Dear A,
In between us … nearly the whole of the continental United States, 6 hours by plane; 3 days by car; An eternity when your tears fall.
In between us…26 years, 1 month, 1 day.
And Yet…
“Between us”… a penchant for a great turn of phrase, a passion for Villanova basketball and a shared playlist for the ever necessary impromptu kitchen dance party.
“Between us”…a U-Haul pointed north outta Nashville, a laugh-till-you-cry trip to Vegas, a slip-sliding hike up the mountain in the dark to watch a jaw-dropping sunrise over Lanakai.
Between us…love, respect, authenticity, trust.
Between us, a conviction that words matter & that Gracious words matter most of all.
***********
And so it begins; this pledge to write. Together, we’ll write bridges into being for the “In between” spaces of life.
Why write? Well for starters, a deadline has an uncanny ability to help me prioritize. Secondly, in a twitter littered era, old school writing obliges two life giving graces, candid self-examination and contemplation. But perhaps there is no better reason for this little project of ours than the one a luminous octogenarian docent at the Portland Museum of Art once reminded me of.
—
She’d just finished giving us an introduction to the work of Henry Moore when she caught me looking, shall we say, “quizzically” at the contemporary sculpture in front of me. I was standing quite still wondering what was so remarkable about this particular piece so that I didn’t even notice she’d sidled up next to me at first. Dressed in a pink knit suit and smart flats, she stood silently admiring the work briefly before reaching up to take my elbow in hand. “Come along” she said gently as she began walking us ever so slowly round the sculpture. We stopped. “What do you see from here?” she asked? “Where? Oh there!” I said excitedly. We walked a little further before she stopped me again,
—
“Look now at how the light falls just so on this bit…Follow the line upward from the arc, what do you notice?” she asked. “Oh, I see it!” I cried. As we made the circle, stepping forward a bit here, then back just a little there, what had been obscure from one angle became observable, even obvious from another. One or the other of us would call out and point with delight at what came clear. As my eyes grew wide, hers danced. She squeezed my arm and took her leave with parting words I’ll never forget. “Try never to stand still when you want to learn, my dear. Great art, like all great truth, begs to be interpreted and enjoyed from more than one vantage point.”
—
And so, I guess you could say it’s my hope that the letters we will write will become an offering up of something just like that; a long distance way of walking around the art of life, together. As far as I can remember, the great temptation of youth is to run faster and faster in dizzying circles. And as far as I can tell, the great temptation of middle age is to stop circling, to sit down out of weariness; to stagnate in stubbornness; or worse yet, to build a bully pulpit out of arrogance that just plain obscures the whole thing.
—
Perhaps as mother and daughter of certain ages we’ve hit that “sweet spot” where we both get to play the teacher. I want to gain a vantage point beyond my own and beyond that of my even my most deeply respected and beloved peers. It will of course, require the grasping of hands beyond our own family, beyond our own culture and quite probably beyond our own comfort level to see the deeper truths…but it is here that we begin the walk.
—
I’ve lived long enough to learn that opinion is little more than a best guess at telling a sensible story out of my own experience. Opinion, I think, is like the sofa in my house: familiar, oh so comfortable, and highly susceptible to holes over time. Truth on the other hand, is something more akin to Moore’s sculpture,
Etched in stone
Impervious to rain,
Invulnerable to time
And best interpreted and enjoyed in community.
Someone has said we don’t write in order to say what we think, but to discover what we know. So here’s to writing, here’s to discovery, here’s to truth and to building generational bridges rather than allowing for gaps.
—
And finally, “thank you A” for the gracious invitation to do so with you.
