willow

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

“If Nana had named you ‘Willow’ like she wanted to, none of us would be here,” my daughter said, quite suddenly, this morning. I was chopping vegetables for soup to take to a friend of mine who is first trimester pregnant and deep in remembering that incomprehensible mix of elated, terrified, and miserable unique to her current circumstances, but the conviction in my old-soul eight-year-old’s voice caught my attention.

“Oh? Why’s that?” I asked her.

“Because,” she patiently responded, “if your name was ‘Willow’ you would be a different person.”

I stopped and turned to her, my eyes moving thoughtfully past her and out the window, unseeing. “Huh,” I said, an inadequate reply, “I guess you’re right.” She said nothing more. She already knew she was right. I went back to chopping vegetables, my mind turning her words around so I could look at them from different angles. I know what she means. I’ve never liked the idea of “Willow” for a name, but I know something of the person she would have been.

Yesterday, on our drive home from homeschool co-op, I listened to a chapter of Susan Cain’s Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. It is a book celebrating the creative drive and empathetic connection of those who “live life in the minor key¹,” as she puts it. A staunch agnostic, sad music—such as Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata, Albinoni’s “Adagio in G Minor” and anything by Leonard Cohen—she describes as the language of her soul. Bittersweet people, she says, feel the aching, intertwined, beauty and impermanence of life. It is sadness that can connect us more than anything else. It is longing that makes life worth living. I felt an increasing tightness in my chest as I listened. As soon as we arrived home and unloaded the car, I stretched out in the greening grass under the spring sun, too tired to walk, to wound up to cry. There is a special force to the earth in April. I got as close as I could, the growing grass tickling my winter-sensitive skin as the sun warmed me from above, hoping the magnetism of the verdant soil and the inescapable heat of the sun would draw the tension from my shoulders. I could not describe what I was feeling. Sad, but also validated. Wistful, but hyper-aware. Cain had put into words something I had always felt without realizing it, and I wasn’t sure what to do with this epiphany besides letting it settle into my body as I settled into the grass. It is at times like these when I need the earth to mother me whole again.

On an episode of The Tim Ferris Show, Susan Cain says, “I define bittersweetness as the state in which you know, you accept, and you truly inhabit the idea that life is always simultaneously joy and sorrow, it’s light and dark².” In that place, she writes in her book, it’s suddenly OK that nothing is permanent, that everyone you love—including you—will one day die. That state, she writes, is the soul’s reaching out for the divine, regardless of the spiritual tradition (if any) to which you ascribe. The longing for heaven, for the more perfect and beautiful world, for transcendence, is itself a form of transcendence. In the grass and sunshine, I remember longing. In my early teens a chasm yawned open just behind my sternum, stretching wider as it pulled the rest of me into it like my own private black hole. I was a dark mass of yearning, so intense that some nights I sat in the dark and wailed into a bathroom towel instead of sleeping. I felt more vibrantly alive on those burning hot nights than at any other time. It was always when the longing was keenest that I felt the closest to God. I had never connected the two before. Suddenly, I began to wonder if that was the reason for the spiritual desert I have been slogging through for most of my married life.