At the end of 2007, I drove out to Chicago with my older brother Graham and my Dad to spend Christmas with my Dad’s side of the family. My Mom and sister flew out … but I was happy for the drive. It gave the trip a sense of place and weight. If we would have flown, I feel like the trip might have just folded into the tumble of my day-to-day life. And I didn’t want that. I’ve been trying to slow down. To appreciate the present as fully as possible – but it’s beguilingly difficult when so many thoughts and events are colliding at such a clip.
So we drove. I guess we all had our reasons. Mine was that I wanted some precious time with my Dad and my brother … because I guess I was never really prepared for the type of separation that occurs when everybody moves away from home, for good, after college. Graham’s all the way in Africa, across oceans, and I find myself, regularly, missing my friend and confidant. I also find myself -- at times -- wishing for just another day back with the five of us living under one roof. I guess I just miss the dynamic, that’s all.
The trip itself was special for me. I got a lot of time to talk to aunts and uncles. I played a shitload of ping-pong with my beautifully vibrant, rambunctious and super-competitive cousin Leah, during which I lost all concept of my age and where I was and just got down to the hard business of not getting beaten by a little girl (she’s freaking good). Likewise, the comic banter back and forth with my cousin Nikki – Leah’s older sister – bowled me over as well. She’s quick-witted and funny; they both are. Spending time with them just makes me wish I could see them more frequently … could watch their progression more intently.
There were countless other moments I’ll hold close for a long time as well – but I can’t recreate them. Time spent with my little sister Anna feels like such a blessing these days, because I rarely see her anymore. She’s got a life of her own at Temple, and is just settling in to her college career.
Yet having the five of us all under one roof again for a week set my soul at ease in a way I haven’t felt for years and years. Though so much has changed, it was heartening to feel the closeness of family all over again.
Anyway, enough of that. I don’t mean to belabor things that are personal to me, and probably don’t entirely translate. But I’m interested in the present, lately, due to a book I’m reading by Annie Dillard called “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” I’m interested in how we all process the moments of our lives, and the intricacy of it all. So often I feel I’m on auto-pilot, and it makes me unspeakably angry. Each day, even in the depths of our routines, we pass sights that should never, ever, be taken for granted. The bodies we have, the minds we carry around, are so complex and beautiful … and yet they slip into the fabric of the “everyday” and the ordinary.
The sky each day, in all its variegated presentations. The color saturating the air at dusk. The particular slant of sun-beams through the plants by the window at 4:00 pm on a Sunday afternoon. Wood smoke from the chimneys of neighbors on a frigid, clear winter night.
We all have our particulars – our particular settings, our particular friends and loved ones. I’m feeling so blessed these days to have the people around me that have sustained my mood and my inspiration as heartily as they have. But sometimes it’s tough not to slip into that shadowy place where you start coasting, isn’t it?
Riding back from Chicago, sitting in the back seat while my dad drove us through the flat, snow blanketed fields of Indiana, I tried to settle myself in that particular moment. To freeze frame each “shot” as it went by. Dillard talks about how the present is forever flashing before our eyes, and as soon as we think “Ahh, here it is, this is it” – it’s gone, and we’ve got some new mystery in front of us, and then gone. The key, she seems to be saying throughout the book … is to remember just how much of a mystery “it” really is.
With old Kris Kristofferson songs playing on the CD-player and my brother asleep -- head bobbing -- in the front seat, I watched the stands of trees separating the fields as my Dad steered us down the interstate. Long, elevated irrigation pipes stretched out across the rows of scrubby, frozen crop stalks. Big old trucks screamed by in the opposite lanes. Just east of South Bend, Indiana, we picked up the hour we’d lost heading west. Time – or our constricting human idea of it – literally shifted ahead an entire hour. In a blink. And do you think that didn’t register on some guttural level as I was trying to drink in the here and now?
Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania … and later, south through Maryland to Virginia. Across the river by train to DC the next morning. Time and place, in our lives, are continually careening here and there, coming together at times to put a sharp focus on a particular moment … but often times blurring.
Time. Just blessed time. Time to assess – to reassess. Take stock. Whatever. Memories cropping up thick and rich. All I could think of was how nice it was to be there, in that hot car, whizzing through the freezing landscape.
That was over a month ago. The same deeper currents are still going through my head … and I have to say that I’m nowhere close to deciphering my direction – but that I have succeeded, on certain days, at taking stock of the moments going by … at enjoying the sliding freeze-frames of each scene that makes up “the present.” I need a change of pace – a plan – a path to set out on. But I suppose I can’t talk about it here in a way that would make any sense … at least not yet. Not now.
For now I just want to pass this along. It’s a passage on the present – on innocence, from Annie D.’s book. If you’re searching for a way to quiet the babbling brook in your brain, to slow down, she is indelibly refreshing.
"These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present."
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Self consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people – the novelist’s world, not the poet’s. I’ve lived there. I remember what the city has to offer: human companionship, major-league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained. I remember how you bide your time in the city, and think, if you stop to think, ‘next year … I’ll start living; next year … I’ll start my life.’
Innocence sees that this is it, and finds it world enough, and time. Innocence is not the prerogative of infants and puppies, and far less of mountains and fixed stars, which have no prerogatives at all. It is not lost to us; the world is a better place than that. Like any other of the spirit’s good gifts, it is there if you want it, free for the asking, as has been stressed by stronger words than mine. It is possible to pursue innocence as hounds pursue hares: singlemindedly, driven by a kind of love, crashing over creeks, keening and lost in fields and forests, circling, vaulting over hedges and hills wide-eyed, giving tongue all unawares to the deepest, most incomprehensible longing, a root-flame in the heart, and that warbling chorus resounding back from the mountains, hurling itself from ridge to ridge over the valley, now faint, now clear, ringing in the air through which the hounds tear, open-mouthed, the echoes of their own wails dimly knocking in their lungs.
What I call innocence is the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration. One needn’t be, shouldn’t be, reduced to a puppy. If you wish to tell me that the city offers galleries, I’ll pour you a drink and enjoy your company while it lasts; but I’ll bear with me to my grave those pure moments at the Tate (was it the Tate?) where I stood planted, open-mouthed, born, before that one particular canvas, that river, up to my neck, gasping, lost, receding into watercolor depth and depth to the vanishing point, buoyant, awed, and had to be literally hauled away. These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p.82
www.anniedillard.com
