On Water, Identity, and Focus

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes I’m very much aware of how much water I’m comprised of.

When I began this post, it was raining again, and I had an odd sense of inexplicable relief. I had spent the previous night painting malformed moths with watercolors, struggling with the shapes, but delighting in the relationship between pigment, water, pulp. Last week I dipped my feet into Lake Erie, the biggest water I could get to quickly. And this weekend, my Love and I greeted the sun rising over Lake Huron. I have been so drawn to water in these recent days I have become almost overwhelmed by it.

When we think of what it means to be human, we must also think of what it means to be water.

I think of the Great Lakes, their depth, churning toward shores without really knowing how or why. I think of what I used to know about being human, years ago, when I thought I understood my history, and when I was naively confident that I knew the general shape of my future. Then suddenly, these understandings and beliefs dissolved. I think of the paper crane in a puddle, that image from a story, maybe one that I wrote, and the way water returned it to pulp, and then nothing.

Sometimes our past is not what we thought was, and we have no easy path back that allows us to remember what we were before. And sometimes the future we thought we were building simply dissipates, revealing that it was never really a constructed thing, it was only vapor, which has now evaporated.

Life does that sometimes, reminds us that we are water, and we are churning, and we don’t really know where we came from or where we are going but we are going nonetheless, toward shore, toward sky, moon, toward ourselves, maybe.

I’ve stumbled across a lot of incidental philosophy that instructs on the moment, the now, being all that we have, all that we can be sure of. My reaction to this concept is always a dual one: I feel simultaneously the logical truth of it, and I feel a hint of dread. I have always wanted to know the future, its contours, and always used to feel that I understood how the past has shaped me. Now, though, I see the present, less like a moment and more like a vast lake. We churn with the waves, toward somewhere, and from somewhere.

And despite all the mysteries of past and future, the water knows itself anyway. Molecule by molecule, it understands its selfness.

I forget sometimes, forget the understanding of self that I possessed before I was conscious of experience or memory, forget the identity I already lived when emerging into this world. Maybe that is why I’m so drawn to water, despite being a poor swimmer. I’m not seeking sport, but self. Sometimes it feels like I’m always trying to remember that me, the one emerging from water into air, a whole self, even though this world had not yet imprinted me with experience. We are always whole, always were. Why is it so difficult to remember that sometimes?

Our true self has nothing to do with anything that ever happened to us or anything we ever knew or anything we have ever hoped for. How ridiculously easy it is to wrap that being in thing-ish notions that feel real, the things we tell ourselves about ourselves. I am this quality or that, how many times do we listen to ourselves, watch our words forming apology shapes as we admit our perceived flaws. Why do we let ourselves conform to those notions? I believe it is because we have an understanding, however misshapen it may be, of what the world expects. How presumptuous to assume that the world knows better than we do how to be ourselves. What if in our efforts to fit, to appear less alien, we appear more so? Worse, what if, in our efforts to fit, we become less of who we are? I am not sure if it is possible to lose that sense of our true self entirely, but I do believe it is far too easy to drift further and further away and make it harder and harder for ourselves to return.

Maybe the trick is learning to know water in all its forms. Maybe if I hold my breath and dive below, I can see who and how I was long ago, and not so long ago. Maybe, surfacing, I can hold my focus long enough and see a little of the future. Not all of it, all at once, in grand cloud formations, but glimpses, in the water droplets captured and rising in the air when I splash with joy in the pink sunrise.

As for the present, we live in a world of uncertainty. I know that many introspective folk like myself consider their understanding of their own identity, their relationship to past and future versions of themselves. Personal transitions lend urgency toward such explorations, and journeying toward self in this way during the times we live in can feel chaotic and confusing. So, embrace and thank and love those people in your life who have the ability see the self you are seeking, even when you cannot. [Thank you, as always, my Love]. And let us also allow ourselves to be embraced for the same reason. Our clarity of vision can be as much of a boon to others as theirs is to us.

Be open to and available for the love that is being presented to you. Let us focus and see through each other’s endeavors to mimic what the world expects, and instead see the people in our lives truly. Let us give and receive that gift, and be thankful, and bold, and authentic.

Love, Cath

On Sycamore Selves and Unknown Things

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes we are unsolved selves.

I walk a lot in my new neighborhood and have been watching the leaves begin to change, and I have been talking to trees.

Several streets here are lined with sycamores, and they often stand in some proximity to birches, silver maples, and the like. It would be easy, at this time of year, to take greater notice of the fiercely crimson and orange maples, or the cheerful yellow hues of the birch leaves. But, a mature sycamore is casually elegant. There is some kind of exuded wisdom you get a whiff of, along with a heady scent that reminds me of honey and hops. The bark of the trunk peels off in strips or patches, leaving behind swaths of varying shades, a silver-grey-green-brown palette that is beautiful, and charming, and comforting. The branches perform unique twists and turns, and the bark on these smaller limbs has an almost swirled coloration, again the silvery greys and browns along with a breath of green. The fallen leaves are yellow or brown, and have their own kind of vibrancy, green and amber heartbeat.

We are learning a lot about each other, these sycamores and I. Fallen branches provide new opportunities to understand the mysteries of how they grow, what they look like up close, up there.

You are strong and mysterious, I say to the sycamore out front, whom I call Henry, for now. I imagine he has observed my own somewhat strange behavior, the jumbled and overwrought moods I sometimes leave the house in when I walk the dog. The calm that often leads me home. Perhaps he thinks I’m strange, too, perhaps he worries about how much I worry. He says, maybe, why do you not see how strong you are?

Today as I get ready for my walk, I decide I will leave my hair unbrushed and wild from sleep, so that I can be more like Henry. I look out the window at him and he tells me that’s not what makes you wild. Sometimes I imagine I’m part witch and that my friendship with Henry is a real and normal thing, and that my humanized translation of our conversation is an ability my coven was known for long ago and part of it still lives in me. And I tell myself I’m crazy and that I should write a short story about it instead of this little essay, which might make people worry about me, and Henry just shakes his leaves a little. I wonder if I’m actually part tree, not part witch.

Sometimes, I get the sense that I’m part me as well, which is a relief.

[It is worth noting that my Love has a special intuitiveness with plants and animals, and he seems to have good instincts about Henry, too. He and Henry had a nice moment together recently one golden autumn morning, and I get the sense that Henry approves of him.]

On my walk today I pocketed pinecones and leaves that caught my eye and was reminded of how often I did so with my children when they were little. I’ve had such a strong instinct to gather these treasures lately that I’ve been tempted to start bringing a bucket with me like I did with the kids so long ago. Shiny chestnuts freed from spiky green shells, leaves, cones, sticks, stones, blades of pretty grass, dandelions.

Sometimes we want to gather close to our hearts all the things that make us feel solid and safe, all the things that bring us back to ourselves when random fears, anxieties, and stresses all make us feel like we’ve been scattered. Too far. Too wide.

On today’s walk I noticed that the dry, fallen leaves from the sycamore trees are louder than all the others when they skitter on sidewalks. The sycamore voice is similarly strong when the wind blows through its leaves.

It makes me smile, thinking that Henry doesn’t really whisper any better than my daughter, which is fine with me, because I’ve never had much use for secrets.

Sometimes, it is difficult for me to tell the difference between a secret and an unknown thing, between a truth deliberately kept hidden and a thing that has not yet made itself known. There is uncertainty in both, and uncertainty can be especially frightening if you’ve ever lost more than you ever thought you would. We try to protect ourselves, once we are strong again, but we don’t really know how. We are clumsy with our defenses because the enemy is a vague and foggy thing – usually the unknown itself. We don’t know its intentions and our instinct is to shield ourselves. Sometimes, too, we are the unsolved thing, which can feel too wild. Maybe this is what Henry meant. Maybe, when life has been full of transitions, it seems as though we need to answer questions, solve for x, know the future, listen for whispers, listen through them.

Sometimes Henry seems so heroic to me. He doesn’t need to fathom the nature of the things that might threaten him, and he doesn’t waste time on false senses of security that might be gained through defense mechanisms, because he doesn’t really have any, except for being what he is. If he loses a branch to weather or to a tall truck passing by, he lets go, and keeps growing. He keeps being his sycamore self because it is the only thing a sycamore can do. I tell him how beautiful this is. And somehow, I know he’s rooting for me, hoping I settle into my sycamore self, or whatever kind of tree, or witch, or me, I am.

Love, Cath

On the Dwindled Familiar

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes you are out of step and looking for something familiar within yourself.

Lately and often, I’ve been considering the impact of erosion, the way events and transitions and life can lead to a dwindling of the sense of familiarity between ourselves and the world around us, and/or between ourselves and ourselves.

For most people in this chaotic, viral year, familiar routines and habits have evaporated. In the midst of it, as I’ve been writing about here, I’ve moved to a new home, and my son is preparing to leave for college, where he’ll join my daughter on campus, and I’ve been trying to acclimate to it all.

A couple of days ago, my son and I visited my daughter. She’s moved back in with her housemates and is also awaiting the new school year. The three of us walked through the collection of small buildings that form the dorm complex where my son will live. We drove to the river, watched the swans prune, the ducks play, and the geese eat and eat. After ordering some takeout bibimbop, we sat on my daughter’s porch, quietly devouring our spicy rice and vegetables and tofu. We talked about ways to be safe.

two person hold hands — Photo by NEOSiAM 2020 on Pexels.com

I sat on the porch swing, close to my daughter and I held her hand, as if she were my five-year-old once more, and I missed her suddenly and intensely now that we were together again. I listened to the two of them talk to one another about their class schedules, their futures.

It is not that I’ve been oblivious to how much of their life now unfolds without me in it on a regular basis, but sometimes it just hits you.

This part is over. Has been over, actually.

I was slow to realize.

With my daughter, even though she’s beginning her junior year and talking about what faraway things come next for her after she graduates, it still almost felt like I had time for everyday moments. Even though, despite a brief pandemic-induced period where she moved back home, I haven’t lived with her for some time. Maybe it is because my son is about to leave too that the truth of it all is clarifying for me. Whatever privileged status I may hold in their lives as their mother will not necessarily translate into daily relevance.

At home, at this home-in-the-making, I walk through the house in the morning, letting the dog out, making the coffee, making the bed, and none of it has quite coalesced as familiar. Sometimes, I only feel as at home here as I would in any place where I like the décor. Those books. That pottery vase. The pink tile in the bathroom. The way the light moves through the house throughout the day is pleasing. And we have begun building memories here, a birthday, morning coffee on the back porch, a wide sweep of conversation. Tears and laughter, sleep and restlessness. Meals prepared and eaten together. At the same time, the notion of familiarity can feel elusive.

I am only slowly realizing that familiar does not always have to do with what the things I thought it did – time, memory, history, objects.

I have new possessions and old ones here in this new place, but the old things have the same hum as the new, though I know them better. Possibly I’m confusing the notion of familiarity with something else.

And then suddenly sometimes it all shifts into place with a soft sigh. I am not always half a step off from the general flow of things, but with all the churn and shove of these transitions, I can be a beat behind. I’m noticing too that people notice what I haven’t, like how long I pause sometimes before I’m able to catch up. I tried explaining this recently to my son but I don’t think I was able to make much sense of it.

At times, I feel at once melancholy and joyous, as if both of these are simultaneously my natural states, and I am perpetually tugged in one direction or the other, and the unease I feel within my own skin sometimes is a side effect of the journey from one state to the other.

This is all to say that sometimes our world and the miniscule and the enormous upheavals therein cause us to feel unfamiliar to ourselves, as we try to respond to all the things we need to. Sometimes we try and fail. Sometimes we try and are slow to realize that we aren’t failing. We are in a state of trying. We are earnest. We are tugged between versions of ourselves. We are tugged in and out of the flow that everyone else seems to keep pace with.

Perhaps the most centering power, the thing that consistently brings me back to myself, is the act of looking into the eyes of those people I love, and being recognized. The warm brown eyes of my son, kind and astute, grounded and curious. My daughter’s sea gaze, all grey and green, passion and power and depth. The blue sky eyes of my love, a soar of melody and truth, wisdom and sweetness.

We are all moving through our own states, and sometimes we are trying to catch up to ourselves and to each other and to the world. We owe ourselves and each other recognition and respect, patience and compassion.

Love, Cath

A Brief Note on the Liminal and Limitless

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes you have to take a moment to float.

When I woke this morning after the first decent night of sleep in over a week, I had a moment of being amazed that it can get so cool at night during this intense heat wave. It was like a breath of clarity in the midst of confusion and chaos. Life has been confusing and chaotic lately. My one-month furlough began several days ago, and it has been a month since I closed on my new house. In that time there has been a tremendous amount of intense effort and endeavoring to ready the new house to be lived in, and I’ve been both guided by and partnered with my love, who can see things that I cannot, who can sense what can be, what shouldn’t be, what might be. Walls have been removed and every surface cared for. We’re getting there.

white clouds and blue sky — Photo by Swapnil Sharma on Pexels.com

I’ve always told myself I’m bad at transitions. From the simplest goodbye, see you later, to the larger-scale move from city to city. Liminal spaces, no matter how big or how small are filled with unknowns, and while unknowns are not necessarily frightening in and of themselves, I’ve always been keenly aware of them. Of their numbers, of their depths. I can feel myself searching sometimes, the way your toes reach for the sandy bottom of the lake bed when swimming. I am awestruck by the limitless, by everything that seems without boundary or border, the night sky, love, deep water, work, forests, fire, joy. It is not fear that strikes me when I contemplate the unknown, though I fear it is taken as such. It is the unbounded nature of the possibilities – good, bad, or otherwise – that yawn open upon a kiss goodbye, the soft thump of the screen door, the boxing up of books and dishes, the zipping of a backpack. It is simply that there is so much.

There is an unbounded universe of next and sometimes I feel as though I am somehow trying to take it all in at once, like a vista glimpsed too quickly from a moving car, like breathing in the ocean, like seeing what the clouds taste like. I like the hug that lingers, that offers me one more breath of this, of now, of known.

As I plot out the next few days of work at the house, and packing at the old, and consider all that is enjambed within those phrases, I take a moment to float in this morning of transition, instead of reaching toward the sandy bottom. To appreciate how thoughtfully and thoroughly I’ve been buoyed by love through all of this.

There is more to say, and/but much work to do. Taste the clouds and/but enjoy that hug for one breath longer.

Love, Cath

On Belonging, Nests, and Popsicle Sticks

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes we find new ways to belong to ourselves.

I read recently that where we belong is not always the same as where we are used to.

That juxtaposition between belonging and familiarity is a curious one. I am in a prolonged state of transition. I have not yet moved into my new house, but have been steadily at work, along with my son, my boyfriend, and his son, to make some fairly dramatic changes there. My old house, which I’m simply occupying at this point, is in a state of disarray as I prepare to move. The yard is getting overgrown. We can only do so much to maintain both places. I have work responsibilities. I am tired.

When I think about belonging and familiarity I think of people, not places, now, which is a fine thing. I do look forward, though, to having the sense that I belong in my new space, to making memories there, building the familiar piece by piece like the log cabins my sisters and I used to make from popsicle sticks we’d collect throughout the summer. Belonging and familiarity aren’t always at odds.

The house I am leaving feels like a collection of homes, four walls filled with debris of different versions of home, good, bad, and otherwise. Here the familiar has a long history, sometimes sweet and wonderous, like bringing babies home from the hospital after they were born. The ensuing, often sleepless years, unfolding moment by moment. The familiar had its run of trouble here too and that’s ground I’ve covered before. The house is filled with discarded nests. It is all twigs and straw and popsicle sticks. There are things I don’t want to forget, and things I don’t want to remember. If I swept it all into a pile, I wonder what would be recognizable, what would still seem familiar. I wonder what to take with me.

Belonging is a funny thing. This house was mine because my name was on the deed and the mortgage, and now different pieces of paper bear that scrawl. Signing all the documents to transfer ownership for both houses, I remember looking at my signature and the way it changed from one document to the next. By the time you have signed your name fifteen times you begin to doubt that you know how to do it anymore.

[Side note on signatures and belonging: I think of the poetry of a name, the way the script mirrors mood, the way when I pen a note with the three letters of your name at the top and the roughly four and half of mine at the bottom, I attempt to corral with the shape of words the way I feel, and it feels like creating art together. It is the words as I write them and the sound of them in your head or on your lips when you read them, and what a beautiful thing it is, to make art with you.]

But despite the documentation and transfer of ownership of what I have called “mine,” what I now call “mine” doesn’t belong to me, because homes have the histories of other families and maybe in a way, the way we reshape a home to our personalities, the way we nest and re-nest over the years, is also a beautiful piece of enacted art, one that we make in collaboration with our own histories, along with those who have inhabited the space before us.

In many stories, place functions very much as a character, a real force the characters interact with, rather than simply a backdrop. Fiction that effectively executes this (Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love comes to mind readily as an example, but there are many others) is easy to immerse oneself in, because it feels like truth. We are products of our environment, acted upon by place, as much as we interact with it.

Belonging is a funny thing. I wonder if you can feel at peace with yourself and not in harmony with your personal setting, or does that peace create the sense of harmony no matter where you are?

I have the strong sense that feeling internally at peace but out of step with your environment is common, and is perhaps what propels us to look at our surroundings perhaps as a place where we do not belong, or no longer belong.

It is impossible to ignore the fact that tucked away within both the concept of belonging and in the word itself is longing. There is an ache within us to fit. I think of the two baby robins snugged in the nest at the new house. It sits securely in the crook of the downspout behind the garage. I think of how we long to feel safe, at least somewhere.

I wonder how it is built, our sense of belonging to one another? How much is instantaneous, how much constructed. I consider what that infrastructure comprised of.

And what does it mean to belong to ourselves? I was told that by the time I reached almost-fifty, I would not care what others thought of me; I would be wise; I would settle into myself. Yet I don’t settle in. I still often feel awkward in my own skin, in my own brain, though at times I have allowed myself to be at peace with that part of me.

The sparrow in the backyard at my old house pinched a beakful of just-brushed dog-fur-fluff. My dog has the softest fur, and I thought, well-chosen! What a happy, cozy little nest that will be to settle into.

And sometimes I think maybe I can settle into myself after all.

Love, Cath

On Home, Magic, Memory

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes home is not what you think it is.

For a few of the many moments that I’m curled up in my bed but unable to sleep, I cast my thoughts outward, trying to capture as much of the world as my heart can hold in a breath, for that is all that I can handle of the chaos sometimes. It feels selfish not to try. I feel so immersed in layers of details involved in home buying and selling that I struggle to focus on life beyond those decisions. But in that effort of casting my awareness out beyond my experience, I suddenly remember fishing with my father when I was young, standing on the bank, watching the ease with which his line sang out over the river. I pull back, clumsy as ever, unable to mimic the grace it takes. I long to be bigger and better than myself sometimes.

time lapse photography of lake — Photo by Baskin Creative Studios on Pexels.com

We are told not to take for granted the things and people that make our lives feel full, rich, happy. I think about how often I say I love you and I wonder if I’m saying it as much to express the truth of it as I am to prove it to a cruel universe, as if a demonstration of love and gratitude can create a protective gloss around me and mine. I love you becomes an incantation to keep us safe and connected.

I started writing this post a couple of weeks ago when my arms were sore from painting. I moved from my desk, where I hunched and scrambled toward deadlines, to the basement where I poured white paint to neutralize my home for potential buyers. I thought I wouldn’t like it, but I do. It reminds me of that summer cottage I’ve always wanted, the white paint. I spend so much time scrolling through pictures of homes in another town, hoping one will feel a little bit like it could be mine, hoping that somehow in this world of wait and restriction and necessary cautions, I will be able to complete the necessary series of business transactions. A series of business transactions that, in a way, is the transfer of ownership of a thing from person to person, but is really the worldly calculus that frames the magical endowing of home to family. (It is a strange arrangement, but if you are lucky, as I am, you get to work with people who have an understanding of not just the business but the business of magic.)

I spent night after night in April falling asleep trying to write before bed. It was all fits and starts, no sense making, clumsy constructions of sentiments in random drafts. Sometimes my best work is the simple I love you, sung across rooms, tucked in a note of freshly folded laundry to be discovered later. Sometimes I feel as though I’m trying to inscribe home into every letter of a scrawled I love you.

I’ve been thinking about what home means, and now more than ever it is who, not where, and on the verge of moving I want my children to know that fact, more than ever. I want them to feel at home within themselves, I want them to know that all our lives we have to remake our ability to remake home. I want them to learn it so that it comes as readily and blindly as tying shoes. I want it to be easier for them. That is the first and most important layer of home.

The next is about the people you feel at home with, and about evolving into the idea that sometimes this will mean your family and sometimes it won’t. And that’s okay. Your idea of family expands and contracts, like a lung full of breath. But like a lung full of breath it has a rhythm, a cadence you can always find if you tune yourself in to it.

But it would be stubbornly naïve to pretend that home also wasn’t a physical place, and it’s okay to have a multitude of feelings about that place, feelings that might not always get on harmoniously with one another, just like family members sometimes don’t. It’s also okay for there to be an apparent dearth of feeling about a place. Sometimes we’ve spent them all, sometimes we will feel them later.

Sometimes years, decades, will pass, and we will suddenly remember standing on a riverbank with our father and we will remember an odd sense of home we forgot we had forgotten. Old magic. And we will realize again that what we thought was about a place really isn’t so much.

I think, too, of the brief vulnerabilities we allow ourselves when we are trying to be strong. I think of what being strong feels like, and how sometimes it doesn’t feel like trying, until we stop for a moment. Anxiety sneaks up sometimes like a soft rage of sorrow when I let my guard down. And sometimes it feels as though it is always there, like a soft flutter wings in the eves when you are lying in bed and hearing a bird take a little morning bath outside the window. It’s just there, letting you know the worrying is happening, but telling you don’t worry about it, it’s for a good cause. Learning to be at home with myself means trying to understand this.

Today definitely feels like spring, and with that sigh of air through the window, warm and a little damp and heavy with the scent of green, it’s a little easier today to feel hopeful and even content within the milieu of this moment.

Remember to protect yourself with whatever magic you can find, a memory, a feeling of home, an I love you.

Love, Cath

On Scattered Things and Rabbit Holes

By Catherine DiMercurio

These days, I collect moments. We had coffee in bed. I couldn’t name the bird singing outside as the sun was rising. I found myself becoming aware of all the details at once. The unnamed birds (somehow wilder because I didn’t know what to call them) and the tightness of the red tree buds and the morning light on our faces and the scattered and speckled pattern the coffee made on the white sheet where I spilled it.

And this: that day, was it only earlier this week? and the warm fog of my dog’s breath in the morning air when I, after days of saying I need to go for a walk, went for a walk. And it had just snowed and the flakes were thick and damp and insisting on themselves as they settled on my face and on the black spots of my dog’s coat, making much ado as they rained down on warm March sidewalks before they disappeared.

Another walk, a few days later, and it suddenly feels like spring. Another walk, trying to beat the rain, and failing at that. Arriving home, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I’m washing my hands and I see the pattern the warm raindrops made on my skin, like something spilled and scattered.

I insist on noticing the ordinary things these days, and I can’t tell if it is to keep the confusion of the world out and a semblance of peace in, or to let the chaos in my brain out and the tiny fragments of life as we knew it in. It is a permeable membrane maybe, this fragile sheen of sought normalcy. I soak beans for soup. I fold the laundry. I hum while I wash dishes.

Maybe the insistence (that normal activity exists not just in the world as we knew it but as it is now) is the result of our brain’s worrying us away from the rabbit holes of news, social media, statistics, exponential growth graphs. I think of rabbit holes, and Alice, her miscellany of sense and nonsense, the way she sought to match known world to new. Adapting.

I think, too, that rabbit holes work just fine for rabbits, and if I could only think like one maybe it would be okay down here, cozy like the little home where Peter Rabbit’s mother tucked him in bed with chamomile tea when he wasn’t feeling well.

two brown rabbits — Photo by Jim Long on Pexels.com

What is the overlap between known and new? Is it simply the unfolding of ordinary moments, of insisting on them?

I think of the things we forget to insist on when we scramble to adapt to the upending of everything.

These days, I don’t just collect moments. I work, and I try to box up worry and stuff it in a corner, lock it up with luck. I’m lucky; I have work I can do at home. I’m lucky; we’re still healthy. I hum loudly with my fingers in my ears as if it can keep luck from running out. I work, but it is hard to focus. Deadlines clang in the distance like the tardy bell at school half a mile away and I remember how I heard it on the first day that school was cancelled and I don’t hear it any more, but maybe I just stopped noticing.

These days, I’m perpetually calibrating, trying to tune my psychological and emotional response to the day, moment, beat. Sometimes it’s all static.

Like anyone these days, I don’t know what to think, and coping looks different all the time. More information. Less information. Different information. Silence. Noise. Coffee. Music. Breath. I like to look at faces, sometimes longer than people like to be looked at.

It’s impossible to stop myself from thinking of how quickly things have changed, how immediately so many plans we had for ourselves seem to have unraveled. But we are nothing if not weavers, and we routinely loop things back together and of course we will do so again. Rebraid the frayed strands, remake our plans, create new ones. Adapt.

A friend reminded me recently that our days are filled with choices, though things seem limited now, constrained and boundaried in ways we weren’t able to imagine just a couple of weeks ago. We choose moment by moment to be hopeful, to proceed, to connect, to insist.

I try to read a little poetry every day. To keep writing. To keep up with the home improvements that need to be done before I can sell my house. Though plans everywhere are collectively paused, we know they won’t stay that way. Timelines might have to be reimagined, details tweaked, but we will move forward, individually and collectively. It’s what we do, what we are doing. Inch by inch. Choice by choice. Coffee by coffee, poem by poem, word by word, walk by walk. Breath by breath.

I’m trying to see something of value in the scatter of my thoughts here. I feel like I have tried to organize a few stones on the beach into little cairns, but having failed, stare at the jumble of them and stop searching for sense. Isn’t that how Alice began to navigate Wonderland? Wasn’t it easier when she stopped expecting sense? Though innately, we do keep trying.

I think of scattered things, birdseed that ends up taking root, crumbs carried away by squirrels, coffee grounds across the garden soil. Things have a way of working out, I suppose, of rooting like seeds, or nurturing in unexpected ways like the crumbs from my bread or the grounds from my coffee.

Things have a way of connecting us to other, like all those tunnels in a rabbit warren. It makes sense to rabbits. They know where safety is, and what to look for, and when, and there is comfort in that, and beauty, too. We just have to look for it, adapt. We become curiouser and curiouser.

Love, Cath

A Brief Note on Surviving Pointless Worrying, and Loving Like a Dog

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes you have to love like a dog does.

Most of us have been through enough to know that we have some thoughts that have a mind of their own. They mine our past for memories and our future for fears and merge them into narratives that seem like facts, like calculations, like ideas that will protect us somehow, from ever being blindsided by all the things life has to offer, all our lives once did offer.

In my own experience, periods of transition and uncertainty amplify this noise. If you ever have endured a sustained period of turmoil, the thing you keep craving long after is the reassurance that somehow everything is going to be okay. I want to hear it in the background, the way you hear the wind chimes on the porch when you’re almost home.

Recently, upon returning home from looking at a house (if you know me or have been reading this blog you know I’m on the verge of a move), I fell apart a little. I grew anxious about finances and location. And it all coalesced, all the fears about the future, and memories of past failures, into a guttural off-key chorus of always-never. It was a performance I desperately wanted not to hear but I couldn’t quite find the switch to flip to turn it off. I thought of the beautiful features that drew me to the house – the historic homes in the area, the beautiful brick, the graceful staircase, the wood floors, the leaded glass door in the foyer. I thought about the rest – the broken panes in that door, the plumbing and the windows and roof work that needed to be done. I thought about my budget. I what-iffed my way into tears of worry and frustration and self-censure, sitting in the spot in front of the large heating vent in my living room, where I had, in the past, gravitated to when things were bad. My thoughts, now thinking for themselves, decided that this was all somehow about what I deserved, or didn’t, thought this would be a good way to keep me realistic in terms of my expectations about the new house, and everything else. I cranked up the heat because I was so cold suddenly, and my big dog leaned into me, trying, in that way he does, to take some of it away.

I gave myself fifteen minutes in this state. I may have taken a little longer, but I managed to throw myself with some deliberateness into the rest of my day. Looking back a few days later on those moments, I wish so much that instead of my thoughts having a mind of their own, the rest of my mind could just rally and be analytical and pick apart the faulty reasoning. It tries. But things don’t really turn around until my heart gets involved. Reminds me doggedly and wordlessly of what matters, what always matters, here, now. My heart thinks the way I imagine dog’s minds do – in images and smells and sounds, with no confusing web of language criss-crossing truth and lies until you can’t find your way out.

I suspect that anxiety is future-grief, worry and sorrow about what we haven’t lost yet. There is a steady, logical part of my brain that can say this is fruitless. There is another part of me that thinks this is a pretty good skill to have, thinks it can somehow protect me from being blindsided. My steady brain asks how it can matter; our hearts cannot really brace themselves for a punch the way other muscles can. If the world is going to hurt us, it will, whether we can see it coming or not. The thing that protects us is what we’re doing now, the thing that protects us is building a bank of heart-thoughts that we can dip into when we need to, that we can draw on to remind us: we are loved and loving, and we are strong because of it.

To those of you who are patient with me, who have spent a few minutes in conversation with me (or who have inched your foot toward mine during a late-night fit of worry, letting me know you are there for me), who reassure me with your steadiness and kindness and goodness and love, I thank you, and I hope I offer some measure of it in return. I am here for you, too.

Love, Cath

Watercolor Pears and Other Journeys

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes we let love remind us we’re okay.

As I hug my daughter, I want to steal back the moments I let go of maybe too easily. I tried to cherish everything I could. But when our children are ready to leave, our becoming ready to let them go gets messy. We let anger, or distance grow, because there is an illusion that it makes the leaving easier. It makes readiness appear to be something finished and beautiful, a little masterpiece of growth, and in a way, it is. But it is also green and new, for us as parents and for them as children.

My daughter left for college a year and a half ago. This weekend, visiting, I wondered, how is it that you do not live in my house anymore. How is it that we so often misunderstand and misuse time, and each other, even when we are telling ourselves different truths. I am not taking this for granted. I appreciate this moment, and that one. The easy ones, the tough ones, the laughter and tedium in between. The fact is, it isn’t possible to appreciate them all, not in the moment. But, possibly, I don’t comprehend the universes contained in each moment. The way that when mother and daughter yelled across the threshold of her pre-slammed door, the instant was a multitude, was everything that brought us there, was everything it would launch us into.

All of what I understand about living and loving could fit in a thimble. If I were a fruit fly, I would swim in it like a swan at sunrise.

At the same time maybe I knew more than I thought I did, and I let go enough and held on enough, and it is only now, with the absence of my daughter in my home a daily reminder of how life tumbles forward, that I feel as though I want to sweep it all back into my embrace for just another minute, every breath we breathed under the same roof. At the same time, it’s now, and she’s doing okay, more than okay.

The dog has found a spot near my feet. Sometimes I think he understands living and loving better than anyone, but maybe he has never quite adjusted to my daughter leaving. He attached himself differently to my son next. But soon, my son will also be gone and my dog will look at me and not understand why love has come to this. Why I, with all my insufficiencies, am the one he is left with. He will think of his girl and his boy and sigh and wish for them every day and I will come home from work and he will resign himself to loving me as best as he can. Possibly, though, he simply loves me.

I think of how many ways there are to love and how each one of them tries to break our hearts even as it expands them. Because it expands them.

I think too of the love we find – after time and heartbreak have suggested, perhaps urged, maybe you’ve had enough. I think of the way I ran toward it, us, anyway. How we sat over coffee cups, hearing each other’s voices for the first time, not really knowing what to expect of self, other, this. How learning the shape of this is a gift.

Years ago, I took a watercolor class. I learned a little, most of which I’ve forgotten. The instructor mentioned that I’d benefit from a drawing class, advice I never took. But I learned that I loved this medium, and that it calms me even if my work is simplistic and flawed, and to call it amateurish would be a compliment.

I love seeing pencil sketch lines beneath pale washes, the way the layers build and you can see both the cumulative effect and the process at the same time. It’s like witnessing journey and arrival in the same moment, even if the arrival is not at the intended destination. No, that is not the way I thought this painting of a pear would turn out. But, still. The beautiful thing is, both “good” and “bad” paintings can be witnessed and appreciated in this same way.

How luxurious it is to appreciate and be appreciated not because we’ve made it to an expected or anticipated destination, but simply as journeyers who have arrived, here, now. In this multitude of a moment. And we’re okay. More than okay.

How new and beautiful it can be to love (ourselves) this way.

Love, Cath

On Patterns, Perspectives, and Puzzles

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes context helps us puzzle things out and find the substance behind the charm.

On the last day before taking my daughter back to college, after her short holiday visit home, we sat at the dining room table, she and my son and I, putting together a puzzle. It was a 500-piece nature scene, quite beautiful and moderately complex, and we laughed and chatted and worked silently, falling into a peace so easily we forgot about the various things we’d bickered about here and there. Tucked away, too, were the few weightier conversations we’d had, and the brief but powerful emotional storms that sweep through a household sometimes, when new transitions are on everyone’s horizons.

In the course of those few hours that we worked, on and off, we found ourselves each selecting a favorite puzzle piece. I was particularly drawn to one of the few which contained a recognizable image, a little vignette, or so it seemed to me. I liked it. It seemed to make sense on its own, independent of the bigger picture it was a part of. So little of life is like that; it so often doesn’t bother to make sense at all.

Speaking of bigger pictures, I often get the impression that my understanding of the “bigger picture” is flawed or misguided or not fully formed. But maybe, the problem is with the very notion of the bigger picture.

We blame our perception, our perspective, we question how our shortcomings keep us from seeing things clearly sometimes, keep us from understanding our lives, our place in the world. But maybe understanding is muddied because the thing we are trying to understand is a shifting, muddy thing itself.

It’s no wonder that we sometimes flounder, that we can’t grasp how all the pieces fit together, that we are at once puzzled, and puzzle.

The afternoon of the puzzle, I found it utterly impossible to snap puzzle pieces into place without becoming overwhelmed by metaphor and wonder. Sometimes I stared at pieces blankly while my brain scrambled up ideas about identity and purpose and meaning and connection and context. Sometimes I was amazed that we were able to fit any of the pieces together, particularly the ones that were part of a uniform background, the starry dawn sky, the rush of water over rocks. We hunted for pieces, each in our own way, seeking patterns in the shapes. I wondered what it would have been like to try and work that puzzle without the picture on the box as a map.

Life is built piece by piece without context, without a map. Instead, we fashion ideas of what it is supposed to look like, in general, and for us. We look for patterns, we seek partners. We create context. We are thirsty for shape, meaning, structure.

I think all of our endeavoring, this trying to see what fits together, is what connects us and binds us in a shifting world.

We create constants, foundations we hope will withstand the shifting muddiness.

When I look at the photo I took of that puzzle piece, I’m struck by how I romanticized the image. It’s a treetop. It appears to me now less like a self-contained scene, a story within a story, as it sits isolated against a dark background. Only in proximity to a sea of other puzzle pieces does the poetry of the little piece begin to hang together. You have to see it within the context of chaos to understand its clarity.

Throughout all of this reflection, which is so unlike an unmade puzzle itself, some things manage to become clear to me. I am growing comfortable with my tendency toward romanticizing things. It no longer seems a silly or naïve trait, now that I understand it within the larger context of myself. It used to be so much a part of me that I was unaware of it as a distinct characteristic but now, because I can usually see it, I can understand it is a part of me, but not so much so a part of me that I’m blind to its effects. That is to say, I do like to be charmed. I enjoy being able to see idealized versions of things, people. In a way, it is a gift. But, gradually, I have learned to see reality and substance more clearly, too. I have learned to see beyond and around charm more clearly now than I have been able to in the past, can more readily recognize, and subsequently respect, that which we call substance. This is not to say that I’ve perfected this move. Even a practiced self-awareness takes time to become a habit. But still.

When we begin to know ourselves more fully, the way the parts are related to the whole, it can be easier to make sense of things, and not just puzzle pieces.

For example, I recently began looking at houses, as I get ready to sell a house, buy a house, to move. I have been a bit afraid that my tendency toward romanticizing things, to be seduced by charm, would run amok. That my love of original glass doorknobs and built-ins and pretty little details would prevent me from seeing the enormous inconvenience of a too-small kitchen or cracks in a foundation. Happily though, while I did feel that swoonful delight in vintage details, I also witnessed myself being able to see the place as a whole – clearly – and to know it wasn’t right for me. (Happily, too, I find myself lovingly supported on this journey by someone who is not only charming – he has the best smile – but who is full of substance, and who is very much looking out for me. Thank you.)

To put it another way, that little puzzle piece, and my affection for it, make more sense when the piece is viewed not in isolation but within the context of the jumble of the unmade puzzle. Looking at it as a separate thing, I’ve wondered, why did it seem so significant? Sometimes trying to remember the sense we’ve made of something is as challenging as trying to remember song lyrics that we misheard the first time anyway.

But we can gain a new understanding of ourselves, and maybe even one another, through this effort of sense-seeking, even when the context is initially unclear. We recreate context when we return to the effort of the puzzle. And we can do the same in terms of our understanding of ourselves, of each other, of what connects us to one another.

It takes sustained effort, but we can and should create and recreate and build and strengthen the connections and foundations to withstand the muddiness of an ever-changing big picture. There is substance there, in that context and in those connections, and we should seek it, regardless of how dazzled we are by the charm in a detail — whether it be a puzzle piece, a vintage doorknob, or a warm smile.

Love, Cath