Miracle, miracle, this broken-open heart, this split-apart life. That such beauty — the picture of brevity, of childhood lost, of time and its diminishing — no longer delivers sadness. No longer pours pain into my open spaces, alcohol into a split in the skin.
Strange it can be this way, when all my life the measure of one was the measure of the other: joy and love had their undoing (or the threat of it), as if one could not be had without the other. I didn’t want a limbo life — a depressed life, one without risk, without potential — so I took it as a given that the harder I loved, the harder I’d have to hurt.
It was worth the cost.
But fear swam around the edges of everything I cherished — including my very life. Above all, that. Fear ate at it, like a cancer.
* * *
This seemed to be my nature, this whole thing, the united picture of it: my depth of feeling, of caring, wanting, appreciating — along with the undying dread of loss. That was “me.” I couldn’t imagine existing and not being all of that, not having the totality of it be my definition, the very “fuel” of my life.
“Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea.” – Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”
I would read poetry about time, about childhood raptures — Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill” and Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” — and feel my very self there in the lines of words. Not just the story of it, but the poignancy it stirred, the pull between the thing once had and the thing now lost. The sadness of it, yet also the beauty! Terrible beauty. There seemed to be transcendence there, in the holding it all at once.
* * *
“This is what it is to be human,” I whispered to myself, a freshman in my dorm room, the heavy book of poems splayed open on my 17-year-old lap. Tears came easily. I was ready to take it on, to risk the pain I could see was inevitable, for the sake of love. Like loving my father, who was soon to die. Loving animals, whose lives would almost surely be shorter than my own. Loving a boy, even though the ones I really loved would surely break my heart. Loving school, though it would end when my father died, and I’d have to go out into the world, make my way there.
And later, much later, I would risk the radical love of giving birth to a child. What risk could top that one? Yet I would willingly face it down (twice), the ocean of it, the unending possibility of something going terribly wrong. My love bottomless, overwhelming.
I did it all, and I knew I was doing it. And though I didn’t deny the force of fear that always stood noisy sentinel beside all my dealings, I thought it had to be this way. I thought these treasures were worth the price of fear, the constant threat of loss, for the sake of a baby in my arms, a lover in my bed — for the sake of loving my own life, reveling in my aliveness.
How I loved it all!
* * *
It did seem to be a package deal: living life at full tilt, hurting hard, and always, ceaselessly, the fear. I’d have liked to make it otherwise, to do without the hurt, to be able to live and love fully, absent the underlying terror. But to me that was a nonsensical prospect. I’d have to die to lose fear — and then, I’d have lost it all, in one fell swoop: the baby with the bathwater. And I wanted to live! To live and live, to have the fullness of life. To stuff myself on it. If the price of that was fear as a container for love and savoring, for joy — well, I’d put up with it.
I cannot say what happened. To try to account for what changed inside, or why, is a useless thing. All I can say is, another possibility came to live in me. And when it set up its life in this very body, in the midstream of a life, it seemed — strangely — the most normal thing in the world. Again and again, in the uproar of its rearrangement of my inner world, I scratched my head and asked, “How come I never saw this as a possibility?”
* * *
Why don’t we? How come people don’t realize our options are greater than the one we seem to have been handed?
Here, love is unafraid, willing to allow whatever comes. I never felt this alive before — in all my passion, all my wanting and cherishing, my dread of loss. How can this be? How is it that love can be so big there is no room for fear, no place for it to set up housekeeping, no food to feast on?
* * *
I wish you well, my friend, as you continue your explorations. Perhaps you would benefit from the recording of my recent teaching gathering in Marlboro, Vermont. Many came together in a room. It was sweet — my first time in years. You will also find other audio offerings on that page. (If you were previously aware that some of the audio links were not working, be assured that they have now been restored.)
Thank you so much (those of you for whom it is possible) for your financial support, whatever the size.