You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March 2008.
My post Morphine is up at other|matters.
I wrote it in 2003, shortly after my first Devic’s exacerbation left me paralyzed from the waist down. Re-reading what I wrote then brought back so many memories: the painful bodily breakdown, the emotional and mental fog, and just how terrified and lost Basil and I were throughout, newlyweds clutching at each other for comfort and only ending up feeling more alone.
Why “sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll?” My pre-illness lifestyle was obsessed with the world and the worldly. Reading Morphine I realize again what a shock it was to be paralyzed, to confront the “impenetrable solitude” that lies within each of us, to see my life as empty…and to begin to slowly stumble towards God from that place of solitude and brokenness.
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Two other posts of interest at o|m are Love Vs. Infatuation and Regarding those who Insult the Prophets -p- and Our Responses.
Click the link to the left to see the wonderful photoblog Absolutely Nothing that is my pick o’ the week, and check out these two fabulous, thoughtful, and bracingly honest denizens of Blogistan:
Me Again, Beasley and The Muppie Chronicles.
Hop over and introduce yourself if you haven’t already.
A conversation with commenter Maximus Mercury reminded me that I’d never posted one of my favorite e e cummings poems for Poetry Monday.
Enjoy!
—
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
- e e cummings
Turn off your lights for an hour tonight at 8 pm your local time to show your support for Earth Hour.
We’ll be having a candlelit dinner with family and friends to celebrate!
Cross-posted at other|matters.
The title is from an e e cummings poem.
—
Having just returned from four days in Boston visiting my in-laws and friends, I’ve been thinking a lot about concepts of home, hearts split by simultaneous longing for multiple places, and the siren song of cities on the sunset edge of the continent.
I have called three cities home – Boston, Islamabad, and San Francisco – having spent the last twenty-two years of my life split almost evenly between them. Basil and I set off for the latter one week after our marriage, lured by its beauty and our shared sense of adventure, never really thinking of the long-term impacts of putting a continent between us, his family, and our friends.
The first few years after moving to San Francisco, we returned to Boston three or four times annually, drinking deep at the well of family and friends before returning to the emotional desert of the West Coast. Much as we loved the hilly beauty of our new city, Boston was still home to us.
As our sense of community deepened here, the multiple trips back whittled down to an annual one. Last year marked a turning point as Basil drove in confused circles around a North End transformed in the wake of the Big Dig; I walked down Newbury Street with a Boston map tucked into the New Yorker magazine trying not to look like a tourist though I’d lost all sense of direction; and the hard edges and curtness of the natives grated on our nerves.
When we returned to our San Francisco apartment, born and bred Bostonian Basil flopped down on the couch sighing, “Thank God we’re home!”
That was the moment when palm trees and sunny skies in November, cheerful-but-passive-aggressive people, traffic jams due to light rain, and complaining about how cold it was when the temperature dropped below 50 degrees ceased to be traits worthy of ridicule by us as transplanted Bostonians, and became, instead, idiosyncrasies understood, embraced, and fiercely cherished as San Franciscans.
California had thinned our blood and made us soft, and we loved her for it.
We’re lucky to have a beautiful community here but, to be honest, I miss my Boston sometimes: the city where I met and fell in love with my husband, where I watched my much-adored niece enter this world, where I found out that I believed in God after all. But my beloved city doesn’t exist anymore, except in my heart’s alternate universe; it is no longer my home, though I sometimes wish to claim it.
As much as we may wish to hold on, cities change until none of one’s favorite shops or cafes remain; lives move on until farewells bring not tears but a cheery “see you next year;” and one is left feeling simultaneously displaced and happy to be leaving, returning to another place now called home.
In response, my idea of home has grown beyond specific physical structures; a city’s essence is found not in its buildings, but in its people. As long as the people that I love – those who carry pieces of my heart around in theirs – live in the city, some version of Boston will remain accessible to me.
And, if friends are those with whom one’s soul feels at home, then I am not limited to just three cities to call my own. Instead, I am blessed to have many homes, next door and scattered across continents, like glowing pinpoint lights seen from a satellite on-high – a global map of my spiritual and emotional life shining brightly in the darkness.
Spring is flirting with San Francisco: a rare Mediterranean day warm enough for pale citizens to dive onto beach sand; followed by one choosing hourly between sun and fog, yet still somehow too warm for wool coats or warm scarves. The body sweats and chafes in layers, then shivers in the nibbling wind.
Trees are bursting into bloom everywhere, but if I was walking at my normal, fast pace I would miss all but the most showy blossoms. I realize that yet another reason that God has slowed me down to a shuffle with this stress fracture is to share that shy tree on the corner, bare limbs just beginning to bud tiny emerald leaves and pearl-sized blossoms.
Fully functioning, I would have swept past unseeing; today, I stood in awe, drawn in by each exquisite detail.
Subhan’Allah.
I don’t have the choice to walk fast right now, but I do have the opportunity to slow down and see. At a quarter of my usual pace, I’m amazed by how much I usually miss.
Just got back from Boston late last night where I had the pleasure of meeting Sa’ila and ABD from other|matters.
Am exhausted from a wonderful trip, down with a cold, madly preparing for a meeting on Wednesday but oh-so-happy to be home.
I hope you are all well too – I missed you!
Enjoy the poem!
—
Wild Geese
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 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.
[Cross-posted at other|matters.]
—
I can still remember the moment I bit through the bubbly, fried rectangular pie; gooey-hot apple chunks flooding into my mouth. And how the suddenly rattling windows herded us first under the desks and then outside to the field after the big earthquake, where we stood laughing in the sunlight, thrilled to miss class.
I remember the way my grandmother’s hair smelled of the wood fires she cooked meals over in the village, silver waves beginning to stream into the dark, and how she fed me with garlic-tipped fingers. Or the time I decided to run away from home and sat on a curb waiting for Amiji to notice, sweat trickling down my neck until I was too thirsty to stand it anymore and ran inside, breathless, sure she’d be frantic with worry because I’d been away so very long.
Had I managed to stay out longer than 15 minutes, she very well might have been.
My childhood memories are so vivid that when I close my eyes, I taste them. Those years are filled with original memories, the “firsts”, with time stretching out to accommodate a rapidly learning mind. But, at some point, the learning declines, a fruit has already been tasted so many times that it barely registers, and memories become less palpable, less differentiated, so dim that they may no longer even be mine.
We lose our days unless we make a conscious effort to live them.
Too often these days, my husband and I return from a day at the office spent glued to a computer screen, and then spend the evening sitting in the same room still connected to our respective computers instead of to each other. Everyone I know is plugged into the TV, radio, Blackberry, laptop, iPod, text-filled cell phone, or video game du jour for much of each day, monkey minds swinging from thought to thought just like links clicked from web page to web page until one ends up in an unexpected place with no memory of how one arrived there or why.
What happens to memory when one day spent in front of a computer blends into another – does it become as soft and indistinguishable as jelly? If each day will only return to us on the Day of Judgment, I wonder how many I’ll actually recognize enough to claim as my own.
If life flashes before our eyes when we die, what will I see? Will I remember the light on the windowsill today, the fresh *pop* of tomatoes in my mouth, the feel of your limbs under mine? Will I recall reciting a sonnet, inhaling a baby’s scent, kissing your dear, departed fingertips? Will I relive praying under the trees, promising You to make each day sacred, conscious and unique?
Or, will my childhood scenes morph into celluloid montages, celebrity trivia, and thousands upon thousands of web pages browsed, the roil of information sweeping out any original memories in my mind?
Whose life, finally, will flash before these eyes – mine, or Britney’s?
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