The moon is waning, which means that the nights are growing darker as the days continue to shorten en route to the solstice. This makes it a good time to hunker and reflect. Plus it’s my birthday in a week. I tilt toward being contemplative the whole year round, but this time of year I tend to go especially inward to scan the ways that a year’s worth of days have shaped me and prepared me for another orbit.
This year has been one of those years that hinges and swings between a before and an after. I got divorced this year. For those who have walked that path, you know that divorce is more than a moment of pronouncement by a judge. It’s a radical undoing that stretches out from its beginnings in uncertain memories and lingers on in lily pads of grief. At its best divorce is a mutual and loving reorientation. I’ve experienced moments of that. But even at its best there is, I think inevitably, something old testament about divorce. Something gets sacrificed on the altar. Something dies. And the pangs of that death ripple out beyond the two parting solitudes.
The other day I was looking out the window and I saw bubbles floating up from the playground in the yard of the nursery school that neighbors our house. I can’t see the yard through the window down to the left from where I sit, but I hear the voices of play throughout the morning and afternoon when I’m at my desk. They were blowing bubbles that afternoon and I saw the bubbles floating up into the sky, into the branches of nearby trees. I watched this through the window. I tried to get a photo, but my camera would only focus on the screen in my window and failed to find the soapy shimmering globes in the world beyond the mesh.
A year ago I remember feeling intense resistance to the idea that I might have moved in a way that brought harm to someone who I love. I didn’t see how to braid together with integrity “I have harmed you.” and “I love you.” and “I am good.” So I looked everywhere I could to pad my sense of self with assurances that my intentions were pure.
There’s that scene early in the Hebrew bible where the humans scheme for the knowledge of good and evil. They talk to a snake and eat some fruit and something like scales are lifted from their eyes, and everything changes in the way that they see themselves and in the ways that they relate with the world. They aren’t innocent anymore. They aren’t dumb anymore. They don’t get to claim ignorance anymore. Which is another way of saying, that living with integrity from that moment forward would require labor, and the ability to embrace truth in contradicting things. New life would correspond with pain, and sustenance with sweat.
It’s taken me most of this past year to pray this—because I have to keep letting go of my insistence on the innocence of my intentions—but part of my daily prayer now is: Give levity and love to those who I’ve harmed. Period.I pray it without qualifications or excuses.
And I pray it without losing myself, because I’ve grown in self-confidence this year. It helped when I accepted as true what my friend Luca said to me a couple of months ago: “We have to risk harm to be in relationship at all.” That risk shoots out in all directions, from me as much as toward.
Truth is more complicated now. It feels more risky than before to trust that my love is reliable, but I do, and it is. At significant points throughout life I’ve conjured the confidence I’ve needed to take each next step. This year—in the midst of radical reorientation—I’ve really worked to author and authenticate that confidence; to source my movements from the wild center of who I am.
My efforts have not been perfect. Sometimes my efforts have been too many, often askew, and sometimes too few. My focus goes in and out, between the bubbles and the mesh, the bubbles and the mesh. But my eyes are open, and the world in the yard is alive with play and possibility.
This year has prepared me, and I’m ready for another orbit.
