comfort food

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,

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.

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"

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

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.

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

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

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...

...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

"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

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.

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

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

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"

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"

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a

bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

[George Eliot]

unseasonable musings

Earlier this week Dr. Tate opened my Classical Lit class with a reading from Luke 2. The Christmas Story. I was caught off guard by my reaction to the familiar words.

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Casesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.

Pendent from each phrase of the matter-of-fact synopsis hung a cluster of rich associations.

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the City of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

Recitations in elementary school during the advent season, snow fluttering beyond the windows and paper-chain countdowns drooping from the ceiling.

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

Clammy palms and quickened heartbeat before a grinning audience, blurting my line into a microphone during the Christmas program, acquitting myself with valor for the prize of a candy bar and an orange from my beaming Sunday School teacher.

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shown round about them: and they were sore afraid.

Christmas Eve parties at Oma and Opa's house, Opa's sonorous Dutch voice rolling the words out into a restive family crowd, everyone pink-cheeked from the smoke scented hearth heat.

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

Squirming in my pew on Christmas morning as the endless service plodded on, my entire being yearning towards the festive heap of unopened gifts beneath our cozy Christmas tree.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

A general warmth of Advent sensations: love, fellowship, trust, excitement, joy. (Greed, gluttony, and indolence as well, of course, but expressed only in socially acceptable format.)

There are certain passages of Scripture that move me most when read in the language of King James, and this is one of them. Psalm 23 is another, and Isaiah 53, and Genesis 1. They are the familiar underpinnings of my earliest glimpses of truth, and when I hearken to them I am awed by God's faithfulness, filled with joy for the sufficient insufficiency of words, and of The Word.

(Addendum: When I scan this version of the Bible, it also becomes all too clear to me why I battled punctuation confusion throughout my formative years.)

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

[Cornelia Funke, Inkspell]

how i'm becoming sentimental

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

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

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

heaven is an autumn mind

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

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

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

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

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

Heaven is an autumn mind.

false pattern

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

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

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

And I can breathe again.

"Elsewhere"

The delectable names of harsh places:

Cilicia Aspera, Estremadura.

In that smooth wave of cello-sound, Mojave,

We hear no ill of brittle parch and glare.

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

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

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

[Richard Wilbur]

What is it about October poetry?

entertainment

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

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

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

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

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

Good day.

personal challenge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear old C Major. I've missed you.

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

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

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

“Meditation In Mid October”

[Barbara Crooker]

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

"Moderation is not a negation of intenisty,

but helps avoid monotony"

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

together

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

no one

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

the ordinary

blankness of little dramatic consciousness is good for the

health sometimes,

only Dostoyevsky can be Dostoyevskian at such long

tumultuous stretches;

look what intensity did to poor great Van Gogh!;

linger, lunge,

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

of one's forces;

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

enough sleep;

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

literature of sleep";

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

Sunday church bells

ringing constantly.

[John Tagliabue]

Restlessness

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

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

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

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

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

Most of all, remember...

the heartshackles are not, as you think,

death, illness, pain

unrequited hope, not loneliness, but

lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety,

selfishness

overnight

It smells like fall this morning: earthy spices turned up by a clawing wind and whipped into an autumnal recipe overnight, so that when I stepped onto the front porch with Janie at my heels, the nostalgia took my breath away. Autumn always pulls my mind toward home.

Working as a custodian can be much more glamorous than many people think

(As if this photo isn't argument enough)
I am an eraser of petty histories.

Every morning, I get to see traces of hundreds of fingerprints on glass doors, their minute and matchless topography a testament to the peerlessness of each individual that crosses the threshold of my building. And I get to splash some ammonium solution on the glass, take my scratchy microfiber rag, and erase those traces.


I am the one who makes the coffee ring on the floor of the elevator vanish uninterpreted. If those breadcrumbs are showing the way home, I am the bird that gobbles them up. Crumpled study guides, torn messages, shoe-shaken dust...I take care that these unclaimed missives will not last long.

So much of life consists of leaving traces, pieces of your habits and personality sloughing off like so much dead skin when the act of brushing against the world works up enough friction. Cryptic detritus that whispers "So-and-so was here" like the blinking transparent icon in a video game.

the truth will out, Peri

(My rebuttal to the gross inaccuracies in the nutshell recorded September 18th, 2009 in Peri's fabulous sprintingtofloor3.blogspot.com)

I have the progress report you asked for, Mr. Hammersmith.
Ah, Hopkins. Excellent. Tell me about the new heroine. What’s the basic sketch so far?
Well, sir, she’s a 22 year old college grad. Average height. Has the liveliest eyes—the sort that any Mr. Darcy would fall for, and the sort of vibrant presence that we look for in a heroine. Spunk, I believe you call it, sir. She’s a current resident of St. Louis suburbia, but she’s been places and definitely appears to be going places, too.
Sounds pretty straightforward. Well, first things first: Relationship status. Married? Engaged? Dating?
No. *suppresses a look of deep relief* She is still solidly single.
Well then, she must have some avenue of meeting a nice young man—
Sir, you try and find a gentleman suitable to match a lady of her considerable merit. It’s a challenge worthy of your utmost endeavors.
...Okay. Is she financially stable?
Not at all. She’s living at home for an indefinite amount of time. She can’t afford an apartment or even a car of her very own.
Very Good, Hopkins. Financial setbacks are merely the guise that tremendous opportunities often take. I submit Austen and Bronte, among others, to your consideration. Does she have a career?
No. She’s trying to stay afloat in this wretched economy by jumping from job to job, while never quite managing to get a foot inside the door of her chosen field.
Any hobbies?
She... *a glint of excitement in the voice* writes.
A writer, eh! Has she gotten anything published?
No, sir. She’s your ideal starving artist type. Imagine the fanfare, once she’s discovered.
Calm yourself, Hopkins. Has she ever tried to get anything published?
No, none of her books are anywhere near completion. She’s at that crucial germinal phase of her writing life. A very interesting phase it looks to be, too, sir, if I may be so bold.
Is there any more about the heroine’s life that is interesting or has any indication of moving forward?
A few miscellanea to wrap things up, sir. Her friends are following her trajectory with the deepest interest, in hopes of piggybacking on her fame once it arrives. They will need to be monitored. She wants to move to Australia, which will boost that nation’s literary clout. Taking her on would thus improve international relations and perhaps incur some of that Nobel buzz that you are so fond of.
Hopkins, where’s my lighter? Pour some wine and break out the cigars. You’ve found us our heroine at last, and she’s one to celebrate in style.

enjoy your self

I was so sure that today would be horrible. It was with some abashment that I found a smile on my face and a lightness in my fingers as I swaddled trashcans with fresh empty liners. Enjoying myself.

Isn't that a funny phrase? But I was. I was enjoying whipping air into the crisp creased bags and watching them billow out. I was enjoying the satisfaction of pulling the fourth corner tight and knotting it, tugging it down and tucking the tail under, a process that feels like second nature after four years of practice.

It simply did not matter that I woke late and hadn't my usual hour to savor coffee and settle into wakefulness at the pace of the natural world. It didn't matter that the clouds continued their surly heavenly coup and had sent yet more troops to swamp the areas of weak defense on campus overnight.

What matters is that my nerves are like tastebuds, and everything is delicious, and I don't know why but I am glad.

Enjoy yourself today. Head, shoulders, knees, and toes. Eyes, ears, and mouth, and nose.

Put your whole self in and turn yourself around. That's what it's all about.

09.16.09

When it rains as it is raining today, with such primal urgency, I always long to put on my tromping boots and go out away from (and into) "it all" and just steep.

It's been a lovely Wednesday so far. I woke early and felt so utterly refreshed as I puttered around the darkly lit kitchen, brewing coffee and pouring dog food and clearing counterspace from the debris of last night.

Janie was particularly endearing, and wasn't visited by any phantoms all morning. Often she'll stiffen several times through the course of a morning and glower at the air in front of her, growling hoarsely. It gives me the creeps to witness this reaction to something I cannot even sense. (What heir of the Old Testament legacy does not wonder at the ramifications of Balaam's ass?) I sometimes wonder if dogs are attuned to the world on a supernatural level. We all know that they can hear things far beyond our range, and they percieve light and movement differently. I've read, too, that dogs can smell if a human has low blood sugar or even certain types of cancer. It makes me regard Janie with a certain awe. This lean, darling creature has the spunky innocence of a child and the grave sorrowful eyes of a saint. I love her.

The afternoon promises rainshowers and company. I'm looking forward to fixing some lasagna for a friend and conversing over dinner in a cozy sanctuary of a living room.

For now, though, work calls me away from my desk and out into the muddied halls and lobbies of my building.

anniversary

Well, my birthday has cordoned off another year. I had sweet, comfortable celebrations with those I love most from my Lookout Mountain community, and congratulatory conversations with family members over the phone.

And I decided, after an evening of music that called my heart out of my chest, that another year like last year simply would not do.

one of my deepest fears

A certain literary type has begun to fascinate me. She unsettles me, because I can see so vividly in her character tendencies that I have, tendencies that could eventually shape me into her. She tends to be the despised foil for the heroinne. She is Mary Piper of "Fall On Your Knees," Charlotte Bartlett of "A Room With A View," and Aunt Elizabeth of Lucy Maud Montgomery's "Emily of New Moon" series. Dorethea Brookes of "Middlemarch" and Lucy Honeychurch of "A Room With A View" narrowly escape evolving into her. Her male counterpart is Javert of "Les Miserables," Cecil Vyse of "A Room With A View," and Dr. Casaubum of "Middlemarch." Repressed, severe, and inflexibly moral, she refuses to acknowledge her own lostness, and thereby divorces herself from our sympathies.

The tragedy of her life is that she begins with the high hopes and ideals that we all begin with. Offered a glimpse of her future self, she would shudder and reject the image with the same distaste with which we regard it. But gradually her reactions to the forces of life corrupt the freshness and recklessness right out of her. And it usually all begins with religious devotion run amok: the belief that to avoid sin one must eschew all earthly pleasures, and even if compelled to partake, must do so with a spirit of self-mortification. She is a Judge. She finds both herself and others worthy of condemnation, and if she does not mete this out herself, she does mete out disapproval in a way that alienates her from its objects. And one of those objects is herself.

We loathe her because in all her righteousness she is so utterly in error. Despite her ascetism, she cannot find ecstasy. Without love, grace, compassion, she is nothing. In the end, her pride evolves into bitterness and at last into despair. She is the good girl who becomes the ultimate instrument of evil.

I am so afraid of becoming her. I am afraid that my love for purity and truth will lead me into a hypocrisy so dense and strangling that I will inflict horrible injury on others (and myself) while believing myself to be enacting God's will. I am afraid that the god in my head will resemble the God of the Universe only in His aspect of Judge and Executioner of Justice. I am afraid of forgetting that His death is the deepest magic of all, because it is both pure and loving and it compells me to be gracious to others and to myself in ways that defy rigid justice.

Oh Love that will not let me go...never ever let me go there.

You know when you finish reading a powerful book, how it continues to hold your head and heart in thrall, even after you've closed the final page and returned it to the shelf? How it changes the lighting on your perspective, and it takes time for your eyes to adjust?

I am still grappling with myself after reading "Fall On Your Knees", a historical novel by Anne-Marie MacDonald. I am still wondering if I should recommend it.

MacDonald is an artist, no doubt about that. Language listens to her and does what it's told, even if it means seducing you only to break your heart again and again and again.

But is it good? There are so many lies in this novel, masquerading as the truth. So much perverted goodness and evil upheld. I need to think about it more.

What have I taken from it? A reminder of the treachery of good intentions divorced from true love and integrity, and the ease with which one can slip into the groove of sin and not realize it. I needed to be reminded of that.

I may end up turning this knowledge against even this beautiful upsetting book.

this is how it felt

(a flurry of palpitations
as cold as sleet
rackets across the marshlands
of my heart
like a wild spring day )
when a few strains of a song I love took me by surprise earlier today.

I probably don't have to tell you who wrote that.

seek

This morning I woke early to see my dear sister off. She had spent six coffee-inundated days in my household, and I regretted the red glow of her receding taillights as I blew kisses from the front porch. Family is such a seething mixture of loving and taking for granted and missing.

The most frantic weeks of work culminate in the six days that pave my future from this deep breath doorstep of a Monday morning. I remind myself ceaselessly that life is NOT about pleasing me. That satisfaction and peace are byproducts of duties cheerfully rendered.

I was standing in my driveway, cupping my mug of coffee between my palms and feeling strangely abandoned, when a flashing white tail alerted me to the flight of a deer through the trees in my front yard.

I miss so much LIFE, merely by ceasing or forgetting to seek.

a bit of humor, from the archives...

I've just returned from my summer Hudsonville visit, during which I had the opportunity to sift through some writings from my middle school years. This poem had me crying with laughter, and recalled to me vividly the utter (if melodramatic) despair that mathematics invariably elicited from my poor unscientific soul. I remember composing it during Algebra I class with Mr. TenElshof, in Room 111 at Plymouth School.

The moment I walk

into Room 111,

the teacher's brisk talk

submerges my brain

in fetid, black water

that's numeral ridden

where every plain concept

seems murky and hidden.

I struggle to rise,

to breathe and break surface,

to open my eyes--

to understand Math.

But all is illusion,

vague, muddied confusion...

The water drifts endless

in directionless path.

-Abby Pettit, seventh grade, age 13

"We rarely consider the soul's excellent qualities or who it is that dwells within her or how precious she really is. And so we don't bother to tend her beauty. All our attention is focused on the rough matrix of the diamond, the outer walls of the castle, which are none other than these bodies of ours. Remember, this castle has many dwellings: some above, some below, others to either side. At the center is the most important dwelling of all where the most secret things unfold between the soul and her Beloved."

-Teresa d'Avila, The Interior Castle

for Hannah

You told me last night that you never leave the kitchen dirty before bed.

I recall marking the passing of time by the growth of clutter in our bedroom years ago.

Time-lapse those months, and behold a miracle:

inanimate objects being fruitful,

multiplying,

subduing our little earth.

Even after we parted

I would laugh,

comforted,

to hear Mom complain of your slovenly ways.

Oh how her eyebrows glowered

when your diamond twinkled in the grimy light

of quarters undomesticated.

Now within you ripens a natural life.

My heart stumbles at the sight of the ascetic sink,

the scoured counters.

"You wait! Your girl will be just like you!"

Your coffee sloshes over the brim

at the spasm of her willing limb.

Dear one!

My hopeful joke is no threat.

gleanings

The reason I cannot escape myself:

..."we continue to behave more or less like the people we are, even on a pilgrimage"...

The reason I cannot stop trying:

..."It is an open secret among pilgrims and other theoreticians of this traveling life that you become addicted to the horizon"...

So:

..."I will gaze at the moon / and cleanse my heart"...

---

I have not understood much of Anne Carson's pilgrim essay, Kinds of Water. There are snatches of Spanish flung in it, and unfinished ideas, and epigrams beyond my wit to concretely solve. But I think I take away the important things...or, at least, some of the important things.

Like life being a pilgrimage through apocalyptic beauty with strangers . One of those strangers being your own hungry bewildered self. The parasite Shame, and the pain you inflict upon yourself to unpry him. Never quite reaching the end. Mystery.

It helped.

Oliver

I feel like I have a disability when I read her poetry and compare my own blasted vision and dulled spirit to the persona in her words.

When she writes of this fat lean bleak beautiful world, stringing a taut grid of tensions across her canvas, my eyes are first opened to and then blinded by the intricacy and mystery that we all inhabit.

Her art drives readers to examine their lives, and does so beautifully with both candor and artistry.

Her words have been agents in my spiritual life, challenging my faith and stoking my zeal.

She has taught me to pay attention.

She asks me to contemplate the exhaustive sweeping world, that Great Engulfment of Time and Matter, and has taught me that the only possible response to this world is one of gratitude and praise.

She has taught me that sorrow is valuable. Without taking evil lightly, she has pointed me away from it, towards goodness, towards light.

Like the psalms, her poems stir within me desire and joy enriched by the reality of suffering and doubt, propelling me toward holiness.

Although her poems are pervaded with disquieted reservations, they yet have achieved greater fluency in the language of faith and worship than many who claim that language as their native tongue, and yet stammer and hesitate, or are silent.

"The day's crowding arrived / at this abundant stillness. ... / Gift after gift." (Levertov)

It has been a joyously productive morning in my house today. Our dogs are luxuriating in their fragrant glossy fur (Dove rejuvenating shampoo) after the usual wrestling bout that is bathtime. The kitchen gleams, the bathrooms sparkle, and the living room carpet is lined with vacuum marks. I've made a pot of coffee, and am allowing myself the special indulgence of a third cup as I sit here at the computer and watch the trees pan the sunlight through their branches.

I love these sated pauses for the luxury they are. It is so rarely that I truly lean back and blink the world into fresh focus, so rarely that I can fill my being with the bounty of it and translate that bounty into a yearning song of gratitude.

With Mary Oliver, this morning I am gushing, "Oh! / the sweetness of reality!"

It is a day when my hosannahs crackle with blinding alleluiahs.

I am letting my Self pollute my experience of life more than usual, lately.

Puppeteering my relationships so that I see only strings.
Hearing only the pitch of my voice when I sing.
Feeling only the unstirred beat of my heart when I pray.

I want to see people when I interact with them.
I want to listen to the entire choir.
I want another to stir my heart.

Self is a big mean ole bully, wrestling gentle Spirit to the ground, pretending to be unaware that he needs Spirit to be truly real, truly fulfilled...pretending not to know that he is weaker.

Please bear with my Buechner kick

Buechner writes that living right is living out of your own humanness and thereby awakening the humanness in others, as well as the humanness in yourself.

But what does that mean, "living out of your own humanness"?

When I consider "my own humanness", I consider my unfinishedness, the idea that as a human I am a work in progress. I am undergoing constant refinement and alteration. To "live out of this" is to live in a way that acknowledges that I am incomplete...or rather, that I am being completed. It is to be aware of the agents that are working to change me from without and within. It is to resist my inner default setting, a setting that I cannot quite seem to re-program, that tells me that I am, in and of myself, as good as I'll ever be.

Practically speaking, I live out of my humanness when I open my heart to the painful reality of my spiritual impoverishment, yet without despair. Pain of this sort is actually a symptom of growth, and should be celebrated as such.

It is vital that I keep in mind that living out of my humanness involves living, intentionally, judiciously. It is a state of being that demands more of me than the state of dreaming on autopilot, that opens me up to real challenges and real relationships and real vulnerability. It is a state that chooses to focus on pursuing Life: Abundant Life. It accepts nothing less.

I am so grateful for those in my life who live this way, and have at various times awakened within me (unbeknownst to myself, perhaps even unbeknownst to them) my own humanness.

for your consideration

(cf II Corinthians 2:14--"We are not, like so many, peddlers of God's word...")

"As peddlers, we may tell stories about ourselves as well as about other people, but not, for the most part, our real stories, not stories about what lies beneath all our other problems, which is the problem of being human, the problem of trying to hold fast somehow to Christ when much of the time, both in ourselves and in our world, it is as if Christ had never existed. Because all peddlers of God's word have that in common, I think: they tell what costs them least to tell and what will gain them most; and to tell the story of who we really are and of the battle between light and dark, between belief and unbelief, between sin and grace that is waged within us all costs plenty and may not gain us anything, we're afraid, but an uneasy silence and a fishy stare. So in one way or another we are all of us peddlers of God's word. And so it's to all of us that Paul speaks. 'We are not,' he says, 'we are not, like so many, peddlers of God's word; but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God in the sight of God we speak in Christ.' That's the whole point of it, he says: to speak in Christ, which means among other things, I assume, to speak of Christ. And when it comes to storytelling, that is of course the crux of it. If we are to speak, as he says, with sincerity--speak as we have been commissioned by God to speak, and with our hearts as well as our lips--then this is the one story above all others that we have in us to tell, you and I. It is his story.

"The story of Christ is where we all started from, though we've come so far since then that there are times when you'd hardly know it to listen to us and when we hardly know it ourselves. ... The story of Jesus is home nonetheless. You belong to it. It belongs to you. ... It is the story of a mystery we must never assume we understand and that comes to us breathless and broken with unspeakable beauty at the heart of it, yet is by no means a pretty story, though that is the way we are apt to peddle it much of the time. ... We are apt to tell his story when we tell it at all, to sell his story, for the poetry and panacea of it. But 'we are the aroma of Christ,' Paul says, and the story we are given to tell is a story that smells of his life in all its aliveness, and our commission is to tell it in a way that makes it come alive as a story in all its aliveness and to make those who hear it come alive and God knows to make ourselves come alive too. ... You and I are here in this place now because of what little life this story dealt us, because each of our stories is in countless ways different from what it would have been otherwise, and that is why in speaking about him we must speak also about ourselves and about ourselves with him and without him too because that, of course, is the other story we have in us to remember and tell. Our own story.

"We are commissioned by God to speak in Christ, and to speak in Christ is to speak truth and there is no story whose truth we are closer to than our own, than the story of what it's like to live inside ourselves. The trouble is that, like Christ's story, this too is apt to be the last we tell, partly because we have half forgotten it, pand partly because we are uncomfortable with it and afraid of sincerity. But tell it we must and, before we tell it to anybody else, tell it first of all to ourselves and keep on telling it, because unless we do, unless we live with, and out of, the story of who we are inside ourselves, we lose track of who we are. We live so much on the outer surface and seeming of our lives and our faith that we lose touch with the deep places that they both come from. We have the story of our own baptism, for one--if not by water, in a river, then by fire God knows where, because there isn't one of us whose life hasn't flamed up into moments when a door opened somewhere that let the future in, moments when we moved through that door as Jesus moved out of Jordan, not perfectly cleansed but cleansed enough, with the past behind us, we hoped, and a new sense of what at its most oultandish and holiest the future might become. And God knows we have all had our wilderness temptations too--not the temptation to work evil, probably, because by grace or luck we don't have what it takes for more than momentary longings in that direction, but the temptation to settle for the lesser good, which is evil enough and maybe a worse one, to settle for niceness and usefulness and busyness instead of for holiness; to settle for plausibility and eloquence instead for truth.

"Two stories then--our own story and Jesus' story, and in the end, perhaps, they are the same story. ...We have it in us to be Christs to each other and maybe in some unimaginable way to God too--that's what we have to tell finally. We have it in us to work miracles of love and healing as well as to have them worked upon us. We have it in us to bless with him and forgive with him and heal with him and once in a while maybe even to grieve with some measure of his grief at another's pain and to rejoice with some measure of his rejoicing at another's joy almost as if it were our own. And who knows but that in the end, by God's mercy, the two stories will converge for good and all, and his story will come true in us at last.

"And in the meantime, this side of Paradise, it is our business (not, like so many, peddlers of God's word, but as men and women of sincerity) to speak with our hearts (which is what sincerity means) and to bear witness to, and live out of, and live toward, and live by the true word of his holy story as it seeks to stammer itself forth through the holy stories of us all."

excerpts: "The Two Stories", Fredrich Buechner

wise as serpents; harmless as doves

I have been identifying with Lucy Honeychurch of A Room With A View in much the same way that I identified with Lily Briscoe of To The Lighthouse and Katherine Forrester of A Small Rain. Unraveling her character as I turn the pages is an exercise of self discovery as much as entertainment or diversion. Through all of these women, all the characters that I have known over the years, I recieve an ever expanding sense of what it means to be a human and a woman. This sense is invaluable, but I also wonder sometimes if it is misguiding. How true do these characters ring, that I should feel such kinship? What if I "cleverly am being altered" after false images--images that cater to my idea of how things "should" be, rather than how things are? It is so tempting to regard Forster, Woolf, and L'Engle as infallable in their depiction of human beings, and so convenient. If they pen the human nature perfectly, I have a reliable source of information to consult and draw conclusions from. If not, then I must entertain the idea that perhaps my perceptions about humankind, and consequently my perceptions about myself in relation to humankind, are flawed. Of course, they are flawed.

I do believe that the insights I gain through my readings far outweigh the errors I acquire. I would never ever consider reading a step away from the straight and narrow, or a useless empty pursuit.

I would consider it a dangerous one. An occasional reality check into the finitude and fallability of the prophets I so admire is necessary to keep me from a mind unguarded. The act of reading is that of judging (charitably, humbly) and reorganizing one's perspective around the truths that emerge.

Usually my thirst is for an open heart, a pliant mind. My upbringing has conditioned me to be too judgmental and unyielding. However, in my struggle for a teachable spirit I must not forget to discern. And this is yet another tension in a world of checks and balances.

Look: it's spring

I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.

excerpt, "A Settlement"
Mary Oliver

meditations

Did you know that Buddhist monks have the enviable reputation of being the happiest people in the world?

This may not surprise you. It didn't surprise me, when my housemate informed me of it several weeks ago. I recieved the information with a nod.

"I guess that makes sense...I mean, simplicity is supposed to make you happier, and so is charity, and passionate devotion to a higher calling. Aren't those things what being a monk is all about?"

Aubrey had agreed, adding, "They meditate, too. Cultivate self-control and tranquility." She poured herself some coffee and stated, "If I wasn't a Christian, I think I'd be a Buddhist monk."

I considered this. "Me too." And I thought no more about it, until last evening. I had returned to a cup of chamomile tea and a house hallowed by rainfall after watching "Confessions of a Shopaholic" at the cheap theatre. The movie had been utterly worthless but amusing: poorly written, unrealistic, forgettable, lacking even the saving grace of a satisfyingly escapist romance, but featuring beautiful people, delightful fashions, and a few humorous scenes. Even so, I felt relieved to be cozily home in my pajamas under my blankets, listening to the small rain in the fresh-scented dark. After a day so fastpaced, I had expected to find sleep within moments, and was surprised to find my mind still on the near shore a half-hour later.

I was thinking the sort of thoughts people think at 11 pm as they wait for the slumber bus: a fairly unregulated gush of memories from the day's thousands episodes, analyzed and overanalyzed, reenvisioned and wished into more favorable but (alas!) only ever imaginary outcomes. In the midst of this exercise, I had the sudden realization of how many hours of my life I spend absorbed in this futile accounting! Evening after evening for most of the years of my life I waste in naval-gazing. Alongside this rather depressing angel of a thought sidled a second angel, resembling a grinning Buddhist monk. The question bobbed into my brain whether Happy Monks ever indulge in such rehashing, and he seemed to shake his shiny bald head.

So I tried an experiment. I relaxed and began to breathe deep cleansing breaths. My mind began to clear. I let go of the cares of my little life: the irretractable moments of self-absorption and immaturity, the burden of being responsible for the images of a thousand selves in a thousands lightings at a thousand angles in a thousand mirrors, the blind reaching forward and obsessive glancing back. In the relieved quiet that remained, I felt my heart beating ahead into a wide and spacious future, my lungs pumping abundant clean air, and my entire body filling with a free and easy peace. It pleased me to think of my mind, well-equipped and with room to grow, and of my personality in all its individuality and sacredness, and of my body in its strength and its capabilities. I laid on my bed and devoted my time to being content and grateful: to praise.

Happiness is really so easy to find, and so freely obtained, if you can keep a strong enough grasp on the perspective that matters. In this distorted world, that is the hard part.