this radiant world

"Annunciation"

2012-01-18T11:07:00.000-08:00

'Hail, space for the uncontained God'
From the Agathistos Hymn, Greece, VIc

We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book; always
the tall lily.
                    Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.

But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage.
                    The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent.
                                                      God waited.
She was free
to accept or to refuse, choice
integral to humanness.

Aren't there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
                       Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehendingly.
                                   More often
those moments
            when roads of light and storm
            open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
                                        God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

--Denise Levertov--

2011-11-08T23:08:00.000-08:00

…and because you are /forever making poems in the lap / of death…

The tickets had been intended for others. Others with schedulespacked so tightly that they were obliged to reject the gift of a free night atthe concert hall from the business where my father worked. Others, I speculated, with scalps full ofkeratin-rich hair and inviolate veins—others perhaps even battling andbewailing an excess bulge of adipose on their robust frames, or at the least adisposition towards such accretion. The maddingcrowd of others and their ignoble strife—or so I deemed them and their existence,with the unreasoned bitterness of one excluded.

Melancholy that day had indeed marked me for her own. I was in the living room when Dad called overhis lunch break with the news that he’d come into possession of some ticketsand would Mom and I be interested in joining him that evening for a free piano concert. I had curled up on the couch hours earlierwith a book that I hadn’t opened. Allmorning, snow-roofed homes and weighted branches had steeped in the weaksunlight. Cars, leprous with wintersalt, drove down our slushy suburban street. A little snow had fallen, halfhearted flakes that served rather toaccentuate the dinginess of the day than to purify it.

“We’d love for you to come, but don’t feel like you have to,”Mom had enjoined, cupping her palm over the phone receiver and studying myreaction.

I hadn’t been anywhere but the house and the chemo ward forweeks. The opportunity was not likely torepeat itself.

“I’d love to.”

---- ---- ---

Hours later, I stood in my bedroom, gazing at my reflectionin the mirror. I had clipped on my sparkliest dangling earrings and decoratedmy sickly face with care: blushing cheeks with a hint of glitter, drawing darkeyeliner to compensate for thinning lashes and brows, plumping lips with glossypink. The feminine touches didn’t domuch for the overall effect, which admittedly seemed a bit clownish, but theydid make me feel less sexless.

I struggled to extinguish the frustration and self-pity thatkept swelling in my chest at the sight of my wasted frame swallowed up in thetailored black dress, my head so obviously naked beneath the hug of the smallknit hat.

Already, before it had begun, my evening was being spoiledby my vanity. It was not so much that Ifelt ugly. I had hardly been a beautybefore the treatments had robbed me of my hair and figure. Rather, I felt conspicuous. It was as if Iwere a child being put on the spot in a classroom of her peers. I imagined theworld pulling away from me, breathing a sigh of relief at not being singled outfor whatever this was that I was experiencing (assessment, chastisement,experimentation?)—while watching with mingled pity and curiosity to see how I conductedmyself.

Of course I recognized the narcissism of this feeling, and wouldtry to talk myself out of it. I didn’treally look so very ill, especially from a distance, at a cursory glance or toan unknown eye. I was at the high point of my treatment cycle, which consisted of oneweek of daily hours-long stints in the chemo ward with a needle in my vein andthen two weeks of recovery. Tonight was thetail end of my second week of rest, and so I found it relatively easy to feigna state of normality. As for thehairlessness—well, it was winter in Michigan, and unlikely that anyone wouldlook twice at a hatted head, certainly not long enough to pick up on the tracesof affliction that I imagined to be so emblazoned on my person. And even ifsome preternaturally perspicacious witness were to infer my disease, thereaction would likely be a mere moment or two of interest quickly subsumed byother associations or concerns.

Perversely enough, this bothered me as well: that my trial,so crushingly significant to me, was so subsidiary to the rest of the world, if it was noticed at all. Part of me yearned for recognition, felt asense of morbid vindication when acquaintances would murmur sympathetically, “Soyoung to have cancer! How awful!”

The rest of me, the greater part of me, simply longed to betaken for an ordinary 23-year-old woman. I think I felt that somehow this would make it true. I was just emerging from that time of lifewhen it is common to invest the opinion of others with almost magicalsignificance, to the extent that (not in so many words of course, but in practice)you believe that if the world thinks it, it must be true. Rationally I would never have said that Iimagined the world’s ignorance of my cancer would cure me. But I caught myself behaving that way.

“Ready to go?” Mom called from outside the bedroom, and inreply I sternly stuffed my dread into the nearest closet in my chest andmarched out the door.

--- --- ---

My parents waited, dressed up and smelling like Sunday inthe kitchen, smiling to welcome me. The largeun-curtained window held our reflection tenderly as we huddled for a moment,ascertaining the whereabouts of the tickets and car keys, slipping gloves overfingers and shrugging on coats and purse straps. Dad had started the car early so it would bewarm for us, and it was a smoldering cloud of vapor in the blue gloaming as wehurried through the frosty air and ducked inside.

Only after I’d settled myself comfortably in the back seatdid I take a moment to crane my neck up and look out the window. At the sight of the sky my heart kindled, itsflame feeding off the air in my lungs and leaving me breathless.

I had always associated the night sky with the idea of thedeep sea. Inhospitable realms, both ofthem: lungbreaking, weighty, immense; dark, yet strangely lit; replete withmatter, yet insinuating a fearsome emptiness. I looked at the waxing moon, the glinting stars, the tattered pennantsof the clouds. And while my mind crackedbeneath the strain of pondering vastnesses beyond my ken, while the seemingabsence of heart within them froze mine…even then there was something in methat felt a kinship. I felt the phraseshape itself in my mind: Deep calls todeep. I heard Modest Mouse singingabout my blood being just like the Atlantic,about the oceans in our bodies, about the stars being projectors, and everyonebeing afraid of their own lives. Ibelieved what the Preacher said when he declared that God put eternity intoman’s heart, and my spine tingled at that idea from Job: These are but the outskirts of His ways, and how small a whisper do wehear of Him.

As my mind started to whirl with associations, Dad pulledthe car into reverse and I reeled myself in.

Nothing new, Ithought to myself, blinking moonlight, the mystery curdling in my brain.

Everyone feels like youdo about the sky, about the sea.

Everyone feels liketheir affliction or grief is exceptional.

There is nothing newunder the sun.

--- ---

Dad took the wheel and rumbled us out of the driveway,cheerfully shouting goodbye to our house as he had on trips ever since I couldremember. Then his eyes met mine in therearview mirror. “So! Ready for some Beethoven and Brahms?”

“Sure am,” I smiled.

We arrived early, managing to secure an attractive parkingspace within reasonable distance of the St. Cecilia Music Society building indowntown Grand Rapids.

I had to focus on keeping my footing on the ice-crustedsidewalks on the way in, and so was not afflicted further by the beauty of thenight and what it taught me of my own vanity. Nor did I have much occasion to dwell on my baldness and illness as Imade my way through the cloying crush of humanity in the yellow foyer, absorbedas I was by the twinkling chandeliers, opulent wall hangings, well-worn rugs,and—above all!—the people: milling and laughing and exclaiming, dazzlinglyappareled in suits and gowns (with the occasional rogue youth in jeans and acardigan), perfumed, and consolingly human with their Midwest-flavored speechand finger-greased tickets.

I had not been in a crowd like this for months and months,and the sound and fury of it enfolded me in an almost tangible embrace, meltingthe chill of my moment in the driveway and filling me with a sense offellowship, of partaking. I had been toomuch alone of late, and the happy echoing hall lifted my heart to almost giddyheights, so that I looked with loving wonder at the faces around me.

Life! Energy! The air crackled with it, generating a warmththat transcended the physical.

My parents and I scouted out our seats in the auditorium,and I trained my gaze on the stage, its gleaming wood-paneled surface gracedwith a gorgeous grand piano and a nearby cello. Leafing through the program in my hand, I read that the concert wouldfeature related compositions by Beethoven and Brahms. As I studied the brief biography of thefeatured pianist and cellist, the lights dimmed and a hush descended.

A small Asian woman dressed in vibrant orange steppedonstage and seated herself pertly on the piano bench. Raven-black (yes: raven-black) tresses (theword must be used) cascaded down her shoulders. So taken by her theatrical deportment was I that I did not harbor amoment’s envy for her flowing locks. Behind her ambled a lumbering giant of a man with large round glassesand a rather undistinguished manner, who sat behind his cello and took up hisbow.

The audience waited as the artists matched theirinstruments.

A final set of lights dimmed, and a fresh beam, thespotlight, flooded the center stage.

The concert began.

At first I was carried away by the technical expertise thisunlikely couple displayed: the nimble dancing dexterity of fingers and arms,the economy of movement, the dynamic range, and the perfect unity of their twoinstruments. I tried to imagine what itwould feel like, to be in their bodies devotedly obeying the music even as theymasterfully created it. But as the nightwore on and the notes kept singing, I ceased to notice the artists or theirinstruments at all. The music tookme.

It lifted me right out of my cancer-ridden body, out of thatroomful of shimmering ambience and warm humanity. My body became all ear, and my ear became allheart, and my heart filled and overspilled with music that was, in Rilke’swords, “the transformation of feelings into audible landscape.”

Rilke also describes music as “language / where all languageends,” and I find that as I try to describe what I experienced that night inthe auditorium, my language does indeed end. The audible landscape cannot even be adequately translated back intofeeling, alas, and certainly cannot be rendered in words. It was one of those “moments of Dominion /That happen on the Soul / And leave it with a Discontent / Too exquisite—totell—”

The memory of it is linked in my mind with the sight of thatcold dark sky from the car window. Ifelt piercingly alone. “Frivolous baby,by distractions possess’d” that I was, nonetheless I felt the pulsing currentof my own “buried life,” the mystery of my own strange self, the unplumbeddisquieting beautiful dark fathoms of my soul. The Atlantic in my blood. The eternity in my heart. The image of God stamped on my very DNA.

And sure, I ought not be narcissistic. Nothing is new under the sun. We do all indeed live “trick’d in disguises,alien to the rest / of men, and alien to [ourselves].” In some sense it is undeniable that “the sameheart beats in every human breast.”

Yet.

I studied the contours of my thumb.

I considered that cliché about every unique snowflake.

--- --- ---

Back home, we brewed a pot of coffee and gathered in theliving room. My brothers and sisterswere asleep, and the house breathed its usual warmth and fragrance, and thewindows were so full of the indoor glow that I had to squint to see through tothe darkness outside. On some level ofmy being, cancer cells were dying; healthy cells too. On another level, my buried life was coursingunregarded, deep calling to deep.

On another level, I rinsed my mug out in the sink, said mygood nights, and went to bed.

Humanity i love you becauseyou / are perpetually putting the secret of / life in your pants and forgetting/ it’s there and sitting down / on it…

November run

2011-11-05T19:16:00.000-07:00

First runner's high since cancer. That euphoric feeling that on this night is full lungs and pearly moonlight and crisp air and houses soft in the gloaming. My elongated silhouette rounding the corner of little Elmwood Lake while the waves toss their moonlit hats.

I am running before the Lord in the land of the living.

And yes, I am feeling God's pleasure.

meetingplace

2011-11-02T18:21:00.000-07:00

I had just seated myself at the corner table in Barnes & Noble, the only table that isn't overshadowed by the lamps that dangle just at forehead level and are easily forgotten until one stands suddenly and remembers, too late to prevent the pain and humiliation of knocking one's forehead against their mellow light. My sister sat across from me with a stack of magazines, and we had divided a slice of red velvet cheesecake equally between us to enjoy while we perused our reading material in a shared, delicious silence. I pulled a chair from the table adjacent and placed my stack of books there in order to clear some table space for my coffee, cake, and Joan Didion's Blue Nights.

I was just reading her fragmented discussion of "the apparent inadequacy of the precipitating event" (for example, the young woman who becomes depressed and kills herself after cutting her hair) when an elderly gentleman commandeers the table beside ours. He has carefully parted white hair and a tanned face, round and wrinkled. I notice him immediately because, in stooping to place his coffee and rice crispy bar on the table, he forgets the lamp that hangs above him and whacks his head on it as he straightens up.

Having been in his shoes often enough myself, I grin at him as he ruefully heaves himself onto the bench on the other side of the table. "Do you want your chair back?" I then ask, remembering that I've stolen it.

"Oh no, no thank you. You just keep it for your books," he assures me kindly, and rises to his feet--again knocking his head against the lamp and wincing, making some remark as to the inconvenience of their placement to which I agree, both of us laughing politely.

He begins to stride away, and then turns and asks, "Will you girls guard my coffee for a moment?"

"With our lives," we solemnly promise, and he nods cheerfully and leaves the cafe.

Olivia and I exchange endeared smiles in his absence, and take small bites of our cheesecake. He returns with a James Patterson novel.

"Ah, thank you! Still here!" This time as he sits he is cautious to avoid the light fixture. We banter briefly about the food and coffee, and he asks us if we are college students. Our conversation turns to our work, where it is revealed that he lives near the place we are employed.

"Have you always lived here, in Michigan?" I ask, hungry as always for glimpses into the stories of the strangers I encounter.

"Nope. I'm from Colorado. I moved here years ago."  He grinned. "For a girl, of course. My wife and I got married here, and I've taught high school for years over at Covenant Christian."

"Oh, our mom went there!" Olivia chimes in. "Did you know her? Tammie Pols."

He leans back and blinks, a smile slowly creeping over his face. "Tammie Pols! Why sure, I knew Tammie! I lived right across the street from her folks, on Curtis. She was friends with my girls--Laura and Beth. She was quite a character. Used to come right up into our kitchen and open the fridge door and ask what we had for her. So! You are Tammie's girls! Huh!"

We all beam at each other, shaking our heads in delight, exclaiming the usual things one exclaims in such situations about the smallness of the world and what a coincidence and really how very neat.

Of course, after such a connection had been established, we could hardly just go back to our books. We tried for a moment. I read another sentence, but my thoughts kept settling delightedly on the serendipity of the moment before, and when I glanced back over at the man he was looking at me.

"You know," he said, "Your mom's sister--Julie, right?--she is the one that went to cosmetology school, didn't she?"

I nod, and he laughs. "I remember one time sending my son, Evan, over there to get a haircut--you know, so she could have some practice, maybe earn some money. Well, he comes back and he's got this baseball hat pulled over his forehead."

Olivia and I start to laugh. "Oh no!"

Our friend's eyes are twinkling. "His mother wasn't there yet, and I ask him, I says, 'So Evan, how'd it turn out?'  Your mom will remember Evan. He was always very dramatic as a boy; still is, actually.  He took that hat and swept it off his head like this and says, 'Not very good!'  Well, he had really straight hair, and Julie had cut it so that it stuck straight out. It might have looked good on someone with different hair, but it looked awful on him. But I had to be his dad, so I told him, 'Son, it looks fine.' And he says, 'No it don't! I'm not going to school!  I'm wearing my hat!' Well, of course he couldn't do that, and the kids probably made fun of him, you know how kids are. But I had to act like it was all right, of course."

We chuckle with him and promise to remind Aunt Julie of the incident. "How old was your son at the time?" I ask.

"Oh, he was about yay high--probably seven or eight. He was a funny kid.  Yep, he's had a lot of trouble lately. He had a real good job down in Indiana, but got a staph infection in his leg and he didn't treat it. It turned into MRSA.  He didn't want to go to the hospital, but they told him that if he didn't he would die, his son would not see him again."

"Oh dear! Is he okay?"

"Yes. Yes, they had to cut out a big chunk from his bottom, but he is okay.  Lost his job, though. They got rid of his department.  He's been good to me. I see him pretty often, give him a little sermon every few months--can't do it too often, or he'll think every time he sees me I'm going to preach at him." The man laughs the same way he had when he bumped his head a second time on those lights. "You know, a few of my kids gave us some trouble, but most of them are living good lives now. My wife, she died when she was fourty-four. And I remarried--years later--and got three more kids. Went through that whole teenager phase twice! But they are good to me, and I never think of them like they're not mine. I live in a condo now, my wife and I, and they'll come over and help us move the furniture in and out. They are good kids."

The stories keep coming, and Olivia and I listen eagerly, amazed at how much he remembers of our own family. One time he was installing some insulation up in the attic of our Opa's house. He cut a hole in the wall, and discovered an old metal bed up there in the attic. "Somehow your grandpa got it out of there--not sure how. I wonder what they did with that thing. It was pretty neat." He paused, then asked, "So, how are your grandparents these days?"

We flounder a moment, then explain that Opa had passed away six years ago of congestive heart failure. "Oma's doing really well, though," we tell him. "Walking every day, still in that house."

"Really? Oh." He is quiet a moment. "That's what my first wife had. She was diagnosed six years before she died, and they told us she wouldn't live long. Good for your grandma, though!" He nods. "My wife now, she works at a candy shop. Boy is that good candy!"

Olivia and I exchange a look, saying over each other, "We should go there!" "We'd better not go there!" and then laughing in agreement with both sentiments. He laughs, too.

"I know. I work out, and it's so hard, and then I go and eat all these sweet things. And I wonder why on earth I did that for, when I just worked out so hard!"

"You look like you're in good shape to me," I assure him, and he does: robust, healthy color in his cheeks, that distinguished white hair and those bright blue eyes. I am quickly growing very fond of him.

"I feel good," he says, shrugging. "Probably am a bit overweight. Used to be I was really tall. And thin, as thin as you girls. But I'm 75 now, and I get tired quickly. I just retired this year. My wife convinced me to."

"How are you liking retired life?" I ask him.

He smiles.  "Well, I like sleeping in, and I couldn't keep doing all those late nights anymore.  But I do get to thinking when I go to bed, you know, what am I doing with my life now? I miss the kids, too. So I've started applying around for part-time teaching jobs to do, to fill my time with. Hopefully I'll find something eventually."

We express our agreement in these hopes. After a moment, he begins to stack his napkins on his plate. I notice that his hands are trembling quite distractingly, and he seems a bit flustered. He smiles at us, though, and says, "Well, you give my best to your mom and grandma and Julie!"

"It was such a delight to meet you!" I say, beaming at him, and feeling as I do so a strong tenderness welling in my heart, a gush of goodwill towards this stranger who knew the strangers that my childhood mother and aunt are to me.

I anxiously wonder if I ought to remind him about those lamps as he stands, but he manages to avoid them again, and I feel relieved. Somehow it would have bothered me to have watched him hit his head again, as it bothered me to see how his fingers were shaking as he gathered his things from the table.

"It was nice to meet you both," he is saying as he prepares to leave. "Have a good evening!"

"Thanks--you too!" my sister and I chime. He walks off the scene, and Olivia and I look at each other as the loud silence of the bustling cafe replaces his garrulous presence. We both exchange cheerful observations on what an unexpectedly charming afternoon it had been, and then return to our books.

As I pick up reading about inadequate precipitating events, I feel a keen sense of time and place, of having arrived at a significant meeting between the two, stumbled into some providential appointment.

Thanksgiving approaches, and family is on my mind. You might call it an inadequate event to have precipitated the glowing intimation of God's providence and faithfulness that I felt as I gulped the last of my coffee, but its influence on my heart was nevertheless undeniable, and a cause for gratitude.

This is my story, this is my song:

2011-10-30T10:21:00.000-07:00

I love the LORD, because he has heard
my voice and my pleas for mercy.
Because he inclined his ear to me,
therefore I will call on him as long as I live.

The snares of death encompassed me;
the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me;
I suffered distress and anguish.
Then I called on the name of the LORD:
"O LORD, I pray, deliver my soul!"

Gracious is the LORD, and righteous;
our God is merciful.
The LORD preserves the simple;
when I was brought low, he saved me.

Return, O my soul, to your rest;
for the LORD has dealt bountifully with you.

For you have delivered my soul from death,

my eyes from tears,

my feet from stumbling;
I will walk before the LORD
in the land of the living.

What shall I render to the LORD

for all his benefits to me?

I will lift up the cup of salvation

and call on the name of the LORD,

I will pay my vows to the LORD
in the presence of all his people.

O LORD I am your servant;

You have loosed my bonds.

I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving

and call on the name of the LORD.

Praise the LORD!

2011-10-27T02:54:00.000-07:00

"Hast thou ever pictured thyself the one remaining creature in the earth, the one remaining creature in all the starry worlds? In such a universe thine every thought would be 'God and I! God and I!' And yet He is as near to thee as that--as near as if in the boundless spaces there throbbed no heart but His and thine. Practice that solitude, O my soul! Practice the stillness of thine own heart! Practice the solemn refrain 'God and I! God and I!'"

[George Matheson]

2011-10-24T14:37:00.000-07:00

"We give back to you, O God, those whom you gave to us. You did not lose them when you gave them to us, and we do not lose them by their return to you. Your dear Son has taught us that life is eternal and love cannot die. So death is only an horizon and an horizon is only the limit of our sight. Open our eyes to see more clearly, and draw us closer to you that we may know that we are nearer to our loved ones who are with you. You have told us that you are preparing a place for us, prepare us also for that happy place, that where you are we may also be always, O dear Lord of life and death."

[William Penn]

Alchemy

2011-10-21T08:51:00.000-07:00

This morning I went for a jog under a dark sky textured like fleece, over trails mosaic with fallen leaves. The pond to my right exhaled a mist that brooded upon reflected moonlight and translated it into a luminous weave. Janie's paws clicked fast and light in comparison to my thudding footfalls, and I could feel her muscled neck straining against the leash and its imposition of my own lagging rhythm.

Not so lagging as it might be, I want to admonish her: Be grateful. And, remembering how, months ago, the slow journey from driveway to living room couch would utterly sap my strength--how my heart rate would grow frantic from the act of brushing my teeth--I find myself welling with a joy that, even more than my steady heartbeat and deep breathing, feels like life.

I am learning that each moment is an opportunity for alchemy: taking the stuff of present sensations and blending in the bittersweet flavors of the past, adding the inexhaustable oil of God's annointing presence, and the assurance of the good future before you. Suddenly your heart is turning everything to gold. Suddenly your life is worship. The mustard seed in your soul is translated: it is an eternity of fruitful bounty planted by Love Himself.

You realize, with Richard Wilbur, that this is no outer dark / but a small province haunted by the good, / where some things may be understood / and where, beneath the sun's coronal arc, / we keep our proper range, / aspiring, with this lesser globe of sight, / to gather tokens of the light / not in the bullion, but in the loose change.

In Memoriam: TJ Baker

2011-10-12T05:33:00.000-07:00

(Composed for TJ's Memorial Service this Saturday.)

When I think of TJ, it is her voice that I remember mostvividly. Her voice entirely suitedher. Even now, a year since I’ve heardit, I can summon the modulation of it, how it was a perfect embodiment of herSouthern birthright and ladylike self-assurance with its elongated vowels andringing clarity. The way she’d lay astress on certain words, like pointing a finger: “Dear”; “If you know what Imean…”

And of course I remember her face. Like her voice, like her personality, herface was a delightful balance of softness and precision: her bright eyes and sharpchin strikingly set against her smooth skin and soft hair. She always carried herself with such dignity,chin lifted and shoulders straight, like a queen.

In both health and sickness, TJ was frankly herself. While confined to her walker, she taught me to make sweet tea. She prayed thatI would get a job even while she was in the midst of confronting her ownsuffering. She and Mike always welcomedme into their home, and gave me the precious privilege of sharing in their seasonof pain and grief. In so doing, theytaught me more about faith than my entire upbringing in a Christian communityever could. When I was diagnosed withcancer later that year, it was TJ’s face that came first to my mind, and thememory of her resounding conviction in the face of death gave me deepconsolation. TJ taught me how to grievewith grace, how to suffer with steadfastness. She taught me so beautifully about the Body of Christ, how worthy andvital and good it is to be a member of Christ, to share in the fellowship ofHis suffering.

TJ was wonderful. Ionly knew her for a brief span of time, and look how indelibly her presence hasbeen carved in my memory! By living outher faith, TJ revealed to me the incalculable treasure we both have been givenby the grace of God. She shouted to me,through her graceful submission to His will, that to live is Christ, and to dieis gain.

I miss TJ, but I rejoice that she is perfectly happy andwhole. Her affliction prepared her forthe eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison that she nowexperiences. And her example continuesto instruct me as I stumble towards heaven myself, carrying the glorioustreasure of the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the humbleearthen vessel of my mortal body. LikeTJ, like the Apostle Paul, “I believe and therefore I speak, knowing that Hewho raised the Lord Jesus will also raise me with Jesus and bring me into Hispresence…that as grace extends to more and more people it may increasethanksgiving to the glory of God.”

And I’m sure her encouragement to us today as we miss herprecious presence on earth would echo Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 4: “So wedo not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self isbeing renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing forus an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to thethings that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that areseen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

I pray that my life, like TJ’s, will be a rich affirmationof God’s goodness and grace.

playing with woodchips

2011-10-03T11:10:00.000-07:00

Were I playing this game with anyone else, nephew of mine, I would have begun rolling my eyes and fishing for reasons to leave long ago. Instead, I find myself hoping that you will not tire.

The yellow hood of your winter coat bobs charmingly as you dart between the grated drain and the nearby heap of barn red woodchips. You stoop to grasp a handful of red. The next moment you are purposefully marching to the grate, where you hunker over it and extend your clenched fist.

The timing is always perfect: a moment's pause to savor the anticipation of what's to come, and then--ha!--the fingers burst apart. Like the reckless young invincible that you are, you let those chips fall where they may. Some catch on the bars of the grate, but most freefall and then splash satisfyingly in the inky water pooled below.

I'm watching you watch them, although you are hard to keep track of from moment to moment. As great as your pleasure is in watching what gravity and ground water do to woodchips, mine is infinitely greater in watching what imagination and curiosity do to you: seeing your eyes sparkle and hearing the glee in your voice and realizing that your mind is so absorbed in this that you've forgotten I'm even here.

It's only after I've written this experience out, after I've taken these woodchips of experience and flung them into the drain of my own mind and reveled in the sensations of memory and love that they produced, that I find the detachment to wonder: who might have been watching me watch you all that precious while?

While the earth remains

2011-09-28T10:54:00.000-07:00

Autumn in Michigan: has it truly been five years since I last experienced this? Trudging the familiar shortcut to the library across the Freshman Campus and hearing tennis shoes squeak and scuffle from behind the heavy gym doors, my heart is simmering with a nostalgia as piquant as the chili I lunched on before I left. My decision to leave my iPod at home is validated by the sounds that brighten the cold air: traffic whooshing along Chicago Drive, acorns crunching beneath my boots, and especially the rowdy voices of happy children shrieking from nearby yards.

The journey is the span of a city block, but my stride has a noticeable spring in it by the time I'm pulling open the heavy glass doors to immerse myself in the heated fragrance of the library. Running through my mind as I unshoulder my knapsack and dump my books into the return bin are those words of Emily Dickinson: "How much can come, and much can go, and yet remain the world."

The theology of that phrase strikes me, caught as I am in life's pattern of births and deaths, beginnings and endings, advents and leave-takings. How much can come and much can go. Yet "while the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease." (Gen. 8:22) Whatever else happens, the world yet remains, hinged on a promise as beautiful and otherworldly as a rainbow.

Implicit in this verse, however, is the truth that this world will not always remain. Ultimately, even this world of coming and going will go. Oneday it will be swept up into a state of completion: the state for which it groans, awaiting deliverance from the One who was from the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.

How much can come and much can go--even this world itself, and certainly my own small life which it encompasses--and yet remains that world. What consolation for my pilgrim soul.

whiffs

2011-09-18T11:16:00.000-07:00

"I think religion has a chance of a look-in whenever the mind craves solace in music or poetry--in any form of art at all. Personally, I think it is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communion all the other arts attempt."

"I suppose you mean communion with God."

He gave such a snort of laughter that his madeira went the wrong way.

"What on earth did I say that was funny?" I asked, while he was mopping his eyes.

"It was the utter blankness of your tone. God might have been a long, wet week--which He's certainly treating us to." He glanced at the window. The rain had started again, so heavily that the garden beyond the streaming panes was just a blur of green. "How the intelligent young do fight shy of the mention of God! It makes them feel both bored and superior."

I tried to explain: "Well, once you stop believing in an old gentleman with a beard...It's only the word God, you know--it makes such a conventional noise."

"It's merely shorthand for where we come from, where we're going, and what it's all about."

"And do religious people find out what it's all about? Do they really get the answer to the riddle?"

"They get just a whiff of an answer sometimes. ... If one ever has any luck, one will know with all one's senses--and none of them."

"But haven't you already?"

He sighed and said the whiffs were few and far between. "But the memory of them everlasting," he added softly."

excerpts, I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith

2011-09-10T10:53:00.000-07:00

When I can make my thoughts come forth

To walk like ladies up and down,

Each one puts on before the glass

Her most becoming hat and gown.

But oh, the shy and eager thoughts

That hide and will not get them dressed,

Why is it that they always seem

So much more lovely than the rest?

Sara Teasdale, "Thoughts"

Love In A Time Of Cancer

2011-09-08T22:00:00.000-07:00

I begin to write an expose about my experience of Cancer, the harrowing ordeal of it, and end up penning a thankful tribute instead...for it was through Cancer's persistent agency that Love and I became better acquainted.

The experiences that invite Love in are not always gentle. Indeed, often we are most connected to Love when we are travailing through grave personal Calvaries. It is not that I was unacquainted with the meaning of love before that cold week in January, the week that apprenticed my trembling heart to the medical diagnosis gravely introduced by my doctor as Stage 2C Ovarian Cancer. At the time I was halfway through my twenty-third year of life, and each year and shown me a little more of what it meant to love and be loved. But it was Cancer that helped turn my glib acquaintanceship with Love into a more intimate bond.

One of the trademarks of Cancer's visitations is the impulse he awakens in those he touches to revisit their pasts. After my diagnosis I found myself preoccupied with memories of the twenty-three years I'd lived before his arrival. How Love consecrates the trivial! Even the most commonplace of my memories glowed. I now was given the grace to perceive what it had indeed meant to be held in the arms of my parents, to break bread with my dear ones, to share sweet meditations with my Savior. Formerly dry and porous memories were soaked in newborn feelings and gained substance. As I reflected on the days of my life, I saw a record of a life hallowed by Love, and that very hallowing created an indispensable atmosphere of security and solace for my contemplation of the future.

Yes, my life was in grave danger, and suffering was unavoidable whatever the outcome of my disease. But I was loved. Aside from Cancer, I might never have realized how true this was. The evidence blazed in my memories and nerved me for the days to come.

What else did Cancer teach me?

Cancer taught me that sometimes Love means breath-stealing Fear. Especially in those early days of my journey, I would frequently feel a cold surge of fright as I contemplated the various destructive potentialities that this disease held in store. I feared the implications that these risks posed for my dear ones: that I might have to leave them forever, that I would cause them pain. My love for them was the source of my dread--a dread that they shared with me.

But Cancer also taught me that even Fear can be a consolation, for it liberated me and my beloveds to cling fiercely and unabashedly to each other in a manner that would have seemed excessive under "normal" conditions. Fear gave us a precious desperation that hungered after ways to articulate our Love with candor and abandon. Had this love-sick fear not stirred us to act, we would have overlooked the thousand opportunities to express our love that were presented to us every day. And what sweet experiences of intimacy we would have missed!

...For one of the greatest lessons that Cancer taught me is this: Love is not real unless it is tangibly articulated. My memory of my time spent with Cancer is like a photo album of a very photogenic Love in action: candid pictures snapped by Cancer's neutral lens.

Take a moment and examine portions of this album with me. Watch Love extending to me a beautiful array of scarves and hats and apparel fitted to my reduced physique, without ever calling attention to my pallor, or the fact that I, gaunt and bald, have come to resemble a bone for affliction to gnaw on. See her tirelessly carrying me to and from chemotherapy treatments. She glows out of a succession of dear, familiar faces in the chairs surrounding mine, keeping her hands swift to perform any small ministration that might arise: fetching a drink of water or dealing a round of cards or tucking my blanket snugly around my shoulders. After the day's bitter doses of saline, cisplatin, bleomycin, and etoposide, she helps me to the car and takes me home. Her are all the letters she sent me. They are quite a hoard of enriching words: multiple letters a day, for weeks and weeks! And look at all the lovely arrangements of flowers sent to lavishly adorn the house. I wish you could reach in and touch this pair of soft gray slippers, or drape this heavy handmade quilt over your shoulders (note the comforting words sewn in its lining). And here is Love delivering meals day after day: gooey lasagnas, piquant enchiladas, hearty soups, indulgent desserts...ah, these pictures will never do them justice! I am sure you understand now that if I ever suffered from lack of appetite, it was not due to any deficiency on Love's part.

Have you noticed, I wonder, the happiness and good humor that continue to sparkle in my eyes through the progression of this album, even while Cancer's grueling regimen made my hair fall out and my body grow increasingly frail? Please do not allow me to ever take the credit for that inner light. It would not have burned so steadily without Love's constant attendance upon it. All my contemplations of Love inspire within me the sister emotions of overwhelming gratitude and sweet humility because they are a constant reminder of how much I owe her. I could keep turning these mental pages with you. I never tire of beholding them, for Love is so photogenic, so lovely, is she not? So well worth navigating the depths of disease to befriend.

Because of Cancer, I know Love more sweetly and truly than ever before. You see? I owe Cancer a debt of gratitude.

I urge you to look around. Consider your own experiences--even the painful ones. (Especially the painful ones.) You may find, as I did, that you are standing in the sunshine of Love's dear company, and that you wouldn't trade that companionship for all the ease life has to offer.

2011-05-16T07:39:00.001-07:00

On the threshhold of my final week of chemotherapy, I am rejoicing.

Outside my window the new maple leaves glow and the fresh wind bobbles the heads of a million dandelions. Perched at my computer chair indoors, I'm savoring a last mug of coffee before my dose of cisplatin makes it detestable to my tastebuds, and Janie is sniffing my slippers. It feels as though every cell in my body is chanting the refrain that has intertwined with my routines since I woke: One week more! One week more of a needle-plugged arm vein, of kidney flushing saline, of black fatigue and the threat of nausea. One more period of wasting away, and gradual recovery. Only one week more.

A friend recently described the past few months of tumor, operation, recovery, and chemotherapy by using Sheldon Van Auken's beautiful phrase: "a severe mercy." As I reflect on my experience, however, I begin to think that severe is too severe a word. Indeed, much as I have lamented my bald head and frail body, I cannot but compare my own lot to the lot of others I encountered in the chemo ward, or even to my own expectations as I entered into this valley. My time of disease has been comparatively brief, my ordeal quite mild. I am blessed that, in this particular scuffle, it was the cancer that proved to be short-lived. And I gained more than I lost.

Emerging from the valley, I feel myself undeservedly enriched. My weakness has shown God's strength to be perfect, his grace all-sufficient--indeed, overabundant! My dependance has been an ideal stage to showcase the surprising and steadfast love of my loved ones. I have faced my own physical and spiritual helplessness, and known that even so, God has delighted to save me to the uttermost.

I find myself turning toward the future with a hope sweetened by proof of my Savior's kindness, and hands eager to demonstrate my gratitude.

My Etherial Gain

2011-05-13T11:11:00.000-07:00

My first well Day - since many ill -
I asked to go abroad,
And take the Sunshine in my hands,
And see the things in Pod -

A'blossom just when I went in
To take my Chance with pain -
Uncertain if myself, or He,
Should prove the strongest One.

---

My loss, by sickness - Was it Loss?
Or that Etherial Gain
One earns by measuring the Grave -
Then - measuring the Sun -

[Emily Dickinson]

Lullabye, post-diagnosis

2011-04-22T19:12:00.000-07:00

I spend the night

(frightening phrase)

rhyming cancer

with

answer.

Abby Considers April Snowfall

2011-04-18T07:26:00.000-07:00

Some child in the sky must be dumping it out, shaking powder white
from the open canister, coating the meadow in a confectioner's glaze.

Where it sets: pastures, gardens, sugar & starch.
Where it candies: trellises, windchimes, treebuds.
After a month's spring thaw, I stick out my tongue,
taste the flakes as they fall.
Frost me, sweeten me up,
with winter's bright knife; crystalize me, beguile me
in your audacious play.

(Composed upon waking to an April snowfall, and having Barbara Crooker's Tu Wi's Considers April Sunlight come ironically to mind. Her version reads thus:

Some cook in the sky must be ladling it out, pouring liquid gold
from her copper saucepan, basting the meadows in hollandaise.

Where it drips: buttercups, dandelions, butter & eggs.
Where it splashes: forsythia, daffodils, tulips.
After a long hard winter, I reach out my arms,
lift my face to the sky.
Fry me, sunnyside up,
on springtime's hot griddle; clarify me, anoint me
in your lavish lemon light.)

Act III, Scene ii

2011-03-23T08:54:00.000-07:00

Someone has altered the script.
My lines have been changed.
The other actors are shifting roles.
They don't come on when they're expected to,
and they don't say the lines I've written
and I'm being upstaged.
I thought I was writing this play
with a rather nice role for myself,
small, but juicy
and some excellent lines.
But nobody gives me my cues
and the scenery has been replaced.
I don't recognize the new sets.
This isn't the script I was writing.
I don't understand this plot at all.

To grow up
is to find
the small part you are playing
in this extraordinary drama
written by
somebody else.

-Madeleine L'Engle-

Fall Breakfast

2010-11-19T09:25:00.000-08:00

The omelette sunrise soaks
fall-toasted fields in golden yolk.
Geese vees move above trees
and chimney smoke.

Let's bring our slippered feet,
our steaming mugs of whetted heat,
out to the wind-chilled wicker.
Let's take a seat.

And feast.

"So we live here, forever taking leave..."

2010-11-05T05:56:00.001-07:00

Every so often, four or five times a year, for no reason that I can yet put my finger on, I will find myself inexplicably awake and usually bubbling with happiness at some pre-dawn hour. This was one of those mornings. I woke at 4 am, three hours before my alarm, and my heart was jumping with excitement. After scrambling into my running clothes and snatching up my iPOD, I tiptoed up the stairs and crept out the front door, where an icy breeze kept me company as I ran up the little hill in front of my apartment to the gravelly trail, and then started towards Scenic Highway. The sky was a rimy landscape of clouds and constellations, and spun just enough ghost gray light to assure my footing and to bleach the outcroppings of boulder and bluff to my right. Chattanooga's lights jewelled the air between the bare branches of trees on my left.

I've been reading Rilke recently, trying to understand him, and these words from his "Duino Elegies" were on my mind as I returned home, muting my music and just feeling the beat of my shoes on gravel, the air rushing in and out of my lungs.

"...Often a star
was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you
out of the distant past, or as you walked
under an open window, a violin
yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission:
But could you accomplish it? Weren't you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)"

I love the way he speaks of taking notice of the world as mission, one that is too vast for me to accomplish. However, I get the feeling that desire, for Rilke, is a limiting thing, a thing that sours any experience of beauty, that distracts us from taking due notice of what we've been given. I prefer to side with Lewis on the topic of desire: that it is a proof that we were made for a different world. My expectations, far from distracting me from my mission, instead make me aware that deeper meaning underlies each event. In that sense, each event does announce a Beloved. And praise, while still a mission, is also (more Lewis) "appointed consummation." ("I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation." C.S. Lewis)

So I can "begin again and again the never-attainable praising" as Rilke urges, while not feeling the least bit diminished by my lack of attainment.

catfish and code blues

2010-11-04T05:20:00.001-07:00

I am enjoying my new job, now that my grasp on its demands is sure and my acquaintanceship with coworkers and employees is strengthening. In what context other than the serving line (dishing hot food onto customers' plates) is "Catfish!" an acceptable and even sensible response to "Hello!"?

I'm even learning a little bit about the culinary arts. For example, adding hot water and stirring it into hours-old creamed potatoes and vegetables will work a temporary miracle of revivication. Nothing can make a pot of greens look appetizing. Catfish is edible!--a fact that still makes me shudder, linked as it is in my brain with memories of a friend's aquarium of bewhiskered mottled slimy catfish, and also rumors (urban myths?) of Volkswagon-sized catfish snuffling over river bottoms.

Then I get to enjoy the immortal flirtatious teasing of aged men, the sweet precocity of children. Who knew I'd be able to dramatically beg people not to "shoot the messenger" as often as I do when, seated behind the register, I am compelled to extort $4 plus tax for three measly chicken tenders, $3 plus tax for a limp slice of day-old cheese pizza.

It can be a sad place to work. A hospital cafeteria is hardly most people's fine dining choice. Every so often someone will share a grief with me: a mother dying, a husband with kidney failure discovering he also is riddled with cancer, a 25-year-old man losing his battle with brain tumors after three years of struggling. In the context of such heartache, I find it it easy to forgive a petty complaint, an impatient demeanor, a sharp retort. In some ways, I am glad for these reactions, glad to offer some sort of outlet for bitterness or grief.

A chill always passes over me when I hear a "Code Blue" announced over the speaker system: adult heart failure: an infrequent but sobering interruption to the day's work. It's a reminder that all around my insulated hub of commerce, lives are being handled with both care and perfunctoriness. My heart flings a prayer heavenward, and then I keep dishing out food, wiping down tables, refilling plastic silverware, taking people's money.

With care, but also perfunctorily.

Learning to love Rilke...

2010-11-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

"To Music"

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what?--: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,--
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distanced, as the other
side of air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.

--Rainer Maria Rilke--
(translation by Stephen Mitchell)

2010-10-25T05:43:00.000-07:00

It's a grubby sort of morning. Puddles swirl with the dye of leaf juices, which stain the windshield of my car and paint the roads in orange and yellow oils. My wooden balcony is slick and dark as I step out onto it with my mug of coffee to survey the view of tattered branches panning mist. After a moment, I turn back inside to lamplight and comfort, radiating gratitude and feeling sure that just that--standing all alone in my little house overspilling with giddy thanks --is useful, is worthy. That sensation is the root of singing, clapping, kissing, embracing, all gestures of excitement and love. My heart was created to do that, to gather in all the gifts my senses can hold and to translate them into the thing I call praise, to add my little heartful to what the world has to offer.

"So", as Mary Oliver says, "every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God."

2010-10-23T07:11:00.000-07:00

Because I was missing Janie something fierce this morning, I browsed through my collection of Mary Oliver's Percy poems. This one in particular had me laughing, for I have had this very conversation with Janie on several occasions. My copies of Buechner's "A Sacred Journey," Shakespeare's Complete Works (Norton edition), and the Bible will all ruefully back Janie's dismissive claim. You have to give that brazen darling some credit: she has, all too literally, good literary taste.

Percy And Books (Eight)

Percy does not like it when I read a book.
He puts his face over the top of it and moans.
He rolls his eyes, sometimes he sneezes.
The sun is up, he says, and the wind is down.
The tide is out and the neighbors' dogs are playing.
But Percy, I say. Ideas! The elegance of language!
The insights, the funniness, the beautiful stories
that rise and fall and turn into strength, or courage.

Books? says Percy. I ate one once, and it was enough.
Let's go.

[Mary Oliver, Red Bird]

"Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World"

2010-10-17T07:04:00.000-07:00

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathng;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance."

[Richard Wilbur]

2010-10-13T06:17:00.000-07:00

I am unsettled by how easy it is for me to live an intransitive life: one that has lost sight of its direct object, with verbs flying everywhere, anchoring themselves to an assortment of indirect objects rather than devoting themselves to their true object. Or getting caught up in adjectives, the aesthetics of my living, or adverbs, the way I appear as I do things.

Of course I know that it is impossible to live life with incessant unwavering focus on the reason I believe I am here. Part of life's wonderousness is that it is teeming with adjectives and adverbs. When used properly, these add richness and texture to my story--to a large extent, they are its glory, and often they surprise me with glimpses into its meaning. To refuse to let them divert me would be to blind myself to that richness, those glimpses. But to get carried away with them, to devote myself to them, is tantamount to making my life a frivolity, and I do not want to do that.

A life well lived is like a story well written. A well written story is built by well written sentences: sentences that are focused on the greater plot. A life well lived is built by well-lived moments: moments that are focused on the greater purpose of it all.

Half the time I don't have the vision to see how many of my experiences will matter, ultimately. But I believe that if I live like they DO (because I believe that they do)...then one day I will look over my shoulder and see that they HAVE mattered. I will see how they have made a difference.

That is how I want to live my life: open to surprises, receptive to aesthetics, thoughtful about my own presence within it, but always all this in light of eternity and the meaning it casts on each passing moment.

2010-10-09T08:06:00.000-07:00

I am sitting at my little wooden desk in my bedroom, listening to the birds sing, surrounded by graces: animal voices, sunlight, colors, scents; the refreshment of clean skin and teeth and hair, of comfortable garments and a tidy room. My appetite is taking a satisfied nap after a breakfast of yogurt and peaches, washed down with a mug of rich black coffee.

It is delicious, at moments like these, to inhabit a body: head, shoulders, knees, toes, eyes ears, mouth, and nose. My lungs inflate with healthy air: steamy, fragranced with ginseng from the shampoo and conditioner I lathered into my hair during my morning shower. My heart's steady beat fills my veins and arteries with coursing life, rich streams that water the fertile acreage of my brain. Nerves run their twinkling races. DNA strands fulfill their wyrd.

I know that my body will not always give me cause for such celebration. This lesson has been reinforced in the past months as I watched a friend's body confront the mortality that it had housed for over fifty years. It is a guest that dwells within everyone.

I wonder if the angels see it, that death that we carry, when they look upon us. If so, I wonder what they see when they look at me.

The idea that one day my breath will fail is as imponderable to me as it was propesterous to Macbeth that Birnam Wood could one day march on Dunsinane. But my Birnam Wood will march, nonetheless, as my friend's did, and the battle will take place, and my body will fall.

Sitting here at my desk, my happy heart keeping my spirit company, I am grateful for three things.

I am grateful that I know that I will meet my death one day.

I am grateful I do not know when that day will be, or what that death will look like. It is enough simply to know that we will meet.

Most of all, I am grateful that I must only meet him once. This knowledge gives me courage. It consoles me when I think about my friend, whose great ordeal is over, who has gone through the last riddle, and who will live the rest of her days in that species that stands beyond, beckoning and baffling, a species that is as invisible to me as music, but positive, as sound.

"I know that my Redeemer lives, that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him, with my own eyes--I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!" (Job 19:25-27)

sweet reminder

2010-10-07T05:50:00.000-07:00

The best things in life are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light
in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of
right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's
plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily
bread are the sweetest things in life.

Robert Louis Stevenson

"a sky, air, light: / a being..."

2010-10-05T05:16:00.000-07:00

My housemate and I have determined that I suffer from the direct opposite of seasonal depression. It makes me happy when skies are gray. Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul--I am alight. The North Wind doth blow, and we will have snow, and the very thought if it makes my heart sing.

Needless to say, then, I am relishing these wind-beaten mornings, the kitchen spell they make possible: a spell of warmth and wellbeing spun out of gentle indoor lights and the throaty conversation of the coffee maker, underscored by the framed square of bruised autumn day visible above the sink.

I was browsing through my Levertov collection as I sipped my coffee this particular morning, and this poem captured perfectly the way I feel about today. Or rather, after I read this poem, I looked out the window and the day did indeed wring me with the feelings the poem describes. I can't tell you now, in hindsight, if the day made the poem resonate so powerfully, or if the poem made the day resonate so powerfully.

All I know is that they partnered together, and my heart is still, even now, dancing their choreography.

A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me--a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day's blow
rang out, metallic--or was it I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.

Denise Levertov: "Variation on a Theme by Rilke" (The Book of Hours, Book 1, Poem 1, Stanza 1)

(the fruits of a little wordplay on a quiet afternoon)

2010-10-03T14:08:00.001-07:00

The cranberry red minivan had acquired a shimmy in recent years--a fact that its driver, Abraham, regarded in much the same way he regarded his own receding hairline: with outer good nature and private interior squirms.

It was barely four in the morning. Abraham's vision was limited to the penumbra of cloudy light cast by his headlights into the inky void. They hadn't passed another automobile since the semi truck twenty minutes back, and after a day of work followed by six sleepless hours behind the wheel, Abraham grew increasingly disoriented. The radio, with its unvaried assortment of jingly Christmas carols, had long ceased to entertain him. He had turned it off as soon as his children were asleep.

He gripped the wheel, squared his shoulders, and reached to the dash to turn off the heat. Perhaps the frigid November air would keep him alert.

His wife stirred in the passenger seat, jogged awake by the sudden drop in white noise. Elisabeth was a light sleeper under normal conditions; much more so in the jouncing minivan. She squirmed to an upright posture, inhaling deeply as she always did upon waking.

"You still doing okay, Abe?" she whispered after finding her bearings.

Abraham nodded, relieved at the clarifying effect of her voice, so familiar to him that it felt a part of his mind's most rational workings.

"Want me to take a turn?"

He shook his head. "Maybe in an hour or so. I'll be okay for now."

She relaxed back into her seat and turned her head to squint out the misted window. The atmosphere of the van settled again into quiet. The absence of the heater's harsh blare and the sharpened edge in the cooling air give this new silence a palpable weight. Abraham indulged the childish fancy that this prosaic minivan was a rocket ship, bearing them through space and time to another planet. He smiled to himself at the aptness of the analogy as he thought of their destination: Elisabeth's childhood home in Iowa, its dust mote laden air, its elongated sense of time and space.

Abraham's thoughts turned to his children as naturally and unremarkably as a washing machine changes cycles. Lizzie, Robbie, Esther, and Henry: he ticked them off mentally, oldest to youngest: a habit of his. Twelve, nine, six, and four.

Glancing into the rearview mirror, he glimpsed their dark shapes heaped like dirty laundry across the benches. The brothers were in the rear. Henry's pale elfish face nuzzled against Robbie's shoulder in a breach of their brotherly code that Robbie would never have permitted were he awake. Robbie's posture was an enlarged iteration, his forehead bumping against the window and his mouth hanging ajar. In the front bench were the girls. Esther's fuzzy curls clung to the pillow she had propped against the armrest. Her wee feet peeked from beneath the hem of her princess nightgown and poked against Lizzie's leg.

Lizzie.

As he looked at her, a semi truck barreled past, its lights illuminating her face for a brief and shocking span. She was awake and staring out the window, unaware of his attention. Something in her expression at that moment pinioned Abraham's heart in his chest. He felt it flapping, frantic, against that keen lance of emotion innocently inflicted by his daughter's transfiguration.

She sat in her usual place in the minivan, unmasked. In her expression dwelt emotions that looked so at home there he marveled that he hadn't seen them before: yearning and faith, a sense of breath bated. These inhabited her countenance with the candor that is the soul of privacy, all considerations of civility and shyness clearly forgotten.

Abraham was startled to find that until now he hadn't believed she had a private self detached from his own--one that glowed beneath the good manners of her upbringing and the instinctive theatricality of her public interactions. With his realization arrived a sick pang of apprehension: the knowledge that his daughter's precious form housed a treasury of vulnerabilities that he was powerless to defend.

His eyes double checked the road and then returned to her face, and this time they encountered her direct gaze: mild again, masked. She smiled sweetly.

"Much longer, Dad?" she whispered.

He cleared his throat. "About three hours left, darling."

"I guess I'll try to sleep some more then," she sighed. He heard her shift position, causing Esther to grunt in her sleep and Elisabeth to awaken with her usual sharp inhalation, look around, and sink back into rest.

Abraham took several deep stabilizing breaths and reached across the armrest to hold his wife's hand. Again he counted off his children. Lizzie, Robbie, Esther, Henry. Burning with love, he chanted their names in his heart again and again, like the rosary, like a prayer.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

2010-10-03T06:52:00.000-07:00

Today's state of mind...

Barbara Crooker, "October":
Chill in the air, the leaves go up
in flame, then all fall down
in litter and mulch. The blue
chrome dome of the sky
clamps tight over our heads.
Trees write in their spiral
notebooks: good year,
lots of rain, let's put
a ring on it.
There's only one note
on the wind chimes:
gold gold gold
---
From the Book of Common Prayer:
"Prayer For Those We Love"
Almighty God, we entrust all who are dear to us to thy never-failing care and love, for this life and the life to come, knowing that thou art doing for them better things than we can desire or pray for; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
---
From Isaiah 45:3:
"I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the Lord, the God of Israel, who summons you by name."
---
Dorothy Sayers:
"Where Christ is, cheerfulness will keep breaking in..."

bookfast

2010-09-20T06:31:00.000-07:00

This morning as I microwaved another cup of coffee for myself and listened halfheartedly to Raising Sand while my eyes trailed my neighbor to her car, I caught a glimpse of myself in my own mind's eye: a smoky phantom superimposed over a vivid kaleidescope of images from the books I'd immersed myself in. Last week, I read a thrilling fantasy adventure story (The Blue Sword), a heartbreakingly epic family saga (East of Eden), and a terse memoir of grief (The Year of Magical Thinking). The week before, it was a sweet nosegay of a novel (The Enchanted April), a dark romance (The House of the Seven Gables), a stark and sorrowful tale of a dying small town (The Plague of Doves), a humorously poignant love story (Lives of the Saints) and a delightfully absorbing satiric fantasy (Going Postal). I could go on. Another series of weeks like the ones I've just experienced, and I'll be donning my armor and setting forth in search of windmills to joust.

When I speak with friends about the delights of reading, I always mention that books have the power to deepen and enrich one's quality of life...but I must confess that of late that has not been true for me. Rather, I have engaged in a parisitic relationship with the books I've been reading by permitting them to sap the vast majority of my time and energy. I've grown dependent on books, have been using them as a means to escape my life rather than a means to understand my life better.

For this reason, I am imposing some limitations on my literary consumption. I am going to let my reading affect my life by having a life that is subject to being affected...which means doing less reading and more living. One hour a day of pleasure reading is plenty, and leaves me (factoring in eight hours of sleep) thirteen hours in which to be present, three-dimensional, and mutable in this three-dimensional mutable beautiful earth.

Already I'm beginning to feel more substantial.

2010-09-14T05:49:00.000-07:00

Scrap looked up at the pine trees motionless among stars. Beauty made you love, and love made you beautiful...

She pulled her wrap closer round her with a gesture of defence, of keeping out and off. She didn't want to grow sentimental. Difficult not to, here: the marvellous night stole in through all one's chinks, and brought in with it, whether one wanted them or not, enormous feelings--feelings one couldn't manage, great things about death and time and waste; glorious and devastating things, magnificent and bleak, at once rapture and terror and immense, heart-cleaving longing. She felt small and dreadfully alone. She felt uncovered and defenceless. Instinctively she pulled her wrap closer. With this thing of chiffon she tried to protect herself from the eternities.

excerpt, The Enchanted April (Elizabeth Von Arnim)

presence of mind

2010-09-06T10:30:00.000-07:00

The ferns outside my window are spreading their green vertebrae out towards the sun-gilded breeze this morning, looking as beautific as ferns are capable of looking. This day is beautific. I am sitting at my kitchen table and soaking up the mingled accords of cleanliness (bleach and Windex), sumptuousness (coffee in the pot and an apple cinnamon coffee cake cooling on the counter), and clean mountain air. My dishwasher is running, I'm eyeing one of the peaches nestled in a bowl on my kitchen table with undisguised intent, and Rosie Thomas is singing about October.

Earlier today, I visited the grocery store and stocked my refrigerator and cupboards with abundant food in eager anticipation of the advent of two very dear friends, who arrive tomorrow for a small reunion. Later on, I'll finish my preparations by running a few loads of laundry, cleaning the bathroom, and readying the spare mattress. For now, though, I'm pausing to be still and attentive in this gentle light.

I was listening to NPR yesterday while I fixed myself a pizza after church. Every Sunday afternoon the station has a show about some aspect of spirituality, which involves interviewing spiritual people and asking them to divulge their secrets. Of late the majority of these interviews have focused on the Buddhist path to enlightenment, and I am enjoying learning more about this particular approach to life. The most valuable concept that I have taken from these interviews is the concept of being present to your own life.

My inclination is to withdraw into my own consciousness and live a shadow life, in my brain and imagination. I'm particularly prone to this brand of escapism when I am feeling pressured or upset, but it also strikes when I'm simply bored with my routines. Thanks to NPR and a few wonderful books (as always, Mary Oliver, along with Robert Hass, Kathleen Norris, and Thoreau) I have realized that in so doing I am despising the day of small things and cheating myself of a rich life: a life in the body as well as the spirit, in time as well as eternity.

I really don't know how best to hold myself at bay, so to speak, and live a physically present life while also managing to live a metaphysically present life. By nature I veer into extremes. But I know things that help me. I know that certain activities stimulate both my body and spirit at once. Beautiful mountain jogs come to mind most powerfully. Also: listening to the radio while fixing food, running through my Italian CDs while cleaning house, holding a cup of coffee while reading a good book. Blogging while savoring a tidy fragrant kitchen.

L'Engle talks about being ontological, how impossible it is, and yet how fleetingly ineffable those moments of near-ontology are. Mary Oliver talks about being attentive and corporeal as a sort of prayer. I don't know how to be ontological, I don't really know how to be a prayer, but I am willing to try to be present in body and mind. I'm willing to try to love this life.

On a beautific day like today, it seems almost easy.

Friday afternoon, September

2010-09-03T12:11:00.000-07:00

Autumn approaches. (Delicious autumn, to thee my very soul is wed!)

Although daytime temperatures still leap towards 100 degrees they rarely make it past 95. I think the mornings (lovely, cool, sixty-degree mornings) are holding them back. On my runs, I encounter trees garlanded with crimson poison ivy. Up by the Craven House one flirtatious maple has already turned a becomingly rusty shade of red.

My thoughts often turn singsong to the cadence of Hopkins' "Spring and Fall, to a Young Child." Margaret, are you grieving over golden-grove unleaving? Death, that blight man was born for, has come again to court someone near to me, as he did almost two years ago this season. I find myself gathering all of the emptiness in my heart and kindling it with prayer, watching the bitter incense waft heavenward. It's a miracle, in a way: something so dense and acrid curling from an altar heaped with all my vacancy. Afterwards I feel listerine relief, bracing and mentholated, rush through me for awhile.

I am not necessarily immersed in sadness, as the above paragraph perhaps may suggest. Rather, I feel like sorrow has been a sort of lens slipped over my perspective, sharpening everything to a degree of poignancy that I haven't felt for awhile. I am even grateful for the new keenness it has given me.

This sorrow was written, too. Now as it is unfolding, I am given my usual under-appreciated freedom, that gift that I constantly forget that I possess: to choose how to respond.

Thoughts about community:

2010-08-26T06:17:00.000-07:00

(or, how my mind has changed)

For at least the past year my lifestyle has demonstrated an increasingly individualistic bent. I have subconsciously tried to cut myself off from my communities, both here in Chattanooga and at home in Michigan, by consistently rating my desire for autonomy and independance ahead of my relationships. The idea of being accountable to or beholden to others, the fear of drama, of the messy obligations that go with the territory of a community, these things have motivated my retreat into myself, a retreat so gradual and tame that I've had plenty of opportunities to rationalize it, to distract myself from the outrageous selfishness that it displays. Only recently have I begun to question my attitude, and seen how radically false it is. Kathleen Norris' The Cloister Walk helped open my eyes. Through her, I was able to see how my individualism reflected one of the worst aspects of American culture: one that elevates self-reliance to an ultimate virtue, that encourages people to look out for themselves first and foremost.

I diagnosed myself as inhospitable at the soul level. My refusal to be vulnerable expresses itself in a staunch closed-heart policy--toxic and flagrantly unloving. It denies my need (yes: need) for community and fellowship. It makes true, powerful, transformative love impossible.

I am so tired of prideful possessiveness, of love limited by self-aggrandizing paranoia. Miserly habits of soul.

I came across this poem by Madeleine L'Engle that expressed the way I feel quite aptly.

Pride is heavy.
It weighs.
It is a fatness of spirit,
an overindulgence in self.
This gluttony is earthbound
Cannot be lifted up.
Help me to fast,
to lose this weight!
Otherwise, O Light One,
how can I rejoice in your
Ascension?
[Ascension, 1969]

Self-absorbed individualism is just that: overindulgence in self, fatness of spirit, spiritual gluttony. Indeed, help me to shed these earthbound pounds, O Light One.

Help me to, in those difficult but transforming words of Scripture, take up my cross daily, die to myself, follow Christ.

after reading "Night"

2010-08-16T02:38:00.001-07:00

A friend of mine has been urging me to read "Night" by Elie Wiesel since freshman year of college--five years later, having finally complied, I understand why. It's the sort of book that compels you to write about it, if only to process it, to exorcise some of the horror that soaks into your heart during the brief hour and a half that elapses as you read through it. After I finished it and sat in my living room with a cup of tea, enfolded in the creature comforts of my happy golden life, I sought to come to grips with the truth that those pages had revealed: that to be a human being means to have within me the hideous potential that created Auschwitz. Somewhere amidst the qualities in my heart that Christians label "the image of God"--creativity, rationality, volitionality, morality, community--is this nightmare, this evil, waiting to be unleashed. It's chilling indeed to come to grips with the fact that I also, in my fallen humanity, have Satanic likeness, a resemblance to that brightest star of the morning whose fall introduced evil into the cosmos.

It is important for me to reflect on this, from time to time, because it's so easy otherwise for me to think that life is about being comfortable and on good terms with everyone, or achieving certain goals. It is too easy for me to forget that there is a deeper narrative beneath the surface and seeming of things, that each ostensibly minor choice I make has powerful implications in that supernatural realm, which is more real and true than the one that I so often delude myself into regarding as "reality."

"Night" took my hand and led me through the world as I so rarely allow myself to look at it: a wasteland of sin and despair and torment and night. It left my heart gasping for Light, and made me realize that, were it not for the presence of that Light pouring through me, igniting my heart, being breathed to flame by the wind of the Spirit, my existence would be that hell.

I am about to make some coffee this morning, about to venture into another routine day of three square meals, of familiar tasks and familiar faces, of comfortable comforts and comfortable discomforts. But I know that, at least for a time, I will be conscious of how precarious my little world is as I do these things. And I hope that this change in perspective will bolster my faith and remind me of how great my salvation is...and will help me be a light no matter my circumstances.

everything's going my way...

2010-08-12T20:09:00.000-07:00

Usually I am fast asleep by 11:17 pm on Thursday evening. Tonight, however, my nerves are positively acrobatic, jubilant from the combined influences of a reckless McKay's book-buying binge, four brimming mugs of City Cafe home brew, and an entire evening of heart-lifting conversation. So here I sit on my living room floor, my back against the footrest of our decrepit orange armchair. My new books are heaped on the floor around me, their price tags already unpeeled and wadded up, my name already scrawled on their inside of their covers. I must go to bed, but I just need to scan one last time the juicy array of names: Hass and Cisneros, Chabon and Morrison, Erdrich, Woolf, Hawthorne, Wiesel, Munro, Ishiguro, Sams, Joyce, and Jones.

Welcome, welcome, welcome to the waiting room of my mind. Oh, I cannot wait to get to know every single blessed one of you.

And don't worry, Jonathan Safran Foer. You will be joining us soon, via the United States Postal Service.

possession

2010-07-30T03:45:00.000-07:00

Today is the much-dreaded 1000-camper-strong same-day changeover, and I'm bracing myself for the imminent panic with mugs of coffee and by listening to some "Amelie."

It's not just changeover that is so thick in the air today, either. It's change. My departure from a job that I've essentially grown into over the past five years looms a mere three weeks down the road, and although I'm ready (eager, even) to move forward, I am coming to grips with the unexpected reality that this transition will feel like leaving home and family all over again. Covenant College, astonishingly enough, is home: I know the housekeeping secrets, the whereabouts and contents of each closet, the layout of every bathroom and its unique needs as to toilet paper style and trash bag size, the procedures necessary to keep every area tidy and inviting: ceiling to floor, wall to wall. The very perfume of the place--the clean accords of Triad and Glance, Activate and RTU, Fresh & Brite and Hospital Disinfectant--is applied and refreshed by me and those who labor with me. In a sense, I have a much deeper bond to this institution than the highest ranking administrator can claim. I remember reading this poem by Richard Wilbur and feeling a kinship with its rich blue-collar pair. It encapsulates the best of what this job has meant for me.

"Summer Morning"

Her young employers, having got in late
From seeing friends in town
And scraped the right front fender on the gate,
Will not, the cook expects, be coming down.

She makes a quiet breakfast for herself,
The coffee-pot is bright,
The jelly where it should be on the shelf.
She breaks an egg into the morning light,

Then, with the bread-knife lifted, stands and hears
The sweet efficient sounds
Of thrush and catbird, and the snip of shears
Where, in the terraced backward of the grounds,

A gardener works before the heat of day.
He straightens for a view
Of the big house ascending stony-gray
Out of his beds mosaic with the dew.

His young employers having got in late,
He and the cook alone
Receive the morning on their old estate,
Possessing what the owners can but own.

--

Now: time to finish this mug of coffee and go enjoy working in my home for another fruitful day.

excerpt

2010-07-14T03:57:00.000-07:00

Nor is it Darce she wants, not really. What she wants is what Ronette has: the power to give herself up, without reservation and without commentary. It's that languor, that leaning back. Voluptuous mindlessness. Everything Joanne herself does is surrounded by quotation marks.

[Margaret Atwood; "True Trash"]

Confessions of a Crazy Cat Lady

2010-07-10T08:19:00.000-07:00

(A Cautionary Tale)

Years ago, I
(being poor) had
just my dreams.

So long as their sly play
beguiled the empty hours,
I could forget the things I lacked.

Their wistful mews and
furtive paws, the
febrile shimmer in

their eyes--these
gave me solace in the crude rooms
of my unfinished self.

But one by one,
their lives expired.

All nine times
my sweet True Love had
life stomped from his lungs.

Ambition died the first
six times in battle...
then he lost his nerve.

He died at last
of corpulence.
Some others starved

or were betrayed.
I did not see that they
were dying off until

I stood one morning
in my dark and empty
heart. Alone.

Look into the windows of my eyes, and you will see:
The rats have finished off all that remained of me.

Fire By Fire

2010-07-09T19:31:00.000-07:00

[Madeleine L'Engle]

My son goes down in the orchard to incinerate
Burning the day's trash, the accumulation
Of old letters, empty toilet-paper rolls, a paper plate,
Marketing lists, a discarded manuscript, on occasion
Used cartons of bird seed, dog biscuit. The fire
Rises and sinks; he stirs the ashes till the flames expire.

Burn, too, old sins, bedraggled virtues, tarnished
Dreams, remembered unrealities, the gross
Should-haves, would-haves, the unvarnished
Errors of the day, burn, burn the loss
Of intentions, recurring failures, turn
Them all to ash. Incinerate the dross. Burn. Burn.

halfbaked

2010-07-04T17:45:00.000-07:00

I've been frustrated of late by my inability to form strong, sound opinions. All of the notions that inhabit my brain are half-baked--mushy and sunken in the center. They don't spring back after you touch them. They stick gooily to the fork that pricks them.

I've decided to be more thoughtful about the way I feel about things, the reasons I feel the way I do about things. I want to be able to support the things I say. If I can't even explain myself to myself, how can I expect others to take me seriously?

Time is the catalyst that I've been sidestepping. I have arrived by shortcuts and conjecture to the majority of my views, and need to go back and spend time baking them through and through. No easy task. But a vital one.

I want to take my life very seriously, and you can't do that by cutting corners.

Only that. But that.

2010-06-30T19:02:00.000-07:00

This summer, I have repeatedly been asked my to describe my idea of a perfect life. "What do you want your life to look like a few years down the road?" friends and family wonder, arching eyebrows over the steaming rims of their coffee mugs.

It is a good question, and one that I have never answered to my own satisfaction, because my vision of the happiest personal future is a nebulous one, comprised primarily of abstract ideals. When I envision myself in a perfect world, I am living well within my means, and my means are nothing more than "enough." I have no desire for an all-absorbing career, and the very thought of a calendar crowded with social engagements exhausts me. In my dream, I have a job that gives me physical satisfaction, also a sense of accomplishment derived from doing a necessary thing well. I have a quiet space to return to at the end of the day, for coffee and reading and journalling and exercise, for fellowship as well as solitude. I fill my days with honest industry, exploring the world with a receptive hungry soul. I live simply, but abundantly. If I had to sum it up, I would use adjectives like clear, deep, quiet, rich, sufficient.

People almost inevitably note that such a life sounds rather lonely to them. "What about marriage? What about children?" they ask.

Of course, as usual, the specifics are where I grow cloudy. My response depends largely on my mood. I am not immune to the stir of curious wistfulness when the topic of love is broached. Sometimes I am very attracted to the idea of a life of prosaic domesticity. I desire the household dynamics of L'Engle's "Circle of Quiet," Barbara Crooker's "Ordinary Life," Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead." I have a hearty respect for the Mrs. Ramsays of this world, of whom I have known not a few. The majority of the emotional life on this planet seems so utterly wrapped up in eros and in family--living on the outside of it, never experiencing it firsthand, at times seems to me to be a cheated or at the least an incomplete existence.

Then again, I think of Lily Briscoe, of Emily Dickinson--of, on the other side of the coin, all the faded or disillusioned wives and mothers that I know or have heard of. I remember that my life is already a glorious love story. I think of how full and happy my life has been thus far, and the prospect of living a similarly solitary existence the rest of my earthly days does not frighten or appall me. In some ways, it allures me. I desire a life of witness and wonder...a bystander life, you might say, far enough from the mess to see its beauty and pattern.

As I considered all this, the words of Psalm 23 quietly filled my heart, and with a sense of wonder I realized that it held the promise of everything I put so much store in for my future.

The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures.

He leads me beside the still waters.

He restores my soul.

He leads me in paths of righteousness

for his name's sake.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil, for you are with me.

Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.

You anoint my head with oil.

My cup overflows.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,

and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

All my confusion about what I specifically wanted evaporated in the sunlight of this passage. Instead of being tyrannized by the possible, by the idea of all the routes I could potentially take and the agonizing necessity of eliminating other (perhaps better) routes as I move forward, I need only follow my Shepherd.

That is my idea of a perfect future, and--imagine that!--I'm already there.

Whatever happens. Whatever

"what is" is is what

I want. Only that. But that.

[Galway Kinnell, "Prayer"]

Summer: June, 2010

2010-06-26T17:12:00.001-07:00

All day the air molecules thicken and swell. They press the scent out of the pores of living things until the atmosphere is intoxicated with their heavy cologne. Distances bend and blur. My brain is a sluggish sea cow rolling in the murky waters of the Amazon.

Now as the earth turns its face from the sun it releases a deep sigh, redolent of honeysuckle. Still reeling from the day's swollen fever, I rejoice in the fall of light, in shadows and cool breezes.

I am comforted by the knowledge of Everest's unmelting snows, of heatless light glancing off of arctic glaciers.

I envision a child's model of the solar system and plot the trajectory of my own spot on the globe.

Away from the sun's smothering scrutiny.

Leaning wistfully against the cold shoulder of outer space.

Letter to My Landlady

2010-06-23T05:47:00.000-07:00

Dear Jessica,

You know what they say about first impressions. When I was first told that my landlady was an elderly woman named "Jessica," I took an instant liking to you. I wanted to trust you merely and foolishly because of your beautiful youthful name, such a rarety in women of your generation.

Now, I realize that I have never met you. But I've been living for several months now in your little cluster of apartments, and I'm starting to learn some things about you. For example: you care a great deal about aesthetics. Thank you for bulldozing our backyards of their wilderness tangle of wild strawberries and scraggy weeds and chipmunk abodes. Thank you for building latticed wooden lean-tos for our trashcans. I've heard rumors that fresh paint will soon be gracing our dull brown siding, and that is lovely. I sincerely appreciate your efforts to beautify the exterior of my little home, and I think that reflects very well on your character.

However, I think that our relationship would improve tremendously if you would remember that little adage "Beauty is as beauty does." Would you schedule cosmetic surgery for a patient with grave internal afflictions? Our house has gradually been falling to pieces from the inside: first the oven, then the dishwasher, then the air conditioning, and most recently, the water. All have failed.

In a demonstration of backwards reasoning, you have repaired the LEAST important components of this total system meltdown. Having a functioning dishwasher is fantastic--but useless, without a water supply. The benefits of a working stove are counteracted by the already oven-like temperature of the house itself...hardly conducive to a cooking or baking frame of mind. While I'm grateful (truly) to have these appliances restored, I would bargain them in a moment for cold air conditioning and running water. Surely that is not too much to ask.

At the very least, Jessica, could you talk to me? Let me know when to expect the water to be turned off (and turned on again); communicate about the status of our bid for a new air conditioning system. Please try not to get so defensive when I bring these requests before you. They are far from unreasonable, and, I would like to think, so are you.

Restore my faith in you, please. Make good on that positive (if unmerited) first impression.

Sincerely,
Your Humble (Financially Faithful) Tenant

snapshot of a Tuesday morning

2010-06-15T03:16:00.000-07:00

It is yet another hot summer day, and I woke to find my covers kicked to the ground during my uncomfortable squirms last night. Perhaps today will be the day that our AC is repaired.

I made coffee anyway, in spite of the heat. Coffee will always be a good idea. To temper its muggy effects, a bowl of yogurt and fresh fruit perches on the edge of my desk as I write this. The chipmunk who resides outside my bedroom door (Queequeeg, as I've dubbed him, for his wildness and charm) is standing alert and shivering all over as chipmunks do, blinking, adorable, on my cement slab of a patio. My ceiling fan has a slight hitch, and makes a monotonous clicking sound with each revolution.

New day, jug of opportunities, I am so grateful for you.

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety--

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light--
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

(Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early)

2010-06-14T06:14:00.000-07:00

Snapshot of a weekend:

1. U2's "Joshua Tree" in its thrilling entirety while driving I-24 beneath a golden cumulus sky.

2. Tennis shoes and iPOD on a mountain jog...keenly aware of my body's limitations and yet somehow invincible. "Inebriate of air am I / and debauchee of dew, / Reeling, through endless summer days / from inns of molten blue."

3. Marvelling at whales, the sea, the human heart--and the multitudinous ways they overlap. Whales are my latest obsession.

faces

2010-06-10T18:06:00.001-07:00

I've just experienced one of those "tumbling down the rabbit hole" episodes that I should count on occuring any time I find myself on Facebook. I've spent an hour perusing photographs from the past five years: snapshots of faces and places from Covenant College, my semester in Slovakia, visits to Michigan, Canada, South Carolina. Click click click, each photo giving my memory a blurred and heady view of a span of past as it leaped over the gaps to the next documented moment.

As I watched my own face flicker across the screen, my mind echoed with remembered fragments from Graham Greene's "The Heart of the Matter." I remember that when I read this book I had been struck by something the main character thought as he looked at his wife's photograph: "It had been a very early photograph, and he no longer cared to be reminded of the unformed face, the expression calm and gentle with lack of knowledge, the lips parted obediently into the smile the photographer had demanded. Fifteen years form a face, gentleness ebbs with experience, and he was always aware of his own responsibility. He had led the way: the experience that had come to her was the experience selected by himself. He had formed her face."

This line of thought led me to recall that e. e. cummings poem: "...nevertheless i / feel that i cleverly am being altered that i slightly am becoming / something a little different in fact / myself / Hereupon helpless I utter lilac shrieks and scarlet bellowings."

What I thought, in connection to these passages, with photographs of myself still fresh in my mind, was that five years can form a face, too. They can "hit and chip" with "sharp fatal tools" and "cleverly alter" me. I don't know that anyone other than myself would have noticed the transformation that I clicked through tonight--it's certainly no meth addict before-and-after. But I noticed, and it was unsettling. I detected the ebbing of gentleness with experience, the creeping in of a certain...slyness, perhaps, or disenchantment.

As my dismay heightened, I gave myself a much-needed reality check. Both of these passages are weighted down by a sense of doom: as though this life is all there is, and you will submit to the experiences inflicted upon you (perhaps helplessly uttering shrieks and bellows, but to no avail) because they are all you've got. The more I thought about the ideas behind these passages, the more I realized how wrong they are.

Scobie seems to believe that his wife's face has been fully formed: that it is now, fifteen years later, a reflection of her immutable Self. But life is not like that, thank goodness! My face will never ever be completely past-tense formed until it has been purified in the fires of mortality and becomes its fully realized Self. Until then, my path abounds with choices that offer me limitless opportunities to change the way my face is formed.

It is also important to note how Scobie shoulders all the responsibility for having formed his wife's face...an unfair burden for him to bear, and one that results in his own moral paralysis and eventual downfall. Tempting though it may be to blame others for the way my face has been formed (and, to an extent, justifiable though those accusations may seem), nevertheless I must remember that I am no passive victim in this process. My choices--down to the ways that I choose to respond to others--are, in the end, the ultimate face-formers.

Similarly barren of any mention of active will is cummings' portrayal of his mind as a "big hunk of irrevocable nothing", "helpless" to the chiseling work inflicted upon it by the "sharp fatal tools" of experience. I am no hunk of irrevocable nothing. And sanctification is really a different sort of process entirely. Although it retains cummings' idea of being altered by diminishment from an original state, this process is not merely the result of the sense's sharp and fatal (and, one gets the feeling, disinterested and indiscriminate) tools. It is the work of the loving and personal Spirit, the divine Comforter. He is making sure that my raw mortal hunk of heavenly metal is cleverly being altered, that I am becoming, in fact, MYSELF. As I was meant to be. And there is a world of difference between the passivity of a hunk of irrevocable nothing and the submission of a trusting hope. Whereas cummings' response is reactionary and futile, I am given the ability to choose to partner in my own transformation by celebrating it and submitting to it.

Active submission is utterly different from cummings' helpless bellowing. It is beautiful and productive, and suffused in a transcendant peace: the sort of peace that forms a face. What comfort.

encouraging

2010-06-05T12:36:00.000-07:00

To Be Of Use
Marge Piercy

The people I love best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals or field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

a green mile

2010-06-03T09:56:00.000-07:00

My new house may not be in all ways, or even most ways, an improvement upon the last, but for the sake of one irreplaceable feature, I've decided that I love it. Take ten steps straight from my front door, and you will see what I mean. Here your feet will encounter a broad gravel bike trail, with a median of green striping down its back. Take it to the left, and it will lead you beneath the tar-scented creaking beams of the Incline Railway and down a pleasant mile to where it dead ends into Scenic Highway. Take it to the right, and all the winding footpaths of the mountain (Point Park, Mountain Beautiful, Sunset Rock, Craven's House, Covenant College, etc.) are at your command.

This morning I decided to go left towards Scenic Highway, opting for a brisk run rather than a brisk ramble. A mile is not a long distance, measured by the amount of time it takes to traverse it. Even by foot: a mile there, a mile back--it's over in a quarter of an hour, and then I am bursting into the cold kitchen, panting and glugging a glass of water. But God has crammed my newest pet mile with such a glorious density of matter. Such atmosphere, summer damp and summer bright! Such effusions of foilage--such madness of buzzing and chirping and chugging and rustling! Greenery fawns around my ankles as my gravel-chomping tennis shoes carry me past flashes of grandeur, where the trees thin enough to disclose the trail's elevation, and then enfold me again in sunlight and verdure. Chattanooga, splattered off the edge of the treeline and bisected by the glittering Tennessee River, keeps flickering in and out of my peripheral vision. Cars cruise along Scenic Highway. I feel isolated and yet involved: queenly. And that is what I should feel.

Daughter of Eve: this is your dominion. Of course you can't know everything about it, or even everything about some of it. But you can love it and delight in it and be grateful for it, for the way it makes your heart climb over itself. For the way it paralyzes you and also mobilizes you: praise's overwhelming paristalsis.

You can live, in your starstruck finitude, forever a handmaiden to the Mystery.

Mother's Day

2010-05-10T02:36:00.000-07:00

This year's Mother's Day was unconventional. I spent the bulk of its daylight hours on the road, headed toward Knoxville on a rather sad errand; returning from Knoxville in a contemplative frame of mind. The length of Highway 27 beat the interstate for scenery, if not for speed: slanting green-blue ridges piling up behind one another in the bright sunlight, flawless blue skies, and sweet little towns with biblical names (Mount Pisgah, New Salem). I passed several cemeteries where visitors were paying their respects, and speculated on the connection of the holiday to their ministrations. The idea of life being so breathtaking and yet quotidian, so full and at the same time so transient, held my mind in thrall, lending each scene a fresh poignancy.

The earth is full of the knowledge of God. I felt this powerfully: a knowledge, unspoken but palpable and immense, on that long drive. I felt it as the source of the "dearest freshness deep down things" that you rejoice in when you pause to note it. The sun knew, radiating its wave/lines of energy across the landscape. The mountains knew, bristling with their current crop of plants and creatures, enfolding the memories of generations before in the accrued sediments of centuries. "For all this, nature is never spent."

But how many of us knew--in our houses, playgrounds, trailers, gas stations, cars? In our landscape bleared, smeared with toil, dressed in our very scent and smudge? In the heartbeat span of our generation treading water (how briefly), the memories of the trodden ones before us?

How do we then not reck His rod?

2010-04-26T08:34:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think about how much nicer life would be if feelings did not exist. When I wake up tired and sluggish and perhaps a wee bit grumpy, for example. What is the use of feeling those things? They are like that obnoxious person who is bound to point out the obvious reasons for the things that ail you, without offering any solution. "You should not have gone to bed so late last night," your heavy eyelids admonish. "Nor should you have had so many sugary things," your puffy face avers, while your aching muscles demand, "What were you thinking, drinking all that coffee?" They have no bearing on the fact that I am nevertheless required to get out of bed, shower, dress, glug a mug of coffee, and go to work. They just make it more difficult to do so with cheer.

Of course, experience has taught me that the best way to deal with such unsolicited and unhelpful input is simply to nod my head in agreement and then count my blessings and focus on the hours ahead. No use letting them get on my nerves. No use arguing. They are right--they are oh so right--but that's all behind me, and today is a completely different matter.

I'm going to go find some pleasant feelings to keep me company.

I have a dream.

2010-04-19T08:04:00.000-07:00

The dream is Italy.

Everyone falls in love with Italy, to some extent. For some it is a fleeting and faraway crush, a brief fascination. For many the fall is irrevocable and enduring. I have yet to meet a single person who was not at one time intrigued by some aspect of this peerless nation.

Even before the few thrilling days I spent there, I was being primed. I was learning about the Roman Empire and the days of the early church, about the Roman Catholic Church and the Renaissance. I was reading Mandie and the Catacombs, Quo Vadis, An Echo in the Darkness. Middlemarch and A Room With A View and Where Angels Fear to Tread. Under The Tuscan Sun and The Age of Innocence. Roderick Hudson and The Marble Faun. I was watching While You were Sleeping and Return To Me and Gladiator. I was spending my afternoons after school poring over art books in the library: DaVinci and Fra Angelico, Botticelli and Bellini and Caravaggio, Donatello and Giotto and Fra Fillippo Lippi, Titian and Veronese. I was acquiring an idea of Italy.

Then I was there. I only spent a week there, but it was long enough to understand that this was a place I wanted to know, to befriend. It was like meeting a famous person, a person I'd heard of but never met, and feeling an affinity...a sense that, under other circumstances, we would become kindred spirits. She would tell me all her secrets, and they would help me understand things about her. I would love her for them. Our friendship would help me understand myself better. It would transform me.

I am determined to live there. It doesn't have to be soon, nor does it have to be forever. But somehow I need to be a part of Italy's story. Italy is already a part of mine.

hidden will of iron

2010-04-12T07:52:00.000-07:00

I am always thrown when relatives express any unsolicited interest in my plans, despite the uncontestable truth that my upbringing should have prepared to me to expect such involvement.

Why do I find it so hard to imagine that my aunts, uncles, cousins, and even siblings, do actually care about me? Why is it so difficult for me to take my family members at face value, rather than reading motivations like pity and a sense of duty into their kindly questions and gentle advice? I guess I am more suspicious and guarded than I give myself credit. And that is saying a lot.

Also, I am private to a fault, particularly in areas of my life where I am unsure of myself. If I am going to go out on a limb, there is no way I'm going to let anyone in on it until I've attained a measure of success. Probably not even then.

Perhaps I've convinced myself that my family truly doesn't care a great deal about the actions I take because I fear the prospect of being a disappointment more than I fear the prospect of being a failure.

Last year I took a personality test in the book Wired That Way and came out very strongly in the "peaceful phlegmatic" camp. One phrase they used to describe this personality group has lingered in my memory. While asserting that peaceful phlegmatics place a high priority on making sure everyone is happy, the book also warned that these outwardly pliable individuals happen to possess a "hidden will of iron."

In a nutshell, this describes my approach to life. I hate when people are unhappy with me, I hate the prospect of disappointing anyone, but there are certain areas of my life where I am brutally inflexible. I will pursue my own dreams. I will try to make these dreams appear as innocuous and palatable as possible in order to make others as happy about them as I am. Or I will simply not share them if I am sure that they will offend. But I will persist in them.

I guess it is this fiercely guarded will of iron that I am nursing when I persuade myself that my family is not truly interested in my plans. I am afraid that if they are truly interested, that if for some reason they are opposed to my will, I will be forced to disappoint them. Much easier to pretend that they are just being polite, and therefore it is okay for me to be casual and evasive in my response.

The book didn't mention cowardice as a side effect of pleaceful phlegmaticism.

Notice, too, the questions I leave pointedly unaddressed. (For example: Am I afraid of talking things out because such discussions might reveal me to be in the wrong? Should I even be pursuing a path that I feel positive my loving devoted family would oppose? Didn't God write a lot about the folly of ignoring advice...of leaning on one's own understanding? Aren't relationships more important than agendas?) Listen to these questions clang against the iron vault of my hidden will.

let this eye be not folly's loophole

2010-04-09T08:08:00.001-07:00

I've been re-reading Marilynne Robinson's Home, and feeling that something about this book is special. For some reason it moves me more deeply than usual.

When I actually took a moment to analyze why this is, I had a revelation. I realized that the difference is not so much in the book itself as it is in my attitude towards it.

Usually when I read a book, my attitude is one of conquest, of entitlement. I'm the conquistador blazing through foreign terrain and seeking to understand it only for my own personal profit. It can be easy for me to emerge from a book having made very little connection with the characters, caring very little about how they end up (or caring only from a scientific distance), and feeling strongly only about how beautifully the author managed to render the scenery. I can draw from it a sense of the picturesque, and perhaps a sweeping overview of the themes that I can, if I desire, apply sweepingly to myself. I can walk away more experienced, perhaps, smarter...but essentially unchanged.

With this book, however, I quickly discover that I am on native soil. It doesn't take long for me to recognize these faces. I am one of them, and that makes all the difference to my posture. I pay each scene, each character, each event the sort of attention (critical and loving) that an insider pays to each landmark or passerby or local occurance. I'm no tourist here, rushing through the highlights of the Baedecker and going my way with only a blur of faces and places lingering in my memory. Rather, these pages turn my gaze both backward and inward, prompt me to pause over memories of the people and places that produced me, and to reflect on my motivations and behavior in both the past and the present.

Embedded in the fictional setting of Gilead, Iowa is a truth I can identify because I have experienced it. And I can let it effect me deeply.

This whole line of thought has me reevaluating the sort of attention I pay to other books. I want to read in order to become a better human--not in order to be regarded as cultured or well-educated. Not to take a little vacation from reality. Not for my own glory or because it simply is the thing to do or because I feel that it will strengthen my morals or broaden my experience. I don't want to be a Cortez of literary frontiers; I don't even want to be a Miss Lavish or an Innocent Abroad.

Books are another sphere in which I can "see in all bodies the beat of spirit," an arena where the "alien hands of love" can touch me if, I let them. Reading opens up yet another place in which I can love my neighbor as myself--where I can learn to be "giver of due regard."

So no more arrogance, entitlement, patronization, generalization as I open each new book.

Instead: humility, teachability, attention, gratitude.

Maundy Thursday

2010-04-01T05:50:00.029-07:00

I love the religious calendar. It is as though a bunch of alarm clocks were smuggled into the year and set to play poignant fragments of a cosmic "theme and variations" at certain times. These strategically timed choruses rouse my heart from its default snooze setting and open my eyes to the full meaning of my experience. When pieced together, the song that emerges is a complete picture of a beautiful and exciting reality.

With every passing year, this song means more for me. Incarnation, Epiphany, Lent, Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, and Advent again. This cycle, Christ's cycle, is my cycle, too. Each milestone reminds me of my own experience: new creation, death to self, resurrection, ascension, life eternal. The pattern contains enough revelation to assure me, enough promise to intoxicate me, enough mystery to keep me reaching.

I look into my heart and count the rings, read the weathers of each particular season: sunshine and rain, draught and flood, harvests abundant and scant. I am consoled to see that, even without my knowledge or desire, each ring came to completion. Each new ring grew wider than the one before.

I think: You are growing.

I may at times feel vulnerable to the elements, at the mercy of the weathers of the world. But then I am reminded that I am a sacred tree, planted beside the living water. My roots tighten their grip. My branches curve up and spread out.

I photosynthesize with zeal.

fry me, sunny side up

2010-03-29T13:35:00.000-07:00

Tu Wi's Considers April Sunlight
[Barbara Crooker]

Some cook in the sky must be ladling it out, pouring liquid gold
from her copper saucepan, basting the meadow in hollondaise.
Where it drips: buttercups, dandelions, butter & eggs.
Where it splashes: forsythia, daffodils, tulips.
After this long hard winter, I reach out my arms,
lift my face to the sky.
Fry me, sunny side up,
on spring's hot griddle; clarify me, anoint me,
in your lavish lemon light.

neediness

2010-03-29T10:14:00.000-07:00

I want to share exactly how it felt yesterday, to roam an uncharted landscape in a restless sunshine. I want you to partake of Janie's exuberance, as I did, watching her leap from lichened rocks to long-stemmed grasses, snuffle through the wind-wakened cellulite of muddy red puddles, stiffen and prick at the sound of a distant howl.

I want you to feel the strong gentle fingers of the wind rifle through your hair, and the sloppy suction of clay on your tennis shoes, and the pale solar glow warming the backs of your legs. I want you to picture the tiny black flies dancing over every inch of water, and then I want you to zoom out and see the textured earth, hummocks and power lines, trees and grasses, somersaulting down to the skyline.

I want you to know the heady smallness of standing on a mountain-top, drawn to scale, engulfed.

I would even wish for you the satisfaction of scratched ankles, aching muscles, dirt-caked laundry.

I want all of this for you, selfishly, because the only thing that is missing to make my experience complete is human fellowship, and I will not be able to fully enjoy it until I have attempted to share with someone.

fragments

2010-03-26T12:34:00.000-07:00

"I stood there and felt the melancholy / of growing older in such a season"... (Evan Boland)

Growing older in springtime does involve a dimension of melancholy. I am still young, but at the same time I percieve the shadow lengthening behind me where I used to sense only sunshine.

“Youth never sees its shadow till the sun’s about to set: and then you wonder where the person went who you were speaking to in all your thoughts for all those years.” (Marianne Wiggins)

The distance between feeling the melancholy of growing older and seeing that shadow is increasingly short. A degree of circumspection would better befit my behavior than the heedless dithering that has characterized it of late.

Nostalgia

2010-03-25T07:22:00.000-07:00

When I think of nostalgia, I think of the poem by Emily Dickinson about the certain slant of light. So often the trigger for nostalgia is as simple as that: a slant of light, a waft of fragrance, a familiar melody.

There's a certain slant of light,

On winter afternoons,

That oppresses, like the weight

Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;

We can find no scar,

But internal difference

Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,

'Tis the seal, despair,-

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,

Shadows hold their breath;

When it goes, 't is like the distance

On the look of death.

The language Dickinson uses is so powerful that some might object to my labeling it "nostalgic." I would argue that nostalgia and mourning share plenty of common ground. When I feel nostalgic, there is often an element of regret and melancholy, a sense of loss, wistfulness, sentimentality. Similarly, mourning (sorrow over something lost) involves feelings of regret, yearning, and sentimentality. The difference between the two is one of directness. Mourning is always transitive; nostalgia is frequently intransitive. When you mourn, your emotion has a direct object: a clear idea of something or someone that once was there and now is gone. On the other hand, it is possible to feel nostalgic and not even know precisely why. The direct cause can elude you, although you perhaps can link your emotion to the indirect object, which is often its trigger.

In this poem, Emily she isn't speaking about her sorrow over the loss of any tangible thing. She is talking about a slant of light, a familiar enough atmospheric condition that happens on winter afternoons, and about how it makes her feel. How when she sees this slant of light, the injury it gives her is a spiritual affliction, a sense of despair that leaves no outer scar but nevertheless changes the meanings of things for her. It seems to her as though the world is holding its breath, listening. And when it passes, it reminds her of "the distance / on the look of death."

The slant of light is not the cause of her despair. But the sight of it pierces deep to the place where she stores her meanings--the things that are important to her, that help her make sense of the world (memories, for instance)--and casts a painful chill over her spirit.

That is nostalgia. It doesn't always come with such intensity, nor is it always a stirrer of grief. But it always makes internal difference, where our meanings are.

I'm ready for a ready heart

2010-03-23T06:56:00.000-07:00

I found in this quote the sting of conviction and the relief of enlightenment. Blessed are the meek, indeed.

"Isn't this the simple explanation for our being so heavy-laden, so tired, so overburdened and confused and bitter? We drag around such prodigious loads of resentment and self-assertion. ... Meekness is teachability. It is the readiness to be shown, which includes the readiness to lay down my fixed notions, my objections and 'what ifs' or 'but what abouts,' my certainties about the rightness of what I have always done or thought or said. It is the child's glad 'Show me! Is this the way? Please help me.' It shows in the kind of attention we pay to one another, the tone of voice we use, the facial expression. The weapon of meekness counters all enmity, says author Dietrich Von Hildebrand, with the offer of an unshielded heart." [Elisabeth Elliot]

fancy

2010-03-22T08:39:00.000-07:00

The World
I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it

nothing fancy.

But it seems impossible.

Whatever the subject, the morning sun
glimmers it.

The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open

and becomes a star.

The ants bore into the peony bud and there is the dark
pinprick well of sweetness.

As for the stones on the beach, forget it.

Each one could be set in gold.

So I tried with my eyes shut, but of course the birds

were singing.

And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music

out of their leaves.

And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and

beautiful silence

as comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we're not too

hurried to hear it.

As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs

even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.

So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.

So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too,

and the ants, and the peonies, and the warm stones,

so happy to be where they are, on the beach, instead of being
locked up in gold.

-Mary Oliver-

Ah, youth

2010-03-19T07:35:00.000-07:00

It's been a joyous day so far. The air is elastic, tingling with spring. I may have been handpicked for trouble by some malignant star lately, but I'm not letting that get me down. After all: I'm juiced up on coffee, sleep, and sunbeams, and my brain is just teeming with hair-brained solutions to every dilemma I face.

R.I.P.

2010-03-17T14:26:00.000-07:00

LeBaron, Chrysler (1994-2010)

I will miss the way your windshield, with its jagged crack along the length of the dash, shrieked like a kid on a rollercoaster everytime I pushed you upwards of 45 mph.

I will miss how I'd have to turn the wheel ever so slightly to the left in order to drive a straight line.

I will miss that little warning shimmy you'd do if I speeded over 80 mph. Also the way you'd resign to the speed and go straight as an arrow at 95.

We've made so many memories, LeBaron. Like the time when it was snowing so hard, and we catapulted into a ditch only a half an hour from home, and you kept me warm while we waited for the tow truck. Or on a particular visit to Canada, when you took the brunt of some mean off-the-cuff poems, created by me and my sister. (I'm sorry. We were very bored.) Remember Black Thursday? You were so great, especially last year, when you submitted graciously between retail destinations to gallonful doses of cold water in your radiator . Although you suffered from turn signal failure, you never let it stop you. The indignity of my litter--mugs and popcans, scraps of paper, ketchup packets--you tolerated without complaint.

My driveway was so cruel but you weathered it daily, multiple times even, with bounce and aplomb, shooting all those pebbles back into the road (zing!) with disdain.

You carried me to Michigan and back four times, to Canada and back once. We've visited South Carolina and Atlanta.

I only regret that I put off all the other road trips we'd idly planned until it was too late.

The last image that I have of you--your unlit headlights facing me in the chilly gray afternoon as you were towed onto Scenic Highway--haunts me still. I didn't know I was saying goodbye.

I didn't deserve you, LeBaron.

Rest in peace.

muddles

2010-03-17T06:15:00.001-07:00

"Take an old man's word; there's nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It's easy to face Death and Fate, the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror--on the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle. ...Though life is very glorious, it is difficult. ...'Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.' I think he puts it well. Man has to pick up the use of his functions as he goes along--especially the function of Love."

[A Room With A View]

See Jan(ie) Run. Laugh Jan(ie), Laugh.

2010-03-15T15:06:00.000-07:00

Today didn't start off very well.

I had car trouble. I was nearly late for work. The bathrooms and lobbies that had been so starched and clean when I left them Friday looked positively hung-over when I arrived this morning. A bathroom spray nozzle rewarded my efforts to clean out a shower stall by spraying foamy green cleaning chemical all down the front of my jeans. I still don't know what caused the excruciating charlie horse in the fourth toe of my right foot a few moments later. My workers (bless them) were too cheerful and peppy to suit my cranky frame of mind.

But why am I even mentioning this? All of that misery vanished at the sight of my dog DOING A SOMERSAULT through the leaf-strewn grass of my front yard in her unbridled zeal to greet me: hunched, mopey me with that huge invisible chip on my shoulder that she didn't perceive, thank goodness. The fervent joy of her gallop was contagious--I swear, she was laughing. Just picture how, in the breeze of her approach, her ears flapped and tongue lolled with goofy dignity. Try not to smile. The way she plopped in the grass at my feet and craned her head back for a better view while her entire hind end waggled in the grass had me feeling like royalty.

Now here I sit in my snug silent living room, sipping tea and smiling. Janie is curled up at my feet with a spoonful of crunchy peanut butter. I can hardly remember how grumpy feels. The day may not be young, but it is aged to a tranquil mellow that suits me just fine. Time for me to read some poems.

freewriting

2010-03-12T06:34:00.000-08:00

I've never much enjoyed the discipline of "freewriting."

In elementary school and middle school, my teachers would scold me for my frequent anguished pauses during our sixty-second freewrite sessions. "Abby, the point is not to get it perfect. Don't worry about spell checks or revision. That comes later. Just get what you're feeling onto the paper, okay?"

So I'd sit there in a paralysis of possibilities, and resort at last to writing lines. "I will not revise. I will not spell check. I will write what I feel. I will not revise. I will not spell check..." The buzzer would go off and I'd turn the paper in with a sense of mingled relief and failure, imagining the scorn with which my teacher would read it later: "Poor girl's a parrot. No originality at all."

Those paralyzed sessions at my desk were prophecies. Little did I know then how symptomatic my revulsion to freewriting was. The affliction to which it pointed was far more sinister than mere "lack of originality." It was lack of artlessness. It was crippling inhibition.

My super-ego constantly played Charlotte Bartlett (hypersensitive, controlling, and pathetic) to my ego's baffled and hesitatingly compliant Lucy Honeychurch. As I'd put the pencil to the page and initiate a clumsy and unpolished sentence ("indelicate" perhaps, but "at the same time, beautiful"), the pinched inner voice would gasp in horror and squeak, "Oh, but that won't do. I'd never forgive myself if I permitted you to commit this act of indiscretion. Best to phrase it this way..."

I could not express freely "what I felt" (as my Mr. Beebe or Mr. Emerson of a teacher urged) because of my mind's spinsterly chaperone. Nor could I proceed with the caution she required because of the time restraint. There was nothing to do, then, but to take refuge in parrotry.

That tension has only intensified as I've grown. In my relationships, in my writing, in my reactions to events, I constantly feel my heart rise to express how I feel--the restraining hand of social mores siezing it--and my lips spilling out some dull but safe Cecil Vyse of a cliche in response.

This cycle is wrong. It is false. I hate it.

I want my expressions of self to be beautiful, even if they are indelicate. I want to know what it's like to freewrite my feelings.

I want George Emerson. I want a room with a view.

2010-03-05T08:48:00.000-08:00

"I've never been able to plan my life. I just lurch from indecision to indecision."
[Alan Rickman]

2010-03-04T06:31:00.000-08:00

What was the subconscious impulse that prompted the circuits in my skull to begin pulsating to the nauseatingly cheesy rhythm of I'll be your wish I'll be your dream I'll be your fantasy? For whatever reason, when I staggered into the kitchen this morning to make myself some coffee, Savage Garden was in my head.

I wonder if King David ever woke up to the Shema Yisrael ringing in his ears. His bodyguards may have heard him muttering it absently as he paced the Jerusalem battlements. Homeric storytellers probably lived most of their lives with fragments of the Illiad and Odyssey running on repeat through their brains. ("Honey, I just can't get that 'rosy fingered dawn' phrase out of my head today!") And so on.

The brain's habit of latching onto a memorized piece has probably initiated countless conversations throughout history that resemble the one I had with my housemate a few hours ago. Conversations starting with "Guess what I've had in my head ever since I woke up?"and concluding with a joint performance of the particular bit of human genius under discussion.

Maybe it's a rudimentary way of preserving and transmitting our cultural heritage. In which case, I am not sure how I feel on this particular day about my brain's selectivity. Yikes.

At any rate, it's fun to think about...and gives my psyche a pleasant break from the song that feels like it will be in my head forever ("until the sky falls down on me").

2010-03-01T16:23:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting in my living room, soaking up the silence and sipping pop after a long and productive day. The lovely thing about my job is that it affords me one tangible arena where I can work, see immediate results, and go home feeling satisfied and useful. I ache to feel that way in every area of my life, but instead feel inadequate or even downright burdensome. The knowledge that I cannot handle everything on my own gnaws at me constantly. I never realized before how much I hate to ask for help, how much of my life revolves around my delusions of autonomy. And oh, what delusions they are.

I survey my many recurring messes. I wrangle with uncertainties about housing and schooling and transportation and finances.

And I realize that really there's nothing for it but to summon my sense of humor and eat my loaded slice of humble pie with wry but hearty laughter.

Hey there

2010-02-25T08:13:00.001-08:00

I continue to revel in the unexpected inner brightness that had me up and alert at 5 am this morning and has not dropped me yet.

The first hour of my morning I spent snuggled in my bedroom beneath the warm halo of light from my bedside lamp, reading "Emily Climbs" and drinking a mug of Starbucks Christmas blend (rediscovered in the depths of my freezer a few days ago and hoarded until just such an occasion). Or rather rereading "Emily Climbs" and reading unexpected little character sketches of my younger self in those familiar pages. Younger Me kept popping up as I read: Younger Me with her huge round glasses and long bushy hair, reading late at night by the crack of light from the bedroom door, moony and clueless, prone (like Emily) to italics and wordspendthriftery, earnestly bent in her most secret heart on pursuing the "Alpine Path." Crushing rather shamelessly on Teddy Kent (who remains a dreamboat to this very day).

After that pleasant little reunion, I just had to grin at my not-so-grown-up-self in the mirror later that hour. The reflection that greeted me--glasses winking in the light, long brown hair disheveled--was oh so friendly and familiar.

Bless her little daydreamy heart.

my curvaceous moment

2010-02-19T13:15:00.000-08:00

Every time I venture outside (usually carrying a harvest of overripe trashbags, their plastic stems clenched in my cold hands), my heart reacts to today's beauty the way I've seen the thick patch of ice on the cement beneath my feet respond to sunlight.

You've seen what ice does when stricken by light. That is how it is for me this afternoon: that inexplicable arresting shimmy of color and glow that flares in my chest at the moment of kindling and then holds, steady and alive, until the attention wavers or the sun departs.

It's an ovation inevitable as a reflex, as natural and irrepressible as ice in the sun. As vital and insignificant as that.

Remember how Mary Oliver speaks of words as "the responses to the thousand curvaceous moments"? I'm pretty sure that this is the sort of thing she had in mind.

remembering

2010-02-17T08:04:00.000-08:00

One of the aspects of my humanity I take most for granted is my ability to remember. What a marvel it is that my 5'11'' 165 lb frame manages to find storage space for my life's chronicles: moment of birth till the constant succession of "nows" that are steadily elapsing. And beyond, if I think about it more deeply.

Some of these records I will never be able to visit: the ones the precede the formation of my words and ideas, like my birth and my first few years of life. But they are there, I am told, making frequent imperceptible contributions to the way I think and behave, the personality I develop.

They exist alongside the records that I do have access to, the ones that warp and blur as they are transmuted through Time's altering medium, continuing to exist only at the cost of their integrity and completeness. The ones that take me by surprise--evoked by some external stimulus: a slant of light, a certain fragrance, a familiar name uttered in a crowd. Also, the ones that are deliberately trotted out in the context of friendship or family: the inside joke, the wistful anecdote, the enthusiastic "I remember when...!"

I have memories that predate my own existence, memories that have been transmitted to me by parents and loved ones and teachers. These include stories about my ancestry, or about world events dating back to Adam and Eve. I carry around with me a memory of the time poor King Harold got an arrow in the eye at the Battle of Hastings, and a memory of the time my Opa jumped ship and became an illegal alien on American soil.

As I go about my daily routines, I am constantly sifting through these memories, being entertained by them, dredging them up to help me cope with all brands of situations, reliving the wafts of emotion that they diffuse into my inner atmosphere. It's miraculous. These fragile, surreal memories are a part of my composition and function as much as veins and arteries, bones and organs--an idea that disturbs me. I take measures to protect them, embalming them in joural entries and blogposts, conveying them to friends and family members for safekeeping. Yet all the while, I am aware that these measures also inevitably distort and weaken them.

Of course, the poverty of my own articulation strikes me when I am reminded (ha!) of these words by Marilynne Robinson in Gilead: "This life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing, I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve."

Also, this quote from Harriet Doerr's Stones For Ibarra. "Memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit."

And yet again, I am brought back to considering the fragility and finity of my human existence. Also, its resilience, its persistence. Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

2010-02-16T13:04:00.000-08:00

I love Faulkner. Without my conscious involvement, he guides my mind to make associative connections that gradually expose all the textures and emotions of the story he is telling. I start reading, absorbing, not quite "getting" the words...and then suddenly it is there: I know what is going on, and I am personally involved, intimately concerned with the characters.

How is he able to work that kind of magic with the same old words we use every day? It thrills me.

comfort food

2010-02-10T08:06:00.000-08:00

I am always in the mood for Madeleine L'Engle.

Yesterday I was feeling crabby and tired. My work day had been trying, and I'd parted from a significant amount of money that evening when I ransomed my car from the auto shop. Janie had shredded one of my Buechner books and torn the binding off my current journal by the time I returned home. Our kitchen was a mess, and our fitful heater was back on its emergency setting and doing a less than stellar job of warming the drafty house. When the house is a mess it seems colder anyway, because it lacks the cozy factor.

All of these conditions combined to bring out the worst in me. To combat them, I knew I needed a reliable fix-me-up, and fast.

So: I fixed a pot of coffee and some stovetop cream of wheat, and I picked up Meet the Austins by Madeleine L'Engle: the comfort food of literature.

It is rich, harboring all the "sound and fury" of a teeming household: rowdy dinners, tumbly bedtimes, homework, chores, television, bicycles. All of this homespun content is handled deftly, in a way that reveals good parenting and childhood epiphanies while managing to avoid the trap of sanctimoniousness or sentimentality, most of the time. It is utterly engrossing without relying on glamor or spectacle. And it has moments of hilarity.

Basically, it reminds me of all the reasons being a human being is so wonderful: fellowship, family, creature comforts, laughter, engaging with life and death and beauty and pain in the setting of ordinary life.

It was the novel version of this poem by Barbara Crooker:

Ordinary Life

This was a day when nothing happened,

the children went off to school

without a murmur, remembering

their books, lunches, gloves.

All morning, the baby and I built block stacks

in the squares of light on the floor.

And lunch blended into naptime,

I cleaned out kitchen cupboards,

one of those jobs that never gets done,

then sat in a circle of sunlight

and drank ginger tea,

watched the birds at the feeder

jostle over lunch’s little scraps.

A pheasant strutted from the hedgerow,

preened and flashed his jeweled head.

Now a chicken roasts in the pan,

and the children return,

the murmur of their stories dappling the air.

I peel carrots and potatoes without paring my thumb.

We listen together for your wheels on the drive.

Grace before bread.

And at the table, actual conversation,

no bickering or pokes.

And then, the drift into homework.

The baby goes to his cars, drives them

along the sofa’s ridges and hills.

Leaning by the counter, we steal a long slow kiss,

tasting of coffee and cream.

The chicken’s diminished to skin & skeleton,

the moon to a comma, a sliver of white,

but this has been a day of grace

in the dead of winter,

the hard knuckle of the year,

a day that unwrapped itself

like an unexpected gift,

and the stars turn on,

order themselves

into the winter night.

Now, don't you feel good?

These days,

2010-02-09T08:06:00.000-08:00

I am...

1. Learning Italian! Thanks to a generous loan of some audio CDs and workbooks from Vowsh, I have a plan that will get me here all the sooner. Rolling basic phrases off my tongue makes this treasured aspiration seem so much more tangible and near.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cgoulao/3594151487/

2. Laying the groundwork for my transfer, hopefully this summer, to a less expensive school where I can complete my degree and get off this mountain. It may not be THE wisest move, but I'm standing by it. Any change is improvement, at this point--I'm that restless.

3. Reading a book a week. So far, since January, I've knocked out The Brothers Karamazov, The Whimsical Christian, The Power and the Glory, Auralia's Colors, Consider This Senora, and Ethan Frome. This practice has done me so much good already, stimulating my mind and heart. Reminding me of important things. Holding me back in the best sense possible.

Lately--in case you haven't already sensed this--I've been feeling like a bottled-up reservoir of recklessness, corked by coffee and routine and my own harassed super-ego. Hopefully doing these things will take the edge off of my fretfulness.

At any rate, they are making me feel a bit less adrift in my own life.

2010-02-04T06:47:00.000-08:00

Thursday. My haggard mind is doing its best this morning, but keeps losing focus. The dense fog cosying around my psyche is unsettling. I cannot count the number of times I've found myself standing slackly in the middle of a room, or regarding a paper towel dispenser with almost utter blankness. "Almost utter blankness" is so much worse than "utter blankness." It's that niggling tooth, that word on the tip of the tongue, that vague deja-vu sensation all rolled into a feeling that is distinctly less than the sum of its parts.

I finished reading Greene's "The Power and the Glory" yesterday, and have been gnawing on it in my mind ever since. The priest even made it into my dreams last night, begging me for a place to stay the night. I was in character as Sara, the protagonist of Harriet Doerr's "Consider This, Signora," and was very afraid that my ex would appear and get the wrong impression, especially if he saw the wine I was thoughtfully procuring for my fugitive. For some reason it never entered my mind to fear the wrath of the lieutenant dogging my winebibbing refugee.

All dreaming aside, it was a book brutally faithful to portraying the dark side of the glamor of the Christian faith (the side nearer to apostasy than hypocrisy), and to revealing how the dark side is often, in the that paradoxical cliche, closer to the light than the glamorous side (which is nearer to hypocrisy than apostasy). The priest experiences a terrible fall from grace, finds himself both metaphorically and literally in the same camp as the publicans and sinners, and is forced to recognize the crippling extent of his depravity. It contrasts the petty compromises and complacencies of his prior comfortable existence to the state of mortal sin--drankenness and fornication--that shadows his current existence. In his journey down the slippery slope, the father learns how to love by learning more and more personally about the nature of sin. While he never overcomes his terror of death, he at length does choose it over the safety and hypocrisy of life in a new country.

The novel reminded me that the most important thing in life is to strive after holiness, even though that path is never the easy one. Even though the choices that face me will often seem small and innocuous enough in themselves, whenever I choose the lesser good I am choosing wrongly.

And when I fail (as inevitably I will), the novel reminded me that the plan and providence of God are much vaster than I can dream, and will make everything right in the end.

It was the most discouraging bit of encouragement I have read in a very long time.

"Waste"

2010-02-02T08:57:00.000-08:00

I know a man who loved his bird so much
He paid a tidy fortune for its cage.

Why is my regret for Juliet
So different from the way I feel about the way this parrot died,
Poisoned by the toxic grain of costly bars?

I can see the humor in the stunts Death pulls
So long as they are distant from myself.

Until I see the man who stares,

guilt-wracked as Juliet, upon

The lifeless fruit of his propitious planning.

weekend

2010-02-01T08:30:00.000-08:00

Last Friday, yet another snowstorm descended upon the area that Al Roker has designated "my neck of the woods." Earlier that morning, I had skipped out of my front door wearing only a light spring fleece over my short sleeved shirt, expecting yet another day of unseemly warmth. Three hours later, my boss was shooing me back to the shelter of home, where I watched out the window as God shook snow over tree limbs and shingles, smoothed the knotted ridges of the tire-scarred driveway, and delighted my mind with notions of angels.

Over the course of the ensuing snowbound weekend, I did my inner compass proud and never once got lost during my frequent rambles through the transfigured woods and trails--unless, that is, you count getting lost in thought, in which case I was jubilantly adrift for hours at a stretch. I firmly believe that getting lost is the best way to know your way around a territory, whether the terrrain you cover be geographical or intellectual. The past few days of wondering through the weathers of my inner wilderness have been quite productive, cartographically speaking. I covered a lot of ground, and always found my way home by the time I'd curled my fingers around a hot ceramic mug and made small talk with the nearest house mate.

Never underestimate the transformative power of a winter snow.

Face it: Art is everywhere. Everywhere is Art.

2010-01-26T07:38:00.000-08:00

There are several little areas on campus, rooms less traveled, that have been decorated with posters in an effort to neutralize the ugly nakedness of cinderblock and the desolate lack of furnishings.

When I pass through one of these small holdouts, I find myself in the crosshairs of a mute conversation between a soulfully glossy Elvis Presley and a shaggily somber John Lennon. John Coltrane, eyes closed, leaning back with his lips to the mouthpiece of his gleaming saxophone, ignores my intrusion. The Beatles stride across Abbey Road in their bellbottomed suits towards the abstract landscape of a guitar chord guide, which must be traversed before they can arrive at the juicy psychadelic explosion of color that is Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Louis Armstrong's eyes roll up from the floor. He is still focused on pumping air into that trumpet as my shadow flits over his felled portrait.

I'll tell you why this quiet little room makes my skin tingle.

In the medium of the presence created by all those faces is rendered an intangible portrait of the person who purchased them and puttied them to the wall. By appropriating these posters, this person announced her personality. She gave it a certain life of its own, detached from her physical being. You might say that she created a spirit and housed it.

The faces of Elvis and the Beatles have become the faces of Rock and Roll, just as the faces of Louis Armstrong and John Coltrane have become the faces of Jazz. Altogether, these faces paint a portrait of the face of Music, an image that is dated like a Rembrandt self-portrait: Music at a certain age, in a certain lighting, with a certain backdrop.

That is why my skin tingles. I step through that door. There is the face of the anonymous person who decorated the walls. The face of Music. My own astonished face.

Whose personality are we announcing?

glimpse

2010-01-25T08:16:00.000-08:00

It's my lunch hour, and I am listening to Yo Yo Ma's "Gabriel's Oboe" beneath the vivid yellow smiley face beaming down at me from its post-it perch amidst the scribbled notes that adorn my computer. This office would make a prime candidate for an "I SPY" book, if only I assembled its contents into rhyme.

I spy three mugs, a blue trash can,
A smudged coffeemaker whose name is "Stan,"
A flower vase, bottle of glue,
A toilet plunger and fire extinguisher, too!
A stuffed dog o'erlooking a vase of flowers,
Two stubborn clocks that won't agree on the hours.

Of course, the ditty could go on and on. Markers, pens, and pushpins, broken vacuums, torn paper snowflakes, outdated Bagpipe issues, beheaded squeegees, cans of cleaning supplies, a butter knife, trashcan liners.

And always, always, the incessent drone that buzzes from the utilities closet in the wall. I like to fancy that this closet is the place where every swallowed complaint comes to dwell. Its tireless groan is the audible manifestation of all the unvoiced weariness of every bored student, every grudging laborer. By seeing it in this light, I can train myself to enjoy an otherwise exasperating sound effect.

(Yes: enjoy. As a supervisor of a janitorial labor force, I have been programmed to thrive off of such expressions of weariness. Or so I find it necessary to pretend, at times.)

This is the hub of all my daily exertions, and I enjoy its incohesive sprawl.

grateful

2010-01-14T10:38:00.000-08:00

I've been puttering around yet another slow private morning during my week of night shift duty, pulling the front door open to admit the sweetness of a surprisingly balmy January day. In the semi-thaw, the sunlight radiates real warmth, and the brittle stalks of the trees even seem to bend (a suppleness that my imagination has probably imposed on them). U2 got my heart thumping, my spirits soaring when I ran the trails after waking. I watched some favorite fragments of "A Knight's Tale," fixed some waffles, made myself an espresso. For accuracy's sake, I'll also record that I plunged a toilet and swabbed out the drain of the kitchen sink. Loaded the dishwasher. Wiped the counters. Cleaned my bedroom.

All these quiet ministrations leave me feeling becalmed, a placid sea, reflecting sun and sky, rolling strong slow swells of consciousness over the smooth slick pebbles of my mind.

Just over the threshold of a new year...

2010-01-08T04:32:00.001-08:00

...this is how I feel.

Time is pouring out of the pitcher and I fail to drink it

Half-asleep, I skim over it in a derelict little boat.
I admire it, smell it, dip my fingers in as I pass,
but neither cup my hand nor lift it out to drink.

Moments themselves have texture, weight, like food:
cheesecake or toffee richness, thick cream: being
and being in a moment seem the only worthwhile things,
to somehow get at the food of moments, to taste
every single one, finish one blessed meal before I starve.

Every person, too, is a well, a column of water going deep
into the earth. Like dogs we lick the brackish surface,
too stupid to lower a bucket to fresh depths. Our tongues,
impatient organs, rule the hour, killing us with our own thirst.
Even the wells we are we cover with planks and long nails.
Even the bucket-drinkers are parched then; even the well-diggers.

Moment and person, both seem not of this world.
Arrested (as we once or twice have felt them each to be
if we've had any life at all) they are in no way related
to time or space. Personality, the who-you-are, seems then
not just well, but sea. Not a drop in the ocean, but the ocean!
And not an ocean on which you float, but in which you drown,
skillfully and alive, like a mermaid. The Other is your oxygen
right then. For just a moment. Lost but not losing. Emptied,
beggared, without missing an ounce of your own gold.

Then the Moment is time gain. Eternity retracts its lovely claws
and stalks out of sight, but never out of the house, aloof as a cat.
Yet it was here, wasn't it? You can't deny the lingering sting;
those wounds in your arm; those blooming beads of blood.

[Diane Tucker]

resolve

2010-01-08T03:59:00.000-08:00

"These young men [honest in nature, desiring truth...and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength of their souls, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, even life itself] fail to understand that to sacrifice five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal, is utterly beyond the strength of many of them."
[The Brothers Karamazov]

This little reminder fell into my lap yesterday as I reread a favorite novel. I suppose it is easier to throw everything into a grand gesture rather than devoting one's "seething youth" to a prolonged effort. I needed to hear that, as the completion of my degree drags on and I constantly tell myself all the reasons that quitting is fine and good and nothing to be ashamed of. Even if withdrawing from the pursuit of a degree is not the worst thing I could do for myself, even if it offers many advantages and likely will not put an end to any of my exceedingly modest dreams, yet still I must recognize the intangible personal meaning that it will hold for me. Discipline and endurance are byproducts of staying my course. Also, there is beauty to a work completed, whatever it may be. I'm sure that Odysseus, lying in the arms of the beautiful enchantress far from home, could easily have talked himself out of the daunting journey back to Penelope rather than devoting years of his life to hardship and peril. But he didn't. Persistence is a virtue that I need to respect, even if I don't feel the merest twinge of ambition.

I don't want to finish school. I don't have to, either. But I should. And so I will.

good morning

2009-12-23T03:36:00.000-08:00

Home is lovely, from the twinkly twig of a tree in the living room, already encompassed by wrapped gifts, to even the frigid outer extremeties of the drafty upstairs and dank basement "junk" room. All my shopping is tucked under my fat black belt, and I've been content to drink coffee and study the boisterous life of my household. A pot brews even as I sit here listening to Fleet Foxes in the darksome stillness of early morning, not a creature otherwise stirring, not even my dog. Who, by the way, is adjusting rather well to the pace of things here in Michigan, aside from displaying a new streak of recalcitrance when it comes to returning indoors when she's called from her outdoor adventures. I'm out of practice commanding a leash and she's out of practice submitting to one, but we manage.

It wouldn't be a journey home if there were no revelations. I've had a few. Snow is always a revelation, a keen reminder that if I remain in the south my heart will never be whole. My favorite moments have been evening walks on Elmwood Lake with Janie, outstriding the gasping mental refrain of shit shit shit its cold until you realize your heart is singing beautiful beautiful joy joy joy to the winter sky with its streaked luminosities, to the crunchy snow underfoot and the black-stubbled fields to your left, the cloudy iced pond to your right holding blurred lights plundered from the houses on its far border, the one evergreen halfway down the path, its branches festooned with champagne bulbs. The way the cold has of befriending you after its initial rebuff. The way dark and wind and snow and glittering distant lights make you feel strong and alive, as though your body is the substance not only of God's breath, but of God's own laughter.

Other revelations can keep, need time to work on me. Meanwhile, it is almost Christmas and I feel free and fervent as a bird. Time for a cup of coffee and an early dip into the Word.

2009-12-11T07:55:00.000-08:00

Today after work I'll be picking up my car, loading my belongings, shooing Janie into the passenger seat, and striking off for the snowy Midwest and a white Christmas. Hopefully this year's journey will prove less eventful than Christmas 2008, which found a much younger Janie and a much less competent me wedged in a ditch awaiting a tow truck while the snow fell lavishly and insensibly down upon us. I am very eager for the long drive, which always affords me leisure to be silent and thoughtful, and also to sing at the top of my lungs without fear of human censure. Janie might not like it much.

For now, I have much to do before my four new tires hit the pavement of I-24. I want no unfinished work dulling the shine of my departure.

the importance of being earnest

2009-12-08T07:01:00.000-08:00

I'm remembering Annie Dillard's Journey to the Pole, and the way she spoke of our strange fondness for penguins. We find them endearing because we see in their biped waddling and earnest bobbing a humorous caricature of ourselves. Perhaps, she muses, a similar relationship exists between humans and God. Perhaps he finds the fumblingly determined circus of our lives endearing because in it he sees a humorous caricature of his own great work.

Maybe if I thought more often about how all my grave pontificating, my frenzied efforts to act beautifully and graciously and uprightly, must strike him (who is the possessor in full of all that I dimly echo), I would find myself spreading my hands in sheepish acknowledgment of how clueless I really am. I would laugh with him.

I don't mean to disparage the wonderful truth about God's image, how my nature is stamped with it. I'm awed when I consider that I cannot but emulate my Creator, that he has intended it to be so and does indeed delight in it. Nevertheless, so often I forget that the flipside of that awe is humility: a recognition of the gulf between the Creator and his sin-darkened image in my frail soul. The idea that I have ever felt a moment's self-importance should elicit my most deserving derision.

It is important to be earnest. I ought to spend my life tirelessly pursuing perfect godliness. It is, in part, what I'm here to do.

But before that, I am here to take a good hard look at my outrageous self, and a good hard look at the Beauty that delights in me. And I am to spread my hands towards him and laugh, trusting him to do the work of teaching me how my earnest, godlike emulation delights him best.

Before anything else, I am here to adore.

uncautionary tale

2009-12-07T08:24:00.000-08:00

Since everyone knows that you cannot properly celebrate a snowday from indoors, no matter how panoramic the view commanded by your living room windows, I bundled myself into a winter jacket, tucked my jeans into my battered Slovakia boots, whistled for Janie, and followed her out my front door after closing my blog entry last Saturday.

It was nine o'clock a.m., and the sky wore more layers than I did. Even so, the sunshine managed to glow through its cloudy bundling and ignite the white on every bristling twig and trodden leaf. The air smelled metallic with the cold. It rang in my ears.

I picked a direction and went forth. Several moments of uphill trudging later and the woods had closed over my house, leaving me swallowed in black and white. Janie chased ahead of me and looped behind me and kept plunging her face into the snow and licking it, delighted at our excursion. I kept walking.

That is how I got lost in my own front yard. I won't speak for Janie. No doubt she knew the way home, but was delighted at the prolonged ramble. Were it not for the muffled rush of Scenic Highway serving to awaken my seriously faulty inner compass, we might be wandering there still, in a wasteland of mud and crusted snowpatches. As it was, it took me miles of walking parallel to the highway to realize that I was headed in the wrong direction and to correct my error. Suffice it to say, I'm no girl scout.

By the time Janie's bark announced our arrival to our own familiar gravel drive, I was quite a sight: rosy-cheeked, wild haired, glasses clouded by vapor from my exertions, thoroughly damp from shouldering a path through snowy boughs, and numbly sodden from midthigh to bootsole after a tumble in a creek.

I can't remember the last time I felt so foolish and happy. So paralyzed by laughter.

"Not Only the Eskimos"

2009-12-05T05:44:00.000-08:00

We have only one noun
but as many different kinds:

the grainy snow of the Puritans
and snow of soft, fat flakes,

guerrilla snow, which comes in the night
and changes the world by morning,

rabbinical snow, a permanent skullcap
on the highest mountains,

snow that blows in like the Lone Ranger,
riding hard from out of the West,

surreal snow in the Dakotas,
when you can't find your house, your street,
though you are not in a dream
or a science fiction movie,

snow that tastes good to the sun
when it licks black tree limbs,
leaving us only one white stripe,
a replica of a skunk,

unbelievable snows:
the blizzard that strikes on the tenth of April,
the false snow before Indian summer,
the Big Snow on Mozart's birthday,
when Chicago became the Elysian fields
and strangers spoke to each other,

paper snow, cut and taped
to the inside of grade-school windows,

in an old tale, the snow that covers a nest of strawberries,
small hearts, ripe and sweet,

the special snow that goes with Christmas,
whether it falls or not,

the Russian snow we remember
along with the warmth and smell of our furs,
though we have never treveled
to Russia or worn furs,

Villon's snows of yesteryear,
lost with ladies gone out like matches,
the snow in Joyce's "The Dead,"
the silent, secret snow
in a story by Conrad Aiken,
which is the snow of first love,

the snowfall between the child
and the spacewoman on TV,

snow as idea of whiteness,
as in snowdrop, snow goose, snowball bush,

the snow that puts stars in your hair,
and your hair, which has turned to snow,

the snow Elinor Wylie walked in
in velvet shoes,

the snow before her footprints
and the snow after,

the snow in the back of our heads,
whiter than white, which has to do
with childhood again each year.

[Lesil Mueller]

Last night Lookout Mountain became a Sherwood for goodwilled guerrilla snow. It crowned each of the pie pumpkins standing sentinel on my front porch with little rabbinical skullcaps (a deserved recognition of their fortitude), and put stars in my hair when I went out to the woods with Janie for an invigorated walk.

I've only come in for a cup of coffee and a moment's rapture before I return. Snows in Georgia never last long, and I intend to make the most of every flake.

"Suspended"

2009-12-03T08:31:00.000-08:00

I had grasped God's garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it
The "everlasting arms" my sister loved to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummetted.

[Denise Levertov]

Sophistication

2009-11-24T18:28:00.000-08:00

It was the final piano lesson of her twelfth year of life, and Evelyn had just finished playing through the Turkish Rondo. She knew, before Mrs. Schwartz uttered so much as a syllable, that she had done it again. Too fast, too loud, too rampant—too much! But the beat of her heart and the flush in her cheeks, not to mention the way that the surrounding air rejoiced as it lapped up the final chord, allayed any stirrings of consternation. She leaned her chin on her right shoulder and knew her eyes were dancing as they focused on the crisp elderly woman beside her.

“You certainly had fun with that one, didn’t you?” Mrs. Schwartz’s sardonic tone soured the finale. “I’m sure that after six years under my tutelage, you can guess what I didn’t like about that performance.”

“I overdid it.”

As she made her impenitent confession, Evelyn watched Mrs. Schwartz’s gaze drift across the room toward the clock suspended on the opposite wall. This brief journey was traveled so often during the course of a lesson that Evelyn sometimes thought of the clock as a magnet like the ones she’d studied in school, exerting a pull irresistible for her teacher’s small lead-grey ocular shavings.

“Precisely.” Mrs. Schwartz’s eyes strained away from the clock and trained them once again on her pupil. “You overdid it. It isn’t supposed to be all one furious fortissimo that somehow incredibly manages to crescendo and accelerando every measure. You need to pace yourself, to feel the natural ebb and flow of the music. Your quarter note should be the same value the entire length of the piece. Your pianissimos should be a whisper.”

She poised her right hand above the keyboard and executed a coy trill. “Soft and disarming, like that, see?” Evelyn jumped out of her skin when the next moment Mrs. Schwartz’s left hand fell into a deep and thunderous tremolo. As the growl died out, the woman patted her student’s shoulder and smiled. “See how effective that contrast is? What you don’t yet understand, my dear, is that by pounding the notes into the ground you are actually robbing them of their potency.”

Evelyn nodded, but her face was impatient. It wasn’t a question of whether or not she understood. She did understand. It was a question of whether or not she cared. And she did not.

Mrs. Schwartz sighed. “Good. Next week, I expect you to be less self indulgent and to show a little more respect for Mozart when you take it upon yourself to perform his work.” The magnet drew her eyes up once more. “And that’s about all the time we have this week. You’d better bundle up tight for the walk home. It looks sleety out there.”

As Evelyn dutifully shrugged on her jacket, Mrs. Schwartz poised her pen above the little notepad that Evelyn was meant to consult during her daily practice sessions. Evelyn threw her scarf carelessly around her neck and embraced her stack of music books.

“Thanks, Mrs. Schwartz.”

“You’re welcome, dear.”

The girl paused with her hand on the doorknob, and then asked with impulsive curiosity, “Mrs. Schwartz?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t you ever play just to see how loud and fast you can go? I mean, even though you know it won’t sound as good? Just for fun?”

Mrs. Schwartz’s face grew suddenly still. When she spoke, her voice was soft. “Well now. There’s a time and a place for everything. You have to know, Evelyn, that when you sit at my piano, I expect you to be true both to yourself and to the work that you have been given to perform.” She paused, and smiled slowly. “That said, I don’t think there’s a person on the face of the earth that doesn’t push the limits every now and then, just to prove a point.”

Evelyn made a mollified face, her interest sapping away as quickly as it had been aroused. She grinned as she pulled open the door. “Well, all righty. I’m off! Have a great week, Mrs. Schwartz!” There was a ripping noise behind her back as she skipped lightly down the doorsteps. A moment later the older woman’s reedy voice arrested the girl’s escape through the wet flinty air.

“Evelyn, you forgot your notepad!”

She whirled around and retraced her steps in several bounds. “Oh, thank you! Goodbye again, Mrs. Schwartz!”
---
When Evelyn arrived home, she dropped her heap of music books on the piano bench. The notepad fell to the floor, and she knelt to pick it up. As she did, her eyes fell across the words Mrs. Schwartz had scrawled in it moments ago. Instead of the usual litany--polish these measures, master these scales, memorize this theory--a single sentence jazzed up the blank page.

"You should above all be glad and young. Happy Birthday!"

Embarrassed by her heart’s sudden leap of pleasure, Evelyn rolled her eyes. “Whatever,” she muttered under her breath, tossing the notepad aside. She looked down at the vacant piano.

The scrupulous ranks of black and white stirred within her an embryonic reverence.
---
Mrs. Schwartz stood in the cold for a moment and watched her ward tango down the sidewalk towards her home a block away, scarf unwinding and whipping in the air behind her. Then the old woman shut the door and leaned back against it. She looked down at the vacant piano.

The gap-toothed ivories grinned a rakish invitation.

2009-11-23T07:44:00.000-08:00

I only have to work three days this week, it being the week of Thanksgiving and all. You would think that would boost my work ethic, but your supposition would be false. To the contrary, the bratty child that inhabits my brain has decided that it wants to be off NOW, and ponders the work ahead of me with sulky ill will. Isn't that human nature? Give me an inch, and I'll pine after a mile.

Today manifests all the ingredients of November: bitter damp winds, tattered brown branches, and a general color scheme of vein blue and cement gray. I look forward to going home this afternoon, fixing a cup of cozy chamomile tea, and sitting down on the couch by the window to just sip and ruminate. I don't take advantage of the companionship of own mind and imagination as often as I should, choosing instead the far more sensational company of TV, or even of books or music. I remind myself constantly that gratitude and contentment dwell most abundantly in a mind that is still and attentive, so that I will continue to aspire to this inner equilibrium.

Some days it is harder than others. It is always easier said than done.

wakeup call

2009-11-20T10:04:00.000-08:00

I am a custodian of a college residence hall, which means that interacting with people who have just awakened is part of my job description. It happens to be an aspect of my job that I particularly relish. Each day I witness multiple instances of the vulnerable process of waking. I see puffy, wrinkled, squinty faces, hair in all stages of Frankensteinian disarray, fashion statements that run the gamut from indecent to frumpy to outlandish. And like a beneficent fairy I flit among these poor shambling lead-footed figures, doling out clean white toilet paper rolls and gooey pink soap refills to smooth the road to consciousness.

They all survive it daily, that rude tumble from the charger to the cement floor of reality. Some of them even muster a smile for me. After all, I’m a survivor, too.

I am realizing, however, that more often than not my heart is content to remain dozing sweetly on that private charger somewhere deep within me. I permit it to stay there, where the woods are lovely, dark and deep.

Waking, even at the heart level, is offering your unwary, shabby, half-blinded self to frigid air and appraising eyes. Sleep offers a tantalizing if false defense from this violation.

Nonetheless, dear heart, arise and shine. Laugh at your unappealing reflection in the bathroom mirror. Assume the heavy mantle of your responsibilities. Travel the necessary miles with grace and goodwill.

Retrospective

2009-11-14T16:04:00.000-08:00

They were playing fetch with a football in the front yard. It was early evening. The shadow of the house slipped further up their playing field with each elapsing quarter hour, its relentless border breached time and again as Dante launched himself after Nora's indiscriminate passes.

Flashing cars happened by too swiftly to pay much attention to the wholesome tableau. The dinner hour was looming, and however charming the house, it was not their destination. When the red setting sun finally renounced the porcelain sink of the sky, light drained fast. By the time Julia slipped out to the front porch only a waxen sheen remained to see by, and it too would soon evaporate into darkness.

Julia stood in the gloom. She watched Dante's ecstatic leaps, Nora's tireless arcing arm in its vivid red sleeve, the cars, the sky. She had not ventured outside all day until now, and she felt like a gigantic knotted nerve whose throbbing had dulled only because it had grown habitual. The open air helped a little.

Her eyes sought out her daughter's face, but so blurred by motion and tangled mane was it that she caught only fragmented glimpses of red cheeks and white teeth. Julia reflected on how different things were now, ten years since she could encompass Nora's entirety--soft pink pate to soft pink feet--in one look. At that time she had watched with leisurely wonder as complete emotions visited her child's quiescent face. These days Nora lived her life at such a pitch that Julia's total awareness could never arrive on time. How many heartfuls of love and blessing had she bestowed upon evacuated air? Or, as today, on a pair of sparkling brown eyes, a whipping brunette haze, a crimson smear against the dim suburban scenery?

At that moment, Nora caught sight of Julia's pale purple shadow in the open maw of the porch. "Hi Mom!" she shouted, waving and waving her scarlet sleeve. Dante's bark distracted her from the reciprocated gesture several yards away.

Julia let her arm fall again to her side and inhaled the coppery scent of autumn air. Her skin prickled. Turning her head slightly, she saw, encased in the dim yellowed frame of the living room window, an old woman.

Julia's mother could still stand with the aid of a walker. She leaned heavily against it in her bulging gray sweatshirt and wrinkled black stretch pants, from which the fringe of a red turtleneck and the mousy gray toes of fur-lined slippers peeked. The lamplight winked wistfully off of the oversized glasses that sat on the bridge of her nose.

Julia waved her arm and smiled. "Hi Mom!" she called.

Nora's laughter distracted her from the reciprocated gesture several feet away.

beautiful things are everywhere

2009-11-13T08:07:00.001-08:00

This morning as I marched out of Founders to walk down to the gym, keychain jangling, I felt terrific. Sun-gilded blue skies, God's own impeccable duomo, vaulted above me. The chemical janitorial squad, more commonly known as C.O.F.F.E.E., was getting busy in my system, cleaning the glass behind my eyeballs, vacuuming all the sleep lint from my brain, polishing the chambers of my memory and imagination till they gleamed, oiling my joints and sweeping my sluggishness out the door. And for some reason my subconscious had latched onto a handful of words (as the subconscious tends to do): "Beautiful things are everywhere." Not the most poetic, artistic phrase, but true nonetheless, and no doubt planted by the most Beautiful One of all as a scarcely-acknowledged blessing on this day.

And that is how, through no conscious effort or questing of my own, I find myself living abundantly. To think that God can work that in me: secretly stirring my energies to joy and delight overnight and then surprising me with them upon waking. It's an incredible gift. How I wish I too had the power to bestow it!

excerpt

2009-11-12T13:35:00.000-08:00

What's In My Journal
[William Stafford]

...Evidence to hang me, or to beatify.
Clues that lead nowhere, that never connected
anyway. Deliberate obfuscation, the kind
that takes genius. Chasms in character.
Loud omissions. Mornings that yawn above
a new grave. Pages you know exist
but you can't find them. Someone's terribly
inevitable life story, maybe mine.

the perils of people pleasing

2009-11-10T06:38:00.000-08:00

One of the things I have learned about myself is that I am a moderate recluse. I enjoy solitude. I need it. When I don't get enough quiet time, I find myself tiring faster, unable to focus, crippled by irrational angst. My behavior becomes erratic and strained.

These loner tendencies often put me at odds with others. After all, it is rather a poor excuse for rejecting an invitation or cancelling a weekly engagement to plead, "I just need some alone time." Even if that is God's truth, I know so many people who would translate the excuse thus: "I just don't care to spend time with you this week." So I rarely use it, and instead inflict my yawning glassy-eyed unfiltered presence upon my acquaintances.

Not only am I (to an extent) unsociable, I also lack decisiveness. I don't care deeply enough about most things to have strong opinions. I tend to like everything well enough. There are a few exceptions, of course. I don't like horror films, for example, nor do I appreciate the flavor of squash. I could do without Taco Bell. These are outliers, though, on a graph that tends to cluster so indiscriminately in the middle region that I would be hard put to name my preference.

But people misread this character trait and assume that I am simply not voicing my inclination. They get irritated and impatient. They feel compelled to draw an opinion out of me. This makes them not take me seriously when I actually do care strongly about something. Since I can be coerced into forming an opinion, they reason, I must also be pliable enough to alter my expressed opinion. My lack of partiality is thus usually translated into lack of backbone.

So I allow myself to feel guilty, all the time. I feel guilty about needing to be alone. I feel guilty about not caring what restaurant we patronize or game we play. I feel guilty about caring whether we watch "Halloween." It's exhausting.

I know there are times when it is important to put aside my own desires and needs. There are times when choosing to spend a night reading in my bedroom would be failing a friend or spurning my duty. There are times when guilt would be a legitimate response. On the other occasions when it is not legitimate, I must stop nursing it. And this can only happen when I stop being an artificial people pleaser.

I also need to realize that constantly expecting to be misjudged is a hypocritical act, an act that undervalues my friends and places them in the very position that I so hate.

I need to start taking people at their word, and trusting them to take me at mine, ignoring all that subtext (real and imagined) until it finds some other relationships to haunt.

mirror of fiction

2009-11-08T05:30:00.000-08:00

"All in all, she suspected that her performance had been glib. Or flinty and pinched. None of which she really wished to be. True, those manners had their uses. They excelled in causing people to take half a step back and give one breathing room. But she had fallen into them out of habit, and at the wrong time, and she regretted it. She feared that without some act of atonement they would take hold and harden within her and that one day she would find herself clenched tight as a dogwood bud in January."

-excerpt, Cold Mountain