If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it. –Toni Morrison

I could hear the four-wheeler rumbling up the drive before I could see it. But I didn’t have to see it to know that my grandson would be flying up the lane, a serious wake of gravel behind him, the whole summer day before him. He pulled up to the porch with inches to spare, dismounted, and flung open the door.

I’ll take you for a ride around the pond, Grandma. He was bare-chested and wearing two different kinds of socks. And so I threw the remaining inches of my coffee down the sink, rinsed my cup, and followed him out the front door. As I swung my leg over the seat and settled in behind him, I remembered how beetles had ravaged the elm trees that surrounded the pond and how a forest of stumps now hid in the knee-high weeds there. I could see it all then: the front wheel catching a stump, the air-born assault, the crash. I tightened my grip around his waist and wondered whether or not it would just be better to close my eyes for the duration of the ride.

I’d seen him take corners, learning into the air as if it could hold him, as if he could bend gravity to his will. Yes, better not to see what’s coming, I thought. Better to hold my breath. Better to send up a silent prayer before we leave the lane. When wild honeysuckle wafted across our path, I knew we were leaving the road and would momentarily descend to the grass around the pond. This was it, I thought. This could be the beginning of the end.

Yet as we rounded the northeast corner of the pond, we slowed considerably. I opened my eyes to see Griffin searching the ground with laser intensity, his eyes working to uncover each hidden stump. And then he was moving among the stumps with skill and certainty, with love.

We’re not going to wreck, Grandma. I know what I’m doing. His back glistened with sweat, and I felt myself exhaling, my arms loosening to my sides, and my face turning to the sun as he drove the remainder of the way around the pond. When he pulled up in front of his house, he turned to me and smiled. Good ride? he asked. Great ride, I said.

For most of us, there are moments when we realize that we’re just along for the ride. We’re no longer piloting our own ships. We’re no longer large and in charge. We’ve become passengers and hold supporting roles. Age, change, and circumstances have intervened, and we become those taken care of instead of those who care for. What a bittersweet transition this often is. We remember days when the very people upon whom we now depend were those we diapered and fed, clothed and cheered. We remember the responsibilities we shouldered and the expectations we met.

My four-wheeler ride wasn’t the first time my grandson had assumed a caretaker role. Last spring during a particularly stormy evening when the power went off, I called my daugher to see if I could bring them a couple of LED lanterns, a 50-yard trip from door to door. In the background, I could hear my grandson insisting that I not come, telling his mother that she’s old and we need her to survive this. Sweet–and funny, to be sure–but words that gave me pause. The fact that he recognized I was old and that he feared for my survival made me feel at once precious and vulnerable, as though I could truly blow away in the storm. Outwardly, I chuckled. Inwardly, I sighed.

I still bandage his skinned knees and wrap him in dry towels when he gets out of the pool. I still know things that occasionally amaze him and stock good snacks. In short, I’m still captain of the ship–for a time. In the end, however, all of it–the care-taking and the being taken care of–is truly a great ride.

If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.
― Anatole France

For weeks I’d worked on a short story that I finally–with some reluctance–submitted to an online journal. A day later (a miraculously fast response from any journal, online or otherwise), I received my rejection letter. But let me back up a bit. I’d physically worked on the story for weeks; that is, I put pen to paper and fingers to keyboard. It had been birthed and percolating, however, for two years. So technically, this story was years in the making.

That I received a rejection letter was no surprise. I’d never submitted fiction for publication, though I often thought about it late at night when sleep eluded me. Writers expect rejection. It comes with the territory of creating something you float out into the sea of public approval. What surprised me was the quick, but sure, response that washed over me as I read the words of rejection. That’s o.k. It was a good ride while it lasted. Actually, it was a great ride, for hours would go by as I wordsmithed and pondered the next paragraph. Hours that retirement has afforded me during which I could lose myself in the writing process.

American psychologist Carl Rogers writes that [t]he good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination. The older I get, the more I like the idea that the good life is a process, a direction towards which we live and move and have our being. Like many things, writing is a process that urges one in a direction, often with no particular destination in mind. American poet Robert Frost understood this well, for he insisted [n]o surpise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. I also like the idea that in simply beginning and pointing myself in some direction, I’m in the good company of the likes of Robert Frost.

For years, my grandchildren and I have made elaborate plans for holiday gatherings. To this end, we’ve become Dollar Store junkies, oohing and aahing over the current season’s wares. Should we get the 4th of July banner AND the streamers? What about those headbands with glittery stars and stripes? And we have to have both dinner and dessert plates that match the red, white, and blue napkins and table ware. Days before the event, we can visualize it. It will be glorious–and unabashedly overdone. As you can imagine, the results could best be described as lovingly tacky. But no matter. It wasn’t the actual product but the process that gave us so much joy. As Gracyn and Griffin grow older (and their holiday tastes grow more refined–and expensive), we’ll undoubtedly make fewer trips to the Dollar Store. But I hope they’ll remember, as I remember, the unadulterated joy of the process, the planning and imagining and shopping.

In his autobiographical travel book, Blue Highways, William Least Heat Moon contends that [t]he nature of things is resistance to change, while the nature of process is resistance to stasis. This is another remarkable thing about process: its resistance to stasis. If you’re in process, you’re moving. And through movement, change is not only possible but probable. When I consider the process of parenting, I can both smile and grimace at my own wild ride. One thing is certain: you can’t stand still, for each day marches forward and lays its spoils at your feet. An hour after I’ve shared sweet moments reading Curious George Flies a Kite, my daughter is screaming from her bed (having frightened both her sisters) that the plant in her room looks like a giant alligator, and she’s too afraid to sleep. Just when I thought I had this parenting thing down, that parents who complained about their children’s bedtimes were deluded–and cleary ineffective–I’ve been duly humbled. And the occasions during which I would be humbled stretched out endlessly before me, ultimately provoking more significant change than I could’ve ever imagined. The process of change through humility continues as I parent adult children. This, as Least Heat Moon contends, is the nature of process. We may resist change, but it can rock our boats in magnificent ways.

I never failed once. It just happened to be a 2000-step process. These are the words of American inventor Thomas Edison. We really don’t like failure, and more times than not, we rationalize it away, ignore it and bury it. In schools today, we pull out all the stops to prevent anyone from failing; we go to elaborate lengths to graduate and promote all (or nearly all). Failure is not an option, as teachers are repeatedly warned, and students are repeatedly assured. It’s all about the product, the final state of being as a matriculated individual. A 2000-step process? Well, that would just be silly and unnecessarily cruel. Still, these words should give us serious pause. When our brightest minds acknowledge failure is not the end but a important part of an even more important process, we should take note. The processes through which most valuable discoveries are made are often long, arduous, and without clear ends in sight. They make take 2,000 steps or 2 million. Failure is simply a gateway to the next discovery if the process is to continue.

Sitting in my cabin the other day, I was watching the birds in the wild honeysuckle bush near the edge of the timber when, without warning or real consideration, I found myself thinking: What if no one ever read a word I wrote? What if I got up everyday to face an empty sheet of paper or blank computer screen? What if I really never finished anything, if the process just continued until I took my last breath? The answer came in on the breeze as the fragrance of honeysuckle wafted through the window: No matter. The path is beautiful, and I really don’t need to know where it leads.

If I ever become a saint—I will surely be one of “darkness.” I will continually be absent from heaven—to light the light of those in darkness on earth. Mother Teresa

As I liberally apply sunscreen in preparation for a session of weeding and mulching, it’s hard to remember that just a few days ago, I was one of many who mourned the delay of spring. It was a long winter, many lamented, a season that seemed to have no end in sight, a cold, dark season that stubbornly held on and on. I was one of those lamenters, zipping my jacket (I refused to wear a winter coat in April regardless of the temperature!) and turning the heat up in my car. I was one who’d increasingly begun to regard the months since Christmas as a dark night of the soul, a noche oscura that St. John of the Cross described as a forlorn feeling that God has abandoned you. I could only muster a sigh of resignation as I woke to yet another dreary day and heard the furnace kick on.

Several years ago, I recall reading about Mother Teresa and was stunned to discover that the woman who’d dedicated her life to the poor and sick, the disciple who’d literally lived as Jesus’s hands and feet through the slums of Calcutta, this saint of all saints, suffered the dark night of the soul for most of her life. In 2007, Come Be My Light, a collection of her private correspondence and personal writings revealed that–with the exception of one short period–she’d suffered from an intense feeling of God’s absence. How could this be, I thought. How could a woman who so completely and devotedly dedicated her life to God have lived for decades without feeling his presence? After all, I reasoned, Mother Teresa is the gold standard of Christian witness, the saintly role model. And yet, the more I read about her life, the more I understood that, like her namesake St. Thérèse de Lisieux (the Little Flower) who decried that God hides, is wrapped in darkness, Mother Teresa sorely felt God’s abandonment.

In her personal writing and correspondence, we can hear her sorrow:

The place of God in my soul is blank—There is no God in me.

I want—and there is no One to answer—no One one Whom I can cling; no, No One. Alone. The darkness is so dark—and I am alone.

Before I used to get such help and consolation from spiritual direction—from the time the work has started—nothing.

To feel a blankness in your soul, a darkness so deep and so profound that God can’t be found, can’t be heard or felt, is perhaps as apt a definition of the dark night of the soul as we’ll ever get. The scandal–yes, scandal!–that her posthumous writings caused is telling, I think, of our unwillingness to acknowledge and accept these feelings of spiritual abandonment. Atheist and longtime critic Christopher Hitchens argued that her personal revelations testified to the fact that Mother Teresa was simply a confused old lady who’d lost her belief in God, a sad woman who served others only as a part of an effort to still the misery within. Hitchens also contended that attributing the title of dark night of the soul to her feelings of abandonment was the Catholic Church’s perverse piece of marketing that sought to spin despair as faith. 

A perverse piece of marketing by the Catholic Church? Really? So many others have written about the authenticity and power of this dark night. Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung warned of the danger of the descent into the dark night of the soul, of the risk of taking the sunset way because it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods, Yet like so many others who’ve lived and written about this dark night, Jung acknowledged that every descent is followed by an ascent; the vanishing shapes are shaped anew, and a truth is valid in the end only if it suffers change and bears new witness in new images, in new tongues, like a new wine that is put into new bottles. American writer, Joseph Campbell, wrote about the universal functions of mythology and is best known for his work with the Hero’s Journey, which also illuminates this pattern of desent and ascent, suffering and return with enlightenment. We know this pattern and these truths; we’ve lived them in one way or another, though many of us have hidden our feelings of abandonment, ashamed that revealing them would also reveal our spiritual weakness. We often fear that our critics will call us out as hypocrites: See, even the believers despair. What good, then, is their faith? In spite of our fear and our pride, though, when the night seems endless and the emptiness eternal, we can’t help but cry out, bereft and alone.

I’ve read about spiritual seekers who cloister or leave for the wilderness, so that they might claim and suffer through their dark nights of the soul. Most of us, however, experience our darks nights in the midst of our ordinary lives and suffer through them in ordinary places. In his book, A Hell of Mercy: A Meditation on Depression and the Dark Night of the Soul, Tim Farrington writes:

You don’t need to retire to a cloister or the desert for years on end to experience a true dark night; you don’t even have to be pursuing any particular “spiritual” path. Raising a challenged child, or caring for a failing parent for years on end, is at least as purgative as donning robes and shaving one’s head; to endure a mediocre work situation for the sake of the paycheck that sustains a family demands at least as much in the way of daily surrender to years of pristine silence in a monastery. No one can know in advance how and where the night will come, and what form God’s darkness will take.

Farrington understands what Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung insisted: the dark night of the soul is a universal experience that manifests itself in very particular ways. Each dark night experience is the same–and uniquely different. It might be argued that we should find solace in a community of fellow dark night sojourners. And while it may be true that some do, many, I fear, don’t.

There are those who can’t find solace in community because they’re wrestling with aspects of their faith that they don’t yet understand and may not know how to express. The solitude of their suffering, then, may be necessary–and ultimately beneficial. Their dark night may be a period of reckoning, of looking into the wormholes of their souls where the truth of their spiritual ailments has taken root. American writer and devout Catholic, Flannery O’Connor, understood this well:

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds the emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints . .

O’Connor has given us characters who, in wrestling with their faith, uncover things about their souls that are hideous, emotionally disturbing, and downright repulsive. Some wrestle their way to redemption, while others are consumed by the fight. When a reader wrote her and complained that her book had left a bad taste in her mouth, O’Connor promptly responded: You weren’t supposed to eat it. In her novels, short stories, and personal writing, O’Connor fearlessly confronts those, including herself, whose dark nights are brutally and necessarily ugly and difficult.

Like Flannery O’Connor, Dutch priest, professor and writer, Henri Nouwen testifies to the necessary role that loneliness often plays in the dark night of the soul. Even as he lived and worked in community at L’Arche Daybreak Community, a home for disabled people, he confessed to loneliness, a feeling of separation from others and from God. He writes:

In community, where you have all the affection you could ever dream of you feel that there is a place where even community cannot reach. That’s a very important experience. In that loneliness, which is like a dark night of the soul, you learn that God is greater than community.

We find it relatively easy to attribute our feelings of loneliness and darkness to the isolation of lingering winter. In confessing this, we may find absolution in a community of others who’ve also struggled to keep the faith during the long, cold months. Truthfully, we find it much harder to attribute our feelings of loneliness and darkness to spiritual matters that have little–if anything–to do with the weather. These feelings are the unmentionables, those you uncover and probe only in the privacy of your own thoughts.

It’s significant to note that after decades of darkness, Mother Teresa began to regard her feelings of abandonment differently than the dark night of the soul described by John of the Cross and experienced by Thérèse de Lisieux. Her dark night, she came to understand, was a necessary part of her vocation. In experiencing her own inner poverty and by sharing the suffering of those she served, she ultimately came to believe that she was sharing the suffering of Christ himself. In recalling the oath she’d made in 1942, a pledge to never deny God anything he’d ask of her, she finally accepted that this meant deferring to feelings of God’s abandonment. I think her deference was, ironically, an ascent from darkness.

Mother Teresa continues to serve as a powerful example of one who lives and works as though God is present, even when he might seem so far away. She was light, in spite of her own spiritual darkness, and sought to light the light of those in darkness on earth. Our own dark night of the soul may be quick and temporary or long and permanent. It may be redemptive or aspiring-to-be-redemptive. It may be necessary or seemingly unnecessary. Regardless, it is human, perhaps one of the most universal human experiences. As such, it shouldn’t be scandalized but accepted and valued.

Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers. –W. H. Auden

It’s the oldest and briefest literary art form, claims James Geary, the editor of the compendium Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists. According to Geary, the aphorism must be brief and definitive, as well as personal and philosophical. And, he explains, it must have a twist which can be either a linguistic twist or a psychological twist or even a twist in logic that somehow flips the reader into a totally unexpected place.

In an age of tweets and sound bites, perhaps it’s the aphorism’s pithiness that is most attractive, that keeps it relevant. If I had to make a sound wager, I’d bet that most of my former students remember little about American Transcendental writer Henry David Thoreau except that he went to the woods and left us with a classic aphorism or two:

–I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

—If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

—A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

The same could be said of Transcendental Ralph Waldo Emerson:

—Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

—To be great is to be misunderstood.

—Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Here are words which, over a century later, grace posters and coffee mugs, t-shirts and greeting cards. Aphorisms like these have lasting power, and generations after they’ve been written, individuals insist that surely they must have been written for them and for such a time as this.

Perhaps the greatest power of the aphorism is the author’s assertiveness which, as poet W. H. Auden insists, stems from a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers. When one writes with such forceful brevity, with such personal and philosophical certainty, we listen. There are too many babblers in the world, individuals who use a universe of words and say nothing. They’ve exhausted us, sucked the very life from us and left us thirsting for a good aphorism. And if the aphorism is not only brief and authoritarian but witty, leaving us with some kind of psychological, linguistic, or logical twist, all the better. For these are words worth knowing and repeating, words that will make us, too, sound wiser than we are.

In his New Yorker article “The Art of Aphorism,” Adam Gopnik quotes English philosopher John Stuart Mill who claimed that [a]lmost all books of aphorisms, which have ever acquired a reputation, have retained it. Gophnik elaborates:

We don’t absorb aphorisms as esoteric wisdom; we test them against our own experience. The empirical test of the aphorism takes the form first of laughter and then of longevity, and its confidential tone makes it candid, not cynical. Aphorisms live because they contain human truth, as Mill saw, and reach across barriers of class and era.

I think that Gopnik’s insight into the human truth embedded in good aphorisms is particularly apt. What’s better than a brief, pithy assertion about human nature? Reading such an aphorism is akin to a 30-second doctor’s visit during which a definitive diagnosis is delivered and cure prescribed. Eleanor Roosevelt offered just such an aphorism when she wrote: No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. The diagnosis: you’re feeling inferior, struggling to see your own worth. And the cure: just stop consenting to feel that way. There it is, short and sweet. Ten words and a few precious seconds later, and you’re on your way to improved self-esteem.

Or consider this aphorism from William Shakespeare: A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool. Short, definitive, personal, philosphical, and with a twist? Check. Insight into human nature? Check. As one might expect, Shakespeare, the aphorist, rocks. Likewise Benjamin Franklin (Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late), George Bernard Shaw (Youth is wasted on the young), Albert Einstein (The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education), and Alfred Lord Tennyson (Tis better to have loved and lost/ than never to have loved at all). The list of famous aphorisms–unlike the form itself–is pratically endless.

Although I love my father’s poetry, like many, I’ve found particular solace and wisdom in his aphorisms:

—Love is what gives legacy a face.

—Anyone who is inclined to wonder edges toward the profound.

—Notice how a child’s cup offered to the heavens simply fills itself up.

—There is no more heroic charge than “Begin again.”

In writing about the art of aphorisms, Adam Gopnik concludes that [w]here big books remind us of how hard the work of understanding can be, aphorisms remind us of how little we have to know to get the point. He understands the real virtue of a good aphorism: that it takes us quickly and easily to the point, for which there is no pre-requisite knowledge or context necessary. To offer the best gift in a nutshell is, indeed, a testament to the gift-giver. Thank goodness there are so many such gift-givers and gifts to be had.