February | 2017 | pull up a chair

dispatch from the land of aches and pains: it’s day five of fever here. the sort of fever that keeps your head splat atop the pillow, unable to lift it for more than a few minutes, and then only because you’ve run out of reasons to talk yourself out of moving. it’s a whopping case of strep + influenza (which is not to be confused with plain old flu) and it feels like someone poured bottles of toxins down my gullet. i don’t think i’ve ever spent so many hours sleeping in my life, and it’s all i can do to sip a cup of tea. but the fun part is that i’m not alone — my sweet mate is on it too. he started it, in fact. but his stopped at terrible cough and achy all over, and i apparently went for the premium plan, adding strep and full-throttle influenza to the mix. thus, we’ve had a fabulous week of empathy. i moan, and he concurs. i hack my lungs out, and he joins in too. he’s been the very best nurse that ever there was, and i must say there is something deeply blessed about being so so sick you can’t even pretend you’re anything but. all vulnerabilities are exposed. all frailties front and center. and you are so grateful for all kindness, from the way he peels you a clementine in the middle of the night, to the way he presses his back against yours to warm you when your teeth are chattering and you can’t shake the chills. when i think back to the fellow in the newsroom i had a crush on all those 29 years ago, i hadn’t a clue how magnificent he would be when i needed him most. he’s shown me, over and over, this week.

xoxox

sending love from the land of counterpane. and p.s., i got my flu shot, but apparently this year’s batch didn’t do the trick….

have you ever been bowled over by the pure loving compassion of someone whose carried you through some mighty dark hours?

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February 17, 2017

moving toward labor & delivery: the birth of a book

this is the part of book birthing where, on one hand, you’re finally breathing, but on the other hand, your breath is beginning to quicken, and you remember you’ll soon be in the part where you feel dizzy nearly all the time.

what that means is that “the book” is off at the printers. the jacket cover too. there’s not a single mark on any page left for me to make, to fix, to erase. it’s rolling off the presses as i type. and, any week now, a big cardboard box will kerplop on my front stoop. when i lug it in the house, haul out the scissors, cut the tape and peek inside, i’ll see the one book i wanted to leave behind on this holy earth.

it’s called motherprayer: lessons in loving, and it’s the deepest work — to date — of my living, breathing motherheart.

all along — ever since the moment (a quarter century ago) when i found out a tiny heart beat inside of me — i’ve been taking notes, scribbling down the lessons learned, recounting the hours when i’d run out of answers, couldn’t quite find my way. my teachers, time after blessed time, have been those two sweet boys whose lives unfurl right before my eyes. and, nearly as certainly, the flanks of wise-souled motherers all around me.

more often than not, in hours glorious or sorrowful, when i shook with loneliness or wrapped myself in joy, i turned to the one sure thing i knew might steady me, or at least get me through till daybreak: motherprayer. those murmurations of the heart and soul that sometimes find no words. sometimes spill in time with tears. or even rise in holy hallelujah (so sweet and rare those moments are).

because part of the birthing of a book means you must practice being brave, stepping out into winds that might blow cold, blow harsh, i’m going to take a baby step here, and share with you the press release written by my beloved comrade kelly hughes, the publicist for slowing time, and now for motherprayer.

her words made me cry (i wasn’t the only one, i’m told). which is a holy anointing, indeed. here, for your eyes, before anyone beyond the publisher gets a peek, the official press release for the one book i most deeply wanted to birth.

(you can tell i didn’t write it, because kelly types with caps, something i seem so disinclined to do….)

***

Journalist recounts her “crash course in loving” in new book Motherprayer

Writer Barbara Mahany’s ability to capture the beauty of small moments, honed as a reporter and columnist for the Chicago Tribune, captivated readers of her first book, Slowing Time. Now, she turns her attention to the sacred mysteries of mothering in Motherprayer: Lessons in Loving (Abingdon Press, $18.99 hardcover, April 4, 2017), with a hope to apply these lessons to the world beyond our own familial bubbles.

For Mahany, who has two sons, “motherprayer” captures the essence of what mothers do: a way of loving that becomes prayer beyond words. “Mothering was my crash course in love,” she says, teaching her how to “love in the way we yearn to be loved: Without end. Without question. Without giving in to exhaustion. Love with a big and boundless heart. With eyes and ears wide open. Love even when it’s not so easy.”

“No other instruction has so captivated or ignited me,” she writes. “Nor so blessed me.”

Before becoming a journalist, Mahany was a pediatric oncology nurse. “Which means I’d spent a good many years entwined with life and death. Paying attention, asking and pondering sometimes impossible questions. And being left, too often, without the faintest answer.”

“Three threads of me—mother, journalist, once and always a nurse—combined in ways I’d not anticipated,” Mahany says. As she kept watch “on the species I birthed,” she kept field notes, gathered here in the book. The arc begins with her first pregnancy and continues on to the present day, written in real time: on the eve of first grade; the first night her firstborn drove off alone in the family car; while grieving a daughter lost to miscarriage; after a crushing baseball loss that broke a second-grader’s heart. These and other moments are extracted from motherhood “to ask the toughest questions, lay bare essential truths, and seize whatever shards of illumination I might have stumbled upon,” such as:

• “The Most Interesting Things Moms Just Know”: a reflection on mothering as “paying pure attention,” spurred by a question from her youngest son. Kids apparently have no clue that moms “live and breathe to map out his landscape; that as he shovels pasta tubes into his mouth, we are studying his sweet face; no clue that we’re listening intently.”

• Mothering Day: Mahany suggests this as a replacement for Mother’s Day, to honor all who practice mothering: “tender caring, coaxing life, leaving mercy in your wake, the art that knows no gender bounds, that the world needs in mighty thronging masses.”

• Teaching Tenderness: on taking her son out on a worm rescue mission, moving those stranded on the sidewalk after a rain. She instructs her sons in “a curriculum of tenderness toward all things living and even those that aren’t.” Mahany’s boys know their mom to be “on a mission from God, perhaps, to let no winged or multi-limbed thing suffer crushing fate or die in a wad of toilet paper.”

• “The Egg that Wouldn’t Take No for an Answer”: Reflections on a most welcome last-chance baby, “eight pure pounds of Dream Come True, Prayer Answered, birthed against all odds, as I barreled toward 45.”

• Food offerings for heart and soul: “Serving up what amounts to depths of heart, to say in mashed potatoes and Irish butter: I love you dearly, and I’m so sorry I’ve been distracted. The hours of stirring, of simmering, of thinking something through, not whipping it off in the last ten minutes before the hunger sirens screech, doesn’t it all find its way deep down in the deliciousness?”

Mahany is Christian and her husband is Jewish, so her family encounters God in the rituals and idioms of two faith traditions. She writes about this weaving together of traditions in the faith life of her family. Since motherprayer can at times be expressed through food, readers will find recipes “From the Cookery Files” throughout the book, such as “Birthday Mac and Cheese (Or for Any Day When Comfort Is All You Need),” “Height-of-Summer Peach Shortcake,” and “Welcome-Home Brisket.”

“Mothering a child is the most sacred calling of my life,” Mahany writes. “It begs all I am and all I’ve got, and then some. Without prayer—the inside line to angels, saints, and Holy God—I’d not have made it, not even close, to labor and delivery. Nor a single day thereafter.”

let me know what you think.

love, b.

p.s. you have no idea how much courage it takes to hit the publish button here this morning….

42 Comments

February 10, 2017

hope patrol

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i’m just in from searching for hope. my boots are a bit muddy. my fingers are cold. and i’m not surprised to report there were no sightings of winter loosening its miserly grip.

sadly, in my corner of the world there is no snow. no drifts of white. no boughs laden with icy meringue. no fat flakes tumbling, tumbling from heaven to earth.

there is, more than anything, drab brown. not even rich brown. drab. drained-of-zing brown. which, perhaps, is apt description for my soul of late. which is why i was out searching.

thank heaven, the heavens responded last night: posted a nearly full moon, a fat moon, a bright moon, a moon that tonight will glow in all its glory. full snow moon. the moon that marks the arrival at sundown of a jewish holiday i’ve come to love. tu b’shevat it’s called, and it marks “the new year of the trees.” in israel, the holy land where all of these blessings begin, it’s the date on the calendar when vernal whisperings begin. when, if you pulled out your magnifying lens, and tiptoed close to the tips of the almond tree’s branches, you’d easily see the evidence: fat buds, fatter by the hour.

the trees are shaking off their slumber. the trees are stirring toward blossom, toward heavenly perfume, toward fruit. (the prescriptions for tu b’shevat i find wholly enchanting, a four-course feast of fruits and wine, so explained by the kabbalists, those deeply spiritual thinkers who believed that we elevate ourselves by the eating of certain fruits on tu b’shevat. if done with holy intention, they taught, sparks of light hidden in the fruit could be broken open from their shells, freed to float up to heaven, to the great divine, completing the circle of the renewal of life. oh my.)

it’s the eternal rhythm of earth and heavens. the inalterable equation of light from above, and richness from deep down inside the earth. it’s carried us forth, a pulsing pull, from the beginning of time. till now. and some winters — some winters inside our soul — we need surrender to the holy earth, to the rhythms that sustain us, move us forward even when we don’t believe we’ve the energy to lift a weary foot.

this winter would be one of those winters. all around the news is drab to worse. we’ve all been holed inside. and around here not even buffeted by snows, by the glory of an icy-painted window pane. we’re worn thin.

so mother earth comes to comfort us. she offers hope. even when we cannot see it.

back before the winter came, my last act of hope came the day i dropped to bent knee, thrust my shovel in the ground, and tucked in dozens and dozens of bulbs. i’d scanned the nursery shelves for blues and whites, the colors of delft, of old willow plates, the colors of sky and cloud. it’s a form of prayer, i’d insist, to tuck hope beneath the earth, to step away, and await the moment when the surge comes, when the tender determined shoot of newborn green comes poking through the earth. declares triumph. offers proof that hope pays off.

it’s too soon for that moment, as my morning’s patrol has made perfectly clear. but i find hope in other ways. i find hope seeping in through the cracks. do you?

i felt hope last night sitting in a circle of prayerful souls. i feel hope as i watch folks far braver and bolder than me pick up the reins and write the truth. i feel hope as all around i see the humblest among us stirred to action. i feel an awakening, even though it’s not yet the one from down beneath the crust of earth, where all the roots are emboldening, the roots we cannot see.

maybe it’s a blessing that we’re all paying attention, maybe it’s a very good thing that we’re being reminded that a democracy is a fragile thing, a living breathing entity that, like the rhythms of the earth and sky, must be carefully attended to. and we must all hold up our corner of its banner. we must all — by little and by little — find our courage, find our voice, think hard, think critically, employ deepest civility, listen with a gentle heart, and wield the purest acts of justice. and not let go — ever — of plain old kindness. the sort that seems to be rising up in some of the loveliest defiance i’ve ever seen.

come to think of it, that all sounds like hope to me. maybe, after all, it’s out there where the winds blow cold, blow certain. maybe my muddy boots led me to the very thing i’m hoping for.

are you sensing any signs of hope? any stories of pure kindness you’d care to share? the more we hear, the more emboldened we become, i do believe….

couple special intentions on this second friday in february. two dear friends of the chair suffered heart-shatterings this week: deepest prayers to pjt, who lost her dearest best friend far far too soon, and pjv, whose sister — last i heard — is on a ventilator and whose hold is fragile at this point. at my house, we are remembering my papa who died this day 36 years ago. i’ve heard from a few of my brothers this morning, who are all mourning his long absence from our every day.

if you’re curious about tu b’shevat, i wrote about it here a few years back….

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February 3, 2017

this is who we are

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truth is, more days than not i feel like i’m climbing a hill with boots filled with concrete. but then, every rare once in a while, a whiff of hope swizzles by. don’t know about you, but i’m reaching out and grabbing as if my life — all of our lives — depends on it.

last night a friend i love — a friend with a tender heart and fierce magnificent defiance — sent along a link to the sign up above, “hate has no home here.” i’m planting those words — in all those languages and alphabets — squarely in my front yard.

that short declarative sentence captures everything. it gets to the gist of the matter — for me, anyway. it’s the bullying, the hateful tone, and the words and the rulings that pit one against another. that’s what’s draining me, scaring me, making me think i might have a stroke.

“hate has no home here.” hate has no home in my heart.

and, day after day, that’s the epicenter of most of it. i don’t want to live in a country where everyone’s eyeing everyone — are you one of us? we wonder. stopped at a stop sign, tapping our toes in the checkout line. it permeates each and every hour of the day. it’s seeped into the interstitia of all of our minutes. it’s why i stay away from the public square of the new millennia: facebook. i don’t want to marinate my days in the vitriol — from either side of the equation — because harsh words — from any side — serve only to wedge, to divide, to move us farther and farther from the peaceable place where we climb on each other’s shoulders and reach for the heavens.

i was blindsided by the gloating that came along with the win. i hadn’t imagined. i admit that i hadn’t imagined the win in the first place, and shortly after discovered that, for too many, the win gave license to let rip with whatever had been bottled inside. it all came gushing out. and that’s why — months later — i’m still struggling to find my footing.

there’s a house not far from mine where life-size effigies of the former president and first lady were perched on a bench beside the president elect. the former president was dressed in a shiny orange pimp suit. the former first lady, dressed as a whore. it took weeks and weeks for parts of it to finally be taken down (for far too many sickening days, the tableau included a black-faced effigy tied with a noose, dangling from a tree. and ugly yard signs, too). the house is stately, sits on a hill, on a main street that slices this town. i’d have to drive out of my way to avoid it, so i did. i still do. because i couldn’t stand the sight of it. it made me sick every time. i understand that theirs is the right to say whatever they choose; but i wish with all my heart they didn’t find it amusing — maybe delightful — to mock with such vengeance, to jeer, to broadcast what feels to me like plain old hate.

jesus told us never to mock. “blessed are the meek,” is what i learned when i was little, and then learned over and over. “blessed are the meek, the merciful, the pure of heart.” that’s what i believed. still believe.

i’m raising my flag and fighting back in the only ways i know: quietly, without folderol and noise.

the other night, driving home through the dark, i was sitting in the back seat when i noticed a car stopped in what seemed like the heart of an intersection, about a block away. i saw the driver get out, and that’s when i noticed something lumpy and dark in front of the car, lying in the road. i didn’t wait for my brain to make sense; i opened the door and i ran. as i got there, i saw that the lump on the ground was a man, just starting to move. he was already bloodied, his face beginning to leak from his nose and his eyes and his forehead. as he strained to lift his head from the ground, the blood poured without pause. the man’s blood spattered me. i cradled him, tried to keep him still. i asked the man his name, praying he’d be able, and he told me. his name was howard. he lived nearby. he had no family, he said. he had no idea what had happened. and that’s when i looked up at the car stopped just inches away, the car whose windshield was shattered as if a boulder had fallen smack onto it.

with all my heart, i tried to keep howard conscious, to keep him from slipping into a place where we’d not get him back. by the time i was asking him to count backwards from 10, my firstborn had leapt too to his side. he helped hold howard still. we both prayed as fiercely as we’d ever prayed. it wasn’t long till a doctor, from out of the blue, ran over too. pulled out his phone, turned on the flashlight, and began to assess the crack that fissured howard’s head.

the one thing i knew most certainly as we all huddled there together, in the dark, in the cold, one man’s blood pouring and pouring: we were all there for each other. life and death is what lay before us, and we were all pulling for life. because we had to. because no matter what’s going on in the world around us, in the end, we are each other’s only hope. and the decency at the heart of every human still breathing is what we’re exercising here. i know that for those few extraordinarily long minutes, it felt to me like we were shouldering all the hope, all the goodness, this world has to muster. we were strangers suddenly entwined in saving one life. and we harbored him with prayer and with love. because isn’t that what all of us hope will be there for us — should there ever be a night that’s dark and cold, a night when our breath is labored, and we’re slipping away?

and in the end, that’s all i know. and it’s the one thing i will not surrender. i will muster every grain of defiance in my heart and my soul, and i will not let hate or hateful words win.

because who we are is all these tiny moments where love wins out, where we rise up out of our comfortable lives, take the reins of what feels right, and do what needs to be done: we march, we make phone calls, we live and breathe kindness as if it’s political protest. these times are begging us to be our best selves. and all around, i see people i love doing just that. they send me yard signs. they raise money for refugee families. they invite those families in for dinner. they listen to their stories. they find love, front and center. and that’s the way we win. that’s what God’s asking. i’m certain.

and i am listening like never before.

what are the moments of love that inspire and embolden you of late?

as for my friend howard, he is out of ICU, and i hope and pray he’ll be heading home soon. i’ve been keeping watch all week. because howard will forever be in my heart and my prayers.

as for the sign above, i’m having a few made today. here’s the link, if you too want to print out a poster, a yard sign, a button to pin to your coat (bless them, they’re free for downloading). the magnificent sign was designed right here in chicago by an artist named steven luce. i don’t know him, but i thank him with all of my heart.

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pull up a chair

Month: February, 2017

February 24, 2017

felled by fever