bushed.

it’s not familiar terrain. not a channel to which i am often tuned. not among my minimal daily requirements.

fact is, i’m not often bushed. not even tired, particularly.

most days, i rocket-bolt out of bed. spend the day pinging from R to Z to Q — often curlicue-ing around the Q — then ponging back to B, C, and maybe W for the end-of-day denouement.

what i mean is: tired, the state of being, is not notched in my gear shift. i was born with my eyes wide open, i’m told (for i’ve little first-hand recollection thereof). and nowadays i’m married to a fellow who thinks one of the funniest things about me (and, yes, his list is long) is that i can’t stand to sleep with the shades drawn. i might miss, say, the first tumbling snowflake. or the pit-a-pat of plopping rain. might not be tickled awake by the first shard of dawn’s light.

full-throttle is my natural gear. and it’s where i’ve been hovering for the last few weeks, as the tick-tock toward my sweet boy’s turn on the bimah (that’s hebrew for altar) drew closer and closer. why, there were flowers to plop onto tables, and argyle socks to pull from the drawer. there were old friends flying in for a few nights’ rest under our eaves. and whole flocks of butterflies to chase from my little guy’s tummy. i was lucky if i’d get an hour or three of big ZZZs before bolting awake. and then i’d just lie there, drumming up worries, till finally i’d surrender and haul myself out from under the sheets.

no wonder me and the sweet boy above have assumed a similar posture: sprawled out and weary. pretty much unable to flinch even a muscle.

took me a few nights to dial down the rev in my engines. didn’t catch a full night’s sleep till just last night. meaning it’s been close to a month since i snoozed more than just a few hours. meaning my days have stretched on and endlessly on, running on fumes, my tank teetering precipitously toward E for empty.

i’ve been craving dark green leafies. and considering frying up liver and onions (far as i got in that department, was the consideration and swift dismissal). i wondered if red blood cells might be in order, a booster pack infused via least nettlesome route.

fear not, i’ll right this old teetering ship. i’ll find my mo-jo again. all it’ll take is a few slow turns of the globe. a few nights curled under the sheets. i’ll be good as new in no time.

which makes it excellent timing that just this week the latest issue of northwestern university’s alumni magazine is spilling out of mailboxes across the planet. back on the very last page, under the heading, “purple prose,” a pun on the school color more than a diss on the exaggerated writing, there spill a few words, all penned by me.

while i practice my deep-breathing exercises and shop for those dark leafy greens, i thought i’d leave you with yet another essay on the art of paying attention, and why it so matters.

without further ado, from the pages of northwestern magazine, curl up and consider this:

STOP, LOOK AND LISTEN

By Barbara Mahany

It was in the murky shadows of an auditorium, on a wintry Sunday morning when I might have wished I’d stayed under the covers, that I noticed the man down the row who raised his hand to add to the voices talking about God and death and the fathomless unknown.

Because I know this man to be wise, and not one to speak unless there’s something worth saying, and because I know this man buried his wife when their two little children were barely old enough to go to school, I listened. Because the man speaks in a rasp — sounds like chunks of gravel chafing against each other deep in his throat — it took determined listening.

This is what I heard, unspooled in one unbroken tendril: “When my son asked why people die, I said, ‘Because it means we have a limited number of days, so how we live matters.’ ”

And suddenly I knew I’d heard the words of a prophet there in the shadows on a Sunday morning. And, suddenly, I was so deeply grateful I’d climbed out from under the covers.

I couldn’t stop thinking of what he said — “… we have a limited number of days, so how we live matters.”

Nor could I stop thinking that he’d first spoken those words to a young boy who’d lost his too-young mother, a boy who would no longer climb into her lap, feel her arms wrap around him, a boy who’d had no choice in absorbing the astringent truth of his father’s lesson: Our days are limited, pay attention to how you live.

I’ve been a disciple of paying attention for years. I’d known — because my own father died, too young at 52, before I had a chance to say goodbye — that our days are numbered. But it was in the way that raspy voice framed those two truths into a single conditional equation, that it stirred me as never before.

In fact, it was the very gift of paying attention — of not turning to my so-called smartphone during yet another Sunday morning’s conversation at the synagogue — that allowed me to take in the words of the wise man a few seats to the east of where I’d plopped with my paper cup of cardboard-box coffee.

It’s become more urgent than ever, this practice of paying attention, especially in this world so terminally distracted by Attention Deficit of the Worst Disorder.

It’s the only way I know — short of climbing behind the monastery walls — to slow the mad-dashing, to quiet the incessant noise, to breathe in and out deeply. To awake to the sacred that surrounds us, that lifts us out of the meaninglessness that numbs us, that corners us into thinking there’s no sin in “killing a few hours.”

We have a limited number of days, so how we live matters.

Here’s how I try to stitch holiness into the quotidian hours of the everyday: I set my alarm an hour earlier than I need to be roused. I tiptoe down the stairs and out into my garden. I quiet my soul. I might catch a sliver of moon. Or the first shards of sunlight. I drink in the birdsong. I crouch down low, take in the poetry of the morning’s dew, the glass-beaded luminescence that captures the slant of the sun, refracts it, refines it, illumines the dawn.

It’s that first hour that fine-tunes my soul for the day. And it’s a rhythm, a depth, I try to hold onto, no matter what the day hurls my way.

It’s become what’s aptly called “a practice.” Practice for slowing my deep inner clock. Practice for opening all of my pores — each of the sensory channels, those vessels that draw in the holy — for the countless moments of grace that might otherwise escape me. Practice as in something I try again and again, hoping one of these days I might get it right.

Nearly every world religion, or any mindfulness for that matter, insists on the wisdom of looping back at regular intervals, hitting the pause, blocking out chatter and tuning in to the still, small voice that you might only hear if you’re quiet. Truly quiet. And paying exquisite attention to the whispers all around. The ones that remind us of our own small place on the globe. And our too-short stay here.

The ones who, in the murky shadow of a Sunday morning, might call out from the darkness, and utter the few short words that, months later, urge us — still — to deeper and deeper attention:

“We have a limited number of days,” spoke the father to his motherless son. “So how we live matters.”

And we listened.

Barbara Mahany ’82 MS is a longtime Chicago journalist. Her first book, Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door (Abingdon Press), will be published in October.

dear chair friends, how do you re-juice your tank when it’s drained to near empty?

p.s. photo above is young T shortly after stepping down from the bimah, and his chanting of the Torah. fairly certain he was lifted by angels up there, for he soared to heights neither he nor i had ever imagined.

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August 21, 2014

susurrations: the blessed rinse of a summer morning’s rain

it came without throat clearing. no rumble off in the distance. no dark skies, foretelling. in fact, the golden orb of sun was rising through the branches of the pines.

but there it was, just beyond the screen, the back door opened to welcome in the summer morning’s offerings.

a drip. a drop. a plop. another plop, plop, plop.

the susurrations of a summer morning’s rains.

the ping that hit the skylight confirmed it: the heavens had sprung the softest, lulling-est leak.

and all at once, i felt my shoulders sigh. heard a gentle whoof of air bellow out my lips. it felt, once again, as if God almighty had reached long arms through the clouds, applied mighty finger tips to brow, and began to make the little circles on the plane above my eyes, the ones that always, always rinse away the worries.

thank you, i whispered, and whisper still, as the gentle benediction of the summer rain soothes on.

i’d been up early, as i’ve been of late; out from under the sheets once the 5 blinked onto the clock’s face beside my bed. i was fumbling for the coffee beans, had already opened the screen door to let in the morning air and the first dabs of light soaking into the inky dome of waning night.

and that’s when the first plop dropped. and i perked my ears. perked my soul, too. starting feeling not so all alone in the dim light of my kitchen ministrations. i walked to the door, inspected the brick walk, and sure enough, the water spots spread like chicken pox on a baby’s bum.

now, i’m 300-percent certain that my strung-out nerves did not figure into the morning’s celestial weather convocation. no one made a motion to be sure to crank the faucet just above my house, in hopes of dousing the wildfires that threatened to scorch my inner wiring. but there are moments when you discard all reason, and you roll with the whimsy that the rains were meant for you. that someone somehow knew just the meteorological prescription for your morning’s maladies.

so i dodged the raindrops, and wandered out to my summer porch, where the wicker chair offers the best perch for taking in the surround-sound of a morning’s wash. a gentle rumble or two finally did announce that this rain was real, and might linger for awhile.

and instead of worrying about the kid whose mama had called last night to tell me about the whopping case of head critters just discovered at her house and on her kid’s head (a head that had been in close proximity to my own kid’s, just the night before), and instead of worrying about the picture show that might or might not work at my little one’s dance party, and instead of worrying about whether my little guy might collapse into a dead faint as he gets up to chant the Torah (so very terrified is he of this call to the bimah, the Hebrew word for ‘altar’), i sat and soaked up the susurrations of the summer’s rain.

in between the plops, i heard a holy whisper: be not afraid. the heavens surround you, hold you, will not let you wobble.

and then, a final psssst, and this: might not be a bad idea to douse yourself in tea tree oil, the sure combatant for those creepy-crawly things that, at the mere mention of their existence, make your hairs stand on end.

amen to summer rains, and end-of-august worries, as the school year races toward us, as the long-awaited bar mitzvah is upon us, and our old house fills with beloved people who love us enough to interrupt their regularly scheduled programming to strap on seat belts and fly our way. i figured today might be better than tomorrow, friday, for tap-tapping at the keyboard, and then the rain came and tickled my brain. i’ll be changing sheets, and choreographing airport runs tomorrow morning, and you needn’t listen in on all that noise. next time i type here, one boy will be back to college, and eighth grade will have begun for another. i’ll be home alone, and the to-do list won’t be quite so long. though, just the other side of this bar mitzvah, that blessed book, Slowing Time, promises to demand my attentions.

till then, the only prayer request that matters: dear God, please keep T’s knees from buckling, and may his chanting be heard all the way to new jersey, where his beloved grandpa, who cannot be among the flock who flies here, will be listening with all his blessed heart.

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August 15, 2014

the pure oxygen of prayer

shortly before i fluttered open my eyes this morning, i steered my rumbly-tummied self into the safest place i know: the arms of who i know to be God.

i’ve been doing it, i realized, all my life. in all the tight squeezes and lightless tunnels, in all the passages when to-do lists drive my day, and i demonstrate a masterful knack for conjuring worries of assorted size and shape and girth. now, for instance. with one week till my sweet boy’s bar mitzvah, and somewhere in the offing, the pages of my book being spilled with words i’ve typed from my heart for years and years, this patch in here has been an adrenaline-stoked doozie.

i awake each morning to a to-do list that slowly, surely, gets chiseled away. but i have to keep the lasso near at hand, for i’ve an inclination to tumble forward in time and go breathless. i picture myself catapulting forward with little oxygen on board. i’ve known myself long enough to know that i’m not so good at shaking the small stuff. i get consumed by the small stuff. don’t want to forget one water bottle by the side of either of the house guests who will be sleeping here for the weekend. don’t want to drone on too long when i stand before the room and ladle love in great dollops to each and every blessed soul who has shone a light on the boy we know as T.

never mind, too, that my sweet boy is as nervous as nervous can be. never mind that he takes soccer balls blasting at his face at 50 miles per hour, and thinks nothing of diving face-first into them to keep them from soaring into the goal. when i tried to suggest he dip into that same well of courage, he explained quite matter of factly that podiums in front of synagogues and goal posts on a soccer field are wholly different realms, and one brand of courage does not bleed into the other. point, taken.

i do what mamas do in such instances: i take on his wobbles, too. pile them mightily on my own over-packed jalopy, and putt-putt along the potholed lanes with his worries strapped on top of mine.

which makes me a bit haggard these days. and if you look closely, you might see my shoulders sagging. and my jeans a wee bit loose around the hips.

so here’s the secret, the cure-all potion for those moments when i am certain i’m perched at the precipice, about to fall headlong into the bottomless inky pit: i sink into a hole all right, but it’s one illuminated in holy light. it’s the arms i practically feel wrap around me. it’s the near-whisper in my ear.

it’s God. my old old friend God.

and God applies balm to my heart, and snips the jangled nerves. God, with that twinkle in God’s eye, reminds me that i am being silly. and letting the runaway worries run away. God gently taps me upside the noggin, and reminds me: I’ll be there. I am there. I’m here, right here. And I’m not leaving.

i know we all imagine God in our own extraordinary ways. those of us blessed to do such imagining. my knowing of God, i realized this morning as i felt myself sink into the feather down of God’s embrace, my capacity for catapulting myself into that safe place, that harbored place, has something to do with my capacity for time travel born of all the pages that i turned when i was just a little girl, and i plopped upon my quilt-square coverlet, and tiptoed along the rose-tangled lanes and secret gardens of England’s countryside, or into the big wisconsin woods where laura ingalls wilder lived with ma and pa and mary in their little cabin.

that was the genesis. the beginning of a power to believe. and so that capacity to make like a hovercraft and transport myself, my soul, into another sphere, another space, it’s been exercised all my days.

oh, sure, my sense of God has grown up alongside me. but at heart, it’s that tender transporting, that moving me from fear and wobble into safe and wrapped that is at the heart of why, worry after worry, year after year, i plunge for the hands, the arms, that hold me, whisper soothing holiness.

and, too, over the years, i’ve discovered the world is stitched with what amount to “on switches,” brushstrokes of beauty that unlock the channels, and draw me straight to the heart of the Divine. my rambling garden. the just blooming bottle-brushes of late-summer’s hydrangea. the pit-a-pat of rain. the sound of my firstborn’s footsteps from the bedroom just above, knowing he’s home, and i’m awash in deepest gratefulness. the morning song of mama wren. the chatter of the sparrows who’ve made their home just above the front door, in a little cove they’ve pecked away with their insistent sparrow beaks.

i’ve grown wise enough to know that i need to stay close to all these channel openers in my life. when i feel myself getting dizzy from worries, i tiptoe out the door, and plonk myself on the bluestone stoop. i sit and breathe. watch the sunlight dance upon hydrangea leaves. follow the flutter of the august butterfly. fill my lungs. feel the arms of God surround me.

drink in the holy whisper. remind myself i’m not alone. never alone.

and all i need do to feel the squeeze of God beside me is slow down, deep breathe, and fill my sorry lungs.

how’s that for an exercise in heart-baring? i’m not quite sure what prompted me to try to write about what it feels like to reach out to God, and feel wrapped in the holy blanket of God’s presence. but now i’ve gone and done it. because that’s what this is, a place where the first draft of the heart and soul is unfurled. it’s but a sketch pad, after all. one week’s attempt to try to wrap words around the ineffable. along the way, maybe i stumble on a moment of incandescence. maybe it’s all a blur. but it’s the trying that’s the point.

how do you describe reaching out for Holiness when you’re wobbling and awash in worldly worry?

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August 8, 2014

boy, becoming…

he is trying it on, my boy in the three-way mirror. trying on what comes next: the gulch between boyhood and manhood. the years when certain nicknames are dropped and stuffed bears get tucked away in shadowed boxes. the years when bedtime comes later and later, long after mama’s in dreamland. the years when testing the fates begins to occur. the years when it all — sometimes — comes crashing deep down inside.

my little one is no longer. he’s 13 today. and while the statute of limitations on that tender name — “little one” — has worn out its welcome, i feel the urge to mark the moment here at the chair with a swift look back at my muse, the one whose moments i captured here where words are the butterfly net, here where the tenderest heart took hold in the cracks between letters.

my little one was all of five when the chair first pulled up to the table. he was a kindergartener who hadn’t quite figured out how to hold onto a pencil. or tie a shoe. or string all the slashes and blobs on the page into what might be called words. he climbed into bed, back in those days, outfitted for battle, slaying monsters with light sabers — all while he slept, apparently.

he went off to first grade here at the chair, armed with red hearts in his little jeans pocket. i kept one, too. mine was in my pocket, and all day long through the torturous hours of school, we squeezed on our wee little hearts, a morse code of the very best kind — “i love you.” “i miss you.” “i’m right here.”– were the messages we squeezed back and forth.

my little one and i went for moon walks. we gazed at the stars. and i captured his wonder.

captured his questions too, his questions without answers. “mama, what will happen when i die? will you die? will daddy die? who will die first?” the rat-a-tat-tat of truth-seeking missiles.

over time, and once he realized the world beyond his doorstep was occasionally reading along, he issued a declaration: i wasn’t allowed to write of his wisdoms and ponderings and wobbles and blips without first submitting draft form before the committee of one — the committee of T. he would read, rule, issue edict: publish or no.

what i’ve found — in that magical playground that is the stringing of alphabet letters into words into sentences into thinking out loud — is that the surest way to discover nooks and crannies in your own heart, and in the heart of the one you attempt to capture in brush strokes and shadings — not unlike the art student sketching the pose of the deftly-draped model in the drawing studio — is to circle back, again and again over the years, to put it to paper, to trace over and over again the outlines, the depths and the illuminations. to stand back over the years, and to see what you’d not seen on first go-around. to hold in your hand the faintest yet sharpest glimpse of the child who populates your hours, your heart, your deepest imagination.

to fall in love all over again is a gift to whomever beholds it. i fell in love, over and over, holding my little one up to the light. and now, my little one is at the brink of something quite big: he’s adding a “teen” to his numbers.

thirteen soft august eighths ago, i was perched in a hospital bed, cradling my very own miracle. the babe who defeated all odds — at every step of the odyssey, from conception to birth canal. i remember how keenly i studied him. his delivery had had a few bumps, the sort that can steal your sweet dream and turn it into a nightmare. in the flash of an instant. in a heartbeat skipped.

prayer — and the mightiest push that ever there was — delivered him. a babe in my arms at 44-and-3/4 years. take that, doctors (and actuarial tables) who swore it would never happen!

all these years, that notion of something outrageous, the blessing of beating the odds, it’s held me tight in its focus. i’ve a gift, we’ve a gift, all of us who melt at the tender words that ooze from that heart, or the way he rubs circles soft on your back. he’s a gift, the boy now crossing the great gulch to manhood. here’s praying we draw on all of our wisdom, and acres of love, to guide him safe to the other side.

bless you, sweet T. happy birthday. and with all of my heart, thank you. thank you for coming along….

one of the blessings of having typed here all these years, is that i’ve managed to capture a string of word snapshots: my boys growing up. and they are among the most precious treasures i know — the boys, certainly, but also the snapshots. i never set out to frame these moments in time, but that’s what’s happened. and it’s why i back-up and back-up. why i wish i could carve these in stone, so no cyber-thief, no computer blow-up, could ever steal these fragments of my heart.

but since you don’t come to listen to me ooze about my beautiful boy, i thought i’d leave a little birthday present for anyone interested in the art of paying attention. here’s a glorious passage from robert bly, observing a caterpillar. it’s so exquisite in its powers of focus and concentration, i just thought i’d leave it out on the table — a morsel in words — for your delight. savor.

A Caterpillar on the Desk

by Robert Bly

Lifting my coffee cup, I notice a caterpillar crawling over my sheet of ten-cent airmail stamps. The head is black as a Chinese box. Nine soft accordions follow it around, with a waving motion, like a flabby mountain. Skinny brushes used to clean pop bottles rise from some of its shoulders. As I pick up the sheet of stamps, the caterpillar advances around and around the edge, and I see his feet: three pairs under the head, four spongelike pairs under the middle body, and two final pairs at the tip, pink as a puppy’s hind legs. As he walks, he rears, six pairs of legs off the stamp, waving around the air! One of the sponge pairs, and the last two tail pairs, the reserve feet, hold on anxiously. It is the first of September. The leaf shadows are less ferocious on the notebook cover. A man accepts his failures more easily-or perhaps summer’s insanity is gone? A man notices ordinary earth, scorned in July, with affection, as he settles down to his daily work, to use stamps.

“A Caterpillar on the Desk” by Robert Bly, from The Morning Glory. © Harper & Row, 1975. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

and what such magnificent observations have you made today?

16 Comments

August 1, 2014

the day begins here…

before i’d even tumbled out of the bedsheets, i felt the low-down wobbles. happens sometimes. even on a morning when birds are in the boughs just beyond the window panes. it’s almost as if the sediment of whatever shattered in the day before is settling down, after a short night’s slumber, into the pits of your veins and your belly — and your knees, always the knees on a wobbly morning.

it’s almost as if, before your braincells awake, your body cells remember. they know there’s unsettling. they know the darkness rolled in before the day was done. needn’t be big things. sometimes the things that wake you up wobbling are simply a potage of rumbles and worries, spiced with bits of unwanted news.

once i’d splashed the cold water on my bed-wrinkled face, once i’d slipped into the shirt with the least number of holes in the elbows, i turned to tramp down the stairs.

there in the kitchen, the morning’s light awaited. the garden nodded, all dappled with dew drops.

i made a mistake in checking my phone: there lurked one of those emails you don’t want to find before the first gulp of coffee. but there it was, so i read it. and then, i glanced at the dining room table, all strewn with hundreds of pages and a fat red pen. i’ve a day of page proofing ahead of me. the last go-around with these pages that have seeped deep into my soul. these pages on which i whisper a prayer every time i begin again, start at the top, read through to the bottom, on alert, high alert, for typos and runaway commas.

i was now in high wobble.

so i did what any wobbly girl with sharp garden clippers would do: i walked straight out of the house where the wobbles had gathered, and i started to snip — the garden, that is. a long neck of yarrow here, black-eyed susans there. snip, snip, snip. next thing i knew i was clutching a fistful of august delight. and the wobbles weren’t so wobbly anymore. or at least for the moment, i’d buried my nose in the ticklish bouquet, and i wasn’t paying the wobbles much mind.

that’s what a holy morning can do for you. that’s the magic of ringing your old tired house with billows of bloom. folks driving by might think you grow bundles of things for the color, or the je ne sais quoi. ah, but you know. you know the secret: you are growing your very own apothecary out there. it’s all healing balm, and wobbly cures. it’s buoyant and tender, all at once.

it’s the deepest blessing of this holy earth: the power to heal what ails us, whatever it is.

all you need do to prompt it along is tuck a few roots deep in the dirt. then add sprinkles of rain. a few prayers and crossed fingers certainly help. never hurt. oh, and then you muster up patience. you wait. and you wait. and the globe spins around, and next thing you know it’s august, the launch of black-eyed susan season. the glorious crescendo of the midsummer garden. all the growing things — the yarrow, the hydrangea, the susans — they’re all rubbing shoulders, shoving and pushing to steal your attention. all they want is to stick out their necks, to bloom, to soak up some sunshine.

and what they give in return is pure bliss. gentle bliss. quiet bliss. a bliss that promises to bathe you in all that you’ll need to weather the day.

here’s the gardener’s pose of acceptance, accepting the gift of the garden: bend at the waist, stick your nose in the powdery parts where the yellow rubs off, now take a deep whiff, and reach for your clippers.

so it went this once-wobbly morning, when i marched out the door and into the billows, armed with my felco no. 2 clippers. i clipped and i snipped, and next thing i knew i was ready to face this fine day, not quite so wobbly this time.

what’s your garden doing to fortify you this fine day? and if not your garden, what’s your secret potion for facing a wobbly day?

a bit of the backstory here is that i’m plowing my way through final page proofs, as that ol’ book, Slowing Time, has locked in its reservation with the printing presses, and is due to roll by the end of the month. that means every wiggle and blip on the page is demanding attention, lest it roll off the press, blips and bloops intact.

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pull up a chair

Month: August, 2014

August 29, 2014