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A Year in Moments

A Year in Moments

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As the year winds down today, I plan to be scribbling about it in my journal. It’s been a ritual for decades, begun when my typical New Year’s Eve plans involved babysitting for the family down the block.

When I was younger, I would take these retrospectives quite seriously, composing a highlights reel of the year I’d just lived. I’m a little more jaunty about New Year’s Eve entries now, though I don’t know why I should be. Each year life becomes more precious.

I think it’s because I realize that the beating heart of a year is not to be found in a list of what happened and how I felt about it. What matters are the aha moments: Witnessing a spectacular sunset. Falling asleep to the gentle patter of rain on the roof. Glimpsing on an adult child’s face the exact same expression she’s had since birth.

These are the moments that matter. And today, I’ll be celebrating them.

Time Untethered

Time Untethered

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“I gotta know what day it is,” says the character Murray in the film “A Thousand Clowns,” a favorite of mine. Murray is a truth-teller. He wants to own each day, “or else the years go right by and none of them belong to you.”

Murray tries to avoid the mind-numbing workaday world, where he sits on the subway staring out the window, not knowing whether it’s a Monday or a Wednesday, knowing only that it’s a work day. I know what he means; I’ve been there. But it’s also liberating to be so tangled up in holiday time that you have to remind yourself every morning what day it is.

That’s where I am now. From what I can tell, today is Saturday, but it feels like the fifth Saturday in a row, maybe even the sixth. It feels deliciously unmoored. The days seem more mine when I can’t name them, when they’re detached from any duties or associations, when they’re pure and unfiltered.

So here’s to the holidays, when a Friday feels like a Saturday and a Saturday feels like a Sunday. Here’s to time untethered.

A Sabbath

A Sabbath

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Yesterday unwound slowly, with a small baptism and lunch afterward. As the afternoon continued, I thought about the tasks that waited for me back home: schoolwork and prep for Thursday. I have lists, and lists of lists.

But it was so nice to sit and visit, to let the kiddos run in and out of the house, their cheeks rosy with the cold. To listen, to chat, to laugh.

Back home, I realized there was daylight enough still to walk. Then, after dinner, I realized that I still had time to do the reading and viewing required for Tuesday’s class. In other words, I’d completed as much in that compressed schedule as I would have over hours.

I often wish I could do less on Sundays, not just for religious reasons, but because it’s good to pause and take stock, to have one day a week that’s different from the others. Yesterday, without planning to, I almost did.

Take Back the Dawn

Take Back the Dawn

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For us early morning folk, the time change gives us back our mojo. No longer fumbling in the dark on waking. Now a rim of light glows around the edges of the shade.

I walk down to my office window to find a palette of color. The corals of sunrise and the oranges of autumn make dawns as rosy-fingered as Homer said they were.

I know what’s waiting around the corner. This light will not last. Mornings will grow dark again. But for the moment, I’m reveling in them.

A Martian Morning

A Martian Morning

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Up early, I creep into my office, journal and book in hand. There is homework, committee work, a presentation, two papers. Plenty to do, in other words. But here, in this warm sanctuary, at this apple-green desk, all I want to do is look out the window at the dark sky.

Is that a star? A planet? Some quick googling tells me that it’s Mars, visible in the southern sky before dawn.

As long as I’m looking, I read about the Red Planet. Though its years are almost twice as long as ours, its days are almost exactly the same.

Here on Earth, the days are long but the years are short. On Mars, perhaps we could reverse that — or at least tweak it a bit.

(Photo of Mars courtesy Wikipedia.)

Twenty Years

Twenty Years

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It’s been two decades since I left the full-time-freelance life and took an editorial job on a magazine staff. I’ve been thinking this morning of how decisions ripple outward into time and space, how they define us in ways we might never fully understand.

The job I took in October, 2004, was a creative boost. Suddenly, I was writing articles about theology and science and history. I felt like I’d gone back to school, and in a way I had. I was working for a university publication. I continued in that vein (though at another university) for a dozen years before joining a nonprofit development firm that sent me around the world to report on its projects.

Each job built on the one that came before. Had I not taken the first, I wouldn’t have taken the second, or the third.

Now, I’m a freelancer again, and I’m a student for real, with more deadlines. I’ve come full circle, back to a place that feels comfortable and right. But these other lives are all around me, in the friends I’ve made, the skills I’ve learned, the “material” I’ve stored. It’s good to have a day when I can reflect on the decisions themselves, on how they worked their magic, even when I thought they might not.

(Always trying to see the forest through the trees.)

Nothing

Nothing

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I woke up this morning, glanced at my calendar, and found … nothing. Oh, there are a couple of errands to run, but there are no trips, excursions, parties or concerts. Nothing I absolutely have to do. 

How lovely nothing can be. Because nothing is potential: a lazy afternoon in the hammock, an hour of weeding, or, what’s more likely, a few hours of reading and study. (Taking two classes this semester has me hopping!)

But right now, for this moment, nothing is exactly that. And I’m going to revel in it.   

Inheriting the Sun

Inheriting the Sun

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It took a poison ivy search to bring them to light, a careful combing of the backyard in preparation for a children’s party here this weekend. At first I didn’t know what they were, saw only the fallen petals, tiny blossoms in the grass.

Then I looked up, saw the bent boughs of the crepe myrtle shining in the sun. It’s my $2 tree, one of the stock I purchased from the Arbor Day Foundation years ago and planted without much hope. It’s 20 feet tall … and it’s blooming. 

Vibrant pink flowers are weighing down the spindly top of the unpruned tree, blooming earlier than the other crepe myrtles in the yard, which are, unfortunately, planted in the shade. 

But this little guy inherited the sun, grabbed the rays when the big oaks came down. He is reaping the harvest. We all are.

Passing on Genesis

Passing on Genesis

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I’ve been waiting months to nab a library copy of Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis. I’ve read most of Robinson’s fiction (incandescent!) and some of her nonfiction (always erudite and thought-provoking). In fact, she’s one of my favorite authors.

When I cracked open her latest, though, I wasn’t sure I was up to the challenge. Nothing against Robinson, but Reading Genesis deserves a more clear-eyed reading than I can give it now. This is a book for cuddling with on a cold winter’s evening. It’s about concentrated mental effort, the kind I don’t have much of when days are long and nights are short and the mercury is topping 90 every day.

Feeling this way about the book makes me wonder about the seasonality of our reading choices. Might I have finished Ulysses if I’d attempted it in September, with the crisp attentiveness of a new academic year? After all, that’s when I finally completed The Power Broker. 

On the other hand, it’s good to take the measure of a book before you start reading it, to save its revelations for another day. I’m sorry to pass on Genesis. But — at least for now — I will. 

(Photo: Detail of Sistine Chapel ceiling, courtesy Wikipedia)

Time and Tides

Time and Tides

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The walks come when they will, when I wake up and make my way to the beach. The tides have their own rhythms, drawn from moon and sun and gravity. 

When I stroll the beach, I’m part of the elements, pulled into their orbit, at one with sand and sea.

Time passes slowly. Eternal time, at least for an hour or two.