...or The Practice of Being Grateful
Human condition. Isn’t it all about this? The human condition. Which, of course, can be in a state of grace, of despair, of struggle, of passion. If I blog about the minutia of my specific daily existence (script revisions, cleaning brushes, thickening paints, feeding the doves), or about being an Armenian daughter, single child, twentysomething painter/game-designer/whatever, I might lose most of you in translation. But the pigeonholing of a person never discounts the universal truths that buoy us. It’s as though we all exist in the same sea and only our ships are individualized. Our prows and sterns, our sails, masts and figureheads, elegant or punk, natural or ornate, the projection of ourselves, our nautical avatar on God’s common waves.
There are elements, experiences which speak to all of us. The crest and swell of our lives united.
11 September 2001
Little one? Today was a very painful day for our family and for everyone in America. I will write about that here and share with you what happened and how we discovered it when we returned from a long, all day hike in the forest above the ocean. How afterwards we stopped at a truck stop for a late lunch and how staff and customers were gathered around the radio in the kitchen. How it felt surreal and how your Mama Jenn shook and had to leave the diner and go sit in the truck and just hold your brother and cry. We lost friends that day. We lost, and found, a lot of things. I will share everything with you... but first I want to tell you that today, in part because of all that has changed in this day, we have decided to bring you into our lives. We don’t want your big brother to live alone, little one, because he is different from other kids and he needs our help. We know in our hearts that you will be strong, you will be perfect for him, you will be the brave hero that he needs. You will shine. And we will love you endlessly.
“I used to lose myself
chasing after tears
falling down the face
of each memory.
“But now I let tear drops fall
like the autumn leaves
forever knowing
what is passing...”
I don’t really believe that death and life are opposites. Any more than I believe there’s any true connection/comparison in making a life and taking a life. These things (all four) are so unconnected really. Only on the surface to simple minds do they seem dynamically opposed. Death is a segment of life. Life’s opposite is, perhaps, stagnation. The inability to make a decision. The terror of choice. To be “unchoosing” is to be “unliving.” For even in death we have choices – like what will happen beyond the shelf life of this mortal shell. To stay in one place, unchanged, safe perhaps, but without growth, is not life. To stay the same is really death.
Along the same lines, the making of a life (not unlike making love, or making art) is a further celebration, an embracing of life itself. It is the transformation of everything you know and everything you have into something else. As one of favorite poets wrote (and I have quoted before) when I make a baby, I am “changed forever from woman to mother.” The change is the same: I make love, and I transcend from a place of words and logic to a place of sensation and emotion; Two people become one experience. I make art, and I transform a blank canvas into a celebration of color, texture and depth; An figment of imagination takes solid form.
20 September 2001
Oh, little one, we want so badly for you to come and be with us. Right now you are a collection of names that may or may not change – Benjamin Aoebinn, Orion Kier, Natalie Katherine, Jette Jeal – but you are also already a presence in this home. Your room awaits you, painted in bright spring greens. The curtains are down to let the sun shine in over the tops of the trees in the orchard. We wanted Mama Jenn to be growing you by now but her body cannot carry a baby to term without help from the doctor. For four months before you can be conceived she gets special shots and takes a special hormone (like a medicine) and many vitamins, too, just to get ready to be a good home for you for those first wonderful nine months of your life. That time is almost past now.... It is so hard to wait for you! So hard to wait.
“Letting loose these gnarled talons holding on
to what already changes.
I’m letting loose these gnarled talons holding on
to what already changes... and emerges!”
We really do cling, don’t we? To that nonliving that seems like living. The unchanging, “I’m just at rest” excuse for a life. If not busy changing ourselves and our world, than we might we well sit and watch ten thousand channels with nothing on. It really is impossible to live a realized life if you don’t know how to build a porch, make a decoupage of photos on a coffee table or explain the smexy perfect of algebra. We have to be able to work and think and *change* to live.
I suppose this is why the Sabbath being a “day of rest” is alien to me. I recast this definition into, “A day to rest from man’s world and man’s demands. A day to transform, to grow, to sweat, to create, to become and cause to become, myself and my world into a more perfect reflection of what Christ wants for me.” On Sundays I like to make life.
Sundays are for waking up.
28 September 2001
We went for the ultrasound today. Mama Jenn’s left ovary is ready to release its egg. She got one final shot to help the egg along its journey and that was the whole appointment. It was... oh, little one! It was so joyful to see you there! That round egg on the ultrasound. I held up your brother to see the screen. I pointed and he touched my face. I tried to get him to see that little beginning of you. I think he saw. He doesn’t speak yet, little one. He should but he can’t because of his differences. But he loves with a fierceness and he’ll love you most of all. I just know it.
29 September 2001
Well, my little one, we drove to the clinic for the insemination today. Grandma Carol came to our house and stayed with Max. We were very sneaky and told Grandma Carol we were going to see a movie. We want to be able to surprise her with the news of you.
The clinic was very quiet this morning and full of autumn light. We went upstairs to the lab to pick up the vial of sperm from the donor we choose three years ago for your brother and you. The lab technician gave us the report that showed what he’d tested, the count and motality of the sperm in the vial. Everything looked good. There was a wonderful poster on the wall of a sperm and an egg. We stopped and looked at it because sperm are so small you can’t see anything at all in the vial except about a teaspoon of slightly pink liquid. But on the poster the sperm was sleek and beautiful. I looked at the poster for a long time, even after Mama Jenn went to look out the window at the sixty year old oak tree growing outside. I thought about how amazing those sperms are that they can wake up that round egg we saw on the ultrasound and make you.
I close my eyes and pray. I picture your face, new and tiny. I’m not imagining. I am seeing outside of time by the grace of God. I am already your mama. Life begins before conception and I am holding you in the palms of my hands even now.
“High above in a cool, white cloud space
the air is rushing and streaming by.
My wings whisper to me silently
of what is changing... and mine!
“And I am balanced
on the face of the wind.
I am balanced on the face
on the face of the wind.”
EJ
