sometimes a batch of words comes tumbling into our world, fluttering onto the path we cross as if the petals from an apple blossom whose bloom has expired. the words come unannounced, and lay there waiting for us to notice. once we read them we can’t think of anything else. all day long, all our thoughts come round to them again and again.
so it was when a friend whose grief is without measure sent along these words the other morning:
I have been telling myself that I don’t know how to do this, that nothing has prepared me.
i’ve been thinking long and hard about those loads we’re tasked to carry. how every one of us, at some time or another, is bound to have one. a load so beyond measure, a load we never saw coming, it simply stumbles us, knocks us flat and gasping. and in the depth of our hollows — if we’re telling truth — we mouth those very words: “i don’t know how to do this. . . . nothing has prepared me.”
all we see is steep climbing ahead. a load we don’t know how to hold. and all we’ve got to bear it are our stubby shuffling feet, and a ribcage that holds the parts of us that breathe and pump the oxygen. our shoulders and our spine we fear will crumple under the weight of it.
and then there’s the beehive of a brain, where all the wiring and the worrying, where all the remembering and the grieving and the what-iffing and the if-onlying whirs in and out at every turn in every hour of the day.
the poet and collagist jan richardson put it like this in her “blessing for the dailiness of grief”:
It will take your breath away, how the grieving waits for you in the most ordinary moments.
It will wake with your waking.
It will sit itself down with you at the table, inhabiting the precise shape of the emptiness across from you.
It will walk down the street with you in the form of no hand reaching out to take yours. . . .
but here, maybe, is what we need to remember, to bear the load we’re sure will finally be the one we cannot budge or bear: our whole life long, we’ve been preparing. every hurt and insult hurled our way. the time in third grade when we cried because the kid one desk over made fun of our clunky shoes. but, next morning, we tied their laces into bows and we walked back in the classroom, and sat there all day long, learning how it is to become more than the stubby shoes that were not penny loafers. the time in high school, when someone in the hall pointed at us and said our face looked like someone smashed us flat against a wall. and it stung for weeks after, every time we stood before a mirror and turned this way and that to measure just how flat our irish face really was.
and then the big ones come: the time the doctor walked up to the knot of us coagulated in the hospital corridor, and simply said, “i’m sorry.” and we were left without air in our lungs, and with the sudden senseless knowing that the brightest light in our existence had just gone dark. forever.
or the night the clots kept coming. and at last the tiny, tiny arms and legs, the intricately blessed face i’ll never forget, as the baby i thought i was having was cupped in the palms of my bloody hands, the miscarriage that hurt the most.
the litany is plenty long. and we sometimes never notice just how much each ache is strengthening the fibers of the muscle group without a name, the one that holds us up — yes, wobbling at first; yes, stained with umpteen tears; yes, with sleepless sleepless night — but the one that, in the end, does not fail us.
we are stronger than we know. and, all along, we’ve been piling on the sinew, deepening the courage, deep breathing the determination, to look that unbearable load square in the eyes, to say, “climb on. i’ll carry you.”
just watch.
and then, at last, there comes this (jan richardson again, this time “blessing of breathing”):
That the first breath will come without fear. That the second breath will come without pain.
The third breath: that it will come without despair.
until at last . . .
When the tenth breath comes, may it be for us to breathe together, and the next, and the next,
until our breathing is as one, until our breathing is no more.
my dear and blessed friend, and all who bear loads they deem unbearable, you do know how to do this. deep in your marrow, you know. your whole life long you’ve been growing strong and stronger. you’ve got this, and you’ve got this. and if and when you stumble, we are here with our simple grace and our love that will not falter.
where did you find the strength you did not know was yours?
PS (note the all caps!): it’s the birthday sunday of one of the wise women of the chair, our very own lamcal, and i can’t gather up enough love in my bouquet to sufficiently surround her. she is beyond measure! happy blessed day, beautiful one. xoxox and happy mothering day who all who love in that way that knows no end….
i tend toward the grays. and i don’t mean the pewter locks atop my head. i refer here to my meteorological preferences.
i’m of celtic persuasion, which means a pigeon-colored sky, preferably with mists rolling in, a landscape without shadow, for clouds are in the way, that’s the sort of day that wraps me like an afghan dropped from heaven’s hutch, makes me feel cozied by the hearth, deeply much at home.
give me a gray day and i all but purr.
this week, though, has been anomaly. the sunbeams of this latest swatch of springtime have been pouring in full proof, and voluptuously so. sunbeams so pure, so concentrated, i’ve bridled the urge to stick out my tongue and lick them––as if a gelato on a cone. or gulp, as if a nectar in the most delicate cut-glass flute that ever was.
it wasn’t lost on me how novel it was for me to be fixated––and bedazzled––by the motes of sunlight shafting in. it shook me from some rafters i’d not even realized had boxed me in. i was paying attention to my paying attention. an attunement to the nth power. and the simple substance that transfixed me was but one of that elemental trilogy: sunlight, water, air.
to live in a state of fine-grained attentiveness is the instructive of every sage or prophet who’s walked this sunlit earth. for us to notice celestial shifts, as winter turns to spring, as the great star is jimmied higher into sky, must be God’s rapturous delight.
and i must have been more sun-starved than i realized after a long and washed-out winter, for i couldn’t keep myself inside the house this whole week long. i was all but stripping bare my crepe-papery arms and legs, so my famished flesh could guzzle sun. and, every chance i got (and even those i didn’t have), i found myself down on my knees, at the garden’s edge, wherever tender growing things gave me excuse to coax and coddle and slapdash in the dirt.
from nearly sun-up to sundown, i was out and about, clocking miles on my soles, slip-sliding along a river trail, dodging red-winged blackbirds who tried to perforate my noggin. and, when my legs and knees were tuckered out, i sat splotched in sprees of golden light as i perched, robin-like, atop a rock or stoop, keeping watch on flutterings in trees.
i’m not typically a sunshine girl. despite a nomenclature suggesting otherwise.
my papa and me (aka his “sunshine girl”)
long long ago, there was a fine irishman––my witty papa––who pinned a moniker on me back in the days when i’d take him by the hand and maybe reach just beyond his knees. he called me his sunshine girl, his one and only, and it’s a name that makes my knees go limp even to this day.
i’ve not heard his voice in 43 years, but i can see the glint in his eyes, the way the pilot light burned bright and brighter, as he warmed up to pronounce the words, deeming me his sunlit girl.
i rather fail my reputation.
in the long years of his absence, i’ve grown more inclined to sunshine’s shadowless counterpart, the days some define as “the color of bad weather.” i protest, tend to be of a mind with leo da vinci, the polymath and painter, who insisted “a gray day provides the best light.”
though not this golden-glowing week. and not without exception.
like the poets emily D and annie dillard, i like my light in slants, or as dillard put it once: “i’m a collector” of such angled penetrations. the oblique is how i see things best.
most days, pure drenched feels too exposed. the white light of summer’s height makes me wither.
springtime, though, is tender season. and the sunlight comes in slant, in perfect concentration. and every once in a rare while, in days as delicious as the sun-drenched string that was this week, i’ll gulp my yearly dose of solar plenty. and i’ll gulp it without pause.
speaking of sunshine and the irish, here’s a line that made me laugh aloud this week:
“the sad truth is that, like fish, the looks of the irish are not improved by sunshine . . .”
—Niall Williams, This is Happiness, page 193
and as is my wont, i’ll bring mary oliver into the conversation, as she came to mind more than once when i was down on my garden knees this week: in “the summer’s day,” she writes:
“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. / I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down / into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, / how to be idle and blessed.”
and, lastly, i zoomed into a poetry conversation with the poet (and yale institute of sacred music professor) christian wiman the other day, and he was asked to read a poem that shocks right through him, and here’s the one he read:
Prayer by Carol Ann Duffy
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer utters itself. So, a woman will lift her head from the sieve of her hands and stare at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth enters our hearts, that small familiar pain; then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales console the lodger looking out across a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls a child's name as though they named their loss.
(the four names in the last line are towns called out on BBC radio’s nightly “shipping forecast” for the various seas around the british isles, waters divided into 31 sea areas, including rockall, malin, dogger, and finisterre. the broadcast litanies, especially the late-at-night ones, are for many britons––including carol ann duffy––a familiar touchstone: the announcer’s voice reciting the sea areas all around the islands, one by one, forecasting the weather. and, higher up, minims are the half-notes in a page of musical notation)
of all the meteorological options, which one most floats your boat? and how and why?
i tend to ground myself in the world in all its nitty-gritty. that mattered (critically) when i was a nurse (don’t you dare inverse a systolic for a diastolic, when it comes to blood pressure reading), and in all my decades of chasing after news, the truth—and every grimy detail—was what we sought. thus, when i peruse the bookshelves of my local free library (the world’s most generous invention, to be sure), i am nearly always in the down-low where no windows are, where the endless rows of fact not fiction reside.
i’m decidedly non-fictionally inclined.
but this week i was lulled into the rooms upstairs, the rooms where sunshine streams through sky-high windows, and where make-believe is the order of the room. in other words, i crept up to where the fiction is. and in the writings of one irish novelist, a fellow i’d give anything to sit with in any irish pub, or better yet to stroll the rocky coastline of the continent from which half my peoples come, i found the surest cure for running from the blues.
niall williams is his name, an irishman, who is but a year younger than me, and who has gathered wisdom as an old stone takes on a mossy coat. i can almost see the glint in his eye, as from some quiet post in the corner of a dimly-lit, crossbeamed room, he’s kept closest watch on the quirks and comedies of human nature. and on the heartbreak too. as the tenderness he kneads into his prose and paragraphs has left me gasping more than once (and i am only eight chapters in).
the book is this is happiness, as prescriptive a title as a girl in search of antidote might want.
the irishman had me at chapter 1: “It had stopped raining.” (that’s the chapter in its entirety.)
chapter 2 picked up where 1 left off: “Nobody in Faha” (the fictional irish town that just happens to be a spot on the map not far from where my non-fictional peoples hailed) “could remember when it started.” by the third sentence of that second chapter, i was ready to shove up my shirtsleeves and not move an inch till i’d turned the last page. it went like this: “[Rain] came straight down and sideways, frontwards, backwards, and any other wards God could think of. It came in sweeps, in waves, sometimes in veils. It came dressed as drizzle, as mizzle, as mist, as showers, frequent and widespread, as a wet fog, as a damp day, a dreeping, an out-and-out downpour.”
and on it goes, plip-plopping along, this incantatory passage that soon enough tells us that the unrelenting rain came “like a blessing God had forgotten he had left on.”
this is nothing less than bliss in garamond font (a literary typographic detail nearly always spelled out at the back end of any book); and most certainly for a girl who penned a paragraph of her own, in her most recent book, that unfurled in uncannily kindred ways. c’est moi:
“Rain, like most of us, has its moods. In its more laconic hours, it comes on unsuspectingly, without folderol, timpani, or cymbal crashing, the barest slip of a presence and suddenly you’re bespattered. On the days when rain is tempestuous, furious, raging, it rattles the heavens, cleaves the night, pummels the trees, and sends all the world—even the puddle-paddling robins—running for cover. Betwixt and between, it’s the master of a thousand voices, from the salubrious plopp—the drop with a splatter—to the militaristic rat-a-tat-tat, when the rain tries to pretend it’s a handful of pebbles thrashing your windows, and on to the audible gulp when a downpour is frothing your gulleys. The Brits, reliably saturated in the subject, offer a lengthy lexicon for precipitation’s multiple personalities: there’s a basking (drenching in heavy shower); a drisk (misty drizzle); a fox’s wedding (sudden drops out of clear blue sky); a hurly-burly (thunder and lightning); a stotting (rain so hard it bounces up off the ground); and, for closers, thunner-pash (heavy shower with thunder). Because it’s so elemental, the life stuff of our very existence, the celestial surge that fills our rivers and waters our crops, rinses away the detritus, bathes all the woods, and the sidewalks as well, it’s been the subject of intense preoccupation and prognostication for a long, long time. time. Since ever ago.” (p. 85, The Book of Nature)
is there not a hint here of shared joy in precipitatory romps? can you not feel the two of us––niall et moi––luxuriating in the many, many wondrous ways to say “the rain is unrelenting”?
i am hardly alone in my enamorment of mr. williams. my best best friend, a longtime children’s librarian in the los angeles public schools, couldn’t stop texting me pictures of its pages this week, and, soon after, when i mentioned to a beloved literary friend (a sister chair, who might reveal herself below) that i’d fallen into novel love, she reminded me that she’d told me so a few years back. as always, i am late to my own party.
in any case, here’s what the new yorker had to say back at the dawn of 2020, in the year of our covid, when happiness whirled onto the world stage.
This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams (Bloomsbury). This elegiac novel is as unhurried as its setting: Faha, a village in western Ireland, “unchanged since creation” until, in the late fifties, electricity arrives. The narrator, now elderly, reminisces about that time; having come from Dublin as a teen-ager, to live with his grandparents after the death of his mother, he conceived a hopeless passion for three sisters. “We spend most of our lives guarding against washes of feeling, I’m guarding no more,” he promises. The novel’s description of a lost rural life style, and the gaps between a young man’s romantic expectations and the inescapable letdown of reality, is comic and poignant in equal measure.
all of which is to say that bibliotherapy is one of the world’s great cures for whate’er ails you. and even more so when it ferries you off to a wee irish village “where story was a kind of human binding,” where church pews were filled as if by unwritten order, where front doors were never closed in daytime nor backdoors locked at night, and where, we’re told, “religion lasted longer … because we were an imaginative people, and so could most vividly picture the fires of Hell.”
and wherein the self-described antiquarian narrator notes in passing, “i know it seems unlikely that Faha then might have been the place to learn how to live, but in my experience the likely is not in God’s lexicon.”
the world these days is wearying. and worrying, too. my week began with a funeral, a breathtakingly beautiful one that wove buddhist and roman catholic threads but was tragic nonetheless, and was followed by a seder where the weight of gaza and jerusalem bore down on every heart. by week’s end, i’d heard tell that my kid was nearly carjacked, and a dear friend who lives alone (and has borne already more than too much suffering) is on the cusp of twelve rounds of godawful, pray-to-God-it-works chemo for the newly-diagnosed cancer in her lungs.
the blooms outside my kitchen door were doing all they could to boost the perfumed quota in the vernal air, and the robins busied themselves constructing scrappy nests in my window box along the alley. (do not ask me to tell you the tragic tale of the mama robin who was tangled in a dessicated grapevine, nor of the nest no longer in the works.) all the earth’s wonderment––glorious as it is as winter erupts into spring––is ephemeral, is here, then, poof, it’s gone.
but what i find on the page is lasting. can be read and read again. can be indelibly inked into the files of our mind.
and so, this week, a newfound balm and friend was found. and i’ll be tucked away in faha, on the fictional irish coast, for as long as the pages will carry me. bibliotherapy rarely fails me.
what carried you away this week?
here’s a jolt of joy that took my breath away this week: the great christian mystic richard rohr, a franciscan friar and ecumenical teacher, and his new mexico-based Center for Action and Contemplation saw fit to surprise me by clipping an excerpt from The Book of Nature in his daily meditations on wednedsay. that he chose a favorite passage, the story of brother lawrence, the barefoot monk who saw God in the pots and pans of his parisian monastery kitchen, and was struck by the innate holiness of a nuck-naked little tree, only charmed me all the more. here’s a peek at the preaching of the trees.
and from this week’s commonplacing. this morsel from DH Lawrence:
The vast marvel is to be alive… The supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul… There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.
Every morning the good news pours through the field
touching every blossom every stem and each of them,
on the instant offers to be part of it— offers to lift and hold, willingly the vast burden of light
all day. In my life I have never seen it to fail— flower after flower
leaf after pearly leaf, to the acre, to the massy many, is silvered, is flooded;
and such voices spangle among it— larks and sparrows— all those small souls—
are everywhere tossing the quick wheels of pleasure from their red throats as they hang on—
as though on little masts of golden ships, to the tops of the weeds— and that’s when I come—
that’s when I come, crying out to the world: oh give me a corner of it to lift also, to sing about, to touch with my wild hands—and they do.
and this from annie dillard‘s the writing life, prose laid out as a poem by my friends at SALT Project:
One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.
Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.
The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now.
Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.
Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive.
Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
You open your safe and find ashes.
and finally, this goodbye to “poetry’s colossus,” helen vendler, whom i was blessed to call my teacher in our year of sumptuous thinking…
and blessings to you, and thanks for whirling by….
p.s. the other two books in my bibliotherapy stack (above) are william’s history of the rain, which had me at the title, and letters from max: a book of friendship, an epistolary collection between a poet and a playwright: sarah ruhl, the twice pulitzer-finalist playwright who was once teacher to poet max ritvo and quickly became dear friends, and as max’s cancer grew worse, their connection deepened. suleika jauoad ran an excerpt the other day in her isolation journals, and i ran to the library to grab a copy.
there are days we mark in silence, days best kept in solitude, in the quiet deep down places where only we can trace the contours of the shadow, the weight of how they’ve changed us, cleared the lens through which we see.
they’re the days that have left their mark on us, indelibly. the days in our lifetime that will forever inscribe the demarcation, time divided starkly––before and ever after.
one by one, or one alone, they’re the days, the dates, the hours that constitute our subterrain, the strata by which our soul is shaped and stretched and textured. it’s the timeline that draws us into depths, to keener understanding of what it means to be alive. or our life, anyway.
it might be a death or disfigurement. it might be birth, or betrothal. a beginning or an end. most often, both at once. to close one chapter is, by definition, to open the next. and while some of those days are duly announced, and bracketed with anything from helium balloons to holding our breath, it might be the weightier ones––the ones whose mark is most unexpungable––best kept in solitary vigil.
it is in the profound spaciousness of unspoken thoughts that we find the room to grope for consequence, that we fumble toward those few faint stirrings that draw us closer and closer to what becomes our truth. we can’t really find our way without the grace of our aloneness, the room where knowing comes. in the beginning and the end, we tread the thin-bare thread of life with but our God to take us by the hand. or so i believe.
and here’s a truth: by the time we’ve hobbled through a few decades (or less or more, depending on our lot), we all accumulate those days. the days whose dates we don’t forget. the day we met our one true love. the long night of our first miscarriage. the house fire that chased us out. the last look into someone’s eyes. the first time the doctor put breath to the word cancer, and quickly added how surprised he was they’d found it deep inside us.
we keep those days in cloak of silence because we are sifting still through all the ways they’ve reconfigured who we know ourselves to be, and how we move through time.
yesterday was one such day for me. one year since i awoke on a gurney, my surgeon by my side. i shudder now to remember it, though at the time i didn’t shudder at all. i was brave that day. it hadn’t sunk in so deeply yet. ever since, and all year long, i’ve had glimpses both of bravery and brokenness. i’ve cried buckets and, then, i’ve set my shoulders firm; i’ve faced the worst of my fears with unflinching questions, endless hours reading, and airplane rides to doctors i wish i’d never needed to know. i’ve slowly, slowly, tried to imagine adding numbers to my years.
april 18 is a date i’ve uttered umpteen times in the last year. date of surgery: date of diagnosis. date of new beginning. date of counting time with deeper intention and attention.
maybe the date will dim, as i move on from it. as 2024 fades to 2025 and . . . (and hallelujah for the 4 that now sits firmly where the 3 began.) a year ago today was the first time i saw my life measured in the span best known as five-year-survival rate, the chance you’ll be around five years hence. believe you me, it’s a bracing thing to count forward and hope and pray you cross the line to––bing! bing! bing! your magic number is….––04.18.28. the date now yours with odds attached.
i’m going for broke here, and placing bets. but that’s only because at this very moment what swells in me is hope. quick as the clouds scuttle across an april sky, i might flinch, get scared, and pull my money from the table.
my point is simply to say that there are days that define who we are, and we keep those days in silent vigil, wrap those days in certain grace. and we pray to God we come out the other side, with lessons learned and underscored, as we reach and reach toward that one repeating prayer: dear Holy Gracious God, let me make of this one most sacred day every iota of blessing that is mine––and yours––to give.
some mornings are so much clumsier than others; this is a clumsy one, but my vow to try–even when i mostly miss–is one i take to heart. to write raw is its own peculiar dare. but here’s the why: because every fleeting while you just might catch a dust mote of life as you know it. and thus i will keep swatting at the passing motes, in hopes of putting words to those ineffable pieces of the puzzle. because we are all bumbling along together here, and in good company we find light and air.
as you look back across the plane of your life, are there days you’ve not forgotten, days you note alone and without mention, because you know how lastingly they’ve marked you? and that’s a questions whose answer you needn’t give voice to here. but just a prompt.
i imagine it’s been well-established that i am of the homebody persuasion. the sort of girl who thrums inside the cozy confines of space and time i know by heart. to plop behind the wheel and point myself in a direction i’ve not been is, well, to stretch me. to accelerate the tempo of my little heart, to bring on the rumblies in my tummy. and so it was as i set out for The Driftless (a topography that deserves every drop of its capital consonants) a week ago today.
for starters, i got lost. yes, yes, after dutifully trying to follow my index-card directions through country roads and farmer fields, i decided maybe it was safer to let the little voice tell me where to go rather than glancing down and trying to find the numbers i had scribbled. well, news flash: there are TWO mineral points in ol’ wisconsin, and the one i was steered toward was the one in otherwise unmarked farrow field. that little voice announced, “you’ve arrived. your destination is on the right,” whilst i looked up and saw literally nothing but an undulating plot of shaved-off stalks. hmm. this must not be, i intuitively surmised.
i was miles from nowhere, and 67 miles from where i needed to be. where the world’s loveliest host had a turkey meatloaf in the oven, and asparagus steaming in a skillet. ah, but in due time, rollercoastering along country roads, past baby calves (yes, i know it’s redundant, but i like to say it that way) all gathered under little calf-ling igloos, which must be the latest in dairy husbandry for each baby calf had its own domed shelter, and a place to escape the drifting snows, past rock formations that felt prehistoric or laid there by ancient peoples, through towns that time forgot and that i prayed still stuck to old ways, and not the toxic juice that’s infected so very much of old america, i pulled in the gravel lane that was my destination.
and, from the first footfall inside the charming farmhouse, i was home. daffodils and aldo leopold awaited on the bedside table, and the bed itself was a cloud of comforters. each morning that sunrise above greeted me from the kitchen windows. and each morning, it took my breath away, and filled me with holy airs.
the folks i met were as fine and fluent in the poetries of earth as any souls i’ve met along my way. i met a farmer who plows his field with draft horses, and writes letters back and forth with wendell berry (be still my heart!). and another farmer who used to cook at chez panisse. (yes, that chez panisse, the one in berkeley CA, where alice waters revolutionized the kitchen.) i scrubbed pots and pans beside a woman whose heart must pump in gold. and i heard tales of keeping watch on eagles’ nests.
and then, come sunday morning, after hiking through the woods, and talking books in a charming indie book store (where croissants were rising in the ovens behind me), i took to the pulpit in a little country church to deliver what you might call the sermon, but which the priest referred to as a “reflection” since i’ve not passed the sermon-licensing exams. and as i wove threads from the doubting thomas gospel and the book of nature’s sometimes tangible God, i looked out on a congregation of fine souls who were listening in a way i’ve never known: heads cocked, a posture of deep attentiveness, eyes on the pulpit, you could hear a pin drop in that blessed church. and i saw how good souls are hungry for a word of wisdom with their sunday-morning coffee. if this is church, and i do believe it is, may we become a people who know to carve out time to put down phones, dial down the pings, and find our way to wherever it is the holy wisdoms come.
not an hour later, the whole adventure in soul-stretching reached its crescendo when every last soul at the basement coffee hour stood and raised an arm toward me, or laid a hand on my shoulders, and at the behest of the priest, father christian was his name, blessed me with a prayer that had me all but gulping back a walloping sob. when i felt the tiny hand of father christian’s little boy, a kid with special needs, squeezing my left arm, i really truly nearly lost it, as they say. instead, i held his hand and together we squeezed and prayed all the way to the last amen.
and then i motored home, not quite the way i got there. and forever deepened and shifted by the glorious goodness of my new friends who dwell in the driftless.
i came home, of course, to sunlight-blocking moon, and a garden erupting in springtime’s accelerandos. and i spent a good bit of week deep-breathing all of that, and getting mighty muddy too. but i also came home to friends who are grieving inconceivable losses. and when i found this prayer-poem from jan richardson, i knew i needed to pass it along. so, here, too, for all of you is a poem to keep for when grief comes to you or someone you love, or even someone you might not know too well at all. jan is a poet, artist, ordained minister in the united methodist church. i was introduced to her years ago now, by my very own night chaplain (slj to all of you, a regular visitor here at the chair). and as jan’s life was torn open by the sudden death of her husband, she has only deepened. and her work all the more mesmerizing. this is from not long after the death of her husband, when she was coming up on her first valentine’s day without him. her words are among the truest i’ve ever read. she is pure blessing.
gremlins seem to be lurking here this morning, so let us see if we can fling this to the cyberwires that carry this from my kitchen table to yours. question for the day, besides “will this work?” is where did you find holiness this week?
and here is a special wink and nod for the great good souls i didn’t get to mention above: the glass sculptor who sailed the world before planting herself on high street, in downtown mineral point. the ones who’d taught for years and years in alaska before sinking deep roots in driftless loam. the bibliophile who opened an indie bookstore, and thought to attach a cooking school besides. and most of all to jane, my storytelling hostess whose graces left me nothing short of gobsmacked.
long a proponent of “the pretty way,” the winding way to wherever i’m headed, i am up against the GPS current, the Waze current, those little voices that come out of the ubiquitous boxes in our lives that try to tell us what to do––and the shortest, fastest, sometimes blandest way to do it.
it’s one thing when running late to a doctor’s appointment on a rainy afternoon when the roads are under construction. but not so when the afternoon is a span of time unmoored from anything else, except an eventual need to show up somewhere.
i am seizing one of those days today, as i drift north and a little bit west and steer myself toward a corner of the world i’ve never seen, a corner called “the driftless” (and if i ever employed my caps lock key, that d would be a D, as in a capital proper-name letter). it’s a corner as dramatic as any in these middlelands of the continent, a chunk of 8,500 square miles described as “a sudden maze of hills” and bluffs and valleys below, rising out of the flatlands of southwestern wisconsin.
it’s the land that time (or at least a good chunk of the ice age) forgot. while the glaciers of 500 bazillion years ago steamrolled the behoozies out of the rest of these parts, they never rolled through the driftless, leaving time to do its thing: cold water streams kept on carving through rock, sculpting and clearing and doing as they pleased. the meltwater from parts beyond incised valleys and bluffs, sinkholes and springs, caves and labyrinthine cave systems. and so, in the midst of a topography best described as pancake, suddenly there is capital D drama.
i could do with a good dose of topographical drama. and today’s the day i’m making it happen. because there’s not a Siri in the world who will point me the ways i want to go, i’ve had to revert to pen and ink, and scribbled my route onto an index card. 90 to 20 which turns into 69, quick right onto 81, then city road G/N and, at last, onto 23. u.s. highways and state roads, roads with alphabetical options, and streets with no names at all. that’s how i’ll get where i’m going.
and all the while i will marvel, and gawk. might even put the car in reverse, to gawk all over again (don’t tell the designated “careful driver” in the family, he who would insist on seizing my wheel).
it’s all a way of seizing time. of gulping down as much as you can of the wonders not too far beyond our very own windows. for the most part, my days trace and re-trace old, familiar routes. and for a homebody like me, that’s a very fine thing. if given my druthers, i’d stay curled in my window seat for hours on end. but, when distant parts call, i’m intent on getting there my way.
which is always, always the wiggledy way.
the way that makes me so blessedly thrilled to be drinking it in.
luci shaw is as dear a soul as she is a fine poet. and this morsel from luci fell on my path this week, in a resurrected interview with Image Journal. here’s luci’s take on why we write:
I have a magnet on my file cabinet that says, Write to learn what you know. So often the physical jotting of words in a journal or on a screen is like a key opening a lock. We know more than we know. When that door is opened, we find unsuspected treasures that can become available to others in our writing. This is a mystery. Because words and ideas have been recorded for centuries, they are available to enlarge our own thinking. We can connect with the words of the great writers of the past—Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Dante, Donne—because they were written down and preserved. It is magical to realize that their ideas are still flying, reaching over hundreds of years into our lifetimes, and as we read them, their revelations are transferred into our modern minds. I just wrote a poem inspired by a saying of Tertullian, an early church father, about birds, and the cross they make with their wings when flying.
and a little dose of poet and zen monk jane hirshfield to wind up the week….
To Drink
I want to gather your darkness in my hands, to cup it like water and drink. I want this in the same way as I want to touch your cheek— it is the same— the way a moth will come to the bedroom window in late September, beating and beating its wings against cold glass; the way a horse will lower his long head to water, and drink, and pause to lift his head and look, and drink again, taking everything in with the water, everything. ––Jane Hirshfield
how might you make the most of time today?
p.s. i’m headed to mineral point, wisconsin, for a weekend of Book of Nature extravaganzas, beginning with a saturday morning nature hike through a wooded (and likely muddy) preserve, followed by an afternoon book talk in a charming book store called The Republic of Letters, followed by a gathering at a new cook shop, followed by my first from-the-pulpit sermon at Trinity Episcopal Church on sunday morning. then it’ll be back home the windiest way i can wiggle…(here’s a little recording the mineral point chamber of commerce posted who knows where…)
in the long tradition of seekers and sages, silence is a constant. a leitmotif maybe. a rhythm that ebbs and flows. it is into the silence that we surrender to enter the depths of our soul, the unencumbered spaces where whispers are heard, where the stirring comes.
in silence, the earthly noise is muffled. we tune our inner ear, the one that’s tied to the soul. the one that allows the sacred to find its way in.
and so, on this day, this good friday, a day long held in silence for me, i will make room for that long quenching that comes when i am alone in the depths, in the stillness.
this is the first holy week in a very long time where the braiding of the two traditions that animate this old house — jewish passover and christian easter — are not entwined. easter i only recently learned falls on the first sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. passover, though, always begins on a full moon, the 15th day of the month of nisan on the hebrew calendar, and because the lunar and solar calendars are marching to their own separate tunes, every once in a while there is a good bit of moon between the two holidays.
so this year, i will be deep in good friday all day, as i was deep in holy thursday last night, the breathtakingly spare hour when, in a nod to jesus’ last supper, a seder in which he knew he would be betrayed by one of his closest twelve, and retreated to the garden of gethsemane to weep and to pray, the whole church was stripped of ornament and color. the altar was washed, the vestments of priest and deacon and choir were removed. every candle was snuffed. we left the church in thick silence.
my own blessed mother held this day, this good friday, in a reverence that seeped early on into the depths of me. silence was kept from noon till the hour of jesus’ death on the cross, which we somehow had determined was three in the afternoon. and so, all these years later, i keep that silence.
most often i take to my window seat, the perch looking out into the trees. i will pick up my caryll houselander, the 20th-century mystic whose words penetrate me like no other, her meditations on the stations of the cross, the dusty desolate path of jesus’ walk to the hill of golgotha, the hill where he would die.
there is much to pray on and for this year. the brokenness, the darkness, is plenty. and all we’ve got to begin to mend the brokenness, to kindle a flickering light in the darkness, is the small but inextinguishable capacity of whatever antidotes we can muster: the smallest kindness; the rare attention to someone else’s suffering; the unexpected delivery of joy.
we can, in our pointillist way, drop dot upon dot of goodness onto the canvas that is our moment in time on this planet. hope stirs as long as we can stand in the face of darkness, and muscle our few and feeble yet insuppressible defiances: we will not surrender to those forces we know to be counter to the sacred; we will not let all the light be extinguished. we are our own last best hopes for the world we imagine. and i will enter into the silence and the depths of the sorrow today to chart my way toward whatever light i can muster.
so help me God.
because it is increasingly my way to bring you the voices of souls far wiser and deeper than i might ever be, i have gathered up a few who stirred me this week.
first up, henri nouwen, restless seeker, priest and theologian, comes along, as antidote to so much suffering, reminding us–in one of his most indelible passages–to be surprised by joy:
Learn the discipline of being surprised not by suffering but by joy. As we grow old . . . there is suffering ahead of us, immense suffering, a suffering that will continue to tempt us to think that we have chosen the wrong road. . . . But don’t be surprised by pain. Be surprised by joy, be surprised by the little flower that shows its beauty in the midst of a barren desert, and be surprised by the immense healing power that keeps bursting forth like springs of fresh water from the depth of our pain.
henri nouwen
and praying this isn’t too dark, this epiphany from louise erdrich‘s the painted drum:
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
louise erdrich
and, bon mot for all who love poetry and find it endlessly a wonder, this from david hinton, chinese literature scholar:
Poetry is the cosmos awakened to itself. Narrative, reportage, explanation, idea: language is the medium of self-identity, and we normally live within that clutch of identity, identity that seems to look out at and think about the Cosmos as if from some outside space. But poetry pares language down to a bare minimum, thereby opening it to silence. And it is there in the margins of silence that poetry finds its deepest possibilities — for there it can render dimensions of consciousness that are much more expansive than that identity-center, primal dimensions of consciousness as the Cosmos awakened to itself. At least this is true for classical Chinese poetry, shaped as it is by Taoist and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist thought into a form of spiritual practice. In its deepest possibilities, its inner wilds, poetry is the Cosmos awakened to itself — and the history of that awakening begins where the Cosmos begins.
where were you surprised by joy this week? and — only to ask yourself — what might you bring to this world today to turn back the darkness, to begin to mend the brokenness?
this is the little hyacinth that surprised me this week. a bulb tossed aside at the end of last spring, she decided to bloom amid an otherwise forgotten patch along the alley
according to celestial alignments, the shadow now is equal, light and dark. the sun has crossed the equator, and here on the northern half of the orb, spring is upon us. except that as i type, snow is blanketing my tender spring tendrils, and the walk is slick, and, well, tis the very picture of springtime here in the heartlands, where you’re wise not to count your blooms before the ides of may.
my heart too is heavy, beating in time with that of a mother i know who is off in the mountains of northern california searching for her blessed daughter who went hiking from the tassajara zen mountain center on monday, and five days and cold dark nights later still has not been found. i ask for prayers for caroline.
motherhearts are a communal collective. we cannot pause the pounding against our own chest wall, we cannot sleep soundly, when we know profoundly of another mother in unimaginable distress. be it the mothers of syria, or gaza, or israel’s kibbutzim, or my long-ago newsroom compatriot now strapped into her hiking boots, hearing only the echo of her own cry as she walks the remote yet exquisite topography where, somewhere, her firstborn is lost, is lying, is awaiting her mama’s arms and a wrapping in blankets.
my prayers have been looping nonstop, clouding out most other thoughts, since i first heard word. caroline’s mama is a woman of incredible, unbreakable faith. the notes she is sending back home, here in chicago, bolster my faltering. “my gratitude and hope outweigh my fears,” she wrote in her last short update, teaching me a thing or two about how to be strong in the face of the unbearable.
because the promise of springtime is, indeed, equal parts shadow and light, i turn to the poets for a dappling of light. and we begin with emily, the belle of amherst, and quickly turn to the little-known artist who inspired her:
“to be a flower,” emily dickinson wrote in her 1865 poem, “bloom,” considered a pre-ecological work, “is profound responsibility.”
clarissa munger badger
a passionate lifelong gardener, emily D (“a keen observer of the house of life who made of it a temple of beauty,” as cultural critic maria popova once put it) had fallen under the spell of wildflowers as a teenager while composing her herbarium of 424 blooms native to new england. but, writes popova, it was an “uncommonly beautiful” book her father gave her just before she turned thirty that rocket-blasted her poetic passion for nature’s own garden: wild flowers drawn and colored from nature by the botanical artist and poet clarissa munger badger (may 20, 1806–december 14, 1889).
published in 1859, the same year charles darwin’s on the origin of species shook science, badger’s book “contained twenty-two exquisite scientifically accurate paintings of common new england wildflower species — violets and harebells, the rhododendron and the honeysuckle — each paired with a poem bridging the botanical and the existential: some by titans like percival and longfellow, some by long-forgotten poets of her time and place, some by badger herself,” writes popova.
seven years later, badger brought her brush to the beauty of wildflowers’ domestic counterparts, the blooms of greenhouse and garden: the pansy and the lily, the day-blazing geranium and the night-blooming cactus, the tulip and the rose, and once again pairing her paintings with poems, she celebrated garden flowers as “brilliant hopes, all woven in gorgeous tissues,” as “stars… wherein we read our history.”
bluebellhawthorne
another poet, one i dream of sitting down to dinner with, or more in keeping with her ilk, plopping on a porch swing, she with cigarette burning orange against the black of night, me, merely pumping my merry little legs. dorianne laux is her name, and you’ve seen me write of her here. she has a brand new craft book, companion of sorts to her earlier the poet’s companion, and the new book, finger exercises for poets, is “an engaging invitation to practice poetry alongside a master,” and it’ll be out this july from w.w. norton & company. (they still send me advance reader copies; bless them.)
here’s a passage i knew i needed to share, from glorious, glorious dorianne’s introduction:
“My instrument is the immensity of language, the techniques and effect of crafting images, shaping sound and rhythm, creating new combinations with the single notes of words, each colliding or coming together, meshing or crashing, standing firm or tumbling. There are eighty-eight keys on a piano, six hundred thousand words in the English language. The patterns, the sequences, and permutations of both are endless. For me, language is another kind of music.
“I practice poetry. This book invites you to practice along with me.”
and i close, this snowy spring morning, with yet another master of language, and truth-telling: james baldwin. (this comes to me from a french monk whose writing i follow; laurence freeman is his name, and here’s a bit of what he sent this week from the bonnevaux centre for peace, in the southwest of france): “toward the end of his life, baldwin gave a television interview in which he was asked to reflect on the essential subject of his classic, groundbreaking novel, giovanni’s room. baldwin’s answer is an extraordinary meditation on love, and in particular, how it can serve a kind of educational purpose in our lives.” here’s what baldwin said, laid out as a poem.
Q: What’s the novel, Giovanni’s Room, about?
Baldwin’s answer:
It’s about what happens to you if you can’t love anybody. It doesn’t make any difference whether you can’t love a woman, or can’t love a man — if you can’t love anybody, you’re dangerous. Because you’ve no way of learning humility. No way of learning that other people suffer. No way of learning how to use your suffering, and theirs, to get from one place to another.
In short, you fail the human responsibility, which is to love each other.
+ James Baldwin
what are the lessons of love you learned in this week of shadow and light?
my “springtime” garden, whitened.
p.s. illustration at the top is indeed one of clarissa munger badger’s beauties. and i will ask once again, please please offer up prayers for rescue for blessed, blessed caroline, her mama, her papa, and all who are holding their most sacred breath…..
dear reader, fear not. at last writing, as i bemoaned the absence of progeny in this old house, and awoke to the relative quietude of life as empty nester, i might have seeded worry. what will she do, that poor blithering mama, you might have wondered. will she clock her time staring out the window, awaiting the return of said progeny galloping in from distant plains, in need of laundry, grilled cheese, or any other assorted task for which a mother is distinctly schooled?
worry not: purpose has arrived.
yes, indeedy. in the form of unknown possibly invisible creatures lurking in the chamber where the recently departed (from this house, that is) now attempts to sleep. these invisible and invincible forces seem intent on making the boy rub his nose and eyes and sneeze. all night long. and well into the daylight.
and so, the call has come. i am (somewhat) needed. or, at least my vacuum is. and i, taking no such task lightly, i’ve equipped myself with a whole battery of dust-bunny-battling weaponry. just last night my friends at amazon delivered the air purifier deemed best in class by the folks at wirecutter, that band of trusty testers at the new york times. and i’ve a gallon jug of vinegar, a mop, and microfiber dust cloths, enough to wipe out legions of pesky mites.
dust buster am i.
dust bunny under microscope: what we’re up against in the dust bunny challenge
all of which points to the foregone conclusion that ol’ mothers never ever pass their expiration dates. we are not sent off to distant pastures. our aprons and our mops, never really set out to dry. we do not wither on the vine. we are, if not invincible, indelibly anchored in the domestic equation.
why, just this week the kid who mostly dashed in and out of the house whilst he was living here, has seen fit to call me for instructions on: a.) how to work a wet mop; b.) what to take for allergies; c.) what else to take for allergies; and d.) all of the above.
it’s a reassuring thing to know the worry chambers of my mama brain need not turn off. i can still muster up a storm in there, scheming up the options, imagining the worst. and, then, as i’ve done since the first note of first pregnancy, i leap into action. if i can slay one dragon––be it lost mitten in the long ago, or dust mites under the bed today––i sidle one inch nearer to indispensability. or so i pretend.
the truth, as i’ve long known, is that love––in any form––does not subscribe to geographical or chronological bounds. i can love as fiercely and devotedly whether you’re under my roof or far far from here. ours is a world in which distance is a given. we are no longer a people of the shtetl or the lane. i only wish those i love lived nearby enough to rap at the door and sidle in for tea. or late night storytelling.
be it by the powers of imagination or a polished knack for empathy, the human heart is the inexplicable muscle with unbound capacity to stretch from here to eternity. and in so doing, we can fiercely and fine-grainedly love the ones too far away or the ones who are no longer, for their essence burns on and on as long as we are breathing. and, sometimes, in the uncanniest of ways: in reaching for my mother-in-law’s signature-red coffee mug on any morning, i can suddenly hear her singsong way of telling me her faith in me has never dulled. and she’s been gone now for nearly three years.
the resurrective powers of love are without rhyme or reason. and, indeed, they save us.
i’ve thought plenty in recent months about the muscularity of love. how it has propelled me up steep inclines, ones i might not have found the nerve to climb had i not felt some forcefield behind me. i’ve a never-ending fascination with this ineffability we know as love, not as valentine ephemera, but love as true physical force, love as divinely inspired. with the power to heal. the power to quell. and, sometimes, the power to slay a bunny made of dust.
your thoughts on the mystical powers of love welcome here:
a desk cleaner than it’s been in a long, long while…
the house i walked into the other day, upon return from faraway, was not the house i left. mostly, it looked the same. same pair of stools at the kitchen counter. same loose brick on the backdoor step. but here and there things were missing: coats no longer weighing down the coat hooks; size 12 shoes, all gone; the big ol’ speaker with the disco lights, the one parked beside the birdseed bin ever since last springtime’s college graduation, it had up and vanished.
and the silence was the loudest i had heard in a long, long while.
whilst i was away, there arrived an absence.
my beloved and i, for the first time in nearly 31 years, now dwell in an empty nest.
the younger fledgling has flown the coop. and we, the grownups, haven’t much clue what to do with the newborn stillness.
while i was off in the nation’s capital, puttering about Boy No. 1’s apartment, planting myself in the way back of his law school lecture hall, motoring about the countryside in search of sought-after antiques, Boy No. 2 set south for the ‘hood to which he was born.
he left behind a room that would be described as empty, if not for the torrent of assorted trinkets strewn in his wake. (it’s a collection of castoffs that counts among its contents a box of not-yet-dusty college paraphernalia, a half-burned chicago-scented candle (who knew?!), the oddest assortment of half-empty bottles and squeezed-dry tubes, outgrown clothes, and, yes, a tall stack of various welcome-home placards we’d penned upon his many returns over the years.)
as of one week ago, this old house boasts an official population of two and only two.
i, though, only stepped into the stillness the day before last––late to the game, as i so often am. my mate, the boy’s papa, has had a six-day jump on the vast emptiness, and he deems it a “sad, sad” state of being.
we just plain miss the kid, is the gist of it.
and while a piece of me is feeling the pangs, i’m just as keenly approaching this new endeavor as if a room to which i’d never before entered. i’ve always known it was there at the end of the hall but the knob hadn’t yet turned, and so as i now tiptoe about, peeking into its nooks and crannies, i am still getting to know my way.
for starters, the quiet. the pared-down daily rhythms (no more nightly shuttle of the old sedan to park it near the train once the meters dozed off at 9 p.m., and where it awaited the boy’s 1:05 a.m. arrival from downtown, thus sparing him a long-enough walk in the cold and the dark and whatever the weather gods chose to hurl on his route). no more rushing to throw some semblance of breakfast in a rumpled brown bag as he raced off to work and we all held our breath that he’d beat the train to the station. (and, yes, yes, if you’re starting to catch on that we might be among the dotingest parents that ever there were, we plead utterly guilty.)
did i mention the newfound dearth of laundry? or the fact that the cupboards look to be barer than ever before?
in that way that the mind plays tricks, as it wraps itself around those episodes in life it’s not before encountered (after a birth, a death, a diagnosis), i find it playing a form of peek-a-boo. an almost haunting hide-and-seek. i forget the kid is not asleep behind the bedroom door. wake up and skip a beat or two till i remember not to check that he made it home the night before. remind myself there’s no need to leave the porch light on when i tiptoe off to sleep.
in this day and age, where youngins come and go till their middlings or older, this new empire of emptiness cannot be called an inevitable geography. while the college years gave us a taste of it, this time round it seems a sharper, bolder border, a less permeable line than the empty nest of yore, when the emptiness ebbed and flowed according to academic calendar.
this time the kid is paying his own utilities, and sending off a monthly check to the landlord. and except for the comfy armchair and the rug he whisked from his upstairs room, he needs us not in his domestic equation.
and while he whistles the freedom song, his papa and i are fumbling in a fog across the contours of this new state of being. largely, i find myself deeply curious, and admit to something of a relieved sigh that i no longer will wake in the night to be sure i hear him clomping up the stairs.
time turns and turns in labyrinthine spirals, and with every twist we see ourselves from whole new angles. though i know full well that parenting is a post without pause, and one i intend to hold onto till my very last breath, this empty nestiness allows for––begs for––a whole new deepening. we’re a duet again, his papa and i, and on our own to chart our days. indeed, it’s solitude i’ll oft befriend.
which makes me think that now must be the hour in a lifetime when our soul begins its quickening, something of a leavening, with more hours to read, more years to remember, heavier questions to ponder. my prayer is that with the quiescence there comes a gathering of deeper grace.
of course, it aches a bit to think we’re past the years where cacophony was a daily occurence. where my hours were filled with comings and goings, and assorted bunches of kids clumped in the basement or were planted in sleeping bags or stuffed in the way back of the old red wagon. where an hour to myself was both rarity and marvel.
but maybe, just maybe, the quiet that’s tiptoed in will point the way toward the wise old lady i’ve always wanted to become.
and let us indulge in a glistening bit of mary O here this morning. an old favorite, something that indeed kills me with delight….
Mindful by Mary Oliver
Every day I see or hear something that more or less
kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle
in the haystack of light. It is what I was born for— to look, to listen,
to lose myself inside this soft world— to instruct myself over and over
in joy, and acclamation. Nor am I talking about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful, the very extravagant— but of the ordinary, the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations. Oh, good scholar, I say to myself, how can you help
but grow wise with such teachings as these— the untrimmable light,
of the world, the ocean’s shine, the prayers that are made out of grass?
how did you navigate through the rocks and shoals of those uncharted landscapes life has surely thrown your way?
pull up a chair 