There must be always remaining in every one’s life some place for the singing of angels, some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful and, by an inherent prerogative, throws all the rest of life into a new and creative relatedness, something that gathers up in itself all the freshest of experience from drab to commonplace areas of living and glows in on bright white light of penetrating beauty and meaning — then passes.
— Howard Thurman
my relationship with time shifted this year. living does that. somewhere along the line, a rock is thrown. it shatters what it hits. and as you stumble to pick up the pieces, you start to see that you won’t get it back to what it was. the picture window is no longer. instead, the shards are what you hold.
i’m beginning to practice gathering the shards, holding each to the light. being careful not to get cut on the sharp edges, the piercing edges. knowing the shards are what’s left, i find it easier to lift each one, position it in front of the flame, turn it this way and that, and watch for the incandescence.
it’s called seizing the day.
it’s why we watch babies, stare at them mesmerized. they are our sages, the ones whose every dandelion, every dust mote floating by, is a new encounter. can you imagine emerging from the dark wet womb and suddenly feeling fleshy arms cradling you, soft lips kissing you? can you imagine finally putting form to the face from which that one murmuring voice has been coming?
babies seize everything because it’s all new. the rest of us learn to seize things when we start to realize they won’t last forever.
if only we all realized how fragile a life this all is. we would be kinder to it. we would be kinder to ourselves maybe. we’d let go of the hurts that poison us. we’d shake off the fears that strangle us. we’d dig down deeper maybe, and let all the beauties out. and, critically, we’d let more in.
and so, with my understanding of time now deepened, my frame of time shifted, i am more determined than ever, and finding it far less arduous, to step out of my old, afraid ways and into the incandescence of each and every shard. each and every blessing called “this day.” this holy day.
i am, as thurman writes above, keeping an ear out for the singing of angels, and allowing the bright white light of this most blessed life to enfold me, to behold the breathlessly beautiful. before it passes.
where are you seeing the incandescent?are you letting it in?
and happy blessed blessed new year. while my seat belt is buckled for the year ahead, let us hold hands, and bump our way along, scaffolded by those few fine things we know to be immutable and imperative.
note to true wonder: the bottom photo i took driving home from your farm all those blessed years ago. yes, i drove and clicked. and how it happened, i still wonder. but that heartland panorama i do love. and the heartland farmer.
fal·low /ˈfalō/ adjective (of farmland) plowed and harrowed but left unsown for a period in order to restore its fertility as part of a crop rotation or to avoid surplus production. verb leave (land) fallow. ”fallow the ground for a week or so after digging”
i am fallowing. i am also making up a word (a particular quirk of mine), but a word most apt for i use it here to describe the wide-open plain of time when i see no deadlines peeking from behind trees, nor wide gulleys and ditches to swallow me whole.
after season upon season that taxed me from every which angle, i am all but stringing a wintry hammock between cedar posts in my fir lot and settling in for a long winter’s nap.
i am fallowing. i am, per merriam webster’s instruction and strict definition, leaving my days “unsown for a period in order to restore fertility” of both soul and imagination.
i have been so thirsty for days that unfurl with little to do, for days that meander from daybreak to starshine. i am, per the law of the fallowing land, partaking of those soulful things that stoke my deepest flickering flame: i am reading deep and thick theological treatises; i am making burgundy stews, and sorting through boxes of long-ago treasures; i am reading old letters, and wiping back tears; i am simmering bones into broth and ferrying batches of soups to friends i’ve long wanted to visit. i am even reciting the occasional poem with my mother. at the moment, i am listening to rain, the fallowest thing i might know how to do.
i am not actively worrying.
to fallow is to partake of an otherworldliness, at least when you find yourself born into an age that grows increasingly attention-deficient. when the background noise is incessant. and so little of it sustenant.
sometimes you don’t realize how deeply you need something till it’s suddenly there in your grasp. and then you can’t let it go. or you hope you don’t have to anytime soon.
advent for me is quieting time. advent ushers in the stillness of winter. advent, i’ve written, is the season of anticipation, of awaiting, of holding our breath for spectacular coming.
as the darkening comes minute by minute, day after day, the liturgical calendar, prescriptive in its wisdoms, unfurls the sacred instruction: make the light be from you. deep within you. seize the month. reclaim the days. do not succumb to the noisy distraction.
make your december a blessed one, a quiet one. a stretch of kindled light against the whole cloth of darkness.
this world is aching, is crying, is calling for even one matchstick of light. imagine if we all struck a match, put flame to wick, and allowed it to burn long through the night. my light + your light + your light would = a light that would make ours one glowing orb.
the instructive is this, even in fallowing times: one mere droplet. one bare kilowatt of luminsence to shatter the darkness. it’s ours to kindle, to light, to enflame. day by day, droplet by droplet. might we gather our goodness and bring back a flicker of light to this world?
i haven’t dropped in on a wednesday in years, but this gorgeous native american prayer just slipped across my path, and i thought i’d leave it here on the table in case you might want to bring it to yours tomorrow. and then i’ll see you friday, as always…..
an Ute* prayer.
Earth, Teach Me
Earth teach me quiet ~ as the grasses are still with new light. Earth teach me suffering ~ as old stones suffer with memory. Earth teach me humility ~ as blossoms are humble with beginning. Earth teach me caring ~ as mothers nurture their young. Earth teach me courage ~ as the tree that stands alone. Earth teach me limitation ~ as the ant that crawls on the ground. Earth teach me freedom ~ as the eagle that soars in the sky. Earth teach me acceptance ~ as the leaves that die each fall. Earth teach me renewal ~ as the seed that rises in the spring. Earth teach me to forget myself ~ as melted snow forgets its life. Earth teach me to remember kindness ~ as dry fields weep with rain.
*The Ute people are the oldest residents of Colorado, inhabiting the mountains and vast areas of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Eastern Nevada, Northern New Mexico and Arizona. According to tribal history handed down from generation to generation, our people lived here since the beginning of time. (found on Southern Ute Indian Tribe website)
may this day of chopping, stirring, standing in grocery lines, making room on refrigerator shelves, and counting and recounting the seats at the table bring you a deep-down percolating of joy….and thank you for each and every blessed one of you….love, bam
i’d told myself that ever since the night my papa died, when i walked in that dark house, his tennis sweater flung over the back of a kitchen chair, as if he’d breeze through any minute, the night when i sat in the den afraid and unwilling to take in a breath, for i didn’t want to let go of the last one i breathed when he was alive, i’d told myself that house was mostly hollow to me.
it’s held a chill for me ever since.
i didn’t think i’d much miss it.
but then i drove back the other day. drove back to walk through the rooms where no sound was stirring, not even the whir of the furnace. drove back to see rooms emptied, the rugs a radiograph in reverse where the geometries of now-taken-away furniture shone bright against decades-worn dim. where you could make out the plot where my mama’s four-poster bed had been, and the circular table beside it. where the den, too, was a checkerboard of absence, chairs and a couch lifted and moved.
this week my mama moved out of the house where she lived, the house she called home, for six whole decades. long long ago, when my papa got a job in chicago (an ad man in the age of the Mad Men), and they’d moved us again from a faraway city, she’d picked that house out of many along the north shore of lake michigan because it was the house with the oaks. more than a half dozen big old oaks. maybe a whole dozen once upon a time. my mama loves big trees and big skies. the house gave her both.
my mama moved into that house in 1963, with four of us under third grade; two, still tricycle-bound. one of us, the fifth among us, was born to that house. never knew another till the day he went off to college. we used to joke that he and my mama are the only northerners among us. all the rest were born south of the mason-dixon line. we all grew up, though, on brierhill road, a winding dead end of a street carved into the woods. a golf course just across the way made for sixty years of unobstructed sunsets for my mama, who kept watch dusk after dusk through the kitchen window. the creek and the crawdads, the green pond, and the logs in the woods made for my playthings, the topography of all my imaginings.
i made my way back there this week, after it was mostly emptied, when i knew i could be alone. i wanted to walk room to room to room, and up the stairs to my old bedroom at the top of the stairs. the room where you can still find my sixth-grade scribble on the wall in the closet’s back corner. the room where so many nights i looked up and out through the oaks into the stars and the moon, where i rocketed all of my prayers and my dreams.
as i drove there, to the house at the bend in the road, i thought of all that had happened there. how i got married there, under the trees, breezing through the garden gate flanked by all four brothers. how, ten years before that, we’d sat round the kitchen table the night after my papa died, and tried to make sense. i thought how that was the house from which i was taken to hospitals, especially the time at the end of high school, and how our family pediatrician (yes, he really truly was Dr. Kamin, the most beloved housecall-making pediatrician that ever there was) came in the middle of nights when i was burning with fever. i thought how i’d close the door to my room in those sodden sulky middle-school years when i was sure no one loved me, and how during high school i’d yank the telephone cord from the kitchen round into the dining room, as far as i could uncoil it, to steal a wee bit of sanctuary amid the roar of a family of seven.
and then i walked the rooms, poked into drawers, shooshed away cobwebs, and inhaled it all one last time. when i got to the oaks out back, looked into the grove where my little girl log cabin once had stood, when i counted the feeders that still swayed in the november breeze, i felt the tears begin to pool in my eyes.
maybe the old house wasn’t so hollow to me, after all. maybe the old house where we’d all grown up, the house that had so long harbored my mama, maybe it would be hard to leave behind, to say a proper goodbye––and thanks–– to.
my tears spilled one last time on that bumpy old earth under the oaks on brierhill road.
i stooped to pluck one last acorn, now tucked in my snow coat’s pocket, and then i climbed in my own red wagon, the one that has ferried my very own boys through their growing-up years, back and forth plenty of times to their grammy’s. and i drove ever-so-slowly away.
but not without whispering a very deep blessing for the house that held us all, and mostly my mama, for so very blessedly, blessedly long.
what do you miss most about the house where you grew up?
the light does come. this is a reminder. this is a note to tuck away for the days when the shadows occlude the sun.
we all live among darkness sometimes. sometimes for spells that stretch on for so long we’re sure we’ll run out of oxygen. but we muscle on anyways. because what other choice do we have? even in the darkest times, there are tiny shards that fall on our path. the kindness of someone we didn’t realize was paying attention. the encounter that puffs just enough hope back into our hearts. the wholly unexpected solace of finding ourselves shoulder to shoulder with someone who knows something about the steepness of the incline we’re climbing.
we all find ourselves in chapters so impossibly hard we’ve no choice but to tap into playbooks we’ve not yet scanned. we revert to those fine few things that just might steady us: we remember to breathe; we stand under the sunshine just long enough to plump a few shrunken cells; we giggle aloud at the ridiculous humor that never fails to creep its way in. even in ICUs. and funeral homes.
truth is: ours is a choreography of shadow and peekaboo sunlight. we bank on it. wars end. babies are born. laughter comes. so does the dawn. even the night is speckled with stars.
i’m here to say that after an almost unbearable few weeks, weeks that had me teetering, all but certain this might be the time my heart called it quits, the load is lighter again. my mama is chipper. my mama is finding her way, carving her path, skittering hither and yon, all on her new red convertible. (the name we’ve given her little red rollator, the latest iteration of spiffy walker, with wheels and brakes and a little compartment for stashing your assorted sundries.)
we’ve pulled through. none of us too worse for the wear.
my mama’s return to her lifelong indomitable state of being happens to coincide with the end of my jam-packed calendar of book talks. and after a summer of searching for answers to questions of cancer, i finally found someone who knows my cancer inside and out. and who laid out a scenario i can live with.
feels to me like someone’s rung the school’s-out-for-summer bell, and i might wiggle a jig all the way home.
because this week held one of my favorite feast day — all saints — and because i love looking for saints in places where no one might think to look, i found myself swooned by this blessed sonnet, “a last beatitude,” from malcolm guite, an anglican priest and poet who’s been said to resemble a hobbit, what with his predilection for waistcoats and long-necked pipes (from which he blows smoke rings), and whose tonsorial tastes tend toward the bushiest of beards, and long locks to go with it.
herewith, “a last beatitude” by malcolm guite . . .
And blessèd are the ones we overlook;
The faithful servers on the coffee rota,
The ones who hold no candle, bell or book
But keep the books and tally up the quota,
The gentle souls who come to 'do the flowers',
The quiet ones who organise the fete,
Church sitters who give up their weekday hours,
Doorkeepers who may open heaven’s gate.
God knows the depths that often go unspoken
Amongst the shy, the quiet, and the kind,
Or the slow healing of a heart long broken
Placing each flower so for a year’s mind.
Invisible on earth, without a voice,
In heaven their angels glory and rejoice.
and one last bit of poetry, as autumn, the season of awe is upon us, these lines from rilke’s poem “Onto a Vast Plain”:
Summer was like your house: you know where each thing stood. Now you must go out into your heart as onto a vast plain. Now the immense loneliness begins.
The days go numb, the wind sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.
Through the empty branches the sky remains. It is what you have. Be earth now, and evensong. Be the ground lying under that sky.
and, lastly, before i skitter off, this line from the thirteenth-century mystic and monastic mechtild of magdeburg:
When simplicity of heart dwells in the wisdom of the mind,
Much holiness results in a person’s soul.
what, pray tell, carries you through your darkest hours?
I’ve always noticed the light shines through more perceptibly, more piercingly, when the skies are grizzled gray, and there’s a fissure, a peep hole, in the clouds.
And so, in this shadowed episode in which I find myself –– awaiting word on my first lung scan since before surgery, trying to navigate my mama through the roiling seas of rehab and the stark knowing she won’t go home –– I wend my way through the days on watch for grace notes which tumble onto me like snowy flakes before the melt: each one unlike any before or aft, each one magnificent in its own faceted incandescence.
And, in the spirit of blessed Francis of Assisi, I am stringing them into a canticle, a praise song typically referencing Gospel text. I’m not so literate in those Scriptural ways, so I am stringing mine in the vernacular of the everyday:
Praise be the blessed, blessed nurse named Vishruti whose charcoal eyes are ever sparkling, and whose attendance to my mama’s every woe is pure blessing before my most grateful eyes.
Praise be the harvest moon pinned high in the night sky one especially hollow night, and the acolyte Jupiter who clung to Moon’s southwestern rim, as if to catch any drippings once the melt began again.
Praise be my blessed “baby” brother who seems the answer to my every prayer before I’ve even prayed it: the one who keeps every necessary form on file (to ensure nary a hiccup in our mama’s journey), attends to every detail with fastidious care, and who is so blessedly tender with our mama’s every ache and pain and worry that in watching him tears spring to my eyes nearly every time. Praise be that brother who has always fit me like my other half. I’m 1/3/57 and he just happens to be 2/4/68. Mathematically sequenced, and aptly paired, we are.
Um, addendum to brotherly praise (did Francis addend his canticles? hmmm): As I was typing that very verse above, said saintly brother was ambling through a lumber yard, intent on rebuilding our mama’s four-poster bed to make it six inches closer to the ground, thus subtracting risk by six not-insignificant inches. And he’s not even the carpenter brother! Be still my brothered heart….
Praise be the ones who fill my stoop with dahlias, and chicken ala yummy, and farmer’s market bounty. And whose prayers and hand squeezes hold me up, even when I wobble.
Praise be my sweet Fred who holds my hand in the dark of night, even when I don’t let on that I am thinking hard about the day ahead, or the one just left behind…
Praise be Pope Francis who, in his latest encyclical, Laudate Deum, squarely implored us to face these crucial questions:
“What is the meaning of my life? What is the meaning of my time on this earth? And what is the ultimate meaning of all my work and effort?”
Praise be Alice Walker who gave us these lines in The Color Purple:
Listen, God love everything you love — and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration.
You saying God vain? I ast.
Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.
What it do when it pissed off? I ast.
Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
Yeah? I say.
Yeah, she say. It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.
You mean it want to be loved, just like the bible say.
Yes, Celie, she say. Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?
Alice Walker, “The Color Purple”
Praise be that God who aims to please us, even with the color purple. Praise be the God who’s “always making little surprises.”
And praise be the simple, simple miracle of a smile spread across any human face. I don’t know why God thought to give us the capacity to upturn our lips in tenderness or joy, but oh, there is little so life-saving as that simple twitch of those few muscles.
In gratitude, in joy, in infinite blessing, and with deepest smile, for all the little surprises that steady us through and through…
of all the majestic moments in the days to come, the days of awe to come, for this is the cusp of the jewish new year –– the hours when we drop to our knees (figuratively, for there’s not a lot of kneeling in the synagogue) in thanks for all creation, for the newbornness of the world, this world we are entrusted to keep, meaning not to possess but to preserve, to tend, to watch over as a shepherd over his lambs –– one of the moments that will stop time for me is when the chanting of the unetanneh tokef (“let us speak of the awesomeness”) begins.
its words are as stirring as they come, deep down to the marrow. and they will stir me so deeply this year.
Unetanneh Tokef (ונתנה תקף) (“Let us speak of the awesomeness”) is a piyyut, or Jewish liturgical poem, woven into the hours of prayer of Rosh Hashanah, the new year, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement to follow. it is chanted just before the Kedushah, the prayer in which the angels sing of the holiness of God, and when the ark that holds the Torah, or sacred scroll, is opened.
leonard cohen sung from it. in his glorious, goosebumping “who by fire?”**
it’s a prayer poem in which we stare into the face of our ending, our death, and examine closely the sharp edges of that terrain we so often run from. while it hurls us into attention, a mortal attention that is the base of plenty of theologies (those teachings believe we heighten our game when we’re aware it will end), it doesn’t look only at the last steps, but, too, at the ones we might take as we march there. it’s in the unflinchingness of judaism –– the bracing, no-beating-around-the-bush, straight-on-ness of it –– that so often grabs me by the scruff of the neck and keeps me transfixed.
and certainly here, and in the hours and days ahead, when we will take public inventory of our sins, when we will stand before a body of water and along with those who stand beside us cast our sins (in the form of bread chunks) into the currents or tide. and when, in the silence of our own pews, we will once again ask these mortal questions. it is the second section of the four-part prayer-poem, the litany of not only death but life, that stirs me most profoundly.
here are its words (with emphasis on the lines that emphasize living, not dying):
“On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed – how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die after a long life and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by beast, who by famine and who by thirst, who by upheaval and who by plague, who by strangling and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted. But Repentance, Prayer, and Charity mitigate the severity of the Decree.”
one of the prevailing pounding questions of this long hard summer has been my considerable wondering about what lies ahead for me, how many years to love on this world that i love so lavishly. it’s left me breathless, a true foggy night of the soul. and yet, as fall emerges, and the new year begins, so it’s time for me to turn (another command of the days of awe, teshuva, to turn in forgiveness, to repair what we’ve broken) to face the light of the days i won’t –– and can’t –– count.
it’s a soul-scouring exercise, one that was flung upon me the moment i heard “it’s cancer,” and i’ve taken it to heart. spent more hours than anyone knows contemplating how i will live what remains of my portion. if i emerge living more alive than ever before, if i emerge wildly embracing each and every dawn and the day that follows, if i love as i would be loved, if i take to heart every last prompt to be gentle, to be kind, to forgive as i would be forgiven, then my prayers this year, my Unetennah Tokef, will be answered.
this is a question to be answered in your own silence: how will you live the next holy days of your one blessed life?
the whole text, for anyone keen to read, broken into four thematic sections:
fear and trembling:
“Let us now relate the power of this day’s holiness, for it is mighty and frightening. On it Your Kingship will be exalted; Your throne will be firmed with kindness and You will sit upon it in truth. It is true that You alone are the One Who judges, proves, knows, and bears witness; Who writes and seals, Who counts and Who calculates. You will remember all that was forgotten. You will open the Book of Remembrances — it will read itself – and each person’s signature is there. And the great shofar will be sounded and a still, thin voice will be heard. Angels will be frenzied, a trembling and terror will seize them — and they will say, ‘Behold, it is the Day of Judgment, to muster the heavenly host for judgment!’ — for even they are not guiltless in Your eyes in judgment.”
God judges us:
“All mankind will pass before You like a flock of sheep. Like a shepherd pasturing his flock, making sheep pass under his staff, so shall You cause to pass, count, calculate, and consider the soul of all the living; and You shall apportion the destinies of all Your creatures and inscribe their verdict.
“On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed – how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die after a long life and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by beast, who by famine and who by thirst, who by upheaval and who by plague, who by strangling and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted. But Repentance, Prayer, and Charity mitigate the severity of the Decree.”
we are helpless:
“For Your Name signifies Your praise: hard to anger and easy to appease, for You do not wish the death of one deserving death, but that he repent from his way and live. Until the day of his death You await him; if he repents You will accept him immediately. It is true that You are their Creator and You know their inclination, for they are flesh and blood. A man’s origin is from dust and his destiny is back to dust, at risk of his life he earns his bread; he is likened to a broken shard, withering grass, a fading flower, a passing shade, a dissipating cloud, a blowing wind, flying dust, and a fleeting dream.”
God is enduring:
“But You are the King, the Living and Enduring God.
There is no set span to Your years and there is no end to the length of Your days. It is impossible to estimate the angelic chariots of Your glory and it is forbidden to pronounce Your Name. Your Name is worthy of You and You are worthy of Your Name, and You have included Your Name in our name.”
bless you all, profoundly.
**i tried to post a video, a glorious recording of leonard cohen singing “why by fire?” but the video seemed to be getting in the way of publishing this post, so if you’d love a musical blessing, try googling “who by fire?” by leonard cohen.it’s worth a listen. xoxox
mistletoe (now studied for its tumor-shrinking capacities) fights “convulsion fits, the apoplexy, palsy, and vertigo.” (elizabeth blackwell, 1737)
there’ve been days of late when i feel dizzy, dizzy with a lightheadedness that comes from being afraid, from not knowing, from wondering if i’m standing on a very thin edge, and worrying about what might swallow me.
dizzy from trying to figure things out on my own, because doctors don’t always tell you all you need to know. so you piece it together the smartest ways you know.
on those dizzying days, the days that come because it seems my cancer is more complicated than i was first told, i all but plant myself –– ground myself –– in this holy earth. i listen for the cardinal’s aubade at the hour of first light, as the inky molecules of night dissolve into the tissue-paper pink of dawn. i pluck flowers with whimsy and abandon, and tuck them willy-nilly into wee tiny bottles that line my sink and my windowsill, and make me dizzy with short breaths of joy. i stare into the depths of the starry night. i all but beg all the heavens and earth to enfold me.
if creation is holy, and i believe it is, if holy God is the spark that animates the whisperings of the cottonwood’s quaking and the duet of the butterfly couplet, and i believe that God is, then this holy earth is here for more than just astonishment and wonder.
this holy earth is here for healing.
for healing what’s broken inside. deep inside. and broken in ways where you barely recognize the pieces, and can’t quite find the way to piece them together.
holy earth has offered its healing since the beginning. the very beginning.
foxglove
sometimes, it’s straight-up medicinal. the foxglove, a magnificent stalk dangling with deep-throated bells, is the font for digitalis, the cure for a galloping heart. coneflower is where we pluck echinacea, the compound that chases away a cold. even morphine, the pain killer to which i’m allergic, comes to us from the fields of poppies that sway in the mountains of turkey and burma. and it was madagascar periwinkle, described as a “carefree annual,” that gave its leaves to heal the kids with leukemia i cared for so long ago. (how gobsmacking miraculous is each of these earth-given cures?)
sometimes, it heals in ways that infuse without compound or molecule. sometimes, pharmacology is not in the equation. but the healing is as certain, as deep, as true, as that from any pill or tonic i’ve ever swallowed or slurped from a spoon.
i was drawn back to the groundedness that comes from this earth, to the veritable apothecary of cures upon which we dwell –– both the medicinal and the ethereal (the ones that most often infuse me) –– when i stumbled upon a poem-slash-essay in orion magazine the other day. it was titled “11 interventions in the 10 days of your dying,” and, one by one, it ticks through the litany of earth’s holy graces that saved its writer as she watched her husband die. it ends in this coda:
XI. Katydids
I have kissed you goodbye, made the calls, packed our things. I step out into a hot summer midnight to the paeans of katydids ringing the trees. The only conceivable response is to set down our bags and bow.
trebbe johnson
i read that its author, a blessed woman named trebbe johnson, is a writer, wilderness leader, and founder of a global community that goes by the name “radical joy for hard times,” a community that describes itself as “devoted to finding and making beauty in wounded places.” sign me up, say i!
because poking around is my default mode, i poked around long enough to peek into trebbe’s newest book, fierce consciousness: surviving the sorrows of earth and self, a book i’m ordering up from my friends at the library. here’s one paragraph that just might pull me out of the cold, dark well where i’ve been splashing about:
so joy is what i’m seizing. joy with its amazing, even if only momentary, loft. startling joy. joy that comes up and grabs you at the heart, and taps on your chest long enough for you to notice. joy is the thing that carries us forward when our feet might feel stuck in the muck.
joy comes in so many colors, and sounds, and serendipities. joy comes when someone breaks into a particular smile, and zings straight to your heart. joy comes when i sit here typing (another source of deep grounding i’ve noticed) and a word or three pop out in a particular order, one i’d not realized would happen, nor even imagined.
joy, to me, is when an old friend i love as dearly as life calls me out of the blue, and out of the decades. just after i’ve walked in the door from a harrowing too many hours in the ultrasound chamber. joy is the sound of his voice when he tells me something he was reading felt like “a theological poem from the heart of God.” joy is remembering how deeply i loved him, my dear friend the priest who’s as joy-filled and funny and holy as just about anyone i’ve ever known.
and joy, nearly every day, is what pours from the throat of the cardinal, and the wing of the butterfly whirling. and the way the sunlight darts and illuminates.
and joy, strung like beads on a string, just might save us. no matter the darkness.
what radical joy is saving you these summery days?
seneca, ancient roman philosopher
p.s. i should probably listen to the old roman, seneca, who has this to say about groundless fears:
“There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
and i should probably pay heed to his follow-up advice:
“What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come.
“Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.”
and here’s his kicker, quoting epicurus, an old greek philosopher:
“The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.”
we should heed the ancients, is the moral here…
p.s.s. dearest chairs, i want to be sure you know that there is no need to worry about me. i am finding my way, and have chosen to be truly honest with you in the wake of my medical mystery tour (though sparing any medical details, as this is not the place for that). i don’t intend to write too often on the subject, but when it interlaces with whatever leaps out from my emotional landscape for a chosen pondering, i won’t skirt around it, and i will always write true. so when i write of being afraid, it’s because that is how this is, this thing that has boggled me and thrown me into territory i never would choose to enter. there are days that leave me gasping for breath and hope. and there are days where i can be utterly swept into joy upon joy. mostly, it’s just that this is all new, and uncharted. and i didn’t see it coming. i have always taken life and its emotional obstacles head-on. my knees might buckle, but my spine stays strong. and the only way i know is the truth way. we are all humans who find ourselves afraid. and i’m not afraid to say so. because in our vulnerabilities, we discover our strengths. especially when there are glorious hands to hold all along the way….
should you poke through the lore-and-legend files of the black-eyed susan, that luminescent exclamation of the august meadow, you’d find it’s long been treasured for its curative charms. the keetoowah peoples (formerly known by the name cherokee, which translated to “people who speak a different language,” which begs the question who’s the different one?) squeezed juice from the roots to cure an earache. a tea made from dried leaves served as a mild diuretic; in other words, it made the bloat go away. and the native peoples of my neck of the woods, the neshnabék (formerly known as the potawatomi) chased away a cold with the ooze they squeezed from black-eyed susan roots. the anishinaabe (a name that means “the good humans”) used it as a poultice against snake bites or open wounds.
i’d like to amend the apothecary: rudbeckia hirta, it turns out, is the perfect balm for rinsing away whatever hurts you deep inside. and i mean the sort of hurt that won’t show up on x-ray, nor splotch a purply bruise on flank or limb or bum. in other words, the black-eyed susan just might be the original pick-me-upper. especially when those nodding heads embroider the banks of a ripple-less pond, especially when their cheery saffron heads stick their necks out as far as the eye can see.
i stumbled onto such a swath this week, after days and days of poring over medical journals that must have been quick-sinking me into summer’s gloom. i’d not known quite how much i needed a spoonful of black-eyed whimsy till it unfurled before me, and far, far beyond me. but once i crouched down low, once i spied the bumbly bees doing their doh-si-doh and la-dee-da, poking their probisci into pollen pouch upon pollen pouch, i found myself entranced. and might have plopped myself permanently amid said swath, except for the fact that chicago’s finest would have given me a chase come the closing hour of the grand old park.
i can’t quite put my finger on whether it’s the hoop skirt of golden petals or the way the fuzzy black-eyed dome periscopes up the middle, or the way the flock of them insistently interrupt the summer fade to jolt us back to joy, but there is a certain je ne sait-something that stands tall and wafts my way, and ever makes me break into a jolly when i come upon a black-eyed susie.
maybe the other day it was the unendingness of it all, the exuberance of earth, rising up and rolling out the golden carpet, one french-knotted with those black-eyed buttons. it was as if the earth was daring me to laugh, to set aside my worries and my dread, to roll with what it offered: it offered stubborn testament to holy hope. it all but rubbed joy in my face, plucked the weight right off my soul, shouted in its earthly way: ”be not afraid; this here’s a world where skies turn pink at dawn, and posies rise in paint-box colors.”
the black-eyed susans got it done. and thus i poked around, to see what else i just might learn while traipsing by their beds.
with one of the more curious common names among the prairie inhabitants, i exercised my curiosities and found out that the name traces back to an old english ballad, one penned near the dawn of the eighteenth century (in 1720, to be precise) by a fellow named john gay. it tells the sad, sad tale of a lovelorn lass (aka susan) who leaps aboard a fleet of moored ships soon to set sail for battle. she’s desperate to find her lover (a sweet fellow by the name of wiliam, the tale so goes) before he shoves off to sea. with tears spilling from her dark, dark eyes (here we find the black-ey’d bit), she cries out his name, he hears her from high above the ship’s yardarms, and, don’t you know, he scrambles down to bid his susan one last farewell. and so it goes in “sweet william’s farewell to black-eyed susan,” the first stanza of which rolls out like this:
All in the Downs the fleet was moor’d, The streamers waving in the wind, When black-ey’d Susan came on board: Oh! where shall I my true love find? Tell me, ye jovial Sailors, tell me true, If my sweet William sails among your crew!
never mind that love language of the seventeen hundreds all but drips with sticky treacle.
and here’s a gardener’s tip to go with it (cuz we never stop pouring it on here at the chair!): it’s said that if you seed wild Sweet William (Dianthus barbatus) with Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta), the pair will bloom at precisely the exact the same time. forever twinned, the star-crossed, black-eyed lovers.
so goes the etiology of the common name, and now for a bit about the latinate, the rudbeckia hirta, so named by the great father of taxonomy, carl linnaeus, who tidily ordered the world of nature, dividing and naming every which thing according to genus and species.
as these things go, there’s always a backstory. and it’s all in who you know. in this case, before hitting it big in the taxonomy department (binomial nomenclature, his claim to fame), it seems mr. linnaeus needed a little side job. a professor at uppsala university, a school founded in sweden in 1477, a professor by the name of olof rudbeck, was in need of a tutor for his three children, and, in 1730, he hired linnaeus to do the job. linnaeus returned the kindness years later when he conferred immortality on his boss, the good prof, by pinning his name to the black-eyed beauty. as andrea wulf explains in The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession: “For his old teacher Olof Rudbeck, Linnaeus chose the popular Rudbeckia. The tall flower reflected Rudbeck’s stature, Linnaeus explained, and the ray-like petals bore ‘witness that you shone among savants like the sun among stars.’”
its second name, hirta, is latin for “rough and hairy,” which if you rub your nose up against the black-eyed dome is pretty much what you’ll bump into.
but from here on in, i’m going to think of the rudbeckia hirta as the bloom that makes the hurt go ‘way…
…and there’s pretty black-eyed Susan,
perfect as the night is blue…
George Elliott Clarke, from “King Bee Blues”
where’d you find your joy this week?
should you need your own dose of rudbeckia hirta, i beg you waste no time and point yourself in the direction of the brilliantly restored north pond in chicago’s lincoln park. it’s breathtaking in the extreme. and will cure whatever ails you.
p.s.s. the perseid meteor showers — summertime’s biggest celestial splash — hit the skies this weekend. without a full moon this year, the good folk at NASA promise A+ viewing. just find yourself a cozy spot to plop (i’d vote for black-eyed susan proximities), align your spine with the curve of earth and look straight up. they’ll be hard to miss.
it’s time for me to slip into a deep well of quiet. one where a pebble tossed into a pond or a puddle makes barely a ripple.
i’ll still be gathering bitlets and wonders that send heart or soul or imagination soaring, and i’ll quietly slip them here onto the “table” on friday mornings, but i am going to practice stillness with magnified focus — at least for the next few whiles.
my body and soul have been turned on their sides in these last few months. and they’re calling for the blessing of a sabbath’s rest. thus, sabbatical; the ancient invention of a God who toiled six days (creating sky and sea, landmass and creature, blooming thing and someone to till it) and deemed that the seventh be made holy, and blessed, and that rest be the call for the day.
this summer sabbatical is my summer’s seventh day.
i’m gentling it with the “somewhat” because i can’t quell my commonplacing, and i do delight in passing along the treasures and trinkets i find. so expect offerings week by week till i rev up my engines again. and, who knows, there might come a week when i’ve something fulsome to say. but i feel a bit thin right now. thin in the voice, and thin all around.
and as any airline passenger knows, we’re instructed to slip on our own oxygen mask before tending to those in our care. and i suppose i need the oxygen that comes with quiet. the rare gift of time to wander, to let thoughts unspool as they will.
i can’t catch my breath. and quiet might help.
from deep down in my quiet, i promise to send forth edification in the forms i find most fitting for a summer’s gambol. but mostly i’m craving the summer relish of bare toes in the grass or the sand. and the cognitive equivalent thereof.
and the sigh that comes on their heels.
shhhh….
i cameupon this morsel this week, a definition of happiness that i knew would have launched me down intricate paths. i shall leave the launching to you. but here’s the line that first stirred me…
willa cather defined happiness as the feeling of being “dissolved into something complete and great.”
(she inscribed it on her gravestone…”that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. the keyword, it seems to be, is “dissolved,” to be dissipated into atoms and ions that meld into the atmosphere. that truly, biochemically become one with the beyond. to lose a sense of one’s boundaries, to float on an innertube of utter vast blessing…)
and while we’re on the subject of happiness, here’s a poem to go with it…(think not that what’s coming is frothy confection…)
THE WORK OF HAPPINESS by May Sarton
I thought of happiness, how it is woven Out of the silence in the empty house each day And how it is not sudden and it is not given But is creation itself like the growth of a tree. No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark Another circle is growing in the expanding ring. No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark, But the tree is lifted by this inward work And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering.
So happiness is woven out of the peace of hours And strikes its roots deep in the house alone: The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors, White curtains softly and continually blown As the free air moves quietly about the room; A shelf of books, a table, and the white-washed wall — These are the dear familiar gods of home, And here the work of faith can best be done, The growing tree is green and musical.
For what is happiness but growth in peace, The timeless sense of time when furniture Has stood a life’s span in a single place, And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir The shining leaves of present happiness? No one has heard thought or listened to a mind, But where people have lived in inwardness The air is charged with blessing and does bless; Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.
here’s a breathtaking definition/description of love (can anyone define love? i think not):
the poet Robert Graves defined love as “a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that…makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other.”
so beautiful…
and because joy harjo deserves the last best word….here she is…
We heard it. The racket in every corner of the world. As the hunger for war rose up in those who would steal to be president to be king or emperor, to own the trees, stones, and everything else that moved about the earth, inside the earth and above it.
We knew it was coming, tasted the winds who gathered intelligence from each leaf and flower, from every mountain, sea and desert, from every prayer and song all over this tiny universe floating in the skies of infinite being.
And then it was over, this world we had grown to love for its sweet grasses, for the many-colored horses and fishes, for the shimmering possibilities while dreaming.
But then there were the seeds to plant and the babies who needed milk and comforting, and someone picked up a guitar or ukulele from the rubble and began to sing about the light flutter the kick beneath the skin of the earth we felt there, beneath us.
—excerpt from When the World as We Knew It Ended by Joy Harjo
consider this a summer’s potluck, and feel free to bring by your own morsels and delicacies. the cupboard is open…
pull up a chair 