pull up a chair

oh, i know christmas is all but tucked away. at our house, sadly, the tree’s outside now. its branches, harbor for the birds.

the ornaments, once again, are bedded down in tissue papers, some as old as lord knows when. the box, though, the one in which the christmas fixings doze till december comes again, it hasn’t made it to the attic. waits now on the upstairs landing, for the day when finally we’ll tire of stepping ‘round its torn, unruly flaps, the cardboard ones marked “merry christmas. lites, ribbons, ornaments & mistletoe.”

but there’s one last bit of christmas i cannot put away.

it’s sitting here beside me. crumpled. splattered with a spot or two of cocoa.

looking more or less like afterthought. a page ripped from someone’s long-lost journal.

which, actually, was quite the point.

it begins, “dear theodore,” and there’s a story to be told. so settle in, while i spin one last yuletide yarn.

twas the night before christmas, really it was, when for the first time ever i invited in my manchild-now-verging-on-man-of-6-foot-1 to the santa stirrings.

told him, with a drumroll in the offing, that what i was about to utter was truly a passage to be marked.

while his papa snoozed upstairs, as he nearly always does on any night when snows are blowing, or the day goes dark (meaning it’s a regular habit, this going to bed well before i click off the lights and trod the stairs), the boy who would be man was asked to take on his papa’s long-held, behind-closed-doors, night-before-christmas task.

might he, i wondered, dropping low my whisper, take some nibbles from the cookie plate, gnaw off a bite of carrot, make like the fat ol’ elf and all his flying herd had whirled right through the family room?

and so the man-boy had at it. puffed his chest in the way a papa would (at least on some old black-and-white ‘50s flick). the glint in his grey-green eyes went to super-glint.

he headed straight for the plate. nibbled. gnawed.

then went well beyond the dental portion of the ruse. why, he made like no santa i had ever known.

he sprinkled crumbs in a path of certitude. left a chunk of cookie on the hearth. and a peel of clementine besides. as if the old elf was rather sloppy, multi-tasking, scarfing, climbing up the chimney.

it didn’t stop there.

next i knew, he was yanking wide the glass-paned door, letting in the bitter cold.

i looked askance, in that way that mothers do, seemed to wonder without words, what in the world was that young elf up to?

he replied, as if he’d heard the very thought: “tossing out the carrot bits as if the reindeer dropped them. you know, flying off the roof, they leave a trail behind.”

still more: “hey, mom, do you have a piece of paper?” he inquired.

whatever for, i asked, ripping one from off my shelf.

“santa’s writing back,” he said, as if he did so every night, then launched into his loopiest, most arctic cursive, apparently.

“dear theodore,” he began, before going on to thank him for the sweetened fuel, the cookies, the orange, for being “quite the thoughtful young lad.”

before signing it, “regards, s. claus, giftgiver extraordinaire,” he even penned a pair of hoof prints from the carrot-dropping reindeer.

apologized for their messy habits. even excused himself for not polishing off the cookie plate, “mrs. claus made me a hearty dinner, you see.”

the words though were only the start.

he began to crumple. then asked for a match to singe the edges. i suddenly wondered how far he’d take it, might we soon be deconstructing santa’s sleigh? leave runner bits littered on the lawn?

grinch, alas, i knew i had to be.

so at the match i drew the line. shook my head, no way, young elf. this is not a pirate’s treasure map, nor a cowboy ransom note.

and besides, i added, i can see it now: the smoke alarm will go berserk, wake the house, and upstairs sleepers will clamber down the steps and find us, you and me, standing here, making like incendiary santas.

and thus, thwarted before the night turned smoky, the would-be man merely laid the letter down amid the cookie crumbs. and i shooshed him from the room.

twas time for doings he wasn’t yet old enough to witness, never would be, i told him as i shoved him up the stairs, needing just a moment to myself as i myself turned into santa dearest and strewed the few fine things we’d gathered for this humble christmas.

he’d have to wait till dawn, like his baby brother did, to see what spilled from st. nick’s pack.

i must admit, i nearly missed the treasure that the would-be elf laid out for all to see. hadn’t even seen it in the making, when i was lone witness to his work of heart.

next morning, in the hustle of the post-dawn pouncing, santa’s letter wasn’t found till shortly after the basketball jersey was permanently affixed (a week later, the little one hadn’t yanked it off his skinny little chest), and the hovering helicopter ripped from its see-through box.

but when the little one discovered the crumpled, hand-penned page, there beside the cookie plate, he held it, rapt. then turned and simply said, “santa wrote me back.”

i could have sworn the child glowed.

i saw of course that he read it very, very closely. i saw how he returned again and again that christmas morn, to read it once or twice or thrice. maybe just to hold it in his fingers, to rub his skin against the very spot where santa’s hands had held it firm.

i couldn’t quite believe he hadn’t seen right through it. i’d been so sure it was boldly overdone. a teenage folly that couldn’t be pulled off.

oh, was i the fool. i nearly missed the bliss of unstained innocence.

it wasn’t till the next day that it all came tumbling clear, that i realized just how much his big brother’s fussing to make it all just so had really truly mattered.

we were out, the little one and i, browsing through an after-christmas sale, and a clerk behind the counter leaned in and asked him if santa had been good, and in that way that assumes young children always get a haul, she asked what he liked best.

and with his little-boy eyes he looked up and said quite certainly: “the letter from santa.”

and right then and there i felt a tear spill down, from out of nowhere, i thought at first. but really, from out of somewhere. from that place inside my heart, that place that leaps before it ever looks.

it was, more than any other bit of christmas, the crumpled letter in the curly cursive his brother strained to make so santa-like.

it was the one thing no one bought, or paid for.

it was the finest unwrapped anything. maybe ever.

it was, he’ll some day know, a big brother’s best gift to the one who, at 7, teeters on the blurry-edged brink of belief versus doubt: plain, clear proof that believing comes to those who hold it in their hands.

twas a fleeting frame of christmas magic captured. and i’ll not forget its fine pure face.

nor will either deep-believing brother.

do you have a tale to tell of a little bit of christmas magic? or any other brand of magic?

my mama tells me every day’s a blessing. and i know that. of course. usually take my birthdays like a skier takes to snow and mountainsides combined. schuss right down those slopes, delighted. don’t mind the face fulls, nor the frosty air. not one bit.

but not this one. not this birthday that’s about to come. this one i take with murky soup of gulps and trepidation and not a shallow sense of dang, that was way too soon.

you see, i’m turning the age my papa was when he no longer lived.

nearly long as i can remember, 52 was trouble. 52’s a hump. and i can’t quite see to the other side.
it’s a mixed-up thing.

i’ve had my eye on this a long, long time. years and years ago, i figured out just what day would be the day that i’d live longer than my too-young papa did.

i know, to the hour and the minute, just when my life begins past his.

i remember, 28 years ago, all the clucking ‘bout his age. 52? they’d ask. oh, God, that’s way too young. too too young, they’d cluck.

and now, after all these years and years, one tumbled ‘top the other, here i am. just days away from 52.

i’ve a sense i’m not alone.

oh, not in that my birthday’s right around the bend, but that the dread that comes with this one, is a dread shared by all of us who’ve lost a parent way too young.

too suddenly.

when one minute your papa was on his way to a tennis game, and the next minute he was gone. and the doctor mumbled something ‘bout, he’s so sorry. and you had to ask out loud, there in the chilly hospital hallway, you mean he’s dead?

when the undeniable hole in your heart sears you in a way that won’t be shed. never does lose the scab.

when, while you do get on with living, do learn to laugh again, there is forever a piece of you that’s marked.

oh, lord, you’ve walked the aisle, birthed babies, rushed a broken child to the ICU. you’ve done all that without your papa at your side. but you’ve never ever stepped beyond the frame of time that once was his.

it’s a knot that won’t be loosed. it is a truth as deep as any shred of DNA buried down inside you.

your papa lived till 52, how will you live longer?

it’s a piercing sort of question. in some ways, fresh-trod snow. in others, a trapeze without a net.

there is certainly a dash of, is it fair? and lots and lots of thinking, this was almost his very end. did he feel finished? did he feel as new at this as i do?

there are, truth be told, some days when the weight of it feels like a rock dropped on my shoulders.
if i’ve the gift of extra days, how will i live each blessed one?

as i type here, i see a string of question marks.

i suppose, like the brink of any year, what’s to come is all unknown, uncharted, still to emerge from the mist ahead.

it’s only that this year, the year i reach my papa’s end, the questions stir more deeply, and they come in cloak of deep, deep sadness.

more than ever i do know this: my papa didn’t live nearly long enough at all.

forgive the sadness. forgive the shadows. but this table comes with dark and light. and even though the candles burn, they drape their black-lit silhouettes on the slab below. i wonder, those of you who’ve lost a mama or a papa younger than you are, did that one singular birthday pose a steep steep slope? or, for those of you who aren’t there yet, does that one stark number loom larger than the rest?

i wish for christmas, for you and for me, i wish that the angel of christmas come tap at your door. or maybe, just maybe, she’ll come to the pane of your window, there where the frost frames the sash.

i wish she slips in when no one is looking, or maybe only just you, maybe you see that she’s come because you find by the sill a feather or two, dropped from her wings, or the fat raggedy satchel she drags close behind, the one she stuffs with all of her blessings.

i wish for you that you know that she’s come because all of a sudden, out of the mist, out of the hustling, the bustling, the forgetting the point, you are suddenly melted with the heart of it all.

i wish for you, and me too, i wish to be bathed and dunked and baptized quite simply in the story of christmas, the story of birth. the story so earthly and holy, at once.

it’s a sweet baby someone, all sticky and wet and covered with blood from his mama’s hard pushing, birthed in the straw of a barn, a barn likely dingy, not swept and not washed.

born amid baa-ing and moos and a hen that was clucking, perhaps.

born by the light of a star and a moon. a birth in the still of the night. a birth that shuddered the world, and stirred wise men, it did, to come on their camels.

it’s a story so pure we tell it again and again.

as the world’s cloaked in darkness, as a chill comes in from the north, we turn to the words of the story. we turn to its undying truth.

and, if the angel of christmas surely does come, if somehow she slips into the room where she’s needed, we suddenly, deeply, feel the whole of the original story.

we make room in the inn of our heart.

we shove aside all of the worries, and all of the noise, maybe for one short window of time, but still we’ve made room.

we usher in the story of birth and a babe and a barn and a heavenly dome of star upon star.

we hunker down in our homes. we leave the troubled old world at the door–just long enough to let the story sink in. to sip from the cup, to break off a chunk of the story that feeds us.

we make christmas within.

we set the table for christmas. put out the plates that come from the shelf just once every year. we pile the clementines into a bowl. we pop out the seeds of the garnet-jeweled fruit, the fat pomegranate that’s waited for christmas.

we kindle the flame, in the tapers of beeswax, in the logs on the grate.

we turn out the lights, except for the ones that are strung on the tree.

we curl in a chair with arms that can hold us.

we let go of all thoughts and all worries and doubts.

we soak, for as long as we can, in the sweet holy syrup of christmas at last.

there is, if we consider the babe, consider the hope born in that barn, much to anoint us in this one star-lit night.

i wish, for you and for me, that this holy christmas, you find the one treasure that came to that manger.

i wish for the great gift of peace–true peace, peace like a pond that only just ripples–i wish for the rare gift of christmas unwrapped to settle quite deep in your heart.

merry blessed day of deep birth.

may it linger and last till the darkness is lifted, and the star shines again in the east, and the north and the south and the west…

i haul them out every year, and every year i wince.

they are my godawful bows. squished. old. tied, perhaps, by someone tipsy–or at least you’d think so, judging from the odd knot there in the middle and the strands that fly like hair in need of hair-goo.

they are my trademark red-plaid bows.

every year, when all the ancient ornaments are hoisted to the bough, when the red-feathered cardinal is twisted to the tippy top, when all the wooden cranberries are strung, i reach for the old stride-rite shoe box. i lift the lid, and there they are: a mash of tipsy bows.

a hundred years ago, just on my own, in a fit of my-first-christmas, i stopped by the nearest ribbon rack and bought a roll or three of red-plaid strands, and another one or two of bright red velvet. i picked up some skinny green wire, too, long as i was at it.

then i sat beside my tree and tied and tied. in fact, i was making up for lack of ornament. when you first start out in the christmas department, you’ve not got a lifetime of ornaments to call your own.

not got the little wooden nurse, the one once given me by a beloved pediatric patient. not got the sequined pine cone dipped in glue and glitter by my once-upon-a-three-year-old. not got the sweet red pocketbook–the size of a dolly’s and clutching a lucky penny–once handed me by my brother’s long-lost girlfriend.

and back then at the beginning, lest i subscribe to some naked christmas club, in which the ol’ evergreen was bare but for all the twinkly lights, i had to fill things out with the gobs and gobs of bows.

year one, it worked. so much so i barely went to bed, if i recall, just sat there all night long, admiring the heck out of my knack for tying knots.

but ever since…well, see…

every year, come, oh, february, when i get around to dismantling that old tree, i unhinge the bows and stuff them back where they belong, in the shoebox that never was quite roomy enough for all that red-plaid overabundance.

this then would be some 29 years later, which means those bows have spent the better part of 319 months utterly squished and rather cramped besides.

problem is, when you’re a bow, no one hears your cries for help, and thus you are simply stranded.

so you do what any self-respecting bow would do: you protest. you get a little cockeyed. you unloose your knot. you decide you’ll do anything but act or look quite like a bow.

you decide, after all those months in darkness, that you’ll subject your captor to a little taste of what she so surely deserves: you will humiliate the heck out of her, should she be so tone-deaf, so tasteless, as to hang you out in public.

ahem.

you now know, i suspect, why all the trees in the lot cringe when i walk by. you understand, i suppose, why at my house the fir is cowering in the corner.

it’s the godawful bows causing all the trouble.

if only i’d give ‘em up and spring for new ones.

but, geez, don’t they get it: you don’t just up and dump all that history.

why, those bows have seen it all, apartment after apartment, chapter after chapter.

the little house where i was tucked upstairs, with the downstairs landlords who stuffed me in their pickup truck and drove us to a far-off farm so we could chop a spindly tree. never mind that they were all dead, the trees, once we got there.

the old victorian where both my boys were born, where each one–barely old enough to wobble without flopping–got plunked on the couch so i could plug in the lights and watch their eyes go gaga.

heck, those red-plaids even made the move from the gritty city to out here where it’s all leafy and so not-urban.

thus, despite the cries of protest from my boys, the ones who claim they’re ashamed to call that tree their own, the bows come out, year after year after year.

and do not pass this around, but even i’m a tad embarrassed. even i deduce the need for a dash of christmas sprucing.

matter of fact, i was all alone this year when it came time to do the bows. and, even though i didn’t see another soul around, i heard the words, “godawful bows,” come out of someone’s mouth.

so now they, too, know the awful truth.

somehow, though, i find it fitting that mine’s a tree that’s far from picture perfect. and therein lies in truest beauty.

do you have something unsightly that, every year, is part of your tradition? something that perhaps is all the dearer for its odd shapes, and bumps and bruises?

as we move now into “year three, the chair,” i’ve not quite decided just what my routine will be. till i figure that out, i’ll keep writing on wednesdays. but perhaps, i’ll switch to fridays. no matter which, you know the table’s always here, so it doesn’t much matter, most likely.

it’s a pair now. a twinned set. there was one. and now, two.

for two swift years this little black place, with the alphabet in white, it’s been a nook, a cranny, a cove of my heart.

some days it’s the place where i curl up in a ball, but keep typing anyway. some days it’s where i let rip my ball of kite string, and hope to lick the clouds.

two years. day upon day, week upon week, laced together by the ebb and flow of seasons, tumbling leaves, cresting moon, the stars, the birds, the growing child.

life passes, i reach out and grab it by the fistfuls, put it down in words. take snapshots. suddenly, there are volumes, I and II. not bound. not tucked on a shelf. but here to read and read again. to remember.

that’s the point, after all.

to hold up each and every day, each moment, as if the holy blessed communion host on the altar, in the church, when the priest in all his robes takes a simple chunk of bread, of wafer, and with a sweep of arms and silken vestment, raises it up, holds it still, so we the people in the pews can behold it, drink in what it means.

so it is with life. and days. and hours. and incidental moments.

we hold them up in words, in snapshots, so we can gaze and think and study. so we can understand what might not be so evident the first time by.

it is why writers write. we write to think, to feel, to absorb, make real.

and so, two decembers ago, a chilly day, like this one, a bright one, too, i set out to start scratching in the sand. i had an inkling. i was breathing life into each and every syllable the way a kindling log needs bellows to turn to flame.

over time, and with each passing paragraph and page, i found, in part, what i was groping toward: a voice, a whisper, a deep still sense that there are those of us who hear and feel and partake of the same soft stirrings.

we don’t much believe in noise, not for the sake of sound alone. we prefer to stitch our hours and our hearts and our homes with knots of grace. and beauty, too. defined not by magazines, but by eternal spirit. what was and always will be a light divine.

it’s what i look for every day. it’s what i hope to harvest, bring home in little bundles and bushel baskets, maybe.

to each of you who has joined me here, who has pulled up a chair, even only once in a long while, i thank you.

it’s been a lonely year, a long year, in some everlasting ways. but whenever i tiptoe back to the table, and find you’ve been here, left a word, a story, or a simple nod, well, i am filled more than you will ever know.

it is a fine thing in this world to know there is always a safe place to come home to, a gentle place, a place where love surely reigns.

bless you, so very much, for making this humble table so deeply alive. you’d almost think, some times, that it was real. and not just a figment of our computer screens.

by jove, someone once declared, i think it’s working.

yes, as i struggle here in the little box i call home, as i try in every way to teach my boys an odd way of living, a way in which any breakfast offers chance for falderal and hoopla, it seems the little one has picked up a thing or two.

and thus it was the other morn that he declared a new tradition had been born.

twas santa letter breakfast, he informed, to be marked ever after on the friday morning following the big gold bird’s disgorging from the oven. you know, the feast that oddly marks pilgrim survival and what mighta been billed the first american potluck by picking on the poor dear turkey, pitiable creature that he surely is, with or sans his dusty dirty feathers.

ah, well, back to the birthing of said tradition–the letter-writing one, not the one with all the thanks and stuffing.

while i frittered away the middle-morning hours dissecting clementines, flicking pomegranate seeds here and there in bloody splattering, seems the young one was hard at work inventing his tradition.

we do these things on the fly around here, so i barely noticed when suddenly he was snipping pages from a pad of neatly-lined papers, and laying down one per placemat, along with requisite pen.

ah, but then came the announcement. “we’re having santa letter breakfast,” was precisely how he put it.

“come sit down and have the tradition,” he hollered to the four nearest creatures, including, of course, the cat, who was spared neither page nor pen.

and with that, there splurted the SPLAT in my heart–no, not from pomegranate pellet–that signaled to my brain that told my mouth to let out a sigh.

thusly, i did as ordered: ohhhhhhhhhhh, sighed i.

young lad was promptly rewarded with pluck of puckered lips smack dab on top of pointy sweatshirt hood (we are saving on heating bills around here and have taken to forced layering to fend off pneumonias and other pulmonary ailments, in case you question our sartorial, um, lumpiness).

i tell you, before we could pull out chairs, the young one was deep in what we dubbed the preamble to the list. he got all chatty, yes he did, that pen rambling right along. reintroduced himself first off, lest the big guy forgot him o’er the summer months. politely, he inquired about each and every reindeer. asked what the elf’s name was. and only then did he get into the raison d’etre behind it all: the list, i tell you, the santa list.

(poor child, he never really got too far, as his mama cut him off at a mere three requests, popping this year’s christmas bubble with some diatribe about recessions and the standard, annual, let’s-not-be-greedy–as if ol’ santa ever had a penpal who had to entertain such sobering equations.)

of course, i too penned a missive to the old polar elf, somehow turning mine into a tragic treatise on how squishy the north pole is these days and then wound into how i didn’t want a thing because–sigh–we have everything we could want or dream of. (in my p.s. i added that maybe a dumptruck load of birdseed might not be a bad thing.)

and, soon as he’d wiped his lips of the last of the egg and cheese, the high schooler unspooled a good dose of his droll 15-year-old wit.

exhibit A, for instance: “well, i dunno, what exactly i might want, you know? it’s really tough when your 7-year-old brother spontaneously declares that it’s whole-family-write-santa-letters-all-at-once day….maybe i’ll get back to you…”

once we’d all penned and read aloud our santa letters, i happened to opine that it felt not unlike writing letters to God, this sitting down for our seasonal tete-a-tete with santa dearest.

that somehow made the droll one nearly tumble off his chair in fits of tears and laughter. as he choked i thought i heard him mumble something about how that line would now be immortalized for years and years to come. at my expense, of course.

even so, it made me think how fine a thing it is that somehow we’ve corralled these kiddies into thinking tradition is a fine way to mark the days and weeks that string together to make a year, and not long after, a well-lived life.

we’ve traditions sprinkled throughout so many days, why you need a day-minder to keep it all straight. there is the trail of paper hearts one cold february morn. and the annual rolling pinecones-in-pb-and-seeds for feed-the-birds day, the saturday before christmas. there’s get-up-at-3-a.-m.-for-soup-kitchen on christmas eve, so you can spend the long day bleary eyed as you stir the soup that santa just might slurp.

and now, it seems, there is the annual penning of the santa politeness-as-preamble-to-wishing list while dodging pomegranates.

splendid is it not?

truly it is, to see the twinkle there in the eye of the child. to feel the pride in his heart that he now is old enough, and certain enough of his place on the planet and in our little domestic society that he too can make proclamations and set the agenda for the marking of time and moment.

it’s not a bad thing to imbue an ordinary morning-after breakfast with something meant to put heft to the occasion.

as i’ve done every other year, when no one was looking i folded up the letters, slid them in a drawer.

some day, when he is grown, perhaps in need of child-sized inspiration, i’ll pull them out. so he can read, and remember, that once upon a time, he felt santa himself worthy of a family gathering ‘round, pouring out our hearts before asking for a single something.

merry almost christmas, indeed.

i’ve somehow managed to type this while fanning off a fever and shuttling back and forth between news that more layoffs are unfolding at the place where i work. if somehow this got jostled in the telling, please do understand. it wasn’t exactly a night for telling ho-ho tales, as i set out to do.
but long as we’re here, do tell, do you have traditions birthed by you or a little someone in your life? why do you think they matter, and what do they bring to the house that you call home?

i know this makes me something of an eeyore, but i’ve a confession to make: i love gray days. and days and weeks when all the world is stripped of excess, pared back to strictly elemental. when even a smidge of color–save. maybe, for the blood red of a clump of berries–is uncalled for, unnecessary.

i happened to mention that aloud yesterday, in the place where i type on tuesdays, and, oh my, it caused a stir. you might have thought i said something odd, perhaps, something along the lines of, “i like a little gravel in my oatmeal.”

now that gustatory revelation i could see causing a ruckus. but not the fact that the deep soot-to-heather canvas of november is balm to me.

it wraps me, the sunless-ness of these days. it is the woolen blanket of the year lifted from the basket in the corner, draping ’round my shoulders, as i settle deep into my winter chair, my thinking chair.

these are the days when i could be alone for hours on end, but not really alone, as i am out chattering to my birds and squirrel friends. i am out protecting them from cold. tossing corn. pouring water into shallow bowls. smearing peanut butter onto tree bark so they can peck it off, stave off the shivers and the rumbly tummies that i fear for them.

these are the days when the stark poetry of gnarly branch and endless sky open up to me. when all around is naked, bared, stripped of its cloak, exposed.

it is in the few fat fruits–american cranberry, rosehips–left on the bough and thorny stem, and the up-reached arms of oak and serviceberry that i find the combination lock to my imagination–and my most satisfying comfort.

it is jagged silhouette against the charcoal sky that haunts me, rustles me, seeps slowly deeply in.

i look out into tangled labyrinth of branch on branch–interrupted only by unkempt knot of leaves assembled by some squirrel intent on keeping warm–and i understand what november reveals.

we have watched, for weeks now, the slow undressing of the world beyond the sill. there is no hiding in the eleventh month, the one before it gets to be too much, and we battle back the darkness with the kindling of the lights, and the stringing of the branches with all the glitter we can gather.

it is these thirty days, or at least a good long line of them, that beckon us to come inside, to draw in to where the embers burn.

by that, of course, we don’t mean merely shuffling ’cross the mat, settling down at table’s edge.

oh, no.

we mean: do. come. in. take off your shoes. get comfy. now mill about inside your soul. breathe deep. the summer’s done. and so too the autumn, ‘cept for maybe one last spell before the bitterest of cold.

think thoughts that take some time to come to. be not in a hurry, not at all. and don’t be afraid of where the thinking trails.

it’s november. the month when all the world strips down to utter truth. and we, too, might do well to follow suit.

the logs are crackling in the grate, the afternoon is long. the kettle whistles. pages turn. understanding just might be ahead.

make the most of these hours when the light goes dim. make the most of the month when all that matters is undressed, and we are left to study only that which cannot hide.

tinglingly, i find myself coming to deep awakening as the northern world begins its slumber. how about you? what is it about november that captures you, stirs your soul, your thoughts, your deepest hungers?

every once in a rare wind, we catch that holy knowing that what just blew past us stirred us, changed us, unalterably altered the landscape, before blowing on again.

so it was the first time, four summers ago now, when i heard the voice inside the squawking box call out to all of those crowded into boston’s convention center, and to all the rest of us tuned in as well, to tear down the schisms and the walls and the barbed-wire coils that divided us into red states and blue states, and to live up to becoming the united states.

we could be better than we were, he prodded. we could cast aside the shadows and the darkness that had crept in. we could, perhaps, let in the light.

i put down whatever it was i’d been doing, thinking, being, and i paid attention.

i heard the voice of the rare hero–true definable hero–who spills with courage and conviction to utter words, carve thought, that until now no one else had been brave enough to breathe out loud.

but once the words rolled off his lips, they were unloosed, free, a part of what we breathed. if we chose to. if we inhaled and filled our lungs. let the truth sweep through and all around.

and so, for years now, i’ve been a believer in what i’d not call his brand of politics, for it’s not so much political (though by definition–“concerned with government”–it is that) but rather wholly of the spirit.

and spirit, i’d suggest, is that force of wind and water and earth and flesh and blood that, once unleashed, leaves nothing in its path quite the way it had been.

where there is darkness, there comes light. despair transforms to hope.

it is mystical, yes. indefinable, indeed. but always unmistakable. it alters terrain and sky and soul.

and so it is that these days and weeks of late have been so very very dark. we wake to news that makes us tremble. we grope for some small wisp of promise and find it plainly up and gone.

but then on a tuesday in november, we each of us trooped alone into a curtained box. we tapped a screen or–in the county of cook in illinois, at least–drew a line connecting front and tail of a broken arrow. some 120 million of us exercised a choice, 63 million chose the one who i chose too.

in a moment too deep and big to wholly grasp in one solitary breath, we took in the ka-ching of history. we felt the streaming down of tears–our own, and nearly every face we looked up to see.

as we sat glued to the unfolding news, we could only imagine the storyline unreeling through so many minds. could only barely grasp the pictureshow that until now had never allowed for a frame so filled with what was whirling through the night.

it was late, but phones rang anyway. in swept stories of merry mobs closing streets and dancing down the great boul mich in sweet chicago. in brooklyn, cars honked and mamas and papas, entwined, lifted sleeping babies out of cribs to swirl in circles. in kenya, crowded ’round a village radio, not-so-distant kin danced and sang. the immigrant’s son was lifted high, from grant park to selma to nyang’oma near the shores of lake victoria.

then the dawn came, and with it the rush of morning-after analysis that for once filled the early light and our hearts with hope.

i lay there feeling a holy rumbling deep inside.

we can be a better people, i heard the words come.

we can be a nation inspired by the man we just elected.

we can put down the barbed-wire coils and the barricades.

we can, in our own small way, be brave, be bold, be the breath of hope.

we can be mighty in the extraordinary ordinariness of our everyday.

we might not, all on our own, wave an olive branch to iran or north korea. but we might ring the bell of the old bent man next door who cares night and day for his dying wife. we might fill a plate with what we’ve stirred for dinner and bring it to his door.

we might roll down the windows of our car and shout good morning to the crossing guard, and garbage man, and just a fellow pausing at the light.

we might, next time we hear the ugly growl of gossip, speak up, say, whoa; unkind, unfair, don’t go there.

we might be our better selves so that we might become a better nation.

yes we can, he says again and again. yes we can, he called out into the night in the middle of america in a city park flooded with believers and those who needed to see it for themselves to believe.

yes we can, i thought this morning as i lay there drinking in the news. yes we can, means every blessed one of us.

every blessed one of us need be brave. we need be brave like the man who, because of nothing other than the pigment of his skin, stands at risk every time he stands before a crowd. but not once has he shied from standing there, saying what must be heard.

and so, my bare arms–and my courage–warmed by the sunlight of this bright new day as i strolled out to snatch the morning papers, i grabbed a pen and poster board, and scrawled my humble message:

yes we can means every blessed one of us, i wrote.

and because i’m practicing that very creed–being brave and somewhat unafraid–i grabbed a roll of tape, and stuck my sign onto the other signs posted in my yard.

it’s not so important that anyone stops to read it, as it was essential that i said out loud just what i meant.

the words, once unleashed, are freed. they might become a part of what we breathe. if we so choose.

but if we keep the words, the thought, locked deep inside, they stand no chance.

and neither does the world that might do well should every blessed one of us believe.

after two long nights of no sleep–i couldn’t wait to get to the voting booth one night, and i was too thrilled the next–i am doubtful that a single sentence up above is coherent, much less filled with the power or the poetry i heard in my head hours ago. i’ve long steered clear of politics here at the table, and don’t much consider this anything other than once again looking through the holy lens of how we choose to exercise the divinity that dwells within every blessed one of us….your thoughts?

she’s caught my heart, this one. she pays no mind to wind or windchill. no mind to season. or slant of sun. or the fact that all around her, the garden’s gone to sleep–shriveled, bent and altogether spent.

not this one, though. she’s bright-eyed, bold, and taking her sweet time.

she is my forget-me-not. and i won’t.

oh, no, i won’t.

she’s the last one standing in my garden. there are others fallen, faded, dangling, dozing. but she is clearly on a clock that’s all her own.

she seems emboldened by the going-down of all her once-steady companions. the dusty rose is somber now. the black-eyed susans, crumbling back to earth. the feverfew is chilled.

but not my stalwart one, uncompromised by calendar.

i’d been charmed whole weeks ago, when, as i was raking up the muck and tossing shredded leaves for winterkeeping, i’d noticed how she was shooting toward the sky, paying no mind to the fact that summer had passed her by, and she was just now considering a bloom.

i have no clue what she’d been thinking all summer long. must have been lolligagging to her own melody.

you see, i’d planted her from seed. a hundred thousand hours ago, or so it seemed, back when snowdrifts still clung to my kitchen window box, and i needed seed to sow for the promise that it holds.

i’d tucked those itty-bitty myosotis sylvatica seeds–think poppy seed, then divide by five and you approximate the size–in a little pile of potting soil, inside a little potting cup, and set it on my sill.

i’d watered, and hoped. and waited.

wasn’t long before i saw the itty-bitty bits of green. good morning world, they seemed to mumble, as they stretched their necks and arms, yawned and met the day.

in time, they grew strong and hardy enough to tuck outside. but i forgot to read the itty-bitty words on the back of the seed packet, so i planted them smack dab in the sun. which, of course, they don’t like so much, preferring where the shadows fall.

being on the shy side, demure even, they never did complain. just took their holy blessed time, i suppose. took till september till i saw much of any action.

and that’s about the time my friend-in-the-making jutted cloudward. and then, not long after that, she sent out little spurts of blue. a blue so pure it could melt you. if blue was butter, this would be that blue. meltable blue. not shocking, not cobalt, certainly not navy. mostly rather like the color of september sky, on the days when the whipped meringue of cloud is the only interruption in an endless pool of, well, forget-me-not blue.

and so, she kept it up. the later it got, the closer the earth and sun moved to the equinox, the more insistent she became.

she was hellbent, apparently, on blooming, and she was not about to let a little frost get in her way.

fact is, just the other morning, i awoke to winter’s thin-veiled hint that it was coming, not far ’round the bend. the hoary frost was stretched from limb to limb. blades of grass stood still at frozen white attention. gutters glistened with the first icy crystals of the dawn’s deep chill.

but not my forget-me-not.

by now, you’ve caught her drift, so i hardly need to tell you that she was, of course, tall and pert and going strong. all day she seemed to be whistling. look at me, she called. i can’t be felled. not by something so ephemeral as a frost that melts by 9 o’clock. in the morning, mind you.

and so, as i wobble through these days that try me, i am inspired, braced by the forget-me-not that did not forget to bloom.

so what if she wholly skipped the part of the instructions that promised she would explode in blue before the pumpkins came?

is she not all the more exotic, rare, cherished, for the fact that she alone trumpets in my sleepy garden?

she stands in glory still, bless her, reminding me at every turn, that there is holiness in minding your own rhythm, in standing on your own, in paying no mind to what the others choose to do, or how or when they do it.

she is prayer on a stem. she is defiant, and i find her humbling.

there is in my garden a stalk or two, each one ending in the bluest blue. and she is, oh, yes, my sacred blessed testament to a dream that refused to die.

i’ll not forget her. i promise that.

have you caught the whisperings of some living thing that seems to hold a necessary truth? is there a tree out your window that reminds you to stand tall against the winds? is there a mountain rising that always catches glint of sun, or a brook that meanders, takes its time and turns, but always runs toward the shore where it is freed to cross the globe? do you, like me, find firmament in the natural world? do you allow an itsy bitsy flower to speak to you, imparting wisdom you need to know?

maybe i should have noticed, clear up and down my street, far as i could see, i was the sole soldier armed with rake the other afternoon.

maybe i should have sniffed out my sisyphean traits before snapping up my old down vest, slipping on my red woolen mittens.

maybe, had i not been so deeply lost in sheddings from on high, i might have caught on earlier to the pathetic notion that every time i’d piled up a meager, humble, pitiful excuse for a heap, the wind blew.

oh, i don’t mean a little whuff of air. no mere ruffling of the fallen oaks and ginko droppings.

no, ma’am. this wind was making like the big bad wolf in every scary fairy tale. it was hungry, and it was howling. made snacks of all my measly mounds. snickered slyly, i now surmise, as i shook my stick and raked them back again.

it was in the middle of, say, my 88th attempt to get the misbehaving leaves lassoed back into their corner, that it dawned on me, just what a fool i was.

and how very often i–and maybe you and you–attempt to rake a rodeo of leaves on the blusteriest of days.

don’t we, some of us, exhibit quite a knack for doing life the upside-down-and-backwards way? aren’t we inclined, some days, to try to mow the meadow, one blade at a time. with cuticle scissors, besides.

why is it that we put ourselves through what my gramma called the wringer?

why, i wondered, do i decide it’s high time to neaten up the yard, on the very afternoon the winds blow at 50 miles per hour?

but then, while dried-up wrinkled bits of autumn’s gold and crimson garb cascaded all around me, while i raked and raked until my shoulder ached, and then my back joined in, i found to my surprise that i rather savored getting lost in the eye of that leafy swirl.

so what if i alone saw fit to exercise the rake that windy, windy day?

so happened that my place beneath the trees that howling afternoon brought me what can’t be shoved in leaf bags, or carted off in croupy trucks.

not only was the whipping of the wind whistling past my ears in melodies i might have learned to hum along.

not only was i standing there alone, chuckling, frankly, at my certified absurdity.

it dawned on me, like a branch klonked on my head, that were it not for my up-churned piles, and the evidence that scattered with every darn-blasted gust, i’d not be witness to the choreography of air in flight.

that very thought stilled me.

for years now, i’ve had a rabbi in my life who posits this as proof of God: have you ever seen the wind? he asks, thus setting up the paradigm for what he suggests is knowing the unknowable.

question two, according to the rabbi’s logic, always is: why then do you think you need to see to believe when it comes to the Holiest of Holy?

i’d barely thought the thought when i saw, quite clearly, the divinity in the honey-locust castings.

it is the very leaves themselves, quarter notes climbing the C scale, playing loopdy-loop around my thighs, my waist, my ears, that bring to life the ebbs and eddies of the wind.

i see the wind in the blowing of the leaves. i see God, then, in the messy world that won’t be raked in piles.

i see, that is, if i slow down long enough to notice the air ballet that swirls around me. i see, that is, if i don’t insist on battening down the scattered shredded bits.

maybe the point of raking, after all, that windy afternoon, was to discover the messiness of joy. or, perhaps, the joy of messiness.

maybe ours is not supposed to be a yard–or life–that’s manicured, a grassy carpet vacuumed leafless.

maybe rather, we stumble on the richest riches when we stop amid that raucous riot of the day-to-day, and recognize the one who choreographs the wind. and stirs the music in the simple raking of the fallen leaves.

it’s late, and once again i am bone tired, but unwilling to let a wednesday pass me by. do you, like me, try your hand at raking–or any other chore that must be undertaken–on the unlikeliest of days? when winds howl, and you’d have to be a fool to try to gather weightless leaves? and, despite yourself, do you sometimes stumble onto discoveries that could only be divine?