Recently, I read Dani Shapiro’s memoir Devotion, in which she’d come to a crisis point in her life, where her son was asking her what she believed, and she didn’t know what to tell him.  Devotion is Shapiro’s quest for that answer (or should I say answers?).

On so many levels, I was wrung out by the time I had finished reading, only because her journey mirrors my own.  I haven’t experienced the same things, only the same questions.

One minute, I think I’m fine not knowing, and the next minute, I’m feeling a little untethered, a little out there.  Most of this is because we’re taught to believe THIS and THAT, and if we stray from the mother ship, we feel a little alien.  “On the fringe” is another term I’ve used to describe myself.

If you’re feeling that way at all, or if you’ve struggled with the what-when-where-how-why of believing, I’d suggest reading it.  Here are my favorite quotes from the book–ones I typed up, cut out, and pasted in my handy dandy word-collecting journal.

“Writers often say that the hardest part of writing isn’t the writing itself; it’s the sitting down to write.  The same is true of yoga, meditation, and prayer.  The sitting down, the making space.  The doing.  It sounds so simple, doesn’t it?  Unroll the mat.  Sit cross-legged on the floor.  Just do it.  Close your eyes and express a silent need, a wish, a moment of gratitude.  What’s so hard about that?  Except—it is hard.  The usual distractions—the clutter and piles of life—are suddenly, unusually enticing.  The worst of it, I’ve come to realize, is that the thing that stops me—the shadow that casts a cold darkness across the best of my intentions—isn’t the puppy, the e-mail, the UPS truck, the school conference, the phone, the laundry, the to-do lists.  It’s me that stops me.  Things get stuck, the osteopath once said with a shrug.  He gestured to the area where the neck meets the head.  The place where the body ends and the mind begins.  Things get stuck.  It sounded so simple when he said it.  It’s me, and the things that are stuck.  Standing in my way.”

*    *    *

“The great yogi B. K. S. Iyengar once wrote, “The moment you say ‘I have got it,’ you have lost everything you had.  As soon as something comes, you have to go one step further.  Then there is evolution.  The moment you say ‘I am satisfied with that,’ that means stagnation has come.  That is the end of your learning; you have closed the windows of your intellect.  So let me do what I cannot do, not what I can do.”

*    *    *

“Carl Jung put it perfectly: ‘Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life,’ he wrote.  ‘Worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto.  But we cannot life the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will by evening have become a lie.’

Doing was what was necessary.  Action has magic, grace, and power in it, as Goethe once wrote.  Whenever I took an action—yoga or meditation practice, trying a new shul, reading a bit from the Buddhist wisdom book to Jacob in the morning, expressing gratitude at the dinner table—I felt…better.  I was writing a new program for the afternoon of life.  The scales tipped away from suffering and toward openheartedness and love.”

*    *    *

“Steve Cope calls early meditation experiences the noble failure.  The first time I heard him say it, I was reminded of my great friend and teacher, the late Jerome Badanes, who once said much the same about writing novels.  All novels are failures.  Even at the time, as a very young writer, I knew what Jerry meant.  In novels—as in life—there is no perfection.  We do the best we can with the told we have at our disposal.  Given that we are changing, the tools are changing, the thing itself is changing—there must be a moment when we stop.  When we say, This is the best I can do for now.  And though Jerry didn’t apply the word noble to the failure or novel writing, I think he would have agreed that there is nobility in the effort, courage in the dailiness—the doggedness.  It is a process of trying and failing.  Of beginning again.”

*    *    *

And I love how Shapiro answers a friend who asks her what she believes.  “‘This is the way I’ve come to think of it,’ I said, turning the pages.  The wisdom of a Catholic monk: ‘Here—from Thomas Merton.  ‘Your brightness is my darkness.  I know nothing of you and, by myself, cannot even imagine how to go about knowing you.  If I imagine you, I am mistaken.  If I understand you, I am deluded.  If I am conscious and certain I know you, I am crazy.  The darkness is enough.’”

If you’re interested in reading more, you can peruse Shapiro’s two blogs–one on the writing process, which you can read here and the other that continues her thoughts from Devotion, which you can access here (because this journey is a never-ending one, right?).

Have the loveliest of Wednesdays!