April | 2018 | pull up a chair

April 27, 2018

permeable season: necessary (and overdue) rinse for the soul

closed off: awakening earth, behind glass

open wide: nothing but screen between birdsong + me

it’s not yet warm, certainly not at this early hour. so i sit wrapped in layers of sweater, with a blanket besides. my down vest is within easy reach. and so is my steamy-hot first mug of coffee. ah, but the sunlight says yes, and the birdsong is begging: open the door, let in the dawn.

and so i surrender.

the glass-paned french door is swung on its hinges, and nothing but screen stands between me and the cool april morn. it’s door-opening season, windows-ajar time of year. even if a smidge on the chilly side.

it’s the necessary ablution of springtime. the rinse of the outdoors rushing in. stale wintertime, out; vernal cleansing, in.

despite the goosebumps parading up and down my fleshy forearms, i am awash in the warbles of avian romance, as males of the species put on a flash-dance of song. there is much feeding of worms out there in birdland, the tender exchange of squirmy invertebrate passed from beak to beak, a wet juicy kiss if ever there was. and one that wiggles, to boot.

my furnace, not yet stilled for the summer, bellows like nobody’s business. it’s doing its darnedest to chase out the chill i am defiantly, purposely, ushering in.

whoever invented the quartet of seasons (hmmm, who might that be?) must have had the insider’s intimate knowledge when it came to the care and maintenance of the human soul. because, i tell you, by the final stretch of april, when winter’s gone longer than long and mittens aren’t yet tucked away, we’re nearly gasping for a good strong dose of undiluted solar infusion.

truth is, i wouldn’t mind being pinned to a clothesline right about now. just dangling out in the breeze, chasing my wrinkles and worries away.

folks i know and love are practically bursting at the seams, ready to shake off the sluff of being stuck inside for far too many weeks. and sitting here, amid the swells of this early morning’s stirrings, i’m bristling to attention with each and every quarter note flung from the throat of my warblers and robins.

it’s as if our pores, every last one of them, need the cobwebs and grime air-blasted out. that peculiar affliction known as spring cleaning, it’s a must for our souls as well every last tile and nook crusted with the long winter’s crud.

i, for one, need a good long march through the woods. i ache to crouch low to the leaf-caked earth, to inspect for fungi and frond slowly unfurling. i yearn for a log to call out my name, to beg i plop down my bum, pull a cake or a grape from my pocket: plein air piquenique, i call it. a feast for the senses, garnished with goosebump.

it’s why the first duke of wellington invented the rubber-soled boot. and why mr. charles macintosh invented the dew-proof, rain-repellant mackintosh jacket. so that fools like me could take to the logs, and the awakening woods when our souls cried out in deep dire need of the airing that comes on the brightening end of winter.

margaret atwood once wrote that in the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. i say bring on the pungent, the woodsy perfume, of knees drenched in dirt, and shoes oozing with muck.

we’re long overdue for that most essential turn of the seasonal dial: the one that stirs us to life, to revivification; the one that quickens the pulse in our tired old ticker, and brings on the proof, living and breathing and warbling, that the beautiful, the tender, it comes, hallelujah.

how do you indulge in the vernal effusion?

and two more little wisps from The Blessings of Motherprayer….

springtimes

practicing presence

xoxox may your week wrap you in blankets and blankets of birdsong and tender breathtaking beauties…xoxox

8 Comments

April 20, 2018

the prayers we pray when we think it’s the end…

i motored home from the faraway writing festival in an ice storm, the sort that has you white-knuckling the wheel, and praying the prayers that matter most. all along the roadside, as i started toward home, crunched-up cars and parts of cars were strewn like pool balls along the sides of the highway. police lights flashed. stunned passengers staggered from what was left of their cars. the lanes of the highway were shiny and gritty, the detritus of ice piling thicker and sleeker.

i’d felt the ice as i walked across a long parking lot, as the spitting rain began to ping against my face. as it started to sting. as i realized it was no longer rain, but bits of ice in the making. by the time i got to my old red wagon, the ice bits had piled along the edge of the windshield, into the groove where the wipers lie still.

the forecast warned it would only get worse. and i had a house soon filling with people i love — with my beloved brother from maine, and his little girl who was turning nine that very day, who was coming to my house for pink polka dots and sparkling pink lemonade and a hot-pink birthday cake covered with roses and shimmering glitter (not unlike the bits of ice now piled on my windshield). so i turned the key and pointed my car toward chicago.

and what prayer popped front and center? the one that begs for time with my boys. the one that found me telling God, over and over, that my job was not done. the one that had me making deals. the one that mentioned how inconvenient it would be for me and my wheels to join the cascade of crunched metal and glass along the sides of the road, mile after mile after mile. and lest God had forgotten, i made sure to mention that my firstborn was about to start his first-year law school exams, and he could ill afford to come home for my funeral. (i’m fairly certain that was the thing that cinched the deal, don’t you think?) for good measure, i added that the little one, the one i will nearly always refer to as “my little one,” well, he had enough to worry about, i reminded God, without losing his mama on the side of the icy michigan interstate.

of all the words in the world, of all the petitions to which i might have put breath, the ones that flowed from my heart and my lungs were the ones that centered on the two whom i mother with my whole blessed being.

truth is, i suppose, that i will never ever hit my fill of being their mother. of loving them with every ounce of all i am — and more. i will, in my last breath, wish i’d had more. wish i could witness just one more chapter of who and why they are becoming.

is that not the burning furnace at the heart of our deepest, greediest loves? is it even greedy to love beyond the borders of who we are, of our wildest imagination? or is it the living breathing definition of love beyond measure? is it, perhaps, the holiest iteration of loving?

i made it home all right. even made it home, i’d find out the next day, with a nail smashed into the rim of my tire. must have picked it up in the last couple miles, as i drove through a construction zone. it didn’t go flat on that long icy ride home; it waited till the next morning when we pulled out of the garage and felt the telltale galump of a car with one flat tire.

later that night, when i mentioned to a friend how scary the drive had been, and how hard i’d prayed, she told me: “my prayer was always ‘I want to tell my kids I love them one more time.'”

the prayers we pray when we’re staring into the hard stop. the ones that chase away all the distraction, and bore through to the life-and-death essence.

the ones we’ll pray till our last….

our birthday girl…

what prayer might you pray till your last?

funny how these things decide to write themselves. i thought i was about to spill out my notebook, to share a few fine lines from the festival of faith and writing, which kwame alexander, the newberry-winning author, decided should be called, “festival of faith in writing.” apparently, the prayers won out.

but before i go, a few favorite lines from the line-up of poets and thinkers who, for three days and one ice storm, made me swoon…

kwame alexander, in a brilliant hilarious keynote, in which one of the stories was about his mother dying: the loss of your mom, he said, is “the most devastating thing any child ever has to go through…” (when mom died) “my star exploded and everything froze.”

poet marie howe: when asked how she found poetry, or perhaps how poetry found her, replied: “I was looking for a language no one else seemed to be talking about.”

“First time I noticed it was the back cover of Bob Dylan’s first album. Looking for language that speaks to this world within the world and I couldn’t find that.”

in a conversation between marie howe and irish poet padraig o tuama, this:

“poetry can be something of a common heart”

“if poetry does its work, it gets to the heart of the matter.”

padraig: “poetry is the original song of human life. I believe the first poem was the lullaby around the fire, a baby is crying…”

the essayist dinty moore, spewed wisdoms from other writers, including these:

Harry Crews: “writers spend all their time preoccupied with all the things the rest of the world spends all their time avoiding.”

Mary Oliver: “pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

James Tate: “when one is highly alert to language then merely everything begs to be a poem.”

Allen Ginsberg: “catch yourself thinking…”

that’ll do for now, with one more offering from my blessings of motherprayer file.

10 Comments

April 13, 2018

once again, of poetry and peepers

packed to the gills

dispatch from 49546…

well, i didn’t strap quite that much onto the old red wagon that carried me across three states to land here, at my biennial infusion of poetry, incandescence, and spring peepers (that frog song that rises up from a pond deep in the woods at the end of an endless parking lot), otherwise known as the festival of faith & writing. where i gorge on writers and poets and wander the hills of michigan in a state of bliss that likely has twinkly little stars whirling from my eyes.

over the course of 48 hours, i’ll inhale the likes of poets marie howe, pádraig Ó tuama, and scott cairns, the writers joy williams, edwidge danticat, kwame alexander, and bill mcKibben, big thinker parker palmer, journalist barbara bradley haggerty, and essayist dinty w. moore, among the many. i’ll feast on flannery o’conner’s prayer journal, and thomas merton’s record collection.

and in between it all, there will be those frogs belting out their vernal love tunes from the murky pond i’ve not yet found.

at night, once heaven’s dome is star-stitched with twice the skylights seen back in sweet chicago, i hole up inside an old, old house, where the floors creak, and the blankets smell of lavender. the folks who run the bed & breakfast, they make you feel right at home, invite you clear into the kitchen while they stir the eggs, or scoop the melon into high-stemmed bowls.

it’s the closest i come to a spell at any spa. in my book, i’ll take poets over thermal mud baths any day.

i’ll try to circle back to this old table and weave in a few of the lines i’ll be scribbling in the margins of my big, fat program guide. i know, sure as i know how to spell grand rapids, that there will be lines and exchanges and snippets of magnificence that take my breath away, set me soaring on the vernal updraft of incandescent poetry.

in the meantime, i’ve been delighting in the joys of making what’s known in the world of literary marketing as “shareables,” lines lifted from the pages of my little bitty book, the blessings of motherprayer, pasted atop all sorts of lovely pictures. they’re meant to share. so feel free to click and drag onto your desktop, and print them out. you could stick them to your fridge, or scribble your grocery list on the back. use as a bookmark, or line your drawers with a whole swatch of them.

i’ll pick just a handful for now, but i’ll keep adding, so please come back to watch them multiply…..

hours that matter mothering verb birthing rooms loop of prayer by little

what’s your idea of a spa for the soul?

(p.s. feel free to tell me which one of the shareables you might like best. i need you all to be my in-house market research committee….) xoxox

6 Comments

April 6, 2018

once again, resilience

scilla resilient

the Great Book of Creation must understand that i belong in remedial class, the flock for slow learners, the ones who need the lessons over and over (and over) again. all but pounded into our thick Homo sapiens skulls.

take Resilience, the course now being offered in the great outdoors. the course that zips us through the syllabus of rise, bud, pummel, wait to see what happens.

the pressing question, the one the professor whispers in our plugged-up ears: will we surrender hope, throw in the trowel and clomp away, or will we stubbornly, insistently believe that one day the hallelujah will be ours?

let the examination begin:

perhaps your sliver of acreage, like mine, was just beginning to break the thaw. perhaps the itty-bitty wisps of green had risen all around. perhaps their flags of cobalt blue or white or even butter yellow had been hoisted. and then the april rain turned frigid cold, turned to slosh of snow. and the dang beauties, caught in the act, were flash frozen, stopped at half-mast.

and you, zipped inside your fluffy layers, you dashed outside to survey the damage. you stood there, gasping, hands over mouth to stifle cries of pain. anguish of the garden variety. all looked doomed just half a day ago. it looked like spring on ice. as if the waiters dumped the slush buckets on the way to the all-you-can-eat buffet.

but i’m just back in from my morning saunter through the beds, and i am here to tell you that while the little buds are still shivering, all but quaking on their tender stems, they have shaken off the icy bits, raised their heads again, unbent their necks, and — altogether now — they await the rising sun.

while i stand gobsmacked, in awe that they’ve not packed it up and shimmied florida way, i consider the legions of parallels in my own life plot: the heartaches i thought would never end, the friend i thought i’d never hear from again, the days and weeks and months when grief leadened my legs, my gut, my heart.

of all the lessons that unfurl in my earthy plots, the ones of rising up from heartbreak are among the most prolific. to tend a garden, to keep close watch on the rise and fall and rhythms of the earth, is to enter into the frailties and absurdities, the puzzles and conundrums for which there is no rhyme, no reason.

it is to know the sharp pang of brittle brokenness, and to slow-breathe the salve of picking up the pieces, slogging onward. finding holy breath again.

i am among the ones who need all the practice i can get. i need the muscles that a garden grows. and i don’t mean the ones that help me hoist the 20-pound sacks of mushroom compost. i mean the ones that teach me hope. and faith. over and over (and over) again.

and then, sometimes, the hallelujah comes.

i think the reason i settled in these northern parts, not far from the edge of the great lake, might have something to do with the lessons of this particular geography. the ones i clearly need over and over (and over).

what lessons have you learned from the springtime garden, the one that endures whatever crushing blows the heavens send its way?

11 Comments

Month: April, 2018