January ends in a bomb cyclone weather event. Also: “Winter storm to blanket Southeast with snow.”

This tracks for me on a personal level. If ever a bomb and a blanket could be used to describe the same thing, it would be the weeks since New Year’s Eve. The difference between something ending and something else beginning can be so small – a breath, a degree of temperature, a shift in perspective.

Epiphany came and went with eerie relief: instead of the inspiration I usually try to get from January 6th, I was just grateful for no violence.

That gratitude was short-lived, as chaos descended on Venezuela and Minnesota, places I called home in my teens and twenties. I texted and made calls, trying to understand how things were playing out for friends in St. Paul and host family members in Maracaibo, where I was an exchange student. Things played out quietly, they told me, if anxiously and with deepening despair. They’re not on the frontlines, yet living in a new reality of fear and uncertainty.

There’s no going back to the way it was, and no knowing what the future holds, just profound sadness and foreboding. I felt heartbroken, and completely helpless. How does anyone write right now, isn’t it so much fiddling or rearranging deck furniture?

Not really, with thanks (again) to Maggie Smith, this time for her Pep Talk about the virtue of poetry in tumultuous times, featuring this reminder:

Poems may not change the world directly,
but a poem can change a person
who can change the world.
—Richard Blanco

Still, I needed something else. I needed to put something, anything, in order. To come home to myself, even if it felt like turning away from others, before heading out into storms forecast to last as long as people believe that values are worth fighting for.

So I cleared off the dining room table and got to work on a jigsaw puzzle.

My dad made this one, a skill he picked up from his uncle. It’s wood, smells of cedar and nostalgia. I turned all 232 pieces right side up, their delicate loops and bumps as familiar as the hands that made them. There is no photo on the box of what I’m working towards. That’s how it was with puzzles in our family: picturing a complete scene would have taken the fun out of watching it take shape in front of us (or so my sister and I were told.)

I started with edge pieces, as usual. I like knowing my frame before filling in the contents and find peace in this kind of constraint. Knowing where a thing ends and directing my attention within its borders, to the exclusion of everything else, focuses my awareness like a superpower.

Piece by piece, color by color it came together. For ninety minutes, my hands and gaze hovered over the board, searching out like patterns and shapes and fitting them together, like seabirds scavenging their next meal. The house was quiet, homework was happening somewhere nearby. Thoughts were free to flit about my head, downturned in concentration, no digital care in the world.

This time I’m on my own, but sometimes I’m joined by one or both kids. And, when the whole family is together, one or both parents, my sister, her husband, even a nephew or two. It’s a reliably calming way to be in the same room with others and not have to talk about anything significant, if at all. Focused on the task at hand, our shared purpose brings stillness.

A metaphor swooped in as I put together the final section (those darn windows!)

What if struggle boils down to rearranging the pieces in front of us to create beauty out of the jumble? Some days I just need to dump out the box labeled Frustration and spend some time figuring out the bigger picture. Other days, it feels like someone has strewn every puzzle I’ve ever known across the Blue Ridge Mountains and said, “Take a hike.”

When the final work emerges, perseverance and patience pay off in the satisfaction of having completed something. It’s done, finito, no question about it. I can’t do one more iota of work to make this baby any more perfect. It’s the ultimate whole being the precise sum of its parts.

I’d forgotten this one was a wedding gift. In 2008, a lifetime ago, my dad carved our names into the sky.

****

In her lovely book Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair, Anne Lamott notes:

When you love something like reading – or drawing or music or nature – it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great. If you are lucky enough to know this, then your search for meaning involves whatever that Something is. It’s an alchemical blend of affinity and focus that takes us to a place within that feels as close as we ever get to “home.” It’s like pulling into our own train station after a long trip — joy, relief, a pleasant exhaustion.

Let us hold onto the small and meaningful ways our lives manifest love. Puzzles and hiking for me, so many other things for you and yours, some we’ve shared over the years. We do this not to rest, or not only to rest, but to nourish for the Unpleasant Exhaustion that is doing better when we know better.