I read it in my book of meditations last night before bed and it stuck with me all night. On a run this morning my friend asked me for a blow by blow of the eclipse since it was cloudy here and she couldn't see it. I have to say that one of the things that stuck out for me was how bumpy and imperfect the shadowed edged of the Earth was. To my eyes, it was uneven. Unlike a crisp crescent moon it was a little splotchy and seemed to waiver at the edges too, sometimes receding a little and sometimes surging forward. So much so that I wasn't sure if my eyes were playing tricks on me. That was what I was trying to get at in my post yesterday. It was sort of humbling and so beautiful in its imperfection, to watch this bumpy edge creep across the moon's surface. 
I often find that imperfections make things more rare and real. I actually love the imperfections of the people I love, the crinkles along the eyes, the wrinkles, the birth marks, the scars. It's what makes them rare and real.
I have a pretty elaborate birth mark on my ankle. I've had it my whole life. When I was little I used to try to wash it off because it looks sort of like a smudge of dirt except that it has 20 or so freckles in it. My dermatologist told me it was called the constellation because, I guess, in a way, it sort of looks like one. My very sweet mother forgets about it though and tells me to wash it off when she notices it. For me that has always been a little hard because I keep inventory on the details/imperfections of the people I love and it's a detail she always forgets. It's okay though, sweetness is her strength, not details. 
I look for rarities not perfections. I think the array of characters in my book reflects that aspect of me really well. And I hope other people love them as much as I do.

I've watched all of my children become intrigued by the shadows they cast down upon the Earth. It comes early. They realize this thing is following them around and that it moves when they move. Then there comes that moment of realization that it is indeed a reflection of their own person and they start to play with it. I actually consider that moment and looking in the mirror for the first time a really big deal. It's the beginning of our spiritual journey, in a way. It's an awareness. The first instance when you realize you are separate and distinct. It is the beginning of a whole chain of other thoughts that come in different stages of your life and build upon one another.
Watching the shadow of the Earth creep so slowly across the moon was one of those moments too. The exact curvature of the Earth mirrored back. Then, once covered entirely, the moon hung there, obscured and smooth and dark red like a Christmas ornament. Watching the edge of the Earth creep so slowly was a reminder of that feeling of separate, a viewpoint that we almost never get to see in this way. 
My father likes to say every time we are on the little beach on the lake in Maine, "In our universe alone, there are more stars than all of the individual granules of sand on this beach, more than you could even count. Isn't that amazing." He is full of wonder. Even at 75, he is always full of curiosity and wonder.
It took 12 hours to get home. It is so remote and separate there, but quiet and peaceful, a good chance to notice things like shadows and see how they play across the water and the moon. Love can do that too, reflect back the soft edges of ourselves.

'Moon and Water'
by Mary Oliver

I wake and spend
The last hours
Of darkness
With no one

But the moon.
She listens
To my complaints
Like the good

Companion she is
And comforts me surely
With her light.
But she, like everyone,

Has her own life.
So finally I understand
That she has turned away,
Is no longer listening.

She wants me
To refold myself
And, bending close,

As we all dream of doing, she rows with her white arms
Through the dark water
Which she adores.

Again

revival, reassurance... all re-words. There are so many. resplendent- one of my favorite words means characterized by a glowing splendor- splendid and sumptuous x 2. re. The resplendent sky, the resplendent bird, his/her resplendent eyes. How beautiful. 

Re- is potent. It is one of the unique aspects of being human. Again. Every day is again. The sun comes up. The sun goes down. Our mind toils with the day.

Re-tell. People love to re-tell their stories, and, I have already said, I love to listen. There is a certain magic in the re-telling, what details are remembered and which are left behind. I really didn't know what I was going to say to my son the other night, but I think I told him some version of the lullaby that I wanted to hear, that in all his sweetness he received so beautifully and gracefully, that everything was going to be okay. 

Re-wind. I print something most days and a picture of my grandparents rests on the printer. It is one of my favorite pictures. To be able to rewind and be with them again. What a gift that would be to go back in time.

One of the things I love about the ritual of yoga is that you visit the same poses on the same mat over and over again. Yet there is such internal and external release over time, day to day, such knowing and movement in 'the again'. The key to writing is the ritual of it. Sun up, sun down, again. The key to meditation and running is the ritual, the re- or again of it. 

To bring up water again... water is the ultimate 'again'- set in its constant movement and cycle of flow, evaporation, condensation. The miracle of the New Testament of the Bible is Re-surrection. In Hinduism- re-incarnation. Re- again. The thing with prime numbers is that they re-cur over and over, again and again. 

I think wanting Revival in the title of my book has to do a lot with the prefix re- too.

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

re·as·sur·ance
ˌrēəˈSHo͝orəns/
noun

1. the action of removing someone's doubts or fears.
   "children need reassurance and praise"
   
• a statement or comment that removes someone's doubts or fears.
  plural noun: reassurances
  "we have been given reassurances that the water is safe to drink

A relative is dying, and my son was in tears. I lay down with him and held him as he cried. His spirit is most like mine and so I know too well what he was feeling. I desperately wanted to reassure him about her passage, about life in general. I started talking, not even sure what was going to come out.
I said something like, this is one of the hardest parts of life and there is no way around it. I told him it's all going to be okay. I told him that her body is sick but her spirit will remain and be omnipresent. I said something to the effect of, our spirits are so much bigger than the bodies that contain them, that in many ways our bodies both enable and confine our sentience. She will be free, I said, to love us all more freely. 

My words seemed to reassure him. Because of my own existential struggles with loneliness, I have always wanted desperately for my children to feel that I am always right there, if not in person, in love. I compare it to a hug, whether I am alive or not, I will always surround them. Love in general will always surround them. They cannot fall. I want them to have an existential reassurance that I have never felt fully myself, a feeling/confidence that I have craved deeply and have seen in others but never felt. That there was a place to cave into in the times I needed it. 

“Stories are masks of God.

That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm.

Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth.

Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God.

So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them.” 
― Melanie Tem, The Man on the Ceiling

"I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on."

Anthony Doerr

Not only am I riddled with self-doubt, I am super cold. The thermostat reads 72. I am wearing a light jacket with the hood up. I am inside and I am still cold. This has been the way for me these days. When I was running the other day, I saw four or five people taking a nap in the grass in the sunshine. It looked warm and amazing, something I haven't made time for since college maybe. It sounds nice right now, curling into a soft puddle of light. It sounds warm and soothing and nice. 

In the book one of my characters is talking to another and says, "You have to be careful not to wrap yourself so tightly in your own story that you hang yourself... or God-forbid let someone else do it for you."

I am a collector of people's stories. I love to discover them, to talk to people, to read about them, to watch documentaries about them. Two books and one documentary about Steve Jobs and I still want to know more. It's not just geniuses and humanitarians I want to know about though. In many ways I care the most about the stories of people I meet randomly on the street, at the library, on planes, the more outcast, the better. When I am out I am always listening to catch little pieces of other people's stories. I have always been that way. In a large part I was so quiet and shy when I was young because I was so attuned to listening and watching, it didn't occur to me to participate in a way. And, luckily for me, people love to tell their stories. Ironically, I really don't like to talk about my own story. That's why this blog has been such a challenge for me. 

I really believe very deeply the lesson that my character is trying to convey. When I was young, my mother became sick in a very devastating and public way. It happened over and over again. It took a long time to resolve. While I was too young to understand what was happening fully, I could always tell who judged my family and who did not. Gossip and judgement surrounded me. I could feel it in the air. I think it made me even more quiet than I already was. If I had followed the stories I heard instead of what I knew in my heart, they would have hung me, not out of spite or ill intent, but out of judgement and careless, idle gossip. Anxiety is just stories we tell ourselves about the future. Depression is stories we tell ourselves about the past. Don't get me wrong, stories are so, so important. They just have to be discerning. And I believe you have to be fluid enough that you don't get so hung up in them that people can't get in and you can't get out.
Like water, a story just is. The best ones flow freely.

My roommate in Nepal was named Mandira, which means temple in Nepalese. I went with her to visit a temple where her sister lived in the Terai region, which is the flat area adjacent to India. The colors there were vivid, bright, beaming yellow mustard fields, more colorful saris, foods, tall grasses with rhino, tigers and elephants. The temple was beautiful and there the monks were creating a sand mandala. I had never seen one before, and I remember the trance of watching the mandala take shape. It was difficult for me to leave.

I had the most beautiful dream last night that involved mandalas, and I don't want to forget it so I am writing here. It was one of those mysterious dreams that I really didn't want to end, the ones that are vivid and that you think about over and over again. 

It was really simple. I had a jar of dark black/blue sand with flecks of gold or micah in it. There was a circle drawn on the floor. I slowly methodically poured the sand into my hands and then through my fingers into the circle for a long time, walking round and round the circle. I even remember how the sand felt sliding through my fingers. It was so vivid. When I finally stepped back to look at it, the mandala lay there like the night sky, the dark universe with fleck of gold peeking out. It was breathtaking. 

“Sublimity,” Hauptmann says, panting, “you know what that is, Pfennig?” He is tipsy, animated, almost prattling. Never has Werner seen him like this. “It’s the instant when one thing is about to become something else. Day to night, caterpillar to butterfly. Fawn to doe. Experiment to result. Boy to man.” 
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See


Sublime:
1- to cause to pass directly from the solid to the vapor state and condense back to solid form 
2[French sublimer, from Latin sublimare]
a (1)  :  to elevate or exalt especially in dignity or honor (2)  :  to render finer (as in purity or excellence) 
b  :  to convert (something inferior) into something of higher worth 

For me, writing is as much a study of words as anything. English, in many ways, is a limited language, and so you see how far you can stretch the words. And you wrap your characters in their stories with words, symbols, metaphors. You reach out to try to touch what is sublime.
 
Steve Jobs had a deep understanding of sublimity, of how to make an inanimate object, a computer screen sublime. His story is one of deep and dark contrasts, but certainly one of sublimity. He was always striving for it, though often at the expense of love. I think that is what is fascinating about him to people is his complex story, such a study of contrasts.

Water is sublimely beautiful because it is always in this process of sublimity, of becoming something else. When you are near it, you can literally hear it happening, in the lapping, the trickling, the rushing, etc... I went running by the river today, stopping to stretch and watch the water flow past every obstacle with grace and a quiet humility.

"Nothing in the world is more flexible and yielding than water. Yet when it attacks the firm and the strong, none can withstand it, because they have no way to change it. So the flexible overcome the adamant, the yielding overcome the forceful. Everyone knows this, but no one can do it."

 Lao Tzu 
 
"Don't you realize that the sea is the home of water? All water is off on a journey unless it's in the sea, and it's homesick, and bound to make its way home someday"

 Zora Neale Hurston

 To touch and behold that which is sublime... to me that is so much of the journey. 

A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.
-Zora Neale Hurston

There are these classic books that really stand the test of time. Our local bookstore has a whole shelf of them on display, unchanging. They were often books that were once banned or controversial. Zora Neale Hurston was one of those writers. Time and distance cannot shrink work of that depth. 

Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!
-Zora Neale Hurston

I remember where this idea of "can't do human" came from.  I am pretty sure it came in the form of an Amy Schumer comedy monologue, though I may be mistaken because I haven't been able to find it. Those words do really resonate with me. The writing process only highlights that aspect even more, spending days and days writing about a world that exists only in my head and my thoughts. I was talking with a painter yesterday and she was talking about this lonely aspect of being an artist, the work is your companion. It is your journey alone. Being an artist places you outside of something looking in. But I think most artists have always felt that way anyway.

I was talking with another friend of mine about anxiety. She talked about the symptom of de-realization, where you feel that reality is this thin veneer, this paper thin illusion, which reminds me of Macbeth's, "Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, life is but a walking shadow, a poor player who struts and frets his our upon the stage..." I memorized the monologue in 8th grade and it has stuck with me. It is too depressing for me to finish writing out though. I memorized one other Shakespearean monologue at that time, one that is interesting for other reasons and I will talk about some other day. I think I've always lived in a state of de-realization. My life reformulated so many times in bizarre ways when I was young that I never really counted on a static reality. I think that is part of what I love about water; it's soft malleability. It just arrives where it is with no expectation. It can permeate any obstacle. I think all artists live in the state of de-realization to some extent. David Foster Wallace certainly talks about it. The artist yesterday spoke of it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is very open about it. Yoga, meditation and writing all push me further in that direction. And it can make this "doing human" thing very hard. 

Art can be such a force that time and distance cannot shrink it. So can literature and music, so can love. When I say "doing human", I am not talking about these things. I am talking about the things that make up the thin veneer of life that surrounds. Love, literature, music, art, etc..., these are things that ask sweat and tear and prayer of us. These things permeate. The "doing human" things are rigid and cannot permeate, they bruise. 

I was going through my computer bag today and found a crumpled up sheet of paper. It had a column called "evocative words" of some of my favorite words- zig zag, mosaic, teaspoon, barb wire. There are like twenty of them altogether. It's not their meaning, it's really just that I like how the words sound coming off the tongue. I must like the S sounds because a lot of them are S words. Not sure where I was or when I wrote it. Sometime in the last three years, I suppose. 

On the other half of the paper was a quote, "learning how to do human" it said.
I'm sure who said it or why, but it struck me so I wrote it down along with notes about the Odyssey's Lotus Eaters. It still strikes me. I think because I don't think I am very good at it. Most days recently I'm not sure if I'm cut out for it at all. I can fake it, but others seem to be so much better really dancing the dance. It comes so easily. That is what I love about interviews with David Foster Wallace. He articulates this dilemma so beautifully. Like him, I am a sensitive observer and this is also my curse. "Learning how to do human" is exhausting. In a radio interview I listened to recently, I was like, 'yes, yes" when I heard his words. Your gift is your curse, and day to day, it is exhausting.