blessings | pull up a chair

the other morning, when the clouds were especially bumpy, i boarded a plane, paid no mind to the bumps, and flew 612 miles to turn back the clock to “before time,” and seize a few of the most important days of my life.

what might those days be, you wonder? those days are nothing so fancy as plain old ordinary quotidian days side-by-side with a law professor who happens to be my firstborn. and whose life all those hundreds of miles away from where i usually lay my head on my pillow feels too far for a mama trying to seize every blessing from every old day.

i count myself among the blessed, having birthed a human who happens to be one of my favorite of the whole species. he is 30 and i am double that-plus. and all these decades in, i still purr like a happy cat when he and i are curled like bookends on either side of the same couch. or side-by-side in the front seat of a car, him at the wheel, motoring hither and yon as together we trace some curiosity. or attend to a plain old errand.

a year ago at exactly this time i was here slicing open boxes, stacking sheets on shelves, and filling a fridge, moving him in at the start of his professorial life. it was just weeks before i had surgery, and before i had any idea what the surgeon would tell me as i lay there coming out of an ethereal fog. in fact, it was during my week here in DC that i tried to casually mention that i was going to be having a little surgery. and so, this week in time and place holds some sort of magical power for me: it allows me to suspend time, to return to “before,” and to savor the simple insatiable union of mother and manchild.

only, truth is, there’s a twist this time round. and that twist takes it up a notch. or many a notch.

i know now, in a way i didn’t know then, how very precious even one day is. and how, if you told me i had only a certain number of days, and then asked me how i would want to seize the most of those days, i would tell you the one thing i wanted most emphatically was to be as close as i could be to the people whose lives have left the deepest mark on me.

this year, i know a bit more about the arithmetic of life. and how, no matter how many days there are, there are a precious few categories for which there are never enough. and how, simply hearing the sounds––even the humdrum ones, maybe especially so––of someone you love shaking off the bedsheets in the other room, awaking to another day, watching that someone in real time, in the flesh, go about the unspoken routines that make for a day––grabbing the keys from the bowl, looping back for one last chug of coffee, turning down a particular street to get to work, all those incidentals that make a life a life––those are the things i want to take in in real time. to press them to my knowing. to be entwined with.

and so, as the calendar rolls back to that seminal season when everything changed, i wanted to slip in between time and enter a netherworld in which i could plant one foot in “before time,” when i wasn’t someone who’d been told she had cancer, and “after time,” another name for now, when i do know that the blessing of cancer, or any leaden-weighted diagnosis, is that nothing means more than time. unfettered, ordinary, spectacular, magnificent hour-upon-hour doing the things that make a life a life.

because these are the hours i will never ever regret or forget. and i don’t ever want to wish i’d made more time for time.

while i marinate in the hours and days before me, before i board the homebound plane, here are a few things worth pondering. all of which make for this most beautiful mosaic we call our sweet fine lives. . .

this sweet gem is an excerpt from the very lovely susan cain’s Bittersweet:

Franz Kafka was one of the great European novelists of the twentieth century. But there’s another story, this one written not by Kafka but about him, by the Spanish writer Jordi Sierra i Fabra. This story is based on the memoirs of a woman named Dora Diamant, who lived with Kafka in Berlin, just before his death.

In this story, Kafka takes a walk in the park, where he meets a tearful little girl who just lost her favorite doll. He tries and fails to help find the doll, then tells the girl that the doll must have taken a trip, and he, a doll postman, would send word from her. The next day, he brings the girl a letter, which he’d composed the night before. Don’t be sad, says the doll in the letter. “I have gone on a trip to see the world. I will write you of my adventures.” After that, Kafka gives the girl many such letters. The doll is going to school, meeting exciting new people. Her new life prevents her from returning, but she loves the girl, and always will.

At their final meeting, Kafka gives the girl a doll, with an attached letter. He knows that this doll looks different from the lost one, so the letter says: “My travels have changed me.”

The girl cherishes the gift for the rest of her life. And many decades later, she finds another letter stuffed into an overlooked cranny in the substitute doll. This one says: “Everything that you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form.”

and, lastly, this: wisdom from The Dhammapada, a collection of sayings of the Buddha in verse form and one of the most widely read and best known Buddhist scriptures.

With gentleness overcome anger – with generosity overcome meanness – with truth overcome deceit – Beware of the anger of the mind – master your thoughts – Let them serve truth – the wise have mastered body, word and mind – the wise harm no one.
The Dhammapada*

“the wise harm no one…” let us be wise, be gentle, be generous.

and speaking of generosity one of our beloved beloved chairs who lives not far from where i sit typing here in DC motored over yesterday to spend a good chunk of the day traipsing through a franciscan monastery that took our breath away (and not only because of the paths up and down hills) and who delivered this glorious berry-filled galette to me and my sweet professor, whom she knew when he was a mere wee lad of kindergarten age…generosity abounds at the chair, and i love you all for it.

pjt’s very magnificent very-berry galette

and how might you choose to seize a day, any old day, in the magnificent story of your sweet and blessed life?

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February 2, 2024

the roots are stirring. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12 Comments

January 26, 2024

the quarryings of time

my hair is gray. my left shoulder is frozen. my right middle finger locks most mornings. and half of one of my lungs is no longer.

there’s more (darn that paralyzed vocal cord), but the dirge needn’t drone on. the point is i’ve been quarried by time. which is close to the way annie dillard, my polestar and patron saint of seeing, put it in a passage i read –– and couldn’t forget –– this week.

on page 238 of pilgrim at tinker creek, my bible of the woods, annie D. turns her otherworldly attentions to living creatures in various states of disarray: spiders with only six or seven of eight species-imperative legs; grasshoppers missing antennae; butterflies whose wings are torn; a swallowtailed sparrow minus its tail. and, yet, and yet, they creep and leap and flutter and glide on anyway. nature is not daunted by its disassembling.

nor should we be.

when it comes to us humans –– the species with the power to wonder, to question, to connect the occasional dots –– each quarrying carries its own volume, its own mysteries and humilities and sometimes epiphanies. each nick or chink in the armament of flesh and sinew and bone both takes us down a notch, and, if we’re paying soulful attention, points us closer to our soul, to that essence that bellows our being.

dillard writes thusly:

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.

she got me to thinking about the beauty in brokenness. in disrepair. in all the parts of me that no longer follow instructions.

and then four pages in, annie lands on the phrase that’s entranced me all week. she wonders aloud if, rather than somehow thinking it our birthright to come into existence “with the spangling marks of a grace like beauty rained down from eternity,” we might be wiser to realize we’re most whole “with the botched assaults and quarryings of time?”

“we are all of us clocks,” she goes on, quoting british astrophysicist arthur stanley eddington, who described us as clocks “whose faces tell the passing years.”

there, in those time-etched crowsfeet and the lines that furrow our brow, lie some of our deepest wisdoms. and most hard-earned beauties. that is, if you, like me, consider it a dazzling thing to have tucked into your brain files those rare few ideas whose staying power drives your every step thereafter.

i’ve been in hospitals more times than i can count, have sat with eyes squeezed shut as someone drew needle and thread through my torn flesh, have felt the warm ooze of plaster cast being swaddled round my broken wrist. and each and every time, the wounds have left me more awake to life’s unscripted, oft-unspoken ponderings. (except maybe not the time when i made like peter pan, and flew off a garage roof when a rope swing escaped my grasp.) each and every time, we emerge keener to the pains –– and wonders –– of the world.

the most lasting empathies are forged in ERs and aftermaths.

and think about this: might you tally the innumerable times you’ve broken into smile, or squinched your eyes in irrepressible delight, to earn yourselves those hieroglyphs that now stand testament to your life’s-long accumulation of joy, or the hours you bent in deep concentration. or worried for the someones you love.

such are the quarryings of time. they inch us toward our holiest core.

it’s an excavation i’d not surrender.

now in my seventh decade (egad, that sounds sooooo old), i’ve been reminded time and again that none of this is a given. and we are breakable vessels nearly every time. and yet, without the botched assaults and the quarryings, from whence would come our vast acquired wisdoms?

how would i know how precious each birthday candle is if i’d not wondered “will there ever be another?” how would i know the utterly-taken-for-granted gift of seamlessly sliding an arm down a sleeve if i’d not done so yelping the whole while?

doesn’t our brokenness bring us the pricelessness of knowing how deeply perishable we are? and how we’d best get on with what we know to be those few defining pursuits: whatever is the thumbprint we aim to leave behind on the life and lives we’ve loved?

aren’t our depths — even the impossible-to-ask-aloud parts –– the prize that comes via our frayed and nibbled selves?

none of us asked for nor expected the choreography of our lives. but with each and every quarrying there’s come an unintended plus. even if it took awhile to make itself apparent.

all of which brings me roundabout to this prayer for beauty in the mundane. beauty in the brokenness is another prayer for which i pray. but first, this from writer and poet Cole Arthur Riley*’s breathtaking book Black Liturgies, in which she prays for our capacity to hold together the extraordinary and the ordinary:

God of every beautiful thing,

Make us people of wonder. Show us how to hold on to nuance and vision when our souls become addicted to pain, to the unlovely. It is far easier to see the gloom and decay; so often it sings a louder song. Attune our hearts to the good still stirring in our midst, not that we would give ourselves to toxic positivity or neglect the pain of the world, but that we would be people capable of existing in the tension. Grant us habits of sacred pause. Let us marvel not just at the grand or majestic, but beauty’s name etched into every ordinary moment. Let the mundane swell with a mystery that makes us breathe deeper still. And by this, may we be sustained and kept from despair. Amen.
cole arthur riley

*i am reading cole, stockpiling her wisdoms, as i begin to stock my larder for the lean months to come, when i sense the discord of the world beyond my quarter acre might otherwise knock me asunder. i intend to find a path toward the light. and i will, of course, bring it here.

how has time quarried you? what treasures did you find down deep beneath the dug-out parts?

any time i can bring a nurse to these pages it’s a good day. here, a fine acolyte of healing in action….can you imagine the shenanigans that landed this crew in her sublimely fine care? and, yes, i once wore a cap as pert as hers. and shoes not too dissimilar….

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December 29, 2023

incandescence

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.

8 Comments

December 1, 2023

fallowing

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?

how and where will you strike your match?

15 Comments

November 22, 2023

earth, teach me: a prayer for all who stir as we gather for a feast of thank you upon thank you. . .

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.

– Found on: https://www.sapphyr.net/natam/quotes-nativeamerican.htm

*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

12 Comments

November 10, 2023

the roof and the trees under which i grew up

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?

19 Comments

November 3, 2023

the light does come . . .

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?

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October 6, 2023

canticle of gratitudes in shadowed times

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…

what blessings steadied you this week?

5 Comments

September 15, 2023

let us speak of the awesomeness

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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.

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**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

6 Comments

pull up a chair

Category: blessings

March 1, 2024

time travel