Stuck

Background art for Sleeping Beauty by Eyvind Earle, 1959.

What the nanny saw–What can I tell you about that day?  More than a hundred years have passed and I am an old woman. Memory is no longer my handmaid, but I will draw her into service if first you speak plainly to me. Tell me true, have I grown old in marrow and bone as my mother and grandmother before me?  I was in my prime and sprightly when Princess Aurora discovered the spinning wheel and sent us to our slumbers.  Now a crone scowls at me from the mirror, but I did not live those years.  I did not live. The princess awoke bursting with life as ripe as a summer peach, but those who shared her sleep bend like ancient willows and fade like autumn roses. Are we old before our time or are we living beyond our years?  It is a puzzle that tests my wits, but I can find no answer.

Illustration for Sleeping Beauty by Liz Wong

My sorrows aside now, let me tell you about that day. The princess was a beauty and sweet.  But never more sweet than when webs were spinning behind her green eyes. It seemed she knew, even from a child, that only the merry and fulsome paraded past her window—that the light and laughter hid darkness and tears. In the scullery, they counted on her kindness and the gifts she would tuck among the dinner plates for those with miseries at home. How she guessed the truth of grieving widows and hungry tots, I cannot avow, but maids gossip on staircases and footmen whisper in halls.  Perhaps she had been seeking the spindle all her days.

She awoke that morning quiet and mournful, with eyes that would not meet my own.  “Why so glum, Your Highness?” I asked her. “Whatever your worry, tis not the end of the world.”  But, in truth, it was.  She had long been at her lessons when the tutor, a dozy, old sot, awoke from a nap to find her vanished from her writing desk.  All in a flurry, stable boys and chamberlains, parlor maids and almoners flew through the palace calling out her name. The queen, in her bedroom, wept. I cannot speak to the tales of an old woman waiting at the wheel, for that is not what I saw.  In that last heartbeat before we tumbled into darkness, I threw open the door at the top of the tower and I saw Princess Aurora, her hand upon the spindle, smiling at her finger, pricked and beaded with blood.  Inspired by the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale “Little Briar Rose”.

I’m stuck!  Without benefit of burning bush or fiery wheel, this lunchtime epiphany smacked me right between the eyes, leaving me open-mouthed and staring at my last bite of salad. Salad–my standard weekday lunch–my default when I can think of nothing else to eat. Amid the chaos, salad has been a mainstay, an easy choice, a bulwark in the face of confusion.  I read somewhere that Einstein always wore sweaters, so he didn’t have to waste his time on choices sartorial.  Salads are my culinary equivalent.  But as I considered the lettuce, dangling from my fork like a limp and oily banner, I realized I had fallen into a rut, perpetually standing at the salad bar while around me the pastas and the panini; the goulashes and the gyros languished untouched.

This is not what I expected.  How could I be stuck?  Map the last eight years of my life and you’ll witness my pinball progression.  Four moves, three jobs, one divorce and a graduate degree, stuck is the last thing I should be.  But there it was staring me in the face and dripping Italian dressing on my spreadsheets. To my surprise, realizing my state came as a relief.  For what is stuck, can be unstuck.  In fact therein lies the stuff of great literature.  Stories, the really good ones–whether fiction or fact–are about people trading in their Velcro for Teflon.  I can do that.  You can do that.  It only takes a shift in perspective.

I’ll allow that shifting a viewpoint isn’t always as easy as picking a burger over a bowl of lettuce.  Sometimes it takes a jolt to the system like Dorothy’s tornado or Jonah’s great fish or sticking your finger on a spindle to make you see that the safe cocoon you’ve wrapped around your life has grown too small.  Sleeping Beauty could have chosen to turn away when she came upon the chance to learn something new, something that was not part of her limited and artificial world.  It is so easy to opt for what feels safe, when the great universe beyond the edge of your knowledge and experience rises up so huge and scary.  And once you chosen the new over the known, it’s natural to take time to process, to sleep on it as the house spins and the sea roars and the vines grow up around the castle walls.  But when we’re rested and ready, when we square our shoulders and step up to the edge, we realize that this is what life is all about, seeking the whats and the what ifs and, most importantly, sharing what we learn along the way.

(The video included here by The Avett Brothers is wonderful, except for the first 50 seconds or so, which is kind of lame.  But if you stick it out, I guarantee, you’ll be glad you did.  Trust me!)

 

Wide Awake

It only took the touch of his heel to appease the hungry waves.  As the water swallowed him up, calf then thigh, then all he was, Jonah could feel the sea relax, satisfied and sated.  Down he plunged and the light began to fade.  Water rushed into his nose and filled his ears. Down he fell, not trying to swim, but surrendering to the inevitable.  Irony sparked in the deepening gloom. Here in the rush of water, the pull of water, the weight of water, Jonah finally appreciated the omnipresence of the divine.  He would drown in the Lord, become one with the will of God.  Perhaps he should have gone to Nineveh straightaway, but wasn’t this so much better.  Down below, a dark shape twisted out of the shadows.  Something glinted silvery in the last of the dying light.  As the darkness within darkness came rapidly closer, Jonah closed his eyes and drifted to sleep.  (Inspired by the story of Jonah and the Great Fish.)

In early summer the central Missouri hills are a green and rolling sea, crashing against the floodplains in leafy swells; tossing my car about like driftwood on the ocean.  I had come to the hills to escape the noise of the city, the stress of the job, the frustrations of the day-to-day.  Somewhere in the sustained quiet of a country night, I hoped to rebuild my depleted energies and regroup for the next foray into responsibility.  For 48 hours, I intended to be lazy and whim-driven.  I would sip wine with lunch and get completely lost in a good book.  I would spend time in the sun and walk until my muscles ached.  For two days, I would recapture the easy smile and the unforced laugh.  For two days, my life was my own and the world was a beautiful place.

View of the fountain at The Conservatory in Augusta, Missouri

When immersed in the luxury of free time, I like to delude myself that if I could live my whole life the way I live my vacation, I would never be stressed or angry.  My stomach wouldn’t cramp when the phone rang and my insomnia would slouch out the door, leaving no forwarding address. Being adrift in a sea of self-determination would be a pleasure cruise that never ended and my golden years would be spent sipping pina coladas and contemplating the sunset.

Like that’s going happen.

I am a worrier of long standing.  Looking at photos of myself as a little girl, I see the same anxiety-pinched forehead that still greets me in the mirror each day.  In fact I think of myself as a pinched-person, someone who lives in perpetual mid-flinch, wearing a life that feels two sizes too small. This cramped disposition affords me a special affinity for the ancient prophet, Jonah.  Here was a guy so crabbed and cranky, he couldn’t join the celebration when an entire city dodged annihilation.  Even his Boss was bemused.

Like Jonah I sometimes tend to get lost in the weeds, fretting over the health of one shriveled beanstalk and ignoring the profusion of the garden.  Though he covered a lot of territory in his travels, Jonah’s perspective never stretched farther than the end of his nose. By focusing on his anger, he missed the miraculous.  During times of stress, I’ve caught myself mistaking my point of view for the general consensus and projecting my personal disappointments on the world at large.  I forget that where I see chaos, others see opportunities; where I see clouds covering the sun, others see the promise of rain.  My little vacation in May gave me a chance to catch my breath and reorient.  Ironically, two days of solitude reminded me how broad is the horizon and how varied is the view. I came home with the desire to live every day with a vacation outlook and not let the grindstone become my only vista.  To paraphrase John Cage, “(my) intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life (I’m) living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.” Wide Awake by Katy Perry