I am a rock, I am an island

"We are each an island. It is your task to bring to your island what you need to live long and well: love, beauty, diversion, friends, work that sustains, a meaningful life."--Kay Redfield Jamison

Mike and I were up at the family cabin again this weekend. First time in the hammock this year, first time putting my bare feet in the water.



The wildfires in Quebec caused a grey haze to obscure the mountains and made the air smell as sweet as a late-night campfire. It was a very pleasant smell, something LL Bean might put in a sachet and sell for $9.99.

I experienced my usual love-hate relationship with nature. In the hammock with my book, a gentle breeze keeping the mosquitoes away, I was as happy as a kid getting a turn on the swing. Then there was a buzz near my ear. It startled me beyond reason and I lost my page in the novel I was reading. I have a very knee-jerk reaction to buzzing. It not only annoys me but it fills me with anticipatory dread. I can't relax until I know the perpetrator is smashed and his accomplices have fled the scene.

I looked around for the source and saw that half a dozen dragonflies were circling the weeds, rocks, and trees around the hammock. What a hypocrite I was! Dragonflies were the theme of our August wedding. People had given us dragonfly-themed presents: pieces of Kate Spade June Lane china stamped with golden dragonflies. Framed color photographs of dragonflies. A dragonfly candle. Even a dragonfly magnet. And how was I reacting to the real creatures? Like they were the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz--proving once again that I like the sanitized version of nature better than the real thing.

Mike and I climbed down the rocks to get to the lip of Lovewell pond. The feel of the mucky pond floor actually appeals to me. It must be all those times my parents took me to lakes when I was a kid. In the shallow end I could touch the floor, and though it felt slimy it was also cool and soft, like stepping into a bowl of pudding. My father preferred jumping into deep rock quarries, places where a kid would need to know how to swim (which I didn't and still don't.)

The pond water had receded and pollen had left yellow bands around the rocks like chalk marks on the sidelines of a football game.


Something about being in a natural setting on a beautiful day makes people want to say something profound about life or death or the state of humanity. I am not immune. Some of my most intimate talks with my husband or with a friend have been when we're away from the city. Like looking out the windshield of a car eases the discomfort of a difficult conversation, talking openly seems natural while watching the small ripples on the surface of the water, the setting sun an airbrushed orange.

I asked Mike why it is that even in a beautiful, peaceful place like this I still worry so much. Is it that I'm addicted to thinking of worst possible outcomes? Mike suggested that I might be trying to prepare myself in case something unforeseen happens--even unlikely things like him falling on a rock and splitting his head open. Of course, he doesn't make me feel secure when he's jumping from one unbalanced boulder to the next.

I'd make the most anxious mother in the world.

It didn't help that I had chosen to bring Nothing Was the Same, a memoir by Kay Redfield Jamison about her husband's death from cancer, as my Memorial Day Weekend read. Did I WANT to be depressed? My wiser cousin Mikki, who was also staying at the cabin, had gone into White Birch Books in North Conway and asked the bookseller to recommend something fun. Meanwhile I was wrapped up in a book about losing a life partner. Yippee!

Mike said that probably more people have these feelings than I realize. It is hard sometimes to imagine other people having neurotic worries like I do. As empathetic as I try to be, I still have the tendency to think that other people have it together where I don't. I'm confident in some areas, sure. But feeling happiness in the present moment without worrying that it will be taken away in the future is incredibly hard for me. How do other people experience life?

One of my favorite authors to work with, Ellen Graf, brought up this very topic last time we spoke. She's married to a Chinese man who came to America to live with her. In order for them to live peacefully together she had to let go of some of her assumptions about other people and how they think. This is harder than it sounds since we all look through the lenses of our own thoughts and experience. It's difficult to imagine a Republican's point of view if you're a Democrat, a life of poverty if you're privileged, or the perspective of someone from a different culture than your own. Graf had the opportunity to experience this firsthand and it proved essential to her marriage.

Knowing that I'm not the only one to feel sad or anxious sometimes, even when there's a spectacular sunset before me, cool water on my feet, and someone I love at my side, is enough to rouse me out of my funk. I may sometimes feel unmoored in life, but this is not a disaster, and I'm not alone.

We all need a happy place

Photo credit: DeaseLake.net

"The only thing I didn't understand

was how in a world whose predominant characteristics
are futility, cruelty, loneliness, disappointment
people are saved every day
by a sparrow, a foghorn, a grassblade, a tablecloth."--From the poem "What I Understood" by Katha Pollitt, from her collection the mind-body problem

I notice lately that I'm having trouble focusing. I must have been too unfocused before to have noticed.

At work, I jump mid-sentence from composing an email to an author, to checking what the weekend weather is so I know how to pack for New York, to adding a new blogger to my review copies list, to checking my Twitter feed. The emails keep popping up in my inbox and the to-do list is growing tentacles.

I know this is typical of modern life as most of us live it. But it wipes me out. I've been walking home from work lately, but instead of using that time to breathe and recharge I'm still thinking about work, as well as the 91 things I need to do at home (Yes, 91. I counted.) I get home, throw a packet of Tasty Bite Madras Lentils in the rice cooker, and if our schedules intersect, have dinner with Mike. By that time I'm feeling as worn out as an old sneaker and I berate myself for not being more productive, for letting another day go by without getting more things done.

Sometimes all this mental stuff depresses me. Now that it's Spring, I feel the cartoon cloud over my head lifting, but the obligations and projects and should-dos are still obscuring the blue sky and brilliant flowers. And then I feel guilty that I'm not savoring the nice weather I wished for all winter!

The tyranny of too much stuff, whether it's mental stuff or that stuff I buy myself because I love acquiring new and shiny things, can be suffocating. It's like when I go to our local craft store, Paper Source, and pick out a few items for making my own cards from their modest but well-selected inventory. Then I go visit my mother in New Jersey, where she takes me to Michael's. There I'm confronted with hundreds of options of cuteness--and that's just counting the new Martha Stewart Crafts line. I get a dizzy, almost out-of-body feeling, like I've had too much caffeine. No end of choice gives me a headache.

This weekend we opened the family cabin in Fryeburg, Maine. I spent Saturday morning vacuuming dead insect parts from the windowsills of the bunkhouse (where Mike and I usually sleep because Mike likes the composting toilet, or what I refer to as the "litter box.") Strings of spider webbing stuck to my fingers like cotton candy. Outside the bunkhouse, I picked up old tree branches and tossed them in a neat pile in the woods.

It was the most calm and focused I had felt in weeks.

Our cousin Mikki calls the cabin "the happy place" and I agree. Not that we sit around all day smiling and singing songs. It's just that it's one of the few places left where our lives get simple again. Our options are manageable--read a book on the hammock or on the comfy old couch in the cabin with its panoramic view of Lovewell Pond? Go into North Conway for fresh vegetables or outlet shopping, or spend an hour splashing in the water? I tend to bring some of the paperwork of my ordinary life to the cabin, but then I forget about it because I've picked up a T.C. Boyle novel at The Local Bookie.

Sunday was a glorious day, sunny but with a gentle breeze which helped keep the mosquitoes at bay. I sat in an Adirondack chair facing the pond, an IPA on the armrest like a Corona commercial, a book in my lap. From time to time I'd look up and watch a pair of nesting loons diving in and out of the water. That's all they do all day is dive for food and then emerge--like synchronized swimmers--right next to each other. The book I was reading was Twitter for Dummies, a compromise between studying up on social media and nature watching. I actually found I could concentrate on what I was reading, even with the occasional looking up to see the late-afternoon sunshine cast perfect photographer's light over the rippling waves.

Life can be chaotic, overwhelming, depressing, alienating, hard. But that's why nature is so important, so crucial. The loons, the pine trees, the quiet--that's what restores us.

Until the neighbors arrive with their power tools, leaf blowers, and mobile lawnmowers.