January | 2015 | pull up a chair

January 30, 2015

sixty…a long, long love story.

sixty.

sixty years ago today, on a crisp january sunday, two people i love walked into the plaza hotel at fifth avenue and central park south in new york city, the very hotel where precocious eloise lipsticked the walls, roller-skated the corridors and poured water down the mail chute of the neo-rococo gatsby-esque overnight chateau. the two i love were married there. moved into an old gardener’s cottage nestled between the two rivers of fair haven, new jersey. and two-and-a-half years later, had a baby boy. five years after that, they carried home to the cottage a beautiful baby girl.

and 29 years after that, i married their firstborn. so, going on a mere 24 years this august, my beloved and i are lowly pikers in the marriage department (compared, that is, to the ones clocking their diamond anniversary today). the ones married at the plaza, they’ve long been teaching us how it’s done — this business of loving across the arc of time, of holding each other up in sickness and in health, in heart-wrenching moments and moments so fine they make you think you could reach right out and touch the stars.

this morning, for the first of the 60 anniversary mornings, there will be no shared breakfast at the maple table in the red-walled kitchen. there will be no bagel sliced and barely-buttered. no stack of vitamins tucked by the edge of the red plate, where my mother-in-law always tucked them. there will be no single cup of coffee with a splash of skim milk, one cup shared by two pairs of lips, the way they’ve always sipped their coffees. this afternoon, perhaps, my mother-in-law will help adjust the wheelchair at the dining table in the lovely place they call the atrium, the place where my dear father-in-law now lives.

in a world where only six percent of american marriages make it to the 50th anniversary — and guessing drastically fewer make it to the 60th — there is much to be learned from those that do. and while i’ve not sat down to ask a slew of pesky nosey questions, i have been watching. and since i’ve lived since 1991 with the son of that solid pair, i’ve had lots of mornings, noons and nights to ponder this living, breathing organism, the long-haul marriage.

it’s the unlikeliest of arrangements, for starters. did you ever think you’d want anyone to know that some nights you tumble into bed without washing your face, or that you gobble down a humongous bowl of popcorn at the long day’s end — no matter how late the hour? would you ever want anyone to know how scared you get before you stumble toward a microphone, or how your heart practically pounds through your chest when you raise your hand in class, or — sometimes — speak up at a dinner party? or how, once upon a time, you worried yourself into such a stew convincing yourself that the black space in your unborn baby’s ultrasound was proof that the sweet child was going to be born without a brain? and, further, you convinced yourself that the doctors just couldn’t find the words to let you in on this terrible news. and then, when you found out you’d been a total fool and the brain was fully lodged right where it was meant to be, the dear fellow who’d been gobsmacked all weekend by your worries, he didn’t even dare to toss a chilly “told you so!” in your much-deserved direction.

oh, and that’s just a teeny wedge of the intimacies that long connections bring. i mean, the standing naked — the showing off your pudgy belly, your jiggly thighs — that’s NOTHING compared to the soul-baring that comes with years spent sharing each other’s crowded space.

and there are days — maybe even months or years — when you spend way too much time considering the exit door.

but you never go.

a.) because you’re blessed beyond words that whatever isn’t right is fixable — because, oh, lordy, we all find our lives — our inner, dearest circles — populated with friends and loved ones for whom the fixing was not there — death, disease, inherited pathology, deceit. the reasons are too many and too heartbreaking.

and then, there’s b.) we choose to fix it, to work it through, to strike a peace accord. because deep down in our marrow we’re betting on this marriage thing, this connection bound through love or law, divine or secular. we’ve invested whole hog in this institution that, not unlike a pair of lungs, expands and contracts, fills with oxygen, and sometimes leaves us gasping.

and after you’ve weathered days or weeks or months of second-guessing, and you find the clouds have scuttled off, you remember once again just why it was that something deep down inside you — something that maybe didn’t even have a voice, was no more than life-divining force — you remember why you surrendered to it long ago. why you dared to wrench open your trembling heart, and let in the one best shot you had at being wholly alive.

because this someone to whom you’ve aligned no less than your very soul, this someone has breathed wholeness into you. this someone has seen who you could be, sometimes long before you could even begin to glimpse that possibility.

in my case, the man i married teaches me every single day what patience looks like. what tender loving care is meant to be. i watch him lavishly rub circles on our little guy’s back, there in the hollow between the angel blades, on the nights when sleep won’t come, or ghosts have come to haunt the little guy’s bedroom. i watch the man i love drive eight hours for a regatta in which the glimpse of a passing kid — a kid in a boat being rowed by eight or four muscled pairs of arms — lasts for maybe five seconds. and not a complaint, not a single complaint, is ever lodged.

in my case, the man i married has patiently waited for the three long years i’ve not had a paycheck. and he’s been the biggest believer that if i dared to spread my wings, i just might find the breeze he believes is there. and for a girl who never ever thought she could be good enough, it is the holiest thing in the whole wide world to wake up every morning to a fellow who utterly and absolutely believes that, armed with nothing but my heart and my words, i might infuse a dash of goodness in the world.

the man i love learned all this because he grew up in a house where that’s what love looked like. that’s what marriage meant. thick and thin. sickness and health. richer and poorer.

sixty years.

may the God of goodness, the God of love, shine down today on the ones who, back on january 30, 1955 — when “bad day at black rock” was playing at the picture shows, and the ames brothers’ “the naughty lady of shady lane” was number 1 on the charts — back then, those blessed two began to etch their story in the marbled walls of time.

the lovely black-and-whites above, that’s my papa-in-law, the newspaper man, blowing out his birthday candles (in 1970, i do believe), and the radiant-faced one (which i can’t get to nestle side-by-side, and so is just below), a teacher nestled with her little charges, that’s my beloved mother-in-law, one of the loyalest readers of the chair that ever there was or will be. bless them both. i love them with all my heart.

i don’t often — rarely ever — write about one of the deepest connections of my life, my marriage. this one is stirred by the big anniversary. and i know — too well — that the true intimacies of any marriage don’t belong anywhere near the public square. as well as the truth that so many of the folks i love most dearly have chosen not to be in such a union. or have life-savingly mustered all the courage in the world to step free from one that suffocated or shattered them and the dearest ones they loved. but these days i so often find myself pondering the truth that a marriage, especially a getting-long one, is practically its own living, breathing entity. across the arc of time, it ever shifts, deepens. it’s the deepening that most captivates me, and i can only scratch that surface here. so the question i bring to the table, one for which everyone might have some answer, is this: what is it about the deepening relationships of your life, the ones that last across the years, and survive rocky terrain, dry seasons, and an abundance of struggles, what has that deepening brought you, and why is it so essential? and what invites the deepening?

happy blessed diamonds, dear A and G. xoxox

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January 23, 2015

soul pickings…

pray tell, you might ask, what is she doing now? perhaps, given the tower of pages above, i’m devising a rube-goldbergian contraption for felling the wintertime ants that dare to cross my kitchen table. or, perhaps, it’s the latest in literary aerobics: hoist this pile off the tabletop and see how many jumping jacks i can count — before dropping the load on my poor baby toes, or tumbling under the weight of the heart-pumping challenge.

or, perhaps this: in the plummest assignment a girl could dream up, my old newspaper, the chicago tribune, has asked me to basically peruse the literary all-you-can-eat and fill my tray with the juiciest morsels — month after month after month. now, you’ll not find me weighing the caloric wonders nor the narrative arc of sultry page turners. and i won’t be digesting the latest in graphic novels, or avant-garde fiction. my little assignment, which runs on the pages of the tribune’s literary supplement, printers row journal (special subscription only), is called “round up: books for the soul.” and i’ll be lassoing soul-stirrers every four to six weeks.

and, in case you hadn’t already guessed, my definition of soul is a broad one, a deep one, so watch out bookshelves, i’m coming right at you. i’ve been asked to mine the lists of just-published pages to pluck out the ones that stir me — and maybe you — the most deeply. in my book, that means children’s picture books are near the top of the pile. and so too is the 8.4-pound, 4,448-page, two-volume whopper, the norton anthology of world religions, a collection i could — and i will — spend the rest of my days inhaling. it means poetry and essay, and even a book of black-and-white images with very few words, if that finds a way to the depth of the place that stirs us, inspires us, sets us wanting to right the world’s wrongs (or at least to course-correct the fumblings that hold us back from all whom we were meant to be).

at the moment, i’m whittling my latest short list down to the final three, and i’ll be defending my picks in short pithy blurbs — all to be handed over to my editor by monday morn. while i can’t let on here what’s next on the docket, i can pass along the trinity of titles that were picked for the perch of the new year, the first installation in what promises to be a perpetual devotion.

a marvelous and hilarious side note on the list just below. when dear, marvelous, and often quite wacky anne lamott spied the review online (i had no idea it had even been edited, yet alone posted) she went bonkers with joy, and declared it “the single best review anyone has ever gotten in the history of publishing,” which made me chuckle on an otherwise gloomy new-year’s-eve day, and slam-dunked my certainty that hyperbole is a jocular, life-giving art. when last i checked, a mere 24,362 of annie’s beloved friends had “liked” the review on facebook, and i for one was simply tickled that ms. lamott felt the love, as it were. (may we all know the joy of being loved out loud, over and over and over again….)

here, with no further ado, is my first round of round ups: books for the soul. i cannot emphasize emphatically enough how wonderful each title is. nor how very much i love this assignment that has me back in the news pages i love. (i’ll post the link, but i don’t think it will work if you don’t already have a tribune subscription. just in case, though, click here.)

Round Up: Books for the Soul
By Barbara Mahany

Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace
By Anne Lamott, Riverhead Books, 304 pages, $22.95

Anne Lamott is practically a household word in the peeling-back-the-soul department. She’s utterly disarming. She’s hysterically funny. One minute, you’re falling off your chair laughing, and the next, you’re gasping for air, because Lamott has just unfurled a sentence that cuts straight to the heart of what you really needed to know. She’s been doing that for so many books now (this is her ninth nonfiction title), I keep thinking she’ll run out of ways to take my breath away.

Which is why I didn’t expect to see her latest collection of essays tumble into my short list of soulful treasures. I was wrong, so wrong. Lamott is one in a million. Who else would make this leap, writing of a moment that’s so serene and holy, “I was sure I was going to end up dating the Dalai Lama.” Or: “I thought such awful thoughts I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.”

Hers is an inimitable mix of irreverence and deep-down holy wisdom. Her wit is so sharp, her synapses fire so quickly, she deftly connects the dots and vaults across the spiritual landscape like nobody else. Never suspecting we’re about to come around some light-drenched bend, we practically sputter when she steers us head-on into one of her wild-eyed illuminations.

Lamott grounds the holy in the messy, hilarious, madcap adventure that is her life. And she sees the truth so piercingly perceptibly, we’re left slack-jawed and wiser in her wake.

Paradise in Plain Sight: Lessons from a Zen Garden
By Karen Maezen Miller, New World Library, 192 pages, $15.95

This little slip of a book, like the best of all soulful books, slips deep in your soul practically unnoticed. Suddenly, you’re sitting bolt upright, because you’ve been reading quietly along and you realize you’ve just inhaled a sentence that packs a spiritual wallop.

As in: “We live stupefied by our own deep terror, our unmet fears. Out of fear, we crush our own spirits, break our own hearts and — if we don’t stop — rot our own flesh,” writes Miller, a Zen priest and teacher, in an essay about crossing the threshold of fear. “All that is ever required of us is that we lift one foot and place it in front of the other.”

Miller’s plainspoken wisdom, the essence of her Zen Buddhist practice, is couched in the story of discovering and tending a long-neglected 100-year-old Japanese garden, the paradise in her own Southern California backyard. Amid a landscape of rocks and ponds and pines and orange trees heavy with fruit, Miller doles out Zen lessons on fearlessness, forgiveness, presence, acceptance and contentment.

“This book isn’t really about Zen, and it isn’t really about gardening,” writes Miller in the prologue. “It might seem like I’m talking to myself, but I’m talking to you. Now, about this paradise. You’re standing in it.”

Indeed, you needn’t be a gardener, nor inclined to long hours of meditation, nor a disciple of Zen. And you certainly needn’t travel to the nearest Japanese garden to unearth the truths Miller so generously lays at your mud-sodden soles.

The Lion and The Bird
By Marianne Dubuc, Enchanted Lion Books, 64 pages, $17.95

A so-called children’s book, a picture book, among the most soul-lifting books of the year? Why, yes. Emphatically yes.

Tripping upon this marvel of a book, by French Canadian designer and illustrator Marianne Dubuc, is to tumble into a tale of unforgettable tenderness — the story of a lion who finds a wounded bird in his garden one autumn day and nurses it back to flight, a winter’s convalescence of warmth and friendship that banishes loneliness, for lion and bird. It’s one that tears at and stitches together again the heart.

Words here are spare, as are the pencil-shaded drawings, and thus the tempo is slow, the mood quiet. It’s the intimate details that draw in the reader, and thus the reader’s heart — the wounded bird pecking seed off a dinner plate, little bird dozing the night away curled inside lion’s bedside slipper, bird peeking out of lion’s winter cap as the two lumber off for a romp in the snow.

By spring, when bird is healed and its flock returns, a nod to the sky is all lion needs to know that it’s time for bird to leave, to put flight to his wings. And so, the summer is passed — lion alone. Come autumn, lion can’t help but wonder, can’t help but study the canvas of sky. And then, after two achingly empty pages, a musical note exalts on a page. There’s bird, perched on the limb of a tree. Lion’s heart leaps — and so does the reader’s.

It’s a lesson in unspoken, ineffable love. And it unspools in gentlest wisps. Sometimes, that’s all the soul needs.

Barbara Mahany is the author of Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door (Abingdon Press, Oct. 2014). Twitter: @BarbaraMahany

and what books would you add to a list of those fine for the soul? even though i’m limited to just-published titles, you can add all-time favorites, classics, can’t-live-withouts to this ever-lengthening list…..(and i promise to keep posting once the round ups take their twirl in the tribune…)

26 Comments

January 16, 2015

old sweater: ode to wrap-around-you love

some mornings, in the swift fractions between bare foot to floorboard, shuffle across the bedroom rug, and tumble into closet, i just know: it’s an old sweater sort of day.

a day when i need to feel my arms slide through the nubby sleeves, feel the wool scratch against me, pull the torso tight around my chest. i need to feel the wrap-around-you love that comes from pulling on an old, old sweater. a sweater that once belonged, and still — if you breathe deep and with all your heart — holds the sweet scent of the someone long ago who wore it. whose chest filled out its threads. whose warmth inhabited. whose whole self animated, in a way that — standing alone in the dark, cold closet — you still can see, as if a picture show before your eyes.

it’s been one of those weeks around here.

every day, an old sweater. truth be told, every day the same old sweater (fashion-forward is not a name you’d put to me, queen of holey jeans and banged-up clogs, and T shirts worn till rags). it’s a navy one, with suede patches on the sleeve. one the maker calls its “shaggy dog.” other than calling it a teddy-bear crew neck (one minus knitted-in images of bears, thank you), i can’t think of a better name for a sweater that fills its particular prescription: dust off the lonely flakes, embolden for the day ahead, stick close and keep the cold at bay. and not necessarily the temperature. more like the draft that comes when you feel all alone, a bit lonely, searching for that particular someone who steadies you, brings ballast to your wobbling hours.

it’s winter here. deep winter. a season i love. but the fellow who inhabits this house with me, the one i married nearly a quarter century ago, he’s been away. so it’s just me and the little one, faring for ourselves. and while i love the quiet hours stitched into each day, i find myself a wee bit lost. i find myself braving winds and cold. i’m without the markers at the start and end of each long day, when usually the door clicks open and in walks the lanky fellow, his glasses frosted up from cold. his cheeks pink from wind. his stories fresh, and filling up the room.

i’ve thought a lot this week about those i love who are missing someone. everyone misses someone sometime. sometimes for the rest of your living breathing days. you can’t go too long in this life before death comes, or leave-taking of some other kind steals the one you love. there are a million algorithms that all wind up with a big fat hollow at the end. there’s a kid i love who’s gone away, simply because he grew up and found a leafy college, far far from here. there’s a dad i loved, with all my heart; he up and died. no goodbye. just a blizzard and a phone call and a doctor standing in the blazing white corridor, saying, oddly, “i’m so sorry.” there’s a grandma, who wasn’t even mine by birth, just by heart. and every time i tumble in my closet, i see her cherry red, gold-buttoned cardigan. i don’t often put it on. but i love knowing that it’s there, in the stack of old sweaters just waiting to do their job: wrap my arms and chest, make like soft-looped armament, a shield that holds me tight, that makes me remember a certain hug, a certain chest against which i leaned and pressed my ear, drinking in a steady heartbeat. a heartbeat that steadied me, that launched me, that served as grounding rod and metronome for the songs i’d yet to let loose from the canyon of my hopes and dreams and wobbles.

sometimes in life we need to grope for tangible knowing that we’re not alone. not deep down, anyway. there are someones from the past, who swirl around us still. who pulse through us. and sometimes simply shoving a fist, an arm, down a narrow sleeve, it’s all the rubbing-up-against-us we need to convince ourselves that, once again, we can face the day. we can march out of the bedroom closet, armed for what the day will bring.

no one can see the someone we’ve tucked into for the day. but we know. we know we’re not alone. and the stack of old, moth-worn, years-stretched sweaters, they’re there to guide us on our ways. to enfold us. to brace us from the chill that’s sure to blow through all the cracks.

what armaments do you reach for when your day begs for emboldening? or your heart just needs an extra layer of fortitude, of resilience, of remembering how deeply it is loved?

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January 9, 2015

once, i had a dream…(or slowing time in real time)

the wintry night couldn’t have made it more daunting. the roads were thick with snow, hadn’t seen a hungry plow. the winds began to whip. the flashing sign on the highway warned that it would take two hours, nine minutes, to snail our way (a mere 11 miles) to the spaghetti bowl of interchanges that only then could shoot us out the next long stretch of byway.

we were, with all our might, trying to get to the little town that once was home to frank lloyd wright and ernest hemingway. a bungalow, candle lit by then, would soon be filled with folk who’d come to taste a wintry eve of slowing time.

we’d be lucky if we got there by 10. and the evening was slotted to unfurl at seven bells. our bellies lurched as we did the math, realized the full throttle of our predicament. and then the car began to shake — convulse, more like it. i thought perhaps it was on the verge of blowing up. or, perhaps, merely screeching off the icy bridge. turned out to be the wheels protesting the ice that stood between the tire treads and traction.

by stroke of side streets, and the zany map in which chicago plows the backroads but not the main roads, we managed to get there at the stroke of half past seven. we’d zigged and zagged and beat the doomsday clock.

once we walked inside the golden-glowing house on grove street, we were soothed. slowed. wrapped in candle light and logs crackling on the fire.

the one who’d done the dreaming up of all of this — a lovely woman named harlene who lives to find the common thread that weaves us all together — she was stirring at the slow time pot, the name she’d pinned to the cauldron of three-bean chili, thick with chicken, zinged with squeeze of lime, the one she’d cooked all sunday.

i got predictably teary-eyed soon after walking in. i only knew four of the 30-some folk who were huddled round the wine, the chips, the hearth. they’d come, i whispered to my flabbergasted self, to hear a bit of slowing time.

oh, it takes a rather packed equation to make a dream come true. but what stirred as i slowly made my way to the stove, to sidle up to the one stirring the chili, was the knowing that i was walking through a dream.

the dream, born long ago, was something like this: what if, in a world that chatters so noisily few can make out any sense, what if we quietly carved out a sacred place, a safe place where words and hearts were shared, and harshness never was invited? what if we could mine the landscape of our simple ordinary lives, our messy stumbling fumbling lives, the one where day after day we try again to get it right? what if we might gather kindred spirits, and hold each other up, on the days when we wobble, yes, but even on the rarer days when we swear we just might glow a little hallelujah glow?

what if, from time to time, the holiness leapt off the screen, or off the page, and took shape in real time, with the flesh of human hands reaching across the table, or real tears slowly mapping their way down a cheek, across a lip, and off the precipice of chin?

what if there were real circles of real chairs in real living rooms? what if stories flowed, and hearts opened, and voices dared to speak beyond the whisper of talking to ourselves?

and there i was: inside the dream. surrounded by smart and soulful women. surrounded by women who’d left behind their day jobs, their kids, their noisy little lives to brave the bitter cold, the whipping snow, and the slip-slidey front steps, to slow time long enough to share a wintry evening’s conversation, to turn a page or three. and, not too much later, to step back into the icy night, behold the glowing arc of moon, and feel a heart a wee bit fuller.

these past few months — the months since slowing time (the book) was birthed — have invigorated and tested, and stretched and stung from time to time. but all of it, every butterfly in my belly, every sleepless hour of the night, even gasping aloud when i was called a “very pagan wiccan,” (yes, ouch), it’s all been the road to last night’s dream come true. and the even-longer potholed path to putting life to hope, to faith, to believing that — whatever it is — it might be done.

so here’s the wondering aloud: might we all not birth a dream? a simple dream, perhaps; maybe just to make it through a morning without the sound of harsh screeching from our throat. or maybe, take it up a notch and declare we’ll paint, we’ll write, we’ll knit till kingdom come — whatever is the shape and form you put to your creative genius (and, oh, yes, it’s genius, all right. every one of us was born with speck of genius, and is it not our job to figure out just how to let that genius out from wherever it’s been hiding all these years?).

what if we envision a world where unlike minds sit in quiet conversation? what if we pray all in one room — jews, muslims, buddhists, christians, wiccans, and, yes, druids, too? whether it’s filling the empty belly of one hungry child, or disrupting the hollow loneliness of the old man next door who sits all by himself, hour after hour. whether it’s tackling tolstoy at long last. or committing to memory every last line of emily dickinson, or maya angelou, or w.s. merwin.

what if we dig down deep and pull out our wildest dream, and then day after day, sometimes after weeks have slipped away unnoticed, what if, little by little, we added flesh to the bones of that dream, and one cold winter’s night, we walked into a bungalow, where bowls of oranges and chocolates waited by the door, where chili bubbled on the cookstove, and women’s words whirled through kitchen and keeping room, dining room and parlor?

what if we all believed that, given time and hope and the great gift of friends who pick us up every time we stumble, skin our knees, or feel our hearts get knocked around far too achingly, even our wildest little dream might come tumbling true?

what’s your dream?

and how might you begin to make it come to life?

and here’s an invitation: perhaps you too have a circle of souls you love — or even ones you barely know — and you, like beautiful harlene above, might put a pot of something bubbly on the cookstove, pull chairs into a circle, and softly, quietly, openly, invigorate the night with what you know to be beautiful, and holy, and deeply needed in this aching, sometimes scary world…(p.s. of course i don’t mean a slowing time night, per se, just a night in which you gather with great good souls and carve out time for what deeply matters. in real time. slow time…)

and from the bottom of my heart, harlene, bless you and thank you and thank you…..

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January 2, 2015

the blessing of beginnings

i’m just in from my morning rounds, my make-believe that i’m the caretaker of the dawn. the nubs of my fingers are nearly numb, for i stayed out too long. i was breathing in the heavens, breathing in the star-stitched sky, scanning for the disappearing moon, the moon playing peek-a-boo this morning.

the world was just rustling out of its bedsheets — or so it seemed. the trees whispered. off in the distance, a train let out its morning moan. i might have caught the stirring of the cardinal’s wing. or maybe it was a night critter, finally ambling home to bed. something in the bushes moved.

i know no holier way to greet the day, the morning light. i know no holier way to unfurl the carpet for the year that’s new, that’s just beginning. today, the dash between the first and third, the dash between the world’s new year and mine (my birthday is a string of primes: 1.3.57), is wholly a day of quiet rapt attention. i’m crouched down low, tucked off to the side, scanning the year ahead, the days of possibility. i’m considering what might come — what might break my heart, what might take my breath away, what might bowl me over with pure sheer joy.

i’ve come to think that my time-delay birthday is one of the gosh-darn blessings in this life that pretty much dropped down upon me. sort of like the curly hair that i’ve come to realize has saved me zillions of dollars in pink sponge rollers i’ve not had to buy, or hours not spent in the beauty parlor chair where alchemy and goop put curl to other people’s stick-straight locks. i had nothing to do with odd birthday or curly locks — or any of what amounted to my starter package, really. but, along the way, i’ve learned to make the most of it.

so my year comes on tiptoes. my year slinks in around the bend. no crash-bang-boom for me. i take my new year launch in itty-bitty baby steps. i’ve three days to consider the turning of the page.

and there’s little i love as much as a new beginning, a chance to start again. to dust off my knees, inhale a deep and cleansing breath, and make a vow: this time, dear God, i’ll try even harder.

try harder to bite my tongue when the words are bunched up in my throat, just ready to launch a harsh, “will you PLEASE hurry up! will you PLEASE clean your room! will you GET OUT OF BED!”

try harder to breathe deep the mantra of dorothy day and st. therese of lisieux: “by little and by little.” as in, by little acts of kindness, by little courage, by little acts of love in the face of awfulness, we stand our one best chance to take up a notch this life that sometimes scrapes our knees and gives us hives and burns our eyes with stinging tears.

because it’s worth a pause within the pause, here’s a passage from robert ellsberg’s brilliantly edited and annotated, ‘dorothy day: selected writings’:

“simply, it consisted of performing, in the presence and love of God, all the little things that make up our everyday life and contact with others. from therese, dorothy learned that any act of love might contribute to the balance of love in the world, any suffering endured in love might ease the burden of others; such was the mysterious bond within the body of Christ. we could only make use of the little things we possessed — the little faith, the little strength, the little courage. these were the loaves and fishes. we could only offer what we had, and pray that God would make the increase. it was all a matter of faith.”

i suppose, because i seem to circle back to it every year, it’s becoming my new year prayer. it’s the only way i know — by little and by little — to take the mountain climb.

i’m certain there’s a wise person somewhere who realized the only way to change the world was one baby step at a time. in my scant few moments of insight — when the world before my eyes snaps crystal clear and sharply focused, instead of all a blur and hard to comprehend — i suddenly grasp that most folks who are making a difference, a big fat difference, are doing it with no more magic than you or i possess. they’re simply smart enough — or unfazed enough — to realize that one step firmly planted in front of another, that one phone call made, or one question bravely asked, or one trip across the street or across the ocean (it hardly matters which, sometimes), just might be the one that starts to pile up, to tilt momentum in the direction of holy change, in the difference between a world that is and a world that just might be.

maybe it’s time to steal a play from the smart-people’s play book: the baby-step guide to living. maybe it’s time to line up in the baby-step brigade.

for one thing, there’s less of a realignment when, inevitably, i flub it. taking a deep breath and trying again is a whole heck of a lot easier when all you need do is “take two” in the baby step department. but baby step + baby step = toddler step. and toddler step + toddler step = well, you get the math.

so here’s my prayer for this new and not-yet-scripted year:

dear Holiness, cast your rays of sparkling light — of shaft of sun, and dappled moonbeam — across my pot-holed path.

give me grace to hold my words, to not engage in prattling on about the wacky folk who try to topple me. give me grace — and wisdom, and a dash of far-sightedness — to live each day as if it’s my one last chance to leave a trail of the world as holy as i imagine it could be.

give me one last puff of energy on the evenings when i’m drained, and the phone rings and it’s someone i love who needs to talk it through, whatever is the hell the one i love has just encountered.

give me forgiveness in dollops. give me, please, enough to share it with abandon — most especially on those who try to take me down, who call me names that break my heart, who whisper unkind somethings.

dear God, thank you for bringing me once again to the crest of this next hill. thank you for the chance to look out upon the undulations of years past and days ahead. hold me in your tender palm, and those blessed unshakable arms. be the hand i squeeze when i get scared. and the pure fresh air that fills my lungs.

dear God, help me take it up a notch. and be ready with the band-aids when i fall and skin my knees.

much love, always, b.

dear chair people, can you see the itty bitty dot of light in that picture up above? just above the filigree of tree? that’s the ringed wonder, saturn. and just before dawn it was shining in the southeast sky. now, i have just about the dumbest little camera known to humankind and it never ever takes the dots of light that i’m hoping it will capture. but today, miraculously, it did. well, if you get out your magnifying glass, you’ll see it did. a small wonder like that is enough to start my day with a skip to the heart. so i hope it’s a contagious skip, and you too encounter a star-stitch of wonder today.

so, what’s your blessing for the new beginning?

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Month: January, 2015