lessons from the garden | pull up a chair

catching my breath is something i do quite often these days. my breath runs away from me. or it gets lost deep down inside me, down where the sacs of my lungs are no longer, i sometimes imagine. and i steady myself in ways i like to think are inconspicuous: i lean against walls, i grab onto the arm of whomever i’m walking with. i plop swiftly onto the nearest flat plane. i lurch to a pause in the thick of a sentence, one that never would have stopped me before.

but the breath i’m catching this week is the breath that comes from deeper than lungs. it’s the breath of being home, of feeling swept into the holy embrace of the nooks and crannies you know by heart. the ones on which you’ve been keeping watch for whole long decades. the ones you sense keep watch on you.

especially the ones in the garden, the patch of earth you call your own. where every square inch is a story unfolding, a story that bedazzles me, that fills me with wonder, a story that feels like watching the impossible prove the possible: like how, after three years of being nothing but prickly canes and leaves, does the raspberry bush know to put forth teeny tiny clusters of what will be sunbursting shades of fat juicy berries? or how, out of the stark and bare ground, does the fern know to jut forth frill upon frill of feathery fronds, tight curled into commas that only slowly relent? and how, pray tell, does the red-breasted robin know right where in the grass to pluck out a worm? (here’s a hint: the robins can hear the slithering of the worm underground. how’s that for astonishing wonder?!?!)

because i’m sauntering at the slowest of paces these days, i find my long silent spells in the garden particularly punctuated by questions like these. and the answers that come, given their long-winded meanders and the places they take me along the circuitous way, give me plenty of time to consider how all of creation proclaims the one certain truth i need in these days: there is an animating force, beyond comprehension, and as it choreographs the turning of this holy earth and the unfolding of wonder, so too it keeps watch over me. which is just another way of saying the God who greens the world is the very God who, so too, keeps me so tenderly, tenderly close.

being home, being back in my garden, is the closest i know to curling into the palm of my God’s holy clutch.

we’re only home for the shortest of spells, which is why i’m so busily catching my breath here. last week we were away for a longer stretch of days––truth be told––than i’d felt ready to be, but it was the graduation of that boy i so love. and it was, uncannily, at the very same time, ultimate frisbee, the national championship. for three days in the sun, and the rain, perched on the sidelines, and under the power lines, in picturesque obetz, ohio. and in a few more days we are going away again: to the city of lights and baguettes and the eiffel tower. it’s a rare trip for the whole motley lot of us, and i can’t think of a quartet to which i’d rather belong. even if it means this ol’ homebody is going to have to uproot her slowpoke of a self once again.

a part of me aches to leave so soon. i am, after all, the queen of the homiest homebodies. but, as i work to absorb the wisdoms this hard chapter brings, i will trust my ferns to unfurl, and my not-yet berries to fatten. i will leave the robins and cardinals in charge. and i will inhale the city of lights, and a few baguettes besides.

i long to be home again. home for a long quiet summer. where my breath will be caught, and my lungs will be filled, and, holy God willing, i will be deeper than ever before.

a few treasures before i go….

And I am thinking: maybe just looking and listening
is the real work.
Maybe the world, without us,
is the real poem.
Mary Oliver (an excerpt from “The Book of Time”)

and this from my friends at SALT Project, who this week bring us denise levertov’s poem about caedmon, the earliest english-writing poet whose name we know, though only one of his compositions—translated as “caedmon’s hymn”—survives. caedmon was a seventh-century northumbrian cowherd, our SALT friends tell us, “who took care of the local monastery’s cattle, and who wasn’t much of a talker or a singer (cowherds would sometimes sing to pass the time, keep the cattle close, and keep predators away).” but “one night in the cowshed, the story goes, an angel inspired him to sing about creation—and he never looked back. convinced he was divinely called, the monastery took him in as a monk, and he wrote lyrics for songs on Genesis, Exodus, the New Testament, and more, always honoring God the Creator. so when it comes to the English language, the earliest poet we know of was a composer praising creation.”

in “caedmon,” levertov imagines that fateful night, to tell the story of an ordinary, humble person who’s given the courage to speak, create, and sing.

*one other note, from SALT: “a twist / of lit rush” refers to a rushlight, an old, inexpensive sort of candle (essentially a wick of rush drenched in fat).

Caedmon

All others talked as if
talk were a dance.
Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet
would break the gliding ring.
Early I learned to
hunch myself
close by the door:
then when the talk began
I’d wipe my
mouth and wend
unnoticed back to the barn
to be with the warm beasts,
dumb among body sounds
of the simple ones.
I’d see by a twist
of lit rush the motes
of gold moving
from shadow to shadow
slow in the wake
of deep untroubled sighs.
The cows
munched or stirred or were still. I
was at home and lonely,
both in good measure. Until
the sudden angel affrighted me — light effacing
my feeble beam,
a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:
but the cows as before
were calm, and nothing was burning,
nothing but I, as that hand of fire
touched my lips and scorched my tongue
and pulled my voice
into the ring of the dance.

+ Denise Levertov

how do you catch your breath?

a heavenly friend arrived at my door with a library of my books, in miniature.

p.s. i promise a few picture postcards from paris….

happy blessed day to my beloved jan, safe harbor for so many years. may this year bring you those things of which you dream….

14 Comments

May 5, 2023

nursing tender things along. . .

barely perceptible nub of palest green, on the first outpost of the left branch of what might once again be my peewee hydrangea…see it?

i found myself crouching down as low as i could go the other day—likely lower than a girl with slits in her side should wisely have gone. but i was intent on inspection. i was searching clumps of stick for little nubs of green. of life. of any sign that the last shrub i planted in the fall — the day before the frost came — had survived the long winter.

it was a long winter for plenty of us — certainly for my garden, newly planted in the weeks not long after the dreaded fence went up next door, and indeed for me.

and yet now the season of birth and rebirth is upon us. from every bough and limb, from every red bird’s throat, the song of springtime’s hallelujah bursts forth and keeps on forthing.

i find myself particularly intent on the tendernesses of this holy spring. i am crouching down low day after day, keeping watch for signs of life, coaxing beauties to unfurl.

poor mama robin laid her egg on a porch railing. oops. fear not, all now is well.

seems a wise posture, that of nursemaid to the birthing earth. it’s one i am learning to mimic as i consider my own deeply tender places, as i picture the convulsions of my poor little lung that likely has no clue what hit it, and why all the folderol and commotion a week or so ago. but it is now doing its darnedest to sew itself back to whole, pressing tight the seams that now are held in place with metal threads. the miracle of the human body is not unlike the miracle of holy earth, and as i slowly walk my garden’s edge, stooping here or there to lend a hand — lifting clematis vine to its fallen trellis, rescuing a robin’s egg mislaid on a railing’s edge — i am breathing in the tender caretaking ways of the God who so tenderly holds us in God’s sacred trusted hand. or so i imagine. none of us has a clue really just what form this God of ours inhabits, so from time to time i apply my storybook imaginings to make it all more apprehensible. i understand the naiveté of picturing a God who scoops me in God’s hand, but somewhere deep in that vision there is a grain of holy comfort. there is an image put to the ineffable. and right in here, i need that image.

i’m not the first to put pictures to my God, and i know i’m not the last. it’s a hard task here on earth to imagine the Divine goodness that inhabits all the cosmos, and surely all the heavens, and then the questions come: is heaven the holy light deep in our hearts? is heaven that palpable knowing that we are held by a goodness beyond our wildest imagination? once upon a time the nuns taught that heaven had a pearly gate, and was carpeted in clouds. oh, lord, they shouldn’t teach such things to wide-eyed little children; it can take a long long time to revise the picture reel inside your head, and why waste time in lala land when God is so much more and vaster and infinitely deeper.

i am spending many chunks of time pondering the presence of God in this messy chapter of my life. what i know is this: when i was deep in the dark tunnel of an MRI that scanned the vessels of my brain, and told not to flinch a single muscle for 45 excruciating minutes, i surrendered to the softest arms i’ve ever known. i imagined them as the arms of God, cradling me. and in that space of utter peace, i rested. and did not flinch, did not cough, did not exercise the itch or cramp in my shoulder; i found the holy wherewithal to do precisely as the doctor ordered.

and that is how i pass the hardest hours. i go deep down under. into the place where God and angels dwell. i’ve no knowledge of this landscape. it’s all uncharted and unknown. but when i go there i am safe. and i am cradled in what feels like love. and that to me is how it feels when i walk my garden’s edge, crouch down low, and lift a hand to bud or vine or mislaid egg. we are all nurturing each other along. God and all of us. and i’ve no idea just how it works, or what it is. but i know i sense a holiness that i am choosing to call my God.

amen.

(i fully grasp that i’m going out on limbs here, groping along in wholly naked ways, but if i don’t use these hours of my life to plumb the deepest questions, to fumble for the truest answers i know, then what worth will these struggles hold? we have a chance to be our best selves in our darkest hardest hours. and these are mine. so far. so why not open the book and see what stirs? i’m impelled to wonder and to muse aloud….)

mama robin, safely atop her mislaid egg. photo by kerry, who saved the egg and whose porch is mama’s birthing room….

and now a few morsels, as has been my way in this year of gathering up bouquets of wisdoms…

Julian of Norwich, an English anchoress who experienced a vision in 1373 and wrote about it in a work titled Showings or Revelations of Divine Love — the earliest surviving book by a woman in the English language. my friends at the SALT Project (emmy-award-winning visual storytellers with a spiritual bent; check them out) laid this excerpt out as a poem. i found it lovely….

And in this he showed me a little thing
the quantity of a hazelnut,
lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed.
And it was as round as any ball.

I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding,
and thought, ‘What may this be?’
And it was answered generally thus,
”It is all that is made.”

I marveled how it might last,
for I thought it might
suddenly have fallen to nothing
for littleness.

And I was answered in my understanding:
It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it.
And so have all things their beginning
by the love of God.

In this little thing I saw three properties.
The first is that God made it.
The second that God loves it.
And the third, that God keeps it.

+ Julian of Norwich

as has been my habit in recent months, i mark the turning of each month by turning to the pages of Henry David Thoreau’s The Journal: 1837–1861. here’s a dreamy entry from the ninth of may when thoreau was 34 and aswirl in the warmth of mid-Spring. (may our warmth please come….)

May 9. It is impossible to remember a week ago. A river of lethe flows with many windings the year through, separating one season from another. The heavens for a few days have been lost. It has been a sort of paradise instead.

Saw a green snake, twenty or more inches long, on a bush, hanging over a twig with its head held forward six inches into the air, without support and motionless. What there for? Leaves generally are most beautiful when young and tender, before insects or weather has defaced them.

These are the warm-west-wind, dream-frog, leafing-out, willowy, haze days. Is not this summer, whenever it occurs, the vireo and yellowbird and golden robin being here? The young birch leaves reflect the light in the sun.

Mankind seen in a dream. The gardener asks what kind of beans he shall plant. Nobody is looking up into the sky.

a little dictionary for those of us who don’t know our greek: lethe: “forgetfulness,” from the river in Hades that causes drinkers to forget their past.

one more thing a brilliant woman sent me this week when i was inquiring whether a certain “tiny retreat” (that’s how it was billed) had a virtual component, for those of us whose lives are pretty zoom-y these days…..

“Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”
Catherine of Siena

finally, a profound note of thanks, to the brilliant and bold mountain-mover of a friend i have in poet and scholar (and my former cambridge landlord) mark burrows, who sent a note to all who were at the zoom book launch a few weeks ago (a lifetime ago!), and who implored you to add a little amazon review to my “languishing” Book of Nature. well, the book isn’t languishing but its state of review sure was. i have no understanding of the algorithms of amazon, but apparently, without reviews, you’re sunk. glub. glub. glub. so mark, unbeknownst to me, rallied the forces and got the reviews boosted from 3 to 11, currently. in a million years i couldn’t have done what he did. in these otherwise upturned days, the human species has shown me in brilliant colors just how magnificently we all can be, and love is pouring forth with the might to rocket me to the holy moon, which was magnificent last night if you happened to notice.

so, thank you, blessed blessed mark. and thank every one of you who in your own magnificent ways has stepped to my side in this curious curious walk through springtime 2023…..

love, bam

8 Comments

March 10, 2023

the vicissitudes of spring. . .

in the dark, i tiptoed down the stairs just now. saw the shimmer of white splattered across the front stoop, reflecting the light of the now shrinking Worm Moon, the moon who takes its name from the squirmers arising from winter’s slumber. any worms out there now might consider zippered jackets. same too for all the dear little green things now courageously, audaciously, sticking their necks out, inching their way up and out from deep earth’s underbelly, where they too have been whiling away the winter doing what green things do in their off-months.

to be a springtime bulb here in the middlelands of the continent, where windswept plains and lake-effect snows are part and parcel of the choreography well into april, is to be of hearty mettle. is to be one who tempts the fates. might as well whisper, “dare you to snow on me.” and yet, the heavens do, springtime after springtime, disgorge their fluffy crystals, dump an icy load. as if a test to see who survives, who withers. it’s lord of the flies, garden variety.

there are those of us who’ve been known to awake to such horrors––our tenderlings adorned in icy crystals––who race out the door, a rescue squad in rubber boots, shaking off the snow, applying blankets to the wounded.

i marvel every time at the ones who bounce back. who shake off the mounds of snow, and go right on punctuating march and april with their crayola-crayon-box colors.

and i think of them as parables, consider the wisdoms they suggest. it’s not too hard to draw a straight line from their vernal trials to the ones we humans face. the waning weeks of this winter have dumped a few harsh snows my way, snows that left me just a little bit knocked back. i’ve stared into the abyss of fear, and found that just like those rescue squads who race outside with brooms and blankets to clear away the snow, life drops down its own brigade of heroes, the ones who steady us in our deepest wobbles, the ones who dry our tears. have you ever noticed how much kindness comes in our darkest hours?

i find the gospel of the season, these liminal weeks when the last gasps of winter blow our way, and the full-on percolations of spring aren’t yet arrived, is one of holding onto hope. the leitmotif––don’t be felled by that which falls upon you––is played out, over and over, just beyond my windowpanes. yes, it snows and crushingly so. but then the melt comes. the stems and stalks and itty-bitty buds, undaunted.

i find a hint of fortitude in glancing out the door in the wake of melt, once the day warms up enough to chase away the fluffy stuff, in seeing the green things shake off their trials, sticking their necks out just a wee bit further. i dig deep and decide i, too, will do as the daffodils. i’ll be brave, and set my sights on bursting forth in fullest color. and along the way, i’ll trust in all of those who come running with broom, blanket, and the curative powers of simple kindness.

on the subject of march, i turn to henry david thoreau and his journals, to see what he had to say on the matter.

here, we dip into The Journal: 1837–1861, with entries from March 21, 1853. thoreau was thirty-five and pondering a different kind of thaw.

March. 21. Morning along the river.

Might not my Journal be called “Field notes?”

I see a honeybee about my boat, apparently attracted by the beeswax (if there is any) in the grafting-wax with which I have luted it. There are many; one is caught and killed in it.

P.M.—To Kibbe Place.

It is a genial and reassuring day; the mere warmth of the west wind amounts almost to balminess. The softness of the air mollifies our own dry and congealed substance. I sit down by a wall to see if I can muse again. We are affected like the earth, and yield to the elemental tenderness; winter breaks up within us; the frost is coming out of me, and I am heaved like the road; accumulated masses of ice and snow dissolve, and thoughts like a freshet pour down unwonted channels. Roads lead elsewhither than to Carlisle and Sudbury. Our experience does not wear upon us. It is seen to be fabulous or symbolical, and the future is worth expecting. In all my walking I have not reached the top of the earth yet.

and, finally, i snipped a few lines from a poem of george herbert, the seventeenth-century poet-priest, on the subject of prayer. i love his litany of metaphors for what prayer is, and find that i might meditate on any one of his multiple choices, the last line here most especially, “the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage”:

George Herbert, “Prayer (I).”

PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage . . .

may the prayers that rise from you this month be ones of resilience, of shaking off the snows that fall. and may our hearts always be in pilgrimage. where do you find wisdom in the stirrings of this cusp of hallelujah’s spring?

17 Comments

March 26, 2021

it’s get-on-your-knees season

from a distance, that is from this side of the windowpanes, where i tend to stand huddled in layers of wraps, it all looks like a matrix of unenlightened brown sticks. these are the weeks when winter has ground us down to particular dust. the pandemic, too. even with a shot in the arm we’re not exactly lying by the side of the pool, sipping our lemony-ades. the name for this stretch of the year might easily be mistaken for bleak.

but then, as i did this morning, you spy a runaway screen from an upstairs window, one that’s worked itself loose and taken a short hop skip and a jump off the roof and landed in the boughs of the trees. so, you, as i did this morning, you climb into your muck-about clogs, you haul out a ladder and you fetch the runaway part of your house. and while you’re out there, while you’re the wacky neighbor lady out climbing ladders at dawn, chasing after screens in the trees, you begin to notice things.

you notice that, once you’ve hauled out your magnifying lens, it’s not really all bleak. there is gazillions of action out there. why, there are sweet little clasps of leaves, gathered in prayer. and there are frilly umbrellas of green rising up from the detritus of winter.

and, like any self-respecting payee of attention, you start to put two and two together, and you start thinking maybe you could pick up a thing or two from this quiet explosion erupting from dear planet underground. maybe it’s not so bleak after all. maybe this is the season of quiet delight. maybe the starting all over again is kicking into high gear. maybe the same old same old is about to slow to a crawl, and one day soon this will all be but another badge on our we-survived-even-this sash. we’ll be sitting around in our rocking chairs, swapping tales of remember-the-year-we-were-afraid-to-touch-our-groceries? remember the year no one came home for christmas? remember the year we all sat down at our sewing machines and stitched together swatches of cotton or t-shirt, stuffed vacuum cleaner filters into the pockets?

the miracle is we’ve lived, the just-by-chance ones among us who weren’t done in by the terrible, horrible, awful red virus. i wasn’t there on the front lines, where friends of mine who are nurses and doctors faced it head on, walked into the dirge of it, day after day. i hope, for the life of me, we never forget what heroes they were, and how even the checkers at the grocery store had to dig down for a brand of courage they never thought would be part of the job of stacking cans on shelves, or ringing my celery over their scanner. and every time i read a story of someone felled by it, i look around and realize this world has lost one more incredible one-of-a-kind miracle. maybe reading all the obits is in the oddest of ways a reminder that lurking behind the facades of all the anonymous anyones we pass every day, there is inside a story of glorious wonder that might put us all in our places. maybe it’s why, once upon a time, i loved to be asked to write someone’s obit. because each and every someone has a story to tell. a story to make you sit up in your chair and take notice.

it’s not too unlike the scene out my window. from a distance it all looks bleak and windblown and soggy. but when you bend down to the ground, take a close look, you see something utterly beautiful. you see even the dew gathered in drops at the ends of each leaf. and you remember that life asks over and over again: open your eyes, open your heart, beauty abounds.

what’s some of the beauty you’ve noticed? on your knees or otherwise?

and while i’m here, a string of birthdays of aries who’ve twice had to blow out birthday candles during pandemic: happy birthday to two of my most beloveds, tomorrow and sunday, sweet P and auntie M, who i think were born back to back to emphatically wondrously remind me how glorious it is to be alive in the same span of time as the two of them. double blessing squared. and to dear amy’s papa who is turning 96 today. i don’t even know him, but i adore everything i know about him, and oh we are blessed to know of his sweet and everlasting presence here on this earth. xoxoxoxo and huge blessings to a sweet baby boy born in san francisco yesterday, and to his mama who is starting this glorious adventure she has sooooooooooooooo long awaited. blessings abound. xox

8 Comments

May 22, 2020

calumet farm

annals of pandemic, part xi…in which surreal spring turns to summer and we set out to build a farm…

you might begin to wonder if the dictionary at my fingertips is one in which the definitions come fast and loose. if, say, there’s hyperbole stitched in on occasion. or, is it simply the byproduct of one storybook imagination?

where, for instance, i start waxing on about a farm–so you start imagining endless loam, far as the eye can see, and perhaps a barn and silo, certainly a mooing cow with muzzle pressed against the pasture gate–and then you realize that what i mean, what i’m setting out to carve into the earth, is nothing more expansive, nor more exotic, than a plain old raised bed. a 4×8 plot of decayed leaf and loam (and for good measure a pile of old manure). a mound on which to sprout a vegetable or two. perhaps an herb, for good measure.

in other words, in the world inside my head, the one where my very own picture shows play all day long, what i see might not be exactly what’s before my eyes. (effusive and sometimes far-fetched imagination is requisite number 1 for anyone who dreams of a life of pen to page, i’d argue.)

fact is, for all my daydreaming about white picket fences and tomatoes so fresh from the vine they’re still sunshine-warmed as i unscrew them from the stem, this so-called plot for which i lift my spade and hoe, might well become little more than an exercise in rolling out a romping ground, a banquet hall, for all the critters who nightly prowl along the hardly bucolic back alley.

which brings us to calumet farm.

as is sometimes the case in a writerly family–in other words, a motley crew of folk who relish words with the enthusiasms others reserve for, say, wine or dollar bills–the tangled knot of daylily, weeds, and the occasional errant acorn-on-the-rise has already been named, though i’ve not yet hauled a single shovel to the plot. (that’s this morning’s project, putting blade to earth.)

calumet farm, outside lexington, kentucky

calumet farm, you see, is a magnificent kentucky horse farm, one my uncle danny used to run before he was killed on iwo jima in a brutal midnight raid near the close of world war II. it’s a farm where two triple crown winners–whirlaway and, later, citation–and, in all, eight kentucky derby winners ran the fields. it’s a farm where my very own papa spent his every boyhood summer, curled up reading near the barns, so the story goes.

history-05 and my beloved bespectacled mate, the one i hoped would not mind my latest fixation, well, he latched right on–enthusiastically!–once we gave him naming rights. he’s downright tickled to have our very own calumet farm sprouting on the back acreage (even if he is insisting i hoe along the alley, where it won’t disturb his line of sight. p.s. what he’s otherwise looking at is beyond me, all i see is grass and birds nibbling at the feeder…but such are the compromises that make a lasting marriage).

history-07 i believe i’ve heard him say he’ll be posting the calumet colors–famously “devil’s red” tracing the sharp edges of the pure-white barns and stables. (calumet was founded by the baking-powder folks, and to this day, that can is trademarked devil’s red.) if naming rights and colors are all i had to trade to get me a summer’s worth of fresh-plucked herbs, and one or two tomatoes, and all these hours of imagining, well that’s a deal i’ll make.

because these distractions of mine can sometimes take up more room in my brain than necessary, because i barely know my way through the tool shed, my faraway brother david, a master gardener, master carpenter, and all-round mensch, took on the role of patron saint of my plot. he’s spelled out in precise detail just the bolts and boards i need. even weighed in late last night on the contents of the 18 bags of loam and compost i’ll be mounding for the farm. when my biggest worry was whacking down the weeds, he scratched that with a simple, “google sheet mulch.” turns out those old moving boxes flattened in the garage will now be resurrected as the “floor” beneath my mounds. all i need do is slice away as much of what’s growing there, yank out roots that might have landed there over the years, and lay down sheets of cardboard. voila. instant start of compost.

once construction is done, and ben-gay amply applied to all my achy parts, i’ll begin the daydreams of what to plant. of course i picture some quaint english herbarium, as well as a bursting-with-a-vengeance vegetable plot, to boot. but truth be told, just one fistful of fresh-born dill or mint or basil, abundant and green and smelling of the earth, that’ll be enough to do me mighty proud.

there is something edifying about going beyond the confines of what you imagine you can do. and building me a farm, even a simple one by arithmetic measure, and doing so when up against an invisible plague that’s turned us upside down, it brings a sustenance you cannot buy at any grocery store.

maybe, too, it’s the turning in, the reliance on little more than our own muscles and our know-how. it’s staking a claim in this old planet, saying i can make my way here. maybe it’s emboldening in the age of pandemic to write your own survival guide. and, once again, to lean on the blessing and benevolence of this holy earth to carry us to safe-keeping.

best of all, my humble plot will always be the farm my brother david believed i could build. and his insistence, his quiet whisper, his certainty, is the bounty upon which all this will grow.

and now i’m dashing to the lumber yard, where a kind and gentle man named mike has all my boards and bolts ready to stash into the old red wagon, the wagon i will now think of as my very own farm truck.

what plots have you devised–amid this pandemic, or otherwise–to reach beyond your comfort zone, to show yourself the self-reliance at the heart of who you are, to prove to yourself you’re more than you imagine?

coming soon: calumet farm

6 Comments

April 3, 2020

in which we pull spring from out of the earth…

file this under “desperately seeking proof.” or perhaps, “it’s so necessary this time round.”

the subject is the eruption of spring: that moment, year after year, for as many years as there’ve ever been, when the whole chorus of buds, the vocal cords of feathered flocks and the tips at the ends of the trees, all decide at once to clang the cymbals, pound the drums, and explode like nobody’s business.

it’s so necessary this time round. so necessary when the airwaves fill us with cataclysmic reports, when going to the grocery is an exercise in holding your breath, when reading the morning news just might have you heaving before your first spoon of cornflakes.

Unknown here in my little corner of the world, about three fingers in from the east coast (if you’re looking at a palm-sized map), a whole thumbprint down from the canadian border, hard against that blue pendicle we know as lake michigan, there is the faintest rumbling of spring. not nearly enough. not enough for a vast swath of humanity staring out the kitchen window on high alert for the invisible virus, not enough for worn-down souls on the lookout for hope.

so i’ve been doing my part: i’ve put serious thought to my latest rube goldbergian plot. my plan to coax the eruption out of the earth. i’ve pictured myself out in the deep ink of the night, knees folded into a crouch, fist wrapped tight around a flashlight, pointing the beam onto stem after stem, branch after branch, seeing if a little light therapy might coax things along.

i’ve got friends in far-off-enough places who are sending me dispatches of itty-bitty finch eggs already laid. cherry trees awash in their seasonal meringue.

here in sweet chicago, here so close to the lake you can hear it lapping the shore: nada, zilch, practically zero. certainly not enough for a soul hungry for spring in the same way some of our bellies growl at the first whiff of oozy cheese in a griddle…

perhaps it would help if i scrawled paint onto a banner, spelled out the plea, “dear mama earth, PLEASE HELP!” we are in serious need of emotional rescue down here. we would do well to fall into the arms of magnolia. might cheer to a bluebird riding along on our shoulder. might fling ourselves face-first and eyes wide open into a bed of tulips and daffodil. fill our lungs with parfum de lilac instead of the fear of the red-ringed demon.

oh, there’ve been the subtlest of cues: goldfinch feathers dropping their wintry drab, taking on the sunshine-gleam of gold that gives them their name; the first lilliputian daffodils putting up their periscopes of promise (see proof above); the birdsong that cannot wait for first light of dawn, birdsong so thick you might think it a recording.

but this is no year for subtlety. this is a year for all the hope we can find. we are holding our breath down here on planet earth, where the whole globe is at a standstill. we need a vernal exclamation like never before.

those faraway friends tell me it’s coming. a friend in cambridge says, except for corona, this would be the most perfect spring she’s seen in a very long while. except for corona…

because my days are a checkerboard of occasional plug-ins — chanting with monks on mondays and thursdays, inhaling celtic spirituality direct from galway nine days in a row, chiming in on a once-a-week book group based in seattle — i’ve plenty of time for prowling my plot. i make the rounds at least twice a day, on the lookout for any sign of eruption. all but wander the walks with measuring stick and string, all in the hopes of seeing some progress.

this is a season for turning our keenest attentions to the rumblings of earth, to this most intoxicating science and faith that never fails, that offers page after page of wisdom and truth.

this unforgettable spring we are learning the art of deep patience. “ride it out,” is the mantra. “stick close to home,” the instruction.

i, like you most likely, have hours when my knees go wobbly. i’ve wiped away the occasional tear or two (or five). i’m trying to be something of a lifeline for a kid i love who’s all alone in a faraway place, where the walls sometimes press in. trying to make life here at home as tranquil and gentle and sometimes delicious as i can possibly muster. (for reasons that don’t quite escape me, i’ve taken keen fondness for a spritz bottle of lavender mist, which i spritz till the sheets and the pillows are soggy. and i figure the more delicious aromas i can stir from the kitchen, the better the chances i can steady the kid in the room up above, the one whose spring semester has — like everyone else’s — gone up in red-ringed vapors.)

it’s a master class in surrender to which we’ve been enlisted. no one asked first if we’d choose it. it was thrust wildly upon us.

the questions are these: how quiet can we go? how calm might we settle our souls? what new and wondrous epiphanies might drop before our eyes, our hearts, our imaginations? what brings you peace? where is your joy? what pulls you out from your darkest hours? who is your lifeline?

and, where oh where, is the promise of spring?

and suddenly, the holiest of weeks is almost upon us: holy week and easter for churchgoers; passover for jews. as i sink deep into the braiding of those two ancient traditions, i leave you with this from our rabbi, a page from the prayers of passover, as we mark the exodus — safe passage — from egypt, in search and hope and belief in the promised land. it’s a theme with particular resonance this year….

In our prayer book,Mishkan T’filah, we read about the crossing of the Red Sea:

Standing on the parted shores of history

we still believe what we were taught

before ever we stood at Sinai’s foot;

that wherever we go, it is eternally Egypt

that there is a better place, a promised land;

that the winding way to that promise

passes through the wilderness.

That there is no way to get from here to there

except by joining hands, marching

together.

join hands, march together; believe in the promised land….

have you stumbled into epiphanies? found yourself a lifeline? what are the saving graces in your days?

10 Comments

May 25, 2018

ordinary time

noddling bells of spring

deep in the recesses of my DNA, these knowings lurk. those little bits of knowledge slipped in once upon a time, those bits that order time, that frame the paradigm, the window frame, through which i watch the passing picture show called life.

somehow this week there was a whisper barely heard that told me ordinary time had come. technically, liturgically, it had come because the church i grew up in, the catholic church, ordains the monday after pentecost sunday as the opening of the long chapter of the year called “ordinary time.” and so, this week, as i slipped into this time, i couldn’t keep myself from considering the folds and undulations of just what ordinary means.

all around me, as lily of the valley sent up its flagpoles of perfume, as apple blossoms drifted down like vernal snowfall, as songbirds in feathers shocking pink and golden yellow darted in and from my feeders, i hardly thought things “ordinary.” the world’s in exultation.

and in my daily everyday, there was no relenting from the news that never stops and never slows to a trickle, nor was there quelling from the firehose of bumps and bangs that comes with loving widely, deeply. one night had me up till 2 a.m., making sure a young typist came to the end of his bibliography and junior theme (aka massive term paper) before we clicked out the lights. that same night had me dispensing nursing cures to a long-distance patient whose neck was in some spasm. all while keeping track of a train chugging to st. louis, where my sweet mate and familial co-conspirator drew more distant by the minute and the mile. by day, i somehow managed to turn in — on deadline — my own newspaper assignment, the first such one (a cookbook tale, complete with half a dozen lively interviews) in quite a while. none of this seemed “ordinary,” if by ordinary we mean “having no distinctive features,” as the oxford american dictionary tries to persuade us.

oh, around here, it’s distinctive all right.

i even plopped my bum on the old cedar slab i call my prayer bench, amid the ferns and bleeding hearts of my secret garden, intent on keeping watch on this so-called ordinary time.

lured by curiosity to the pages of old books, i dug around to learn a thing or three about this ordinariness. here’s a bit of what i learned: the church, in all her wisdom, divides the year into chunks of time (perhaps to fine-grain our focus, knowing full well we’d succumb to blur if not for demarcation). the church knows, according to one wise writer, “that human psychology desires the marking of moments.”

there are, apparently, two liturgical mountain peaks in the year, easter and christmas, each with preamble (lent and advent, respectively) and in between (here comes “ordinary time”) “the pasture between the mountains,” otherwise referred to as “vast verdant meadows,” of ordinary time, of tempus per annum (my church loves its latin, and, according to my resident latin translator, this literally means “time throughout the year”).

it must be the quiet season, the chunks of year when — inside the church and beyond — there is not the cacophony that comes with birth (christmas) or death and dying and its glorious resurrection (easter).

in one lovely meditation, i read that God, in infinite wisdom, invented the notion of seasons (not unlike the kaleidoscope that turns a notch and explodes in all new shapes and colored bits) as “invitation to reflection,” to jostle us awake as the all-around ever shifts. yet another meditation opined that God uses seasons to “translate wisdoms into a language of purpose for our lives.”

what that means, i think, is that it’s no accident that some of us walk around fully willing to be klonked on the head by the 2-by-4s of revelation that have us extracting lessons from earth and sky and trickling waters in between. it’s why a vine that blooms long after deadline (the week before thanksgiving, one year) might speak to me of undying courage, and the quiet of the dawn reminds me to settle my soul and breathe deep before the launch of day. it’s why the springtime stirs me full of hope, and all but insists i power up my rocket blasters.

ordinary, i read, comes from “ordinal,” or numbered, the weeks of the year simply counted off, one by one. amid the canvas of quiet, without profound distraction, our task in this stretch of time is to think hard and deep about the mysteries in the weft and warp of being alive. as this is the longest time of year, a full 33 to 34 weeks of ordinary time, depending when the feast days fall, i suppose the point is to settle in, sink deep, into the extraordinary work of living, with our attention meters cranked as high as we can muster.

all of that is literal, is what the books i sought spelled out. i tend to veer off the page. and that’s when i began to really contemplate the power of unencumbered ordinary. as if we’re given unfettered canvas on which to quietly and without bother absorb the sacred simple. the gift of being alive without all the inner chatter. the charge to scan the hours of the day for those moments that break us out in goosebumps. the blessing of deep, slow breathing. the chance, scant chance, to catch God in the act….

of late, i’ve become intrigued by what i call the theology of the sacred ordinary. not the loud bangs and pyrotechnics, not the stuff that comes at the end of miles-long, desert-crossing pilgrimage, but rather the stark and quiet notion that we are living the Holy right now.

it’s the hush of a whisper, the percussion of the rain, those are the sounds that call us in, call us to behold the simple pure sacred. it’s the humility of the moment that belies its grandeur, its magnificent majesty……

and perhaps that’s the invitation of ordinary time, to dwell amid the plain-jane, stripped-down quotidian of the everyday. to awaken our deeper senses, our fuller attentions, to behold the Beautiful, the Wise, the Profound amid our daily stumbles and bumbles. to live as if the Book of Wonder has been placed upon our open palms, its pages spread akimbo. to extract, inhale, deep breathe its mighty and eternal lessons. the ones that whisper, the ones we hear only when we truly, truly listen.

what does ordinary time mean to you?

this morning’s writing came in fits and starts, as it sometimes does, as somehow this morning this old house clattered like it was grand central station, locomotives and the people who aim to board them rushing in and out the station, barely and noisily keeping to the clockwork schedule.

5 Comments

May 4, 2018

perceptible growth

i must be one of those people who needs things klonked over my head. and thus, the simple act of walking past my kitchen window yesterday took my breath away. a quick glance out the window set my eyeballs in direct gaze of what had been the straggly, misbehaving leathery-brown vines that snake along my garden fence.

only, the thing was, yesterday — just a day after the day before when i swear the straggles were mostly stripped naked, without more than a paint drop of green anywhere in sight — they had decided to erupt in a tapestry of sawtooth-edged leaves and cauliflower buds that come july or august will unfold into nodding white hydrangea heads.

that’s the thing about spring: it catches you unawares. it all but grabs you by the cheekbones, holds you in its clutches, and bellows in your face: “there is growth by the hour here, something beautiful is unfolding.”

and then the one-two punch: “pay attention. it could happen to you.”

yes, my wise old professor of a vine seemed to be telling me, even you. even after all these weeks and months of feeling about as fruitful as a stripped naked, leathery-skinned vine, even you might be growing just beneath the surface. perhaps not yet erupting into cauliflower-budded bloom, but keep the faith; there is rumbling, stretching, reaching for the depths and heights. even you, little pewter-haired flower, even you just might be unfolding by the month — if not the week or day (let us not set our growth expectations too high here…).

it’s why spring makes me dizzy.

it’s why, i think, God invented the season of promiscuous advancement and rambunctious take-your-breath-away-ness. because it comes after the long season of stillness, of winter’s deep-down stirrings, the ones that can’t be seen. and then, the very instant we’re at the end of our hope rope, the days when we’re sagging like nobody’s business, God decides to wallop us with undeniable, whirling-all-around magnificence.

the flocks of feathered things arrive as if a river, saturating sky and bough with their shots of color and their song. the trees practically poke us in the eye, with frilly, lacy shades of velvet green and white and caution yellow and lipstick pink, as if slathered with a paint brush. and then there’s the best-of-show for those who dare to bend their knees and crouch down low: there, just above the crust of earth, that’s where all the tenderest unfurlings are. that’s where fern literally unwinds from its tight-wad comma — or is it a question mark? it’s where the itty-bitty baby leaves first reach for sky. it’s where you might even spy a worm, drowsy from its long winter’s snooze, out and about for its first seasonal constitutional (if one can apply such a noun to a walk without legs), slithering in between the rising stems of daffodil and lily of the valley.

year after year, it happens: i fall deliriously in love with the opening-up hours and days and weeks of spring, the ones where the volume is dialed to blaring, so clogged-ear folk like me can’t help but catch the message, the one that beats a billboard along the side of the highway.

if it can happen to a bush, you might find yourself thinking, i suppose it could happen to plain old me. i suppose i too just might be unfurling in the tight spots deep within. i suppose i too could dare to believe that something bright and beautiful dwells deep down inside. and something gentle, too. and, like the magnolia or the hydrangea vine, if i dared to let it out, if i found the faith to strut my stuff, the stuff that God has tucked there for a certain purpose, maybe the world around me might glow a little bit more heaven-sent.

it’s the wisdom and the glory of the book of spring: the world bursts into beautiful all around, undeniably all around, so that we too might know that at the end of our seasons when no growing, no perceptible beauty is apparent, there is something breathtaking astir, something take-your-breath-away just beneath the surface, coming soon to bloom.

what lessons do you extract from the beauties — or the heartbreaks — of the spring?

bleeding heart dew

and one more little wisp from the pages of The Blessings of Motherprayer…..

wonder

8 Comments

April 6, 2018

once again, resilience

scilla resilient

the Great Book of Creation must understand that i belong in remedial class, the flock for slow learners, the ones who need the lessons over and over (and over) again. all but pounded into our thick Homo sapiens skulls.

take Resilience, the course now being offered in the great outdoors. the course that zips us through the syllabus of rise, bud, pummel, wait to see what happens.

the pressing question, the one the professor whispers in our plugged-up ears: will we surrender hope, throw in the trowel and clomp away, or will we stubbornly, insistently believe that one day the hallelujah will be ours?

let the examination begin:

perhaps your sliver of acreage, like mine, was just beginning to break the thaw. perhaps the itty-bitty wisps of green had risen all around. perhaps their flags of cobalt blue or white or even butter yellow had been hoisted. and then the april rain turned frigid cold, turned to slosh of snow. and the dang beauties, caught in the act, were flash frozen, stopped at half-mast.

and you, zipped inside your fluffy layers, you dashed outside to survey the damage. you stood there, gasping, hands over mouth to stifle cries of pain. anguish of the garden variety. all looked doomed just half a day ago. it looked like spring on ice. as if the waiters dumped the slush buckets on the way to the all-you-can-eat buffet.

but i’m just back in from my morning saunter through the beds, and i am here to tell you that while the little buds are still shivering, all but quaking on their tender stems, they have shaken off the icy bits, raised their heads again, unbent their necks, and — altogether now — they await the rising sun.

while i stand gobsmacked, in awe that they’ve not packed it up and shimmied florida way, i consider the legions of parallels in my own life plot: the heartaches i thought would never end, the friend i thought i’d never hear from again, the days and weeks and months when grief leadened my legs, my gut, my heart.

of all the lessons that unfurl in my earthy plots, the ones of rising up from heartbreak are among the most prolific. to tend a garden, to keep close watch on the rise and fall and rhythms of the earth, is to enter into the frailties and absurdities, the puzzles and conundrums for which there is no rhyme, no reason.

it is to know the sharp pang of brittle brokenness, and to slow-breathe the salve of picking up the pieces, slogging onward. finding holy breath again.

i am among the ones who need all the practice i can get. i need the muscles that a garden grows. and i don’t mean the ones that help me hoist the 20-pound sacks of mushroom compost. i mean the ones that teach me hope. and faith. over and over (and over) again.

and then, sometimes, the hallelujah comes.

i think the reason i settled in these northern parts, not far from the edge of the great lake, might have something to do with the lessons of this particular geography. the ones i clearly need over and over (and over).

what lessons have you learned from the springtime garden, the one that endures whatever crushing blows the heavens send its way?

11 Comments

November 10, 2017

putting a season to bed…

for weeks now, i’d been thinking i’d mark this one-year point with an open letter to the occupier of the oval office. i was going to politely suggest that i’d prefer a country of considerate kindness and gentleness. i’d prefer the bullying, the bragging, the bombast be put to bed. i was going to mention how i’d withered across the arc of the year, how i went to bed some nights with such a sinkingness in my belly, i ached. and then i woke up aching some more. i was going to tell him that, from the eensy-weensy spot on the map where i keep watch, i felt like i was elbow-akimbo at the edge of the fourth-grade playground, watching the schoolyard bully chase after the scrawny kids who couldn’t run fast enough, the ones who could never find a safe place to hide. i was going to ask if maybe, for the sake of our souls and our sanity, he could please swallow a humble pill, take a hard look in the mirror, and remember that children are watching, children are taking their cues, and parents all over the land are hitting the mute button every time he chimes up again. i was going to ask to stop with the tweets.

but i decided — or my wiser, gentler angels did — that i’d best invest those energies under the great pewter dome of november’s sky. i turned, as i so often do, to the balm that comes in raking my hands through cold damp earth. in tuning my ears to the sound of the blade slicing through the garden’s autumnal frost.

i spent the morning taking census of nodding heads and withered stems. i dumped out shallow pools of rainwater from the last few pots, hauled spent vessels into their winter’s resting place. the hoses i drained of last dribbles.

autumn is the season of turning in, and i partook of the liturgy with muddy hands and dirt-stained knees. there is a whole body immersion, a surrender to the dilution of light and heat, a preparing, a submission, that comes with the ticking through earthly chores. chores, perhaps, are those seasonal triggers, the ones that pull us into the lure, into the spiritual cadence of each and every turning of the calendar page.

we are on the cusp now of the darkening, a season i regard for its inner kindling — look past the inking in along the margins, dwell on the lumens arising within.

we coil now into our depths, into the nooks and crannies of our soul, and we do best to dial down the noise, to slow the beating of our hearts, to aim for a stillness shared with so many citizens of the woods and waters and sky.

consider the painted turtle, who a week ago might have been basking in a pool of sunlight atop a log, but in one invisible moment, might have heard the ancient whisper: it’s time now. and so the turtle took her last deep breath and plunged to the silty bottom of the chilling pond, pushed aside the lily pad roots and stems, burrowed deep into the mush, and settled into her wintry stillness.

just now i was reading that she goes so still she doesn’t need to breathe, “she slows herself beyond breath in a place where breath is not possible,” writes gayle boss in “all creation waits,” a breathtaking advent book i will soon share. and while the turtle is without oxygen all winter long at the murky bottom, as lactic acid builds in her heart and her bloodstream, she draws calcium from her hard shell, in order to neutralize the acid, in order to keep her muscle from burning away.* she literally dissolves through the winter, till the vernal thaw when she rises, deep-breathes again.

blessedly, we do get to breathe. and, mostly, we don’t dissolve over winter. but turtle has a lesson to share. it is this:

“…every stressed particle of her stays focused on the silver bead of utter quietude.

“it’s this radical simplicity that will save her. and deep within it, at the heart of her stillness, something she has no need to name, but something we might call trust: that one day, yes, the world will warm again, and with it, her life.”

i say we’d all do well to turn in. to tuck away our last few pots. to coil away the hose. to replenish the bins of seed for the birds. to aim for the stillness of the painted turtle. to put this season to bed. and await the deepening to come.

painted turtle, from “all creation waits,” illustrated by david g. klein

how will you put this season to bed? do you dread the darkening or do you keep your gaze on the flickering flame deep within?

* is not the divine design of creation the mind-blowingest, knee-bendingest endeavor you ever did encounter? that the pond-bottom oxygen deprivation is balanced by the turtle’s hard shell, that one yields and shields the other, that all of this was conceived….

4 Comments

pull up a chair

Category: lessons from the garden

May 26, 2023

catching my breath . . .

May 5, 2023

nursing tender things along. . .

March 10, 2023

the vicissitudes of spring. . .

March 26, 2021

it’s get-on-your-knees season

May 22, 2020

calumet farm

April 3, 2020

in which we pull spring from out of the earth…

May 25, 2018

ordinary time

May 4, 2018

perceptible growth

April 6, 2018

once again, resilience

November 10, 2017

putting a season to bed…