Believing
WHEN YOU
STAY STRONG

 

 

 

Here's the scary thing about reaching Believing. No doubt about it—you're really happy. You're grounded in good relationships and meaningful work, amazed and grateful that somehow this is your life. But the better things get, the more you find yourself waiting for the sky to cave in again. You're thrilled with the too-good-to-be-trueness of every day, and terrified that you'll screw it all up somehow. It's as if you just won the Super Bowl and you're headed to Disneyworld, but all you can think about is getting thrown from a roller coaster or having to watch Bambi's mother get blown away by the hunters again.

No, you haven't landed in some Happiness theme park. You're still in the same world that once crushed your spirit and left you forsaken. But the great thing is you're different now. Sure the world can still slam you around, but you've worked hard to build hope and courage. You have a center, and it's going to hold.

Still, you may get a little scared or nervous sometimes, and you may need reminders of how and why you built that core. So we filled this section with exhilarating, comforting poems aimed at helping you keep the faith in yourself and the world.

Take a look at “Sadie's Poem,” for starters. This is how our four-year-old friend Sadie approaches the world—with absolute confidence and joy. She's not quite sure what the day holds for her—will it be cenie, meenie, minie, or moe? But it doesn't really matter because there's this hot-diggitty fire in her toe! She's itching to move, to run, to explore. And wherever her choices take her, she's going to grab her butt and not let go—she's going to hang on to herself and jump into the day.

“Sadie's Poem” cracks us up, but it also calls us to take the same approach to life, to trust that fire in the toe. The key, we think, is to free yourself from conventional standards of happiness. Stop thinking you have to keep up with everyone else, want what they want, acquire what they acquire (the husband, the baby, the summer home, the SUV). There is no one “right” way to be happy—you get to pick your own way, you get to follow your own fire. Sadie already knows this—she took a conventional nursery rhyme, dumped the parts she didn't like, and created something entirely new, in a voice she owns and respects. She followed her own butt-grabbing philosophy and created a poem that is unmistakably, uniquely Sadie.

We think you can do the same thing with your life. Stop sweating the big choices that make you fear the future and pull a Sadie instead. Remember that whatever you choose, minie or moe, you'll be okay if you just trust your own sensibilities. And be sure to pay attention to the tiny things around you that burn with intensity (that fire in the toe)—that's where you'll find the beauty and inspiration you need to keep believing in yourself.

So instead of walking past the poor old woman munching on a plum in William Carlos Williams's “To a Poor Old Woman,” stop and really look at her. You could see just an old paper bag woman slurping fruit in the street and think, “How pathetic.” Or you could drop your uptight judgments, open your eyes, and glimpse a moment of pure pleasure and comfort, a moment as perfect as a ripe plum. And you'd carry that delicious moment of solace with you the rest of the day.

That's the only way to live in Believing—stay open to moments of revelation and grace, even in the most unlikely places. The speaker in Elizabeth Bishop's “Filling Station,” for example, finds herself in a filthy gas station, run by an oil-soaked, monkey-suited father and his greasy sons. Yuck, ick, disgusting, is all she can think at first. But then she notices the garish comic books, the big dim doily, the hairy begonia—and even though she wants to dismiss it all as horribly tacky, she instead finds herself deeply moved by these little signs of home, these proud attempts at beauty. “Somebody embroidered the doily,” and “somebody waters the plant.” Maybe “somebody loves us all,” she thinks. Even her, a high-strung automobile of a yuppie, even this imperfect filling station we call the world.

What a relief to experience moments like these in Believing, when you know with certainty that you're part of something grander than yourself. Call it an epiphany, or like poet James Wright, call it “A Blessing,” to find yourself rooted in a place of such hope and tenderness that you feel “that if I stepped out of my body I would break/into blossom.” You have access to this kind of serene beauty because you've made the effort to find these moments, to “step over the barbed wire into the pasture” where the Indian ponies wait with eyes full of kindness.

Of course these simple little epiphanies are harder to come by when ordinary chaos is erupting around you—deadlines and family crises and flat tires. Sometimes everything seems so complicated and crazy that even though you know you're Believing and all, yadda, yadda, yadda, you just can't figure out how to keep everything together.

That's when Gerard Manley Hopkins might tell you to pull another Sadie—turn convention on its head. Instead of cursing the world, take a minute to thank your lucky stars that you're part of a place this complex, this rich, this full of dappled beauty. Of course things get complicated—the world offers us everything: “All things counter, original, spare, strange.” We need the slow in order to appreciate the swift, the sweet to complement the sour, the dim to give full glory to everything adazzle. Sometimes this spotted, couple-colored world might overwhelm us, but we've got to put it in perspective. We all have a place in the abiding order and the beauty that “is past change” of our intricate universe.

While we're praising the pied beauty of the world, we may want to take a shot at appreciating and accepting our own contradictory selves. All of us are a jumble of impulse and restraint, emotion and reason, the sacred and the profane—and that includes the Pope himself, Sharon Olds suggests in “The Pope's Penis.” At our best we are-bells waiting to ring in praise of goodness, we are striving toward the divine, but most of the time our halos are strictly human. What more could we hope for in an imperfect world?

Even our mixed-up families—so irritating! so burdensome!—can shine with a dappled charm, once we free ourselves to really see them. The speaker in Gregory Djanikian's “Immigrant Picnic” tries hard to be the stereotypical all American guy, with his hot dogs on the grill and his “hat shaped/like the state of Pennsylvania.” His family drives him nuts with their misunderstandings of English idioms and their irrepressible bad jokes. But once the speaker throws up his hands and stops trying to force them into some sitcom picture of an American family (and he's thinking Brady Bunch, not Costanzas), he's free to see them for who they are: the jumbled-up people who love him.

So instead of wishing things were simpler (like a boring old nursery rhyme anyone could recite), sometimes we need to celebrate everything that's mixed up (“Sadie's Poem”!). That's the fun of vacations like the one described in Lynne McMahon's “We Take Our Children to Ireland”—we get away from the usual routine, kiss off comfort, and fall into adventures that change the way we see everything. Like the kids—and the parents—in McMahon's poem. At first they're stopped cold by the cheerful profanity they hear in Ireland. But soon a “fuck off, will ye” doesn't even faze them—they know it's meant lovingly, teasingly. And they become converts, offering their own “grand responses to everyday events” in Belfast. So your breakfast isn't just good, it's brilliant. Your crust is gorgeous. Even the “shite” smeared on the face of two-year-old Jack is brilliant and gorgeous.

This is the kind of happiness you want in Believing—not the kind you can shield from the elements, like some Martha Stewart garden, but a brilliant assemblage of “grand responses to everyday events,” rooted in love, humor, and glorious shite, thriving in full view of the barbed wire and turf fires.

Believing in yourself isn't about finding a perfect plateau and staying there. It's about being secure enough to see change as an opportunity for growth, no matter how much you like things the way they are. Look at “Emily Dickinson and Elvis Presley in Heaven.” Emily doesn't rest on her laurels as the Belle of Amherst, and Elvis doesn't strut around being King. Who needs a heaven where you spend all day being the same old thing you used to be, anyway? No, these two shake it up, try new things, challenge and delight each other. They'd rather rock the house where “God wears blue suede shoes,” then dawdle on some quiet cloud for eternity.

In “Sister Lou,” Sterling A. Brown tells us that maybe we can have that kind of rocking heaven right here on earth. Maybe we can approach every day the way Sister Lou approaches Paradise. After a lifetime of Jim Crow indignities, Sister Lou finally reaches heaven, but she doesn't expect fancy harps and angels. Instead she finds joy in earthly pleasures, like teaching Martha how to make greengrape jellies or giving Lazarus a passel of her Golden Biscuits. Heaven is a neighborhood where people know and care for one another, where you can visit with Jesus for a spell and joke awhile with Jonah. If we can learn to live that way here and now—to forgive all the betrayals we've endured, the way Sister Lou rubs the poor head of mixed-up Judas; to face the world with courage and kindness, the way Sister Lou always follows the rules of her raising—then maybe every day we'll find ourselves in a life with windows “openin’ on cherry trees an’ plum trees/Bloomin’ everlastin’.”

In Believing, you're finally free to live in your own unconventional heaven on earth. You're not looking for uninterrupted bliss, you just want to be able to maintain trust in yourself and the world. You want to know that whatever comes, you'll face it with bedrock integrity, grace, and acceptance.

The speaker in Grace Paley's “Here” epitomizes the way we want to feel in the ultimate stage of Kiss Off—simply free to be who we are. Somehow this laughing “old woman with heavy breasts/and a nicely mapped face” makes us think of Sadie. It's that butt-grabbing, fire-in-the-toe sensibility that we love in them both. This grandmother isn't afraid to age, to sit with her “stout thighs apart under/a big skirt,” to enjoy the sweat of the summertime—she is utterly content to be here in her garden, still full of desire to kiss the “sweet explaining lips” of her old man.

This is what we hope for all of us who have been through the pain of loss—that one day we'll be able to look at our lives with the contentment of the grandmother in her garden, that we'll be able to ask ourselves, “How did this happen?” and answer, “Well that's who I wanted to be.”