"Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said..."As if something were left between the pages everytime you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar."

[Cornelia Funke, Inkspell]

how i'm becoming sentimental

I've been reading Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, and was convicted of the sin of acting "highbrow." That last post was a bit over the top. It is so easy to get carried away. The further I distance myself from the inner Abby that regards floridity and passion as impulses to be tempered by sarcasm or not indulged at all, the more likely I am to nauseate people by my enthusiasm. Three years ago I would have died before writing a post so effusive about such abused topics as the autumn sky, the changing seasons. I've reached an age of aesthetic accountability, and I used to take that much more seriously. But I've grown self-indulgent now, and I consider a blog an appropriate arena for such self-indulgence.

And anyway, rather be too "highbrow" than to be the sort of robotic modern figure that George F. Babbitt esteems.

In related news, I am now the sort of person that cries over a movie like "Marley and Me." Yet even as I clutched Janie close and wiped tears from my cheeks, I couldn't quite smother the inner voice that felt obliged to scoff (albeit with a slight catch of the breath), "For heavens' sakes, it's A DOG."

heaven is an autumn mind

I often wonder if it is true for everyone, that the flavor of their thoughts varies by the season.

For instance, why do winter days spur me to hibernate in the words of Emily Dickinson, to gravitate mentally towards libraries and Dutch meals and the faces of loved ones? What is it about spring that makes me think about sailboats and Mozart and gentle yellow birds? Is it the heat or the relentless monotony of work that drives my imagination off in the summertime, giving my brain very little peace from unadulterated reality?

I love being in my mind most in autumn, when I am very much occupied by skies. In the season of fields leveled and gathered in by the harvest, of streets emptied early while interiors flare with warmth and fragrance, everything seems to withdraw, to turn downward and inward. Some mysterious compass pulls the birds and the leaves south. The same sort of impulse humbles daylight's brash extravagance into ascetic brevity.

Something about all this hunkering and meekness draws my mind up and out, and I become occupied with the skies. They seem sharper when temperatures drop, the light cleaner. During the day the blue is a presence, cutting and distinct--not even the blur of clouds can mask its clarity, but serves instead to define it, like a five o'clock shadow on a pronounced jawline. The holy heights leave us kindled and entranced, glimpsing otherness and glory from the midst of the sauces and dirt and blurred windowlight of a mown earth.

In the fall, my thoughts are capable of detaching themselves sufficiently from the fragrant broth of earthly things and accessing at moments a different perspective. Everything looks beautiful and simple from such a distance, and it is easier to love people for the wonder they are. I rest encircled by that which is afar and holy, which at the same time contains and invites.

Heaven is an autumn mind.

false pattern

You start off with a thousand directions. And you play with them fast and loose. You only start to panic when you've narrowed or compromised your options too much, trapped yourself in debt or in diminishing relationships, until you just accept where you are and stop growing.

Sometimes that pattern is all I see when I look at the lives of those around me, and it makes it hard for me to breathe.

Until I feel the stir of the Spirit breathing within my constricted soul for me. Until I hear the sloshing of living water deep in my gut. They whisper to me in a still small voice of the One whose name is Faithful and True, the One who is both the Alpha and the Omega of my life and of every life. They remind me of the authentic, glorious, mysterious pattern.

And I can breathe again.

"Elsewhere"

The delectable names of harsh places:

Cilicia Aspera, Estremadura.

In that smooth wave of cello-sound, Mojave,

We hear no ill of brittle parch and glare.

So late October's pasture-fringe,
With aster-blur and ferns of toasted gold,
Invites to barrens where the crop to come
Is stone prized upward by the deepening freeze.

Speechless and cold the stars arise
On the small garden where we have dominion.
Yet in three tongues we speak of Taurus' name
And of Aldebaran and the Hyades,

Recalling what at best we know,
That there is beauty bleak and far from ours,
Great reaches where the Lord's delighting mind,
Though not inhuman, ponders other things.

[Richard Wilbur]

What is it about October poetry?

entertainment

I am staggering under two cases of toilet paper as I crash through the door that leads out of Third Lobby and into the main stairwell, which is haphazardly carpeted with juicy yellow and red leaves. As I think to myself, sighing inwardly, that the steps will need to be swept and mopped yet again that day, a descending friend whistles at me. "Whew! Bearing gifts, I see." I grin at her over the blue saran-wrap-style casing and agree. "Yes. They're indispensable."

Arriving at the bottom of the stair, I am laughing at myself and the word I chose. Indispensable. What a word to describe the gift of toilet paper, which, after all, I will spend all week first dispensing to each lobby and hall closet, and later loading into the contraptions that we in the custodial business refer to as "toilet paper dispensers." Goodness.

Not that any of the recipients of these magnanimous dispensations would dream of dispensing of them. In that final dispensation, so to speak, they can indeed be aptly labeled "indispensable."

But I'm getting carried away. Words tend to have that effect.

Now that I've found some means of dispensing my mirth, I can carry on dispensing the indispensable.

Good day.

personal challenge

I've just finished reading Bob Benson's devotional, A Living Prayer, in which the author chronicles his personal quest to learn how to pray. He taps specifically into history, exploring the Benedictine order, the various elements of the mass, the Common Book of Prayer, and so on. He also quotes heavily from Annie Dillard and Frederick Buechner, two of my favorites.

Although something about Benson's writing style did not impress me, and in fact struck me as plagairized (if that can be said about a style) from Buechner (and poorly so), I nonetheless am so glad it fell into my hands, because I needed to hear what it said.

It reminded me of how crucial it is to carve out a sacred place in my life. I think when I complained about my inner disquiet a few days ago, it was the lack of this that I was feeling. I don't make time to quiet my soul, to wring confessions from it, to expose it to the weather of the Word, to offer up all the bits of praise and gratitude and fear and yearning that accumulate during a day. My prayer gutters are clogged with unshriven sins and unvoiced communication, not to mention with the daily debris of all the distractions I heap over them, and I'm not taking the time to clear them for the Living Water.

And now, even though I've been challenged, I still am finding a million other things to do. I am stalling, knowing that hard, hard work lies ahead of me. I have to create a habit out of thin air. And I have to make sure that it never becomes one of those thoughtless, involuntary habits like fixing my morning coffee or logging onto my computer. It has to be a habit in which I am totally engaged in each of those four facets of being: heart, mind, soul, and strength.

I know that this quest is not solitary, and that is part of the trouble. I am afraid of baring my soul to my Savior, because I know that that means I will find out more about who I am in relationship to Him, and that I won't like what I see. And then He'll change me, and require my complete and undivided attention and service, and it will be painful and difficult and I'll disappoint Him and fail. Already this shallow probing has made me realize more about my own laziness and cowardice and selfishness than I ever wanted to acknowledge.

But that is the reality of being a fallen human in a fallen world, and being loved by and moved to love a perfect God. And I know that it is also the only way to live a joyful, peaceful, satisfied, worthy life.

So I am going to begin carving the very pit out of my life and offering the void that it leaves to the only One who can truly fill it.

Seven years ago, I would have emphatically denied the possibility that a day would come when I would sit at the piano and feel, as I ran up and down a simple C Major scale, a rush of heady elation.

You see, seven years ago at this time I was determined to become a classical pianist. Madeleine L'Engle's A Small Rain had gone straight to my head. I was practicing my heart out a minimum of two hours daily...and that heady rush was reserved for the moments when I'd finally mastered the three against four rhythm, or nailed that tricky sinfonia trill, or expressed a phrase with all the poetry in my small but fervent being. C Major scales were old hat. Yawn.

By the time I started college, however, I had resigned myself to the truth. I would never be Vladimir Horowitz. Katherine Forrester's turbulent, romantic future would not remotely resemble my own. I settled into the teacher route (thinking: who doesn't love Anne Shirley, Christy Huddleston, or Jane Eyre?--teachers, all), and let music fall to the wayside.

Last week, however, after over a year of abstinence from those glossy black-and-white landscapes, I was given the push I needed to revisit them. I sat down at the bench and executed a brisk C Major scale.

Dear old C Major. I've missed you.

It was getting a whiff of news about a long-neglected friend. It was driving past a childhood haunt and finding it unchanged. It was smelling the unique perfume of some forgotten room. Clinging to those bits of ivory, captured beneath that polished black piano lid, connected to those duckbilled pedals, was a piece of my identity just waiting to be remembered and enlivened.

Sure, I know I won't be Katherine Forrester, falling desperately in love with her tortured mysterious piano teacher while becoming a renowned musical enchantress. For that matter, I probably won't ever be a Jane Eyre, Christy Huddleston, or Anne Shirley. I am Abby Pettit, and I won't know what that means entirely until my life is sealed. But I'm learning as I go.

And last week, a very exciting C Major scale taught me that Abby is a pianist, in her own small way.

“Meditation In Mid October”

[Barbara Crooker]

Right now, just the tips of basil have been brushed
with frost's black kiss, but it's coming soon, that clear
still night when Orion rises over our house
and the dew falls in an icy net of stars.
On a small farm in Wisconsin, my friend's cancer spreads.
Piece by piece they've pruned her body.
Now they want to harvest her marrow.
They are promising her eternal life.
Soon, every blazing leaf will fall to earth,
stripping the trees to their black bones.
Soon, the only flowers will be the ice roses
wind etches on glass in diamonds and scrolls.
And if she refuses the surgeons
and their dazzling promises? The snow geese know
when it is time to go, head south.
We hear them pass overhead on starless nights,
wedges of bells in the cold thin air.

"Moderation is not a negation of intenisty,

but helps avoid monotony"

Will you stop for a while, stop trying to pull yourself

together

for some clear "meaning"--some momentary summary?

no one

can have poetry or dances, prayers or climaxes all day;

the ordinary

blankness of little dramatic consciousness is good for the

health sometimes,

only Dostoyevsky can be Dostoyevskian at such long

tumultuous stretches;

look what intensity did to poor great Van Gogh!;

linger, lunge,

Scrounge and be stupid, that doesn't take much centering

of one's forces;

as wise Whitman said, "lounge and invite the soul." Get

enough sleep;

and not only because (as Cocteau said) "poetry is the

literature of sleep";

be a dumb bell for a few minutes at least; we don't want

Sunday church bells

ringing constantly.

[John Tagliabue]

Restlessness

It's a feeling that I never ever used to have. I was the most contented body to grace this planet during my childhood. Home contained all I needed. The corner of the green living room sofa with my latest Redwall, L'Engle, or Tolkien; the Wurlitzer piano and its cargo of sheet music; the battered boombox and three mismatched candles in my half of the bedroom I shared with Hannah; the journal I slid under my pillow each night. So long as I could escape the sound and fury of my bustling home for a few hours each day, so long as the library was a block away and I could bike to the park when the weather was fine, I was satisfied. And venues for escape abounded. There was the massive snowpile in the adjacent parking lot in the winter, the shallow crick and its clayed banks in the summer. There was the luxury of Monday night piano lessons: just me and mom, and NPR keeping us company on the way there and back. There was the secret pleasure of doing dishes on winter evenings, sleeves rolled past my elbows and the front of my shirt soaked and sudsy. In a world where I could not even claim a set of pajamas as distinctly my own because I shared all things in common with my twin, I carved my privacy from the crowding and pandemonium of a household of ten, and rarely felt smothered.

Now I possess the sort of privacy that would have shocked my childhood self: my own bedroom, my own bathroom, a closet full of my own clothes, my own car, my own office, mountain trails, soccer fields, and city haunts at my disposal. But it is never enough. I am restless now. No matter how much solitude I get, I can't find the stillness that used to live within me.

What changed? I grew up. I became complicated. Materialism sank its claws into me. The standards that I saw on TV and in the lives of those all around me became overwhelmingly important, and the important things shrank into the background, and now they are neglected and clamoring. Even in the silence that used to be so precious to me they will not let me rest.

I tell myself that moving will cure me. I fantasize about hopping into my car one morning and driving as far north as I can--to a place where I don't need to feel the embarrassment of not having achieved the proscribed measure of success or affluence in my life, or worry about disappointing anyone.

But who am I kidding? Remember, Abby? "Everything glorious is around us already." Remember? "We continue to behave more or less like the people we are, even on pilgrimage." Remember? "It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for."

Most of all, remember...

the heartshackles are not, as you think,

death, illness, pain

unrequited hope, not loneliness, but

lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety,

selfishness