Month: August 2016

From time to time, I search online photos of the streets I lived as a child. We can do that now. When I see the photo of the address of the house I lived in from Kindergarten through the 4th grade, the picture is framed to look right down the alley that ran alongside the flat on Ring Street. As a little girl, I played in that alley with other kids in that working class neighborhood. I was Dale Evans to Randy Larson’s Roy Rogers.

As a girl, I watched as my small grandma, wearing a long, black coat, her hair covered with a babushka, slowly walked to our house through that alley, her eyes toward the pavement, while I hung perilously over the edge of the upstairs railing. Grandma did not speak English well, and so I don’t remember having conversations with her. Was I afraid of her, this strange woman only a generation removed from me, illiterate in both Ukrainian and English? I don’t remember.

I have only a few pictures of my Ukrainian grandma, but one is a favorite. The year is 1955, and the photo is in black and white. I am sitting at the kitchen table of that flat on Ring Street, the table ringed with little girls, paper crowns atop our heads, celebrating my birthday. I have dark circles under my eyes. In the chair behind me is my Grandma, and I see in her eyes a brightness, the brightness I might see in the eyes of a child. Did she love me? Was she happy to be at the party? Did she enjoy the little girls gathered in that small and dark upstairs kitchen? Only that picture frames the possibility that she had a light in her, a light that even years of alcohol and violence could not, did not extinguish.

As I grow older and encounter the lessons of this time of life, I remember those I have loved who have not been with me for many, many years. I think about their lives, and sometimes I remember something I had not remembered before, a long-ago moment with dust on its edges, which I rub off with my hands as I remember. Sometimes, my memory does not shift; the details I have carried with me for many years remain the same. Sometimes, I know something I have always known, although that knowing has never been spoken, not even by me. Sometimes, a feeling accompanies the memory, and I am sad again, and again.

This much is true: the ancestors are in us, in our genes and in our memories, in our eyes and in our hearts. They live in us. They live, bigger than our memories. I like to think of them hanging out in my life, observing, without judgement, who I am. They are there for all of us, but it makes my life richer and deeper to remember them being there for me, too.

I love my Grandma. I always did, and I always will.

Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall. – Confucius

For those who need hope today, I offer you this reminder, which has been present in human beings for all time: “Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall.”

So often, we value being positive above truly living. So often, we want the world to see our best face, as if we have never failed. So often, we do not really live, because we have not fallen into the darkest places in ourselves, and risen, free.

We limit ourselves. We limit ourselves by holding back, on the edge of our despair and discomfort, on the edges of our lonely and lost places. We limit ourselves when we are clear, always, on how to act and how to not act, on what to choose, and on what not to choose; we limit ourselves when our greatest value is to hold on to those rules of etiquette that were given to us as children, and which we cherish, holding tightly to them. We hold our breath. We hold back our true selves, our deepest selves, our richest selves.

We drown, really, in the great waves of despair that threaten to overcome us, when we fight those waves of despair. When we ride those waves, when we go down, into the darkness and depths, we rise again, our faces radiant, our hearts bursting, our eyes shining with the knowing that we have faced the very worst, and we live, we live! Then, we shine our eyes toward others, and we see and know their despair, also. Until we have gone into the darkness, our hearts cannot open to the pain of the world.

It is difficult to totter on the edge of the abyss, that difficult, tear-filled place within ourselves, to always be careful never to break the rules we were taught as children: “Be careful!” “Don’t be mad!” “No tears, now!” Or we totter on the edge of the abyss when we are confronted, once again, with a memory that reminds us of an angry parent, the silent bitterness of that place we left long ago, that place that still has the power to haunt our lives. Yes, it is difficult to totter on the edge of the abyss, that place that has us balancing, using our vital energy just to stay afloat.

In this drought, I watch the dry plants wither in the summer sun, and I know, without a doubt, one green shoot will stay alive, catch the tiniest drop of moisture from the winter rain, and come to life again, surely, in the spring.

Today, if you are lonely, if you are in pain, give yourself the gift of relishing that loneliness. Revel in it. Go for it!

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall.”