Entering the Wave

On loving the moment you're in

I am getting nothing done.

In the meadow, the wild thyme is a horizon of purple silk, rippling with activity. I count thirteen bees and a few common buckeyes, but there’s so much movement in the flowers, there must be more.

Their busyness only highlights how idle I am. How incapable I feel, in this moment, of pollinating anything, of bringing any thoughts together to produce something as sweet as nectar.

Time. So much time, and I am wasting it.

I don’t know why I’m surprised—this seems to happen every year at this point, mid-July, midsummer, when I am uninspired, unmoved, unproductive. All the corporeal gears grind to a halt as if to make way for the land to bloom and bolt. One body gone still so that the spotlight can shine on another. A reminder, once again, that I am not the star here.

I hate it though, this feeling of inadequacy. The faint stink of misery muddying the waters of what should be a perfect season. This is the good stuff! Peak summertime, bare feet and cropped tees, black-raspberry brambles in the ditches on dirt roads, sweetpeas, pesto, light as long and lean as the stretch of a house cat.

This is the best it will ever be, a voice says. It goes so fast. Don’t waste it.

It’s not an easy place to live: inside a moment that you know you will miss someday, when the now of it is hard and uncomfortable. There is this hiss to be present, this pressure to not squander the gift of it, to enjoy every instant—but what if in this present you are drained of sleep, head hammering from exhaustion, nerves frayed, teeming with ideas that can’t seem to make the leap out of daydream?

What if wildfires are turning the air pearly with smoke, keeping you inside on a gorgeous day?

What if in this moment your heart is so full of love for two boys who are growing too fast, who are every second older, who are on their way to leaving you? How do you look directly into the scorching eye of that moment, how do you stay in it knowing it is already gone?

Already gone.

How do you live in that infinite echo?

To put it plainly, I am finding it so hard to purely love being here, in this moment—this glorious summer, this season of early motherhood—and I feel so guilty for that. I understand that these are the days I’ll ache for someday, I just didn’t think I’d also be aching inside them.

But reality—like the light in the woods where I live—is a dappling. There is no perfect moment. There is the baby napping against my chest, his sweaty curls under the white sunhat, while my father is in the emergency room. There is the vase of wildflowers I brought into the kitchen and the rogue caterpillar on one of the stalks, defecating in the salt pot. There is the warm sun, and there is the smoke obscuring it, painting it red.

Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh would argue that every moment, in fact, is perfect because it is what we have; it is all we have. Dwelling in the present moment, he said, I know this is a wonderful moment.

We drive up to the cabin, the one I’ve been going to since I was a kid, the one where my father was a kid too. Generations of us, making the long pilgrimage each year into a citadel of trees. Forest City, Maine. Not quite a town, more of a fishing camp at the lip of the country, on a lake that’s mostly Canadian.

Each year, I’m struck anew by how much I have to leave the world to love the world. How far I have to travel—into the deepest, untouchable wilderness—in order to restore my connection to it all.

At the cabin, the coffee is weak. The plumbing is ancient and keeps breaking. I accidentally wash a load of laundry alongside a dead mouse who got stuck in the machine all winter, and I scream when my hand reaches in and pulls out its waterlogged body.

But I understand that this is all the good stuff—the days we will dream about. Not in spite of the errors, the terrors, but because of them. Present moment, perfect moment.

When the loons call on the lake, it is the saddest beauty. The sound carries across the water, raking the surface with its shifting hues, like the rainbow trails of gasoline left behind by speedboats. The word that comes to mind as I listen is saudade, which Portuguese writer Manuel de Melo defines as “a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy.”

The loon song is a thread, stitching sadness and beauty together. Stitching past and present. It leaps octaves, leaps through time. A saudade song—pain and pleasure mixed together like paint until a new color is born, until you can’t separate the good and the bad.

One evening, we take the boat out at golden hour. I sit in the middle seat with the baby standing on my thighs, craning his neck out of the puff of his life jacket. My young cousins are in the front, an older one manning the motor. I remember seeing a photograph of my mother sitting in this very boat with baby me in her arms. The elders have gone, are passing on; we are the elders now.

And suddenly I get it. Sometimes it happens—I catch it like a wave at the exact right time. My head is aching from lack of sleep, and the wind is cold, and my father is sick, and there is fear and worry like a seam of ore in the center of it all—but for a sliver of a second, I completely understand.

Entering the wave, I am airborne.

I leave it all. I love it all.

And it is a perfect moment.

Photo by my cousin Julia Sabot, who always knows how to capture the moment, perfectly.