​These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

If nothing else, I am a reader. Perhaps because I always had my face in a book, my parents logically wondered when I would finally write one. As much as I love reading novels (the longer the better), I have also always been aware that I am not driven to create them. Characters do not haunt me, demanding I write their stories, as in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. Extended, magical narratives do not spring into my mind on the train. My few hesitant attempts at starting a story and seeing where it would go led . . . nowhere.
And then our first child died, our Tessa. And that experience was too large to hold, and I was helpless to know where to put it. I only wanted poems. I had always loved poetry, but in the casually passionate way we love favorite foods. Now I came to poems in a state of complete surrender, starving to know I was not alone, that the world is not all just a darkling plain. Lucille Clifton. Mark Doty. W. S. Merwin. Sharon Olds. They said many things that helped. They said some things that called to other things inside me. Slowly, I found relief in getting a few words down: a line, an image, a phrase. Sometimes I could write a whole page, breaking the lines like twigs wherever they were weakest, and create what might look like poems from arm’s length, but they had no music. I kept writing a little at a time, though, grateful for tiny shards of light, and I’d throw the scraps in a box. Or I’d think of something at work – like a new fear of crocuses – and type it into a document called “bits.”
I wondered if I would ever be able to find sustained time to shore the fragments, and after a few years, the answers were all, suddenly, yes. My angriest, saddest lines, after thirteen discordant tries, flew into place like a blackbird and won a Pushcart Prize. I applied for a sabbatical, and received it. A friend taking a graduate course in design asked if she could work with me to produce a chapbook. And so in the spring of 2012, when Tessa would have been eight, I filled our birdfeeder, said a prayer of thanks, shook out the pieces, printed the drafts, and spread everything out on a table. I looked at my notes in the margins of great poets. In the softly silent house, for six hours a day, I listened to what I remembered. I followed those fragments, my breadcrumbs, my torches, planchettes. They were tickets, too, to a prize I was finally able to claim – the gift of understanding how I and my whole here and absent family are connected to a much, much larger story of love and loss, and what comes after. So I guess I do have that blessed clamoring that leads to the work, the words, and the release. It is one of my daughter’s many gifts, to turn me into a writer, after all.

I started posting pictures to the album “Three Beautiful Things” last spring to offer something of myself and my day in a simple, positive way. It adds joy and a sense of a changing, abundant world to my daily walks with the Buddha.

Lately I have been more aware of what I cannot capture, the much more fleeting sights: a doe’s tail receding in the leaves like a white, surprised face; the tiny fawn hiding from us in the bracken; the red-headed woodpecker bursting across the path. There is also the whole unclickable world of touch and scent: honeysuckle, pine, warm wind lifting my hair, the feel of bark and stone.

I can only take in the moments as they slip past, and I can’t share them afterwards in anything but words. Telegrams of loss: wish you were there. We stick them on the Web like flies, tie them on the ends of lines we cast towards one another. Maybe the beauty lies in the impulse to cast, and is manifest in the motion.

I like living where I can walk easily into what feels like deep green woods but also see rooftops and the big windows and decks people put on their houses to enjoy the trees. I love how, in our town, the green world intersects the village. I also love the invisible webs we climb around on, spinning tales of our days, hoping others will look up, point, and click: yes, me too, we are like each other.

It’s Mother’s Day weekend, and my girl has strep throat. She is rarely sick, and since I’ve only recently started to get used to her seven-year-old wit (“Oh no you didn’t, Mama-girlfriend!”) and independence (“You’re really embarrassing me!”), the sudden throwback to toddlerhood that the illness causes is startling. She wants constant closeness – for me to lie next to her and stroke her face and arms, to sing lullabies, to make the universal soothing shushing sounds of mothers everywhere. I hold her hair when she throws up, steam up the bathroom and cuddle her in the eucalyptus mist, take her temperature, coax down the medicines and sips of water. We’ve been doing this for almost thirty hours, and I hope the amoxicillin kicks in enough tomorrow to give her some relief. I hope she comes to forget the pain and joins those of us who can conjure a cherished feeling decades later with the slightest whiff of Vick’s vapor rub, ginger ale, toast and tea.

But as much as I wish her discomfort away, and as immeasurably grateful as I am to live in the age of antibiotics, to have access to good doctors and sick leave, to know that this is a common illness with a known and reliable cure, I can also say that this sweetly intimate time has been, strangely, a gift, and an oddly apt way to spend the hours leading up to Mother’s Day. This girl loves her dad, but I’m the unique and irreplaceable being she wants when she’s sick. The intense love and focus I have always within me, that lie fallow on brisker, ordinary days, are suddenly very much in demand. The old sayings about giving being far better than receiving strike true and clear. My old friend adrenaline, from their baby years, comes back to visit. I sleep and eat little. I don’t need anything all this Mother’s Day weekend but to place myself within constant reach, and to give thanks: for having a loving mother, and for the chances given, over and over, to be one myself. 

Spring has finally come with its new colors and warm air, it has melted the ice from our paths, and I’m getting a little drunk on it during our morning walks. I can hear the Peanuts gang singing “Beauty ever-y wheeeere,” and I start taking pictures with my phone of the tight buds and trumpeting daffodils. And then I can’t seem to stop taking pictures, which annoys the dog, Buddha, but I remind him how often I stop to let him nose through his own mysterious realities of scent and aura. 

Returning to the kitchen and a cup of tea, I find I want to share the pictures on Facebook. I’ve come to appreciate and use FB in ways that strengthen my connections to people I care for, that make me feel I’m creating or passing on something good (humor, wisdom, knowledge, beauty) to family, all far away; to people who are an important part of my daily life; to people I see less frequently but with whom I share love and respect and shared history; even to a few acquaintances with whom I share something significant, like the memory of an intense poetry workshop or a mutual appreciation for the same writers. I have finally found the right amount of and uses for social media so that my life is better for it.

Sharing just three images seems the right amount – I’m conscious of respecting people’s time and attention, and I believe in the power of careful editing. Many people like the images and say kind things about them: this builds my happiness. I’m sure my pictures are very "Photography 101," and while more knowledge of compositional principles and a better app or camera would likely result in technically better pictures, at this point that isn’t really the point. The effect on me of seeking beauty every morning goes surprisingly deep.

Each morning as we set out, I worry that I won’t find more beautiful images than yesterday’s, and I wonder if I need to put Buddha in the car and drive to find new paths. And yet, before I’ve even reached the end of the same old block, I’ve stopped several times to frame and click. Again, I get giddy with it, every step bringing a new angle and something to capture. Of course, I couldn’t have chosen a better time of year to begin this project. Springtime in suburban Maryland is an embarrassment of riches.

I didn’t always feel this way about spring. I never felt it was “the cruelest month,” but after childhood somehow I never felt completely worthy of it, never  exuberantly “puddle-wonderful": more “like a perhaps hand.” The first spring that I met as an adult with pure joy was in the year 2006, pregnant with Bennett. I write about this in my poem "One Easter," and it reminds me that, of the many gifts my children have given me, the way all three of them brought me out of the layers of self-preoccupation to live more immediately, with the core of me open to the wind, is one of the dearest.

When we arrive home from our walks now, I feel unusually full, in the best sense. I am walking in abundance. I’m very new to this practice, but already I am somehow eating less, buying less, needing less. By deliberately noticing beauty, and forcing myself to choose only a few pieces of it to keep and share, I am cultivating the sense that what is available is more than enough. My real self-challenge goes beyond taking and sharing three beautiful things: it is to respond to this burgeoning world like an artist, with both exultation and discipline, and to sharpen my eye so that the beauty is still evident to me over time, when Nature is no longer so obviously lavish and bursting with fists of blooms. It is early in the season, but I hope the lessons hold.