#SOL17: Suck Out all the Marrow

from my art journal. June 2017.

I.

On Sunday, after I went food shopping for the week and came home and used the meat that had been in the refrigerator to make a double batch of chile, adding an extra pound of grass fed beef I had just purchased--and after I set 8 chicken breasts to marinate in a lime mustard marinade in the refrigerator--I then got my brother a can of soda as he requested.

Hey, did you put new cans of soda in the fridge? I asked.
Nope. 
This can should be ice cold and it's kind of lukewarm, I said handing him the can of Pepsi, recalling he had put the cans in the fridge the day before. Only he drinks Pepsi.
Yeah, I noticed that yesterday. How old is the fridge?
15 years. We bought it when we moved here.

Then I remembered. There had been a persistent smell. Onions. Each time I opened the refrigerator this last week I could smell onions and I was wondering why but not wondering too hard apparently. I was distracted. Preoccupied. I had been out most of the week in the evenings and when home I was so busy with a curriculum project that I had not cooked since Tuesday night. As Devon only seems to know how to order food, he too was not in the fridge very often. It remained closed and unnoticed.

Then I remembered a year ago having to call the repair person because the refrigerator was not working correctly.  Like this time, ice continued to be made and yet the frozen fruit was slushy and the almond milk was almost cool, but not quite. The repairman told me we had a year or so left. My brother took a look and told me the year was over and so I bought I new refrigerator that was delivered yesterday, as it had been promised.

After the situation was handled and my brother left for home and Devon was tucked upstairs in front of a computer he built, I sat on the sofa and sobbed until I felt cried out. It was an eye-sore and blotchy kind of cry. When something breaks in our home, I feel the break in my bones, my heart. It reminds me that Rob is no longer here. I would not normally cry over a broken appliance. But on Sunday, I did.

Then, Devon and I went out and ate Mexican food for dinner.

II.

I have needed a lot of help recently. My brother spent last weekend staining the back deck that had been power washed. I cleared most of the furniture off the deck on Friday night so it could be ready for him. Today a handyman is coming to fix a problem in the bathroom and my brother is returning to finish the deck staining. Yesterday morning a repairman fixed the air conditioner. Two weeks ago, my other brother climbed up a ladder and cleaned a bird 's nest out of the dryer vent and now the dryer works better.

All of this highlights what is most hard to accept. Rob is truly gone and my level of competence is woefully low.  On Monday our son graduated high school--and though Rob was there in spirit I have been told, he was not there in flesh.

Milestones are so double-edged.

Yes, I am proud of and happy for Devon. Very. Yes, the loss is more acute at such times.


III.

If you have recently suffered a loss, it might be best to ignore the books, the carefully worded columns by psychologists, and the advice from well-meaning friends who try to situate grief as something you will move beyond. This is inaccurate. There is no moving on as if the life the two of you created together could be something packed away.

There is no moving on.  That is mythical.


IV.

For me, after loss, living has become more of a decision made and remade. I never lived so overtly before. Life's sweetness and pleasures have become more noticed, as have the wonders and ambiguities that mark my days--not because days, weeks, months, and a year has passed since Rob's death, but because living now requires a deliberateness it did not require before.

Living is harder, more noticeable.


V.

Every overt decision made builds strength. Thoreau told us:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...”

I had not lived.

My neighbor, Dawn, told me that every day we are shedding bone. This resonated. It almost seems as if sorrow allows for new bones to grow--ones that can carry the burden and joy of grief and hopefulness; sorrow and pleasure; uncertainty and caution.  Thoreau closes Walden by saying,

"The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."

Live wide awake.
Live wide.
Live.

Yes, there is more to the day than dawn.

Even after great loss.  There is always more.

That's what time allows us to know.  That is what must be savored.

It is not getting over,
                                     moving on,
                                                             being done with.

Grief teaches us to savor the now.
That's the gift.

Live Deliberately

I Went to the Woods (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

Beginnings, even the annual ones, offer us a moment to reconsider, to start new and to do so, differently.   

I wish you the confidence to pierce beneath the skin of the everyday.   

Two contemplative pieces to get you on your way: one familiar, one less so.                                                      

Mary Ann, 12:46 a.m. 1/1/13

I. The Familiar

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion." - Henry David Thoreau

II. The Less Familiar

from Nic Askew: Concerning Choice

We Are Too Full with Knowing

A Walk Through the Woods (5.23.11)

I believe in rituals.

For a long time, each spring I would reread Thoreau's Walden.  I found it reconnected me to self and other in ways often necessary after a long winter in the Northeast. Sometime between December and May I had forgotten the most fundamental of things: how to breathe.

I have neglected reading Walden in recent years, hurrying about as if the work at hand might be better shaped through frantic pace.  I was feeling all of this today as I made my way to work, wondering not for the first time, what is it that I do and is it worth what it takes.  It was as if I saw school for the first time, wondering how Richard Elmore might see it: With indifference? With certain clarity?  It caused me to pause, remember what my first years of teaching were like and how privileged in many ways those days were before the advent of external and national Standards and with them all the rush, rush, rush to perfection.

Today I asked a group of senior students which was more beautiful: perfection or imperfection. They were discussing ethical implications of cloning and it had me wondering why we find ever newer ways to shun our humanness, our imperfections. I was thinking of being married, of being a mom and how I have learned that I will never be perfect as either and how hard it is nonetheless to not expect an idealized version of love in return.

I thought about this as I listened to this group of students discuss their views-- their partial understandings.  How can you know at 17 that love will always disappoint and that it is in the disappointment that its beauty will be so clear?  

What do we teach at school and how essential is what we teach?  Much of what I read in the Common Core Standards feels inconsequential to me, quite frankly rather unimportant.  I mean just how important is it for 10- or 11-year-olds to type three pages on a computer "in one sitting"? Is this essential? Is this even worthy of our time, our children's attention? Where in the Standards does it say that students need to know that perfection has been oversold; that imperfection is beautiful?...That the way home is often not direct and that we may be the better for it?

A Bend in the River (5.23.11)

It was with such thinking that I made my way home and was hardly surprised by my sudden decision to pull to the road side and take a walk through the woods.  Yes it was misting, perhaps some might characterize it as drizzle or light rain, but it fell with such aimlessness and I thought there's a message here I need to feel, to hear.  Deep breaths of rain and spring must be good. A restorative perhaps?

The woods were wet, filled with fog and empty of people.  And surely the hour I spent there was a baptism of sorts.

Summer Waits

I walked mostly on paths I had not known before, with my camera in hand and thought is there nothing lovelier than a feeling of being lost? I stopped thinking and lifted the camera to make images and now and then I put the camera down knowing no image could be made.  It was this lovely bit of tension between making and being that steadied me, reminded me that art and living are not separate breaths I take.

Later, I began to read Walden and stopped in the second chapter when I read:

I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet.

It is in what I do not know that I make art.  I have searched the Standards and cannot seem to find this elemental truth.

Sadly, I think, we are too full with knowing.