pull up a chair

it might have been the last time i’ll ever hear it, those words rising out of the murky middle-of-the-night darkness, curling out from under the door of the bedroom at the bend in the stairs. “mo-o-om, i feel sick,” came the plaintive declaration, my one-syllable moniker being drawn into multiples, emphasizing the dire straits the sick one was in.

and, with that, the boy about to move out of this old house, about to move into the big city where his freedom will be all his own, we played out one last time the choreography of mother caring for feverish, achy, gland-swollened child.

this time around, he took his own temperature and called into work in the wee dark hours. but still i was the one who deep in the night tugged on the medicine drawer at the top of the stairs, and filled the cup with fat chunks of ice and glugs of gingerale. and, soon as the light came, i set out for the store to fetch the fixtures of sick days with this particular boy: salty oyster crackers and noodly chicken soup.

it’s a role i know well. it’s a role i have loved, all told, for thirty years now, even though it first came upon me with my own arms trembling, so worried was i by the baby i cradled (this one’s big brother, my firstborn) on a long-ago night when the cry came shrilly and skin felt hot to the touch.

i can’t count the number of nights i’ve lay on the bathroom floor, a bath towel for both pillow and blanket, as we staked out the nearest position to the toilet bowl or the bath — depending which virus was doing the attacking. i can’t count the number of trips up and down the stairs in the dark, fetching ice, fetching honey, fetching gingery ale.

on day two of this latest siege, when morning came, and the boy on the verge of moving out let on that he was hungry, i dove in to a task i couldn’t have relished more: i made one last sick tray, and, right down to the spoonful of brown sugar i plopped in a dish, i felt my whole soul being ladled into each unnecessary flourish.

somehow the ticking down of days in which i can take care of him, in which he’ll let me take care of him, made me all the more emphatic about each and every drop. i ladened that sick tray with every indelible talisman from our homegrown, family-specific, sick-day manual: the buttery toast sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, the ice chips drizzled with honey, the clementine and plump red strawberries for extra vitamin C. and of course the spoon and the glass wrapped with a rubber band, tagging it sick-kid’s-only, just as my mama had done for me, her unscientific attempt at keeping the lid on infectious disease amid her troupelet of five.

it was as if i was packing him off for a lifetime of taking care, as if an eternity of loving him was what i was ladling onto that sick tray, and into his soul. as if i was shortshrifting the snuffing out of time, making my own tight-end run around some clock that is ticking. i was sealing a deal with forever and ever. and it came, in this moment, in the form of being his nursemaid.

there is something in me that takes like a bird to the wind when it comes to taking care of the ones i love, especially the ones i birthed and the one to whom i was birthed. maybe that’s why i found myself in nursing school. i’ve always been drawn to the sick-bed bedside.

it’s a place of certain tenderness, of amplified permeabilities (we are more wide-open when we are ailing, and our needing each other is heightened). it’s a place where exercising empathies is so often met with eager and unspoken reception. it’s one of the best places i know to love as i would be loved. and more than once or twice, i’ve found myself on the receiving end, tended to by the very boy i am tending to now. (a story i’ll never forget.)

maybe because this is the last or almost last go-round in the sick-kid-under-my-care department, and maybe because i am feeling this latest pulling-away (the kid getting ready to move, once and for all) deep in my marrow, the reel started wheeling of sick hours when he and i have stitched our hearts together: the ERs where i was right there, and the one when i was far away, connected only by long-distance telephone line and left only to imagine him strapped inside the ambulance that carried him across farmland and rolling hills to the heartland hospital where they checked him in. i remember a yom kippur he and i spent in the ER, and another when he had a bulge in his neck so golfball-sized they considered slitting it open. i remember the awful time i’d squished his tiny toddler fingers in the car door window. i remember and remember, and truth be told i feel every tug of the letting go.

when the surest thing you have done in your life, the one thing you’ve most tried to imbue with the holy, is about to shift into another more distant gear, it’s an act you surrender with all the grace you can muster. and a spoonful of dark brown sugar besides.

what are your most natural ways to dollop your love? and what are the ways of the sick bed you’ve picked up along the way?

15 Comments

February 9, 2024

hungry for color

it hits this time of year, at this point in the turning of globe when we’re deep in shadow, and the world out our window is endlessly, endlessly, drainingly gray. even i, a self-proclaimed fangirl of the cloudiest day, a girl who thrills at billows of fog, those days when the sunlight can’t find its way in — even i get a bit itchy for hues beyond pigeon and charcoal and smoke, all close kin in the family of gray.

which is precisely why that shock of scarlet and pink boldly inserts itself in the february calendar. we need a little color. and the heart-shaped holiday brings it on. coils and coils of red, beribboned with oyster pink or flamingo. maybe even dashes of fuchsia.

i detected this color deficiency (more of a self-diagnosis) when i realized that all through the week i was clicking and clicking on dizzying droplets of anything resembling “other-than-gray.” and when i caught myself daydreaming, once again, of a riotous, bouquet-gathering, summery cutting garden — zinnias and cosmos and blue bachelor’s buttons all rising up like a botanical box of jazzy crayolas (preferably the 64-pack in which those waxy rainbow-hued sticks stand shoulder-to-shoulder as if choir-robed darlings marched into their multi-row loft).

and so, in hopes of sating your own chromatic hungers, i bring you a compendium of colors from a painter, a cook, a maven of tulips, and a poet.

first up: the painter, whose style of garden i aim to emulate, mostly because it’s been said that her “rambling garden was unkempt to imperfection.” jean cooke is her name, and she was considered one of britain’s greatest woman painters of the twentieth century. described, too, as a remarkable, bird-like woman, the london gallery that shows her work, goes on to describe her “ungardening” thusly:

Cooke’s neglect of her garden—she sometimes called it ‘ungardening’—was partly a reflection of her priorities: her painting and the care of her children. Beyond these demands there was little energy to give less pressing concerns. Grass went unmown, fences unmended and trees unpruned. But the messy garden was not entirely accidental. The disarray was cultivated over an extended period of time and helped Cooke to create a new subgenre in works such as The Wild Plum Tree, which drew upon aspects of both landscape and garden painting traditions. Whereas Claude Monet’s waterlily pond was scrupulously tended, Jean Cooke’s rambling garden was unkempt to imperfection just as her painting required. Whereas earlier paintings such as Grassland had used the Sussex coastline to create landscape-scale wilderness, by the mid-eighties when she began painting spring blossom in earnest her own garden had achieved a similarly expansive quality.
piano-nobile gallery

jean cooke at work in her unkempt imperfection

and in a nod to cupid’s holiday cusping on the near horizon, here’s a tad of insight, should tulips be the thing you choose to send your true love:

“As far as I’m concerned, …[tulips] are the best, indeed the only flowers to send or receive on Valentine’s Day. Wild, irrepressible, wayward, unpredictable, strange, subtle, generous, elegant, tulips are everything you would wish for in a lover. Best of all are the crazy parrot tulips such as ‘Rococo’ with red and pink petals feathered and flamed in crinkly lime-green. ‘When a young man presents a tulip to his mistress,’ wrote Sir John Chardin (Travels in Persia, 1686), ‘he gives her to understand by the general red color of the flower that he is on fire with her beauty, and by the black base that his heart is burned to coal.’ That’s the way to do it.”
– Anna Pavord, wonderful British garden writer and bulb lover, in The Curious Gardener: A Year in the Garden, 2010

on the subject of wild women who tend toward the vivid end of the paint pot, there is the utterly marvelous and delicious emily nunn, formerly of the new yorker and the chicago tribune. she is a food writer like no other, and in recent years she has devoted her not-inconsiderable genius to the subject of salads. her newsletter often has me giggling straight off my chair. and her salads are beyond delicious more often than not. it delights me to introduce you to the one and only emily nunn’s department of salads, along with a peek at but one of emily’s many-hued produce concoctions….

and finally, let’s wrap this up with a wonder from mary O that i had never seen before, from a slim little volume i’d not known of till just last week when a wonder of a woman hosted a candlemas gathering and asked us all to bring a.) a candle, and b.) a poem about light. and thus i discovered house of light, mary oliver’s 1990 collection of poems. since the subject of this one is van gogh, it seems perfectly suited as a prescriptive for those who find themselves suffering a little color deprivation.

EVERYTHING by Mary Oliver

No doubt in Holland,
when van Gogh was a boy,
there were swans drifting
over the green sea
of the meadows, and no doubt
on some warm afternoon
he lay down and watched them,
and almost thought: this is everything.
What drove him
to get up and look further
is what saves this world,
even as it breaks
the hearts of men.
In the mines where he preached,
where he studied tenderness,
there were only men, all of them
streaked with dust.
For years he would reach
toward the darkness.
But no doubt, like all of us,
he finally remembered
everything, including the white birds
weightless and unaccountable,
floating around the towns
of grit and hopelessness––
and this is what would finish him:
not the gloom, which was only terrible,
but those last yellow fields, where clearly
nothing in the world mattered, or ever would,
but the insensible light.

and with that i shall wonder, where did you find color this week?

jean cooke’s “springtime through the window,” 1980s

6 Comments

February 2, 2024

the roots are stirring. . .

sometimes, especially when staring into a tableau best described as blkkh, a monochrome of melted soot + oozy mud, we little people need reminding that there is stirring afoot. underground, that is. deep in this holy earth, particles expand. and multiply. and do those “rooty” things. they set down shoots. reach into the hollows to construct the nutrient highways that, come spring, will rise in daffodil and snowdrop. will punctuate the earthscape in royal-purple crocus and knock-your-socks off cobalt blue.

since ancient times, spurred by the collected wisdoms of those who’ve found themselves at this point in the revolution of the year, at the very midpoint between winter’s darkest longest night — the solstice — and springtime’s resuscitating equinox, the moment when the shadow and the sunlight fall in equal measure, this moment has been marked in ways that promised hope. ancient peoples, too, must have known the dregs of winter trodding on too long, or at least the ancients of the north.

those ancient peoples dubbed this a cross-quarter day, the precise mid-score between the changing of the seasons. and those ancient peoples, ones whose livings came not from sitting in front of keyboard pounding keys, but rather who picked up staff or rod, and herded flocks or fished the seas or tilled the earth, they turned to what they knew best to look for hopeful signs: earth and sea and sky. therein was the stirring from which they drew their wisdoms and their post-it notes from God.

in the case of this cross-quarter day, the one that falls as winter wanes, when springtime hasn’t yet picked up its paces, there might well have been some undercurrent of we-are-running-out-of-steam-here. and so perhaps one wintry day, one wise (and desperate) someone dropped to her knees, pawed the crusty earth just down deep enough to catch a glimpse of tangled rootlets reaching down, down, down. she might have whooped in exclamation, let her fellow desperados know that, lo and behold, all was not lost. the earth had not gone thoroughly to sleep. deep down where earth keeps all its secrets, there was promise stirring.

and so, the peoples celebrated. the peoples, being wise long before we were specks of anyone’s imagination, might have extracted their own wisdoms from this botanic wonder. they might have realized that if the wondrous underbellies of the bulbs were hard at work in ways unseen, we too might seek analogous metaphor in the vicinity of our psyche and our souls. we too might figure out that now, as winter’s grip begins to loosen, our own deep-down growing stirs. even when we think it not. (and we’d be wise, methinks, to bolster that stirring with at least a dab of concentrated meditations, sifting through the questions that might propel our year ahead, steering our own soulful energies to those one or two roots we decide most warrant our attention.)

the ancient israelites (and jews today) called it tu b’shevat, the new year of the trees, so marked by the first blossoming of the almond trees. the celts called it imbolc, a word that means “in the belly,” when the earth’s belly begins its thaw and the seeds below begin their stirring. (the word imbolc comes from Old Irish, and was reference to the ewes beginning to lactate as birthing season comes and the field grasses start to grow.)

indeed, the earth is quickening, the obstetric name for that first sacred stirring from within, when that tiny tiny human limb first garners enough muscular oomph to kick the wall of mama’s womb. i remember sensing it, unsure if it was just a tummy rumble, or the first fetal morse code that someone in there was really in there. in due time, the kicks make clear that it’s no hiccup of the fetal variety.

jews gather for the tu b’shevat seder, a feast of seven fruits and four glasses of wine, beginning with one of deepest red (winter at its fullest) and each successive glass a paler pink till springtime’s wine, all white. the celts, being earthly people, turned to fire and water: the women of the home slept beside the hearth on imbolc’s eve (jan. 31), and checked in the morning for any markings in the ash signifying that saint brigid (a fiery spirit) had wafted by in the night, spreading her imbolc blessings. they headed for the hills, too, and lit bonfires atop the crests, then spent the night leaping over the flames. more docile celts might have settled for kindling a few wicks around the house. but every peoples has its wild ones. and if fire wasn’t your thing, you might wander to the nearest sacred well, and take a dip for purification purposes.

i might let the candles burn today, or perhaps i’ll take a sudsy bath, as i think deep and hard of how i intend to bring my little flickering of light into this world that grows dark and darker by the day….

and on that note i bring you this emboldenment that my blessed firstborn sent along the other day, quoting from his favorite of thomas merton’s writings, raids on the unspeakable.

Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God. You agree? Good. Then go with my blessing. But I warn you, do not expect to make many friends…
Thomas Merton

what might you do today to mark the incoming of light, minute by minute, day by day, till the full birthing comes?

12 Comments

January 26, 2024

the quarryings of time

my hair is gray. my left shoulder is frozen. my right middle finger locks most mornings. and half of one of my lungs is no longer.

there’s more (darn that paralyzed vocal cord), but the dirge needn’t drone on. the point is i’ve been quarried by time. which is close to the way annie dillard, my polestar and patron saint of seeing, put it in a passage i read –– and couldn’t forget –– this week.

on page 238 of pilgrim at tinker creek, my bible of the woods, annie D. turns her otherworldly attentions to living creatures in various states of disarray: spiders with only six or seven of eight species-imperative legs; grasshoppers missing antennae; butterflies whose wings are torn; a swallowtailed sparrow minus its tail. and, yet, and yet, they creep and leap and flutter and glide on anyway. nature is not daunted by its disassembling.

nor should we be.

when it comes to us humans –– the species with the power to wonder, to question, to connect the occasional dots –– each quarrying carries its own volume, its own mysteries and humilities and sometimes epiphanies. each nick or chink in the armament of flesh and sinew and bone both takes us down a notch, and, if we’re paying soulful attention, points us closer to our soul, to that essence that bellows our being.

dillard writes thusly:

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.

she got me to thinking about the beauty in brokenness. in disrepair. in all the parts of me that no longer follow instructions.

and then four pages in, annie lands on the phrase that’s entranced me all week. she wonders aloud if, rather than somehow thinking it our birthright to come into existence “with the spangling marks of a grace like beauty rained down from eternity,” we might be wiser to realize we’re most whole “with the botched assaults and quarryings of time?”

“we are all of us clocks,” she goes on, quoting british astrophysicist arthur stanley eddington, who described us as clocks “whose faces tell the passing years.”

there, in those time-etched crowsfeet and the lines that furrow our brow, lie some of our deepest wisdoms. and most hard-earned beauties. that is, if you, like me, consider it a dazzling thing to have tucked into your brain files those rare few ideas whose staying power drives your every step thereafter.

i’ve been in hospitals more times than i can count, have sat with eyes squeezed shut as someone drew needle and thread through my torn flesh, have felt the warm ooze of plaster cast being swaddled round my broken wrist. and each and every time, the wounds have left me more awake to life’s unscripted, oft-unspoken ponderings. (except maybe not the time when i made like peter pan, and flew off a garage roof when a rope swing escaped my grasp.) each and every time, we emerge keener to the pains –– and wonders –– of the world.

the most lasting empathies are forged in ERs and aftermaths.

and think about this: might you tally the innumerable times you’ve broken into smile, or squinched your eyes in irrepressible delight, to earn yourselves those hieroglyphs that now stand testament to your life’s-long accumulation of joy, or the hours you bent in deep concentration. or worried for the someones you love.

such are the quarryings of time. they inch us toward our holiest core.

it’s an excavation i’d not surrender.

now in my seventh decade (egad, that sounds sooooo old), i’ve been reminded time and again that none of this is a given. and we are breakable vessels nearly every time. and yet, without the botched assaults and the quarryings, from whence would come our vast acquired wisdoms?

how would i know how precious each birthday candle is if i’d not wondered “will there ever be another?” how would i know the utterly-taken-for-granted gift of seamlessly sliding an arm down a sleeve if i’d not done so yelping the whole while?

doesn’t our brokenness bring us the pricelessness of knowing how deeply perishable we are? and how we’d best get on with what we know to be those few defining pursuits: whatever is the thumbprint we aim to leave behind on the life and lives we’ve loved?

aren’t our depths — even the impossible-to-ask-aloud parts –– the prize that comes via our frayed and nibbled selves?

none of us asked for nor expected the choreography of our lives. but with each and every quarrying there’s come an unintended plus. even if it took awhile to make itself apparent.

all of which brings me roundabout to this prayer for beauty in the mundane. beauty in the brokenness is another prayer for which i pray. but first, this from writer and poet Cole Arthur Riley*’s breathtaking book Black Liturgies, in which she prays for our capacity to hold together the extraordinary and the ordinary:

God of every beautiful thing,

Make us people of wonder. Show us how to hold on to nuance and vision when our souls become addicted to pain, to the unlovely. It is far easier to see the gloom and decay; so often it sings a louder song. Attune our hearts to the good still stirring in our midst, not that we would give ourselves to toxic positivity or neglect the pain of the world, but that we would be people capable of existing in the tension. Grant us habits of sacred pause. Let us marvel not just at the grand or majestic, but beauty’s name etched into every ordinary moment. Let the mundane swell with a mystery that makes us breathe deeper still. And by this, may we be sustained and kept from despair. Amen.
cole arthur riley

*i am reading cole, stockpiling her wisdoms, as i begin to stock my larder for the lean months to come, when i sense the discord of the world beyond my quarter acre might otherwise knock me asunder. i intend to find a path toward the light. and i will, of course, bring it here.

how has time quarried you? what treasures did you find down deep beneath the dug-out parts?

any time i can bring a nurse to these pages it’s a good day. here, a fine acolyte of healing in action….can you imagine the shenanigans that landed this crew in her sublimely fine care? and, yes, i once wore a cap as pert as hers. and shoes not too dissimilar….

8 Comments

January 19, 2024

i-can’t-get-warm-enough cooking, an arctic imperative

on days when the mercury out the kitchen window is barely visible through stalactites of ice, and, from what i can make out, it appears that the high for the day hovers far below the murky line at zero, there are choices to be made: you can curl in a quivering ball under your strata of blanket; or you can strip off the flammable parts (the wraps with dangling clusters of ignitable threads) and post yourself boldly in front of the six-burner, commercial-grade range that fell into your custody the long-ago day you signed for the old shingled house with the ricketiest of windows.

i opted for six-burner range.

and all through the arctic siege, i cooked anything i could get my mitts on: simmering stews, bubbling soups, sheetpans of roots, just about any comestible that called for application of flame. i might have been fooling only myself, but i pretended it put some level of purpose to my bone-level desire to rub up against any surface weighing in at greater than zero degrees. the imprecise dial that purports to crank the oven all the way to 450 is my most-cherished doodad of late.

and so in a week in which i might have been distraught about the state of the world, and in which i might have been pondering how in heaven’s name to navigate the narrow straits that look to be ahead, i dallied in the kitchen. a wise woman i met the other night let on that as she sees it, her job in dark times is to fill herself with as much light as she possibly can, and then get out in the world to start spilling it.

but first you need to be able to feel the tips of your fingers and toes. and wandering about in the five layers of woollen and fleece and yoga-pant spandex sometimes gets in the way of even apostolic wanderings. so i did what i could: i cooked.

and despite the corona making the rounds, i invited folks in. i might have asked even the mailman had he not spun on his heels before i could stick my neck out the door to extend my relatively-warm invitation. i seemed as hungry for company as i was for the faintest trace of heat. there is something about gathering, even with goosebumps, when trying to chase the cold spell away.

here’s a soup i made for one catch-up lunch, and which i intend to ladle when old globe-trotting cronies gather this weekend to welcome a stray back to the fold.

i-can’t-get-warm-enough tomatoey soup

(aka Provençal Tomato, Basil, Parmesan Soup)
a collective effort with input from Martha Rose Shulman and Ali Slagle and Babs
Time: 1 hour
Yield: Serves four

Martha, one of crunchy-granola cookbook writers I followed back in ancient times (the 1970s), learned to make this soup years ago when she lived in France. She tells us that if there are no fresh tomatoes at hand, use canned. And she thickens with rice or tapioca, which we’re forgoing. Ali chimes in: “What if you could have a tomato soup that was as plush as a cream of tomato but tasted like pure tomato? Enter Parmesan. Simmering tomatoes with a Parmesan rind is like seasoning a bowl of soup with a shaving of cheese 100 times over. It gives the soup an undercurrent of savory fat and salt that only bring out tomato’s best sides. Many specialty groceries sell containers of rinds, but if you can’t find any, stir 1⁄2 cup grated Parmesan into the final soup (or cut off the rind of a wedge you’re working through). Rinds will keep in the freezer for forever, so start saving.” Babs echoes and amplifies both, having plucked the very best bits from each of the kitchen geniuses.

INGREDIENTS
1 – 1.5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 -2 medium onion, chopped
4 to 6 garlic cloves (to taste), minced
1/2 tsp. red-pepper flakes
Salt to taste
2 (28-ounce) cans whole peeled San Marzano tomatoes with juice
2 large sprigs basil, or about 16 leaves, plus 2 tablespoons slivered basil for garnish
1 Parmesan rind
Freshly ground pepper to taste

For the Garnishes:
Garlic croutons (thin slices of baguette, lightly toasted and rubbed with a cut garlic
Grated or shaved Parmesan

PREPARATION
––Heat oil over medium heat in a large, heavy soup pot or Dutch oven. Add onion. Cook, stirring often, until tender, about five minutes. Stir in half the garlic and a generous pinch of salt. Cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 30 seconds to a minute. Add the tomatoes, basil sprigs or leaves and remaining garlic. Cook, stirring often, 15 to 20 minutes.

––Add Parmesan rind and salt to taste. Bring to a simmer, cover and reduce the heat to low. Simmer 30 minutes. Remove basil sprigs and Parmesan rind. Puree in a blender in small batches, taking care to place a towel over the top of the blender and hold it down tightly. Return to the pot, add pepper to taste and adjust salt. Serve garnished with garlic croutons and/or Parmesan, if desired, and slivered basil leaves. If serving cold, which I decidedly am not, refrigerate until chilled.

Tip:
Advance preparation: The soup will keep for two or three days in the refrigerator and can be frozen.

and here’s a peek at that beefy-root stew i made last week as the many snows fell. it fueled me through to the last succulent drop of its leftover bits, which i zapped just the other night when the day had kept me too far from my heat post to start from scratch all over again….

to what do you turn when your insides need warming? is it a cookstove, a voluminous book, or are you more inclined to strap on your snowshoes and slap through the woods?

p.s. i fully realize that opening cans (see soup above) hardly qualifies as cooking, but it’s warm and it’s red, and in my book it qualifies as delicious.

13 Comments

January 12, 2024

winter when it wallops

oh, Winter your wilds are furious. you’ve pulled out all the verbs from the far end of the dictionary: gusting, icing, blinding, hurling. the ones marked “extreme.” and i, for one, am reveling. sitting here with nose pressed against window, marveling that this ol’ globe can still order up a duster of snow and wind and ice. and howl. oh, the howling here in my little wedge of world.

it’s a potage of white out there. gray and white and swirl.

when you grow up in these parts, you need a little snow boot to punctuate your season. heck, i grew up knowing the feel of snow around my knees. trying to lift my snowy clods as if through moon dust, wondering just how far i’d make it till my little heart pounded so extreme i’d have to pause to keep from keeling.

it’s falling now in fat flakes. flakes the size of manna from heaven, i’d imagine, if you imagined manna something like the wonder bread of our youth torn in fist-sized bits, which was something like the way some nun once described it, and for me the picture stuck, which is why when i read exodus i picture all the ancient israelites scrambling about the sinai gathering up their gobs of wonder bits.

but back to winter: the alarms are pinging wildly into my laptop. schools closed. roads a danger trap. all the planes now grounded at o’hare, once the world’s busiest airport except for when the wilds of winter are unleashed.

someone clearly opened the winter barn door deep in the night. and the winds now gallop. and if only i weren’t afraid of skidding to the ground, i’d be out there taking in a full-throttle dose of all this wintry wonder, the season that reminds you what you’re made of.

winter reminds us we’re not the ones in charge here. oh, sure, many a day it’s us and our to-do lists, those are the hills we’re meant to climb. but then the weather gods step in, decide to put us in our little place. show us just how wild the elements can whirl and hurl and turn things upside down.

with all the poisons swirling in the air, i’m all in for a world that puts us in our place. reminds us we’re not quite in charge. not remotely. i like a little climatological force put up against our feeble mortal ways.

my prescriptives on a day like this begin and end with keeping watch: i’ll let the day unfold in its extremes. watch the boughs bend low, as they bear the weight of snow and more snow. pray the old house doesn’t groan too much (already the rafters are making monster noises). i’ve made a winter stew of all the old-time roots that once sustained the people of the prairie: turnip, parsnip, rutabaga. and a dab of beef for those who need their meats. i’ve my stack of tomes, fresh from a pre-storm raid of the library shelves. and i’ve got blankets at every bend in this old house.

most of all, i’ve got windowpanes on which to press my nose. and all of which give me front-row seat on the theater of winter, the one that makes me know just how vulnerable we are. and how wise we’d be to know we’re not in charge.

how do you prefer to spend your snow days?

15 Comments

January 5, 2024

new year upon us: proceed with all the grace you can muster

Now is the season to know
That everything you do
Is sacred.

~ Hafiz ~

and so we begin. wrapped in the whisper of unknowing. all is vast, and formless. we etch out possibilities, promises, in our mind’s eye. we put shape to what we hope will come, what we worry might come, in the allotment of time we call “the new year.”

as long as humans have been harnessing time, putting order to the rhythms of darkness to light, warming to cooling to warming again, we have imagined our dominion over the hours unspooling. some of us live by clocks. and calendars. and pings and beeps and the showtunes we set to awake us, to remind us to sleep.

i’m especially attuned to the timekeeper beyond the clouds: the solar star. the one around which we turn and spin and revolve in our somewhat elliptical geometries.

what if we returned to a time without second hands, and minutes parsed into fractions, what if we surrendered to shadow and light, allowed the cosmos to do our timekeeping? what if we understood the passage of time by the wrinkles on the backs of our hands, or the ebbing of wisdom that comes with a life lived at attention?

but that is not the world we live in, the moment we live in. we’ve been conditioned, all of us, to count time in blocks, and the newest addition to our arithmetic table is the one we’ve named 2024. and so it shimmers before us: new, unmarked, not yet broken.

not a half day in to this newly-bordered chunk of time, the year threw me a challenge. decided to let me know that my well-laid plans for my first birthday since losing half a lung would not be quite the occasion i’d (for once) carefully plotted (a dinner i’d cook for beloved old friends on the eve thereof, followed by a dinner for three at a charming cafe on the day itself). indeed, they’d be altogether scrapped. our old friend covid decided to drop in unannounced, in the form of a grand exposure (my mate sat for four hours on new year’s eve beside a woman who awoke to a positive test the next morn). and so we did what any respectable citizen would do: we donned our masks for five straight days, steered clear of any and all, and tested accordingly along the way. (so far, so clear.)

i admit to meeting the news with a mighty harumph. and a stinging tear in my eye. in my heart i was crooning something along the lines of “can’t i please catch a fresh start here?” but, alas, covid is covid and there’s no getting around it. so, i cobbled the best that i could: roaring fire all day, long walk under gray cloudy skies; i seized what i could, and turned the page anyway.

and here we are, in what hafiz reminds us is best thought of as “the season to know that everything you do is sacred.”

the new year, i sense, is going to ask plenty of us. i, for one, am strapping on my seat belt. for, as a dear friend reminded me last night, “you may just want, as bette davis said, to ‘tighten your seatbelts. it’s going to be a bumpy night.'”

indeed, it might be. and for such a bumpy spell ahead we shall need to equip ourselves. my plan is to take it slow, and with all the grace i can muster. i’ll bite my tongue when wisest to do so. and speak up with actions not words when that is most warranted. i’ll aim to dollop out goodness all along my way, not unlike hansel and gretel in the woods, leaving behind their breadcrumbs. i’ll imagine droplets of sunlight scattered like shards. and hope to enter and leave each encounter with a soft unspokenness, a sense that something like an angel wing has just wafted by. it’s a big ask, but it’s the litany for which i pray. for i’ve an inkling, like bette, that we’re in for one bumpy night.

what are you seeking to equip you for this year?

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December 29, 2023

incandescence

There must be always remaining in every one’s life some place for the singing of angels, some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful and, by an inherent prerogative, throws all the rest of life into a new and creative relatedness, something that gathers up in itself all the freshest of experience from drab to commonplace areas of living and glows in on bright white light of penetrating beauty and meaning — then passes.

— Howard Thurman

my relationship with time shifted this year. living does that. somewhere along the line, a rock is thrown. it shatters what it hits. and as you stumble to pick up the pieces, you start to see that you won’t get it back to what it was. the picture window is no longer. instead, the shards are what you hold.

i’m beginning to practice gathering the shards, holding each to the light. being careful not to get cut on the sharp edges, the piercing edges. knowing the shards are what’s left, i find it easier to lift each one, position it in front of the flame, turn it this way and that, and watch for the incandescence.

it’s called seizing the day.

it’s why we watch babies, stare at them mesmerized. they are our sages, the ones whose every dandelion, every dust mote floating by, is a new encounter. can you imagine emerging from the dark wet womb and suddenly feeling fleshy arms cradling you, soft lips kissing you? can you imagine finally putting form to the face from which that one murmuring voice has been coming?

babies seize everything because it’s all new. the rest of us learn to seize things when we start to realize they won’t last forever.

if only we all realized how fragile a life this all is. we would be kinder to it. we would be kinder to ourselves maybe. we’d let go of the hurts that poison us. we’d shake off the fears that strangle us. we’d dig down deeper maybe, and let all the beauties out. and, critically, we’d let more in.

and so, with my understanding of time now deepened, my frame of time shifted, i am more determined than ever, and finding it far less arduous, to step out of my old, afraid ways and into the incandescence of each and every shard. each and every blessing called “this day.” this holy day.

i am, as thurman writes above, keeping an ear out for the singing of angels, and allowing the bright white light of this most blessed life to enfold me, to behold the breathlessly beautiful. before it passes.

where are you seeing the incandescent? are you letting it in?

and happy blessed blessed new year. while my seat belt is buckled for the year ahead, let us hold hands, and bump our way along, scaffolded by those few fine things we know to be immutable and imperative.

note to true wonder: the bottom photo i took driving home from your farm all those blessed years ago. yes, i drove and clicked. and how it happened, i still wonder. but that heartland panorama i do love. and the heartland farmer.

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December 22, 2023

looking into the darkness

maybe it’s the darkness we’re meant to look into. deep into. maybe halves of the world go darkest once a year, so we become practiced. so not only our eyes but our souls learn to widen the aperture, to let in whatever droplets of light there might be. or maybe it’s the inky darkness itself we’re meant to wrap ourselves in. to not be afraid.

maybe we’re left to our own devices when the darkness comes — and it will come — so we learn to find our way. steady our wobbling, put meat to the muscle that holds us upright. in a lifetime’s ebb and flow of darkness and light, it’s the shadowed chapters that have made me the deeper parts of who i am. maybe we should all look to the roots wriggling down below the frozen crust of earth to see how it’s done, how the growing comes unnoticed, in the tabernacle of earthly darkness.

maybe we’d be wise to consider the hidden work of wintertide, the profound intelligence unfolding where eyes cannot see, where sense cannot reach.

in this year’s darkest hour, i can’t say i was up keeping night vigil, awaiting the nadir of night. i was not out in my yard, kindling sticks and dried-up old leaves, setting a bonfire to keep the darkness at bay. fact is, i was felled by a bug that did have me up moseying about the house in the wee hours, but not to contemplate the darkness.

what i did do, as is my wont (and i did it by daylight), was gather up words, snippets of poetry, that made me think about light and darkness, and the shimmering shards we need to find to keep from tumbling headlong into the abyss.

the world this christmas is dark indeed. more than ever, we need to light our way. and pray that our penumbra illumines the path of those who travel nearby.

a solstice offering…

Let the ordinary be in your hand;
hold it open and imagine a bird landing,
offering all it possesses in trust
to come to you.

Learn to look for the little things
that weigh nothing at all,
but fill the heart with such light
they can never be measured.

-Kenneth Steven*, Seeing the Light

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

-Wendell Berry

Holding the Light
by Stuart Kestenbaum

Gather up whatever is
glittering in the gutter,
whatever has tumbled
in the waves or fallen
in flames out of the sky,

for it’s not only our
hearts that are broken,
but the heart
of the world as well.
Stitch it back together.

Make a place where
the day speaks to the night
and the earth speaks to the sky.
Whether we created God
or God created us

it all comes down to this:
In our imperfect world
we are meant to repair
and stitch together
what beauty there is, stitch it

with compassion and wire.
See how everything
we have made gathers
the light inside itself
and overflows? A blessing.

i keep watch on a few monastics who dwell in the heart of france. brother laurence, a modern-day mystic, sent along this the other day, a wonder of imagery from the winter’s solstice at Newgrange, a stone-age relic and world heritage site that rises from the earth not too, too far from the irish sea along ireland’s eastern shore. he sent a short video along with this short meditation:

“New Grange is a monumental 5,000 year-old burial mound in Count Meath, Ireland. At sunrise on December 21st, the first ray of direct sunlight from the new-born sun precisely, silently, enters the narrow aperture over the entrance, penetrates into the mound of solid rock and fills the inner chamber with golden light for seventeen minutes. Light overcomes darkness. It is irresistible and yet gentle. As it grows stronger with occasional surges, its intensity increases and the power of its beauty. It communicates purely by itself – the meaning of truth.

“I hope you can take time to watch this short silent video of the phenomenon. It captures a sacred moment, the revelation of God in nature. And it may give you a sense of how the light of Christ, the light of truth, actually enters and changes our world.” (Laurence Freeman, OSB)

and finally, for those among us who find the poetic to be a vessel of the ineffable sacred, this from a Paris Review interview with the late great Louise Gluck. i particularly swooned over the line that a poem “is like a message in a shell held to an ear”…:

From the beginning, Glück cited the influence of Blake, Keats, Yeats, and Eliot—poets whose work “craves a listener.” For her, a poem is like a message in a shell held to an ear, confidentially communicating some universal experience: adolescent struggles, marital love, widowhood, separation, the stasis of middle age, aging, and death. There is a porous barrier between the states of life and death and between body and soul. Her signature style, which includes demotic language and a hypnotic pace of utterance, has captured the attention of generations of poets, as it did mine as a nascent poet of twenty-two. In her oeuvre, the poem of language never eclipses the poem of emotion. Like the great poets she admired, she is absorbed by “time which breeds loss, desire, the world’s beauty.” –Henri Cole

*as this is the second Kenneth Steven poem in as many weeks, you can bet i am following his thread and will be finding out more about this scottish poet and children’s book writer. and gathering up his new book of poems, Seeing the Light, from my favorite friendly librarians….

where are you gathering up shards of light these days?

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December 15, 2023

love letter to the chairs on the occasion of seventeen years

dear chairs,

a calendar turned the other day, a yearly one. and it turned for the seventeenth time. thus begins the eighteenth year of this little old chair.

that first day of that first year –– december 12, 2006 –– i faced a blank white screen and a motherlode of trepidation. that screen plus the trembling inside equaled a scarier form of publishing than i’d ever really done before –– and that was 25 years into my stint at the late great Chicago Tribune.

to write what at the time was a newfangled thing — a blog, an ugly gutteral word if ever there was — was, to my mind, to take away the filter that might have allowed me to occasionally put my heart to my sleeve in the stories i told and how i told them, but it shielded me from going deeper than that, from willingly baring my soul, where my truest self stirs.

i was compelled to write the chair because i was convinced that the deepest truths of our lives are played out in the quotidian. on the humdrum stage of our day-after-day domesticities, and the confines of hardly exotic daily rounds. i’d come to believe that the common, plain-wrapped stories of our lives are in fact imbued with the sacred, the lasting, the shared. and more than worth holding up to the light.

i still think so.

chances are, you and i are not going to find our names chiseled in the roll call of global heroes. we are going to live on in the scant traces we leave behind, the simple kindnesses, the one or two times we mustered just the right words, the softening we brought to someone’s unbearable hour.

and so, i thought then and think now, if this one bracket of time is ours, then perhaps we’d do well to plumb the depths of it. or at least plumb a little more pointedly. root around a bit. not shy from asking the tough question, the true question. search for the sacramental. name the holiness where we find it. shine the light on it. make known the magnificence that runs through the river of each of our lives.

because i firmly believe that, in the end, we are all animated by a few certain yearnings: to love and be loved; to be seen or be heard; to reach out in the darkness and be met with a soft and warm hand to hold onto. some of us live to be stirred, to feel our hearts beating hard against the wall of our chest. to delight in the whimsies of each and any hour. and to know more when we fall asleep than we knew upon waking that day.

so i offered up the stories of my own life’s spool. i scanned the day to day, and plucked the shards that shimmered the most, the ones that seemed to hold the most questions. maybe even a quiet holiness. the ones i’ve described as exuding the most wattage. the ones i thought might resonate a bit more than all the rest. ones worth examining.

and so for 17 years i’ve turned here, plopped my bum on this rickety chair that’s missing a spindle, tapped at the alphabet letters as if i was at once alone and in the company of the dearest of soulmates. i’ve pushed toward the truth, even when i worried you might wriggle a bit. even if i pictured you rolling your eyes. to write the truth is to blot out the worries of just how your words might land. especially if your mother-in-law or your mother is one of the ones reading your words. (i learned not to hyperventilate on the days when only a weighted silence followed a post, when my usually exuberant mother-in-law chose silence as the way of letting me know she was, um, not such a fan of whatever i’d mused that morning.)

over the years, dear chairs, you’ve chimed in, and made me laugh aloud, and more times than you might imagine you’ve moved me to tears with the words and the wisdoms you’ve brought here.

and this year, this darn nasty year, you all but kept me from keeling right over.

the fourth wall, the one they talk about in the theater, the invisible screen that separates actors and audience, it’s non-existent in the realm of writing, or at least in the writing i write here.

ever since that long ago first morning, i’ve meant for this to be a back and forth, a call and response. yet i never imagined the friendships that would leap off the page, break through the cybersphere and become so very real, some of the dearest in my life.

whether we’ve sat in the same room never or once, or dozens of times, your very big hearts, your high-soaring souls, your whimsies, your tender ways, have worked their numinous magic in a world that’s sometimes so, so dark: you’ve become true, true friends. the sort you tell truths to, the sort whose hands you reach for when your own are trembling like leaves in an autumn wind.

so all of this is a long-winded way of simply saying thank you. from the bottom of my very big heart, the one i’ve long worn on my sleeve. where it now shares a space with my soul.

and thank you to willie, who long long ago, got me started. and to teddy, who long let me tell his collection of growing-up stories. and, of course, to each and every one of you, whether you ever leave a trace, or tiptoe in and out quiet as a mullipuff bobbing on the breeze….

where do you sense the holy in your lives?

photos by Will Kamin, long long ago. xoxo

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