On the bed where I sit cross-legged, leaning against the headboard: eyeglasses, a couple of paperbacks, a new but already much loved hardcover novel, half-read, its pages folded over, the margins scattered with lightly penciled exclamations, each one a silent, emphatic yes. Two pens, gray and black, a notebook with a dark brown cover and magnetic clasp. A pile of down pillows pushed aside, the familiar quilt, softened by age and use, sun-faded. The folded comforter.

Beyond the tall triptych of windows, the view that is the backdrop of all my days and nights. Sloping fields still patched with snow, the stone walls that define our edges here, meandering tendrils of wood smoke curling skyward, the final exhalations of a slow-burning brush pile. The maple tree that’s almost close enough to touch, its dark limbs silhouetted against a twilight sky: rose, transparent blue, violet and gold. The fading palette of an April dusk. Tiny, tight-fisted buds where just yesterday there were none.

A platoon of robins that descends as if summoned to the yard. They work away at the newly bared patches of earth, eyes cocked like surveyors taking measure of the land. The mushy, receding snow. The flat, matted grass. A lone yellow crocus still clenched shut, withholding its bloom. The distant mountains drenched for one singular instant in the day’s last light, already slipping into shadow as the sky drains of color. The ticking clock on the bedside table. The quiet way evening settles in.

One son on his way tonight to New York City — hopeful, off to answer a call, a long-shot opportunity to take one small step closer to his Broadway dream. The odds aren’t good. He knows that but goes anyway. This is what it is be twenty-three and wishing for something, anything, to happen — you say yes and figure out the details later. The brief heart-tug when he left an hour ago, fresh shaven, clothes shoved into a pack, one eye on the clock, car keys jangling in his hand. Imagining him tomorrow morning at ten, climbing the stairs of some building in Times Square, giving his name at the door, slipping into a much-coveted seat at a pre-Broadway workshop where, just maybe, he can convince somebody he’d be a useful guy to have around.

From the kitchen below, the muffled sound of a Celtics game on TV. The rise and fall of my younger son’s voice and his dad’s responses, their staccato, companionable conversation punctuated by alternating cheers and cries of despair. The pleasurable stillness of the house in the hour after dinner when the dishes are done. The slow, unwinding hours before bed. The sense of embrace.

All week, I’ve been thinking about the line quoted above, Salter’s idea that “everything that is not written down disappears, except for certain imperishable moments.” By imperishable, I assume he means the big ones – the birth of a child, a phone call bringing good tidings or bad news, a vow spoken, a declaration of love, of betrayal. We don’t need to preserve those moments that instantly engrave themselves upon our hearts; for better and for worse they become part of who we are, our own unwritten enduring history.

But everyday life — the life we fumble through and take for granted and get distracted by – this ordinary life is comprised of little else but perishable moments, random strings of details, most of them barely worthy of our notice: the slant of sun across the breakfast table, the coffee steaming in the mug, the brush of a hand across a brow, the dog’s head in your lap, a son’s casual, quick embrace, a handful of stars flung across a vast night sky, few notes worked out on the piano. The flotsam and jetsam that add up to days lived, days forgotten.

It takes a kind of determined willingness to pay attention, an eye deliberately refreshed and attuned to nuance. And it takes time, time I rarely spare of late, to pause long enough to truly see. To sit in silence and slowly, haltingly, put what is fleeting and ephemeral into words. The inescapable truth of the present moment: it’s already gone by the time I manage to set it down upon a page.

And yet, I do believe there’s something to be said for trying. Something to be said for inhabiting stillness and then looking out at everything as if for the first time. For me, it is always the same lesson, one I learn by lingering in one place for a while and softening my gaze. Making myself at home in the moment means allowing time and space for each thing to become wholly itself, distinct and beautiful in its own way, each bearing its own secret revelation.

What I’m noticing as I sit in bed this evening and take stock of the fading, golden light, the muffled sounds of home, the unimportant particulars of here and now, is this: the simple act of recalibrating my attention calls me back into relationship with my life.

Perhaps a day will come when I will be grateful even for this humble record, this snapshot of an unremarkable time. I still believe with all my heart in the gift of an ordinary day. But I also have to remind myself, again and again, to accept that gift for what it is: proof that every moment offers another quiet opportunity to be amazed.

So, why not try this? Close your eyes. Draw a deep breath in and then exhale a long, deep breath out. Step gently through the opening, into now. Allow your eyes to open quietly, as if you are drawing back, a curtain. See whatever is at hand. This is where you are. Before the moment sheds its skin and assumes a new shape, weave a skein of words around it. Take a picture. Say “thank you” out loud and feel the texture of those words on your tongue. See how the very act of noticing is something akin to wonder.

You have traveled too fast over false ground;

Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up

To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain

When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,

Taking time to open the well of color

That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone

Until its calmness can claim you.

           ― John O’Donohue, from “A Blessing for One Who is Exhausted”

Hard as it is for my mom to be away from her fourteen-year-old cocker spaniel for a few hours, let alone three days, she couldn’t bear the thought of not being present for her sister’s grandson’s wedding up north this weekend.  My Aunt Gloria’s been gone for three years.  But this winter, my mother says, has been harder than the first one without her; she is missing her big sister more these days, not less.  Being with her extended family, staying in a hotel with my dad in Newport, watching the first grandson take a bride – none of that would fill in the hole carved by loss, but it would make her feel a bit closer to her sister and remind her she wasn’t alone in missing her.  Of course, she was torn between going and staying home with her dog.

“I’ll come down there and take care of Justin, so you can go to the wedding,” I promised her weeks ago, happy to fill in some empty March days on my calendar with a trip to Florida and grateful for any excuse to have a visit with my mom.

“Words Justin knows (but can’t hear),” she wrote in the extensive care-and-feeding manual she left for me.  “Sit. Stay. Off.”  Justin is sweet-natured, deaf, and, above all else, a creature of routine: up to pee at 5 am, breakfast at 5:03, back to bed til 7, dinner at 4:30, a walk at dusk, playtime, bed.  During the day, between periodic call-of-nature visits to a small circle of bleached crab grass in the backyard, he sleeps.

“I’m looking forward to this,” I assured my mother as she packed her suitcase on Friday.  “I’ve been going nonstop since December. Three days alone, with no one who needs me for anything, will be a luxury.”

I meant it.  It feels as if the only conversation I haven’t had lately is one with myself.  So, I had my own plans for the weekend:  disconnect totally and do nothing.  I would read, think, write in my journal. Allow my soul to welcome me back.

What a relief it would be, I was certain, to just close up shop on my life for a couple of days.  I vowed to take a technology holiday — leave my laptop asleep in its case, my phone on vibrate, my emails unread, incoming texts unanswered, my Facebook status unchanged, my Amazon sales figures unchecked.

Yesterday, all alone in my mother’s house, I erected my cathedral of quiet.

And then, moment by moment, I struggled to live inside it.  All day long, I fought against the uneasy, unfamiliar discomfort of keeping company with my own silent, non-doing self.  How humbling, to realize I’ve lately grown so accustomed to distraction and busyness that it’s a challenge to simply stop in one place and be, to inhabit an empty space in time without giving in to the impulse to fill it up.

For months now, I’ve been in high gear, doing not only my normal every-day stuff (shopping, cooking, cleaning, mothering) but also the adrenaline-rush stuff of traveling, giving readings and talks, connecting, and promoting –  what I’ve come to think of as the job of being a person who’s written a book.  And I’ve loved just about every minute of my own thrilling Magical Journey.  It’s been a privilege to visit bookstores all over the country and a joy to hear from readers, to receive their thoughtful, heartfelt letters, to meet new friends and reconnect with old ones.

At the same time, I have to wonder:  have I become so used to being connected somewhere, to something, all the time, that making a deliberate choice to unplug and shut up, even for a day or two, has become a challenge?

“Stop,” I kept reminding myself yesterday, each time I reflexively reached for my phone, “just to check my email,” until at last I just stuck it out of sight in a drawer.

Pausing just to be sounds simple enough in theory, but it can be wildly hard. Making a choice to inhabit a windswept interior emptiness rather than trying to stuff it full of mental furniture feels awkward, even a little scary.  “Is this all there is?”  my busy mind kept demanding, casting about for something, anything, to do or worry about or fixate upon.

Having grown used to velocity as my automatic response to complexity, I’ve become pretty efficient when it comes to getting things done, but somewhat less graceful, apparently, in repose.  Give me a to-do list, and I know how to power through to the bottom line.  But even competence comes at a cost.  Give me a day without an internet connection or a deadline or a self-imposed goal to be met or a finish line to cross, and all my self-doubts and vulnerabilities come rushing out to meet me, jostling for position, demanding to be seen and heard.

I floundered around for a while, at odds with myself, rubbed raw by the rough edges of my own solitude.  It was hard to sit still, hard even to focus deeply and completely on the pages of the book I very much wanted to read.  I did some yoga and tried to match slow steady breaths to slow steady movements.  I took the dog for a walk, frittered the hours away, spoke to no one.  I didn’t try to get Justin to read my lips, as my mom does, or engage in doggie small talk he couldn’t hear, just to break the silence.  I resisted the urge to email a friend, to text my sons, call my husband, or turn on the TV and catch up on Downton Abbey.

In the end, I stretched out in a lawn chair, put down my book, and gazed up into the turquoise expanse of sky. Finally, time slowed down.  Finally, I felt something inside me begin to soften and settle, to release and let go.

This morning, I’ve been reading a memoir called “Until I Say Good-bye,” by Susan Spencer-Wendell, who was diagnosed with ALS two years ago, at the age of forty-four.  Knowing she had, at best, one good year of life left, Susan made a deliberate choice: to plant a garden of memories for her beloved husband and their three young children, and to cultivate joy in whatever time remained for her.

She wrote her book in three months, painstakingly using her one good finger to type into the Notes function on her iPhone.  By the time she was finished, she had lost her mobility, her voice, nearly everything except her courage, her consciousness, and her conviction that although she had no control over her illness, she could control the attitude she brought to her approaching death.  Certain the greatest gift she can give her family is her own acceptance of her fate, Susan is facing the end head on; as her book makes its way in the world, she is preparing, with little fanfare, to leave it.

Last week, following up on an earlier  interview conducted a few months ago when she could still speak, Scott Simon asked Susan how she is doing.  Her written reply to him was simple, straightforward, tremendously moving: “As well as can be expected. My body and voice become weaker every single day, but my mind becomes mightier and more quiet. You do indeed hear more in silence.”

She is right, of course.  And so, with gratitude now, and a good bit more ease than I felt yesterday, I sit outside at my mother’s quiet house, beneath the rustling palms, and watch the sun go down. I receive John O’Donohue’s words of blessing into my being, and feel what it means to imitate the habit of twilight.  I wonder whether, if I abide here long enough, a well of color might somehow open within me, too, just as the evening sky itself grows diaphanous at last light, the clouds translucent veils of rose and gold and mauve.

 

Magical Journey News

On the web

I never thought much about how my yoga practice has shaped my work as a writer, and vice versa, until Kate Hopper at Motherhood and Words, asked me some probing questions about both craft and practice in this lovely interview.

Other recent interviews and blog posts I’ve loved are:

Ali Edwards’s beautiful review. Click here.

An interview HERE, with Harriet Cabelly at her inspiring and rapidly expanding Rebuild Your Life site.

Amy Makechnie’s  brand new and engaging “fascinating person” series,  HERE.

 

Appearances

There’s a bit more magical journeying in my future, and a few new events on the calendar that I’m very excited about — each one an opportunity to meet wonderful, like-minded women, to listen and share our stories, and to reweave and reaffirm our connections with one another.

Next:  A reading and conversation at the Annapolis Book Festival on April 13 with Donna Jackson Nakazawa, author of The Last Best Cure.  (More about this terrific book, and a give-away, here very soon!) In the meantime, do visit Donna’s website and get to know her there.

It seems to me that the best book conversations (well, the best conversations in general) are the ones that take place over a good meal. So my writing buddy Margaret Roach and I were thrilled to be invited to speak and read at a luncheon hosted by The Hickory Stick Bookshop in Washington Depot, CT, on Friday, April 19.  Details to follow; in the meantime, you can call the store for more info.

I first “met” Priscilla Warner right here last June, when she left a comment on a blog post I’d written.  I immediately read her wonderful memoir Learning to Breathe, she read my manuscript of Magical Journey and encouraged me through every step of the final revision, and pretty soon it felt as if we’d been friends forever — even though we STILL haven’t ever laid eyes on each other.  That will change next month, when I go to Larchmont, NY, to speak at the Public Library  on Sunday, April 19, at 3:30 — an event Priscilla helped organize, in part, so I can finally come visit her.

Other spring-time journeys:

Margaret and I are doing our very last bookstore “duet” at the Concord Bookshop on Sunday, April 28, at 3.  (Think daffodils, home made cookies, and wide-ranging conversation– everything from the thorny questions of midlife to composting secrets revealed!)

I’ll be back at Ann Patchett’s beautiful Nashville bookstore Parnassus on Thursday, May 2, at 7 pm.

And from Nashville, I’ll go straight to Minneapolis for my final two readings this spring: The annual Motherhood and Words talk at the Loft Literary Center on Saturday, May 4 and, finally, to cap it all off, a reading at Common Good Books, Garrison Keillor’s beloved bookstore in downtown St. Paul on Monday, May 6.  Minneapolis friends, St. Olaf connections, Twin Cities readers, I want to see you all there! 

As always, HUGE thanks to all of you who are creating this community of like-minded souls and keeping the word of mouth going by writing reviews on Amazon, showing my video to your friends, or sharing my blog posts on your Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.  Every week, this newsletter is going out to more people — there are well over 2,ooo subscribers now, but I’d love to widen this circle even more.  My Magical Journey Facebook page, which started with exactly zero followers in November, now has nearly 2500.  (That really DOES feel like magic.)

 

 

sunrise
flannel sheets
cold water
hot water
peppermint soap
oatmeal
long underwear
iTunes
sturdy legs
running shoes
dogs
silence
online friends
close-by friends
new friends
forever friends
traditions
sons with jobs
nephews and neices
oranges in a bowl
peppermint tea
tech support
hardcover books
1.50 reading glasses
a good haircut
a good husband
cardinals
clouds
stone walls
old trees
pink geraniums
piano music
faith
photos
grandmothers
grown children
little kids
handwritten notes
child pose
new kitchen sponges
Mary Oliver
parents
laughter
magazines
folded towels
matched socks
candlelight
cloth napkins
soup
resilience
forgiveness
footrubs
wrinkle cream
peppermint ice cream
chocolate sauce
sunset
stars
the moon
the sky
space
wonder
the words “good night”
flannel sheets
dreams
breath
today
tomorrow
this
now

Inspired by my friend Maezen

I want to remember the holy hush just before dawn, the mists rising out of the valley, the sharp, clear sky still pricked by the bright eye of Venus. I want to remember the way light returns slowly to this earth, taking its time. How it arrives at last from behind a curtain of rose and purple clouds. How glad I am to be here.

I want to remember the sudden uprise of Canada geese bursting through the silence, honking and flapping and lifting into to the sky, oblivious to our astonishment. I want to remember their wild call as they jockeyed into a ragged V before shearing off through the clear veil of morning. The way my husband and I smiled at each other, silent, as we watched them go.

I want to remember the cold smell of Gracies’s coat when I bury my face in her neck, her silky hair so dry it fairly crackles. She is twelve. I want to remember everything.

I want to remember the September woods. The rich, smoky, earthy smells of nature concluding a season’s business. I want to remember the great buttery clumps of mushrooms, such fecund, untouchable bounty. And when, exactly, did the pliant maple leaves grow brittle and thin enough to see through? How subtle was the moment when summer’s green palette was exchanged for the golden hues of fall? I want to remember the exquisite turning of this page, as the blue-green hills I’ve gazed upon all summer begin now to glow with color. I want to remember this: Don’t blink. Every hour the scene repaints itself. We are heading toward brilliance, fleeting and irrepressible.

I want to remember the nasturtiums, how they came up everywhere this year, tumbling through the garden like handfuls of jewels, tossed and scattered with wild abandon. I want to remember the shy orange poppies; all summer they held back, only to bloom now at the end of September, long after I’d given up all hope of them. I want to remember the greedy, glorious, rampant pink and violet petunias, spilling out of their pots, cascading over the steps, taking advantage of every barren crack in the walkway. I want to remember the hummingbird that comes each afternoon to drink their depths. I want to remember these days before frost lays claim to every cherished, fragile blossom.

I want to remember the industriousness of bees, the hum in the garden. I want to remember the slow undulation of a Monarch’s wings as it sips from a pink zinnia. I want to remember the robin splashing like a hedonist in the birdbath beneath a stand of exhausted sunflowers, their drooping, heavy heads plucked clean of seed. (I should cut them down, haul those useless stalks to the compost pile.) I want to remember how reluctant I am to see anything come to an end, and how even now I leave the dead flowers standing standing there, patiently waiting for me to summon resolve.

I want to remember the last breakfast on the screened porch, the penultimate bouquets, the hydrangeas drying on their curved stems, the end of peaches, the first Macouns from the trees up the road, the puckery sweetness of a Concord grape splitting on the tongue.

I want to remember Henry’s oatmeal cookies and the rich buttery smells in the kitchen, Diana Krall singing “Love Me or Leave Me” as he washes dishes at the sink. I want to remember how good it is to have a son come home.

I want to remember my favorite sandwiches, made without bread: sliced Brandywine tomatoes and white mozzarella ovals and basil leaves still warm from the sun. I want to remember the briny grit of sea salt, and juice dripping off my elbows, and not minding.

I want to remember dozing in the lawn chair with a book in my lap, as the first yellow leaves spin to earth. I want to remember days with windows wide open, and the way cold seeps through the house as soon as the sun disappears behind the trees. I want to remember Henry practicing Rachmaninoff. I want to remember lighting candles at dinner again, and how it feels to live in one place for five years, to feel one’s own roots sinking into the earth. I want to remember that change is part of being alive. I want to remember to take time to sit in silence, to breathe into the still point, where past and future are gathered. I want to remember some lines by T.S. Eliot:

Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline.
Except for the point, the still point,
there would be no dance,
and there is only the dance.

I want to remember that in the week before I turn 54, I am vexed by a private catalog of imponderables. I want to remember that even these most perfect days and nights have been limned with sadness, punctuated by sleepless hours, a host of worries, questions without answers. I want to remember that sometimes I can set my troubles aside, choose instead to see my life as a blessing. I want to remember that surrender is always possible, and that I can be sad and grateful at the same time. Filled up and emptied out, both. Even a heavy heart can overflow with contentment. I want to remember to keep my eyes open, to pay attention. Life is short. I want to remember: this is it. There is only the dance.

Tell me, what do you want to remember?

(I write today inspired by my friend Lindsey’s poignant post on this theme at A Design so Vast. Thank you Lindsey!)

And in moments of light, when I can quiet the voice in my head long enough to listen to what my soul is trying to tell me, I hear this: It is okay to stumble. You are allowed to fail. Doubt your doubts. (Because in fact you are okay just as you are.) Know that you are worthy of your joy and strong enough to survive your pain. Wholeheartedness is what you’re here for.

I know that’s all true. It’s just that lately, I feel depleted, half-hearted, out of ideas and out of confidence. Not even quite up to the job of being me.

I packed quickly to go to Kripalu for the weekend; there wouldn’t be time for much besides the yoga workshop Henry and I were doing together, but I stopped by my bookshelf on the way out the door and threw a couple of books into my bag anyway, almost at random. And then I kissed Steve and Jack good-bye, climbed into the car with Henry and, for the first time ever, our family split up for New Year’s Eve.

Kripalu turned out to be a good place to usher in 2012. Many hours of yoga with my beloved, first-ever yoga teacher, Rolf Gates. A walk by the lake, particularly tasty kale for dinner, a long silent meditation at midnight, time to reflect on the year past and the one to come, deep sleep, early rising.

I loved the sense of belonging that washes over me as soon as I set foot through the door of Kripalu. I loved being in the very room this weekend that my month-long teacher training was held in last winter; the memories were fresh in my mind, the faces of my classmates easy to conjure. I loved not having to think about what to wear, or what to cook, or what to do at midnight, or how many glasses of champagne I should have. I loved having time in solitude and I loved meeting, at long last, my dear on-line friend Pamela, whose gorgeously written blog Walking on My Hands is one of the few I read religiously. And I especially loved it that my twenty-two year old son was so open and willing to sign on for the ride, to give yoga and meditation a try, to experience firsthand this place that’s come to mean so much to me, and even to spend a weekend as my room mate. I know he did it for me, and his presence at my side was a gift. Henry may be a beginner on the mat, but he is a yogi in spirit.

(My husband Steve was happy to be home alone on New Year’s eve, which is what he prefers anyway, and I’m sure Jack was quite relieved I wasn’t around to tell him to “make good choices” or offer up some other motherly platitudes as he headed out the door to spend the night with his friends.)

Very early yesterday morning, I sat down with one of the books I’d brought along, an odd little volume that’s been sitting, unread, on my shelf for a long time. A brief, unlikely meditation on unencumbered living, “Journeys of Simplicity” is essentially a collection of lists about traveling light: what Thoreau took to Walden Pond, what an 85 year old hermit needed to survive, what an anonymous Celtic woman prayed for a hundred years ago.

My book fell open to page 39, “Raymond Carver’s errand list.” According to Carver’s partner and companion, poet Tess Gallagher, he always lived according to what she calls Carver’s law. It was his practice, she says, “not to save up things for some longed-for future, but to use up the best that was in him each day and to trust that more would come.”

Even as he was dying of cancer at age fifty, Carver continued to write and plan and hope. Just after his death, she found this to-do list in his pocket:

Eggs
peanut butter
hot choc

Antarctica??

Hope. Wholeheartedness. Ordinariness. How beautifully these three qualities intertwine in our best, most essential expressions of our humanity. To live is to hope. To live wholeheartedly is to trust that there is always more to come, to believe in the rightness of things as they are, to drink hot chocolate and dream of far-off continents even as you confront the loss of everything you love. It was not lost on me that someone else’s final, heartfelt errand list was the very first thing I laid eyes on as the first day of this new year dawned. The message from the universe seemed pretty clear: live fully, live here, live now. Wholeheartedly.

After two days of meditation and challenging yoga practice I was tired, a little sore, and more than a little raw when our last session began. As we moved through our final series of poses, I could feel the tears gathering behind my eyes, ready to spill. “You know,” Rolf suggested, as we eased down into child pose, resting foreheads to mats, coming into stillness, “it is okay to be vulnerable. In fact a willingness to feel our feelings completely, to show our vulnerability, to acknowledge our own tenderness and confusion, is really what living wholeheartedly is all about. To be wholehearted is to be vulnerable.”

And then, at that moment, a pair of knowing hands pressed down upon my back, smoothed along my spine, and rested there for a long, full minute. An assist in child pose, yes. But also, I’m pretty sure, some cosmic, loving gesture made on my behalf, just to make sure that the mail really was getting delivered: “wholeheartedness.”

The tears I’d been fighting off all weekend came then, tears of surrender and grace and relief. I didn’t have to make a new year’s resolution I couldn’t keep, or choose a word to try to live up to. The word I needed found me, hovered for a while, and landed. What better time than right now, the dawn of this new year, to give up my own unnecessary suffering, suffering that is all about believing I need to be someone other than who I am?

And so, gently and with great love, I say to myself – and to you, too – as we step into 2012: “Live wholeheartedly. Know that your vulnerability means that you’re alive. Remember who you really are. Use up the best that’s in you each day, and trust that it’s enough.”

Yesterday, on a gray, colorless January 1, this rose was a singular spot of color. Someone had placed it on an altar in the woods, and there it lay – exposed, vulnerable to the elements, yet, bravely, pinkly, wholeheartedly being itself, a rose in winter. May we, too, bloom with wholeheartedness in this new year.

Do you have a word that is your touchstone? Does the idea of “wholeheartedness” resonate with you? I would love to know!

As I sit in my kitchen on this gray December morning, so aware of time passing and so wishing to make the most of each shared family moment, the idea of cultivating peace at home and in my heart seems particularly apt.

These are short, dark days. Much of the world is in turmoil. Our country feels divided, split by cynicism and falsehood. In my own life, I’m feeling the weight of having too much to do and never enough time to do it all. No matter how early I get up or how late I go to bed, I don’t get enough accomplished. There are no Christmas cookies this year, no handmade gifts, no special things to place under the tree. My writing is stalled, my concentration jagged – I keep thinking of all the loose ends I’ve left dangling, keep wondering where, exactly, I’m meant to be and what I’m really meant to be doing, keep being distracted from the slow, painstaking work of crafting sentences and returning instead to the ever-expanding to-do list. Neither place feels quite right: I “should” be working on my manuscript, and I “should” be creating Christmas for my family, but instead I’m stuck somewhere in the middle, feeling as if I’m failing at both.

Yesterday, my son Henry turned twenty-two, a fact that fills me with both pride and wonder: how did we get here so fast? Wasn’t it just a few short years ago that he was a week old and we dressed him up in a tiny velour Santa suit and posed for our first family portrait? Wasn’t it only yesterday that he spent the days before Christmas sitting upstairs at his desk writing college applications? Now, he’s just months away from graduation, months away from having to find a job, a home, an adult life of his own. The years fly by, faster and faster it seems. This week Jack was accepted at Boston University, his first choice for school. I’m thrilled he’ll be close to us next year, but stunned to realize he’s actually old enough to go to college. Over the weekend, my husband pulled out a pile of old photographs of our boys when they were little: all fat cheeks and cuddles, innocence and giggles. Tiny beings that live now only in pictures and in our memories. Amazing to think that our lives have already had such breadth and span, that we have lived through our child-rearing years, raised sons to young adulthood, watched them leave home, and then eagerly awaited their return, knowing that soon they will leave again.

Tomorrow night, Henry will arrive and our family will have two short weeks together. Today, I’m preparing for his homecoming by clearing all my books and papers out of his bedroom, where I’ve been working these last few months. But I am also taking some time to prepare myself. Instead of getting started on a new chapter or running around doing errands and last-minute shopping, I’ve decided to stay home and just sit in stillness for a while. Today, I need to cast my lot with “being” rather than with “doing,” and to trust that being is enough. To believe that reclaiming large areas of peace in myself is perhaps the most urgent, most necessary work I could do.

I feel inspired, most of all, by a moment on Saturday afternoon at my brother and sister-in-law’s house. Jack and Steve and I had attended their four-year-old’s Christmas pageant, an epic musical production performed by sixteen nursery schoolers in full costume. Afterward, as the whole extended family sat around in the living room enjoying a late lunch of chili and cornbread, little Gabriel accidentally whacked his grandfather’s dish from his hand; a direct, home-run hit. Food flew everywhere – an entire bowl’s worth of chili spattered on the beige wall-to-wall. There was a moment of stunned silence in the face of the disaster. Gabriel’s eyes filled with tears. And in that instant, as chili seeped into the rug and everyone leapt into action, a choice was also made for peace. No one shouted. No one scolded. No one got upset or delivered a lecture about little boys who ought to be more careful.

“It’s all right,” Gabe’s mom said, as she went for the Resolve and paper towels. “It’s all right,” my brother reassured his son, as he got down on his knees and began to clean up the mess. You could feel the tension in the room dissipate as quickly as it had come. Peace reclaimed and reflected back into the world. Peace as moral duty. Peace as the true lesson of the day. Peace because Gabriel, too, will be all grown up in the blink of an eye, and soon enough his own parents will be looking back at his vanished childhood, wondering if they’ve taught him well, if they’ve prepared him to bring peace into this troubled world. Small moments; big, lasting impressions. I like to think that, as the big sister with the grown-up kids, I’m the one who can teach my younger sibling a few things about being a parent. But just as often, he teaches me.

I know that what matters most this week is not how much I manage to get done, how many words I write, or how many presents I wrap, but how I choose to be. And that what brings our sons home to this house, my parents to our hearth on Christmas morning, family and friends to our table for dinner, is surely not just a sense of duty and tradition but a universal longing for connection and love, acceptance and peace.

Peace is what we all yearn for, and peace is the gift that we can offer one another – in a word of forgiveness, in a smile, a hug, a kindness done, a gratitude expressed. Even in the ease with which a huge mess of chili gets cleaned off a rug.

Reading the newspaper each morning, it is easy to despair, easy to see how readily seeds of hatred and fear grow into crops of violence and cruelty. But I take my cue from my brother and sister-in-law’s loving patience with their children, and solace in the faith of a young Dutch woman who could envision the possibility of peace even as she awaited her own certain death at Auschwitz in 1943. This is the Christmas spirit I aspire to embody, the truth I will try to remember as we light the candles, serve the meals, play the music, and celebrate this time together: peace begins here, right where we are, and peace is always possible.

I type these words in an airport terminal, waiting for my delayed flight to Atlanta, where I’m giving a talk tomorrow on “the treasure of an ordinary day.” These invitations still catch me off guard; the idea that someone would think of me as a public speaker, as a person with enough wisdom to impart that my appearance is worth organizing an event around. But I’m learning to trust the people who ask, to gather some thoughts, and to go where I’m wanted.

Of course, I have nothing to offer those who come to hear me speak that every one of us doesn’t know already. The themes are plain and simple: That life is precious. That we already have everything we need. That we can choose to be grateful. To see what’s right in front of us. To be in the present moment. To slow down, rather than racing so fast through our own lives that we miss them.

I also know how hard it is to remember what we already know. If you’re like me, you probably have to remind yourself, over and over again: to notice where you are, to accept what is, to love that. Sitting still helps. Coming to a stop and allowing my busy, wild mind to be at rest is the only way I’ve found to be truly mindful. It’s why, after years of not meditating, I finally do. Walking helps, too. It’s why, although I love to run, I also spend hours each week walking alone on the empty roads near my house, allowing my thoughts to drift and noticing everything there is to notice.

Last week, I spent a few days alone at a friend’s tiny, secluded cabin. There was no internet, no opportunity to toggle back and forth, as I tend to do at home, from e-mail to a friend’s latest blog post to my own stop-and-go writing to the most popular stories in the New York Times. With nothing to do but sit and write, I sat and wrote. With no company to keep but my own, I got back in touch with a deeper, quieter part of myself. With no to-do list to whittle away at or schedule to keep, I felt the expansiveness of an hour, an afternoon, a day. Time became generous.

I tried to carry some of that spaciousness home with me. To remember my own capacity for quiet, focused attention, whether I’m alone in a cabin or standing at a podium in front of a room full of strangers. I can react to events, get carried away by stress, allow myself to be distracted and distractible. Or I can simply do the next thing that needs to be done, with care and commitment and faith in the rightness of things as they are. Without making a fuss. This is the way I want to live. And yes, I do need to keep reminding myself.

The photo my husband took at dawn this morning captures the fleeting beauty of the moment. It says “peace” to me. It’s easy for me to be grateful when I’m sitting in my own backyard, feeling blessed to have these gentle mountains as my neighbors.

Now, held captive in an over-air-conditioned terminal, with CNN blasting away, boarding announcements crackling over the loudspeaker, and the smell of pizza in the air, gratitude is a little more challenging to practice. But it occurs to me that living mindfully isn’t just about sitting and meditating, or about appreciating a beautiful sunrise. The real practice comes when we are called to keep going even when things aren’t exactly going our way. It’s using what’s at hand, and being ok with that. And so time is generous here, too. I have hours and hours to myself, with no place to go and nothing to do but wait for my delayed plane to arrive at the gate. Annoyance, or grace. The choice, of course, is mine. Perhaps the treasure of an ordinary day is always right in front of my nose; all I have to do is decide to see it.

A week ago, I could feel my own personal dark cloud settling over me like a cloak. And then, almost on a whim, I enrolled in a two-day course on Reiki healing. Last fall, hanging out with my friend Diane, sipping tea on the couch and chatting through the early autumn afternoons, I often found myself wanting to put my hands on her – as if the simple power of touch might somehow bring some small solace to us both. Sometimes, I gave in to the urge and rubbed her feet, or held her ankles in my hands as we talked.

But we are a hands-off culture, and to reach out in this way, human to human, hands to body, almost always means crossing some kind of barrier. We may feel free to talk about anything, but to lay our hands on another person is not something most of us do regularly or casually. For me, the impulse to heal through touch has always been there; what I lacked was any belief that my touch might actually be helpful or welcomed.

Two days of hands-on Reiki and I still don’t know if my hands are of much use to anyone but me. But I have learned this: simply settling into a quiet space with another person and allowing our hands to speak for us, to say to a friend or loved one, “You matter to me,” invites a sense of well-being. There is nothing quite like the gift of time and a loving touch to communicate caring and compassion – that became clear as I took my turn upon the table on Sunday, while my fellow students laid their hands upon my body and invited their Reiki energy to serve the highest healing good. It was so simple. So quiet. So practical. So wonderful.

And you know what? That elegiac case of “the blues” that visits me like clockwork every September has pretty much vanished into thin air. I’m not certain I’m cured, but it certainly seems as if some sort of healing has been going on here. Out for a run, I inhale the soft scents of the late-summer woods and give thanks for the fleeting beauty of the season. Each time I pause and put a hand upon my own heart, I’m almost absurdly pleased to feel it in there, beating steadily away. Laying Gracie out on the bed and laying my hands on her old arthritic haunches, I am filled with gratitude for all the years of walks we’ve shared, for all the mornings she got me up out of bed and out the door. She thumps her tail upon the mattress: could it be that she’s grateful, too? Sliding my palms against my husband’s sore back and breathing with him, I think how lucky we are, to have known and loved and shared one another’s bodies for a quarter century now. “That was nice,” he says, “thank you.” His back may not be better, but we are, reconnected by touch. Out in the garden, my hands at rest on my neighbor Debbie’s shoulders, I watch a hummingbird hovering over the petunias and am struck by the way this tiny, vibrating being embodies words we heard in class: “An invisible but palpable life force energy infuses and permeates all living forms. This energy is infinite, limitless, and pure.” Visiting a sick friend, I can tell she has no energy for conversation. But we can still spend time together in companionable silence as she reclines on her porch, my hands gently cradling her aching head.

I am a beginner, with four days of Reiki experience under my belt. Sitting with my hands cupped in my lap, drawing Japanese symbols in the air in my imagination, whispering strange words to myself, envisioning the highest healing good, I’m not quite sure whether I’m praying or meditating, or just opening myself up to forces already at work in the universe. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe what’s important is simply to live in a state of awareness, and to give ourselves and others the opportunity to take a few moments each day to move back into balance and harmony with our souls, our bodies, our environment, one another.

Yesterday morning I woke early to gentle rain, cool air, clouds blanketing the peaks across the water. As summer draws to its inevitable close, each day feels edged with a scrim of sadness; I’m always greedy for just a little more. Or, if not exactly greedy, at least aware that these golden days are numbered, that a month from now, back at home and yoked into fall schedules, summer swims will already be a memory. And so without thinking it over, I left my sleeping family, slipped out of the warm bed, into my still-damp bathing suit and down to the water.

I wonder if there is any place more solitary than the middle of a lake in the rain at dawn. Alone in that chill, dark water, shrouded by mist and suspended in a dance of rain drops, I disappeared from myself. What a relief it is, to leave the mind and all its small preoccupations behind and to swim far from shore, out into the big picture. Lake, mountains, sky, rain – and me, one small, insignificant human body treading water within this vast, mysterious universe. I watched my pale arms moving before me, allowed my breath to carry me along on its rhythmic journey, felt the water’s buoyant embrace, and offered up my humble prayer of thanksgiving: what a blessing it is to be here, a single note in this gloriously complex hymn that is our natural world.

There were, finally, scents of breakfast drifting across the water, the dense, civilized smells of bacon and coffee summoning me back to life on land. My skin pricked with cold. The rain fell in sheets. Yet it was with some reluctance that I turned around and began breast-stroking toward shore. “Without a big perspective, we are only half awake to our life,” writes Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfeld. “Lost in a thousand errands, and our small self, we are not truly free.”

It’s not easy, when lost in those errands, to remember the magnificence of this world. But nature’s beauty is always available, if we’re willing to take the first step toward intimacy, to stop what we’re doing and thinking long enough to quiet our minds and open our hearts and go forth.

I didn’t go swimming in the rain in search of anything but one more taste of this waning summer. The moment’s profound teaching caught me by surprise, as much a shock to the system as the first slap of cold water on bare skin: Remember your interconnection with all things. Love the mystery. Be free.

The fact that they were both on hand to be honored on this steamy summer day seemed cause enough for holiday spirit. The sight of these two, the innocent babe and the proud centurion, put everything else into perspective: the down-home joy of a small town’s annual celebration, the comfort of tried-and-true traditions, the preciousness of this particular, never-to-be-repeated morning, the inevitable passage of time.

I tried to take it all in: my own parents, cheering on their two youngest grandchildren on their decorated bicycles; my brother and his wife, gamely marching alongside the trikes and training wheels; my husband snapping pictures; the multigenerational crowd gathered along Main Street; the antique tractors, the Shriners in their funny little cars, the kids with water balloons and squirt guns; the bagpipers, boy scouts, and baton twirlers; the fire trucks and vintage cars.

The 4th of July always feels poignant to me, a day when my heart lifts and, at the same time, feels heavy in my chest. It is the too-soon turn of summer, the moment when this brief season suddenly starts to feel over instead of still beginning. We go from one first after another — the first dinner on the porch, the first day it’s still light at nine, the first ripe strawberries, the first hummingbird at the petunias, the first nasturtium blossoms in the garden — to a glimpse of endings. The baby robins leave the nest, the foxgloves drop their blossoms, the furled goldenrod appears alongside the road, the school forms arrive in the mail, the sun sets a little earlier.

I guess I’m greedy. There is never enough summer for my liking, never a long enough day, never an afternoon that fully satisfies my yearning for more. “The strange part about being human,” Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote the other day in a reflection in the New York Times, “is that that ‘life’ so easily comes to mean a quantity of time, an allotment of experience. We note that we are alive, without recognizing that we are, for a time, indomitable organisms sharing a planet with indomitable organisms of every other kind.”

I’ve thought about those words all week. The mystery that delivers us into existence, the luck-of-the-draw allotment of time, the very fact of our own insignificance in the large scheme of things. And yet, because we are indeed human, we do need to invest our time on this earth with meaning. More and more it seems to me that the real meaning is not in the big moments, but in the chain of interconnected small ones, the ones we might miss altogether, so eager are we to get on to the next thing. A parade is a pretty good time to slow down, take a good look around, and remember the blessing of our being here. What we tend to forget, unless we are the awe-struck parents of a newborn, or the venerable holder of the Oldest Citizen cane, is that every moment in life is big.