Fickle Tide
May 9, 2010
Like a fickle tide that swoops in to kiss the shore, I find myself seven years into the great journey of Motherhood.
As a wave must retreat back into the swirl of its own currents, I value time to pull back and take the long view of my journey. I sit and watch the glisten of sun on the harbor, watch the trees submit to the playful breeze, listen to birds and cars driving by, and to people on walks outside the open window. What can be better than this to a mother whose days are filled up with the beautiful and arduous task of caring for her family? Time alone, but filled up at the same time. Kids and husband occupied at a Farmer's Market down the block, leaving me with uninterrupted time to reflect.
Picasso painted Guernica. He also needed to step away now and then to consider the strokes of his brush and perhaps marvel with satisfaction (or criticism) at what he was creating. It is this motherhood two-step I am so taken with. The ability and necessity to be gently aware in the moment of both the brush strokes and the larger work. Too much on one or the other and you lose the purpose and meaning of the Work itself.
Who has stopped to think about the snapping cameras and smart phones at a child's play at school? Are we in the moment or just obsessed with creating it, staging it, capturing it, framing it, documenting it? Are we encouraging people to grow up performing to cameras or sharing experiences with people? If we all become documentarians of our lives what are we leading but a life outside the flow of constantly gathering experiences rather than merely living them?
Both are necessary. Looking back on a past event that warms the heart is a tonic in the ever-changing, too often disheartening world. There is certainly a pull to cherish memories but not to the exclusion of living. I would rather have a life that resembles a mosaic constantly on display, than a scrapbook closed and sitting on a shelf.
As a writer I am caught in the push-pull because of the writer's mindset of pulling in all the grist of life's experience only to experience the need to churn it out again in some form or another. It's a way of being that's so innate to me that it feels only marginally like a choice. So I am often on the edge of what's happening around me and must resist the auto-pilot reflex to accumulate experience rather than live it.
Perhaps this is why so many artists are drawn to the beauty of nature. It pulls us out of our intense need to create. Even if we have not dedicated our lives to studying it in our art, a life of letters tapped out on a keyboard in Key West or overlooking the Annapolis harbor is preferable to a dark room somewhere (yet that's also one of the best parts of being a writer, that it is the ultimate portable, mobile profession).
The kids will be back soon, the house will fill with energy that itself is a form of meditation in its all-encompassingness.
The river is outside the windows and I remember the currents of life, the unchanging give and take of nature. I am a wave swelling, waiting to break and crash back onto the frenzied shore of my daughters' daily lives. Sometimes I find rocks smoothed over with my good mothering; other times a sunlit shell shimmering like a jewel, and at yet other moments I find myself on jagged edges and try to negotiate them fluidly as my mother essence tells me to. Thank goodness for the unquestionable reliance I have on those instincts.
At sea, with the long view, I am flowing water watching the beach. As it has forever, it awaits my return in an almost cavalier way -- the way that only the innate assurance of symbiosis** can create. I picture my girls on that shore, as that shore. There is no goodbye for the ocean and the shore. We are just interlocking parts of one organism.
I want to give my daughters the steadiness to know it's okay to pull away from the love you have, to nurture and nourish and honor and search for your own unique essence; and that if you take time to do so, your waves will swell even more. As a result what you have to give will be even more sublimely, tumultuously, uniquely YOU when it reaches the shores of those to whom you offer up your self, your friendship, your love.
