I need to write every day. So I do.
For the first time in my life, I hit a wall of real stress. Trouble sleeping. Trouble remembering. Trouble with my mood. It's too much.
For the first time in my life, it doesn't just go away. I can't really see clearly. I doubt many things. I get sad. I can’t say what’s different now—maybe nothing, maybe it’s just a passing thing.
But I can say that it’s a relieving kind of release, filled with love, to have a conversation with my adult daughter, who had a severe stress reaction two years ago, and to feel how wise she is. To feel that she can advise me. To feel that she’s right. To feel that we’re in life together. To feel the love.
Did I also write about love yesterday? Is there anything more important—will there ever be anything else at the center?
Possibly. Possibly, but then it will be peripheral.
Love IS what carries us, lifts us when we can’t go on alone, catches us when we fall and fall and there seems to be no bottom. Maybe it’s love that removes the bottom, so we never really hit anything? I don’t know.
We watched the lunar eclipse from the bathing jetty by the Magic Forest (Trylleskoven). There is much beauty in Køge Bay. When the weather is calm, the water is soft and glossy, and just like anywhere else in the world, the sunset is a process of infinite beauty.
All the children were there, both sons-in-law, and two of the children's friends. The two boys who love my daughters have this in common: they’re not afraid of me. Shortly after this photo was taken, they were laughing heartily at me. Not with me. They’re both lovely and wonderful, and I love having them in my daughters’ lives. That, too, is a song about love.
On the jetty, my crazy husband was fumbling around and talking to everyone, excited and nervous not to miss the phenomenon, happy and enthusiastic. He kept checking the internet for the exact time and direction, and did a truly hilarious reading from a terrible but widely read Danish newspaper, where it said that if you went outside at the right time and looked in the right direction, there was a chance you could witness the lunar eclipse.
Such a massive piece of journalism—and what wonderfully useful advice that paper managed to deliver!
Well. Suddenly, it was there. Slowly, slowly more visible. Slowly, slowly we got colder. Quickly, quickly we got hungrier. We walked out onto the jetty to see the phenomenon without the glow from the sand, back again because the dogs panicked, and then it was there—the ring, the light returning, gently, delicately, more and more, until a whole edge began to glow.
In the meantime, we had plenty of time for laughing fits as our brains tried to keep all the moving parts of lunar eclipse physics in mind: like an amusement park ride with an overstimulated machine spinning you around and around in something that tilts one way while also swinging around with something else inside a third thing—and you just end up vomiting more than you’re having fun—yes, that’s how we wholeheartedly tried, one of us being Earth and the other the Sun, and we spun and ran, tried to be shadows and understood less and less, until we laughed so hard we could no longer speak.
As we walked back through the forest to the car and drove along the water back to the house, the moon passed through ALL its phases (or is it only half?) in under an hour. Amazing to see.
And here I sit the day after, with my stress. I’m thirsty. I’m tired. I wonder if my texts are worth reading? I wonder if there should be a parallel blog with these daily thoughts. I wonder if it’s too early in the process to plan that.
I think about unschooling, our choice of education that isn’t linear, that challenges the concepts of what it means to understand, to grow, to take something in: how not understanding a phenomenon is also to be in it and with it, to learn about it.
That same eldest daughter said, as we crouched in the sand watching the spherical red watercolor in the sky:
Maybe we’re not supposed to understand the moon. That’s not the point of the moon—for us to understand it. The moon belongs to another plane, another reality. It wants and means something else than for us to grasp cosmology?
The poetry. The togetherness. The cold sand. The sound of the waves. The time that is shared and therefore expands. The laughter.
The love. The love again.
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