February | 2024 | pull up a chair

be not afraid is the instructive. it comes in a hymn we belt from our pews, and in one form or another it’s spelled out in sacred text in most every religion. i’ve belted the words to the hymn with voice cracking, and tears running down my cheeks. i’ve belted out those words as if in singing them loudly i could muscle up to the task.

to be not afraid, we’ve been told, is to be certain of faith. what then of us wafflers? the ones with wobbly knees?

i sometimes think i’m the poster child for fear. and the fear i’ve felt in this whole last year is a whole new subterranean trembling. it’s one that wakes you in the night. and one that sends you and your worries catapulting off into nevernever land. all it takes is a headache that won’t go away. or a pang in the side that’s not from cold ice cream.

sometimes i think it’s only fair that i find myself in the company of fear so very often these days. it’s an unerasable fact of my life that not quite a year ago i awoke from a surgery and heard the doctor say, “i was so surprised, it was cancer.” and then, as if needing proof there on my gurney, i reached down to where the holes were, five of them––front, back, and side––the slits from which they pulled out a good chunk of my lung.

surprises like that are a bit hard to shake.

so now, for two long weeks, a curious constellation of queasies has been pinned to me like a shadow, and i am pretty much wide-eyed afraid. last night my doctor sent me for blood tests. a whole slew of them. i almost thought they’d grab a jug off the shelf and start to fill it.

for someone who doesn’t like talking about my medical woes, i am wading in a bit too deep here. but i am someone who takes to heart the knowledge that i’m not the only scaredy cat in the litter. and sometimes i think it’s the right thing to do to put voice to the truth that there are times when we aren’t so brave. there are times when we wish we could hide under the covers, or under the bed, and wait for the bogeyman’s footsteps to turn and go away.

does it mean i’m faithless because i’m afraid? i don’t think so. i think it means i’ve been keeping watch long enough to know that stories don’t always end with happy endings. and God can love you to pieces, but not write the story quite the way you’d plot it out. i mean, i’ve been to funerals of souls so breathtakingly good, you sit there gasping at the hole now left in their absence. at how the world without those particular angels living, breathing, and wafting among us is a far sorrier place. at how you can’t quite fathom a world without their showing us day after day just how magnificent the human species can be.

turns out the words to the song, “be not afraid,” were written by a jesuit priest-in-training who was deeply afraid when he wrote it. he was quaking with fear. the fear of not knowing what lay ahead. would he be any good at this priestly existence? where in the world would it lead him? was he hours away from the biggest mistake of his lifetime? well, father dufford was his name, and, on the cusp of his ordination, he was sent off to pray all by his lonesome. and that’s when he opened the nearest book to his elbow, which happened to be a Bible. flipping through chapter and verse, he turned to the story of the Annunciation, when the angel gabriel is said to have come to the Blessed Virgin Mary––an unmarried teen, you recall––to tell her she was “with child,” and gabriel said to her “do not be afraid.”

father dufford had his first line.

a few weeks later, as father D tells the tale, a friend of his told him she was being sent to ghana to do missionary work. and that made him really want to finish his hymn before she left. but hymn writing is not always easy. and despite his determination, he could only come up with a second line: “i go before you always.”

it would be a whole year before he got to the last line: “and i will give you rest.”

it’s a hymn that since 1975 has poured into the brokenness that defines so much of history, both the intimate personal history we know to be our very own, and the collective history of us as a people who’ve been crushed and shattered and brittled by so, so much.

it’s a hymn sister helen prejean, the great saint of death rows upon rows, often sings to those inmates she walks to death’s door––the last words they hear before their last breath. it’s the hymn bill clinton chose for his first inauguration at the morning prayer service. father dufford says that he’s gotten notes from people who lull themselves to sleep humming it on those nights when sleep won’t otherwise come.

when father dufford’s own father died some years later, he added one last verse:

And when the earth has turned beneath you and your voice is seldom heard,
When the flood of gifts that blessed your life has long since ebbed away,
When your mind is thick and hope is thin and dark is all around,
I will stand beside you till the dawn.

maybe i should remember all the words.

and on the subject of fear and holding hands in the face of fear, here is this excerpt from naomi shihab nye’s “EVERY DAY AS A WIDE FIELD, EVERY PAGE,” a poem in which she puts word to the one sure thing i know that takes away my fears: when i picture ones i love huddled right beside me, squeezing my hand; when i remember that all of us together can keep our knees from buckling. isn’t that why we’re here? given that the world these days has plenty to knock us off our rockers, it’s a blessed thing to picture wide-eyed tender-hearted folk all around the globe, looking up into the night, holding hands in a virtual steadying circle. here’s naomi’s take on that, a thought that came to her watching fireflies blink in the dark of night….

We didn’t have to be in the same room —
the great modern magic.
Everywhere together now.
Even scared together now
from all points of the globe
which lessened it somehow.
Hopeful together too, exchanging
winks in the dark, the little lights blinking.
When your hope shrinks
you might feel the hope of
someone far away lifting you up.
Hope is the thing …

when i am afraid, i look to the stories and the strength of ordinary folk whose hurdles are daunting, and yet who lope forward with grace. i seize on the kindness of strangers, the lady at the immediate care check-in desk, the schedulers on the hospital phone, the sweet woman who tied on the tourniquet and borrowed those many tubes of blood. in the past year, i’ve bumbled into a troupe of brave souls whose fearlessness takes my breath away. some of their roads are far bumpier than mine, and yet they press on, shedding their light on all who are blessed enough to take a few steps beside them. maybe the gift of being afraid is that it makes you reach beyond your own trembling walls. it makes you take a deep breath and step into the darkness. and in time, you find your bearings, and you look down and realize you’re stronger and braver than you ever imagined.

where do you turn when you are afraid?

p.s. in poking around just now, looking for a photo that wasn’t hokey, i stumbled on this bit of intrigue: apparently the words, “do not be afraid,” appear in the bible 365 times. (i love the folks who count these things…) so, apparently, that’s a reminder a day. except for in leap year. which is this year. which is six days from now. so we’ll have to remind ourselves: do not be afraid.

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February 16, 2024

the last sick tray

it might have been the last time i’ll ever hear it, those words rising out of the murky middle-of-the-night darkness, curling out from under the door of the bedroom at the bend in the stairs. “mo-o-om, i feel sick,” came the plaintive declaration, my one-syllable moniker being drawn into multiples, emphasizing the dire straits the sick one was in.

and, with that, the boy about to move out of this old house, about to move into the big city where his freedom will be all his own, we played out one last time the choreography of mother caring for feverish, achy, gland-swollened child.

this time around, he took his own temperature and called into work in the wee dark hours. but still i was the one who deep in the night tugged on the medicine drawer at the top of the stairs, and filled the cup with fat chunks of ice and glugs of gingerale. and, soon as the light came, i set out for the store to fetch the fixtures of sick days with this particular boy: salty oyster crackers and noodly chicken soup.

it’s a role i know well. it’s a role i have loved, all told, for thirty years now, even though it first came upon me with my own arms trembling, so worried was i by the baby i cradled (this one’s big brother, my firstborn) on a long-ago night when the cry came shrilly and skin felt hot to the touch.

i can’t count the number of nights i’ve lay on the bathroom floor, a bath towel for both pillow and blanket, as we staked out the nearest position to the toilet bowl or the bath — depending which virus was doing the attacking. i can’t count the number of trips up and down the stairs in the dark, fetching ice, fetching honey, fetching gingery ale.

on day two of this latest siege, when morning came, and the boy on the verge of moving out let on that he was hungry, i dove in to a task i couldn’t have relished more: i made one last sick tray, and, right down to the spoonful of brown sugar i plopped in a dish, i felt my whole soul being ladled into each unnecessary flourish.

somehow the ticking down of days in which i can take care of him, in which he’ll let me take care of him, made me all the more emphatic about each and every drop. i ladened that sick tray with every indelible talisman from our homegrown, family-specific, sick-day manual: the buttery toast sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, the ice chips drizzled with honey, the clementine and plump red strawberries for extra vitamin C. and of course the spoon and the glass wrapped with a rubber band, tagging it sick-kid’s-only, just as my mama had done for me, her unscientific attempt at keeping the lid on infectious disease amid her troupelet of five.

it was as if i was packing him off for a lifetime of taking care, as if an eternity of loving him was what i was ladling onto that sick tray, and into his soul. as if i was shortshrifting the snuffing out of time, making my own tight-end run around some clock that is ticking. i was sealing a deal with forever and ever. and it came, in this moment, in the form of being his nursemaid.

there is something in me that takes like a bird to the wind when it comes to taking care of the ones i love, especially the ones i birthed and the one to whom i was birthed. maybe that’s why i found myself in nursing school. i’ve always been drawn to the sick-bed bedside.

it’s a place of certain tenderness, of amplified permeabilities (we are more wide-open when we are ailing, and our needing each other is heightened). it’s a place where exercising empathies is so often met with eager and unspoken reception. it’s one of the best places i know to love as i would be loved. and more than once or twice, i’ve found myself on the receiving end, tended to by the very boy i am tending to now. (a story i’ll never forget.)

maybe because this is the last or almost last go-round in the sick-kid-under-my-care department, and maybe because i am feeling this latest pulling-away (the kid getting ready to move, once and for all) deep in my marrow, the reel started wheeling of sick hours when he and i have stitched our hearts together: the ERs where i was right there, and the one when i was far away, connected only by long-distance telephone line and left only to imagine him strapped inside the ambulance that carried him across farmland and rolling hills to the heartland hospital where they checked him in. i remember a yom kippur he and i spent in the ER, and another when he had a bulge in his neck so golfball-sized they considered slitting it open. i remember the awful time i’d squished his tiny toddler fingers in the car door window. i remember and remember, and truth be told i feel every tug of the letting go.

when the surest thing you have done in your life, the one thing you’ve most tried to imbue with the holy, is about to shift into another more distant gear, it’s an act you surrender with all the grace you can muster. and a spoonful of dark brown sugar besides.

what are your most natural ways to dollop your love? and what are the ways of the sick bed you’ve picked up along the way?

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February 9, 2024

hungry for color

it hits this time of year, at this point in the turning of globe when we’re deep in shadow, and the world out our window is endlessly, endlessly, drainingly gray. even i, a self-proclaimed fangirl of the cloudiest day, a girl who thrills at billows of fog, those days when the sunlight can’t find its way in — even i get a bit itchy for hues beyond pigeon and charcoal and smoke, all close kin in the family of gray.

which is precisely why that shock of scarlet and pink boldly inserts itself in the february calendar. we need a little color. and the heart-shaped holiday brings it on. coils and coils of red, beribboned with oyster pink or flamingo. maybe even dashes of fuchsia.

i detected this color deficiency (more of a self-diagnosis) when i realized that all through the week i was clicking and clicking on dizzying droplets of anything resembling “other-than-gray.” and when i caught myself daydreaming, once again, of a riotous, bouquet-gathering, summery cutting garden — zinnias and cosmos and blue bachelor’s buttons all rising up like a botanical box of jazzy crayolas (preferably the 64-pack in which those waxy rainbow-hued sticks stand shoulder-to-shoulder as if choir-robed darlings marched into their multi-row loft).

and so, in hopes of sating your own chromatic hungers, i bring you a compendium of colors from a painter, a cook, a maven of tulips, and a poet.

first up: the painter, whose style of garden i aim to emulate, mostly because it’s been said that her “rambling garden was unkempt to imperfection.” jean cooke is her name, and she was considered one of britain’s greatest woman painters of the twentieth century. described, too, as a remarkable, bird-like woman, the london gallery that shows her work, goes on to describe her “ungardening” thusly:

Cooke’s neglect of her garden—she sometimes called it ‘ungardening’—was partly a reflection of her priorities: her painting and the care of her children. Beyond these demands there was little energy to give less pressing concerns. Grass went unmown, fences unmended and trees unpruned. But the messy garden was not entirely accidental. The disarray was cultivated over an extended period of time and helped Cooke to create a new subgenre in works such as The Wild Plum Tree, which drew upon aspects of both landscape and garden painting traditions. Whereas Claude Monet’s waterlily pond was scrupulously tended, Jean Cooke’s rambling garden was unkempt to imperfection just as her painting required. Whereas earlier paintings such as Grassland had used the Sussex coastline to create landscape-scale wilderness, by the mid-eighties when she began painting spring blossom in earnest her own garden had achieved a similarly expansive quality.
piano-nobile gallery

jean cooke at work in her unkempt imperfection

and in a nod to cupid’s holiday cusping on the near horizon, here’s a tad of insight, should tulips be the thing you choose to send your true love:

“As far as I’m concerned, …[tulips] are the best, indeed the only flowers to send or receive on Valentine’s Day. Wild, irrepressible, wayward, unpredictable, strange, subtle, generous, elegant, tulips are everything you would wish for in a lover. Best of all are the crazy parrot tulips such as ‘Rococo’ with red and pink petals feathered and flamed in crinkly lime-green. ‘When a young man presents a tulip to his mistress,’ wrote Sir John Chardin (Travels in Persia, 1686), ‘he gives her to understand by the general red color of the flower that he is on fire with her beauty, and by the black base that his heart is burned to coal.’ That’s the way to do it.”
– Anna Pavord, wonderful British garden writer and bulb lover, in The Curious Gardener: A Year in the Garden, 2010

on the subject of wild women who tend toward the vivid end of the paint pot, there is the utterly marvelous and delicious emily nunn, formerly of the new yorker and the chicago tribune. she is a food writer like no other, and in recent years she has devoted her not-inconsiderable genius to the subject of salads. her newsletter often has me giggling straight off my chair. and her salads are beyond delicious more often than not. it delights me to introduce you to the one and only emily nunn’s department of salads, along with a peek at but one of emily’s many-hued produce concoctions….

and finally, let’s wrap this up with a wonder from mary O that i had never seen before, from a slim little volume i’d not known of till just last week when a wonder of a woman hosted a candlemas gathering and asked us all to bring a.) a candle, and b.) a poem about light. and thus i discovered house of light, mary oliver’s 1990 collection of poems. since the subject of this one is van gogh, it seems perfectly suited as a prescriptive for those who find themselves suffering a little color deprivation.

EVERYTHING by Mary Oliver

No doubt in Holland,
when van Gogh was a boy,
there were swans drifting
over the green sea
of the meadows, and no doubt
on some warm afternoon
he lay down and watched them,
and almost thought: this is everything.
What drove him
to get up and look further
is what saves this world,
even as it breaks
the hearts of men.
In the mines where he preached,
where he studied tenderness,
there were only men, all of them
streaked with dust.
For years he would reach
toward the darkness.
But no doubt, like all of us,
he finally remembered
everything, including the white birds
weightless and unaccountable,
floating around the towns
of grit and hopelessness––
and this is what would finish him:
not the gloom, which was only terrible,
but those last yellow fields, where clearly
nothing in the world mattered, or ever would,
but the insensible light.

and with that i shall wonder, where did you find color this week?

jean cooke’s “springtime through the window,” 1980s

6 Comments

February 2, 2024

the roots are stirring. . .

sometimes, especially when staring into a tableau best described as blkkh, a monochrome of melted soot + oozy mud, we little people need reminding that there is stirring afoot. underground, that is. deep in this holy earth, particles expand. and multiply. and do those “rooty” things. they set down shoots. reach into the hollows to construct the nutrient highways that, come spring, will rise in daffodil and snowdrop. will punctuate the earthscape in royal-purple crocus and knock-your-socks off cobalt blue.

since ancient times, spurred by the collected wisdoms of those who’ve found themselves at this point in the revolution of the year, at the very midpoint between winter’s darkest longest night — the solstice — and springtime’s resuscitating equinox, the moment when the shadow and the sunlight fall in equal measure, this moment has been marked in ways that promised hope. ancient peoples, too, must have known the dregs of winter trodding on too long, or at least the ancients of the north.

those ancient peoples dubbed this a cross-quarter day, the precise mid-score between the changing of the seasons. and those ancient peoples, ones whose livings came not from sitting in front of keyboard pounding keys, but rather who picked up staff or rod, and herded flocks or fished the seas or tilled the earth, they turned to what they knew best to look for hopeful signs: earth and sea and sky. therein was the stirring from which they drew their wisdoms and their post-it notes from God.

in the case of this cross-quarter day, the one that falls as winter wanes, when springtime hasn’t yet picked up its paces, there might well have been some undercurrent of we-are-running-out-of-steam-here. and so perhaps one wintry day, one wise (and desperate) someone dropped to her knees, pawed the crusty earth just down deep enough to catch a glimpse of tangled rootlets reaching down, down, down. she might have whooped in exclamation, let her fellow desperados know that, lo and behold, all was not lost. the earth had not gone thoroughly to sleep. deep down where earth keeps all its secrets, there was promise stirring.

and so, the peoples celebrated. the peoples, being wise long before we were specks of anyone’s imagination, might have extracted their own wisdoms from this botanic wonder. they might have realized that if the wondrous underbellies of the bulbs were hard at work in ways unseen, we too might seek analogous metaphor in the vicinity of our psyche and our souls. we too might figure out that now, as winter’s grip begins to loosen, our own deep-down growing stirs. even when we think it not. (and we’d be wise, methinks, to bolster that stirring with at least a dab of concentrated meditations, sifting through the questions that might propel our year ahead, steering our own soulful energies to those one or two roots we decide most warrant our attention.)

the ancient israelites (and jews today) called it tu b’shevat, the new year of the trees, so marked by the first blossoming of the almond trees. the celts called it imbolc, a word that means “in the belly,” when the earth’s belly begins its thaw and the seeds below begin their stirring. (the word imbolc comes from Old Irish, and was reference to the ewes beginning to lactate as birthing season comes and the field grasses start to grow.)

indeed, the earth is quickening, the obstetric name for that first sacred stirring from within, when that tiny tiny human limb first garners enough muscular oomph to kick the wall of mama’s womb. i remember sensing it, unsure if it was just a tummy rumble, or the first fetal morse code that someone in there was really in there. in due time, the kicks make clear that it’s no hiccup of the fetal variety.

jews gather for the tu b’shevat seder, a feast of seven fruits and four glasses of wine, beginning with one of deepest red (winter at its fullest) and each successive glass a paler pink till springtime’s wine, all white. the celts, being earthly people, turned to fire and water: the women of the home slept beside the hearth on imbolc’s eve (jan. 31), and checked in the morning for any markings in the ash signifying that saint brigid (a fiery spirit) had wafted by in the night, spreading her imbolc blessings. they headed for the hills, too, and lit bonfires atop the crests, then spent the night leaping over the flames. more docile celts might have settled for kindling a few wicks around the house. but every peoples has its wild ones. and if fire wasn’t your thing, you might wander to the nearest sacred well, and take a dip for purification purposes.

i might let the candles burn today, or perhaps i’ll take a sudsy bath, as i think deep and hard of how i intend to bring my little flickering of light into this world that grows dark and darker by the day….

and on that note i bring you this emboldenment that my blessed firstborn sent along the other day, quoting from his favorite of thomas merton’s writings, raids on the unspeakable.

Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God. You agree? Good. Then go with my blessing. But I warn you, do not expect to make many friends…
Thomas Merton

what might you do today to mark the incoming of light, minute by minute, day by day, till the full birthing comes?

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pull up a chair

Month: February, 2024

February 23, 2024

poster child for fear