blogging | pull up a chair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

much love, b. images

22 Comments

February 9, 2015

the original mother nature (appearing elsewhere…)

a note: a dear writerly friend of mine, laura lynn brown, author of “everything that makes you mom,” and the award-winning essay, “fifty things about my mother,” published by iowa review and slate, has carved out a writing place for all things motherly. it’s called “makes you mom,” and in her ever generous ways, she asked if she might pick something i wrote about my mama and post it there, as she begins her library of motherliness. i would do anything for laura, so i said yes. it’s posted there this morning, and in hopes of helping more readers find her newfound corner of the cyberworld, where soon enough laura and her team of writerly compatriots will be accepting submissions, i’m pointing you toward laura’s lovely new botanically-bedecked site. and even though a monday post feels a bit like getting out of bed and forgetting to change out of my jammies, here’s the pull up a chair post (originally written in 2007) that dear laura chose to post. i’ll include the first few grafs here, but to read it to the end, you’ll need to click the link. that’s how the cyberworld often works. and how it works this fine and foggy monday morning…..

we didn’t know it, her little brood. we thought everyone’s home movies had pans of tree tops, flashes of scarlet tanager in between the frames of children waddling, waving, being silly for the camera.

coulda fooled us. didn’t every mother teach her hatchlings to hush when an oriole was in the yard? to rush out and scatter halves of oranges, the winged things’ sweet reward for populating her old oaks.

doesn’t everyone get daily, heck, hourly if warranted, phone calls with the up-to-the-minute news of the baby screech owls whose mama pirated the wood duck house, high up in the trees, and taught her babies to fly, right over my mama’s head?

when you grew up with my mama, you took these things for granted. you had no clue how much you’d learned, how much she’d taught you about the world of God’s creation while other children were merely trying to memorize the capitals of algeria, and bolivia, and, perhaps, the republic of congo.

it came slowly to my attention one day sitting in the newsroom, when an extremely intelligent friend of mine, a friend who grew up in queens, was wondering what the red bird was, not the one with the orange belly, she said, but the one that was red all over.

you mean the cardinal? i asked, as if she’d asked which letter followed C.

but you didn’t even look that up in a book, she cried, unnecessarily impressed.

well, no. but my mama is the original mother nature. or at least my original mother nature, my very own earth mama. and some things, you just absorb.

(to keep reading, please click the link below….)

http://makesyoumom.com/original-mother-nature/

blessings, and see you friday, when i will remember to get out of bed and change out of my jammies…

and while you’re at it, please tell your friends about “makes you mom,” and the lovely work my dear friend laura is unfurling…..

8 Comments

December 12, 2014

the lesson of eight: follow the whisper

i remember the morning. i remember the dark. i remember the quiver, there in my fingers. i remember the pounding in my heart.

i’d tiptoed out of bed, taken a deep-down breath. and then i started typing, started believing.

i’d pulled up a chair for the very first time. and i’d no clue where that typing would lead. heck, i wasn’t even sure i’d find the end of the very first sentence. but i did. sentence after sentence. so many sentences now — eight years of sentence. of fragment. of shards of my heart.

the words that are tucked away here, in this place that — for me — amounts to a treasure box, an unlocked treasure box, one that holds virtual sheafs of paper, and snapshots i lift from the stack, study as if dust motes floating across a shaft of light, the words here have been my butterfly nets, as i lope and stumble and try — oh, i try — to capture the moments of life passing by.

it’s the closest thing i know to lifting up these holy hours, to etching the words of my boys, of passing strangers, of friends, onto this screen that i pretend is parchment. that i write as a relic of life loved well. life loved deeply.

to write in the dark of the just-dawning day, to write when the sky out the window is first soaking up light, starting out black, turning to blue-tinged haze or cottony gray, depending on clouds, to write when the shadows and shapes of the trees fill in, the birds first rustle the branches, is to write at the cusp of consciousness.

this is the hour when the heart and soul, perhaps, are most porous, so what oozes through is closer to truth than anything else we might know all day.

this is the sacred hour, the hour of stillness.

and so, this hour is the one when i’ve learned to slide into my explorer’s boots, when i’ve hauled my butterfly net from the jam-packed closet, and loped around the premises to see what i catch, what i find.

and then, like a child whose attention is held, is rapt, by a ladybug landed on a leaf, or a fuzzy caterpillar inching along, i crouch down low. i pull out my looking lens, and i examine. i marvel. i wonder.

eight years. eight years today. 12.12, the chair’s birthday.

when this old chair first scratched across the kitchen floor, my little one had just turned five, my older one was nearly 13.5. i only wish i’d started before both boys were born, because then i’d have the whole cloth, and now i’ve got only a portion. priceless portion.

because more than anything this is a stack of love letters to my boys. this is a record of who their mama was, and how she loved them. it’s the surest way i know to give them the gift of my heart. because in my book, words equal heart equal love — exquisite, breathtaking, stumbling and fumbling. love that tries so hard, and yet still blows it. love that aims and misses. love that dusts off her knees and tries it again. love = a work in perpetual progress.

but beyond this place as a keeper of heart, it’s taught me one other thing, if not 100 other things, or 1,000.

it’s taught me to follow the whisper.

back when i first sat down to type, that trembly shadowed morning, i had no idea where i was going. i was typing into the dark. but i believed in the light.

i wasn’t sure where or how i’d find it. but the one thing i knew was that the surest way through the dark was one word at a time. one word quietly, boldly, sometimes trepidatiously following another.

word after word equals sentence. sentence after sentence equals moving toward truth. and in time, whole cloth is unfurled.

this is who i am, the words start to say. this is what i believe.

it’s called finding a voice. but it’s also divining for heart. if you quiet the noise, the distraction. if you muffle the ever-chattering doubt, you just might stumble upon the poetry that breathes at the pulse point of all of us.

we are infused with whisper. that’s where our dreams begin. and when — despite all the back talking we can do to ourselves, all the convincing ourselves we might as well throw in the towel, call it a day, pack up our toys and shuffle off home — when we keep our ear to the whisper, when we go with the heart that’s pushing us forward, the heart that says, over and over, “don’t mind the darkness, just live toward the light,” we’re tracing the course to the deepest-down truth. we’re becoming the blessing we are most meant to be.

maybe your whisper is dance. maybe your whisper is healing the sick. maybe your whisper is pleading: “please lift a paintbrush, tickle it into the azure, the cobalt, the tourmaline, and, please, paint a sunrise or sunset.”

my whisper told me to write. write for the depths and the shadows. examine the light. see the poetry. wrap your words around the breathtaking essence of each and every day.

my whisper said, “just keep writing.”

so i did. and along the way, oh, the beauties i’ve gathered. the beloved friends whose whispers heard mine. the ones who whisper back.

eight years later, and there’s a book in the world, the one being “mullipuffed,” even now as i type. God bless mullipuffs.

i’d long dreamed of armchairs pulled round the hearth. and kitchen tables splattered with crystals of sugar, and cream-stirred rings spilled from mugs of hot coffee. i imagined a world where kindred spirits pulled chairs to a circle, and talked about the holiness that animates their every blessed hour.

i have no clue, not an inkling, how many such tables and chairs are out there right now. but i have a picture i keep in my head, in my heart: i close my eyes and out of the darkness, out of the black velvet cloth that wraps the globe, night after night, dawn after dawn, i see golden lights glowing. dabs of candlelight here and there, all haloed together. a shimmering, glimmering necklace of light. lanterns of flame. old kitchen fixtures. maybe simply the roar of the fire, the logs of the forest offering up their incandescence — blessed sacrifice, indeed.

i typed in the dark, dawn after dawn, for eight blessed years. an octave of typing. i followed the whisper to wherever it led. it led me to here, the place where my heart nestles so soundly.

and, here in the dark, in the shadow of dawn, i’ll keep fumbling for keys and the truth. i’ll keep typing, i promise.

bless you each and every one of you who has ever pulled up a chair. bless you for listening. and following along in the dark.

what is your whisper telling you?

28 Comments

September 12, 2014

an invitation

the invitation is broader and deeper than simply offering you a date and a time and a place. yes, there is that (details below). but the invitation i’m gently laying here at the table, it’s a doorway, an entering in….

the invitation is to slow time, to savor, to pay attention, to carve out quietude in the rush and the whirl of your every day.

we’ve been circling around those notions for years now, here at the chair. and somehow, in a mystical, magical, marvelous way, those quiet ideas have tucked themselves into the pages of a book, a book that might plop onto my front stoop any hour now. while i’ve not yet lifted it out from a box, haven’t felt its weight hard against my palms nor flipped through its pages, haven’t marveled forward and back that words typed here in the murky first light of so many mornings have found their way off the screen and onto the page. spelled out in ink — a newsgirl’s primary intoxicant.

but i’ve seen proof that those pages are finally off the printing press. they’re bound, slipped between covers.

any hour now, i’ll christen those pages with my freshly spilled tears.

so it’s time for the invitation.

for starters, consider the book, Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door (Abingdon Press, Oct. 7, 2014), a portable iteration of this old chair. why, you can take it wherever you go. you can bring it to bed, tuck it under your pillow. you can spill it with crumbs (and not have to worry that your keyboard gets jammed with a bit of a cracker). you can climb into a tree, and turn its pages. you can even slink in the bathtub (and not have to worry about glug-glugging your screen under the bubbly suds). it’s the chair unleashed. the chair on the loose. we’ve snipped the cords and numbered the pages.

ah, but there’s something even more enticing than the fact that Slowing Time, the book, can follow you anywhere, can go where’er you go.

and that’s where the invitation begins: my prayer all along has been that what’s tucked in the pages of Slowing Time is simply a field guide into the depths of your holiest hours. my hope is that it might become your whispered companion. a place to begin to contemplate how your life might look and feel and radiate if we dial down the noise, hit pause, and sift through the mess for the shards of the Sacred.

it’s a sketch pad, really, in which the flickers of half-baked ideas clothe themselves in words. and those words become the stepping path into the woods, into the depths. or at least point you in intriguing direction.

professor elisa new, beloved poetry scholar at harvard, talks about how a poem is a “communal resource, a convening space — written in a language we all understand.” it’s a place, she says, “where one human being has tried to make meaning, using a tool — the language we all share — that belongs to all of us. and so, by entering into inquiry, discussion, and interpretation of that poem, we can fully engage in that activity so central to the humanities, that activity of human conversation about what it is really to be human.”

and so, too, with the words you find spilled on the pages of Slowing Time, it’s an invitation to “shared inquiry.” and its words are, at heart, prayer unfurled in plainspoken prose. one someone’s prayer searching, searching for companion — be that gentle journeyer God, or the soulmate you find along your stumbling way, or sitting just inches across from you.

after all, the geometry of the old maple table, and the chairs that are tucked up against it, is the circle. heart linked to heart, hands within squeezing range, eyes close enough together that we can catch the sparkle on a joy-filled day, or the empty hollows in the hours when sadness or grief has eclipsed the light.

it is in those circles of our life — the circles we create out of love, or even when carved by accident of geography — that we find communion. and our own plumbing of the depths becomes shared inquiry, scaffolded exploration. a safe zone, where even our rawest tender spots can be laid before us, with no fear of harm or scorn or raised eyebrow.

still, though, it is in solitude, and in the sanctuaries of time we’ve hollowed out of the day, that the deepest paying attention begins.

as with so many spirit-filled vespers, slowing time — here at the table over the years, most lately every friday morning — has become a practice. practice, as in trying over and over and over to hew closer to the anointed edge at our most blessed core. practice, as in a ritual that surrenders to a rhythm. and, as with all holy acts, the holiness is found burrowing into the nooks and the crannies of a place — an interior, our interior — at once familiar and still to be explored.

it is the nautilus of prayer.

and it is the invitation that pulses at the heart of Slowing Time: use these words, little more than one pilgrim’s prayer, to lead you deeper into your own heart’s vault. settle in. deep breathe. catch the light. embrace the shadow.

and, once you’ve breathed Holiness in and in and in again, lift your eyes, and discover the light of the circle around you, within you. there is Holiness abounding, and it’s ours, radiant with grace.

and here’s the date-time-and-place invitation:

Slowing Time begins here: Reading, Conversation and Book Signing

Wednesday, September 17 (feast of St. Hildegard of Bingen, the great medieval mystic, composer, writer, visionary)

7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Francis Xavier Warde School at Old St. Patrick’s Church

120 South DesPlaines Avenue, Chicago

(leave it to Old St. Pat’s to prompt the heavens to rain down books before the publication date…)

yet another reading, after the actual publication date of Oct. 7, is now inked onto the calendar of a marvelous magical bookshop in Evanston:

Slowing Time Reading and Conversation

Bookends & Beginnings bookstore, a magical bookshop tucked in an alley that feels as if it’s popped off the pages of Harry Potter. Co-hosted by Evanston Public Library. To reserve a seat, please contact Bookends and Beginnings at 224-999-7722.

Thursday, Oct. 9

6 to 7:30 p.m.

1712 Sherman Avenue, Alley #1, Evanston

bookendsandbeginnings.com

and yet another marvel:

Slowing Time Reading and Conversation and Autumnal Joys

Women & Children First, a Chicago literary landmark in magnificent Andersonville, is hosting a reading, conversation and celebration of autumn, Season of Awe.

Wednesday, Oct. 29

7:30 p.m.

North Clark Street, Chicago, IL

womenandchildrenfirst.com

more readings to come…..stay tuned.

and now a question: how do you slow time? (oh, and what will be your crumb of choice to spill onto the pages and clutter the book binding gulley?)

14 Comments

March 2, 2012

goodbye to white-on-black

oh my goodness. i am filled to the brim here today, as i type these white keys on the black page. chalk to the chalkboard i always thought of it. all these five years, two months, two weeks and five days.

oh, i’ve heard grumbles now and then. hard to see. makes folks eyes do the wazzle-dazzle, which means the albino letters get all wobbly, do a dance on the black velvet curtain, and it’s impossible to read.

i’ve always found it homey. but then i like cloudy days, a gray november day is some of God’s best artwork, far as i’m concerned.

so it’ll be a bit like taking off the sunglasses when we up and move over the weekend. when we kiss iWeb goodbye, this lovely little paintset that all these years has let me play here, write my heart out, let you join in on the hearty conversation.

in the nine gazillion changes underfoot, i found out not so long ago (where was i when the smoke signals went up?) that ol’ iWeb will soon be obsolete, and mobileMe, the cloud that carries the chair to all your houses, it is evaporating come summer.

it’s pretty much like finding a bright orange eviction notice slapped on your front door. or parking in some illicit spot downtown and finding a big ol’ chicago police department clamp on your back right wheel. while you were away, the sheriff came and booted you.

so as long as i was leaping out of airplanes in the last few weeks, i decided now’s the time to make the one last leap. we are moving, you and i and all our chairs and the kitchen table too. and worry not, i won’t forget the old milk pitcher, the cracked one up above. i’ll haul it along. with all the coffee mugs and spoons.

all you have to do is ring the same old doorbell. i’ll be there, waiting on the other end.

i’ve been doing all the packing for the last few days. trying to make it all cozy over in the new place. the walls are white. and some of you — though you’re not here reading, because you told me long long ago that you would not read a place where words come out all chalky white on slate — well some of you will be tickled to learn that the new place believes in black letters on white walls. just like in the old days, when you could count on ink getting smeared all over your mitts as you read the morning’s news.

i up and moved — with MAJOR assist from the chief technical saint, my little brother bri, who swooped on a cape and saved the day when i thought the chair was forever lost — every last one of the 523 daily meanders that have meandered here, and soon as i’m done with this one, making it a neat 524, i’ll carry this one over there too. sort of like when the moving van takes all the big stuff, and you throw one last lamp there beside you in the passenger seat, lest it get left behind.

it might take a while to get the curtains up, to make it all pretty again. for one thing i have a full 524 photos to move, one by one. and somehow the paragraph indentations all got lost. can you even begin to guess how many paragraphs need to be indented? oh lord, does anyone know a 1-800 listing for the paragraph patrol?

as with any move, i’m a bowl of floopy noodles over here. part of me is sad to leave this place that’s been such a fine home for me, and my heart. and the words that spill here.

this ol’ house was built with and by my sweet college boy. back when he was just an eighth-grader. i loved the way he sat down that long ago december’s night, and started poking buttons and next thing i knew he had me shoved out the window and onto the blogosphere.

where would we be without the ones who push us from behind when we don’t realize how very much we need the shove?

i might walk around one last time. peek in corners i’ve not seen in a long long time. wipe off the last of the cobwebs, then take one big brave breath, and pull the shades.

there’s a new place waiting for all of us to pull up chairs. and it’s a spiffy place. it’s got tricks and marvels i can’t begin to grasp. not yet anyway.

for starters, i don’t think you’ll ever be tangled again in the darn comment snags, the ones here on iWeb that sometimes let you pipe up and add your thoughts, and sometimes kept you banging on the window, trying to get someone to let you in.

i never much like change. i could wear the same old pair of slippers till my big toe pokes through (and it is, even as i type). i wouldn’t notice if a rug was worn to the threads. it’d be the same old beautiful rug it was the day i brought it home.

so this moving thing gives me the wobbles too. and i’m all worried you won’t find it cozy. but it’s clean. and we’ll all be together. and the coffee will never stop percolating there on the cookstove.

give me a wee bit of time to gussy it up.

and stick with me.

the other night, when i thought the chair was lost, when i thought our zillions of heart beats shared would never ever see the light of day, i cried myself to sleep. real tears. poured onto my pillow.

oh, sure, these are just computer keys that i push down with the pads of my fingers. but you all know the secret: they are wired straight to the nerve center of my heart.

this is all virtual, indeed. but what spins from here is as real as anything i have ever known. and it is propelling me, keeping me airborne.

so that’s it.

just one last thing: have i told you lately that with all my heart and all my soul, thanks for coming all these years.
now, let me grab the coffee and let’s get goin’ down the lane. we’ll make it just right. i promise.

love, the chair lady

housekeeping: you have nothing to do, nothing to change. the tech committee and i will get the phones changed, the new mailbox hung. just find the chair the old way, pullupachair.org
you’ll find us, wherever we are….
and i’ll be waiting…

2 Comments

December 9, 2011

five. really?!?

the little guy was polishing off his morning plate of eggnog french toast this snow-dusted day, when i went and struck a match. lit up that burning five, the one you see above, and plunked it in a plate of merry-sprinkled cookies.

burning plates in early morn apparently get his attention.

“why five?” he asked, not beating round the bush.

“the chair is five,” i said.

“today?” he asked.

“actually, it will be monday. but it’s five years of fridays,” i said with a number girl’s precision.

“that’s big,” he said.

i agree. quite heartfully.

i think back to december 12, 2006. i was the mother of a 13-year-old who had recently broken his neck, and a 5-year-old in kindergarten. i typed from home, not yet called back to the mothership of the newspaper where i’ve told stories for 29 years now.

i’d discovered somewhere along the way that i secretly hummed when it came to the homefront.

i knew i loved the heart and soul that upholsters every richly built dwelling place, be it cottage in the woods, or an old gray-shingled house with a birds’ nook built into the eaves. the garden, for me, had always been holy ground. the kitchen, a place that drew me. and being a mother absorbed me, in the truest ways. of these things, i thought deep and often. though none of them out loud. not much anyway.

but then came a starry december’s night.

i’d been prompted by my firstborn, who could wield a mouse, a keyboard and its contents with head-turning amazements.

“you should do a blog,” he said, shoving me into the deep end from the tentative edge of the pool.

“here, i’ll make your website,” he offered, putting off some 8th-grade algebra to make his mama purr.

it’s not every night your kid turns his imaginative powers your direction, and when he does, you haul over a chair and play along.

and that’s pretty much how i got here. i found a site, with a name that spoke to me, and down in the wee corner, it was copyrighted to me.

i had little choice but to begin to type.

every week day for a year, then every friday for the next four. which brings us to today. the three-day-early birthday. but when you get to five, who is counting minutes? who’s keeping track in such compulsive ways?

for all of you who’ve been here for all five years, i have a special row of chairs for you. right here, in the deepest chamber of my heart.

some of you are among my dearest, on the screen and off. some of you, though, became my dear beloved friends simply through the act of clicking, which in blog terms amounts to listening.

and listening is the thing.

because, really, all we want, most of us, is to be heard. whether our words come out in whispers or full-throttle proclamations, we are looking to find a few inches on the world stage where what we wonder, what we believe, matters.

world stage, of course, does not mean we seek a microphone and podium. sometimes the choicest stage is the one where someone sits across from us, and nods in rapt attention. is that not what’s at the heart of most every child’s prayer? someone, listen, please.

and so i whisper here.

not all of you whisper back, but for those of you who do, who’ve put down your own stories, who’ve wiped away a tear and let me know, who’ve joined the conversation, raised a question, turned a story upside down to discover something altogether new, i’ve another row of chairs for you, and those have padded seats.

i never asked to be a writer. i just discovered, early on, that making words and paragraphs was the closest thing to humming my heart knew how to do.

all my life i’ve written. all my life my words have flowed from deep within my heart. i can’t seem to help it.

it’s not that i’m not compelled to get my story out, but to unearth all the touchpoints, where yours and mine are intertwined, where we discover more about who we are, and this path we try to navigate, by putting words to inklings, by giving form to prayers that have not made a sound until we typed them out.

in the five years that this table has been set, so much has changed: the blogosphere, now, is a very crowded place, and i know how rare, how hard it is for anyone to carve out time to visit. my hope that this might have opened some unmarked door, the pages of a book, it did not take flight.

instead, the steady pounding of my fingers on the keys brought me a circle of voices who i know–without fanfare or applause–see the world in ways that are not unlike mine.

and most of all, and best of all, i have left a record for my boys of how deeply, purely, vastly they’ve been loved. and i’ve captured priceless snapshots from the pages of their lives, how one grew up, went off to college, and how the other melted us like butter.

i’ve discovered, deep and true, a voice that comes from miles within. and i’ve learned not to be afraid, to speak it as i live it.

it’s not an easy thing to write from your heart. not an easy thing to have your heart be questioned, tested, singed.

five years is a solid sum. and i think it satisfies my urge to complete what i’d begun. writing every friday is surely in my rhythms. but maybe now i’ll change it up. perhaps i’ll post some of what i write for the newspaper, for now they let me write there in ways i write here too.

perhaps i’ll be silent on a friday. because silence is a skill, a prayer form all its own.

what matters most is for all of you who get to here, to these holy sacred words, thank you. bless you. in ways you and i might never know. i am casting out my sparks of light, and trusting that in some form they’ll land upon your heart, and burn an everlasting flame.

know that yours forever burn in mine.

amen. and bless you.

7 Comments

October 8, 2010

chair unplugged

brave new world here. scary world. trembly-fingered world.

so, the old computer goes kerpluey, all but sends up sparks, sends me scrambling for the nearest 9-1-1. only, i find out, the firetrucks don’t come when it’s megabytes that smolder.

you are left to fend for your sorry self. you pack up what’s left of the old white box. you haul it off to the resuscitation station– a.k.a., the mall.

once there, you are convinced, by general consensus and the nice man at the apple store, that it’s time to drop the leash, venture forth.

or, in my particular case, time to leave behind the little room and the old pine desk where i’ve typed long as there’s been a chair. and long before, truth be told.

why, there were cobwebs tied up with all the cords that tangled at my feet.

pull the plug, the un-plugged pleaded.

be bold and seize the world, as defined by the flat rectangle that is the laptop. the digital universe no bigger than a magazine, and not a page-y one, either.

now, mind you, i’m not big on shaking up my world. i picture a giant 20-liter bottle, shaken, top unscrewed, and fizzies fizz all over creation. splatter the walls, splot the ceiling. you’re left to spend the day mopping up sugar-fizzing beads.

just now, egad, i discovered that the comments from last week are gone, ka-poof! how dare they. and all the little boxes of the entire history of the chair have turned, like litmus paper, or home pregnancy tests, from blue to red. does that mean that i am just about to erase the entire record of the chair? will this be but memory, and fuzzy one at that?

of course i’ve no technical support team here at chair headquarters. that particular committee up and grew. has left me to fend, again, for myself. he’s off rowing down a river, and here i am, on the banks, waving white flag, red flag, any old hankie i can find bunched up in the backpack that is always dangling from my back.

ah well, back to business: if all goes up in smoke, we’ll bow our heads and whisper words for the departed dream.

i get to be existential about the cybersphere. does it exist, at all, if it can be wiped out with the wrong stroke of a key? does it matter? and if it goes, it was all just words, right? and much much heart.

gulp.

so much for the wobbly part of this equation. the not-so-wobbly part is that here i sit, at the kitchen table in the kitchen i so love. the heartbeat of my make-believe farmhouse. i look out and see the birds–only thing is, today it’s squawky starlings who’ve moved in, taken over the limbs of every bush and tree in sight. i’m thinking alfred hitchcock might be out there somewhere, panning with his lens, remaking his scary horror flick, “the birds.”

for years now, writer friends and not-so-writerly friends have expressed pure shock that i, a would-be writer, was tethered to a plug-in writing pad. you don’t have a laptop, they’d practically gasp.

well, no, i didn’t. not till now.

i have long longed to feel the eastern sunlight streaming in, to be closer to the tick and tock of the old clocks that syncopate this room, to keep watch of the flutterings of the birds as i think and type.

question is, is this the start of a bigger unplugging in my life, as i look at paths ahead, decide which one i might take. i know the spot in the woods i want to get to. but getting there is not without bumps, not without wobbly steps.

maybe this is but the first, maybe it’s practice, dress rehearsal for the play called life.

surely, the day-to-day is smoother when we don’t shake things up. but is it better? is it wise to keep the course as is, when all around we sense it might be time to stir things up, to take the one big giant step? to hold our breath and leap?

as i ponder that, i might just take a deep breath in, push the publish button and see what happens. we’ll all know soon enough. if you see this, the great leap worked. if not…..

time to get out the pen and paper and start all over once again.

what big bold scary steps have you taken lately? and fear not, i will get that comment string back on last week’s meander…….oh dear. wish us luck….

4 Comments

April 2, 2008

the other blog in this ol’ house

maybe it’s because we shared a glass. maybe it has something to do with sleeping on the same sheets for the past 18 months. (oh, i mean i changed the sheets and all, but even when i did our arms and legs were still stretched out on common threads). egad, we might have even touched. our toes, i mean our toes.

what’s happened, though, is most peculiar. i once resided with a fellow who harumphed at the notion of a blog. i still recall him–quite vividly, in fact–with his gray hooded sweatshirt pulled up and past his ears, sitting at the banged-up kitchen table one dreary weekday morn, spooning little Os into his mouth, while i pranced by with camera.

“i will not be blogged,” he bellowed. and i of course demurred. i’ve only once or twice trespassed across that line–and that was to make nice. and he, of course, responded with a mighty grin.

but now, it seems the anti-blogger has come around, crossed over to the dark side. why, even as i type, he is on a train tap-tapping at his keys.

stranger than fiction, truer than truth, we are now a two-blog household.

he of course is blogging boldly, about that thing he loves, the size and shapes of towers, and how we build our cities. i too write of that i love, the little things that unfold around us, our hearts, our souls, our wings, our stumbles.

seems he’s taken rather quickly to this whole new world of laying it on the line (he seems to lay it nearly every hour, on the hour). and seems the world is taking rather quickly, too, to every word he writes.

there is irony aplenty here, so much in fact, i need to scrape it off the walls. but i’ll leave all of that to your imagination.

i’ll offer these few points:

you’ll get a chuckle, yes indeed, at the fact that weeks ago he was moaning–over mashed potatoes, if i recall–that there might come a day when he’d get merely 10,000 to 20,000 hits.

i choked, i really did, nearly spit my spuds across the table. thought of all the mornings i arose before the rooster even crowed. i realized, i did, that in 18 months of all this finger exercise i’d only just barely scraped the 20,000 mark (and half of those i fear, were me simply clicking past the chair, on the way to other places).

in fact, just the other day, his first official day, he clocked a stunning 6,000-something clicks. i did a little checking, flipped through the pages of my calendar, where i confess i scribble all my clicks on the days that i hit “publish.” took me, for example, from aug. 24 to dec. 10–a full 14 weeks, or 76 meanders–to get that many clicks. and his were on the single day he launched, for cryin’ out loud.

oh, not that i’m comparing. not that i’m feeling one bit, um, overshadowed.

just that well, after all of this, i am now the other blog in this ol’ house.

mostly, i sit in pure amazement at the power of the internet, when it knows where to find you. i scratch my head, trying to figure out just why it is you and me might be the only ones who visit here today.

just a week or so ago, i was getting up at my most delicious hour–that would be five bells from the noisy clock downstairs–and the stretched-out someone right beside me, groggily inquired as i rose, “getting up to blog?”

“no, merely writing in obscurity,” i shot back, quite proud of my early morning sense of humor.

it’s not every woman who can a.) take the dismal comparison, and b.) find something still to laugh about.

so there you have it.

fact is, i more than many on the planet understand the yins and yangs of feeding this here blogging beast. i know what it is to worry all the time, to wake up in a sweat, to wonder who might think that you’re a fool, and, worst of worst, what in the world will you do if, at any hour, the computer won’t turn on.

fact is, as always, he is doing a mighty job. i would not be lying if i said that long ago i fell in love, in part, with just how much he cares, and how triumphantly he makes it matter.

i worry of course that once again he works too hard. and frets too much.

of course, i understand the bumps and bruises, and the exhaustion to the point of flopping to the floor.

what i don’t get is how in the world can it be a bad day when you only get 10,000 hits?

dearly beloved loyal readers, bless you–all three of you–who continue to come back for more. ‘twas too tempting a morsel to pass up this chance to poke a little tease at me and my beloved blogger. here’s hoping it is tossed and caught in the same shared jovial spirit. truth is, in these fretful newsprint times, i stand up and applaud anything that draws a reader. and so i wish the hooded one smooth soaring to the highest heights. i’ll be here, holdin’ down the fort. a job i attempt to manage…..
p.s. the photo up above is the smiling picture of the author of the skyline, the latest blog wholly endorsed by the chicago tribune. they ran a lovely post about it earlier this week. seems they recognize a good thing when it’s in their grasp.

1 Comment

January 27, 2007

weekend update

i know. i know. i’m not supposed to be here. supposed to be off spooning lucky charms into my lazy little saturday morning mouth. well, rules, as they say, are to be broken.

so here i am. in my jammies. and my big fluffy slippers. seemed like it was time to not meander in the monday through friday way, but rather get us all here at the table, chat about just a few little things.

first off, chair people, i cannot tell you deeply enough how much i love that you are pulling up chairs. wish i could prance around in my big whites (aka slippers of many yarns), tap on your window panes, leave big pucker marks on the glass. yes, it’s true. i would kiss each one of you who is out there regularly pulling up a chair. or even just once in a while.

and i must tell you that when you step out of the shadows, boldly hit that “add a comment” button, well, then you make this the very place that i dream of it to be. it is soooooooo fine if you just like to drop in, read, scamper away. but when you add your fine thoughts, your perspective, your queries, your ponders, well, then this broth gets really rich here.

it almost gives me goosebumps the notion that chairs from maine to california are pulling up here. that dots are being connected. like souls are sniffing each other out. when that happens i just stand back, like the proudest mama that ever there was, and watch magic unfold.

now about that “add a comment” button. do not be afraid. just add. someone asked me just this week, a couple someones i think, if there were rules. heck no! i am not a rule girl, despite my many years of good catholic nuns. (my nuns, by the way, were behind the convent, smoking cigarettes, wearing shorts, stripping off their veils. so that tells you something about my formative catholic years.)

back to rules: no, there are no commenting rules. well, yes, there is one. be polite. please. but that’s not something i need to tell chair people. sing your heart out, like blessed brilliant wm ulysses (wow, can that man write). charm us with tales from your front (see just about any jcv or pv-az post). take us to a new height (all of the above, plus jan the moon lady). delight us with your word play (check out thelonius; and, by the way, how’s that for a name?) unspool your wisdom (mbw on children’s books comes droolingly to mind, but there are so many others). drop in like the old friend you once were and are once again (kd-nj, hullo). pop up here and there, melting us every time (susan, nancy, becc, blessed becc. or even vpk). you might even insert a question, a question to think of all day (carol z, aka bread-delivery queen).

write like you are writing to friends, which i hope we will all become, if we aren’t already. say whatever strikes your fancy. and please please, talk among yourselves. you don’t have to talk to me. i just get the yarn rolling each morn. i am only the beginning.

oh, and one more thing: if there is a spool of conversation that you still want to meander, don’t feel compelled to stick only to the meander of the latest day. (we’re still thinking about what’s called a forum page, so you can easily talk among yourselves, following a particular thread ‘til the spool runs dry.)

but, truly, if you care to sit in silence, you are just as welcome as us wordy ones.

one other thing before me and my slippers shuffle away: seems not all of you are seeing this the way i do, and i don’t mean in a metaphysical or philosophical sense. i mean graphics. plain, old, what you see with your eyeballs.

i see the words that i type in a font that looks, well, just like an old typewriter. some of you do not. i am learning these things. occasionally, i’m told, that mucks things up. words slide behind pictures. pictures eclipse thoughts. not a good thing.

so the committee on graphic construction is considering a little reconstruction (though it pains me to give up the typewriter, although not so much if you can’t see it anyway). so, let’s all pull in our chairs, and give me your vote.

i could start writing in this, which is called georgia, and which my technical wizards think is cool, think is different, think is the closest approximation to typewriter that almost all computers can read.

or i could go for my old stand-by, times new roman, the type i have used for years and years, the type that i first loved. now that i see them cheek-to-cheek, i think i can see why the wizards want door no. 1. but that doesn’t mean i could ditch my first love….

anyway, it’s out on the table. i’ll sure hate to let go of this baby, american typewriter. it’s the font that birthed pull up a chair.

so that’s about it, people. back to your cheerios. back to your froot loops. i’m off to rustle up bagels, lox, the works, for my boy who did not get the part of his dreams, but who is weathering it well. we invited over the boy who did get the big part. and my boy, the fiddler’s butcher, the man who wants to marry daughter no. 1, is taking in wisdom that will last his life long.

see you monday. when i’ll be back to meander. in the meantime, i’ll put some fresh morsels onto the lazy susan. not now, but by the time the weekend is done.

here’s the big kiss i’m smearing on your windowpane. mwah. and here’s me, shuffling away….

10 Comments

January 4, 2007

cleaning, housekeeping, the recipe

sometimes i feel i need to apologize for being such a cleaner. not now, not at the new year. which for me begins today. this is my jan. 2, by the way. i’m on a two-day delay thanks to the accident of my birth.

but here we are. all of us on the relative same page here. all leaping in anew. perhaps you too are cleaning. it seems to be a widespread affliction. right up there with new date books, new diet plans. i, believe it or not, forgo both of those. get my date book in july, just to be a trend-bucker, i suppose. don’t diet; hard to do when popcorn and broccoli are your main food groups.

ahem, back to the subject at hand here, back to the cleaning. the older i get the more i give in to my quirks and my personal square pegs. and the quirk of the day is i love to clean. down on my hands and knees in the corner. vacuuming can send me to the moon. (which by the way, that wolf moon has me howling.)

there is something about wiping away dirt, sweeping off crumbs, returning to order that simply sings to my heart. i cannot go to bed with dishes in the sink. oh, okay, maybe the single occasional popcorn bowl waits ’til the morn. but i am a girl who likes to pretend my life is in order by banning the crumbs to the dustbin.

i am not naturally neat. naturally, i am a piler. piles are not mess, i tell myself. piles are order, vertically. but i married a guy who likes neat. and i am a once-nurse who likes clean. so, once children were born, and my life turned upside down, inside out, suddenly found myself cleaning for joy.

and, oh the joy. i breathe easier when i walk out of or into a room that is sparkling, especially when the sparkle comes from my own sweat and muscle. there must be little tiny specks of my germanic genes washing around in the great irish stew, for the hard work of cleaning is balm to my soul.

the tree is not yet down. i should say trees, for we indulged little T and planted a sweet baby balsam up in the hall on the landing, so he could fall asleep to the lights, wake up to the rumble of the train tumbling off the tracks down below.

so the big cleaning, the clearing of trees, still lies ahead. but for days now, i have been clearing my desk, sifting through files, wiping the slate for the start of a new year of piles.

and speaking of cleaning, how ’bout time for some…

housekeeping: with the holidays tucked behind us, it seems there’s a new percolation of chairs being pulled to the table. i couldn’t be more delighted. it is a gift in ways you will never know. my heart only keeps whispering, carry on, carry on. a most important critical point is that at a table we all take turns talking. please please add your thoughts. and if you’re new here, or took some time off, feel free to meander around. there are some magnificent thoughts being added to meanderings, some way back in the days.

please see a delightful, wonderful passage, tacked onto “extending the table” (12.27.06), by a marvelous thinker and writer, who tags herself jcv, and who trembled at her first-ever blog moment. she is a treasure i know you too will come to treasure.

delight yourself further, and not so far back, by reading along with jan and her moon story, on “bring on the birds” (01.02.07).

marvel, as i do, at anything posted by the mysterious, marvelous wm ulysses, who goes back nearly to the beginning and makes my jaw drop every time.

and finally, drum roll……

the recipe, the one we’ve been waiting for….here’s where i will get teary. if you haven’t, please please read, “eggs, cheese, an ungodly hour” (12.22.06). it was a magical, heart-filling tale of a miracle of a woman named nina who for years made a christmas gift for a soup kitchen. she made a strata, which is an egg-cheese-and-bread layered-y thing. (forgive me, i love making up the occasional word.) well, sweet blessed nina died nearly two years ago but her strata lives on. in a pure christmas twist, her beautiful husband, her father, and her sweet little girls carry on. they make strata by the carload, and we (the ones who get up at an ungodly hour) dish it up in the dark of christmas eve morn. i had thought that we could truly lift nina up if we all got the recipe, and beginning now, made nina’s strata into a most blessed christmas tradition. what if, i wrote, we all made nina’s strata, and, in true nina spirit, we gave it away, gave it away to someone whose eyes needed glistening.

well, michael, god bless him, came through with a marvelous rendition of the recipe. and it seems those who loved nina most have added their heart to the mix. please please, i beg you, go take a look. it’s right there in the archives. and i will re-post the recipe on the lazy susan page, for easy plucking. fear not, next christmastime i will haul it out of the recipe box, remind everyone. and we shall all of us, perhaps, take to our kitchens, tearing up bread by the bits, to lift nina to heights she only could have imagined, as we all brighten the world nina-style, through our great oozy pans of eggs and cheese served at an ungodly hour.

bless you each and everyone. ’til tomorrow…

nina’s strata, coming out of the oven christmas eve morn….