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[ A song I’m loving ]

Hi, sweet reader. My daughter had her last day of preschool a few days ago — my face was a leaky faucet all week — and we are now in the swirl of a few weeks of thick and ripe summertime before starting at her new Big Kid School. I can barely believe we’re here, in this phase of truly leaving toddlerhood behind, facing a whole new world together. I am flooded with the confusion, tenderness, awe, and curiosity that comes from recognizing when you’re in a threshold in real time.

Yesterday, we went blueberry-picking at a local blueberry farm, filling our basket with the sweetest bursts and inhaling blueberry ice cream and watching a gaggle of kids swarm around a pond, ooh-ing & ahh-ing over crawdads. I noticed myself trying to grasp the bliss, not miss the sweetness, hold on tight to the memory as it unfolded in front of me. Remember this, I insisted, rather than simply feeling it. This insistence on remembering made it near impossible to sink in, to be with sensation, to simply stay. The grasping is an attempt to avoid the grief of every moment and season and experience I love slowly evaporating into something else. This turning of time always in the background of presence. This knowing so much is about to change, and can I just linger in this simple love a little bit longer? Can I let it permeate into my being a little bit deeper? Can I hold on? Can I just stay here?

When I’m afraid of change (which I am often), my attention feels more like gripping than feeling. I try to contort it into being instead of getting out of the way and allowing it to unfold. Sometimes, my attempts at presence are eroded by my wondering if I’ll remember what it felt like — if I savored it enough, or if it will become fogged over by what comes next. Sometimes, I am so attuned to the past and future that staying right here, in all of its waves of discomfort and achy beauty, feels futile. The fear of losing what’s here can become so wide that I distance myself from fully feeling it, so it won’t be as sharp when it leaves. I morph into a reporter instead of one who fully experiences. In this way, my attention turns into a task instead of an opening. Something to Get Right instead of something to offer the wild beauty, horror, and astounding aliveness right in front of and around me.

an ending that can only bring another beginning

Mary Oliver once shared that attention without feeling is only a report1. In this current threshold of change, I want to feel it more than I remember it. I don’t want to simply have reported on my life; I want to sink down into the marrow of it and let it change me, let it rearrange how I hold my heart, let it stir me beyond my control.

My daughter is growing. My family’s life is changing. We are moving on, into new territory, and the tenderness of it is at times too big for me to metabolize. It is so much to be with alongside the pains of this world, and the unknown future she will grow into. Part of me wants to cling to Now, wants to refuse the moving forward of time as it feels like marching into a thick fog. And yet I trust the power of attention to show me what I need to know, if I can just let it. I trust the thresholds of this life to take me to places I couldn’t get to by avoiding change altogether. I trust what is being written, even when I can’t yet decipher the words. I trust the grief of letting go, the buoyancy of what beginnings can bring, the potency that comes with being with my body in this very moment, in all it contains and all it wants to reveal.

May we remember attention is less about vigilance of presence and more about feeling in the present.
May we stay close to what the moment wants to show us.
May we be patient in our attempts at leaving, and slowly return again.
May we allow the grief of change to rise by way of trusting ourselves to stay with change as it unfolds.
May we trust our bodies to register what matters most, without needing to force or cling to it as proof of its importance.
May we let the unknown provide wisdom that could never arrive by way of knowing.
May we feel, and may what we feel change us in all the ways it needs to.
May we stay gentle with ourselves and others in the throes of threshold.
May change lead us to more and more aliveness, more letting it all in.

Thanks, as always, for being here.