fear | pull up a chair

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

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

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

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

surprises like that are a bit hard to shake.

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

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

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

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

father dufford had his first line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

maybe i should remember all the words.

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

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

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

where do you turn when you are afraid?

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

34 Comments

June 16, 2023

maybe acres of flowerpots would help. . .

in which i tell the truth and let on that this is a bumpy road right in here…

my summer companion, a fellow named tedd, leapt into the passenger seat, as he is wont to do these days. he loves nothing more than wending his way through the city, curiosity propelling the route. we stopped along the way, biscuits with cheddar and honey, fuel for the road. he took notes of places he’d want to come back to, the romanian sausage shop, the honeybear pancake house where the windows were bursting with clouds of silk flowers.

we were headed to a chicago institution, a garden shop that’s sprawled across city blocks. a garden shop that upholstered my very first garden, long long ago. we were looking, allegedly, for a fountain whose splash would punctuate the summer sounds, whose soothing whoosh might lull us into that fugue state that comes when you plop in a chair and listen to all that the world has to offer.

i love my companion more than life, and i love our urban adventures. but truth is, there was yet another uninvited passenger in the old red wagon, and its name was fear. i am inhabited of late by runaway fears, and worries, that this cancer has let loose and is running amok in odd parts of me. it’s too scary to say aloud to the people i love, so i mostly hold it inside. except for here, where words tapped out on keys have always been my one certain release valve.

it seems that two months after the day i first heard the words “it was cancer,” i’ve been caught in what’s likely an inevitable gulch. it’s a lot to absorb. it’s a lot to have half your lung up and cut out, sent off to pathology, where science-y folk slice it apart and mark it with names, stamp it with numbers that scare and confuse you. even the oncologist the other day said as much, though i think her words were something along the lines of “it rocks your world, especially when it’s right there in your chest.”

i was listening to a podcast the other day, a podcast for people with cancer (i still gulp when i write phrases like that, realizing i’m now among them, the people with cancer), and they talked knowingly about “the middle-of-the-night questions,” the ones that basically all circle back to “am i going to die?” there is solace, much solace, in knowing how universally some of this hits us. we are all human beings, a motley collection of bones and flesh, of freckles and smiles that wrinkle our faces in particular ways. we all hope big, though my big is different from yours. and we’ve all suffered hurts we’ll never forget, even if we’ve pushed them off to the side. and a lot of us get scared. the thing about cancer –– or any one of the other life-altering diagnoses –– is that it strips away so very much of the pretense. it’s brass tacks, and un-glittered questions. it’s a swift dunk in the truth-telling end of the pool, where you dispense with roundabout thoughts and spit out the unedited ones. the ones you might not bring up in the produce aisle, sifting through the bunches of carrots, or reaching for the ripest avocado.

once you have cancer, and find out the one or two others in your life who are on the same road, it’s like you’re ushered in to a particular locker room, where everyone walks around with the same flimsy towels, and no questions are barred. where you can say out loud those things that keep you awake in the night. and, somehow, putting breath to the words, seeing the knowing in the eyes of the one to whom you are talking, reminds you, over and over, how very much we all want to cling to this life we have built, this life filled with people we love, and dreams we still hold.

i’m thinking i’m struggling because all of this is so new, and it still feels like it came out of the blue. and it knocked the breath right out of me. i keep thinking that once i get one of those scans under my belt, the ones that will come every six months, i might settle in to the notion that maybe the cancer is gone. or at least settled back to its indolent state, my couch potato of a cancer, as the doctors proclaimed it (after all, it had been lolligagging down at the bottom of my lung for eight long years before anyone realized what trouble it was).

i realize i can’t call my doctor every time there’s an odd sensation — say, like the lump i feel in my armpit — or maybe i should just get a diagnostician on retainer, one who wouldn’t hold it against me for all of my worries.

somehow or other i am going to find my way to the other side of this rather dark cloud.

i intend to get on my knees. with trowel at my side. and a big jug of pellets, the ones that give plant roots a boost. while i’m down there i intend to dig deep into my very own soul, open up a portal to the God who animates the whole of me, and the whole of this earth.

deep in the night i spend plenty of time asking “those” questions. but i also spend just as much time lying in silence, holy silence, channeling the God in whose palm i am trying to rest, aching to rest.

i tend to find God when i’m out in the garden, or lying in the impossible dark. i tend to find God, too, when i tell the whole truth, and the balm comes — Holy Balm comes — to settle deep in the cracks.

how do you find your way to the other side, when the dark clouds come, or the wall of fear feels too high to scale?

i did find a couple poems i was going to leave here today, but i will save them for another day. and simply close with this blessed thought from rabbi abraham joshua heschel, one of my great, great sages…

To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.
Abraham Joshua Heschel

p.s. a delightfully joyful thing did happen this week when, lo and behold, i discovered that none other than richard rohr, the great modern-day mystic, had quoted from The Book of Nature in his daily meditation for tuesday. and i’m getting back in the saddle this weekend, for a nature walk with an oak park synagogue, a two-hour radio show with a pittsburgh priest i’ve come to love, and a trek to milwaukee tuesday night for a conversation with the journal sentinel’s book critic, jim higgins, at the boswell book company, an east side literary institution.

p.s.s. happy blessed father’s day to the brilliant fathers who sometimes gather here…

19 Comments

December 18, 2020

archipelagos of calm amid a roiling sea

ar·chi·pel·a·go /ˌärkəˈpeləˌɡō/ noun

noun: archipelago; plural noun: archipelagoes; plural noun: archipelagos

a group of islands. “the Indonesian archipelago”
a sea or stretch of water containing many islands.

early 16th century: from Italian arcipelago, from Greek arkhi- ‘chief’ + pelagos ‘sea’. The word was originally used as a proper name ( the Archipelago ‘the Aegean Sea’): the general sense arose because the Aegean Sea is notable for its large numbers of islands.

alternative definition: calmus interruptus, in which rocky protruberances, barely discernible in dimension, arise from roiling fluid surface, providing flash of terra firma before which desperate swimmer loses grip, plunges once again into tempestuous sea — alone, afraid, intent on staying afloat. sanctity provided, ephemeral at best.

we turn to the mapmaker’s lexicon — complete with dictionary definition and etymology — because it was the faint and far-between dotted line of rock piles (aka the archipelago) that leapt to mind as the fittingest metaphor for an otherwise nearly indescribable heap of twists and turns, as i tried in vain to keep from keeling over amid this week’s drama of near historic family proportion.

it went something like this:

round about the middle of tuesday, the geography of my interior life morphed suddenly and without warning from restless squatting on the shores of big-enough occasional islands of calm (the sort where you might slow your breathing for as long as five-minute stretches, and in which you might temporarily put at least a shred of worries to the side) to swimming breathlessly through an archipelago of tiny anxious island dots, each one offering maybe a moment’s lull before the waves kicked up again. before i found myself paddling madly to not go glub-glub-glub.

while awaiting the biopsy results of brother No. 2 (see last week’s news), beloved brother No. 3 up and had a heart attack. a real one, a not-so-small one. oh, lordy. (i only have four brothers, so these odds are getting stiff.)

brother 3 — four years younger than me, the father of two young and glorious children — had called mid-afternoon that day (as ordinary as a tuesday might be when awaiting a second biopsy of someone you dearly love), wondering what to do about a terrible case of heartburn, a dyspepsia he was blaming on the banana pepper and hot sauce he had tucked into his lunch and the preamble pot of coffee that had started his until-then ordinary weekday. next thing we knew — and i mean within minutes — there was an ambulance and ER, swiftly followed by OR and days in ICU, all deeply laced with prayer upon prayer.

and i mean hard-knees-against-the-floorboards prayer. the highest octane of beseeching known to this prayerful sister.

as of this writing, brothers 1 and 4 are idly sitting in their homes, where they’ve been instructed to not move, not lift so much as a pair of scissors for fear of fate tap-tapping at their wintry windowpanes.

quite frankly, i’ve found it hard to breathe at various twists and turns in this wildly unspooling narrative. i was reportedly circling room-to-room-to-room the other afternoon, muttering, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” in more exclamatory than prayerful tones. (and i was not previewing the Christmas story.)

a mere week ago, i was finding episodic solace in simple kitchen tasks — slicing onions, plucking cloves. this week, that all went whirling out the window, and i could not have cared less if we swallowed air for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

there is only so much adrenaline one’s itty-bitty fight-or-flight pump can spurt and swoosh through veins. and i’m about to call a truce, to leave my shaky nerves stranded on some unassuming island. which is where the archipelago — or interrupted line of splintered refuge — comes in.

cling is the more appropriate verb in describing my posture when, amid hyperventilation or dizzying projections down the pot-holed road ahead, i catch my breath via one of my ever-shrinking litany of soothing balms. (hot bath; hot bath; hot bath.)

we humans do seem to have a godly bottomline default, a trapeze net for those stretches of our lives when all hell seems to be breaking from the quiet room where we try to keep it handcuffed to the chairs. in those rare quiet spells, when i might be sitting in the dark watching the dance of the candle flame, or folding one lone shirt from the dryer, or glancing toward the moon while taking out the trash, i find my inner gyroscope settling still. i manage an in and out breath. i might even think of something that makes me laugh. (gallows humor is a saving grace; brother 3 mentioned in a text from the ICU that, after a weekend conversation about Faulkner, he’d requested “As I Lay Dying,” from his local library. and then he drolly mentioned “it awaits me now,” fully acknowledging said gallows. God bless his never-ceasing wit.)

the reprieves were short, so short, the fractions of a minute when breath was caught, when fog of fear fugaciously lifted. the rocky seas between made it seem i might not ever get there. might be swallowed whole by swirling waters, pulled down by stubborn riptides.

i’ll get through this tight passage, as we always have before. but, oh my, this december at the start of the twenty-first century’s third decade…it’s a doozy.

here’s hoping we return soon to more quotidian rumblings round the chair.

i mean not a word of this lightly, and fact is, the palpitations just beneath my ribs have not yet quelled. i seem to have twisted myself into a knot of nerves that, as the author of a tome on stillness, is making me feel a wee bit silly. i am employing all my stillnesses, and for the momentary peace they bring, i am deeply deeply grateful. my brothers and i are deeply blessed to be so close, to march through life (especially of late) arms locked and bent into whatever winds we face.

all i need now is for child No. 2 to turn in the last of his string of finals, to prowl the Christmas tree yard for the humblest branches on the lot, and to await the word that things are taking turns for all that’s good and blessed and ripe with hope.

i wish the same for you.

when you’re at wits end, what wraps you in a cloak of calm?

30 Comments

January 27, 2012

holding hands

it’s been a long time since i leapt off the high dive, felt the whoosh of my body — bare skin, wet suit — free-falling through air.

it’s been a long long time since i last mustered the courage, flung myself out into the unknown.

but, i was reminding myself, i’ve done it plenty before.

i can do this.

there was the time, long long ago, when my mama and papa drove me downtown. to the hospital, they told me. you are going to get better, they told me. and i did. but not before being scared out of my wits.

and there were long nights in college when i had no clue where i was headed. but one saturday night in the library i decided i knew. and i decided that to get there i was going to snare myself a solid line of straight As. so i did.

there was the night my papa died. and i never wanted to exhale the breath in my lungs from before he was gone. could not bear to take in a swallow of this new oxygen, depleted of the great love of my life at the time, my hero, my papa.

but i did.

not too many weeks after that i picked up a telephone and told a man on the other end of the line that i was a nurse, but i wondered if maybe they’d have room in their school to teach me a thing or two about writing.

he did. so i did.

and then, not long after that, i walked into the great gothic tower of a newspaper i’d grown up reading. i bumped into a fellow who wore purple high-top tennis shoes, and spilled chunks of oil-drenched salad all over the pages, my pages, that sat on his lap. he read along, looked up, said, “i think i can use this.” i let out a yelp. said, “i think you just made my life.”

not long after that, the lady in charge of plucking recruits out of the masses, enlisting them in the summer army of interns, she called me up, called me in for an interview. last thing she said to me in that tiny broom closet of an interview room was this: “around here, you sink or swim.” i looked her straight in the eye and said, plainly, “i’m a swimmer.”

and so it’s gone, over and over and over again.

we forget sometimes, until we need to remember, just how brave we can be.

and then, once we remember, the oddest most curious things start to happen.

once we stare our fears in the eye, once we decide, okay, universe, we’re not going to be bound anymore. not going to stand here, frozen in time and space, thinking of all the things that could go wrong, might go wrong. we’re going to step off this ledge, and try that free-falling move once again.

once we do that, just as goethe, the great german philosopher, long ago said, “at the moment of commitment, the universe conspires to support us.”

in other words, all around, from out of the darkness, folks start extending a hand. taking our shaky one in theirs, and holding it soft and tight.

the phone starts ringing, and people say things that give you tingles up your spine. because how did they know–out of the blue–that you needed to hear those very words at that very moment?

emails pop into your mailbox. and you click here or there, not really thinking what you’re doing, and next thing you know you are reading something that slides right sweet into the place where you needed it to be.

might be that the fellow you married — a guy known to be plenty cautious and not keen on rash, irrational moves, pretty much the life-long grounding rod for your high-wire act — keeps telling you you’re doing the right thing.

might be your 10-year-old boy, who lets out a whoop, pipes up during dinnertime prayers, “dear God, thank you for the bravest mommy there ever was.”

trust me, i’m not launching myself into space. not about to set up a colony on the moon. not tackling a cure for cancer.

just putting one foot in front of the other.

but, for the first time in a long time, headed in the direction of my heart. instead of the way that’s been slow-dripping, leeching the pink right out of my cheeks.

and once i got through the talking to myself, reminding myself i’ve moved my own personal mountains before, i have been utterly and joyfully buoyed by the power, the knowledge, the wisdom, of the universe to make like a marvelous tunnel of hands and hearts, each one reaching out, giving me the nudge, the squeeze, the full-throttle embrace i need to keep this free-fall from feeling like a death-dive.

instead, i am slowly, solidly, catching the wind.

and one of these days, i just might look down and realize i’ve started to soar.

what a bummer. can’t let you in on specifics. not yet. will when i can. but in the meantime, what freefalls have you knowingly, bravely, stepped into in your life, and who were the great good souls who reached out and let you know you were going to be all right, and no one was letting you splat flat on your face? what are your moments of personal courage?

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June 13, 2008

shaky all around

the news seeping into my little world isn’t so swell these days. nothin’ at all to do with today being that unlucky friday. phooey, i say to that. that’s ol’ superstition. and superstitious i’m not. not so much, anyway.

i’m talking about the front page of the paper. and, lately, the business page, too. they’re the ones spelling out the downs and the more downs; whole columns of type, sprinkled with words like recession, inflation, and war that won’t end.

oh, and bosses at work being shown to the door. and other ones, new ones, saying they don’t like what we do. and we don’t do enough. and, oh, by the way, they’re cutting the pages, and the numbers of people paid to fill the ones left.

all sorts of talk, all day in the newsroom, about what’s going to happen, and who’s going to leave. anyone left, we all wonder, still reading the news? anyone left who loves turning a page, not knowing just where your fancy might land, soaking up something wholly brand new you might never have known? getting grabbed by a photo, or maybe a headline. seeing a byline, sinking into the words of a friend you’ve not ever met but feel that you’ve known for ever and ever.

it’s all very shaky. and it’s not only newspapers.

here in the village where i now mostly walk, or pedal my bike, to save the gas in my tank, i see houses for sale. hear stories of folks needing to move.

i know my dear friend the breadman isn’t baking so much. because no one is buying quite so much anymore. and cash registers, all over town, seem to be rigged with an odd little button that makes all of the totals twice what they were.

even at home, there are reasons to worry. the tall one is stiff, with a pain in his back. and all of us grownups, on pins and on needles.

so what do i do when it’s shaky all over, when the world at my door gets blurry and buzzes and is all out of sorts?

i crank up the dial on the parts of my life that matter the most.

i pay attention to what i’m cooking for dinner. i set the table with just a little more care. i cut more and more peonies from out in the garden. i tuck them there by the bedside, even in rooms strewn with little boy’s clothes.

i walk to the library. i sit with my sweet little starting-out reader. we pluck books, chapter books now, from shelf after shelf, whole piles too heavy for one of us only. we take turns with each chapter. we take turns with the book bag. sometimes, each one of us takes one of the handles. we lug it together.

i buy pie for no reason. i promise to learn to make my own crust. i snip herbs from the garden, snip with abandon. it’s summertime now and i needn’t be stingy.

i work in the garden. i pull weeds and more weeds. i stand back and admire the one-inch-by-one-inch that‘s finally weedless.

i sit on the stoop. i let ice melt on my tongue. we stuff chocolate-chip cones with mint-chocolate ice cream. then, for no reason, really, except for the joy of redundance, we sprinkle jimmies on top, those bit-lets of bite-able sugar. then we try not to bite, but only to lick. not once have we made it, not once without biting. these are the games that we play when we play for no reason, ’cept for the pure joy of playing at play.

as the world around me feels all very shaky, i sink deeper and deeper into what i love most, on a scale that gets smaller and closer to home, closer to heart.

it’s almost, you might want to think, like whistling in the dark. only that’s not what it is if you look from the soul side. it’s whistling, all right, but with very deep roots.

it’s the whistling of grownups old enough and wise enough, and humble enough, to know that the whole of the world we most likely can’t change.

but we can keep the ones that we love from feeling the bumps and the worries, from noticing that all around the edge of this boat, the waters are sloshing, are getting quite queazy.

we can make this place we call home a fine and true respite. the place we come back to, because it soothes us and calms us. because in a thousand small ways, we can dust off the dirt, and polish the places that just might maybe shine.

we might not steal headlines. we might not cinch deals. we might not be brokers of peace ’round the globe.

but what we do with our days, and our hours and minutes, just might make the difference in just a few blessed lives.

and those lives, some of them, were handed to us, for just a short time, really and truly.

someone wiser and truer than i’ll ever be, someone infinite, someone you maybe call God whispered once upon a time, spoke to each of our hearts. said, this is my beloved, and this is yours, too. i’ve breathed in a life, i’ve sculpted with love. it’s your job, should you so choose, to cradle, to take by the hand, to teach the words and the poems and the stories. to tuck into bed with a prayer, to draw tight the sheets. to kiss sweet blessed heads, and send dreams off to dreamland.

give the gift of your calm. give the gift of your grace. give laughter. give whimsy. give ice cream with sprinkles.
make each hour count.

make it be simple. make it be rich.

and then that Someone reached out and gave us our loves.

a wise friend of mine tallied the world as some of our children have lived it: 9/11, afghanistan, iraq, columbine. then there’s tsunami, new orleans under water, virginia tech, and gas at 4-plus-bucks-a-gallon. and, sure as heck, i’m leaving out a thing or two that’s kept you awake.

now, in grade school and high school, even in pre-school, they practice drills year after year, in case of intruders. our cold-war atomic-bomb scares replaced with very real fears that a classmate, or passing-by kook, could burst through the door, carrying guns.

some nights, as i lie in my bed, whispering prayers, and begging for mercy, i ask for a cloak of untattered peace to fall on my house.

and then i wake up, and give it the whole of my heart: i crank up the oven, i tuck in a pan of cinnamon rolls. i wait for the sound of the feet that i know. the big ones and little ones. even the cat’s.

and i do what i think i do best: with all of my might, i aim to sew even though i can’t thread a needle (not anymore anyway, not without my old-lady glasses). i stitch this old house with gracenotes of beauty, and fumble for even a loose knot of calm. i pay attention to nooks and to crannies no one might notice. i iron out wrinkles. i wring out the worries.

it’s called housework. and mine is of and for the soul.

i owe it, i do. to the ones whose everyday stories are being inscribed at my old kitchen table.

and besides, long long ago, i promised: dear God, bless me with life, and i’ll make it most noble.

how do you make your world a little bit calmer, a little bit richer, when all around it feels like the walls are starting to crumble?

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pull up a chair

Category: fear

February 23, 2024

poster child for fear