Sick of pictures of snow? It's the first day of Spring no less. The theme of today is unpredictability. I’ve been weak, needing long naps, and was about to write about weakness, when I find out my white and red blood counts are climbing back up. Woe is me, how can I get a trajectory going here? Once again I watch my body do things I have apparently little control over. I rewrite this post.Control. I’ve had good reason to keep chaos at bay in my original family and then in my own previous marriages. Kelly used to call me “the rock,” which isn’t altogether the best of epithets, for a mom. Steady and reliable, yes, but wouldn’t one want to see the vulnerability, the uncertainty, to see how it might be managed?Most of my life my nerves have been, as the poet Anne Carson puts it, “open to the air like something skinned.” As is true of many writers, I’ve been pretty smart in figuring out how to buffer, how to let the words hold me—or hold the words, my sheaf of arrows. It’s harder to buffer—for any of us---when things change so obviously quickly. I’m not complaining. I’m just looking at this. I’m looking at this through the lens of the visits of my daughter Kelly, Jerry’s daughter Pam, and my son Scott. Jerry’s daughter Amy will be along next week. A change: they’re all here mid-winter (not usual) because they love us and they want to help take care of us.
I found Scott some plastic bags to put on his tennis shoes, and he and Jerry got the snow dug out and 
blown. Scott stayed almost a week: snow delayed his flight. But he works with Big Data stuff for IBM and can click from the wilds of northern Michigan to California and India. But I’m aware especially of just being taken care of. Looking at my big son and knowing he’s brought not only several seasons of BBC Sherlock, but his own precious self. Seeing all of us-- in my present particularly fleshly awarenesss--as flesh, all breaking down at its various rates, all joyously hung in this void or un-void where we just go on, watching out for each other.I remember my Nana Simpich, who, it seemed to me then, wanted everything perfect—house, garden, flowers in vases, dinner table, yard. She used to pinch my cheeks because she said they didn’t have enough color. She was dismayed about my tomboyish clothes. Then she had a stroke. Then a woman was brought in to help out. She directed this woman with the best authority she could, but it was a trial to her. How would I be, how will I be, if my life comes to that?I have been one to plan, arrange, amass credentials. But now I’m reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Murial Barbery. (I recommend it!) The main character, Renee Michel, a French concierge, intelligent and educated far beyond her station, has been flipping through her sister’s pretentious dissertation on William of Ockham. Renee says “The quest for meaning and beauty is hardly a sign that man has an elevated nature, that by leaving behind his animal impulses he will go on to find the justification of his existence in the enlightenment of the spirit: no, it is a primed weapon at the service of a trivial and material goal. And when the weapon becomes its own subject [my ital.], this is the simple consequence of the specific neuronal wiring that distinguishes us from other animals; by allowing us to survive, the efficiency of intelligence also offers us the possibility of complexity without foundation, thought without usefulness, and beauty without purpose. It’s like a computer bug, a consequence without consequence of the subtlty of our cortex, a superfluous perversion making an utterly wasteful use of the means at its disposal.”I do know that the greatest joy is when we are able to see through (not obliterate, as if we could) that need for intellectual control, to be amused at it, to see our lives develop and disappear moment by moment. I know this as surely as I know anything after over a lifetime of practicing Christianity and then Buddhist meditation. What I learned from Christianity has often been over-simplified to “Let go and let God.”Then it appeared to me that the wildly ambiguous word God is like a door-stop in front of the openness. Just see. Just see what’s there, what’s beyond the fussing and the organizing and the desperate desire to hang on, to avoid change. Something is changing all the time. And Something is the wide sky of our own mind and is made of change-and-not-change. This is how it seems to me.Not to get all apocalyptic. But when one’s “ordered” life is disrupted, one ponders. Oddly, as I feel less “substantial,” there is a great joy underlying, or should I say pervading, or should I say behind? I don’t HAVE to be substantial. Or in charge.
News Flash! Next week, look for the link to Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, Sydney Lea’s and my ebook from Autumn House Books. Our thoughtful/crazy essays about how things used to be, how we see our lives in poetry, how our children, sports, food, music, and more have shaped our work and our lives.