“Ah, there’s the sorrow,” said the boy Liam as we passed the car wreck with the ambulance and two cop cars by the side of the road, “I knew there was one coming today, but didn’t know where it was.”

Liam, newly 8 years old, is the boy we picked up every morning for a week last summer to carpool to my youngest son’s nature camp out in the country. I did mornings, his folks did evenings, saving each other a precious hour each day and a lot of mileage, and gaining some pretty good conversation. 

“The sorrow?” I asked. Such an old, lonesome word for this chipper, snaggle toothed boy with his fidget spinners and slime and camp backpack.  And did he really say “Ah” at the start with just a whiff of a wistful old Irish lilt?

“Yes,” he said solemnly, “a sorrow.”  

“But how did you know you would see a sorrow?” 

“Because I saw two crows this morning. So, you know, I knew there would be a sorrow today. I thought the sorrow was when my dogs ran out the front door this morning and I cried and didn’t think we’d get them back. But that wasn’t it.”

He paused meaningfully.   “It was the wreck.”

I like this accounting of sorrows. Two crows = One sorrow. No more. Exacting, precise, reassuring both in its historical recounting (it wasn’t the dogs, they came back and that was all fine) and in its future predicting (no more sorrows to worry about today!)  Liam leaned a little further back in his booster seat and confidently pulled out his newest fidget spinner and began speculating on whether they’d make forts or fires that day.

As I took on the snakey curves of the country road that would eventually empty us by the clear Moorman river at the bottom of the Blue Ridge, I thought about how, too, this notion of crows heralding a sorrow that needed to be watched for, and ultimately, found and acknowledged might be another, less spoken of way to cultivate awareness in our lives.  

Life can be such a whirlwind of trying to control a yo-yo while riding a roller coaster – equal parts nauseating and thrilling  – that we spend a lot of time and energy trying to get quiet and still in efforts to stay in connection to ourselves and stop the room from spinning. At least I do. And in that stillness, there’s some well-meaning pressure to notice what’s good and lovely and loving in our lives.  Awareness is, after all, an antidote to the spin that dissociates us from each other and our own selves.  

But awareness might also be dispassionately but attentively acknowledging the sorrow. I feel in myself a resistance to this even as I type it. Several months ago, I was noticing this hollow feeling that comes to me as I drift off sleep and first wake up – a deep and lonesome missing of my own self. Missing my awareness to my life.  My dear friend and mentor Paula said simply, “it is so hard to wake up to our own lives.” And she’s right. I find it’s also not easy to remember that waking up requires not trying to put myself to sleep – in all the ways I numb myself with lullabies of work, wine, the internet.  My own children and their constant and complicated choreography of lessons and activities and plans, which seems essential, has a benedryll effect, submerging my consciousness just below the next pick up, the next meal prep. Even my seemingly self-reflective ruminations – a circular lullaby, just the chorus on repeat, spinning gauze around me.

In my better moments, I think of awareness as something to capture with effort and hustle, like a firefly. I try to catch hold of its tail as it’s flying past me in the blue gloaming light. I listen to my children’s breathing in the pre-dawn morning and ignore the call to get a little more work done on my laptop before they wake, in efforts to make up for the fact I will have to take away from work to drive them places later in the day. I work hard to spool the thread up against myself and sit on the couch with the dog to meditate, then journal.  Soon, though, I’m lost again to the laptop and the dishwasher. It’s no bad thing, this practice of trying to architect still moments to inhabit for a few minutes, before falling back in the maelstrom and doing it all over again.   And yet – I also think this jumps over something more gentle and more essential – the solemn naming of what we are experiencing – before chasing the enlightened calm.

I never lose this notion (and myself along with it) more than when my kids are experiencing pain.  My daughter has been battling – and defeating – her own demons like an Amazon.   But she, like anyone battling an enemy within, especially at the tender age of 16, grows tired and doubtful and weakens. The afternoons are particularly hard for her as her mood dips precipitously and everything “feels like shit.” I feel my own heart plummet like a lead weight to my shoes and any plans I had hoped to make fizzle as my mood dims alongside hers.  I didn’t acknowledge the sorrow – I became it, along with her.  I unzipped its ratty grey zipper and climbed inside, and worse – became resentful as we both ran out of oxygen in that sad sack that I couldn’t fix for her.   And while she’s far stronger now than summer before last – learning to just turn towards her pain, her sorrow, and acknowledge without action remains a lifelong effort.

Paula recently told me I am not turning towards my own grief, my own hollow, and giving it the attention it needs. I want Presence-to-Myself to be the rosy kind –  long quiet walks in some beautiful tick-free forest, a meditative labyrinth in a churchyard, a poem scratched out in my journal.  When so often Presence-to-Myself, to my life, is face down on the carpet or behind my own cupped hands – no expansive vista, no act of creation – just the act of turning towards something too big and lonely to name. “It’s okay,” she said, “to simply say, ‘This is hard. What I am living and feeling is hard.’”  

And even now, as there is a levening, a blessed lightening in my life – the accounting is the same. I have to remember to stay honest first with what I’m actually feeling before finding the silver lining. Two crows, it turns out – that is, if you go by the old rhyme* anyway, is joy.  ( I didn’t tell Liam that) But you’d only know that after counting and really seeing that first old bird. 

This is getting better at awakening, this is non-enmeshment, this is self-kindness and a lightening of the heart, from – hand to heart, a tiny man in a booster seat with a fidget spinner.  Awareness is joy, yes – but not without counting the crows.

Ah, there’s the sorrow. 

* Counting Crows Nursery Rhyme:

One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told.

Eight for a wish,
Nine for a kiss,
Ten a surprise you should be careful not to miss,
Eleven for health,
Twelve for wealth,
Thirteen beware it’s the devil himself.