to prune or not to prune

Over Labor Day weekend, we visited my parents and I was surprised to see the state of their peach tree. The branches, heavy with too many peaches, were bent over and hung to the ground with the tops of their branches brushing against the grass. It was at once comical and tragic. We spent a good part of an afternoon picking the bad peaches off the trees but there was still a considerable amount of peaches weighing the boughs down. I tried persuading my mom to pick off more peaches, but she was reluctant to lose the peaches that looked more promising.

After doing some online research and getting advice from a friend who's grown peach trees, I learned that some preventative measures can be taken before a tree gets to this state:
1) Pruning: cutting and trimming branches and buds
2) Thinning: proactively and preventatively picking off peaches as they are growing to space them out more

If neither measure is taken, then the result is what you see with my parents' tree: a fruitful but useless (and tired...and nutrients depleted) tree.

I can relate to that peach tree. More often than not, I am so focused on being productive, on staying busy, on doing too much because I'm unwilling to let go of all the good things. The result is that I'm tired, cranky, feeling depleted and producing half-ass fruit. Without taking time to actively prune or thin in my life, I too can bear a lot of fruit but at the expense of my well-being. And the fruit produced is not as good had I pruned and thinned.

I'm currently reading Necessary Endings by Dr. Henry Cloud and it's been reinforcing these notions of pruning and thinning in my life.
"Pruning is a process of proactive endings." (Cloud) In his book, Cloud notes that pruning purposefully cuts off branches and buds that fall into these three categories:
1. Healthy buds or branches that are not the best ones
2. Sick branches that are not going to get well
3. Dead branches that are taking space needed for the healthy ones to thrive

Life is a series of seasons and rhythms - whether I like it or not, endings are a natural part of that. I can either proactively prepare for, consider, and even initiate endings, or I can be in denial or even fight against endings. But the endings will happen anyway - with or without me kicking and screaming all the way. I've lived too many seasons like this overburdened peach tree - with all the good intentions in the world but none of the decisive action required to prune and thin towards health and sustainability. So in turning over a new leaf (haha, pun intended), this is a season that I'm challenging myself to practice pruning - in obligations, commitments and relationships.

Do you prune? How do you feel about pruning?

Look to the trees

The world is literally on fire.

Daily, it seems as if the world is crumbling and we are destroying one another, tearing at each other's throats even as we tear ourselves apart. Is this the rest of life as we know it? Or is this a reality - and has always been a reality - that we only soberly realize and acknowledge the farther we edge into adulthood? That to grow old is to grow weary, to sink slowly into these tired bodies in this tired world.

When I grow weary, I find myself staring at trees. I need to go anywhere with greenery, with tall quiet trees that do nothing but stretch into the sky with their invisible roots anchoring them as they have done before I arrived and will continue to do long after I depart. I find solace in considering the trees. There they stand, silent and stoic except for the occasional gentle rustle with the right breeze.  Their branches bend with the wind, they sway in the storms, they shed all their leaves and stand naked for months only to push through the pain of growing buds and blossoms to be swathed in leaves when summer comes. Year after year, season after season, they endure. Even when the earth is scorched and they are burned, somehow, some of the trees persevere. And survive.

* * * * *

I wrote this poem a couple of years ago and revisit when I find myself worrying and overthinking everything.

And all the trees of the field will clap their hands

How do the trees know to grow with such grace

The way they splay and bend and stretch

Dancing to the pulse of unheard strains

In perfect time and syncopation

existential crises

What's your favorite season to have an existential crisis?
Summer's mine, hands down.

I think it's because it feels so unexpected in the summer....you're eating ice cream, swimming in the ocean, drinking on a rooftop, strolling in the park... and all of a sudden you're contemplating the point of it all - what is life, anyway? - and realizing that the sea of people surrounding you, enjoying sunshine and loved ones - every single person will die someday.

So summery, right?

I find having an existential crisis on the most beautiful of days, in the season filled with the most sunlight, strangely comforting. It's as if somehow, all this beauty - painfully wonderful beauty - is at once reality and not. That to be fully present is to also embrace the fleetingness of it all - that all we know is what we know, but it's not all there is. It's sobering, even as I feel drunk with the sweet languidness of these days, thick as the humid air that drips off my skin.

I've seen an increased frequency of existential crises this past year, due to a couple of factors. One, I turned 40. I know 40 is the new 30, blah blah blah, but there's a perspective shift that comes (maybe it's connected to my slowing metabolism and slightly tilting hormones?) with rounding the fourth decade of life. I'm officially over FOMO. I feel at home in my skin and the spots, wrinkles, and extra pounds that it comes with. I care less about where and who I will be someday but more concerned with where and who I am right now.

Two, I celebrated one year of marriage. Being married has expanded my heart in ways I never imagined. The love overwhelms me - which is also frightening. How is my heart capable of loving someone so much - and what is the depth of this vulnerability? What do you do with all this love, especially with our inevitable mortality?

The older I get, the less I know. The more I question. But what I do know - it feels more sure. And I feel ever more grateful - even when thinking about death on a beautiful summer day.

Skin

My husband is watching "When They See Us", based on the actual case of the Central Park Five, in the living room. I started watching it with him, but I got so overwhelmed by feelings of rage, sadness, injustice, and pain that I had to leave the room. I feel like a coward sometimes when I'm unable to watch certain things because the feelings of pain become too strong. I've been highly emphatic since I was a child - it doesn't take much for me to step inside someone else's skin and take on the emotions they may be experiencing. Just the other day, I met with my spiritual director and we were discussing my struggles with empathy; I'm grateful that I have a high level of empathy but it certainly feels like a blessing and a curse. There's no way for me to dial down, let along turn off, the emotion overload, particularly when it comes to suffering. I don't know how not to feel the suffering of others.

The issue of race is particularly unnerving. I grew up in a small, rural town that was predominantly white. To be an immigrant and minority impressed upon me the importance of not just fitting in but acceptance; to succeed, I needed to - no, I must - be part of the dominant culture. I remember being vulnerable, being on guard, learning to fend for myself and for my family by mastering English. That was the greatest defense and offense - to have a voice, to speak up, to explain, to challenge. Language was my greatest weapon.

In my desire to be accepted, I always envisioned myself marrying an American - a white American at that. Becoming fully acculturated by marrying into the dominant culture. God has a sense of humor, however, and I ended up falling in love and marrying a non-American - and an immigrant at that. A beautiful, brown man whose first language is not English.

I've noticed all those dormant feelings of protectiveness reawakening during this first year of marriage: that little child warrior in me who had grown accustomed to explaining things to my parents, serving as the translator, yelling at those who had wrongly assumed they could bully my parents because they didn't speak English fluently. My husband is a grown man who is very adept at taking care of himself. But I can't help but feel those guardian tendencies, particularly as he navigates a land where he will be perceived a certain way by the color of his skin, a perception he may not be accustomed to having grown up in a different place - a place where he is the dominant and not the minority. Just thinking about it makes me want to protect him somehow from arrows that may be wrongfully flung at him.

How different this world would be if we knew more deeply what it means to step inside someone else's skin? How differently would we make laws and policies, construct systems of justice? How differently would we debate topics like gun reform, abortion, and civil rights? How differently would our public conversations be shaped if we focused less on "My rights" and more on "Your pain"?

This is what we do

I wrote this poem on an Amtrak train at the start of this long weekend.... watching a mother of two dish out shares of lunch from their KFC family order - making sure her kids, her husband, and her parents were fed before she fed herself - and then getting a blanket out of an overhead suitcase halfway through the trip for one of her kids.... I was thinking of how much we women serve as caretakers - either because we're wired to or because we're taught....

This is what we do

We are born to gather—

driven by urges coded in DNA strands

twisting helixes that can’t help but intertwine and pull and connect.

We enter this world with mouths open, fingers grasping,

swallowing swathes of air and light and cries and song.

We are taught to be like Mama,

gifted aprons and dolls,

mimic the swaddling of babes, tilting the bottle just so

while we bake pies of air in plastic ovens.

We are taught to be soft,

soft even as we seek to know the sharpness of our edges,

developing a toughness not unlike the smooth shellac of a crab’s shell.

Beautiful and brittle,

hiding tenderness that spills out of cracks split open.

“Your body is meant to produce life.”

Bodies that become like vessels,

equipped to create and carry other sentient beings,

sowing and harvesting,

a storehouse without end,

Keeper of all things:

sandwiches, medicine, blankets, bandages, kisses, hugs, secrets, knowledge.

We are asked - again and again - to keep it together,

to pull taut the threads,

to pick up pieces even before they fall,

to turn the wheel as if to command the sun to rise -

again and again -

from his sleepy bed.

mother's day

Seven months ago, I found out I was pregnant. Six months ago, almost to the day, I found out I had a missed miscarriage.

It suddenly dawned on me today that if the pregnancy had endured, I would be celebrating my first Mother's Day and preparing for the arrival of a little one in one month's time.

That's a lot of stuff to be feeling. The pregnancy was not planned and I confess that my husband and I were both very surprised - shocked even - when that pregnancy test quickly flashed positive. The next few weeks were filled with a lot of conversations, tears, and prayers as we wrestled with news that was both jarring and wonderful. We had finally turned the corner emotionally and accepted - even embraced - the fact that we were going to be parents sooner than we would have liked when my gynecologist could not locate a heartbeat at my check-up. The emotional rollercoaster took yet another turn.

I must confess that in many ways, I am relieved I'm not having a baby right now. I hope that doesn't sound terrible - it's just honest. I do find myself wondering what our child would have looked like. When I see a little boy with caramel skin and curly hair and almond-shaped eyes, I wonder if that's how our son (my husband was already solidly convinced it was going to be a boy) would have turned out. I wouldn't pinpoint any of my residual feelings to grief, anger, or bitterness. If anything, it's closer to curiosity.

four years

It's been four years since I updated this blog - actually, four years, 2 months and 27 days. I almost forgot this blog still exists. So much life has happened in these past four plus years.... I graduated with a master's degree. I have my own place in NYC. I got married. I entered my 40's. I have made this city a home.

So why am I picking this up again? Life is moving much faster than I would like, and there's something about writing and processing on paper that helps me to pump the brakes a bit. Pause, reflect, listen. Sit with my emotions and let them just be, allowing myself to feel every curve and edge.

Perhaps it's also that today, l feel a range of emotions more acutely. Celebrating and remembering the resurrection of Christ on this Easter Sunday. Mourning and deeply hurting with the hundreds of innocent lives destroyed by vicious bomb attacks in Sri Lanka. Grieving and aching with friends as another friend departs our world via the ruthless vehicle of cancer.

Some days, it's hard to swallow the bittersweetness of it all. I am deliriously happy and grateful, my heart is full when I recount the ways I've been blessed in unexpected ways these past few years. But all this is so fleeting, we are surrounded by pain and death, and the violence of a world turned onto itself is more often than not unbearable.

I know the desire for control is futile, and it's ultimately not what I want. I'm not even sure if I want to know everything - omniscience seems more detrimental than not with my mortal limitations. Perhaps all I want is to faithfully make sense of it all - to take each step with more faith than fear, to honestly wrestle, to ask questions, to hold with open hands.

So, after a four-year hiatus, an attempt to pick up a discipline of reflection and writing again. Maybe with a little more wisdom, definitely with a lot more questions.