hidden will of iron

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

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

I love the religious calendar. It is as though a bunch of alarm clocks were smuggled into the year, strategically timed to rouse my heart from slumber and open my eyes to the full meaning of my experience.

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 revelation to assure me, promise to thrill me, 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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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.

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

"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.

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

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.

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

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").

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

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

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

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.

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

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.