The not-so-selfish reason I am writing this is because knowing we are dying; living with the daily truth of that is the ground we all must walk. This is not an anti-life statement but rather the very statement that allows life to become the powerful punctuation that shakes us from our reverie and points us to the dance floor.
Remember, I'm just sailing along on a hand-drawn map with "monsters" scribbled in the margins--an MRI and enough information to make a real doctor roll her eyes and groan. But I find this instructive, I'm using this moment of ambiguity to explore the one of life's truths which is its brevity. Really living with that brevity in mind--waking with it, sleeping with it. Feeling the throb of mortality in a dizzy moment or a bad headache day provokes mindful attention, blazing focus on the mundane. And I find I want to see what happens if I frame that now blazingly precious mundanity on behalf of those beside me on this free fall.
For example: These pictures.
It was a day-after-Thanksgiving moment on the edge of Lake Nakoma in Madison in about Zero degrees wind chill. We were doing the goofy family drive-through tour of town. I insisted on a boys & mom lake shot. I didn't yet have a picture of my guys and me all together on this holiday. They had made special effort.They coordinated, scrounged up transport, left girlfriends to their own families and met me in Madison, Wisconsin at my sister's home that is now the apex of a Midwestern triangle of family. For boys that sometimes take DAYS to respond to my motherly texts, they done good; they showed up. And they were sweet, smiling, friendly, kind, good sports in a swirl of family interaction They really showed up. The picture was necessary: The joyful, here-we-are-together, okay and loving and--bonus!--handsome. I was a driven women seeking this picture, looking for one they could hold in hand and say "That was a nice, time, wasn't it?....We showed up for mom and she was happy. We made mom happy...and we didn't even steal each others socks." I planned this one. I wanted to make sure they had this "Little Wallet Picture
Underspent and too young, too
I stumbled onto a, a picture of you
You wild bitter tale, all cherry oak and tears
As the branches looked in
The summer is done and we are too, dear
Pull back the drape
And let the silent light in
Soon, I'll be on that highway
And damn this stretch of 99
That takes so many lives
One of them was mine
Hand me that lil wallet picture
1985, one more time*
We all have those little wallet pictures. For my sister, this is an art form. When she sent me these pictures, I wrote her back, telling her that they made me weep in a good way. She replied:
I also love sharing the moments I see with pics b/c they are all around us, most times an image falls short but sometimes...for me, it's pure content when it connects - connects people, memories.. all my life, I've been fascinated with documenting and capturing moments of life- at least in my minds eye, and while critical of myself, remarkably I've still enjoyed it - almost to obsession when I get to crafting the images, etc. I really do see SUCH beauty, I think a part of me feels that if I can note it - not really 'capture' but note...it will never leave me, and it will carry me through those moments of loneliness... ...I am so blessed with my girls, and you with your boys, and our healthy family, we are so lucky...really, amazingly lucky. But you know, I think that's always been it for me, I want each moment to count. Good, bad, euphoric, devastating - I want to show up. Sometimes I don't know how to show up, for myself and especially for others it's hard to know how to show up.
I have never been good at capturing the picture. I even have eschewed doing so, at times--no videos at wedding, no pictures of births. I decided that messing with the mechanism, for me, with my inclinations, distracted from my ability to inscribe the moment on my heart...to show up. To be there. But, this Thanksgiving holiday, I wanted to get a little wallet picture for my boys.
Hold
It
I
want a moment with you
like
a picture, or better yet--a
Daguerreotype--something
on glass
that
develops so slowly that the faces
lose
their smiles and peer out
somberly,
as if they know how little
they
will matter to other eyes and
how
little that matters.**
***(Apparently, mothers' brains contains cells from their children, this just in in. Talk about some interdependent co-arising of being!)
*(Little Wallet Picture, song by Richard Buckner)
**poetry by Julia Heimer Dadds Beebe all rights reserved
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