. Think of these Everyday Essays as freewriting exercises, rough drafts, or the jumbled, interconnected contents of my mind, which may or may not take root and grow into longer (deeper) essays.

How You Come Back (an Everyday Essay)

This post is part of the "Everyday Essays" series. See below for a description of the series, and read others essays here.

how you unsettle me — how you go
infinite — how you come back —

(from "the silver book" by jen bervin)

My mind tries to recreate you in dreams, but it's a poor sketch artist. And maybe I forget more than I remember. Last night you sat in the back of my dream space, it may have been a bus, or maybe an auditorium (two places I've never seen you while awake), and your hair was the wrong shade: light tan, when it should have been dark chestnut. Years ago I dreamt you into the wings of a stage and there you were, until you removed your sunglasses and showed me brown eyes instead of the true blue they should have been. (The blue they were, and the blue, presumably, they still are.) "Excuse me, don't I know you?" And then the big reveal of some detail gone wrong. "Oh, I guess not."

I can't make my mind paint you right any more than I could wring out of you the truth of your leaving with my young tears and a pleading so ancient as to be banal. Foreshadowing: When duty called and you had to leave, I begged you, "Don't go. Please don't leave me." That was unfair, I know. You weren't leaving me then, though that would be the beginning of your eventual goodbye.

When you finally disappeared for a time and came back changed, I gave you an ultimatum, and you chose to take the out, which wasn't what I'd intended. (I remember you saying you don't appreciate ultimatums.) (I don't remember giving you one.) (How many times did I let you convince me of something else?) If you wouldn't stay, you should have at least told me the truth about why. "This is for the best" is what you tell a child. I know you were young and that I was younger, but that wasn't very brave of you, was it?

"Someday you'll understand." I don't think you ever said that, but I always hear it as the subtitle of the book called, "This Is for The Best." A lifetime later and I still don't understand. I've made the best of it, as every one does about every thing, but who's to say what's best? Sometimes, just before I fall asleep, when I need a familiar hurt to fixate on as an escape from more pressing worries, I leaf through that book, "Someday You'll Understand: This Is for The Best," and I try to read the appendices, where I expect to find notes about the meaning of things. I fall asleep.

In my dreams, the puzzle pieces of you -- the odd shapes of action that don't fit my narrative -- take on physical form: hair, eyes, the sound of your voice. Wrong, wrong, wrong. We keep piecing you together, my subconscious and I. Childlike renderings, simplified, symbol, redux.

I imagine you in the passenger seat of my car. Stepping through the broken gate of my backyard fence. Standing outside my front door, looking up to me in the window. (I swear to you: These are not metaphors. I mean all of this literally.)

You have dark brown hair and indigo blue eyes. I remember. (The photos verify.) Dark hair, blue eyes. Dark hair, blue eyes.

** ** **

About Everyday Essays: At least a few times a week I jot down notes about something -- usually a small moment, detail, or thought -- that I want to write about. Most of those ideas stay frozen as notes and never bloom into essays. Everyday Essays is my new writing practice to allow some of those notes to move beyond infancy. I've decided to share some of them with you here, even if they're still half-naked or half-baked. The word "essay" (as is almost always noted when the form is discussed) comes from the French verb essayer, which means to try. The essay is a reckoning, a rambling, an exploration, an attempt. Think of these Everyday Essays as freewriting exercises, rough drafts, or the jumbled, interconnected contents of my mind, which may or may not take root and grow into longer (deeper) essays.

On Location: A Mild Cow Stampede (an Everyday Essay)

I didn't mean to cause the stampede.

Twilight edged toward dusk, and the full moon peeked above the hilly tree line. I had to hurry to catch the remaining light, but I approached slowly. I didn't want to spook the cows, especially the cute little black one with the fuzzy head nearest the fence. She stared me down, like a barnyard sentinel or a kid still young enough to be curious.

This farm sits next to a monastery just down the road from my neighborhood. The cows have been out in full force lately with the early spring weather. Of course, "full force" for a cow is still a fairly laidback affair that seems to center on the grass -- munching it and lolling about on it. One day earlier this month I noticed that they were hanging out in the field closest to the monastery parking lot, enjoying a smorgasbord (sMOOrasbord?) on tractor wheels,  which was great luck for me. For weeks I'd been on the lookout for a good cow photo shoot  opportunity. I needed some bovine beauties to accompany an essay I'd written. So when I drove by and saw these ladies ready for their close-up, I circled back home to grab my camera and snap a few shots.

It went quietly for awhile. The cows ate. A few stared. The moon rose.

Then I crouched down to get a different perspective.

And that's when the young sentinel bolted, setting off a chain reaction. Stampede! Cows turned and scattered everywhere. A quick rustling sound and then thundering hooves. Dust! Perhaps a stray bellow or two. This was exciting. I became a National Geographic photographer, shooting wild animals in their natural habitat! Cows in action!

I waited for a nun or farmer to appear and reprimand me for provoking the wild life, but no one showed up. I stayed still for a few minutes and the cows wandered back. Some of them went back to eating from the rolling buffet. Others formed a phalanx and kept a closer eye on me.

This one kept her distance from me and the group. She wasn't taking any chances.

I think this gang, staggered strategically off to the side, was part of the Secret Service or the Mafia.

I think they're on to me.

I hope they don't show up in my front yard.

** ** **

About Everyday Essays: At least a few times a week I jot down notes about something -- usually a small moment, detail, or thought -- that I want to write about. Most of those ideas stay frozen as notes and never bloom into essays. Everyday Essays is my new writing practice to allow some of those notes to move beyond infancy. I've decided to share some of them with you here, even if they're still half-naked or half-baked. The word "essay" (as is almost always noted when the form is discussed) comes from the French verb essayer, which means to try. The essay is a reckoning, a rambling, an exploration, an attempt. Think of these Everyday Essays as freewriting exercises, rough drafts, or the jumbled, interconnected contents of my mind, which may or may not take root and grow into longer (deeper) essays.

Fill Me With Flowers (an Everyday Essay)

March 13, 2012 — I have been thinking about the local farmers and their crops, this early warm weather and the buds on trees aching to burst out into flowery flames. I'm worrying about the planting schedule. Winter was so mild; did the farmers move up their timetable? Will there be fresh spring peas and asparagus in April instead of May? Or will we skip over those first vegetables of the season and head straight toward early lettuce or whatever comes next? I'm thinking about the berry farm, too. It always snows here in April, though who knows if it will this year. But if it does, if the weather pendulum swings back from spring to winter, what happens to that delicate fruit? We need strawberries for our poundcake and whipped cream, for Easter and Mother's Day. Yes, I'm thinking about the local farmers and the weather, fretting over all of it on this day filled with sunshine and cloud, the alternating currents of the sky. I'm thinking about all of this as my grandmother lies in a darkened room, the mercy of morphine her constant companion. It's easier to worry about the crops that might suffer and die than to think too much about her. I want to take her out of that dark hospice room, out into the play of sunlight and cloud, the dance of blue and grey. I want her to have the breeze on her tissue skin. I want to believe that the air is soft and sweet enough not to bruise or tear at her, like every human touch seems to do. Last night I hummed to her a song I don't know, just me and her in that darkened room. I don't know if she could hear me. I wanted to touch her head, her grey hair all pushed back from her brow, but I didn't, too scared to disturb what I hope is a peaceful sleep, or at least a gentle drug trip. So I hummed, because that room was so damn dark and cold. People we love should die surrounded by beauty. Everyone should have something human and beautiful right up to the end. I keep thinking about buying some grocery store daffodils for her bedside, even if she'll never open her eyes to see them. I want to fill that room with the early flowers: cream, yellow, white, and orange hued daffodils; purple crocus with slender white-striped green leaves; voluptuous tulips in every shade, their black stamens punctuating the heart. A few days ago, when she was still semi-coherent, I wanted to tell her what a beautiful day it was outside, how soft and nice it felt to have the top of your head warmed and the skin of your arms cooled. But this seemed like cruelty, to tell her of the things she'd never again feel in her current body. I never knew my grandmother well enough to know how she'd feel about these things or which flowers were her favorites. If one day I'm in that same room, please tell me about the world. Regale me with descriptions of sky, trees, sun, and wind. Bring the puffy cumulus clouds indoors for me, let nature force its green shoots up through the brown haze. If ever I am you, Grandma, feed me a story of flowers.

In memoriam, Leona Jane McGuiggan (July 20, 1923 – March 14, 2012): May you have armfuls of flowers or whatever brings you the most joy.

** ** **

About Everyday Essays: At least a few times a week I jot down notes about something -- usually a small moment, detail, or thought -- that I want to write about. Most of those ideas stay frozen as notes and never bloom into essays. Everyday Essays is my new writing practice to allow some of those notes to move beyond infancy. I've decided to share some of them with you here, even if they're still half-naked or half-baked. The word "essay" (as is almost always noted when the form is discussed) comes from the French verb essayer, which means to try. The essay is a reckoning, a rambling, an exploration, an attempt. Think of these Everyday Essays as freewriting exercises, rough drafts, or the jumbled, interconnected contents of my mind, which may or may not take root and grow into longer (deeper) essays.