Lightly child, lightly

Posted on by Live & Learn

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Yet in a way, I wish for everything back that ever was, everything that once seems like forever and yet vanished. I wish for my own girlhood bedroom with its dark brown desk, the monkey with real fur from the 1964 World’s Fair, the pile of coloring books under my bed. I wish for my grandparents, both long gone, and Saturday night suppers at their kitchen table, in a house whose smell of bath powder and pipe smoke I will remember always. I wish for a chance to relive an afternoon with my brother, when I was mean and made him cry by grinding a cookie into the dirt beneath the swing set at our very first house. I wish for my horse, sold thirty-odd years ago, and the dim corner of her stall in a barn long since demolished, her sweet breath on my neck as I brushed her flanks and daydreamed about a boy named Joel who might want to kiss me. I wish for my college apartment, the hot plate and electric skillet that my up my first kitchen, the fall morning I lay in bed their reading To the Lighthouse, shaping the words in my mouth, reluctant to let them go. I wish for my husband as he was twenty-five years ago, the first time he ran his fingers through my hair and asked if I would see him again; and for my own younger self, in love with the idea of marriage and so certain of our togetherness. I wish for the first bedroom we ever shared, in the back corner of his Cambridge apartment, wind whistling through the old window sashes as we pressed close, sleeping naked together no matter hold cold it was. I wish for my two sons at every age they’ve ever been, for each of them as newborns at my breast in warm, darkened bedrooms; as stout toddlers, shy kindergartners, exuberant little boys filling every space, every moment of my existence with their own. I wish for Easter morning and Christmas mornings and birthday mornings and all the hundreds of ordinary weekday mornings — cereal poured into bowls, fingernails clipped, quick kisses and good-byes for now.

Standing here on an empty hilltop in New Hampshire…I allow, just for a moment, the past to push hard against the walls of my heart. Being alive, it seems, means learning to bear the weight of the passing of all things. It means finding a way to lightly hold all the places we’ve loved and left anyway, all the moments and days and years that have already been lived and lost to memory, even as we live on in the here and now, knowing full well that this moment, too, has already gone. It means, always, allowing for the hard truth of endings. It means, too, keeping faith in beginnings.”

~ Katrina Kenison, The Gift of an Ordinary Day: A Mother’s Memoir

Notes:

  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”
  • Thank you Carol  @ Radiating Blossom for pointing me to Katrina’s book.
  • Image Source: eikadan 

38 thoughts on “Lightly child, lightly”

  1. Sounds like a great book “Kenison is surprised to find that the times she treasures most are the ordinary, unremarkable moments of everyday life, the very moments that she once took for granted, or rushed right through without noticing at all” This is exactly why we need to slow down! 🙂 Thanks for sharing.

  2. This reminds me of the miracle of being able to capture memories like this and relive them … If only for a moment. Although we let them go with time they become a part of who we are. Heartfelt thanks!

  4. Oh wow – between chills and nods, tears and an equally impressive flood of memories, I can feel these words etching themselves into my heart. Yes. Yes. Yes.

  13. Truly lovely. I find it hard, though, to keep the faith in beginnings other than the one this life will have been a door into.

  19. Well, well, well. What do I say?
    She just lets her shoulders fall and shakes her head.

    How many times have we all done this:

    “..It means, always, allowing for the hard truth of endings. It means, too, keeping faith in beginnings.”

    And yet each time, it seems impossible?

  21. This took my breath away! I often think about the people, places and things that make up my favorite memories. I can easily shed a tear at some of them, but I’m grateful they are happy tears. This was simply beautiful!

  24. Sweetly captured, honoring memories …treasure keepsakes from her heart ~ her soul wept, momentarily for her past history that resonates in her every cell… she is forever grateful to have that Journey to Claim…”as we live on in the here and now” …Each past breath had a purpose and each new life giving breath brings change & takes us forward, so quickly the breath becomes the past & perhaps the last gifted.. .We need to remember to live and appreciate each breath, Savor It.

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