bam | pull up a chair

we mark time to measure something far deeper than the number of days. we mark time to take stock of our soul. to plumb its depths. to trace across its undulations. to peek into the shadowy places, and bask in the patches of pure illumination.

tomorrow, the twelfth day of the twelfth month, this old chair will once again glide across the stretch of shadow and light on which it began. its ninth circle round the sun. nine years of keeping watch, of perking my ears to the faintest of whispers. the whispers of the heart, yes. but just as certainly the wind rustling the leaves. the blue jay’s squawking. the world holding its breath. the pounding of bare soles against hardwood planks, rushing to the door to welcome love home.

at the break of dawn on december 12, 2006, i tiptoed down the stairs to a little nook of a room where a screen glowed, a screen waiting to be filled with words, with pictures, with postcards from the front — the homefront, in this case. the heart and soul of the homefront.

i had no real idea how all of this would unspool. but i knew that i wanted to carve out a hollow of quiet, a tide pool along the rushing river of life, where you and i might plop our bottoms onto a rock, might dip our finger into the current, might watch the light shifting, listen for the crunch of the forest under the wee padded feet of the creatures who call the woods home.

i knew i wanted a sacred someplace. a place where kindness prevailed. a gentle place, a home for tenderness and telling the truth. a place where we could bring our brokenness, or, just as emphatically, our bold claims of hope.

it would be an enchanted someplace. or at least that’s what i prayed.

i’ve long believed in enchantment. long believed in the possible. and the power of divine imagination. you can, sometimes, if you’re spectacularly lucky and a whole lot blessed, will your way to the landscape of which you dream.

when i was little i spent long hours in the woods across the way from the house where i grew up with a motley crew of four brothers. i plunked sticks into the pond where the ancient turtle basked on a log. i splashed across the rocks in the stream where crawfish bobbed from deep down in the dark.

that’s where i learned to believe in so very much of what still matters — the sanctity of silence, the incandescence of heavenly light, the blessing of being alone, the joy of muddy boots.

and maybe, too, that’s where i learned to believe that, fueled by imagination and spiced with a good dash of faith, i just might carve out a holy place.

and if there’s come to be anything holy about this make-believe table, circled with so many old chairs, it’s thanks to the good grace of your company — your day-after-day, week-after-week, year-upon-year coming by to share a few words, or a story, or kindness or wisdom. and ladles of love.

looking back over the nine blessed years — and thanks to the wizards at wordpress who keep track of these things — i can see at a glance just where these 729 posts have taken us, a bit of a roadmap in reverse, a by-the-numbers snapshot of what’s captured our imagination: 39 posts have considered the angels among us, 16 times i’ve laughed at myself (clearly, no one was counting), stillness has been a subject 22 times, motherhood 101, motherlove 44, mother prayer 17. we turned to cooking — for comfort, for joy — 42 times. blessings have been the subject du jour 64 times, paying attention 51 times, worry 11 (yet another serious under-estimate), wisdom only once (egad!). savoring moments, at 89 posts, is solidly a leitmotif.

and in just the last year here at the chair, we’ve traversed death and grief, awe and hope and hearts that are shattered by the most intimate of devastations or those played out on the world stage. we’ve considered quiet and the eloquence of silence. and this year, blessedly, the trumpets blared at the prodigal homecoming of my firstborn. i’ve written of words and books and harper lee. but if i had to pick three posts that will stick with me forever, it would be the prayer of remembering, the day my little one tried his hand at healing the sick, and, more than any other this year, the magic day at the magic hedge, where my most beloved friend and i pressed each sacred hour against our hearts, knowing, too well, the hours — and she — would soon slip away, a hole in my heart will ache till the end of time.

bless you. and thank you. for every kindness. for every dollop of wisdom. for your patience, your faith, and your blessedness. for the times you make me laugh out loud. and for every time you’ve made me wipe away a tear. from my heart to yours, a never-ending embrace.

may we never give up on the promise to infuse this weary old world with all the love and goodness we can possibly muster.

much love, b. images

22 Comments

December 3, 2015

how do the heavens know?

i can’t begin to count the number of days it happens.

as the night lifts, as the dawn spreads across the landscape, as i begin to make out the shifting silhouettes of the grasses, of boughs, as a sparrow here, a cardinal there, begin to animate the tableau, i sense the day beginning to blanket me, soothe me, wrap my cold shoulders in what amounts to a shawl. a prayer shawl, more often that not.

so it was, when i awoke this week to a dawn draped in white. snow on the bricks and the sharp blades of grass, just starting to stick. snow on the bough beginning to clump. the world just beyond my window pane, a filigree of shadow and palest of light.

how did the heavens know? how did the Great Beyond know that i needed a morning’s blanket?

i needed stillness to step into.

the night had been long, had been tumbled. it was one of those nights when worry stitches each one of your dreams. you awake, yes, but you wonder if you’ve slept even a wink.

all you need on a morning like that is softness. is quiet. you need a world on its tiptoes, padded tiptoes. you need a morning that, like an old friend, understands without words. sidles up beside you, lays its head on your shoulder. breathes.

the morning needn’t rattle you. needn’t startle.

the morning comes softly. snow tumbles down. in flakes that shift from fat to fatter. you breathe. you inhale blessing, breath after breath, and then you let loose, your morning’s litany, petition tumbling on top of petition.

dear God, watch over him. dear God, protect her. dear God, forgive us; forgive us our endless temptations, our trespasses, too. dear God, forgive this globe that seems to be spinning too close to the edge of madness.

dear God, fill us with grace. give us strength. give us wisdom. and, please, for once, let words fall from our lips with half the sense we’d hoped they would hold.

dear God, blanket us. open our eyes, and our hearts. show us the way. let us startle someone in these hours ahead, with some blast of unheralded goodness. let us be the instrument of your peace. let us pass over temptation, not be the one to whisper the word that would cut to the quick. not turn the cold shoulder.

dear God, steady us. deepen us. let me be the vessel this day that carries you into the midst of the chaos. let me sow love. let me bring pardon. let me, in these hours ahead, scatter faith wherever there’s doubt; hope, in place of despair.

you’ve answered my prayer before i’ve opened my eyes for the day. you’ve laced the dawn in white upon white, you’ve hushed the world out my window. you’ve opened my door into prayer — still heart, deep vow, bold promise.

dear God, i thank you. now let us tiptoe softly into this day…

what prayer did you pray on the quietest morning this week?

19 Comments

November 27, 2015

after the feast

fullfridge

if there was one slice of time to slip-slide into a bottle, to save for a rainy day, to relish, it might be that hushed and sumptuous moment when you tiptoe down the stairs and round the bend into the still-dark kitchen, first thing the morning after a very big feast.

the kitchen counters are cleared, the cookstove is sighing a deep sigh of relief, of exhaustion, of having been put through the holiday paces; all burners now still after blasting for hours, the oven now deep in a post-prandial sleep. there might be a bottle tucked off to the side, or the one lonely crescent roll that wasn’t torn into, the odd stack of plates that never got called for duty. open the fridge, though, and the shelves nearly groan, now pressed into service in hopes of preserving just a wee taste of all that was stirred and sautéed and browned and baked and roasted and mashed and pureed and, finally, dolloped over the course of a five-day kitchen maneuver, one mapped out with lists upon lists and timelines and charts and post-its galore.

as i sit snug at the old kitchen table, keeping watch on this blustery drizzle-drenched day, sipping my mug of the one hot liquid that catapults me out from under the covers, i find myself soaked in the grace of a year stitched with sadness, yes, but just as emphatically sewn with a hundred thousand shimmering threads of blessings for which my heart whispers thank you.

i’d start, sure as could be, with the three beds upstairs filled with long lanky boys who come in three sizes — small, long and longer. (while we’re at it, i’d add a long note of thanks for the post-feast delirium that more likely than not will fuel their sweet dreams — and my all-alone quiet — till long past midday.)

it wouldn’t take long — not far from the top of my roster of thanks — till i ticked through the deeply-loved friends who keep me aloft through whatever storms try to yank me down under.

i am thankful, so thankful, for this arthritic old house, and its creaks and its groans. for its doors that won’t close, and the window or two that refuse to budge open. i’m grateful of course for my unruliest garden, the one that paid little mind when i left it (mostly) to its own devices this much abandoned summer. thank God, yes and yes, for my little birds, the ones who buoy my heart with every flap of their wings, each chirp that rises up from their lungs and their throats and their short little beaks. thank you, especially, for the scarlet-robed cardinal i’ve lured back to my roost with scoop upon scoop of sunflower seed.

thank you for the crotchety old cat, the one who decides most nights around 3 in the morn that there is a world beyond this old house through which he must roam; the very old cat, by the way, we’re convinced we’re keeping alive through super-strength doses of love and not a few cans of high-grade tuna.

thank you, heavens above, for brothers strung across the country, and sisters-in-law i could not love more. thank you for mothers, by birth and by heart, ever my back-up squad, at home or afar. thank you for fathers, now resting in heaven. thank you for little niece and adorable nephew, proof that growing up loved is hope for the world.

thank you for books. and thank you for nuggets of time to burrow deep into pages, to contemplate a thought or a word — an old friend of a word or one newly unearthed. thank you, specifically, for my brand-new “garner’s modern american usage,” a genius of a roadmap through the vagaries and tight spaces of vernacular language (the late and ever-brilliant david foster wallace claimed it “eminently worth your hard-earned reference-book dollar“).

and thank you just as deeply for the gem that arrived in the other day’s mail, wendell berry’s “sabbaths 2013,” a small-press edition of 20 poems, signed by the master, and filled with wood engravings now etched into my soul.

WendellBerry

thank you for sacred hours in light-dappled woods with a long beloved friend whose hours, we knew, were numbered. thank you, months later, for the minutes i sat at her deathbed. and thank you, yes thank you, for the long hours since, as we grope through the dark, wrapping our hearts around her left-behind beloveds, as we cry with them, make room on the couch, share blankets, pile plates with good eats, and blessedly utter her name amid the swapping of stories and deep belly laughs, and believe — even when they cannot — that the light will someday come again.

my list of thank yous is long. my list of petitions seems to never grow shorter. so before i sign off, the ones that top this season’s beseeching: a friend and a sister i love, both still facing cancer head on. and another friend whose ankle, of late, is shot through with screws and rods and titanium plates, and who finds herself recliner-bound, though she’d never complain, not even a whimper.

lest i linger too long, before i rummage through the fridge, pile my plate with a spoonful of this, a swift taste of that, these are a few of the prayers that rise from my heart, on this, the glorious morn after the feast.

thank you, and bless you, amen and amen.

at my house this morning, one of the somethings left on the counter is a tumble of string from a box from the bakery where my husband bought brownies to stack into a tower in homage to his papa, whose november-25th birthday was often shared with the turkey, always nestled nearby, and always punctuated with thick-frosted brownies, bedecked by my sister-in-law. this year, far from new york and new jersey, my sweet mate stacked the chocolaty tower with architectural precision and not-often-seen tears in his eyes. it was a son’s salute to his bakery-born papa.

happy blessed birthday, dear AZK, among us always in heart — and in teetering chocolate.

what’s cobbled onto your list of thank yous this glorious day after the feast?

4 Comments

November 20, 2015

i heard the wind howl

blustery day pooh

i heard the wind howl, that shiver-your-spine whistle of late november, the one that tells you the world is being stirred. the one that always reminds me, always stops me in my tracks, whispers: there’s a force infinitely bigger than you, there’s a force to lean into.

it’s the sound of something’s coming. it’s the sound of batten the hatches. and yesterday afternoon it wasn’t much longer till i heard the words, “snow advisory.” followed by “three to six inches.”

once again, i find my soul pulled by the world around me. i’m just a puppet on a string, i sometimes think, and i let my prayerfulness be defined by slip-sliding myself into the Big Book of Nature, the one all around, the one that whirls and whistles and blossoms and withers, the one that drenches and parches, sometimes stirs not a leaf, and some days makes like we’ve stepped inside the waring blender.

when the whistle begins to blow, when autumn’s shrill cry rattles the window panes, seeps in through the eighth of an inch under the door (old houses don’t know from taut construction), i commence the pulling-in posture. i might take to the couch, i might take to the underside of the afghan. or, just as likely, i might press my nose to the glass. wait. watch. scan the heavens for sign of storm coming.

i suppose it’s a sign of my spiritual weakness, my saintly shortcoming, that i’ll take a dose of drama any old day. gets the juices rolling, i find. shakes me into my senses. heightens my paying-attention antenna. i pretty much dare you to see tree trunks bending in half, posing in downward dog of the woods, and not snap to salute.

but then, once i’m wide-eyed, i begin to go deep and deeper inside. prayers take off. i am grateful for walls, yes, and roof overhead. grateful, so grateful, for that box in the basement that cranks all the heat. i’m grateful for days that don’t demand i leave the house. grateful for 10-quart kettles that simmer with bones and broth and whatever the produce bin has offered up for the cause (the cause, of course, being kitchen-sink soup, a name that i now realize needs some revision).

once those elemental gratefuls are out of the way, i sink deeper still. as i scan the sky for sooty snow clouds, survey the heavens, i begin to survey my own deep-down depths. there is much down there deserving of contemplation, there is much coursing, much that begs to be unearthed, lifted, turned over to the one who stirs the wind.

year after year, it’s the first winter storm that packs the mightiest wallop, the one that throttles us back to our proper perspective: we are defenseless if left to our own devices. we’d be battered without whatever, whomever, blankets us, keeps us safe from the elements.

my second instinct on days when the weather report is written in caps, with long strings of exclamation marks, and maybe even an asterisk or three, is to make like auntie em in the wizard of oz, to head out the door to batten those hatches: anchor the bird houses, strip the landscape of soon-to-be-flying projectiles, slip the old glass bottles off the ledge in the summer porch. and, of course, dump seed for the birds, make sure the water basin is filled, should any one of the soon-to-be-scattered flocks decide a pre-emptive guzzle is in order.

it seems especially apt this year, as the landscape of the world at large and the more private one i know best are both so cloaked in sadness, it’s apt that the wind is calling us out of ourselves, pressing our nose to the glass, stirring the breeze deep inside, rustling up prayer. we’re about to be shaken into our places again.

november’s wind is the call to attention. we’d do best to listen.

and pray.

in searching for an image of winnie-the-pooh and the blustery day, i realized our well-worn copy of a.a. milne’s masterpiece, illustrated by the ever-charming e.h. shepard, has gone missing, which is a terrible thing to discover. so i made do with a frame from the original disney version. and i am so sad for the page that’s missing in action.

what calls you to attention in these blustery days of november?

6 Comments

November 13, 2015

writing school

friday mornings are sacred. friday mornings are when i burrow deep into my soul, poke around, see what’s percolating. i learned a few years ago to pencil in friday mornings, ink them in is more like it. as certainly and solidly as if it’s a trip to the dentist, or a date with the pope, i scribble “write” on my friday morning calendar. that means i’ve devoted the hours to whatever unfolds here. that means it matters — to me, anyway.

but this friday morning i’ve surrendered my sacred time, turned it over to a gaggle of kids — high school kids — who want to learn how to write. how to write from the heart, specifically. so i’m writing this on thursday afternoon. i’m pausing from the making of outlines, the stacking of papers, the pulling tomes from my shelf, so i can lay out the words that will find their way to you come friday morning.

come friday morning, i’ll be at the head of a class — a workshop filled with 78 kids in the first round, and a second session with 32 seats now claimed — and i’ll be trying to impart a few things about the magnificent art of writing. i’ll ask, first, why it matters, why finding and telling the truth is essential to not just the whole lot of us as a republic, a civilization, but why it matters to each of us as living, breathing, heart-pounding human beings. human beings who know what it is to grieve or to doubt; to thrust our arms in the air, expression of joy; to question, to ponder, to stumble toward illumination. at its best, its holiest, writing allows us to slip inside someone else’s story. to understand their loneliness, their heartache, their triumph or tragedy.

we write to lean into communion, to abridge the abyss.

which brings us to craft. to the “how” of the sacred equation. we’ll peek inside the bag of writerly tools, pull out a few, try them on for utility and maybe even capacity for magic.

all week i’ve been pounding away at the keyboard, typing up thoughts; poring through pages and pages, culling the very best musings i could find on the subject of writing, writing straight from the heart. i’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the blessing of teaching. of finally reaching the point in a long life of doing one thing with unswerving focus — devotion, defined — day after day, year after year, and finally realizing you do know a thing or two worth turning around and passing along to the folks coming up behind you. i’ve considered the moral imperative. and the miracle of being in a room, strolling up and down the rows of desks, watching the gleam in the eyes begin to turn on, to brighten.

i’ve felt my heart skip a beat at the thought of connecting. of being in a room where the number of years on the planet does not matter. where we connect, writer to writer, because we were born, some of us, with a heart that beats to the rhythm and power of poetry, with a deep-down knowing that story is, after all, the great connective tissue, the one best hope for, well, nothing short of peace on earth, and the particular soul-soothing balm that comes from knowing you’re not all alone in the end.

so while i shuffle off to room 301 at new trier east high school, that storied hall of secondary learning nestled along chicago’s north shore, i’m leaving you perhaps my very favorite of seven handouts, a glorious swatch of thought from the writer Colum McCann, author of Thirteen Ways of Looking (Random House). McCann’s “Letter to A Young Writer,” instruction worth etching onto a wall of your house or your heart, is the 24th in a series of posts on 2015 books entered for The Story Prize, an annual prize for a short-story collection published in english and in the u.s. during a calendar year.

here’s McCann, advice to a writer — young or old or anywhere in between:

“Do the things that do not compute. Be earnest. Be devoted. Be subversive of ease. Read aloud. Risk yourself. Do not be afraid of sentiment even when others call it sentimentality. Be ready to get ripped to pieces: It happens. Permit yourself anger. Fail. Take pause. Accept the rejections. Be vivified by collapse. Try resuscitation. Have wonder. Bear your portion of the world. Find a reader you trust. Trust them back. Be a student, not a teacher, even when you teach. Don’t bullshit yourself. If you believe the good reviews, you must believe the bad. Still, don’t hammer yourself. Do not allow your heart to harden. Face it, the cynics have better one-liners than we do. Take heart: they can never finish their stories. Have trust in the staying power of what is good. Enjoy difficulty. Embrace mystery. Find the universal in the local. Put your faith in language—character will follow and plot, too, will eventually emerge. Push yourself further. Do not tread water. It is possible to survive that way, but impossible to write. Transcend the personal. Prove that you are alive. We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate. Become your own voice. Sing. Write about that which you want to know. Better still, write towards that which you don’t know. The best work comes from outside yourself. Only then will it reach within. Restore what has been devalued by others. Write beyond despair. Make justice from reality. Make vision from the dark. The considered grief is so much better than the unconsidered. Be suspicious of that which gives you too much consolation. Hope and belief and faith will fail you often. So what? Share your rage. Resist. Denounce. Have stamina. Have courage. Have perseverance. The quiet lines matter as much as those which make noise. Trust your blue pen, but don’t forget the red one. Allow your fear. Don’t be didactic. Make an argument for the imagined. Begin with doubt. Be an explorer, not a tourist. Go somewhere nobody else has gone, preferably towards beauty, hard beauty. Fight for repair. Believe in detail. Unique your language. A story begins long before its first word. It ends long after its last. Don’t panic. Trust your reader. Reveal a truth that isn’t yet there. At the same time, entertain. Satisfy the appetite for seriousness and joy. Dilate your nostrils. Fill your lungs with language. A lot can be taken from you—even your life—but not your stories about your life. So this, then, is a word, not without love, to a young writer: Write.”

what words of wisdom would you impart to a starting-out writer, or starting-out thinker, intent on employing a very big heart?

up above, a few of the books i’m hauling along to writerly school. vivian gornick, donald hall, mary oliver, leslie jamison, and alice laplante, among the bound volumes.

11 Comments

November 6, 2015

dear sisyphus,

a rare moment’s meditation on the slow road to school and back. before my pal sisyphus pulled the latest from his bag of slick tricks.

yo sis,

forgive the familiarity, but it seems we’ve been on most-familiar terms in the last 24 hours, so it dawned on me that perhaps it wise to befriend you. for reasons that escape me, you seem to have barged in this ol’ house, with nary a knock at the door. just, oomph! blew right in, settled down alongside me, tried to see what havoc you and your up-and-down ways might wreak.

you, my sisyphean interruptor, you must have run out of folks to mess with, so you decided to mess with me. there’s the dinner you burned, the pants you nearly set on fire, and in your latest attempt at folly, you must have decided it would be oh-so-charming if, after staying up till past midnight with the kid whose homework would not end and whose headache wouldn’t stop pounding, you first made him miss the bus. and then, just as i was thinking how much i didn’t mind the morning drive through the woods to the schoolhouse, and how in fact it stitched a dose of meditative calm into my daily rush, you dawned on the big bright idea that it would be hilarious if, when the kid hauled his backpack out of the car at the schoolhouse curb, you tugged at the pencil bag, the one that carries the calculator he needs for the quiz he missed because his headache was so awful. you kept it in hiding, of course, you sly little rock-pusher, you waited till the car was almost home, and then, in a fit of devilishness, you poked the pencil bag’s edge out from under the seat, just far enough so that when i saw it, i could feel that wonderful sense of heart reeling to throat. that’s when i pulled over and texted said kid: “do you need pencil bag?” to which he replied: “of course. why don’t i have it?”

and that’s when i made like, well, you, mr. forth-and-back-forth-and-back-forever-and-ever-amen!

i spun the old wagon back in the direction from which it had just come, and emphatically hit the gas. oops. lest the cops pull me over right here and now, let’s say i “gentled the pedal” that ties to the gas, ever so delicately hightailing from 10 to 40 mph. and that’s when i looked down, and realized that today of all days was the rare and unusual morning when i figured i could head out the door in my jammies, the ones with the tie-dyed dots all over the pants, the ones no fool would wear into that high school where high-cheekboned kids stay up late into the night perusing the latest fashion trends.

so, yes, you pulled a good one there. you must have been doubled over in fits of giggles, as you watched me leap from the car, lope up the steps, and weave through the teen-aged throngs to get to the window where lost and left-behind items are left. far as i know, those adorable kiddies thought i was just another silver-haired mama, decked out in my retrofit tie-dyes, adding to the daily pile of forgetfulness.

and before this goes on much longer, before you decide it would be SO funny to, say, let a chipmunk romp through the house, or bathe the old cat in eau de skunk, i thought i’d dash off this dispatch, this plea for detente, and see if maybe just maybe we could sit down for tea, negotiate a truce.

i need no more tearful outbursts. i’ve had it with smoke-billowing appliances. all i want, mister one-step-forward-two-steps-back, is a calm rest of the day. no speeding tickets. no sprained ankles. no fire department banging down my front door.

in fact, i’ll sweeten the deal: you steer clear of my path for the day, just this one measly day, and i’ll shoulder your load to the top of the hill.

but you’re on your own after that, mr. deja-vu-all-over-again, when per eternal order of the undergods, that nasty old rock bobbles back to the starting line. and you find yourself right back where you were.

much like the drill i’ve come to know as my own. ever since you so rudely barged in.

has sisyphus visited your house of late?

11 Comments

October 30, 2015

“don’t be afraid of the dark”

i heard the words, suddenly, as if instruction. it might have been late afternoon, a day or two ago. the details are murky now. i know i was in the kitchen, not far from the window, and i know the dark hadn’t yet rolled in when i heard the words, as if a celestial whisper.

“don’t be afraid of the dark.”

i never am. afraid of the dark, that is. my celtic soul is one of the ones that, most of the time, shimmies into the darkness, as shoulders into a soft-knit sleeve. dark invites mystery. invites deepening. dark is where shadows dance. dark is where faint outlines appear, the chiaroscuro of night.

but somehow, deep down in my soul, maybe i knew this might be different. maybe i knew this year’s season of darkness, as globe turns away from the sun, as our point on the planet lies mostly in shadow, the faint slant of light more diluted than summer’s blaze, maybe i sensed that this year it might be tougher to shoulder.

so the instruction crept in, out of nowhere. the sort of whispered coaxing that might make you look up to the ceiling, to see if it came from above. or, maybe, truly, it might make you pause, put ear to your heart, and know it came from within. the still small voice that whispers. and every once in a while shakes us by the shoulders, says (more or less), “listen here, i’m talking to you, and i don’t want you not paying attention.”

so there you are, about to swing open the door of the fridge, reach for a tub of cottage cheese or some other plebeian foodstuff, when all of the sudden you’re shaking your head, trying to knock off the cobwebs that must be messing with your ear drums, and next thing you know you’re thinking hard about darkness, and how it’s coming, and how you’ve just been instructed not to be afraid.

all right, then. so i won’t be. i’ll try, hard as i can, to peek out the window at four in the afternoon, and look for the beauty in the purpling hour, when the world outside goes violet, awash in sinking sunlight. maybe i’ll crank the stove a bit earlier, a bit more heartily. maybe i’ll stack candles along the window sill, the armament of light from within.

maybe i’ll keep the afghans close at hand. maybe i’ll pencil in night walks. maybe i’ll memorize planets and stars.

there’s an enchanted picture book, a book for children who might be eight or 85, and it’s one i keep close by, on the bookshelf here in the room where i type. it’s titled, “caretakers of wonder,” by cooper edens, the glorious illustrator whose work with the magical publishing house, “green tiger press,” served as my muse through the 1980s, back in a decade when life was walloping me this way and that. back when mr. edens (let us be wholly respectful of this master of brush and charcoal pencil) was a child, his principal sent him home from school (for the year, not the day!), telling his mother he was “too creative.” his mother, wise woman, sat him down for the duration with a set of crayons and stacks and stacks of coloring books. it wasn’t long till he began channeling van gogh and monet, and his works have always swept me away.

he might best be known for the bedtime book, “if you’re afraid of the dark, remember the night rainbow,” but the one i love best is “caretakers of wonder.”

it begins with these words: “this very night, while you lie quietly in your bed, open your eyes. now, look out the window! for even at this yawning hour, so many of your friends are working to keep the world magical.” (now, turn the page…)

“yes, they are the ones who make new stars and put them up” (illustration of two fine caretakers climbing into the wicker basket of a hot-air balloon — how else to float to the stars?) (turn page again…)

“the ones who light and keep the stars burning.” (and here we see the heart-air balloon, and the extra-long wick that kindles the night stars…)

sometimes all it takes is one reading, one brush of words up against the soul, for whole new paradigms to be born, whole new ways of seeing, of glistening. and so, perhaps, ever since i first brushed up against cooper edens’ whimsy and wonder, i’ve found the night all the more enchanting. to think there are caretakers flitting about with their miles-long wicks, and their night work of wonder….

it must be the make-believe part of me that’s never faded away, the ember that would not extinguish.

and so, this very morning, beginning to reacquaint myself with the wonder of darkness, the darkness that’s coming this very weekend when we turn back the clocks, i tiptoed outside with my dawn-viewing equipment: my slide-in shoes, my fat mug of very hot coffee, my old tin can of birdseed filled to the brim for the birds who were still off nodding at that early hour.

i looked up. that’s all it takes, a simple crank of the neck, chin pointed skyward. and there it was, dawn awaiting. gibbous moon, ringed in a halo of violet and rose and peek-a-boo cloud (one of those early morning mysteries whose science i do not understand, nor do i need to). planets emphatically spotlit (venus, mars, and jupiter pinned to the southeastern sky). stars on the brink of fading away.

it was breathtakingly beautiful, all of it.

and i’m fairly convinced the beauty is ours for the taking, yes, deep in the darkness. if we take in a chest-filling breath, and wrap ourselves in the whole of the long night’s offering, the invitation to burrow deep inside our souls. and bring on the night candles, the flame, and the blankets.

what particular beauties do you find in the darkness? will you steel yourself against its early coming, or welcome it with rapt attention?

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October 23, 2015

the cry of the october garden

the garden’s been hushed for months now. or maybe i’ve been too distracted to notice.

this week though, with honey-dappled light oozing across its fading, bent, and desiccating boughs and stems, with fronds of fern collapsed, splayed every which way, and nodding heads of hydrangea weighing down the branch, with my own soul ragged, in need of long slow immersion, i heard october’s garden call my name.

i’d been typing — or trying to anyway — when suddenly some drop of golden light, nectar from the heavens, caught my eye. i looked up, pushed out my chair, threw on my muck-about boots and grabbed the clippers on the way.

for a good long soak of an afternoon, i snipped and yanked and piled high the proof. my growing things, most of them at least, were forgiving; i apologized anyway. i’d left them all abandoned through summer’s height and frenzied weeks. they’d waited, as all good gardens do. they knew that, someday, i’d return. i always do.

and, apothecary on slender sturdy stem, the whole plot applied its balm. gentian blue dots, a sure cure for any faded heart, still winked at me. mopheads of hydrangea kept on their color show, turning lime to rose to tinged in plum, all but begging me to snip them at the neck and bring them in for winter. the black-eyed susan, once a perky swath of whimsy, now lay dark, nothing but the black-eyed button, landing pad for hungry songbirds, who peck and fill their bellies.

to be amid a garden in october is to catch up to the end of the story, to pay notice to what happens when the glory fades away, and yet another topography of beautiful is bared.

this is, after all, the wabi-sabi season, so defined by a farmer friend of mine as the season that pulses with the beauty of sadness and the sadness of beauty, the season that pulses with the poetry of imperfection and impermanence. nothing beautiful lasts forever, my garden whispers, so savor all of it, every drop of it, while you have the chance to reach out and rub your nose, your hands, your heart, in the whole of it.

essential wisdom, far beyond the garden.

i’m fairly certain it was the earthy, tactile element, the dirt under my nails, the pin scratches up and down my arms (october’s thorny roses are no less forgiving than the sturdy stems of june), that soothed me. the being out in golden afternoon, feeling the faintest ray of sun bathe across my sweatered back. there was healing in the garden stain splotting my knees, and surely in the armloads of autumnal offerings i hauled in the house, tucked in old vases.

once my shoulders ached, and my clipper hand throbbed, i kicked off my garden boots, and clambered back inside, content to watch the sunlight fade as i assumed my steady post just beside my chopping board and cookstove. in yet another iteration of surrendering to hands in lieu of cerebration, i turned this week to slicing, stirring, cracking eggs, and cranking up the oven. there was, there is, in the alchemy of the kitchen a sure cure for ails of the deepest-down ilk. stew and soup and pumpkin bars, i made them all this week.

i was drawn by battered heart, and sodden soul, to find my solace where the growing things live and breathe and surrender to the season’s close, and when the air grew chill, i warmed the rest of me — and those i love — by tending to the cookstove.

not a bad prescription, after all.

where and how do you practice healing acts or arts?

12 Comments

October 16, 2015

when all else fails…turn to page 200

for two decades now, ever since may of 1995 when i was plotting my firstborn’s second birthday fete, and i flipped open the pages of my monthly infusion of delicious, gourmet magazine — before it was ruth reichl’s gourmet magazine, before it was defunct, folded into the crypt of long-gone magazines, magazines that shaped our culture and then withered and died, the sad fate of so much of what’s printed in ink on the page — page 200, the page where the binding is coming unglued, the page crusted with splatters of roux, it’s been my no-fail, last-ditch, best-hope-of-filling-a-hole-in-a-heart-by-way-of-the-belly cookery map.

so it was yesterday, a crisp october day, when the sun poured in as if from a flask of molasses, so it was on a day when the boy who’d loped from the car at the school house curb was a boy with a leaden heart. he had so much homework, was so worried about homework, that he’d decided to skip the end-of-the-season soccer gorge on pasta and pizza. instead of hanging with friends, he’d decided he should come home straight after practice.

to make matters a tad bit worse, i wouldn’t be home when he got there. i try hard to keep my nights away to a serious minimum, but last night was a night i’d promised to be elsewhere, in a dim-lit watering hole and song hall, actually, reading words from a page for a very fine purpose, all to raise funds for a most noble cause.

i’m always torn when tugged away from my boys. and at the end of this week, this week when the lights in the kitchen never went out before midnight, because a young soccer player was trying hard to finish all of his homework, often accompanied by the sadness that lingers in our house, it was especially hard to be away.

so i reached for my holy salvation: the plainly-named “Baked Macaroni and Cheese,” ala page 200. it’s a cheesy-buttery bath stirred round and through tubes of wide-mouthed pasta, each tube filling with ooze as much as being wrapped in it. it vies, in our house, with bread pudding, as the neck-and-neck nos. 1 and 2 comforts on a spoon.

over the years, the making it — for me, anyway — is as soothing as it must be for my boys to polish it off in one sitting. assembling its components — the butter, the cheddar, the flour, the milk, the salt, paprika, bread crumbs, and parmesan shavings to finish it off — i slip into priestess mode. my old black cookstove — an industrial-grade contraption that somehow slipped into this old house in the 1970s, never to be removed — is my altar.

i begin my incantations and prestidigitations right there, where the flame is cranked, and the concoctions in my pots begin to bubble, not unlike vats of heavenly potions. with the oven cranked to 375, the kitchen begins to warm. everything about this kitchen ritual is warming. soon, my old sweater is off, and as i stir i imagine my sweet boy coming home to find the big white ceramic souffle dish perched atop the stove, my hand-scribbled note just to the side.

is there a more certain way to say i love you than to have cooked all afternoon? to have reached for the cookery shelf and pulled out the one thing a kid asks for on those nights when his sleepy head hits the pillow but the worries won’t be extinguished?

because a big old vat of mac n’ cheese wasn’t enough, not on this particular day, in the thick of this particular passage, i pulled out the produce bin and piled a mound of apples atop the cutting board. i chopped honeycrisp and granny smith, i didn’t peel — why bother? — and i tumbled the slices into the pot, added a splash of honeycrisp cider, a shake or two of cinnamon, and once again, applied flame to the equation. wasn’t long till the whole house was swimming in eau de apple and buttery-cheese. even the cat ambled back in from the garden.

then i set the table. is there anything that says i was thinking of you quite so quietly, certainly, as coming home to a kitchen table that awaits you, that has your very own napkin and napkin ring at the place where you always sit?

it’s the rhythms we carve into the grain of the day, of the months and the years — simple rhythms, unadorned rhythms, nothing so fancy as a napkin and fork at a place that is yours, set by someone who thought about how it might be to come home harried, and worried, and tired to the bone — that makes coming home feel as if someone just handed you your oldest, comfiest slippers. and a fuzzy sweater to boot.

i’d left the stove light on, and the mac-and-cheese under a foil dome, as i slipped out the door and turned the key. then, not a block from home, i got a message: the soccer player had decided, after all, to skip coming home. he’d hang out with the soccer team, inhale store-bought pasta and delivery pizza.

such is a mama’s existence.

so much for stirring and chopping, in hot pursuit of healing a tattered heart.

but here’s the holy truth: i was the one whose heart was soothed in the long hours of love at the cookstove.

and, besides, mac-n-cheese cold makes for excellent bedtime snack. when the lights go out at midnight.

what’s your when-all-else-fails cookstove concoction?

12 Comments

October 9, 2015

catching the elusive slipstream and other hints of holiness

more than once this week, i’ve felt shivers run my spine. more than once this week, i felt myself suspended in some holy sort of hammock. i’ve giggled. and more than once, i’ve wanted to dash to the telephone, to call my blessed friend. and then, stopped cold, i remembered phone lines don’t go to where she is. wherever she is.

my friend died not two weeks ago.

but that didn’t stop me from feeling her as close to me this week as if we were, as we so often were, huddled on the couch, under the buffalo-check blanket that might belong in a horse barn, but kept us warm through many a long winter’s afternoon when, curled up with mugs of tea and bowls of clementines, we coursed across the landscape of our lives, our hearts, our souls.

death when it’s new can be like that. out of the blue you bump into the reality — a cement-block wall, almost — that the someone you want to reach for, the someone you’ve always reached for, isn’t there. it’s as if your mind is playing tricks with you, taunting, teasing, playing hide-and-seek. maybe it’s just me, but i push my imagination as far and deep as it will go, all but see and hear the someone right before my eyes. convince myself one day the phone will ring, and the someone will be there, and at last i’ll hear, “trick’s up. i was only hiding.”

but in moments when i wasn’t playing mind games, when i’ve been going about the business at hand, i’ve suddenly had a certain sense that something, some holy force, had slipped beneath me, inside me, and propelled me or the world around me in inexplicable ways. well, i’ve an explanation, but it defies logic, and laws of physics.

take, for instance, the fact that all summer i’ve been drudgingly tapping keys on my keyboard, slowly uprooting words from deep down underground. i’d type my way to the end of sentences, but really, i was all but lost. form was formless, and all swirled foggily around me. i was trying to find the words, the shape, the essence of some elusive book. i knew what i wanted it to be, but somehow i couldn’t find the path. i’d get distracted, spend long spells away from the keyboard. i started to think nothing would ever come. i thought a bit about my capacities for swirling foam in coffee at the local barista bar. maybe, after all, that was better use of my waking hours.

but then, this week, once again i sat down. opened up a document, one that had no name, and suddenly — slowly at first, but building in speed and force — i’d renamed it “chapter 1.” it’s finished now, and sits waiting on my computer. it’s been followed, swiftly, by chapters 2 and 3, now almost written down to the very last period.

where’d that slipstream come from, i wondered? i didn’t think too hard to pounce upon my answer.

and in another breathtaking moment of serendipity, a fellow i love, a post-college living-in-a-new-city sort of fellow, he was out and about recently, and struck up animated conversation with a lovely lass. they weren’t too deep into conversation before it was revealed that, out of all the souls who inhabit this giant metropolis, they both just happened to share in common a deep love for our beloved friend who had just died. the fellow had known and loved our friend his whole life long, called her his “spiritual godmother”; the lass was one of her devoted students, one of the very few she’d tucked tightly under her wing, imparting the intricacies of her craft even as her cancer spread and spread. the meeting of the two — the fellow and the lass — could not have been more random, impossibly so. and the depth of their first conversation was, apparently, the sort that glimmers on the prairie.

now i can’t claim to be one of those folks who frankly believes that angels have wings and hover over us. but i do believe in souls that never really fade, and i do believe in forces of holiness and miracle. i’ve spent decades trying to figure out just what happens when someone you love dearly dies. what happens after the last breath comes, and stillness fills the room? i promise to let you know when i nail that one. but until then, i’ll side with the folks who believe that holiness is a force of life abundantly present, and animating all the hours of our day. maybe the work to be done is on our side, maybe it’s about opening ourselves through a particular level of prayerfulness, maybe it’s about a soul so porous we’re a filter, a catch basin, for all that’s good and beautiful and buoyant. maybe thinking aloud about all this is the dumbest thing i’ve ever done. or maybe, in putting words to wondering, we might — together — stumble on some truth, some shimmering shard of wonder, of heaven tumbled down to earth.

i can only hope. and pray. and keep watch for the gentle brilliant touch of my beloved slipped-away friend.

as is so often the case, i had no intention to write a word of this. but the words came anyway. so here we are. i’d been thinking that i was so intent on getting back to chapter 3 and 4, i’d just post the latest edition of my chicago tribune roundup of books for the soul. that might have been the safer, wiser bet. or maybe not. a short bit of one of the reviews was cut for space, so i’ll post the link to the latest roundup here, and down below, i’ll include the unedited version of the first review, the glorious, The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible, by Aviyah Kushner, which i loved.

The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible
By Aviya Kushner, Spiegel & Grau, 272 pages, $27

The highest praise for a book, perhaps, is tucking it into a slot on your bookshelf where you’ll always be able to effortlessly slide it out, lay it across your lap, and soak it up for a minute or a long afternoon’s absorption. The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible, Aviyah Kushner’s poetic and powerful plumbing of both the Hebrew and English translations of the Bible, now rests in just such an easy-to-grab spot in my library.

In a word, it’s brilliant. And beautiful.

Kushner, a poet and journalist who grew up in a Hebrew-speaking home where dinner-hour debate often pivoted on the meaning of the Bible’s original Hebrew text, went off to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop back in the summer of 2002, and found herself in novelist Marilynne Robinson’s class, parsing the Old Testament. Kushner barely recognized the text in English translation.

Therein was launched a trek into language and belief that took Kushner around the globe. She draws on grammarians and lexicographers across the millennia to lay out this roadmap into the depths of sacred text. Not lost is her insistence that much is lost in translation, and even if you’ve no interest in religion, the linguistic excursion here is not to be missed.

Most essentially, Kushner lifts the veil for all of us who don’t know ancient Biblical Hebrew. She pulls us deep inside etymology and history and meaning. And as a Kirkus review so aptly put it, Kushner’s first book is, in the end, “a paean, in a way, to the rigors and frustrations — and ultimate joys — of trying to comprehend the unfathomable.”

how have you brushed up against the holiness of someone you’ve loved, no longer right here among us?

10 Comments

pull up a chair

December 11, 2015

nine.