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| Feeling nostalgic this week. Doggy paddling in a sea of memories and trying to figure whether to dive in or swim ashore.
My dad recently played me a clip of contemplative thinker Cynthia Bourgeault. She was talking about what makes like difficult.. she speaks of this world as being dense and having hard edges. We are constantly forced to make choices that preclude other possibilities.. we bump up against the hard edges of other finite beings, against the cold rails of time and space. Loving one person sometimes means you cannot love another.
And then we lose things. Perhaps we lose an unselfconscious joy in some activity or pursuit. Perhaps it is as simple as losing the resonance that we feel (or at least I felt) with music as a teenager. As we get older we lose the right to be childlike with each other, to do and say all the awful but sometimes incredible things that children and teenagers can do and say to each other. We lose a wide open sky of possibilities, years stretching out in front of us like rows of corn. Then we lose people we love. Slowly we lose our memories, or they become so distorted with each successive remembering that they are eventually as good as lost.
All this loss is so painful. And yet. I believe all will someday be found and restored. The singularity, the linearity, the density of this life, I hope and believe, will be redeemed, exiled, and glorified in ways that I can not imagine in the slightest.
And this is only half the story. We gain much along the linear life we cobble together. I just always mourn the loss. Maybe more than I ought to.
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Wow it's been awhile. I'm quite busy with research now that I've settled into my real lab (where I'll be for the next four or so years).... Still dating my new man-boy... I guess not so new anymore.
I am feeling off-kilter and have been, in a fairly minor way, for the last month or so. Crying more than normal, feeling overwhelmed and generally not peaceful. As usual I don't want to pathologize it, but neither am I ok with it. But I don't like anything that I can say about it.. don't like the idea that it's hormones, or my brain, or the season, and certainly not that that's just how women are... I don't know how to think about it honestly and in a way that is productive and makes me feel like a human being. Maybe nothing is actually "wrong" at all? I don't know.
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| So I'm officially in a relationship again, and not with Ash, from whom I've not heard for four months. This makes me feel torn, and I am not in the habit of dividing my affections. I told a friend of mine that these two people are not in competition because they are polar opposites, and he said but yes they are because you are one person. And he's right.
This new fellow is (is it bad to say this?) everything I miss about PM. He's silly, incredibly extroverted, witty, sometimes offensive, quick, blunt, honest, very affectionate and loyal, and around just me, quiet and open. He has that metrosexual streak that PM had too which makes for a hilarious combination of gym rat and fashion slave. Of course he differs from PM in an number of things as well, like political sensibility, stubbornness, metaphysicality, adventurousness, and diplomacy.
Half a world away, Ash is probably enduring the darkest period of his life. How much of a relationship did we have? What could the future possibly hold for us? I don't know exactly. I don't want to be calculating all these things. But I do have to figure out when to tell him that I'm coming to Israel in June.
Otherwise things are great. My rotation this quarter was not what I had planned on, but I ended up spending most of my time with a new female hotshot professor with whom I get along quite well. I know I can learn what I want to learn under her care, and become a good scientist, a clear thinker, a clever experimentalist, and a woman maneuvering in what is still a man's world without necessarily acting like a man OR banking on any gender dynamics to smooth the road. We'll see if I end up there in a few months.
My family is doing great, and I'm really really looking forward to a road trip up the coast with pantalones in just over a week........!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! KWA, I'll be in the bay area very briefly (heh heh, briefly...) on the weekend of the 30th-- maybe we can sneak in a coffeeshop trip together!?? | | |
| I just found out that Gomez is playing in town tomorrow night-- well technically tonight! SO EXCITING! They rock so hard that I am fine with going alone, even though all the music is suffused with memories of PM.
Soon to be my visceral experience of the week:
Wish you could join me, y'all!! | | |
| Lately on my mind:
Three nights ago a man died who I heard speak twice in the last five months. He was (I just wrote 'is' instead) the head of the overarching department that my Ph.D. program falls under, in the medical school. This man was known as an Alzheimer's and aging expert, and one of the main players in California's emerging stem cell policy-making. He came to our orientation at the beginning of September and spoke about the program for about ten minutes until he got a call from Sacramento and took off early. He mentioned that his hobby was flying his plane all along the west coast, whenever he could.
In mid-December, he spoke at the department's holiday dinner, and my table-mates and I rolled our eyes about how his short speech was all about stem cells, which generally have little impact on what we do, basic scientists that we mostly are. He was well-spoken and enthusiastic.
He died when his small plane crashed in the desert east of here, on Saturday night. Although I but barely grazed paths with him, this news has colored the past two days in rather somber hues. It is too quick, this life, and we are too breakable. Death is kind of like the final act of our awkward tenure in our crazy bodies, always falling apart and embarrassing us with their corporeality and smells and needs and sounds and unpredictability. In a quote I can't find at the moment, Polkinghorne talks about the importance of acknowledging and examining our deep sadness at the transience and fragility of things. I would go further and say that it is horrifying in some ways. It doesn't square with what we feel ought to be so. I have long identified with the girl in GM Hopkins' poem, Goldengove.
But that is not, will not be, the sum total of my response to death. Jesus wept just minutes before he restored Lazarus to life-- what a combination. It's a hopeful image that you can sink your teeth into, isn't it? In the end, it is that remarkable being-- Jesus-- whose strong, surprising love makes everything... actually ok.... in the final, very, end. How crazy is that? I'll leave it at that tonight, and do my reading on one of the more remarkable and less embarassing things about our bodies-- motor learning. | | |
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