Tribute to Deborah Digges, and Fear, and Sweeping
Note: This was written three weeks ago; I am just getting around to posting.
Each time my life seems to settle into a rhythm, something changes again.
Right after writing that, I said out loud, “What am I talking about?” My life, truth be told, has always been chaotic. I think maybe I welcome this chaos, even if I don’t choose it exactly. Or maybe I do choose it. I chose, after all, to take S into my life; I chose to leave my partner of six years; I chose to move to a small town in the middle of nowhere and to make a home here. Each choice has meant leaving behind, starting over. Each choice has irrevocably changed me.
Sometimes I imagine moments in my life when I could have chosen differently. Not gone to the college I chose. (I might not have become a writer, or a teacher, or a person who cares about the world beyond herself). Not moved to Cincinnati to work in publishing. (I might not have finally come out). Not kissed the woman I would spend three years loving and hating—the worst relationship of my life. (I would have suffered less, but also known less). Taken the other job, closer to my graduate school home in Arizona. (I can’t even imagine what staying in Arizona would have meant, can’t imagine myself not living and loving and learning here). Not left my partner three years ago (I wouldn’t have S).
There’s nothing profound about this—our lives are a series of choices, and everybody can look back at the decisions they made and wonder, “what if…”. But I am lucky enough to not have any regrets. I wonder how many people can say that. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve made plenty of stupid mistakes. I have hurt myself and other people plenty of times. But I’ve learned from all of these situations, and I feel lucky.
A few months ago, I was convinced I was losing my job. All the signs were there: the university was facing a major financial crisis, and I am in the most vulnerable class of workers, not tenure-track, and also not unionized. And, over the last couple months, I’ve watched plenty of people lose their jobs. A friend has worked closely with me for nine years; two weeks ago, she learned she had won one of the university’s highest honors, and last week, she received a layoff letter. We sat together at the faculty/staff dinner, and I watched her get her award, then followed her out into the hallway and wept with her when she couldn’t hold it together. Later, a group of us went out and had a few too many drinks, talking about the unfairness of it all.
In the meantime (as I mentioned in last post), I’ve learned that I’m not going to be fired, but that my job will change—I’ll go down to teaching one class a year and administrating an office that combines my current halftime job as service-learning coordinator with other work related to outreach. At first, I was sad—being a teacher is so central to my identity that I can’t imagine not teaching—but since then, I’ve come to see this change as an opportunity to build something new from the foundation of the current program I coordinate, to rededicate myself to what I consider to be the center of my life and work, the triad that started this blog in the first place: writing, spirituality, and social justice. Also, truth be told, I am getting burned out on teaching, finding myself more irritated with my students than I’ve ever been before, tired of planning lessons and grading. I think the change will be good for me (and my students) in the long run. And although my work may involve more evening and weekend commitments, they are the kinds of commitments in which I can involve S, whereas grading papers until 3 a.m., as I was doing last night, separates me from her rather than helping her to grow.
It is hard, though, to be happy and grateful when people I love are losing their jobs. I can’t fathom how it would have felt if my trip to the dean’s office had had a different outcome—if I’d been told I was getting laid off rather than that I was getting a new opportunity (even if that opportunity does not come with a raise).
The woman I know well said to me the day after she’d heard the news of her layoff, while weeping, “I know deep down inside that when one door closes, another one opens.” It sounds simplistic, and yet it is so true. I think about how devastated I was the first time I got close to getting a book published but didn’t. The experience made me rethink what would really make me happy, what I really wanted. I think about how sad I was when I didn’t get a job I really wanted a year before I got this one—I never would have ended up here. And the kids I’d inquired about before S came into my life, the ones for whom other families were chosen? They weren’t my kids. It’s that simple. S was meant to be mine.
This week S and I had our biggest fight to date, and she physically hurt me for the first time. I didn’t fight back, didn’t touch her, and I know that because of this I have kept her trust. But I’ve grown more wary of her moods; frankly, for the first time, I’m afraid of her. I spent the week trying to make sense of this fear, and doing so has made me look closely at the nature of fear itself.
I was afraid I wouldn’t have a job, and now, I’m afraid of failing at this new one, of not making myself valuable, of losing my job the next time around. More to the point, I am worried that whatever I do won’t be enough, that people will look back at it years from now and think it didn’t really matter. And, of course, I worry about S’s future—she’s backsliding after so many months of progress. I am afraid of what the future holds.
But maybe fear is not meant to be avoided. Maybe it’s also not meant to be fought. Maybe we’re supposed to live inside it, to let it teach us a new way to see.
Deborah Digges, a poet whose work I love, wrote in her poem “Late Summer,”
Mercy’s at best approximate,
like the first weeks of blindness
before the other senses’ stunned quartet have learned to translate
inside the skull’s black paradise
some recovery of touch, this odor of apples, sea-wind,
hearth-fire, this prophesy
of rain or danger,
this autumn or spring dryness in the leaves.
Deborah Digges must have stumbled around a lot, as I have, to have written these words. She must have also understood that stumbling can lead to translation, to a new way of understanding—she knew fear, and perhaps more importantly, knew how wonder and fear could coexist.
I can’t write this, though, without also mentioning that Digges killed herself recently. I can’t understand it, but then, I didn’t know her, only her work. She was a visionary, though, and it is sad to me that someone who can make words come to life the way she did would want to die. I wonder about this, what makes some people strong enough to live in the “first weeks of blindness,” hoping there will be “some recovery,” and what makes others stumble, never learning to live with their own fear, expecting some kind of salvation that is not possible or real, not realizing that “mercy is at best approximate.”
The longer I live, the clearer it becomes to me that fear is always with us, holding on tightly enough to keep us safe—we need to know our own limits, to understand our own vulnerabilities and frailties. But fear grips harder on some than others, warping words, actions and thoughts. The outcomes of fear, its effects on one’s life, reflect one’s life circumstances, and maybe also some genetic predisposition for survival.
As I stumble through these last two busy weeks of the semester, this start of my third year as a single person and my second year as S’s mom. It is almost summer. Most of my seeds have sprouted and are waiting patiently in my enclosed front porch to be put into the ground.
Digges wrote,
Once I asked myself, when was I happy?
I was looking at a February sky.
When did the light hold me and I didn’t struggle?
And it came to me, an image
of myself in a doorway, a broom in my hand,
sweeping out beach sand, salt, soot,
pollen and pine needles, the last December leaves,
and mud wasps, moths, flies crushed to wafers,
and spring’s first seed husks,
and then the final tufts like down, and red bud petals
like autumn leaves—so many petals…
Even now, I am sanest when I can take the long view, backwards or forwards. Maybe happiness isn’t real except in the whole narrative of our lives, which we understand only from a distance. Later in the poem, Digges goes on,
And so the broom became
an oar that parted waters, raft-keel and mast, or twirled
around and around on the back lawn,
a sort of compass through whose blurred counter-motion
the woods became a gathering of brooms,
onlooking or ancestral…
gone in motion, back and forth, sweeping.
Each time my life seems to settle into a rhythm, something changes again.
Right after writing that, I said out loud, “What am I talking about?” My life, truth be told, has always been chaotic. I think maybe I welcome this chaos, even if I don’t choose it exactly. Or maybe I do choose it. I chose, after all, to take S into my life; I chose to leave my partner of six years; I chose to move to a small town in the middle of nowhere and to make a home here. Each choice has meant leaving behind, starting over. Each choice has irrevocably changed me.
Sometimes I imagine moments in my life when I could have chosen differently. Not gone to the college I chose. (I might not have become a writer, or a teacher, or a person who cares about the world beyond herself). Not moved to Cincinnati to work in publishing. (I might not have finally come out). Not kissed the woman I would spend three years loving and hating—the worst relationship of my life. (I would have suffered less, but also known less). Taken the other job, closer to my graduate school home in Arizona. (I can’t even imagine what staying in Arizona would have meant, can’t imagine myself not living and loving and learning here). Not left my partner three years ago (I wouldn’t have S).
There’s nothing profound about this—our lives are a series of choices, and everybody can look back at the decisions they made and wonder, “what if…”. But I am lucky enough to not have any regrets. I wonder how many people can say that. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve made plenty of stupid mistakes. I have hurt myself and other people plenty of times. But I’ve learned from all of these situations, and I feel lucky.
A few months ago, I was convinced I was losing my job. All the signs were there: the university was facing a major financial crisis, and I am in the most vulnerable class of workers, not tenure-track, and also not unionized. And, over the last couple months, I’ve watched plenty of people lose their jobs. A friend has worked closely with me for nine years; two weeks ago, she learned she had won one of the university’s highest honors, and last week, she received a layoff letter. We sat together at the faculty/staff dinner, and I watched her get her award, then followed her out into the hallway and wept with her when she couldn’t hold it together. Later, a group of us went out and had a few too many drinks, talking about the unfairness of it all.
In the meantime (as I mentioned in last post), I’ve learned that I’m not going to be fired, but that my job will change—I’ll go down to teaching one class a year and administrating an office that combines my current halftime job as service-learning coordinator with other work related to outreach. At first, I was sad—being a teacher is so central to my identity that I can’t imagine not teaching—but since then, I’ve come to see this change as an opportunity to build something new from the foundation of the current program I coordinate, to rededicate myself to what I consider to be the center of my life and work, the triad that started this blog in the first place: writing, spirituality, and social justice. Also, truth be told, I am getting burned out on teaching, finding myself more irritated with my students than I’ve ever been before, tired of planning lessons and grading. I think the change will be good for me (and my students) in the long run. And although my work may involve more evening and weekend commitments, they are the kinds of commitments in which I can involve S, whereas grading papers until 3 a.m., as I was doing last night, separates me from her rather than helping her to grow.
It is hard, though, to be happy and grateful when people I love are losing their jobs. I can’t fathom how it would have felt if my trip to the dean’s office had had a different outcome—if I’d been told I was getting laid off rather than that I was getting a new opportunity (even if that opportunity does not come with a raise).
The woman I know well said to me the day after she’d heard the news of her layoff, while weeping, “I know deep down inside that when one door closes, another one opens.” It sounds simplistic, and yet it is so true. I think about how devastated I was the first time I got close to getting a book published but didn’t. The experience made me rethink what would really make me happy, what I really wanted. I think about how sad I was when I didn’t get a job I really wanted a year before I got this one—I never would have ended up here. And the kids I’d inquired about before S came into my life, the ones for whom other families were chosen? They weren’t my kids. It’s that simple. S was meant to be mine.
This week S and I had our biggest fight to date, and she physically hurt me for the first time. I didn’t fight back, didn’t touch her, and I know that because of this I have kept her trust. But I’ve grown more wary of her moods; frankly, for the first time, I’m afraid of her. I spent the week trying to make sense of this fear, and doing so has made me look closely at the nature of fear itself.
I was afraid I wouldn’t have a job, and now, I’m afraid of failing at this new one, of not making myself valuable, of losing my job the next time around. More to the point, I am worried that whatever I do won’t be enough, that people will look back at it years from now and think it didn’t really matter. And, of course, I worry about S’s future—she’s backsliding after so many months of progress. I am afraid of what the future holds.
But maybe fear is not meant to be avoided. Maybe it’s also not meant to be fought. Maybe we’re supposed to live inside it, to let it teach us a new way to see.
Deborah Digges, a poet whose work I love, wrote in her poem “Late Summer,”
Mercy’s at best approximate,
like the first weeks of blindness
before the other senses’ stunned quartet have learned to translate
inside the skull’s black paradise
some recovery of touch, this odor of apples, sea-wind,
hearth-fire, this prophesy
of rain or danger,
this autumn or spring dryness in the leaves.
Deborah Digges must have stumbled around a lot, as I have, to have written these words. She must have also understood that stumbling can lead to translation, to a new way of understanding—she knew fear, and perhaps more importantly, knew how wonder and fear could coexist.
I can’t write this, though, without also mentioning that Digges killed herself recently. I can’t understand it, but then, I didn’t know her, only her work. She was a visionary, though, and it is sad to me that someone who can make words come to life the way she did would want to die. I wonder about this, what makes some people strong enough to live in the “first weeks of blindness,” hoping there will be “some recovery,” and what makes others stumble, never learning to live with their own fear, expecting some kind of salvation that is not possible or real, not realizing that “mercy is at best approximate.”
The longer I live, the clearer it becomes to me that fear is always with us, holding on tightly enough to keep us safe—we need to know our own limits, to understand our own vulnerabilities and frailties. But fear grips harder on some than others, warping words, actions and thoughts. The outcomes of fear, its effects on one’s life, reflect one’s life circumstances, and maybe also some genetic predisposition for survival.
As I stumble through these last two busy weeks of the semester, this start of my third year as a single person and my second year as S’s mom. It is almost summer. Most of my seeds have sprouted and are waiting patiently in my enclosed front porch to be put into the ground.
Digges wrote,
Once I asked myself, when was I happy?
I was looking at a February sky.
When did the light hold me and I didn’t struggle?
And it came to me, an image
of myself in a doorway, a broom in my hand,
sweeping out beach sand, salt, soot,
pollen and pine needles, the last December leaves,
and mud wasps, moths, flies crushed to wafers,
and spring’s first seed husks,
and then the final tufts like down, and red bud petals
like autumn leaves—so many petals…
Even now, I am sanest when I can take the long view, backwards or forwards. Maybe happiness isn’t real except in the whole narrative of our lives, which we understand only from a distance. Later in the poem, Digges goes on,
And so the broom became
an oar that parted waters, raft-keel and mast, or twirled
around and around on the back lawn,
a sort of compass through whose blurred counter-motion
the woods became a gathering of brooms,
onlooking or ancestral…
gone in motion, back and forth, sweeping.
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