ships

Maple texted this picture to me the other day, and I just can’t even. Ya know? The clearness of her eyes kills me. Everything about her really. Slays me. There is this way over the course of the last several months that she is just completely claiming herself. It is radical to watch. Kids that picked on her and tore her differences down and did their best to make her feel small and less and other are now like “Hey Maple when did you get so cool?” To which she responds with the only viable answer I can think of “Whenever it was that you stopped being an asshole.”

Last night, during our Practice Wellness Community call, I shared a piece of writing by David Whyte. It is called Beginning and as much as anything it makes me think of Maple and all of the beginnings that wait ahead for her. But also, it makes me think of the continuum of beginnings that are strewn throughout the path that each of us has taken, are taking, will one day take. Last week when one of my longtime students and friends from Madison was visiting, she shared that she was quite enjoying a book and thought I may like it as well; The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. We bantered back and forth a bit about the book because Maple, who reads everything, had said that she thought I might really like it too, even though she said she did not. My friend laughed when I told her that, saying that perhaps that is because she is only 15 and hasn’t quite wracked up the regret of a lifetime that time accumulates for each of us one way or another, like it or not. She is probably completely right about that. So, I am reading the book. I am just at the beginning but basically, I think that the woman is visiting all of the possible lives that she never lived, due to one choice and then another made at each different fork in the road. Relatable, no doubt. Especially to those of us in our middle years and beyond.

It brings to mind one of my most favorite quotes from Cheryl Strayed; “ I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.” Don’t you love that? I have been letting some of those ghost ships tumble around in my mind as of late as I consider my many sleepless toddler nights and excruciating pandemic fatigue. But at the same time, I am working to harbor some particular attention to the very real ships that have yet to present themselves or are even in the process of presenting. Right now. In these days.

Sometimes I think about how swell it would be to have a little apartment in an old house in the East End of Portland Maine. I could go there on my own, or with Chris, or with one of the kids, or the whole lot. Eat out. See a show. Do the stuff you can do in a small and beautifully walkable New England City. I also still think about how curious I still am about raising some of my own wool (ahem those are called sheep meg), and seeing what that might yield. Some old world far northern breed with warm fleeces for turning into creamy sweaters and rich meat for eating all winter. Chris laughs at these two ships in particular because of how at odds they seem with one another. Which is it? He says. The City or The Farm Meg?

And I guess that is the thing of it. There is a bit of that feeling of some of my dreams really being at odds with one another. Which is not super helpful in terms of any level of decisiveness for me. I wind up not choosing one so as to not block another which, as far as I can tell, looks a heck of a lot like a whole lotta nothing. I am tentative of the bold moves. And yet. Anything other than some boldness feels not quite right. Not quite me.

So. Lots of living left to do, and choices to be made to be sure. And oh my god, for my girl? So much. She is in the process currently of applying to spend a semester of her junior year at the Oxbow School of Art. Most likely, that will ride right on the heels of another summer spent as an apprentice/instructor at Islesford Boatworks. She has plenty going on, and from what I can gather, much of it is awesome.

OK. All the while I have been writing this, Wilfred, who fought his nap for a good 2 hours today and then finally relented to sleep on the drive to take Eider to soccer practice, has been snoozing in the car. I have been sitting on the steps watching his face through the tinted window, obscured and slightly distorted and imagined like those fancy new ultrasound images. He has woken up now so I guess this is where I’ll leave it.

Here is David Whyte’s piece Beginning, that I shared in the pwc cohort last night, from his compilation entitled Consolations:

BEGINNING

well or beginning poorly, what is important is simply to begin, but the ability to make a good beginning is also an art form, beginning well involves a clearing away of the crass, the irrelevant and the complicated to find the beautiful, often hidden lineaments of the essential and the necessary.

Beginning is difficult, and our procrastination is a fine, ever-present measure of our reluctance to take that first close-in, courageous step in reclaiming our happiness. Perhaps, because taking a new step always leads to a kind of radical internal simplification, where, suddenly, very large parts of us, parts of us we have kept gainfully employed for years, parts of us still rehearsing the old complicated story, are suddenly out of a job. There occurs in effect, a form of internal corporate downsizing, where the parts of us too afraid to participate or having nothing now to offer, are let go, with all of the accompanying death-like trauma, and where the very last fight occurs, a rear guard disbelief that this new, less complicated self, and this very simple step, is all that is needed for the new possibilities ahead.

It is always hard to believe that the courageous step is so close to us, that it is closer than we ever could imagine, that in fact, we already know what it is, and that the step is simpler, more radical than we had thought: which is why we so often prefer the story to be more elaborate, our identities clouded by fear, the horizon safely in the distance, the essay longer than it needs to be and the answer safely in the realm of impossibility...

David Whyte