Shelter from the Storm

I’m just back from a long weekend in Sonoma, celebrating my mother’s birthday with my sisters and their kids. As always, Sonoma was gorgeous and I found myself missing a landscape that’s never been mine, but still manages to tug at my heart: the high, bucolic hills a patchwork of grassy meadows and neat grids of grapes. How vines so twisty and gnarled can give the illusion of such precision and order is a mystery to me.

After the birthday celebrations were over, Steve and I snuck out for our usual run up the one-lane road to the top of the Mayacamas Mountains. The sun was setting and as we gained altitude, the air became damper and richer, more alive with the summery smell of Douglas firs and sweet bay leaves and far to the southwest we could see the high rises of San Francisco and Oakland shrunken with distance and glittering in the late-day light. It felt both Mediterranean and maritime, with a bit of Northwest big-tree grandeur chucked in for good measure, and it made me wistful for a life I don’t lead, or used to lead, or might someday want to lead, but I didn’t say any of that. If I had, all fears and exhaustion and doubt might have spilled out, and I wanted to be free of them, at least for a little while.

It was a choice I made. Sometimes it’s easy to forget we have choices. We may not be able to choose the events that define our lives, but we can choose how we respond to them. In the past few weeks, no matter how fast I run, grief and motherhood have finally caught up to me, weighing me down with a heaviness that feels both inevitable and inexplicable. It’s hard to put words to the darkness, only that when it settles on me, most everything I love feels difficult, insurmountable, wearisome. It moves in as a storm, clouds blowing in from the west, wispy and innocuous at first, wind building until it’s directly overhead, flattening me for a few hours or a few days with its wall-to- wall charcoal skies and sideways rain.

This is a meteorological event—I don’t have a say in the matter. The only thing I can do is root down, fling my ice axe into the ground and hang on so the cyclone doesn’t pick me up by my pinky toes and suck me in. I suppose this is normal, this reeling of birth and death. Maisy is nearly 10 months old; she has been out in the world longer than she was in the womb. My dad has been gone for five months, twice as long as he was sick. What to do? How to make sense of it all?

When I was little and feeling out of sorts, my mother would say, “Just get busy and do something”—a gentle, upbeat prodding, the verbal equivalent of whisking me on the bottom with a tea towel. She made it sound so simple, and it was. I’d go shoot hoops in the backyard or ride my bike around the neighborhood or pester my sister to play Trivial Pursuit or stretch out on my bed and read Harriet the Spy. Invariably, it worked. Activity was the antidote to that nameless, shiftless loneliness we know as kids, when we first become aware that time is passing and life is moving, carrying us with it, and that nothing lasts or is permanent.

But it’s tiring to be busy doing something for so long. So now I am trying to choose stillness, to find silence and peace in even the most fragmented moments, to slow down and do less, to live in the troughs between the storms. I don’t really know what this means, only that I need to find a balance between endless, instinctual striving and a visceral need for stillness. I could try to figure out, right here in this post, how to do this, but that would defeat the purpose. So I think I’ll just settle in and shut up and see where the troughs carry me. It’s a mystery.