Baby steps
Wobbling my way to normal
Before we begin…
Honestly, I don’t know how to begin. I only know that it seems important to try. So, let me start with an easy question – how are you? And maybe this one: when you find yourself reading during difficult times in your life, what books/stories/essays/other have helped you in ways expected or unexpected?
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Hello again
These are the first words I’ve written in more than two weeks. Except for texts and a few emails, I have been unable to muster a sentence that conveys more than logistical arrangements, quick hellos, and thank-you's that feel inadequate in the face of the many kindnesses offered since my brother died. So many have come my way from this community. Others have come from strangers who had no idea that I would pick up something they had written and feel the kind of warmth I used to feel when a bit of sun broke through the clouds for just long enough to remind me it was still there.
Today, I’ll share a few of those bits of sun and light that arrived in the form of a book, a column, or a poem. Before that, though, I want to thank you for your kind words, your support, and your presence which pulled me back to my computer today to take a few baby steps back to normal. Some day, down the road, I’ll share some of the books that my brother Peter and I read together at different points in our lives. That will be a joyful discussion and I look forward to it. I also look forward to picking up the thread of our conversations next week. Until then, here are some reads that found me recently. Maybe I can help them find you.
Once again, The Book of Form and Emptiness
“It was as though the words on the pages of the books had given the voices in his head something to think about, to contemplate in silence, and so the summer passed.” - The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki. Even though I started this novel over a month ago, I had only made my way through a third of it by the time I climbed onto the plane to travel back to New Hampshire to be with my family. I was never so grateful in my life for reading more slowly than I usually do because this novel took me by the hand and guided me through the entire five hours we were in the air. I finished about a half-hour before landing. This novel, the second I’ve read by Ozeki, made me want to read everything she has written. It is big, complex, full of message and yet always completely readable. In fact it compels a reader to keep going to find out how a thirteen-year-old boy who can hear the voices of the things around him, and his mother, who hoards in response to pain, find their way separately through the grief that follows the death of the father/husband.
There are crows, books, a library that is more than a library, a Japanese nun who works to save her temple first by cleaning it and then by writing a popular book about cleaning and tidying up. There are misunderstandings, communications that go wrong, constant challenges to any idea I hold about psychiatric conditions and perceptions of reality.
Tears came and went quietly as I read although I could never be certain whether they were a response Ozeki’s prose, the grief and small joys of her main characters, or the offerings embedded in the text: it is good to remember, our perceptions of what is real may not be accurate, our relationship to things is important but it is equally important to understand the nature of that relationship, nothing is permanent, healing is possible, life goes on, and if we are lucky and accept the help, there are people who will walk with us.
Two novels by David Hartshorn
“That’s just the way it is with hometowns, he’d decided. You never really let go of them, even when you’d spent most of your life living elsewhere.” - The Life That Follows by David Hartshorn
Ruth Ozeki helped me get back to New Hampshire but David Hartshorn’s two novels, More Than Half Way There and The Life That Follows, helped me return to California by keeping the town and area I grew up in alive and present even as the plane took me further and further away from them. Jackson Meadows is a thinly disguised Lancaster, NH, the next town over from mine and the one where I attended Junior High school. That’s where David’s mother, Eleanor, taught English. She was the kind of teacher that made you love words, love class, love her. She was one of the first to encourage me and, I’m guessing, her son, to write.
David Hartshorn, who has not lived in Lancaster since he was a child, chose to write about the tug one feels between the place that nurtures and forms you and the places you find elsewhere and make your own. In both novels, he explores that tug along with friendship, loss, and beginning again. He writes with a sure hand and resists, for the most part, a sentimentality that threatens whenever anyone tries to go home again and write about it. I learned about both of his books at my brother’s celebration of life when an old friend from high school mentioned them to me. I am grateful.
We’ve talked before about how the feeling of home can be mutable at times, and confusing. I’ve lived in California for over twenty years and, before that, New Jersey and Massachusetts, but when I return to Jefferson to see my family, its hold on me reasserts itself. When I am there, I have one foot on the West Coast and one on the dirt road leading from Route 2 to my mother’s house. I have one step in the present and one step in the past. This time, for all kinds of reasons, I hated to leave my mother’s house even though it was time. Through David Hartshorn’s novels, I could linger a little longer in the place my brother loved and which shaped me. I felt closer to him and to my family when I needed it most.
Two pieces that made me feel better even though I cannot tell you exactly why
’s notebooks made me laugh out loud
’s ghosts made me wonder if she’d read my mind
A walk with Anne Lamott
“We know that death won’t be so hard. We’ve seen many people through the end of life. It’s never dramatic, like Snagglepuss staggering around onstage clutching his throat. It can be rough, and then one slips over gently to whatever awaits. My old pastor told me it is like going to bed on the living room floor and waking up in your own bed.” - Anne Lamott in “All That is True About Aging is Illuminated on a Walk”
Finding some peace with Wendell Berry
This poem came to me in a real envelope enclosed in a card and imbued with love from a reader who has known me a very long time.
The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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Ciao for now!
Gratefully yours,
Betsy
P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…homecoming
Calling for Your Contribution to “Moment of Zen”:
What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.
Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed.
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"the tug one feels between the place that nurtures and forms you and the places you find elsewhere and make your own"
I feel like my writing and life are in this same tension of the in-between
PS: I loved the VIEW from your mother's house; it's quite stunning.