Everyone once, once only

“Everyone once, once only.  Just once and no more. And we also once.  Never again.  But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable.”  — Rilke,   Duino Elegies

These words, the epigraph to Mary Oliver’s new collection of poems, pierce my heart.  I have read them over and over again, have felt the depth and heaviness and truth of that italicized word, once.  For so it is, every moment of every day, once and only once.

Two days ago, I stood in my garden, taking stock after a week away.  My neighbor Debbie had protected all of my fragile plants from the first two nights of killing frost, spreading black plastic in the entry way, carrying in the heavy pots of geraniums, petunias, chrysanthemums and ornamental kale, one by one.  She had spread bed sheets across my rampant nasturtiums, and returned in the early morning, before sunrise, to spray a fine mist of water over everything, laboring to eke out just a few more days of life and color.  Standing there, on the most perfect fall day of all, I wanted to grow roots myself, to become still enough to see and absorb everything before me — the mountains ablaze with color, the crystalline sky, the grass, emerald green again after a long, dry summer, the yellow leaves drifting slowly to earth from the maple by the stone wall, the flowers.  Oh, the flowers, these final, brilliant blooms of the season.  For weeks I’ve been cutting things back, getting rid of the spent sunflowers, cone flowers, rudibeckia.  And meanwhile, the cosmos and nasturtiums have thrived, a riot of glorious, mismatched late season finery — oranges and pinks, side by side, crazy and beautiful.

I wanted to give myself a moment there, a moment in which to simply appreciate the transient beauty and bounty of the day, and then I intended to get right back to the work at hand — the pot of soup on the stove, the load of laundry to fold, the overnight bag to pack so I could head out the door again.  For a self-proclaimed homebody, I haven’t been home much lately.

Steve and I had just returned from a long weekend in Minnesota, where our son Henry was the musical director for the St. Olaf theater department’s fall musical.  Watching him do, at last, the very work he has long aspired to was quite a parenting high.  All those hours of “conducting” with a drum stick behind a closed bedroom door, all  those years of music lessons, the high school productions, the accompanist jobs, were finally paying off, coalescing into the realization of a dream.  We wouldn’t have missed it for anything.  And yet, all mixed up with my feelings of pride and excitement for him was the bittersweet realization that we were visitors in his life out there, the life he lives on his own, far away from us.  We dropped in for a while, met his friends and had a meal, and then we said our good-byes right on the stage, as the actors began to strike the set around us after the final performance of the show.

The next morning, before we headed to the airport, I took a run through a nearby park and found myself alone in an empty playground.  Looking at the swings, the slide, the jungle gym, I was overcome with memories of my own boys, age four and seven or so — back when swings and monkey bars offered hours of thrills, back when an ordinary day might include a trip to the park, a snack on the grass, singing along to Raffi on the ride home, a nap, hour upon hour of togetherness.  That life I loved so much, that time of close, intense mothering, is so far in the past now that the wave of nostalgia that washed over me, the sudden lump in my throat, caught me off guard.  Once, and only once.

Back at home again, standing in my own yard and wishing that I could somehow seize every detail of a gorgeous autumn morning, I felt the same shadow across my heart, couldn’t help mourning the loss of all that beauty even as I tried in vain to somehow reach out and hold onto it for a little while longer.

“I’ve missed the fall,” I lamented to myself, thinking back over these last few too-busy weeks, the travel and book store readings and commitments.  This, I know by now, is my grasping mind at work, the part of me that is never quite satisfied with the present because I am so busy regretting what’s over (the entire month of September–gone!) or anticipating what’s to come (rain in the forecast!  no more warm, golden days like this one!).

So there I was, standing in the midst of autumn glory, wringing my hands, because I hadn’t had enough of it, and because it wouldn’t last.  Sometimes I have to wonder: will I ever get it?  Will what is ever be enough?  “This isn’t the dress rehearsal,” as my husband likes to remind our son Jack, “this is your life.”  He’s nearly 18; we want him to know that every choice he makes has a consequence, that what he does defines who he is.

The same is true, I realize, of my thoughts.  What I think creates the reality I live.  I can stand in a deserted playground and feel the loss of my sons’ childhoods, or I can choose instead to celebrate who they have become. I can wish for more flowers, more warm days, more free time, or I can shift perspective, and accept the gift of the present moment — exquisite, fleeting, already vanished.

We die a little every day.  With every change, with every loss, with every turn of season or cloud passing before the sun we lose what was and are asked to respond to what is, again and again.  And yet, how easily we overlook the wonder of life, in our rush to attend to its details or in our dissatisfaction with the way things are. Seeing my grown son move ever further into adult life, feeling another season slip away, feeling the pressure of a day with too much crammed into it, being with a friend in pain, I struggle against what is, when I could choose instead to see how precious it is simply to be alive. Some day, some how, I hope I can finally learn to be at peace with the fragility of it all, to accept the truth that in every moment we are, all of us, dying to something.

And so, like a traveler who keeps getting off course and must stop in her tracks and seek out a better route, I find myself constantly rushing headlong down the path of sadness these days, only to realize that I’m going the wrong way.  Seems as if my life is full of stops and starts, as I pull myself together, get turned around, and choose another direction.  Gratitude is always a good way to go.  How grateful I am to Debbie, for saving all the flowers for me, until I could get home and enjoy them for one last morning.  I can be grateful for an autumn day unlike any other, before or since.  Grateful for bees in the sunshine and wild colors in the garden, for parents who are healthy, children who have turned into men, a husband who has stood steady through it all, friends who give so much and who allow me to give of myself in return.  I can even be grateful, in this very moment, for gusting winds and the cold rain that has poured down relentlessly all through the night and into this afternoon, pummeling the garden, shredding the last of the flowers, and whipping most of the leaves right off the trees.

It has been a difficult, tumultuous fall, with much change and sadness in my life and the lives of those most dear to me. Suffering can seem so random, so pointless — and yet here it is, inevitable.  What can we do but meet it however we are able, knowing that while life itself is a gift, each day also offers us a series of little deaths. These losses and transitions, these heartaches, they too are simply part and parcel of our daily turn upon this earth, reminders of what it is to be human.  Nothing lasts.  And, as we practice dying, over and over, we also learn what it is to be fully alive.  Once, and only once.

As I type these words, the sky grows even darker, the fog settles over the mountains, the garden lays drenched and flattened.  In the vase on the table where I write is a bouquet of bright, jewel-toned nasturtiums, picked in the dark last night, just before the storm began.  They will be the last ones this year.  A long-ago birthday gift from my friend Diane, the vase holds not only flowers, but memories, too, of a deep and abiding friendship; I keep it full, full of life and beauty, in honor of a friend who has taught me much about how to live well and whose company I cherish.  Finding the good in each day, she reminds me by her own example that although we can’t resist or refuse the natural course of change, we can choose to pass through it gracefully.

And so, I say Rilke’s words again, to remind myself  who I aspire to be and how I want to live: with awareness, heart open, grateful for every juicy bit of joy that can be squeezed out of the life I have. “Everyone once, once only.  Just once and no more.”