Ache and Awe

And inhabiting possibility

At Palisades State Park in South Dakota

Poetry

Here’s James Crews’ “Ache of Aliveness”¹

I feel it while scuffing through
the first leaves to blanket the garden,
feel it in sun that lifts the dew
from grass blades and fern fronds
beginning to rust at their edges.
I feel it in the thimble of a black
raspberry dangling just for me,
in the way you grip your lower back
as if touch could calm the pain.
But there is no cure for the ache
of aliveness that runs like a current
through each of us—we can only
embrace it, bittersweet as the last
ear of sweet corn pulled from the pot,
so golden and packed with sugar, 
I almost can’t bear to bite into
all that long-gone summer light.

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Journeying

In Lincoln, Nebraska, I stopped at a local coffee chain to buy a “hippie cookie” for my ride home. I’m addicted to these chunky cookies and like to tell myself that they are semi-healthy because the pumpkin seeds, oatmeal, and walnuts they contain offset the sugar, chocolate chips, and butter. I made my purchase and climbed back into my car for the hour drive home to Omaha. Faced with the silent, familiar drive ahead of me, I remembered a podcast I’d begun a couple of weeks before and realized that now would be a great time to finish it.² As I queued up the interview, I noticed again the pain thrumming in my chest, then shifted my attention to the voices in my phone.

I had just delivered one of my sons to his college apartment after a visit to his girlfriend on the east coast. The pain in my chest began as I left the apartment parking lot, an ache spreading through me like a spill soaking a paper towel. I felt the shadow of tears in my eyes, their reflexive squint. Now, as I drove home across the Platte river, marshy from lack of rain, past harvested fields rimmed with trees turned gold in late October, my mind wanted to listen to the information funneled to it through my ears and the tinny voices inside the small yet surprisingly heavy device in my hand. But I couldn’t listen and feel at the same time.

Less than hour before, the empty seat next to me had held a thick haired, vibrant young man, whose choices and the life they lead him towards seem to expand with each day. Possibility stretches the seams of his self and brings his mother to her knees with joy. The opportunity to inhabit that spacious place of what one could do and be is not a given. It’s a gift and also an elusive mix of context and choice. I am just beginning to discover its existence in this the fifth decade of my life. But my son, and his brother and sister, have found this space and begun to explore it as if they belonged there, as if it belonged.

I switched off my phone and with my free hand reached out to touch the seat my son had occupied. I let my hand rest there for a few moments. Then I touched the head rest, the seat back, the green ceramic bowl that had held his breakfast, the spoon. I ache for my son’s presence, even as I wonder at his freedom, a freedom inconceivable to me at his age. In him, I recognize what I lost but also what I worked to give him, a sense of safety and self. The results are beyond anything I could have imagined. After each movement of my hand, I paused, giving my heart space to acknowledge and accept what I felt, so that I could finally enter my own version of possibility.

Eventually, my hand found the wheel again. The pain in my chest abated, but I didn’t restart the podcast. Instead, I listened to the white noise of tires on asphalt and felt the warmth of mid-morning sun on my arm.

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Gardening and Making/Mending

Fall viburnum

A few weeks ago, I dreamed I heard rain outside my bedroom window. In the dream, I thought, “oh, good it’s raining.” After forty plus days without a drop of moisture, we did in fact get rain this week. Earlier in the month, I wondered how much fall color the trees would have this year. A dry year usually means more color, a wet one less. But we had a very wet spring and earlier summer and then a very dry late summer and fall. What would be the results? Well, pretty lovely, actually. Nebraska autumns do not include the flood of deep red and orange that the northeast experiences. Gold is the common denominator here mixed with the scattered orange of a few intentionally planted maples and a bright red flash of sumac. One of the many shrubs I’ve planted in the last three years, a viburnum, although I don’t remember what kind, has become a two and half foot tall ball of color. It, too, fills me with awe and some sadness. It’s so beautiful! And with our move next summer, I won’t get to watch it grow.

Those top four are the books that must be read. And yes, there’s a knitting book in the stack.

In the last newsletter, I complained that my finicky fingers kept me from knitting my many projects, imagined and actual. My fingers have improved, but I seem to have exchanged knitting for books in the last fortnight. Luckily, my eyes work well, allowing me to read steadily through the stack of books on my coffee table. The hold system at my local library is part of the problem. Don’t get me wrong, I love the hold system, but all of my most desired books seem to become available to me at the same time. In one day, I receive three text notifications about books I’ve waited months for, books I forgot I requested, books for which I was hold number “68 on 4 copies.” Every other library patron wants to read these as well, so once I check them out, the clock is ticking. I have two weeks to read all of them before dutifully returning them so that the next patient reader can partake. Whew. It’s an overwhelming but incredibly enjoyable assignment.

1. You can sign-up to receive James Crews’ “A Weekly Pause,” which includes a poem, a reflection, and a writing prompt. The above poem is from this year’s September 20th edition.

2. “Deep Time Diligence: An Interview with Tyson Yunkaporta”, Emergence Magazine Podcast.