Sunlight Always Comes

I woke up this morning to a world that was just becoming light. My first thought was that I could go back to sleep and take the SAT II on a later date. My second thought, when I walked out into my living room and the cold air of the swamp cooler pressed against my bare legs, was that this was the way that mornings felt in summer.

It was summer. There were cherries on the trees outside. The grass was soft and warm. The world was already transitioning from halfway illuminated to bright and full, and here I was. Standing in the living room. Eyes half-open. Getting ready to take the SAT II.

I think that my values have changed in the past year. I have gained a better understanding of the life that I want to seek for myself. I know that I want to waste as few hours as possible staring at SAT prep books and that I want to go to a college that places emphasis on learning, rather than prestige or status or achievements that lack real meaning for the achiever.

And yet.

I was scared out of my mind this morning.

I was scared when I pulled my clothes from the dryer and got dressed. I was scared when I placed two Clif bars, a handful of mints, three #2 pencils, my wallet, and my admission ticket into my purse. I was scared on the ride across town to the testing center, and I was scared standing in the too-hot sunlight out of the too-big building with too many nervous kids. I was scared sitting in the library waiting for the test to begin and watching my friend Sophia through the library's glass windows as she waited to be led to her testing room. I was scared staring at her orange backpack and her bottle of water, wishing that I had brought a bottle of water, too.

More than anything, what I wanted was to walk downstairs to the school's dark basement and run around it ten times. I wanted this really badly, in the same way that I wanted to take off my long-sleeved undershirt, which was about to give me a heat stroke. I wanted to take it off and step outside in my tank top and never turn back.

But I didn't do this.

I took the Literature SAT II. It is composed of several passages, each accompanied by a set of questions. Some of the passages were so beautiful. One of the poems was the kind that I would have read over and over again if I had been at home. I would have memorized its lines without trying, held it to my chest as if the rhythm of the lines and the fullness of the words could seep into the core of me.

This poem was one of the last on the test. By then, a few of the students next to me had finished their tests and were staring at the ceiling or rolling their pencils forward on their desks and catching them before they fell off. I finished the last set of questions and flipped back through the test to answer a few questions that I had left blank. Then, just before time was called, I re-erased a few erase marks.

That was it.

My shoulders loosened, and my fingers relaxed. We had one more section to fill out before we could leave: a statement to be copied in cursive and then signed. It took one boy ten minutes to copy the statement in cursive because he was so used to manuscript. I watched as he stared at his paper too closely, his fingers tensing, trying to get the letters right. When he looked up and saw that he was the last person, he addressed the whole room with a loud "sorry." We all laughed. It didn't seem to matter now. What did cursive writing or minutes on a clock matter when compared with a crazily important sixty-minute test designed to prove one's encompassing knowledge of a standard high school subject?

What, in truth, did life matter when compared with a crazily important sixty-minute test designed to prove one's encompassing knowledge of a standard high school subject?

The answer, of course, is that life matters more. Snow and red dresses and music and the outdoors matter more. Cherry trees and soft warm grass and early mornings spent in bed matter more.

We walked through the library's glass doors and escaped into the world outside.

(Image one here. Image two by Escape Photography.)

Journey

A Series of Unfortunate Events were the first books that ever spoke to me in that mysterious way. The words seemed to be coming from some ancient place within my heart. I laughed and cried with the understanding of them. I wanted to be a part of the story, to go to that corner of the world or the imagination where Klaus and Violet and Sunny lived. And yet I felt that I was already a part of the story, that without bearing any similarities to my life, it was warm and familiar. 

Today, I re-read this Lemony Snicket quote and loved it all over again. 

“At times the world may seem an unfriendly and sinister place, but believe that there is much more good in it than bad. All you have to do is look hard enough. And what might seem to be a series of unfortunate events may in fact be the first steps of a journey.” 

-Lemony Snicket

(Image here.)

Broken Book Boxes & Tricycle Lamps

Today, my mom cleaned out the shed while I sifted through the boxes and surveyed the damage. A box of my books from boarding school broke open on the way out of the shed (the cardboard disaster in the front of this picture). 

I took the books inside and am still deciding which ones to keep and which to give away. I have the hardest time parting with books.

I have memories with all of these. In my poetry workshop, we would sit by the huge bay windows in the library and read The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry aloud to each other. The verses were so terribly beautiful.

African writer Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard was one of my favorites from my Literature and the Writer class. Whimsical, meaningful, and hilarious. I also loved The Prime of Miss Jean Brody.

My copy of Jane Eyre, as you can see, is well worn. And well loved. With books, isn't it the same thing?

Later this evening, while I picked and ate cherries from our cherry tree, my mom rigged up this lawn ornament/outdoor umbrella. The tricycle lamp was my dad's creation. Instead of getting rid of it, she added an old squeegee and an umbrella. Wall-ah! A tricycle-lamp-umbrella-stand-lawn-ornament.

It was a beautiful day. I hope yours was, too.

Too Late

Source

"She offered the sandwich to the almost completely blind photographer. 'Aren't you hungry?' he asked. She told him that she was, but that she'd never told her mother that she hated chopped liver, and eventually it became too late to tell her, having said nothing for years." 

-Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

Around the House and in the Garden

I have been thinking of the summer when I turned thirteen. My sister and I had gotten a job looking after a woman in the later stages of Alzheimer's while her husband worked on their farm. Our mother would drive us out to the house they shared in the country. Down a little gravel road, it was almost hidden beneath the trees. The garden was sun-drenched and lovely. The fields were just in sight. It was, as my mother said, "a little slice of heaven."

We spent that summer digging our hands into the soil of Merry's garden, pulling weeds and planting flowers in their place. We cared for her ducks and ran across the lawn, playing with her dog Snickers. We sat in her living room, where a fan blew cool air onto all of us, and listened as she told us the story of the wooden figurine on her mantelpiece. He was a man named George, and she told us his story almost every day. I don't remember it anymore.

I have been thinking of that summer and remembering Merry. She had once been a teacher. She had once known the names of hundreds of flowers. She had an entire room of her house dedicated to the miniature villages that she and her husband would build each year around Christmas time. They would create entire towns on the tops of several tables pushed together. They would open up their house to the neighborhood and allow people to wander through, examining the miniature stores and cottages, admiring the miniature men who stood waving on miniature street corners. That summer, my sister and I built more miniature villages for Merry. We unpacked figurines and arranged them carefully, creating story lines in our head. She sat on a chair and watched us, smiling.

There are so many things that I will never forget: the image of Merry's husband standing with his arm around her in the garden, his blue eyes shining, as he told us the story of how they fell in love; the way it felt to jump on the old trampoline in the apple orchard behind their house, my sister's laughter awakening the air around us; the Dr. Pepper and ice cream bars that Merry's husband would buy just for my sister and me, so that we could enjoy them on the porch in the heat of the day; and how beautiful everything was in their little world of trees and sunshine and flowers, how beautiful the whole world seemed.

It was, I am just now understanding, one of the most magical summers of my life.

(Image here.)

A Poem for Your Sunday

One month ago, W.S. Merwin came to Santa Fe, and I had the opportunity to attend his reading. I will never forget that night. The wisdom and love emanating from Merwin was incredible. The poem below was one that he chose for his reading. 

As he reached the middle verse, I remember thinking, "I want to be the tree that stands in the earth for the first time!" as if this was my new life philosophy. Read below. 

"Place" by W.S. Merwin

On the last day of the world

I would want to plant a tree

what for

not for the fruit

the tree that bears the fruit

is not the one that was planted

I want the tree that stands

in the earth for the first time

with the sun already

going down

and the water

touching its roots

in the earth full of the dead

and the clouds passing

one by one

over its leaves

(Photo by Mark Hanauer. Source here.)

A Day on the Job

I work in downtown Santa Fe at a social media management company. Vague job title aside, what I do is pretty simple. I write Facebook updates. I write Twitter updates. I write blogs. I do all of this for local businesses (mainly restaurants and galleries). Many of them don't have the time to run their own Facebook and Twitter pages, but they recognize how important it is for their customers.

For the first few days, the job was overwhelming. We were swimming with new clients, and I had to learn about all of these different restaurants I had never been to so that I could write convincing updates from their perspective, and I had no clue what the heck "Squareberry" was (this is the site where we schedule the updates). 

Once I settled in, however, I could really appreciate it. Because what we do there is fascinating. Social media is a powerful marketing tool, and it's powerful because it makes businesses and celebrities and authors and restaurants seem so accessible. We are all in need of that form of connection. It is nice to know that, as much as technology has the power to alienate us (for example, every member of my family is sitting in a different room right now, doing our own thing on the computer), it also has the power to connect us. I will never forget what my grandmother said to me after she went on Facebook for the first time. "It was so energizing!" she said, "I felt so good!" She had been given a glimpse into the lives of people she hadn't spoken with in years. She had found out which restaurants they were eating at, what their pets looked like, how old their children were. It was uplifting. 

Lately, I have been writing more blog articles than updates, and I enjoy them for a completely different reason. What I love about writing is that it allows us to interact with the world and to learn about it. For the past few weeks, I have written blog articles for local galleries. Most of these blog articles feature artists and their upcoming shows. I don't pretend to approach the subject with the eye (or the knowledge) of a critic. But I do love writing about these artists and their work. For one thing, they are such incredible people. They have led interesting lives. They are exploring ideas that are at the very core of what it means to alive. They are trying to convey just a tiny bit of truth to the world. 

Most of the time, I write these articles using the official biography of the author and whatever other information I find online. On Thursday, however, I had the opportunity to interview an artist. I was nervous. I shut myself into my company's meeting room and arranged a little area on the table for myself: my computer in the center, a cup of coffee and a muffin on the left side, my phone on the right side. I wasn't nervous to speak to him, necessarily. I was just nervous that I would not do it right. That I would not ask the right questions. That I would not end up with enough material for the blog. That I would not grasp the concept of his work. 

Our conversation, as it turns out, was the highlight of my job so far. There was something so satisfying about going out and getting the material for myself and then translating all of my notes and all of his quotes into an article that--I hope--captured the essence of his art. 

The artist spoke to me about the importance of gratitude. He meditates every day before he begins painting. He gives thanks for the moment. On my drive home from work, while waiting at a stoplight, I felt so happy that I started thanking the world out loud. These past two years have not been the best for me or for my family. I don't usually feel inspired. I often feel lonely. I want to go out into the world and make a difference, but I don't know how to begin. 

And then there are those moments. On the phone with an artist. Typing an article about him. Waiting at a stoplight on the drive home. 

There are those moments when I know that I will be okay. 

(Image one here. Image two here.)