seeking tranquility | pull up a chair

the necessary pause

this sacred morning is anointed by quiet. it’s the sound of my soul breathing. which it certainly needs to be doing.

yesterday morning the cacophony came from the squawking of intercoms, and waiting room televisions cranked up to blaring, dialed to odd channels that give you a clue how the rest of the world stays tuned. on top of it all, the hollow sound of footsteps hard against hospital corridor. and the tingling sound of holding your breath.

this morning, the morning of saint nicholas at our house, a wintry sort of morning with half-lit sky and crimson berries still left on the bough (by nightfall my hungry birds might have plucked those branches dry), i am home alone and savoring the holy pause.

right in here, the pause is essential. is necessary. is filling up what’s been draining away.

i’ve said it so often i sound like a broken record, a record stuck on pause, on silent. but silence and lull are holy balm to me, are necessary to the going forward of the every day. i am soothed by downy-feathered sounds: the simmering of orange peel and clove, the ticking of my husband’s grandfather’s old dutch clock, the rushing exhale of the furnace that keeps me warm.

oh, i wouldn’t mind the crackle of pine cones on the hearth. or the tinkling of a teaspoon against the porcelain of the hand-me-down blue-willow tea cup.

i wouldn’t mind the poof of air when i punched down the cloud of risen dough in the old bread bowl.

but this morning i am far too lazy for ferrying in the logs, for dumping flour and yeast and melted butter in the bowl.

i am indulging in the lull of nothing more than the tap-tap-tap of keys. and writing, more than anything, is the potion i pull down from my heart’s apothecary.

i’ve been holding my breath for far too many reasons, for far too many days: a kid tromping around vienna (with three papers due by particular midnights; all turned in, all glorious. i should begin to learn to trust the procrastinating child); a mama who next wednesday will face the surgeon’s tool kit; a husband halfway across the globe, so far away, his day is my night, my day, his night.

so this rare morning of words and breath is just what i would wish for my best friend, if my best friend asked what might deeply cure the aching, the worry, the vivid dreams that unspool even when she wakes.

i do feel gathered here, knowing that in due time, and one by one, the chairs will be filled, and the great good souls who’ve woven hearts here, all will settle in, and offer words of tender wisdom, or simply the unspoken squeeze of hand to hand.

we are blessed, those who come here, those who understand the necessary pause. and how essential it becomes to fill our oozing aching heart with whatever balms patch us back together. whatever fortifies and sends us on our way, whole again, and emboldened to begin to ply the ministrations that heal the ones we love and hold together the scattered threads that begin and end at the very depths of our heart.

what are the sacred balms and potions in your heart’s apothecary?

8 Comments

June 28, 2013

quiet time

on friday mornings, i click off the radio. it’s quiet time. time for the soul to do it’s percolating. see what bubbles up.

this particular friday — home alone except for the few straggling matchstick-legged friends who seem not to be able to kick the soap-nibbling habit in my upstairs hall drawers — it’s just me and the tick-tock of the clock, the chittering of sparrows out the back door, and a train chugging in the distance.

it’s been quiet here all week. as i’ve succumbed to the rhythms, once again, of this old house. as i’ve felt the deep sigh of once again being home.

it’s almost as if it was a dream, the ambles through cambridge, the unrelenting calendar that day after day demanded full-on attention, that kicked brain cells into high and higher gear. i get missives from my now faraway friends, friends now scattered all across the globe — from turkey’s tear-gas zones, from south africa where a people weeps for their dying national treasure — and i feel something like a piercing in my heart. i love those friends, and miss them all the more for not being in their every day.

rumor has it that The Professor is, at last, pulling up his cambridge stakes tomorrow, filling the trunk, the back seat and the front passenger seat (the one that would have been me, had i not been unable to untether myself from this quiet bliss) and motoring into the sunset. poor sweet soul, he doesn’t really want to leave. he’s re-discovered his love for colonial new england, for the proximities it affords, for the nooks and crannies in its landscapes and its coastline.

so, in my solitude — the longest stretch of alone time i’ve had in 20 years, since my firstborn was plopped into my arms in june of 1993 — i’ve bathed in the whole soul healing waters of allowing thoughts to unspool in their own slow measure. i’ve scribbled to-do lists and actually worked my way toward the bottom of each and every one. satisfaction, defined.

i’ve scrubbed, and dusted away cobwebs. i washed dingy pillows, and hung them out to dry. i’ve clipped and clipped from my old roses, my exuberant welcome-home roses, all of which seem to be thriving without my ministrations, without what must amount to interference from the bumbling gardener.

i’ve settled in, at my old writing table, and picked up where i left off before i packed the boxes back in cambridge. i’ve a project, a book project and a deadline of september 1, so my summer load is piled high. when i was off in cambridge, i followed a serendipitous and holy trail to a luscious and brilliant editor. her name is lil. i first met her at an umbrella table in the shadow of the bell tower of st. paul’s church off harvard square. we sipped gazpacho and whispered about the spirit, the human spirit.

it was the first time in my life an editor breathed holiness, breathed benediction onto the lens through which i see much of the world, the sacred lens. she asked me to write a proposal, a book proposal. gave me till january to get it done. then, a whole committee pored over that literary blueprint, and deemed it a deal. a contract was signed, sealed and delivered.

the working title is Holy Hours, the subtitle is a work in progress. it’s why i’m home alone. to launch back in, to sink deeper into the weaving of threads into whole cloth.

it is such a blessing to be able to reach for the books on the bookshelves i know by heart. to have my whole library and wellspring all around me. to sit at the table where the dappled light filters in through the overgrown ivy. to get up from writing and pedal my old blue bike up and down the lanes. to plunk on the beach, beneath the cottonwoods, amid the dune grasses. to dash across the street to my beloved and wise friend, and fill my belly on her welcome-home feast. to take walks past familiar gardens and front porches. to have old friends ring the bell. to feel their hearts pump against mine in pressing hugs so deeply overdue.

this is what quiet time brings the soul. it feeds hungers, quenches thirst. we are, all of us, so much more than meets the eye. we have soft places deep inside that need sustenance, that are fueled on wisps and prayer and uncharted encounters. that depend on brushstrokes from On High, or wherever you believe Holiness abides.

as i typed that very sentence, i looked up at a frantic chattering out the window. there’s a fledgling wee cardinal in hot pursuit of his papa, the two of them squawking up a storm from two branches, one just above the other. must be an early flight. i missed the nursery hours here. and now, the papa’s flown away, and the little fellow is alone there, wings trembling, barely cheeping. perhaps stuck in mid-flight. left to his own devices. not certain what to do. how to get from point B, back home to where the nest is.

such are the blessings i am home to witness, as i breathe deep the quietude, the abundance that surrounds me, home alone.

i’m inclined to go quiet for awhile, my beloved chair people. to pull up a chair only when it seems there’s something truly to say. i think often of the crusty newspaper editor i bumped into in the produce aisle a few years back. as we picked over the bananas, he groused that “too many people are talking these days; no one’s listening anymore. everyone thinks they’re a columnist.” i feel like i’ve talked too much here this past year as i strained to record the bumps and dips of one sumptuous year, and you’ve all been blessed listeners. since i’m a creature of habit it might be hard to shake my friday morning routine, but i worry that i’ve rambled on too long.

before i duck back into my quiet zone, tell me: how do you carve out hours — or scant minutes — for your soul? and what feeds you most deeply?

14 Comments

March 1, 2013

home alone

dispatch from 02139 (in which the only sounds around here are the ones le cat or moi decide to make…)

the soon-to-be ski boy is meandering up blue highways as i sit typing. he’s in the back seat of the shiny black chariot taking him to the mountain. stowe mountain, precisely. a good three-plus hours north and a tad west of here in quaint vermont.

he’s with the trusty driver, the tall bespectacled fellow we like to refer to these days as “the professor.”

the two of them, and a gaggle of niemans on ski patrol, are leaving behind these ivy-covered confines, for a weekend of — dear patron saint of glued-together bones, be merciful — shooshing down the mountain sides. the tall one won’t be imbibing — in skiing or apres-ski debauchery. his loosey-goosey vertebrae keep him from strapping on and whooshing anywhere, and his generally mild temperament keeps him from long-necked brews and whatever else might be stashed in someone’s traveling cocktail bar.

they’ll all be nestled for the next two nights inside a postcard-perfect inn. the sort of place misters currier and ives might have plucked for one of their easel moments, wherein upon spying the lovely white-clapboard country manse they would have firmly planted tripod with ledge, plopped up canvas, and dabbed away at pretty colors, till the whole tableau was tres fini.

which leaves me home. alone.

let’s rewind, and say that all over again for emphasis: home alone.

that’s me.

yes, indeedy.

for the first time in all these days and weeks and months, for the first time since landing in the whirl of 02139, i shall be sleeping under this roof with not a single someone to elbow me, or hiccup in my ear, or pad into the bedroom with a tummy ache near the midnight. save for the fat old cat, that is. (and since he’s taken to sprawling long and wide and weightily across my pillow in the deep of night, i can’t swear that this will be any sort of unencumbered slumber.)

i am rather dizzy at the notion. can barely decide just what to do. i hear the schlesinger library cooing my name, from over at radcliffe college, where julia childs’ cookery books and letters are squirreled away. and there’s that untouched gifty certificate for painted tootsie-toenails that’s been dozing on my desk for months now. and there is the most scrumptious stack of books that i can read willy-nilly and till the cows come home.

since i’m sans wheels till i pick up a rental sunday morn — when i head up to portland, maine, to visit with my mama, and the sweet new baby boy plus all his peoples — i made sure i had the pantry stocked. and tonight i’m going out for unending conversation with a glorious longtime friend.

but more than anything, i shall use these holy hours to deep breathe, and let my braincells start and finish one whole thought. why, they might engage in hearty conversation, back and forth and all around, complete with synapse click-click-clicking.

it is so very necessary for some of us to wholly unplug from time to time. to marinate our hearts and souls in the blessed bath of all-alone time. to unfurl our tight-clenched worries. to go off the clock. unplug from every incoming outlet.

to simply be. and see if, somehow, amid the utter silence, we might rediscover our own outlines. sift through the sands of all that’s spilled since last we checked, pluck out the shiny baubles, toss away what weighs us down.

it is the tapestry of textures that makes a weaving beautiful. so, too, a life of variegation, with hustle-bustle hours interrupted by soothing spells of solitude.

i’m one of those creatures — like humpty-dumpty, i suppose — who’s inclined to put myself back together again. as needed.

but an essential ingredient in that equation is time to think aloud. time to shake off all expectations. time to grasp a passing thought, swoop it in my butterfly net, and pause to consider its pattern, paint-dabs, subtleties and intensities.

there are days, i swear, when i flop in bed at night, and can’t remember which sentence fragment belongs to which. not unlike folding laundry, perhaps, when fluffy bundle is hauled from tumble dry, and suddenly you find that you’re the shepherdess of a flock of mismatched socks, all mewing for their missing twins. where, oh where, could ever they be?

and so, i intend in these next 36 hours to stock up, drink in, amble, inhale, breathe — and exhale, too, i do suppose.

i understand how rare this is, and thus how sacred the chance to pluck and choose at whim. on no one’s measure but my own. oh, the riches! to keep the lamplight burning till the wee, wee hours, or whene’er my eyelids call it quits. to eat only when my tummy growls. and only what intrigues me. or, heck, to take a long walk after dark, if i’m so inclined.

for i have no one to answer to for one sweet short spell. and i know just the soul with whom i must catch up: the one i call my very own.

my reading list this weekend likely will begin and end with evelyn waugh’s “brideshead revisited” for dear professor wood (who twice weekly makes me swoon). i spent most of the past week devouring w.e.b. du bois’ “the souls of black folk,” (1903) wherein i found myself weeping over passages like this one i must share here (purely because i promised to share the best of what i trip upon here in this year of living sumptuously). du bois writes:

“Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this period [just post-Emancipation] calmly, so intense was the feeling, so mighty the human passions that swayed and blinded men. Amid it all, two figures ever stand to typify that day to coming ages,—the one, a gray-haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed to the evil of slavery because its abolition threatened untold ill to all; who stood at last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined form, with hate in his eyes;—and the other, a form hovering dark and mother-like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had aforetime quailed at that white master’s command, had bent in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife,—aye, too, at his behest had laid herself low to his lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only to see her dark boy’s limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding after ‘cursed Niggers.’ These were the saddest sights of that woeful day…”

if you need a mighty read, “the souls of black folk” is a classic.

when you stumble upon 36 hours all to yourself, how do you line up the holy hours?

10 Comments

February 22, 2013

this nook i’ve come to call home

dispatch from 02139 (in which, after 192 days, it makes me wince to think of leaving….)

really, i think, i’m part squirrel. or maybe fat-cheeked chipmunk. certainly from the mammalian order Rodentia. i know, i know. it’s not a pretty picture. those furry little critters that make so many yelp. leap high on stools. lurch for brooms.

but really.

i do exhibit many squirrel-like tendencies. i burrow. i conform whole-bodily to my confines. i’ve been known to overstuff my pantry with twos and threes of things i love — just in case! a squirrel does too. only they call it hoarding. stocking up for winter. i call it making sure i don’t have to dash to the grocery in the wee wee hours, when suddenly an urge for popcorn strikes (see! yet another link between me and the bushy-tailed kernel-loving kind!).

mostly, though, it’s about the burrowing. about boring in, carving tunnels in my cove. making cozy. is not the squirrel the queen of cozy comfy? heck, if you can make the insides of an old oak’s trunk the very place where you can’t wait to scurry at the end of a long day hauling acorns, you are one fine cozy-maker.

and so it is, here in the aerie. where 192 days into this experiment in third-floor living, i can barely consider packing up and leaving without scrunching up my countenance.

i’ve come to love this little place. love the pit-a-pat of soles against the shining planks of maple. love the sunshine streaming in by day, and the moonlight every cloudless night. love the sounds of the city down below, tucked away, not far from harvard square, where just now cardinal and blue jay are out the window carrying on a discourse above the din of all the thinkers strolling by.

i am particularly fond of this little breakfast nook, all bench and cushions, with steam heat pouring up from down below my bum. how fine a configuration is that? to have your undersides steamed like chinese buns?

i sit here by the hour, especially at the dawn. my earthen mug filled high. the morning birds flitting in for a nibble at the feeder. this morning it is particularly quiet. and quiet is a sound i love more than most. so hushed i hear the water drip-drip-dripping from the sink. every once in a while, the gurgle from the french-roast trough. the hum from the fridge.

i leap out of bed before the clock chimes “time to wake,” just so i can steal a few extra minutes — all alone, in cloak of morning light, before the rush begins.

and i can’t help but marvel at the human capacity for burrowing down to joy. for shirking off the parts that make us squirm. for honing in on finding where our hum comes. where comfort rises up, wraps round us, holds us tight.

we are a species — we and our bushy-tailed brethren, yes — who can’t help but toil toward equilibrium. and, hardly content to idle in the neutral zone, we burrow deeper still, down to where the glories bubble up. we find our hum, indeed.

all this from a girl who, just a year ago, was dizzy at the thought of leaving a place that had carved her in the palm of its hand. all this from a girl who 192 mornings ago was clicking snapshots of the old house she was leaving behind, as if she’d not breathe again till she returned. and here i am, humming. knowing my well-worn footpaths in the maple planks. having carved a whole new routine. morning coffee, followed by reading, followed by catching glimpse of sunrise, followed by clomp-clomp-clomp along the cobbled sidewalks, drawing me into lecture halls and classrooms where i nearly purr with pure contentment.

we adapt.

we find joy.

it’s what, as a species, we are wired to do.

i write this because i never cease to be amazed. at this capacity for comfort. at making home wherever we are plopped.

i write this because a friend i love — nay, adore — stands at the brink of just such a translocation. and she is trembling. wondering what she’s doing to her family, up and hauling them across the country, to a faraway place that right now feels oh-so foreign.

i write this because i was that trembling soul. but a wee small voice inside propelled me. whispered louder than all the others: don’t be afraid. just go!

and so, for all these days and weeks and months, we’ve been living the experiment. (and here’s the part where the hallelujahs come, rise up and bring on tears…) i’ve watched my boy become best friends with a kid who can’t afford the hot cocoa in the cafeteria. i’ve heard stories that might make your hairs stand on end. but he takes them in stride because he loves the kid who tells the stories, true stories from a life that’s short on lucky breaks. and i can’t help but know that to have your eyes wide-opened when you’re 11, when you’re smack dab in middle school, is to keep those eyes forever scanning the landscape in whole new ways.

that sweet boy will not go back to our leafy little village taking it for granted, taking anything for granted (so help me, Lord on high). he will not forget his friend who has to step over the drug-dealing in the staircase. or the other stories i can’t tell here. he will remember how much he loved the street ball in the gym. how the big towering kids loved the scrappy little white boy, my boy. and how he woke up and realized he was truly color blind. and more than comfortable in a united nations classroom.

i write this because i live and breathe contentment these days. pure joy is an hourly intoxicant.

and i wouldn’t have gotten here if i’d let the demons hold me down.

i promise you, my friend, you will purr again. your babies will stretch and pull and some nights, at bedtime, break down in floods of tears. but the morning will come when you are all gathered round the breakfast table, and laughter will rise up. and you’ll all feel oh so deeply home. and you’ll look around at all the wonders that have come your way, and you won’t want to imagine what it would have been like to not know such particular life-defining joys.

i promise you, my friend. we’ve all got a dose of squirrel somewhere down inside.

what are the little joys that make for comfort zones in your long day?

6 Comments

December 10, 2008

being still

curious thing this december, more than ever, it is the stillness that speaks to me. that i seek. that some days i grope toward as if a blind one making my way through the woods on nothing more than the steadiness of my footsteps and the fine-grained whorl of my fingertips rubbing up against the underbrush, telling me i’ve lost my way.

it is as if the deep dark stillness itself is divining me toward home.

which, of course, it is. it always is.

oh, there’s noise all right this december. clanging like a cymbal in my ear, the squawking from the news box, the screeching of the brakes, the sound of plain old money gurgling down the drain.

but i am–in my best moments–pushing it away.

oh, i take it in in stiff long drinks–the news, the noise, the grave distractions–but then i do odd things: i lift the blinds at night so i can watch the snowflakes tumbling. i wind the clock and listen to its mesmerizing tick and tock. i sit, nose pressed to frosty pane of glass, and watch the scarlet papa cardinal peck at berries on the bough.

i am practicing the art of being still.

stillness, when you look for it, is never far away, and not too hard to grasp.

i find, though, it takes a dose of concentration. and sometimes a stern reminder; i mumble to myself, be still now. but then i find my steps determined.

just the other night, my heart most surely trampled, i climbed the ladder to the attic, pulled down the box of christmas treasures, the ones that spark the eyes of my little one, my little one who could not care about bankruptcies and buyouts–though he is sadly quite abreast on both.

it is advent time for my little one, and so it is advent for me. it is the counting-down time, the something-coming time of darkest winter. and, in my good spells, i am deeply, urgently, savoring the getting there.

i am hauling out my usual armament of soothers and elixirs. i simmer spices on the stove. i scatter corn on drifts of snow. i kindle candle flame. crank soulful christmas tunes. tiptoe down the stairs in deep quietude of night, and stumble onto moonlight making magic out of blue-white undulations in the yard.

i am even dropping to my knees, or curling up in bed with incantations on my lips. they carry me to sleep some nights; what better lullabye?

i am ever thankful this december for the one bright side to all the downturn: there will be little shopping this year. no running here to there.

i will simply look the ones i love squarely in the eye. i will tell them how deeply and dearly i depend on their presence in my every blessed day.

and among the ones i love there will be the cheery fellow who drives the bus that hauls my little one to school, the pink-haired checker at the grocery store who always makes me laugh, the neighbors who every time i ask open their door and let my little one come in to play.

there are the voices faraway, the ones who call and calm, the steady ones, the ones who make me laugh. the one who calls merely to “sit with” me on a night when she guesses i just might need some sitting.

it is an advent this year of simple things: there is a ring of candles on the kitchen table, one new one lit each and every week, till at december’s peak there will be a rising cloud of incandescence as we join our hands and pray.

there is a string of red-plaid pockets, each one numbered, 1 to 24, strung from one window to another, and every single morning, my little one rushes down the stairs to find the sweet tucked there inside the number of the day.

it is, as it so often is, my littlest one who softens me, who stirs me back to stillness, who insists we not forget to give the twisty fir its drink. who takes me by the hand so i don’t crash and break. who asks his big wise brother if he too “checked advent,” (meaning did he yet dig out his daily dose of duly-numbered sweet).

it is, nearly as deeply, the thick meringue of snow bending all the branches. it is the flash of scarlet feather at the window. it is the sound of orange peel simmering. and the tinkling of the spoon scraping at the bottom of the cocoa-filled mug.

these are the things that make for stillness, or rather are the keys on the ring that might unlock it after all.

it is, in fact, the heart, the soul, that are the vessels of pure true stillness: those chambers deep inside us that allow for the holy to unfold. the birthing rooms, perhaps, of our most essential stirrings.

to be at one with all that matters. to begin the pulse-beat there where the quiet settles in and the knowing reigns.

it is, yes, in the stillness that the sacred comes.

and this december, more than ever, i am blessed to find it’s that, simply surely that, that is carrying me through this tangled woods.

i type this in the interlude between the madness of this week. and i wonder how you too seek stillness. do you hunger for it? do you find yourself distracted by the worldly buzz? do you get lost in the woods sometimes? or have you forged a steady path to that place that soothes you?
in two days, the chair turns two. i’ll be back to mark the day. as always, bless you for pulling up your chair…

6 Comments

January 2, 2008

a monk’s life

no, people, this is not some new year’s diet prescription. not the bread-and-water plan to a more minimalist you. no, no, not at all.

rather, this is my new year’s confession.

huddle up close, here, and perk up your ears.

what i’ve got to say might befuddle you. might leave you scratching your noggin. or perhaps you, too, share the same yearnings, and you and i shall skip off to behind some walled garden, a place of prayer and bells chiming, of bread and water. and surely some wine.

oh, but that’s getting ahead of the confession.

so, come, come, step here in the little black box, kneel down beside me, and listen in.

the fact of my matter is that beneath all the trappings that make me out to look like just another mama on the leafy shore of chicago–the old swedish wagon, the red-flowered backpack that bops behind me wherever i go, the grocery list that never seems to end, the curly gray curls i keep forgetting to color–well, underneath it all beats the soul of a monk.

i’m convinced, increasingly, and much to the dismay of my boys–the tall one who calls me his wife, and the others who call me their mama–that really i belong in the friary.

i’ve no desire, curiously, to go to the nunnery. somehow i think it more joyful off where the monks do their monking.
i find myself dreaming of days all alone. of unbroken quiet. of tending a small patch of earth. of growing nearly all that i swallow. and milking the rest from a fine little goat. or a cow i might name little flower.

i dream of simple repasts–bread, cheese, a chunky fine soup. salad i’d started from seedlings. and the bread, too, would be made from my hands, my fingers pressed into the slow-rising flesh of the yeast and the flour.

drawn as i am to the dawn, i think i’d adjust quite without ruffle to the prayer of the earliest morn, the one the monks call matins. the one where the night meets the daybreak, at the hour the celts and the seers deem thinnest–or closest, really, to heaven.

i already dress day-after-day as if in a habit. i’m nearly all black, with a little white tee. and if i think of it, i do slip on socks. but often i’m barefoot. (don’t tell my mother, but i’m sockless even in snowboots sometimes.) all i need is a rope round my middle, tied in a long line of knots–one for each prayer i need to remember–and i’ve got the garb for the job.

the best part of being a monk, besides the hours and hours of quiet–oh, and the chanting, the gregorian fly-me-to-the-moon prayers that soar from the old wooden pews to the holy on high–is that a monk’s is a life of quotidian moments and tasks, each and all distinctly imbued with the sacred.

to till the soil is to make way for the seed, to witness the infinite mystery unfolding. to leaven the dough is to consider the miracle of rising again. to kindle the wick of the bee-bundled wax is to bring light to the darkness.

over and over, again and again, from the dawn to the dusk, under sunlight or moon, not an everyday chore is left without purpose divine.

and that, in the end, is a virtue to which i’d turn over the whole of my soul.

now, of course, i’ll not ever discard this life that is mine. this life that is messy, that’s filled with the joys and the sorrows of being a mother, a friend, and a lover in so many ways.

but i do think there always will be a part of my heart that yearns for the life i imagine on the other side of the towering monastic wall.

like all make-believe lives, i pick and i choose the parts i warm up to. i don’t want, not at all, to sleep on a hard slab of oak. nor do i care to be given the cold stare of the no. 1 monk.

no, the abbey i inhabit in my mind’s eye is one that is supremely simple, and utterly warm. the stone floors, i think, are radiantly heated. the garden is bursting with color, and armloads of herbs. the kitchen is steamy all day.

i think really what i am looking for is to make my life in this old creaky house the one i imagine far off in the hills of kentucky, or upstate new york.

it is my task–and maybe yours too–to continue to mine for the heart of the monk here in the midst of my modernday madness.

to find joy in the simplest brushes with heaven above. to fill up my hours with a prayerfulness that never ends. to understand the sanctity of an everyday chore done with pure heart, be it the zen of washing a bowl, or the blessing of changing the sheets for someone whose slumber you pray will be sweet.

it’s a quirky confession, perhaps, but it’s mine. and as this new year unfolds, i enter the most hallowed hours intent on bringing the life of the monk here to a home so utterly earthly.

i wonder, do any of you harbor monastic leanings? any of you spend any time behind the blessed walls of some faraway abbey? any scholars of merton, or friar tuck, or one of the other wise and soulful monks from centuries past?

photo above, courtesy of my sweet will. for the life of me it looks like some ad you might find in the new yorker.

and it is with great joy that i welcome the birth of a beautiful blog that promises to feed our spirits, day in and day out. everyday soup, is the name of dear slj’s blessed repast, now served. please do, give it a taste. you’ll find it, i’m certain, delicious.

by virtue of birth accident, my new year is abundantly a roll-over in every which way. the calendar turns as i too take on another year. my annual summing up, and looking ahead is double-dosed. tomorrow i turn 51. and the gift i just opened is the one of dreaming aloud. bless you, each and every one, for coming here, and letting me do so, day after day.

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December 3, 2007

counting the days

already, the little one knows the routine. he wakes up early, just to run to the room where the numbers now hang. where the numbers, each one a pocket, come tucked with a wee chocolate bear, or a nibble of peppermint bark.

not finished, he runs, yet, one more place. to the corner where the old german calendar waits by the cookie jar. there, he scans the numbers, counts one more than yesterday, folds back a door. and, lo and behold, more chocolate.

for him, then, these are the days of the wake-me-up chocolates. two a day, every day, for 24 days.

december, he says, licking the little brown dab off his lips, is a month that’s mostly delicious.

for me, the mama who birthed him, these days are the birthing of something wholly as melt-in-your-mouth.

these are the days when, for the very first time in a very long time, maybe ever, i am practicing advent. really practicing. paying attention. giving in to the season in ways that wash over me, seep into me, bring me back home to a place i may never have been.

like a child this year, i have a just-opened sense of these days.

i am, for the very first time, not counting down. not ticking off days, and errands to run, like a clock wound, really, too tightly.

instead, i am counting in a whole other way. i am counting, yes, but the thing that i’m doing is making count each one of the days.

i am counting the days in a way that takes time. that takes it and holds it. savors it. sucks out the marrow of each blessed hour.

i am, because i’m on my way home here. i’ve not ever before seen december in quite this way. not known, quite this way, that it holds a deep and winding road into my soul.

i am this year embracing the darkness. i am kindling lights. i am practicing quiet. i am shutting out noise, and filling my house with the sounds of the season that call me.

i am practicing no. no is the word that i’m saying to much of the madness. no, i cannot go there. no, i cannot race from one end of town to the other. no, i will not.

i am practicing yes.

yes, i will wake up early. will tiptoe alone, and in quiet, to down in the kitchen, and on out to the place where the moon shines. where the early bird isn’t yet risen. but i am. i am alone with the dark and the calm, and i am standing there watching the shadows, the lace of the moon. i am listening for words that fill up my heart. it’s a prayer and it comes to me, fills my lungs, as i breathe in cold air, the air of december, december’s most blessed breath.

yes, i am re-dressing my house. i am tucking pine cones and berries of red, in places that not long ago were spilling with pumpkins, and walnuts, and acorns.

i am waking up to the notion that to usher the season into my house is to awaken the sacred. it is to shake off the dust of the days just before. to grope for the glimmer amid all the darkness.

december, more than most any month, can go one of two ways at the fork in the woods.

one trail is all tangled, all covered with bramble. you can get lost, what with all of the noise and all of the bright colored lights.

or maybe not. or maybe that’s not how you’ll go.

december, if you choose, if you allow it, can be the trail through the woods that leads to the light, far off in the distance.

the darkness itself offers the gift. each day, the darkness comes sooner, comes deeper, comes blacker than ink. it draws us in, into our homes, yes, but more so, into our souls.

it invites us: light a light. wrap a blanket. sit by the fire. stare into the flames, and onto the last dying embers.

consider the coming of Christmas.

i am, in this month of preparing, in this month of a story told time and again, listening anew to the words. i am considering the story of the travelers, the virgin with child, the donkey, the man with the tools, the unlikely trio, knocking and knocking at door after door.

i am remembering how, long long ago, i winced when i heard how no one had room. open the door, i would shout deep inside. make room. make a room.

i didn’t know then, that i could change it. i could take hold of the story, make it be just as it should be.

but i do now. i know now.

i am taking hold of that story, the way that it’s told this december. i am, in the dark and the quiet, making the room that i longed for. for the three in the story, yes, but even for me.

i am preparing a room at the inn. the inn, of course, is my heart.

i am for the first time in a very long time, paying attention. paying attention to the coming of Christmas. i am seeing the beauty of advent. the season of lighting a candle in the thick of the darkness.

i am noticing the whole of the woods. keeping my eye on the light in the window. but taking my time. filling my lungs with the sweet scent of the pine. hearing the crunch of the woods under my feet. wholly breathing an air that’s divine.

the walk to the light in the window is, for the very first time in a very long time, one that is sacred and hushed. i see the light, see it grow closer and closer.

it’s a glow that really is something, really is radiant. framed, as it is, in the dark of december.

oh my goodness, the forces today conspired against me. alarms didn’t ring. children missed buses. i had places to be, and the meander wasn’t yet wholly meandered. oh well. here it is, then, at the end of the morning. have you stopped to consider the power of a month that invites us to choose a path through the woods that’s not quite so trampled? how do you practice the coming of Christmas? or simply pulling in to the quiet that comes as the darkness grows longer and deeper?
my whole advent journey was sparked because i was asked by a church that i love to please pencil some thoughts on the subject. it was recorded and made into a CD. soon as i can i will share it with you on the lazy susan. keep watch and i’ll tell you as soon as i have maybe a minute to do some decembering over there on the page that i love, but can’t get to hardly often enough.

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January 29, 2007

baking for God

if you wandered by my house, you would never stop to think, hmm, something unusual happens inside that house. not any more than you would think that at anyone else’s house.

but inside my house, once a month or so now that my kitchen is back in business, i bake for God. yes, yes.

not in the way dear benny, grandson of a bagel baker in the charming, makes-you-brush-away-a-tear, children’s book “bagels from benny,” ferries the hot bag of bagels into the synagogue every friday morning, tucks them into the holy ark, the blessed cabinet where the torah scroll is kept. only to find, come every saturday morning, that the bagels are gone. and he is convinced he is feeding bagels to God.

no, i don’t bake for God that way. though i cherish the story, cherish the thought.

in the uncanniest twist for a girl who grew up knowing that only cloistered nuns in faraway places were holy enough to mix the wheat with the water that would be cut into wafers that would rest on our tongues and get stuck to the roofs of our mouths, all in the name of jesus, well, i bake communion.

yes, yes.

the same ovens that once a week transform twisty dough into risen sweet challah, once a month turn hot water (4 cups), white flour (2 1/2 cups), wheat flour (4 hard-to-add cups) into squat, flat unleaven loaves.

there is a recipe i follow, and i follow it religiously. turns out i was not doing it according to rules for my first few at-bats, and in a flash that took me back to sister leonardo mary rapping me for my mispronunciation of the word “women” (i couldn’t get that the pronunciation change was on the first syllable instead of the second), i was rapped in an email for my failure to cut the unleaven bread into little brown bits.

i was told they were tossing my loaves. (never mind that that step had been left off the photocopy they’d given to me.)

and i was informed, later on at a workshop (a remedial baking class, disguised as one-day retreat, perhaps?) that the recipe i now follow, one titled “boulder bread recipe” (you only need drop a loaf on your foot to understand the derivation thereof), was the product of many many hours of ecclesiastical to and fro. i was informed that to diverge from the steps was a sure path to, well…at the least your loaves would be, shame of shames, tossed. they would become so much squirrel food.

all kidding aside, there is something so sacred about turning two essentials of life–water and wheat–into loaves whose cut-apart squares will be blessed, will be made into communion.

communion, whatever you believe about it, is the sacrament of taking in life in the form of bread so that in your belly, your soul, you might live life more fully.

i have always found it to be far more than a metaphysical vitamin. i have the sense when i swallow a host that God, more than ever, dwells deep inside me.

so to stand in my kitchen, alone in the silence, to stir the ever-thickening dough, is indeed to be in communion with something far greater than little old me. i think as i stir of all those who will partake. i haven’t a clue who they are, or how this might change them. even if only so far as the trip back to their pew.

but perhaps, just perhaps, the person who swallows the bread that i bake needs sustenance of a form that only can come if you believe that far more than water and wheat is mixed in that bread.

believe me, i pray as i knead. i push hard into that smoothing-out mound. God only knows what else is working its way into the soon-to-rise dough.

for a short spell, then, my kitchen is holy. and the oven at 375 is filling the room, filling my soul, with a heat and a light that lasts long after the loaves they are packed, sealed and delivered.

you wouldn’t know that if you paused by my house. but you do now.

baking for God is a prayer that i pray with my hands and my raggedy red oven mitt. baking for God is my unspoken blessing. baking for God is, well, really quite heavenly.

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January 22, 2007

monday morning slam

it hits sometimes, with all the force of a dumptruck backing into your front hood (a force i recently felt firsthand).

one minute you are tossing off your hazy dreams, the next your heart is pounding, your boy is running late, oatmeal is looking impossible, and the week is barreling at you.

this was one of those mornings. oatmeal got into the boy, but only thanks to a styrofoam, toss-away bowl thrust into his clutches as he dashed past, stumbling into untied shoes, en route to carpool at the curb.

the throbbing thing in my mouth kept up its 2:4 time. i realized, head spinning, we were out of the weekend zone of leftovers and chili made by someone else in the middle of the afternoon.

it’s my turn again. to feed the boys. to wash their clothes. to get them where they need to be. to get me where i need to be. imagine that.

and so, lumbering down the stairs, to unearth the frozen chicken breasts from their frosty slumber, i take in a deep, deep breath. i consider all the things that soothe me. i take account of what surrounds me for moments such as this.

i consider soup, a tall slow pot of it simmering through the day. i consider the loaf of bread a wonder woman dropped by yesterday afternoon, hot still from the oven. i shoot a glance at my amaryllis, the one now neverminding a measly three blooms, going instead for homeplate, with four trumpets about to blare in all directions, north, south, east and west.

i press my nose to the window. see the birds flapping and the squirrels chasing each other for the cookie i tossed out last night.

i listen to the heartbeat of the clock, slow mine to sync with its.

i pour a big tall mug of coffee, spiked with cinnamon, as always.

i invoke the patron saints of everyday grace. i realize it’s my job to soothe these jagged nerves, the ones that are mine, and blessedly the ones of those who dwell here with me.

it is a job i love, a job that i’ll get done with snippets of herbs on bowls of soup, with toasty bread, with more seed for more birds, with breathing deep and slowed.

may every one of us this day find ways of stitching grace into the madness that is the monday morning slam. how do you soothe the dwelling place that you call home? do tell….

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pull up a chair

Category: seeking tranquility

December 6, 2013