Beauty and Terror

“All my life, and it has not come to / any more than this: / beauty and terror.”

–from Blue Pastures, Mary Oliver

Each morning I wake to the certainty of my husband in bed next to me. His frame is long, his breathing steady. I am anchored by the fact of him. The alarms cry out and we reach to silence them—our phones so much easier to dispatch than the screaming sirens of 1980s alarm clocks. On the mornings we both leave the house, I’m up and downstairs to ready breakfast as he rumbles above me on the second floor. I make our coffees, mine caramel, his tar, and revel again in the fact of our large 1930s kitchen. Its usefulness and good light since we bought a red glass lamp at an antique store and placed it atop the fridge. The morning is bathed in the glow of contentment, a feeling that still stuns me to silence some days after so many days—before—without it.

This is the beauty in Mary Oliver’s equation, I think. The momentary seconds of our one wild and precious life where we are aware enough to stop and say thank you. To breathe in gratitude. To be without fear.

The price of such joy, though, is a weight of fear and dread so heavy I can only imagine it would break the scales at highway weigh stations. This invisible burden never visited me before I was this happy. Now, it is the duet partner of my joy—an ever-present bass note in a minor key beneath the bird lilt of happiness.

At night, I will the terror away. In bed, book on my lap as Michael works a New York Times crossword puzzle so dense it must have been designed solely for linguistic masochists, I fight the nagging undercurrent that this is all fleeting. That, as Jason Isbell sings, “One day I’ll be gone,” or one day he’ll be gone. 

There is never enough time. 

The time’s running out blues is a song I know well. As a woman, there’s a sell by date for attractiveness, usefulness, and value that I knew early. While those dates seem to be moving a bit—see Viola Davis, Helen Mirren, Sandra Bullock, and assorted other women over 50 as evidence that power and vitality and beauty aren’t age-dependent—letting go of the feeling that I’m past my prime is a hard thing to do.

Take, for instance, the show Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates. We watched an episode tonight that wasn’t anything special; all the episodes are fantastic and it is a show worth watching, but this one had no huge reveal or wow moment as some tend to do. What it had was two guests, men in their 60s, looking back at their ancestry and thinking about their own children—links in a long chain of legacy that shows they were here. And friends, I have to tell you, the beauty of it was so terrible I nearly fell to tears on my couch.

I am 45 and have no children both by choice and circumstance. Would I have had children had I met this man sooner? Had I trusted myself more? Had I believed I could be even half the parent that my parents were to me? I’ll never know. That ship has sailed, and I’ve been happily watching her fade into the horizon for years.

But, there’s a real ache when I consider Stephen Sondheim’s “Children and Art” from Sunday in the Park with George. The sentiment is that these are the only two things worth leaving behind in this world: children and art. Much as I’d love to be the sort who never considers things like this, my love of books gave me the gift of the long gaze a long time ago, and I just can’t move through a day without thinking about the great big hairy question: what is it all for?

If not for children to look up their ancestry and see my name and wonder about who I was and the choices I made, if not for a future filled with relatives who come behind me grateful for my place in their line, then it must be for art. This life, the breath in my lungs and knots in my hair and stiffness in my joints when I step onto our hardwood floor each morning must be in the pursuit of art. I must create something that says “she was here—this was her voice—she mattered.” Right?

Michael says “you have your book of poems and who knows what else is in you?” He says “you’ve taught 200+ kids per year for 15 years.” I tell him I don’t need him to fix this, and he says “But I really want to.” And I am in love with him all over again, falling faster and deeper than I knew possible just a few seconds ago before he tried, for the umpteenth time, to save me from myself.

I saw an ad for a sweatshirt the other day that featured a half-full coffee pot and the words “Your worth is not measured by your productivity” and I’ve thought about it since. If that is not the measure of my worth, if I haven’t produced anything—like children or art—how can anyone know my worth? And of course, the better question—why do I need anyone else to know something that should be ingrained in me?

The feminist in me who preaches confidence and self-esteem and the value of knowing your own monstertrucking value feels ashamed to admit I don’t always carry the torch of those ideals. The teacher in me knows the only real lesson I have to offer is my own failings and what I’ve learned from them. I can’t think of a single success story I’ve ever been told that made me feel better about myself, but the real shitshow stories always give me something to hold on to.

So I’m trying to see the beauty in the terror. To accept that my witnessing of a startling streak of bird song or a shock of sunrise over the plains is what it is all for. To be here, now. To see this, today. To love Michael for as long as I can because Sondheim missed one thing in his list. He missed love.

As it was in the beginning, it is now and ever shall be. 

Love without end. 

Amen.

Amen.