On Monday afternoon, my daughter and I went to the airport to collect dear friends arriving for the week. As far as airports go, the Missoula airport is a quaint, quiet affair.  Before 9/11, my husband and I used to park our Subaru at the curb and leash our dog to the flagpole on our way to get visitors. Now a little more formality is required, but still the biggest thing about the Missoula airport is the taxidermied black bear rearing on its hind legs in the arrivals lounge.

This Monday, as Birtie and I found a place to stand in the loosely clumped strangers awaiting friends and family members, I noticed TV cameras and members of the press taking interviews.  A quick look at the arrivals board put the pieces together.  The flight that had just landed was from Las Vegas.

A reporter from the local paper spoke to a couple just in front of me.  The couple held each other tightly.  “We thought there were two shooters,” I heard the woman tell the reporter.  “It was chaos.”  She thumbed away a tear.

Birtie pulled at my hand.  “Why are they sad?”  It’s hard to know what to tell your six-year-old about a mass shooting, about these periodic and appalling ruptures to the incredible safety in which we are blessed to live, about the rank and frankly, bewildering, parts of human nature.

“They were at an event where some people died,” I said truthfully but not completely.  Fortunately, for once my inquisitive daughter didn’t have a follow up question and just a few moments later our friends’ Seattle flight arrived and, in a welter of hugs and joy and luggage,  we bundled them off into the blustery Missoula afternoon.

The next day I sought out the Missoulian.  On the front page was a photo of the people I had seen tearfully holding each other in arrivals. When the shooting began, they had managed to get their wheelchair-bound son to safety, before returning to help administer first aid and load people in cars and ambulances.

Like so many of you, I’m sure, I don’t know what to do with this past week’s news.  I feel a raft of emotions.  Along with hefty sadness and anger, I find myself deep in bewilderment. I know I’m not alone. The New York Times lead headline currently reads, “No Manifesto, No Phone Calls: Killer Left Only Cryptic Clues.”

I’ve been curious about how much we humans seem to need a motive.  We crave a storyline to help mitigate the psychic cost of such an event.  Mental illness.  Radicalization.  At the very least we expect a change in life circumstances of the perpetrator.  We want a reason to hang our hats and hearts on.

These past few days, I’ve been trying to hold myself in this space of unknowing. To notice how much a desire for a reason, is for me, a desire to bring order out of chaos, to stitch over a rent in the world.  Reasons are false bottoms.  For those of us not personally affected by this tragedy, reasons allow us to complete the narrative, close the book, look away.  They paper over the wrenching loss and instability that fracture this world.  Right now, I’m sitting with a deep and honest bewilderment, a tear I don’t want to seam over, a troubled story without an end.

Peace,

Lindsay

Dear Friends,

I turned 40 this week, and in the midst of the lovely tumult of phone calls and texts, dinner with friends and well-wishes from many corners, my mother said something that crystallized my feelings about the day. “How did you get to be my age?” she asked.

I understood exactly what she meant. From a certain vantage point, there is a way in which time seems anything but linear. While days fly by, and years accumulate, the Self seems to somehow stand outside of time, to bend light in its own way. While I notice my kids growing up, my own discrete consciousness doesn’t age. My mind feels roughly the same as it did whenever I first tuned into its continuous stream. From this perspective, of course my mom and I are of one age.

A few weeks ago, I began teaching middle school language arts. “How do you know you are growing up?” I asked my eighth grade class as we launched our unit on personal narrative. Our school is K-8, and many of them have been enrolled since Kindergarten. “Look at you all!” I held up a picture of their Kindergarten class. “What did you care about back then?” The class was off and running. “Stuffed animals,” one said. “Remember how loooonng it seemed between each birthday?” another asked. “Sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference between imaginary and real.” “On the first day of school in Kindergarten I tried to dig a hole through the Earth.” “I remember thinking that if I tried hard enough I could really fly.” These eighth graders with their lanky bodies and changing voices, had memories tumbling out of them.

We read the Billy Collins poem, “On Turning Ten,” which ends with these memorable lines:

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

“Now that you are older,” I asked my students, “what sidewalks of life have you skinned your knees against? What are the realities you bump up against?”

“We moved,” one student said, “and I had to start over with friends.”

My own son slyly piped up, “I used to believe in my parents.”

“Right, adults are fallible,” I nodded, adding that to the list on the blackboard. “You all have probably learned that by now.”

They laughed knowingly, these thirteen-year-olds pivoting on the threshold between childhood and growing up. I could almost feel their consciousness beginning to bend time out of shape.

Later, I thought about that Billy Collins poem again.  He’s right about one thing– there’s no denying the way we all bleed when we fall against life’s sidewalks.  Daily it seems, I watch my eighth graders skin their knees against the pavement of their tricky social navigations.

And yet, there’s all this shining.

Unlike the poem’s speaker, I still believe there’s light under my skin. It’s this quality my mother is speaking to when she asks, “How did you get to be my age?” There’s a luminous stream coursing through each of us and time bends in its current.

Peace,

Lindsay