pull up a chair

i called it the year of thinking sumptuously. the year we closed up our house, packed a few necessities (including a gray striped cat who nearly had a heart attack on the plane), and flew to beantown. there, we motored north to the republic of cambridge, wended our way through harvard square, parked at the corner of franklin and putnam streets, promptly climbed three steep flights of stairs, and settled in for a year best described as “trying to catch a drink from a firehose.”

i drank mightily, slurping down my chin. and i never minded one sloppy bit. 

i studied poetry with helen vendler, english literature with james wood, and global health with the late great dr. paul farmer, the physican, anthropologist, and humanitarian who sought “to cure the world,” as tracy kidder so put it in the subtitle of his 2003 telling of farmer’s unparalleled devotion to his patients in haiti, mountains beyond mountains. 

i went for coffee with harvey cox, my beloved bicycle-pedaling professor for “religion 1004: religious revolutionaries and spiritual pioneers.” i was mesmerized by henry louis gates who lectured brilliantly in his “intro to af-am studies,” a class in which i sometimes wanted to shake my fellow students who were busy browsing facebook while an american treasure, professor gates, held me spellbound with his elocution and encyclopedic knowing. 

and i befriended souls i will never let drift from my heart. 

we were among 24 journalists — and the occasional mate (we mates called ourselves the “co-vivantes” as opposed to going by the more pedantic “affiliate,” which made me sound like a corporate afterthought). the journalists came from across the u.s and around the globe: war correspondents; a chilean radio legend; a middle east reporter who regularly trekked to far-flung tents and underground bunkers to interview the taliban; videographers who covered conflagrations the world over; combat photographers; and writers who made words flow like golden-glimmering honey. 

and, this weekend, in what feels like something of a mirage-like oasis amid a very dry desert, we are headed back to 02139, for a massive jampacked three-day binge of catching up and storytelling and sumptuous thinking. it’s been ten years since i romped the cobbled streets of cambridge, climbed the footworn steps of lecture halls, and opened wide the gullet that is my brain, trying and trying to quench an insatiable thirst for knowledge, wisdom, and the occasional epiphany.

it’s as sweet a reunion as i might sketch on my wildest imagination pad.

reunion (n.)

c. 1600, “act of coming together again,” from re– “back, again” + union; or from French réunion (1540s). Meaning “a meeting of persons of previous connection” is from 1820.

what’s sweetest about this coming together again is that amid a life deep-cut with facets light and dark, our nieman year stands out as among the most brilliantly glistening in my allotment of sunlight. i loved that year. felt alive, and young and hungry. even though i was the only one who was already mother to a college kid, and a sixth grader at the time. i loved that rare chance to go back again to college steps, to squirm into those awkward seats with flip-top desks, to carry heavy loads of notebooks, to run through packs of pens at quick clip, so voraciously did i pour ink onto the spiral-bound college-ruled notebook pages. i loved it so much because i knew with every cell in my being how blessed it was, the chance to be immersed in all those things that my first go at college had missed.

and now, the chance to go back, to re-union.

it’s a rare thing to get to go back to a page in your life story where you felt most stirringly alive. especially after weeks and months when my constant prayer has been for more such hours in my one sweet lifetime. 

going back again is, too, a way of marking time. surveying the span between then and now. all the life that’s filtered in, the chapters that have tested me, the long nights i lay worrying, the hours when i drank in sweet and long-prayed-for triumphs. in ten years, my tally is one that stops me in my tracks and makes me savor all the more. so, so much in but a single decade. 

turns out the decision to go hasn’t been easy in the end: we’d planned to have one brother from portland, maine, fly in to be with my mom, so i could go away knowing he was nearby. but there’s a shooter on the loose in the pine tree state, the army reservist who killed at least 18 in lewiston, 30 miles from portland, and my brother’s family is on lockdown, and his kids are afraid. i thought hard about not going, but my mom insists i go. and a couple wise women concur. took one look at me and chimed in that i needed it! 

so, with a somewhat torn heart, i’ll fly off along with my very own nieman fellow and the kid, now 23, who once insisted we say yes to cambridge, because, he reasoned way back then, “we need to see the world!” 

i know i’ll fly home sated, yes, but i know too that i’ll come home hungrier than ever. wonder begets a hunger for more wonder. and that’s as it should ever be. it just might be the magic potion that cures all ails. 

“seek out what magnifies your spirit.” 

that’s a nugget i stumbled across this week, culling a list of the seventeen most lasting truths that cultural critic maria popova has gleaned in her seventeen years publishing “The Marginalian” (formerly Brain Pickings), the weekly missive she describes as the “record of my reading and reckoning with our search for meaning.”

Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.

Maria Popova

protect your radiance, indeed. above all else: magnify your spirit.

what magnifies your spirit?