Lindsey Mead's Blog, page 2

Seven years

Kirtland Chase Mead

6/9/34-11/26/24

Seven years without you, Dad. I’ve missed you every one of those days, but mostly what I feel now is what I felt literally the day you died: deep gratitude that you were my father. I remember being stunned by how immediately and viscerally I felt that. I’ll never be able to fully express all the things you taught me, as my first and most important teacher. You showed me the world. You taught me not to be afraid of adventure. You demonstrated the importance of hard work. You showed me the transformational power of art – music, painting, architecture, poetry. You preferred to be alone, with a book, above most things and I definitely inherited that. You were a true believer in meritocracy and listened carefully to most speakers. You loved working with others in a professional context – the number of people who spoke of you as a mentor and a teacher after your death was astonishing. You believed in the value of taking the hard road (that Chris Stapleton line will make me think of you every single time I hear it). You will forever be the smartest person I’ve ever known, with the widest range (PhD in engineering from MIT and published poet just scratches the surface) You had an extremely finely honed bullshit detector. You were the king of the one liner (“I’m sorry, you must be mistaking this for a democracy” and “two words separate us from the animals, and those words are may and well.”) you did not suffer fools but once someone impressed you, oh were you loyal. You believed I could do and be anything and I still feel your faith in me and I still am not sure you were right. Being Kirt Mead’s daughter is one of the identities I cherish the most fiercely (I can name the others I equally esteem: Matt’s wife, Grace and Whit’s mother, and co-founder of the firm where I work and that I adore). You’ve crossed the bar, Dad, and as you always wanted we read that Tennyson poem at your funeral (and then Whit surprised me by memorizing it for a poetry contest at school). I’ll never stop trying to make you proud. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I love you.

My father’s eulogy is here.

On Being 50

Wow.

To say I honestly can’t believe I’m turning 50 on Friday is an understatement.  I suspect very few people actually feel the age they are but … I really feel abject disbelief that I am here.  I am bewildered, awestruck, amazed.  To be 50 and, I’ll be honest, at life in general.  I texted a couple of close friends a week or two ago:

“Btw guys I am just absolutely overwhelmed with gratitude lately.  Tearful thinking of Grace and Whit.  Matt.  You guys and other friends.  Intensely thankful.  Is this what 50 is?”

Truthfully I have always inclined towards sensitivity and, often (though not always) towards gratitude.

I think often of a comment I made on Rachel Levy Lesser’s wonderful Life’s Accessories podcast (listen to my episode here –  then listen to them all!).  She recalled a moment in the intro to the book I edited, On Being 40(ish), where I referred to a friend saying her 40s were her favorite decade so far.  How did I expect the 50s to stack up, was Rachel’s question.

I expect them to be even better, was my answer.  More striated with loss, for sure.  I reflected on my father’s funeral, where 5 college friends attended and 5/6 of us had lost their father somewhat recently.  That will speed up in our 50s, I imagine, both parents and others close to us – loss is an inevitable part of life, always, but even more as we get older.  But I also think that is inextricably wound together with our growing awareness of life’s beauty and majesty.  Aren’t they two sides of the same thing, after all?  This life is a glorious, incandescent gift, and it’s not forever.  Both are true.  Unavoidably so.

That’s the overarching theme of 50 for me.  Gratitude and grief, marbled together in every minute.  Gratitude for what is, grief for what is no longer. 50 is also a lot else.

50 is

Young adult children.  Laughing hard.  Worrying about different, bigger things.  Intense pride at watching them become who they are.  Realizing how grateful I am that these three people are genuinely my three favorite people to spend time with, full stop.  Shock and awe at how fast it’s flown.

Reading glasses and sunglasses, sometimes at the same time.  The biggest physical manifestation of aging, for me, has been my decaying eyesight.  It’s frustrating all the time and disorienting, often.

Deep thankfulness to my young self for choosing such incredible friends.  As I get older I feel closer to the women I met and chose as beloved when I was becoming who I am.  It’s amazing how deep these bonds are, how enduring, and I’m more grateful than I can express.  Native speakers, you know who you are.  Thank you. (a subset of these dearly beloved people are below, taken as another of us turned 50 a couple of weeks ago)

I toasted my work partners when we had dinner recently in New York, and told them that there’s a strong case to be made that they are the most important people in my life beside my family.  Their partnership is one of my life’s great joys, and what we’re building together is something I’ll never stop feeling both awe and gratitude about.

My FOO (family of origin).  I miss my Dad every day, but I feel so fortunate to be sailing wing and wing with these two.  It will never cease to amaze me that we have no redheaded children, but HWM thank you for all the laughing, grammatical jokes, and wisdom.  I’m so lucky.  And Mum, where it all began. Alpha and omega.  Thank you.

Speaking of thankfulness and younger me, how did I know how great this guy would turn out to be?  We met when I was 23.  I am turning 50.  We’ve lived many lifetimes together and it isn’t always easy but it’s also never dull.  I could not do any of this without him, and I am very lucky and I know it.  Thank you, MTR.

50 is also waking up at 4 something most mornings.  It’s unapologetically preferring to get into bed at 9 with my book most nights.  It’s realizing I just don’t need to be liked by everyone.  It’s being discriminating about who I want to be close to.  It’s telling people I love how I feel because I know that opportunity may not come again.  It’s more sunrises than sunsets, which is ironic as I’m moving into the afternoon of life.  It’s getting our first pet at 46 and learning how profoundly I love dogs.

I’m not accustomed to being speechless, but that’s how I feel right now.  At least full of an inchoate, incandescent emotion I can’t even begin to express.  To say it is both thankfulness and sorrow at the same time just begins to scratch the surface.  For those of you still reading as I near the 18th anniversary of this blog, thank you.  For those I adore and who make my life what it is, thank you.

Closing with a quote I love.  I sure hope it’s right.

“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.” -Meister Eckhart

The singular and the strange

Well hello!  Yes, I am still here.  I love this little corner of the internet.  Photo from Instagram which is where I do more writing these days (though still not enough.)

I am endlessly fascinated by why things come to our mind when they do?  Why is a certain person that I’m not in touch with in my thoughts one day, and a quote I’ve known for years but not thought of in ages pressing into my consciousness another?  I’m sure there’s some hidden meaning to these rhythms, equally certain we’d do well to listen to them and heed the message they bear.  Today the words I’m thinking of are old ones by Gail Godwin: “The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite.”

I am reading and enjoying a book whose protagonist is a midwife (The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon – enjoying!) which made me think about how if I wasn’t a recruiter and a writer I’d be a midwife and a writer.  And so I wanted to ask and share some small details that I personally think can illuminate a lot about a person.  My own version of the Proust Questionnaire, I guess.  I’d love to hear your answers!

What would you be, professionally, if you were doing something else?

A midwife

If you are married, what is engraved inside your wedding ring and that of your spouse?

Mine: nothing (it’s diamonds so can’t engrave).  Matt: you are my sunshine

If you ride the train, do you like the Quiet Car or hate it?

Love.  If I could live in the Quiet Car I would.

Do you prefer sunrises or sunsets?

Sunrises

What is your favorite color?

Orange.  No, this is not because of Princeton, though that doesn’t hurt.  It is the Buddhist color of enlightenment and I’ve always loved it!

What is your favorite quote?

“There is no such thing as a complete lack of order.  Only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.” – Louise Erdrich (for which this blog is named)

What is your Myers-Briggs type?

INFJ

Solstice

“We are moving towards the solstice, and there is still so much here I do not understand.” – Adrienne Rich

This is the holiest day of the year for me.  I’ve written ad nauseum about it.  For many many years my parents co-hosted a Winter Solstice black tie dance on this night.  It’s the darkest day of the year yet it also holds the promise that tomorrow we begin to move towards the light.  Deep darkness that holds the promise of light.  That’s what this day means to me.  I am thinking of Adrienne Rich’s words which are in my head most days.  The more I know, the less I understand.  Darkness.  Light.  Memory.  Movement.  Life.

From Instagram on 12/21/23.  Photos below from a family wedding on 12/20/23.  And below, some links to previous thoughts on the solstice.

The Huffington Post: Darkness and Light

Solstice: Light and Shadow

Thoughts on Darkness

A Darkness Full of Light

 

 

Kilimanjaro was nothing to this

A couple of sappy Instagram posts for Matt seem to be worth sharing here.  We are newly empty nesters and just celebrated 23 years.  Wow!  FWIW I do most of my writing on Instagram these days. I’d love to come back here.  Maybe someday.

I’ve shared this picture before and I likely will again. It was taken 25 years ago, in August 1998, by my father in Marion Massachusetts, in the exact spot we would take our wedding photos two years later. It’s framed in our house. Matt just sent it to me and I am struck by how much has changed and how much has not since this photo. The last 25 years have been full of adventure and both ups and downs, challenges, heartbreak, surprises and joys. Most of all welcoming and watching grow our two beloved children, both of whom are now in college and off on their own paths. And so we are full circle and back to these two people again. Circle Game. May we remember this joy as we move forward to this next phase, Matt.  I love you and I have for a very long time. Onward.

23 years. Wow. Craig, the visiting minister who married us, was right. Kilimanjaro was nothing to this. And we find ourselves at a new camp now, in a new season. Back to where we began: just the two of us. I found 8 selfies of just the two of us taken since June. This is our new reality. It’s different and it’s quiet and we really miss G and W but wow I’m lucky that all those years ago you chose this difficult redhead. Thanks for walking this path with me – challenging and surprising often, stunningly beautiful sometimes, interesting always. I love you MTR. Here’s to the next 23

Mornings during a time of transition

Morning in the mouse house. Coffee in my favorite Ratio mug (thank you VJQ). Phoebe. Crossword. Matt is sleeping. Whit’s been gone all weekend. This is such a time of transition, hanging between what was and what will be. I guess it’s not a surprise I am feeling emotional and raw (Dr Thompson made me absolutely weep on Friday morning at BHS – high school graduation is the end of childhood). Whit is leaving and we are entering the empty nest. Grace is halfway through college. We are not in our house. I can look out the window from where I am sitting and see the house my parents lived in for 30 years and where Dad died. Blink, and everything changes. I think of last year’s holiday card message, which is still true: “Once again a time of change. Oh the change makes music.” Music and heartbreak. Beauty and loss. This is apparently the lesson I have to keep learning in this life. Can’t have one without the other. As Dad told Grace after John died (a month before he died): everything passes. The only thing to do is to reach out for the future with both arms, even if it hurts. What I’m learning to trust as I enter deep midlife is that I can let go of the past and it will still be there. I lived those years well. I paid attention. They’re always with me. Those small children, that younger me, that Dad, those moments – they exist in some way in this one. I’m just figuring out how. Onward. Both arms

Originally posted on instagram.

Enchantment

Sometimes a book says things that are in my heart, puts words to things I have felt but been unable to express.  Enchantment by Katherine May is such a book.

“We are a forgetful species, obsessed with the endless succession of tasks that hover over our days, and negligent of the grand celestial drama unfolding around us.  And here I am, remembering.”

“Slowly and slyly it had crept into me, this conviction of . . . what? That something is there, something vast and wise and beautiful that pervades all of life. Something that is present, attentive, behind the everyday. A frequency of consciousness at the low end of the dial, amid the static. A stratum of experience waiting to be uncovered.”

“The act of seeking attuned my senses and primed my mind to make associations.  I was open to magic. and I found some, although not the magic I was looking for.  That’s what you find over an over again when you go looking: something else.”

I think I’m beginning to understand that the quest is the point. Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things; the sublime is not hiding in distant landscapes. The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. It is transformed by our deliberate attention. It becomes valuable when we value it. It becomes meaningful when we invest it with meaning. The magic is of our own conjuring. Hierophany—that revelation of the sacred—is something that we bring to everyday things, rather than something that is given to us. That quality of experience that reveals to us the workings of the world, that comforts and fascinates us, that ushers us towards a greater understanding of the business of being human: it is not in itself rare. What is rare is our will to pursue it. If we wait passively to become enchanted, we could wait a long time.  But seeking is a kind of work. I don’t mean heading off on wild road trips just to see the stars that are shining above your own roof. I mean committing to a lifetime of engagement: to noticing the world around you, to actively looking for small distillations of beauty, to making time to contemplate and reflect. To learning the names of the plants and places that surround you, or training your mind in the rich pathways of the metaphorical. To finding a way to express your interconnectedness with the rest of humanity. To putting your feet on the ground, every now and then, and feeling the tingle of life that the earth offers in return. It’s all there, waiting for our attention. Take off your shoes, because you are always on holy ground.

I remember you

Woke up to a text from my beloved sister that she read this poem and it made me think of her.  I have read this before but not in ages, and was touched that it made her think of me.  I love it.  Happy almost-spring Wednesday, all.

What the Living Do – Marie Howe

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

Right now; February 2023

sunrise, Boston, February 2 2023

Happy new year.  A few things on my mind lately.  I’d love to know what you’re reading, loving, and thinking about.

More and More, I Talk to the Dead – I love all of Margaret Renkl’s writing (her book, Late Migrations, is gorgeous) and this piece in the New York Times is no exception.  This article made me gasp out loud, and I relate.  The article reminded me of one of my most vivid memories, which is from years ago on the Solstice, December 21st.  I was walking at sunset (which was around 4:30) and had a sudden and strong sense of people that were gone to me – most of all my grandmother and my mother’s best friend Susie, who was a kind of second mother to me – standing just over the horizon.  It was like they were there.  And instead of being eerie, the sensation was reassuring, comforting.  Now dad is with them, and my other grandparents, too.

I’ve also been thinking about when Matt and I summited Kilimanjaro, in June of 1998.  Perhaps because I’ve been listening to Southern Cross on repeat.  And as I wrote on Instagram, as we headed up to the summit we could see both the southern cross and the big dipper in the sky at once.  As we kept climbing, a storm rolled in.  Our summit photos could have been taken in front of a show blower at Killington; the background is just white.  No spectacular sunrise for us.  Anyway, at the top of Kilimanjaro we met two other people who we thought were heading to the summit. You get towards the top and there’s about an hour to the actual summit (and the famous sign that you’ve seen in friends’ photos – but not ours!).  They had stopped moving and were heading down.

“Did you get to the top?”  We asked them.

“No, but we got to this spot and it’s close enough.” One of the two men answered.

We nodded at them.

“I mean, who will know?” He continued.

“Well, you will.” I said, before I could apply my filter (my filter is not, at the best of times, particularly well developed).

We continued up.  It was slow going.  We got to the top and headed down.  The next day, we were getting onto a bus at the base of Kili back to the hotel where we had been staying.  One of the men we’d encountered at the top was sitting on the bus.  He smiled at me, and said hello. “I have you to thank,” he said to me, surprising me.  What was he talking about?  “I would never have gone to the actual summit if not for you.”

“Oh, wow.  I did not realize.  I’m sorry I was so abrupt with you at the top.”  I had been feeling badly about my comment to him.

“No, I want to thank you.  It’s because of you that I got to the top.”

I’ve never forgotten that.

That’s my February 2 2023 update.  How are you all doing?  What are you reading and thinking about?

Thoughts on darkness

In a dark time, the eye begins to see. – Roethke

This is the darkest season.  Here in the northeast, we have two days until the shortest day of the year.  I love the photo above because I think it could be sunrise or sunset.  It’s the morning, though, day break from the air, a week and a half ago.

It’s fair to say that the contrast, interplay, and interrelation between light and dark is one of the central preoccupations of my life.  I’m fascinated by the way one allows the other, the way we need both to live in this world, the fact that light and dark are at once polar opposites and so closely related as to be two sides of the same coin.  When I search my archives for “light” I come up with 33 pages of results.

You might imagine that I have strong emotions about this particular time of the year, these week of deep darkness.

And you would be right.  I used to dread this time.  I can easily recall the physical sensation of gloom and fear that came over me as the days shortened.  And it’s true that in the spring, perhaps around February, I am buoyed when I begin to notice that the days are creeping longer.

But I don’t dread these dark days anymore.  I actually love them.  There’s something deeply reassuring to me about this season.  I’ve written extensively about my attachment to the solstice, and that is surely part of this comfort.  It isn’t hard for me to summon a roomful of candles, and to know how quickly they can dispel the darkness.

There is more going on, though.  I suspect it has something to do with the Roethke quote above, or with Wendell Berry’s lyrical lines which run through my head all the time:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.  To know the dark, go dark.  Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is travelled by dark feet and dark wings.

– Wendell Berry

Berry asserts that to really know the dark we have to surrender to it.  We have to let our eyes adjust, which means we must go in without any external light.  And that, in that darkness, there is a beauty that we never imagined.

It’s a short leap from thinking about the darkness out the window to the darkness inside myself.  I am still getting to know the darkness there, learning to gaze into the ragged hole that exists in the center of all of our souls, practicing pushing on the bruise and feeling the wound.  I have often described the feeling of that intense darkness as staring into the sun.  Again, light and dark are so close together as to be inextricable, sliding across each other, both occluding and showcasing as they do so.

Maybe that’s what this life is: an eclipse.

I read Margaret Renkl’s beautiful essay in the New York Times, Falling A Little Bit in Love with the Dark, today, with interest.  She too recognizes the gifts – threatened and rarer though they are- in darkness.  I haven’t thought through her point about how rare true darkness is, in a world in love with light (metaphorical and real).  My favorite line:

So I am teaching myself to rest in uncertainties, to revel in the secrets of darkness.

It has only been when I have really let myself lean into that darkness, accept that my deepest wound is the profound sadness of impermanence, that I’ve started seeing the gifts that are there.  As I sink into the way my life actually is, everyday I find unexpected gems buried in the mundane.  Sure, I also cry a lot more.  I grieve and mourn constantly, far more than I imagined possible.

But there’s also beauty here.  Surprising, staggering, serendipitous beauty.  Divinity buried in the drudgery.  Dark feet and dark wings.

Every year I feel more at ease in these dark days, protected, somehow.  I realize now that this is a manifestation of my increased comfort with my own darkness.  I have begun to see.