blessings | pull up a chair

i’m not too keen on wearing my medical woes on my sleeve, and in fact i wish i could keep them locked tight in a jar at the back of the cellar. but because sometimes i can’t hide how afraid i get, and because profound wisdoms are here to be unearthed in riding the hills and vales of cancerland, i’ve thought hard about when to say what. or whether to ever say anything at all. and today, i have a story to tell that might make you smile, and might bring you hope — for whatever your own scary tale is. (and it wouldn’t seem fair to leave you thinking that happy twists are never somewhere off in the distance.)

it’s a chapter that began back in early october when my every-six-months scan came back not the way anyone wanted, and the surgeon who called to give the bad news spent less than three minutes on the phone spelling it out, including the seconds it took for him to tell me that if in fact it was a recurrence (an especially bad thing, a mere 18 months from first diagnosis) they’d consider taking out the rest of my lung. that’s a lot for a girl to swallow in less than the time it takes to peel the skin off an apple.

he wound up telling me he wanted to push up my next scan to just after the new year, a date that seemed a grand canyon away, the far side of thanksgiving, christmas, new years, and my birthday.

so i did what any scared person with a bolt of bad news might do: i stopped breathing, started to cry, and because i was home alone i dialed a brother i love, a brother i’ve leaned on more than once when life’s at its thickest. (it was too scary to tell my own boys or practically anyone else for that matter, not when there were so many questions and no answers in sight. my number one instinct, no matter the script, seems to always be to protect my boys from unneeded worries. so i waited till i could give them more than a basket of runaway fears.)

tears dried that ominous october morn, i got on the horn, or in this case the keyboard whose little black keys allow me to reach far and wide to my wee brigade of self-assembled experts who understand the ins and outs of my wily little cancer, a cancer that doesn’t like to play by anyone’s rules. my No. 1 expert, a fellow with nose to the microscope who studies this rare iteration as well as lovingly caring for people who have it, wanted me to board a plane and fly to salt lake city to go under anesthesia and have a little chunk of lung snipped out for biopsy: the surest way to get to the bottom of things. but he also decided in the end that it might be just as reasonable, and a whole lot less stress, to wait for the next scan in chicago, a mere four weeks difference between the two options.

it would not be understatement to say that i was pretty much as scared as i’ve ever been for a good bunch of that time. went so far as to type up housekeeping instructions, made sure my passwords were all up to date, and even thought hard about a few other things too dark to type here. it’s what happens when you know there’s a cancer lurking inside and you’ve no idea what it’s up to, but the indications aren’t good.

i admit to a panic attack or two before things settled down. but then i started breathing again, and the day before my birthday (the one i’d once worried would never come) i swam a mile in my little warm bath of a swimming pool (i swim with the seniors these days, and by seniors i mean the ladies who glide out of wheelchairs and into the pool where they take laps walking edge to edge of the pool.) and the day before the scan i did it again. a mile, that is. my dear mama, looked at me in that way that she can, and asked, “what are you trying to prove?” to which the answer would be, that cancer can’t catch me. as if.

well, it took a good week for the radiologists at my big fancy medical center to get a close look at the scan and when they did they finally sent word: looks good, they agreed. and even tossed in a cherry on top when they wrote “mild improvement” in one particularly concerning spot.

it took a minute or two for the truth to sink in, but the image that came soonest to mind was a big shimmering diamond. a blob of diamond the likes of which i’d not before pictured in such shimmering shards of luminous light.

i felt like someone had just handed me the hope diamond, the gift of six whole months before they need to go in there and peek around again. i felt the full sweep of six months in which every sentence my boys speak isn’t backwashed by my own private fear that i won’t be around for the end of the story.

to be told that your worries, the ones that all but froze you in fear, are lifted, are zapped, are momentarily wiped off the map, is to be catapulted into a landscape you’d thought was a no-trespassing zone.

it’s pretty much like getting your life handed back to you on a plate. a gold-rimmed one.

you get to imagine the very few ways you wish to cherish this breathtaking time. you consider buying a pair of plane tickets and telling each of your boys to pack a bag and fly away with you for a weekend. to take long walks, and sit over candlelit dinners. to hold hands on the sands of a beach. or a bustling city sidewalk. to tell the deepest truths. and to say as many times as you possibly possibly can that you will love them till beyond the end of all time.

you think of the moments you might be around to absorb now that you’re not being shoved toward the exit. and the peals of pure joy sure to rise up when wee dreams come true. and maybe a big one or two.

you think of how blessed you’ll feel, day in and day out, when not an hour nor minute is taken for granted. when staring up into a starry night, or tiptoeing into the dawn will each be a moment you’d feared would not come. will be a moment of beauty you all but bathe in, every drop of it sacred and whole.

simply because you’re alive, you’re awake, and you’re drinking it in.

you take a deep breath once again, and you all but fall on your knees: life is giving you one more run at making it count. and you’ll not waste it. you utterly, totally, certainly promise.

here, some of the holiest words i read this week, while working my way through a good old-fashioned case of influenza, the kind with fever and cough that send you under the blankets….

May you grow still enough to hear the small noises earth makes in preparing for the long sleep of winter, so that you yourself may grow calm and grounded deep within.

May you grow still enough to hear the trickling of water seeping into the ground, so that your soul may be softened and healed, and guided in its flow.

May you grow still enough to hear the splintering of starlight in the winter sky and the roar at earth’s fiery core.

May you grow still enough to hear the stir of a single snowflake in the air, so that your inner silence may turn into hushed expectation.

–David Steindl Rast, May You Grow Still Enough To Hear

and lastly, when you’re lying around under blankets, poking around the internet is the most fun you might find, so here’s what i found when i got curious about the hope diamond this week:

the Hope Diamond, which happens to be blue as the sky in july, weighs in at a walloping 45.52 carats, and thus has been heralded round the world since the 18th century, though its story traces back to when it was dug from an indian mine a century earlier.

according to the mind hive that is wikipedia, its recorded history begins in 1666, when the French gem merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier purchased it in India in uncut form. After cutting it and renaming it “the French Blue” (Le bleu de France), Tavernier sold it to King Louis XIV of France in 1668. It was stolen in 1792 and re-cut, with the largest section of the diamond appearing under the Hope name in an 1839 gem catalogue from the Hope banking family, from whom the diamond’s name derives.

did any happy twists in a tale come upon you this week?

36 Comments

October 6, 2023

canticle of gratitudes in shadowed times

I’ve always noticed the light shines through more perceptibly, more piercingly, when the skies are grizzled gray, and there’s a fissure, a peep hole, in the clouds.

And so, in this shadowed episode in which I find myself –– awaiting word on my first lung scan since before surgery, trying to navigate my mama through the roiling seas of rehab and the stark knowing she won’t go home –– I wend my way through the days on watch for grace notes which tumble onto me like snowy flakes before the melt: each one unlike any before or aft, each one magnificent in its own faceted incandescence.

And, in the spirit of blessed Francis of Assisi, I am stringing them into a canticle, a praise song typically referencing Gospel text. I’m not so literate in those Scriptural ways, so I am stringing mine in the vernacular of the everyday:

Praise be the blessed, blessed nurse named Vishruti whose charcoal eyes are ever sparkling, and whose attendance to my mama’s every woe is pure blessing before my most grateful eyes.

Praise be the harvest moon pinned high in the night sky one especially hollow night, and the acolyte Jupiter who clung to Moon’s southwestern rim, as if to catch any drippings once the melt began again.

Praise be my blessed “baby” brother who seems the answer to my every prayer before I’ve even prayed it: the one who keeps every necessary form on file (to ensure nary a hiccup in our mama’s journey), attends to every detail with fastidious care, and who is so blessedly tender with our mama’s every ache and pain and worry that in watching him tears spring to my eyes nearly every time. Praise be that brother who has always fit me like my other half. I’m 1/3/57 and he just happens to be 2/4/68. Mathematically sequenced, and aptly paired, we are.

Um, addendum to brotherly praise (did Francis addend his canticles? hmmm): As I was typing that very verse above, said saintly brother was ambling through a lumber yard, intent on rebuilding our mama’s four-poster bed to make it six inches closer to the ground, thus subtracting risk by six not-insignificant inches. And he’s not even the carpenter brother! Be still my brothered heart….

Praise be the ones who fill my stoop with dahlias, and chicken ala yummy, and farmer’s market bounty. And whose prayers and hand squeezes hold me up, even when I wobble.

Praise be my sweet Fred who holds my hand in the dark of night, even when I don’t let on that I am thinking hard about the day ahead, or the one just left behind…

Praise be Pope Francis who, in his latest encyclical, Laudate Deum, squarely implored us to face these crucial questions:

“What is the meaning of my life? What is the meaning of my time on this earth? And what is the ultimate meaning of all my work and effort?”

Praise be Alice Walker who gave us these lines in The Color Purple:

Listen, God love everything you love — and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration.

You saying God vain? I ast.

Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.

What it do when it pissed off? I ast.

Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.

Yeah? I say.

Yeah, she say. It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.

You mean it want to be loved, just like the bible say.

Yes, Celie, she say. Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?
Alice Walker, “The Color Purple”

Praise be that God who aims to please us, even with the color purple. Praise be the God who’s “always making little surprises.”

And praise be the simple, simple miracle of a smile spread across any human face. I don’t know why God thought to give us the capacity to upturn our lips in tenderness or joy, but oh, there is little so life-saving as that simple twitch of those few muscles.

In gratitude, in joy, in infinite blessing, and with deepest smile, for all the little surprises that steady us through and through…

what blessings steadied you this week?

5 Comments

April 29, 2022

when grace comes tapping at the windowpane…

amid a season of war and worry, on the very day when steam was all but rising from this keyboard––a deadline looming, conveyor belts of verbs and nouns at high production––there came a rustling in the bushes just beyond the panes of glass that stretch between my bookshelves.

the morning was punctuated with the sounds of preoccupation, the faintest plink barely tapping at the glass, more than the usual chatter between birds. over and over, takeoffs and landings from bush to branch to nearby picket fence. the occasional outburst of trills and warbles.

it was the quiet of the sound that most intrigued me, the sound of trying to be unnoticed, hard at work in the art of concealment, a most necessary survival skill when up against the odds of danger, in a world where prowling cats and coons, thunderstorms and untimely freezes are another name for doom.

because i knew my role in this rare showing was to be as discrete and invisible as possible, i barely shifted my eyes, dared not tiptoe near the glass, for fear of spooking, for fear of shutting down production.

turned out, the faintest murmurings were these: the sound of wing brushing up against the glass, the sound of branches being jostled to make way for the laying down of bits of grasses, dried and brown and wholly unremarkable.

but what was done, over the course of a single day, was not only wholly remarkable and breathtaking. it was only the beginning.

mama and papa–a pair of cardinals i know by name–had for the first time in all my decades decided to grace me with a front row seat on their reproductive spring: they’d chosen my very ordinary, very ungroomed evergreens, as the very spot to build their nest. it just so happens to be up against the glass, as if the window to the nursery in the maternity ward, the ones where long ago fathers pressed their nose against the glass to get a first peek at the progeny newly birthed and swaddled, the hard labor shielded from the men not allowed near delivery, too faint for such primal birthings.

over all my years, i’ve spied robins all but nesting in the public square. i’ve seen sparrows busily and noisily stuffing gutters and cracks in this old house with the makings of a nest. but never ever had i figured out just where it is the cardinals go to replenish the species.

i now know why. my guess is they’re the high scorers in the game of hide-and-seek. their nest, literally up against the glass, is all but impossible to see from the other side of the bushes, and wedged in in such a way that i cannot for the life of me peek into the bowl of the nest (believe me, when mama flits off to grab a seed, to relieve her feathered bum from all its incubating, i’ve climbed atop my window seat to try to fetch a look).

we’ve come to work in synchrony, mama cardinal and moi. i tap quietly at my keys all day long while she goes about her warming of those eggs all day long. once the sun goes down, i leave the premises, turn off the lights, shuffle off to the old maple table in the kitchen–not wanting a brood of mixed-up baby birds to mistake my desk lamp for a never-setting sun.

far as i can tell, and i tell you my guess here is based on scantest evidence, there’s not yet a clutch of little beaks to fill with bits of worms. each day, though, the drumbeat picks up pace. it’s been two whole weeks, and surely we must be getting close.

it’s a blessed thing, a most blessed thing, a thing that fills my soul, to be witness to the against-all-odds timeless knowings of the feathered flocks. those little birds know nothing of the ravages that tear apart the human flock. theirs is a universe––far as we know, and maybe i’m just wishful thinking––without the sorts of strife, without the demonic ingenuities to dream and build and drop a bomb. do birds know worry? does mama bird go about her business without the slightest hint of begrudgement? is she already plotting her grocery list? does she count her clutch, scan for misshapen egg, dread the day those baby birds take flight and leave the nest?

such are the questions that reel through my mind, as mama bird and i go about our tasks this one most blessed spring. it’s a wonder when grace comes tapping at the window pane. as if the heavens know just who and when needs holy balm far far from the madding crowd.

what grace has brushed you by this spring? what’s caught you unawares? what quiet has so startled you, and awakened you from your worldly slumbers?

7 Comments

March 19, 2021

prayer list

i remember walking the halls of my high school, tucking a day’s worth of worries into my backpack. i might have bumped into tears in the girls’ bathroom (for that’s what it was called back then). i might have noticed someone slam a fist to a locker. or leaned in to listen while threading my way through the throngs in the halls. i’d sit in my bedroom at night, tucked between the two twin beds, sprawled on my old braided rug, and one by one, i’d scribble a note, cut out a heart from construction paper, try to put words to all of the heartache, and the next morning i’d make like the valentine fairy and deliver each one. it was my earliest rendition of keeping a prayer list.

gathering up the heavy hearts of the day is what it means to live and breathe on this planet. we hoist up each other’s loads, to try to shoulder the ache in the hearts of the people we love. in the aches we just happen to hear about. and we don’t put them down till the darkness has lifted, has shuttled off to the distance.

i’m thinking about prayer lists because once again i found someone’s very big worry this week. and my heart, like hers, is now hurting. i’ve no idea really if taking on worry is something like taking on water. if now two boats are low in the lake, and that’s the whole of it, or if my taking on a bucket or two of hers might actually buoy hers even an inch. i’ll go with the inch. i do know that in my own hours of barely being able to breathe it sure helped to have someone ping me, let me know they were squeezing my hand from afar, reminding me every once in a while to remember to take a deep breath.

in the world where i grew up, prayer lists were as common as the alphabet. you heard about a heartache, you scribbled it onto your list. recited it every night before dinner, and when you dropped to your knees at bedtime. when it was really bad, a gargantuan worry, you called up the rectory and asked the church secretary to please scribble “special intention” onto the list. sometimes it felt like your whole pocket was filled with a long string of beads, one for each worry.

or maybe i was just raised by world-class worriers, and i learned early on that there are certain things that wrinkle your brow, that make you stare into the faraway. and that prompt you to scribble a name on a list, and stick it onto the fridge under a magnet. in the world i grew up in, worries weren’t simply invisible. worries showed up in pencil on paper.

i can’t imagine not worrying. but maybe to worry is another name for “to care.” to bump up against the hard edge of our superpowers, and see there’s a cliff and we can’t go one step farther, not even an inch. which is where the prayers swoop in. which is where we throw up our arms, and look toward the clouds, because a hundred thousand years ago someone might have mentioned that that’s where the angels hang out. but, honestly, truly, those are just motions. the point is we knead into our hearts, into the very core of our breathing, the clear and certain intention of the someone we know, or the someone we love, who is bearing an impossible burden. and life sure would be easier if we were all out pushing each other’s wheelbarrows. if we all gathered round, 1-2-3 hoist!, and did what we could to carry their loads for even a minute.

so, for my faraway friend who i love very much, i turned to one of the saints i met in my life, a very, very tall and glorious soul who once folded himself into the brown-plaid front seat of my little brown toyota corolla. his name was john o’donohue, and at the time he was a priest, a priest with a brogue (the very best sort), and a poet with a soul so big you felt like you could climb right in it. he was in the business of putting words to the flickers and blips of the heart that escape most everyone else on the planet. but he had telepathies and poetries inside him, and he wrote like nobody else’s business.

this is the blessing — the beannacht — he wrote for his mother. it’s nearly famous now, but it’s so very beautiful, and it captures nearly every last drop of the wobbles and soft spots that come when life hits the skids.

this is for my friend who i love, from a poet i call a most blessed friend, an anam cara, or soul friend, a concept my poet friend made a little bit famous because he wrote a book all about it.

a beannacht from john o’donohue, God rest his soul; born on a new year’s day, he died in his sleep the night after january 3, in 2008, just barely 52.

john o’donohue, anam cara, friend of the soul

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

what are the lines you recite when you are carrying the worries of someone you love?

here’s my long-ago tribune story about the day i spent with the blessed poet, which just so happens to have run in the paper on st. paddy’s day, in 1999. so it’s fitting for this week, 22 years later. egad.

18 Comments

December 9, 2016

ten: a decade of keeping close watch

a decade is long. a decade is 10, of course. but in this particular case, a decade is the distance between a little boy who was five, and finding his way through kindergarten, and now, a sophomore in high school, a sophomore wishing he was in a faraway high school. a decade is the distance, too, between a boy of 13, an eighth grader who dared his mama to type her way into the dawn (otherwise known by the hardly poetic verb blogging), and the man he is today, 23, and heading to law school.

a decade, too, is the distance i’ve grown since the dawn of december 12, 2006, when i tiptoed into the dim light of my writing room, once the garage of this old house, and sat down to type.

what i wrote that long-ago morning was this:

we are looking for everyday grace. i believe that in quietly choosing a way of being, a way of consciously stitching grace and Beauty into the whole cloth of our days, we can sew love where before there was only one moment passing into another. making the moment count, that’s what it’s about here. inhaling, and filling your lungs and your soul with possibility. learning to breathe again. learning to listen to the quiet, blessed tick and the tock of your heart. filling your soul with great light so that, together, we can shoosh away the darkness that tries always to seep in through the cracks, wherever they might be. please, pull up a chair….

everyday grace, surely, is the shimmering something we’ve found, the holiest thing. it’s there when you look, when you pay close attention. but it’s so easily missed. you need to attend to your post in the watchtower of life. need to be on the lookout, ever on the lookout. you’ve no idea where or when it will come, the everyday grace. it doesn’t arrive with trumpet blast, nor even a rat-a-tat drumroll. true grace is not seeking applause. simply the certain knowledge that it’s just brushed by, grazed against the contours of your heart and your soul. and it leaves you, every time, just a little bit wiser, a little more certain that Holy is all around.

and the quiet we set out to find, it’s infused every square inch of this space. in a world torn at the seams by incivility, in a world where, day after day, tenderness is trampled under the hard boot heels of hate and bullying and a toughen-up attitude, we’ve stayed gentle. we’ve traded in tenderness. we’ve held up a radiant grace, a blessedness that stitches hearts into a whole. and we’ve done it right here on the internet, the mad-dash highway that seems to traffic in all the things that this table is not.

when i think across the arc of years since i first faced the blank black screen (for back in the day, the words here were white against a canvas of black, an inside-out contrast that drove at least one dear friend cockeyed and made her dizzy besides), i tick through this litany: two grade-school graduations, one each from high school and college; a move halfway across the country, and a move back home; a whole presidency, and too many tragedies to begin to count. over the decade, i left my newspaper job, wrote two books, grew a garden, simmered a few stews, stirred countless bowls of porridge, dried even more tears. i’ve kissed goodbye two beloved friends, and a father-in-law like no other. we’ve watched a kid learn to read, another learn to row, nursed and buried a very old cat, counted stars, chased after the moon, sent my mama off to surgery twice, but mostly marveled at her devotion for tuesday night dinners, plied week after week for nearly two dozen years.

in all this sacred time here at the table, i’ve made and deepened friendships. i’ve stood back and watched strangers reach out across the way, find shared communion, grow close in friendships all their own. i’ve listened closely, taken notes, as the two boys i love have wound their way through the landscape of their lives. i’ve loved them in double time as i put their words, their stories, to ink. i’ve netted a moment or two worth savoring, worth holding to the light, worth keeping as long as i’m alive — and then some.

i hadn’t much clue where this typing would go, back on the first day i started. i certainly never dreamed that 10 years later, i’d still be typing, finding my way. i hadn’t a clue that here, in the sacred space of our shared creation, i’d find the holy bliss i’d always been after. i suppose i’ve always been a make-believe girl, and here, at the table, i used the one sure thing i know — words typed into inklings, carved into thoughts, emerged as insights — to claim a space i knew was possible: a place where radiance lights the way, and gentle truth is our guidepost.

on the dawn that marked the first full whirl around the sun (a year that had me writing five days a week, every single weekday), i wrote:

we set out — me and my soul and my fingers — to see where we’d get if we were dropped, one distant december, in the snowiest woods. if we stayed there for a year, groped around, poked under leaves, sat by a babbling brook. looked skyward. counted moonbeams and twinkling stars.

some days, i swear, my ol’ boots, the ones i wear when i’m hiking, meandering about in the woods, they felt like 100-pound weights on each foots.

more often, though, i was barefoot and running through meadows. i was catching a glimpse of the butterfly wing. feeling the gentle fingers of God on my shoulder. hearing the sound of my heart thumping, and thumping some more.

i only kept doing the smartest thing i know if what you want is to get from place A to place Somewhere: i put one foot in front of the other. kept my eyes mighty peeled. my heart too.

and look, here, where we are.

we made it through the woods, all right. but the thing is, along the way, i found a something in the woods that fills my lungs, that makes my blood run quick. that gives me something to think mighty hard about.

i’m thinkin’ maybe the woods is a beautiful place, a place that offers me and my soul just what we need.

with all my heart, thank you and bless you for making this a most beautiful space in the holiest decade of my one sweet life. more to come….

amen.

love, bam xoxox

what lit your way through the last holy decade?

17 Comments

November 25, 2016

blessing, stitch-by-stitch

but one of the blessings i count…

the dome of heaven, thin veil between earth and sky, is only now daubed with morning’s light. when i tiptoed down the stairs, eager to begin my count of blessings, there was only deep dark shadow, no stars stitched the dawn, not that i could see, constellations occluded by cloud.

i began the day in the hour where i find my deepest prayer: the still-slumbering hours when i alone animate the house. when the creaks in the floorboards come from my soft-fleshed soles pressing against the slabs of oak, when lightbulbs burn — or not — because i flick the switch. when clocks tick unencumbered. when my morning ministrations — scooping seed for the birds, scooping beans for my coffee, cranking the furnace, fetching the papers from the curb — become a liturgy of gratitude, as i lift the curtain on the day, as i sweep my heart in prayer.

cranberry and pear, under a raw-sugar cloud, before they simmer into relish

and never more so than the dawn that follows thanksgiving, when the refrigerator groans under the weight of turkey carcass, and every inch is strategically occupied with cranberry and cold mashed potato and autumnal roots roasted into surrender. and, because i was on my knees scrubbing last night, with a vat of vinegar and water by my side, the maple slabs by the stove no longer are slick with splattered butter and olive oil.

it’s become something of a tradition on this day when the world screams of one-day-only sales and count-down bargains, and the stories of mobs at the malls are enough to make me break out in hives, i retreat. i take to the woods. to the rustle of brittle grasses under my boots. to the chill against my cheeks. and when i come to a clearing, where a singular oak rises up from the prairie, i trace my gaze heavenward, beyond the bare naked limbs that scrape the late november sky.

the more the world rushes at me, the more certain i’m beating retreat.

but first i wrap myself in prayer, in the count-down of blessing, more emphatic than ever this year as i set out to steady myself in the aftermath of these weeks that have shaken me to my core, as the din all around seems fueled by a hate i can hardly fathom, as the discourse too often appears to have lost its soul.

i bow my head and begin.

before my feet hit the floor beside my bed, i am washed over in the knowing that this morning is especially blessed: all the beds in this old house are filled. the two boys i love, tucked under blankets, their dreams rising up from their pillows. i whisper infinite thanks for these two who, more than anyone, wrote the script of my sacred instruction, who taught me how to be alive, how to love, through their hours of question, and struggle, their shadow and light.

i pause in the closet to stretch a holey old sweater over my head. thank you, dear heavens, for old familiar clothes, the ones that make us feel deeply home, the ones that put on no airs, the ones not afraid to expose their thinnings and raggedy threads.

i find my way down the stairs, passing the wall of so many people i love, ancestral gallery, some in sepia tones, some black-and-white, all framed, all blessed and blessing. not a morning goes by that i don’t pass under their gaze, under their vigilant watch. thank you, all of you who came before, all of you who are wired into our DNA and our souls.

and then i round the bend to the kitchen, the high altar of this old house, really, where pots are stirred, and conversation bubbles up by the hour. where butcher-block counters hold up bottomless vats of talk, of questions and quandaries, as certainly as they bear the weight of my chopping and mincing. thank you, old stained maple block. and thank you, Most Sacred One, for the wisdom that sometimes comes to me, and the holy communion of shared silence in between.

i turn to brew coffee. my hand bumps into an old glass jar stuffed with thyme and oregano snipped from the window box just beyond the sill. thank you, dear God, for thinking to make leaves with a smell and a taste redolent of holiday, or our grandma’s kitchen, or some faraway place on the globe. thank you, too, for star anise and cinnamon stick simmering on the stove, my definition of heavenly vapors.

i tumble out the back door, my old banged-up coffee can spilling with shiny black sunflower seed. in the not-so-distance, i hear the ruffling of feathered wings, and soon as i dump my morning feast, the yard erupts in the darting and dashing of flocks hungry for their sustenance, hungry from the long night’s staving off the freeze. i’ve yet to run out of thanks — nor do i imagine i ever will — for the miracle of the sparrow and the scarlet-coated cardinal and the pair of blue jays who squawk like there’s no tomorrow.

i dash inside, shake off the cold, plop into my old red-checked armchair. i consider the wonder of a chair that wraps its wings around you, and sturdies your spine. thank you, Blessed One, for the hours i spend here, turning pages, inhaling the poetry that life can’t stanch.

and so it goes, our days a litany of blessing. i begin with the tiniest of stitches, a petit point of gratitude that stretches across the vast canvas of my every day.

the more i read, the more i listen, the more deeply i understand that the miracle we’re after, the wonder we seek, the beauty that tingles our spine, it doesn’t come with trumpets blaring, but rather in the accumulated whisper of one small blessing after another. the blessings at once unadorned and majestic. the blessings that make us whole, and fill us when we’re hollowed.

my blessings, entwined

before i ask what blessings fill your day, and your soul, i want to leave a poem i stumbled across yesterday, one that seems to belong here at the table. it’s a meditation on the blessing of a kitchen table.

Perhaps the World Ends Here
BY JOY HARJO

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

and now, what are the simple unadorned blessings that stitch together your day — and your soul?

2 Comments

September 23, 2016

the blessing of friday night dinner

the table is already set. the brisket — five pounds of it — now idles in the fridge. its exercise in surrender — from muscled slab to fork-tender succulence — began yesterday, when for nearly five hours it filled the kitchen, filled the whole house really, even the brick steps just beyond the kitchen door, with olfactory titillation — a mix of chili sauce and bay leaf, brown sugar, red wine, clove and peppercorn.

no one’s coming for another 12 hours. but the preamble, the moment the binder of family recipes is pulled from the shelf, the moment i place the call to the butcher who always cracks a joke about my irish surname and my jewish cooking, that’s when i begin to be swept up in the magic of it all.

and this friday night, in particular, brings with it a whole new landscape. for all the shabbat dinners i’ve served, and there’ve been many, this is the first time our firstborn is taking the train, and coming home, or coming back to this old house anyway. his home now is miles away. but not too many miles. not as many miles as he’s been before, and will be again. so, tonight, i am sliding into the folds of a brand-new cloth, one i’ve not before slipped my arms, my heart, into. all week, i’ve had flashes of the old mama i must now be, the one with the ample bosom, and the flour-smudged apron, the one who opens wide the front door, as she pushes back the floppy curls now dripping from the workout in the steamy kitchen, and welcomes in her sprawling brood. (ditch the ample bosom, ditch the flour-smudged apron, and the portrait takes a closer resemblance to my reality.)

i’ve had this friday night on the calendar for weeks now. it’s the shabbat when, after dinner, we will go to synagogue to say the mourning prayers, the prayers of yartzeit, marking the one year since my father-in-law, my boys’ beloved grandpa, the only one they ever knew, died.

for this night, the word went out: please be home for dinner.

and so, some time this morning, our old red wagon, now parked on a leafy college campus in iowa, will point east, pass cornfields and the occasional shimmering tower, and finally pull down our alley, bringing home the son who has now been without his father for a whole orbit of the globe around the sun. another boy will hop off his bike, park it in the garage, maybe think to wash his hands, once inside the bustling kitchen. and the third dinner guest will climb off the train, tuck his briefcase under his arm, and stride along acorn-pocked sidewalks till he gets to this old gray-shingled house.

it’s the blessing of the friday night dinner, a blessing like no other i have ever deep-breathed. as the week lurches to a close, as deadlines are met, and hustle and bustle hit pause, i circle in on final preparations. candles stand erect on the table. lids topple off the coterie of pots and pans. i blanket the challah — the loaf of braided egg bread that’s a staple of shabbat — with the cloth my firstborn penned with brightly-colored markers long ago in kindergarten sunday school. wine will be poured.

and one by one, they’ll trickle in, the boys i love. they’ll have put their busy weeks, their worries and distractions, behind them. i’ll strike the match, put flame to wick, and unfurl the first of the three blessings. blessings for the sanctuary of time we’ve constructed friday after friday, just before sundown, according to ancient text and modern-day awe. for all time is holy, but on friday nights when the table’s set, the candles are burning, and the faces you love are the ones you look up to see, that’s when the cloak of holiness drapes most certainly around your shoulders.

tonight, we’ll raise a glass of deep red wine, and my husband will lead us in the prayer we call “grandpa’s prayer,” the shehecheyanu, the blessing reserved for the most extraordinary times, the most sacred times. the times when you reach deep down to the bottom of your soul, and pull up grace and blessing. when every pore of your being shimmers with the knowing of how richly, finely, you’ve been blessed, anointed by purest holiness.

and because i stumbled on my own jewish prayer of blessing, of remembering, i too will recite words that stir me to full attention, words that make me bristle with deepest knowing just how sweet the hour is, every blessed hour, and the turning of each season. and the knowing, too, that the ones we love are ever woven into the whole of who we are.

the words are these:

In the rising of the sun and in its going down, we remember them.

In the blowing of the wind and in the chill of winter, we remember them.

In the opening buds and in the rebirth of spring, we remember them.

In the blueness of the sky and in the warmth of summer, we remember them.

In the rustling of leaves and in the beauty of autumn, we remember them.

In the beginning of the year and when it ends, we remember them.

When we are weary and in need of strength, we remember them.

When we are lost and sick at heart, we remember them.

When we have joys that we yearn to share, we remember them.

So long as we live, they too shall live, for they are now a part of us, as we remember them.

—Text by Rabbis Sylvan Kamens and Jack Riemer from Gates of Prayer, R.B. Gittelsohn

may the memory of my beloved father-in-law, arthur zavel kamin, ever be a blessing. and may your friday night be drenched in all that is holy, is deep, is broken loose from the shackles of haste and deadline.

do you have a weekly pause for holiness? what’s your preamble for sinking into sacred time?

18 Comments

May 6, 2016

he gave us a year: this mama will never forget

DSCF1325

the first inkling came a year ago december. it was a bitter cold sunday, and the voice on the line was one that had been making my heart skip since the first time i heard it. the words that followed were these: “mommo, i’ve been thinking. i want to do something meaningful in the year between college and law school, and i can’t think of anything more meaningful than being there for tedd. i think i’ll come home for a year.”

such is the sound of wishes come true. of prayer you hadn’t even put to words, come tumbling true. a mama’s wildest hope.

so, back on a sultry june afternoon, the old black sedan pulled down the alley. out spilled a boy and a thousand some boxes. a childhood bedroom was duly re-ordered. carpet was ditched; floorboards, exposed. old books, the books of a boyhood, were pulled and tossed in a box. college tomes took their place. jobs were procured, the ones that would keep him busy by day. by night, he made his place at the side of the much younger brother, the brother just finding his way into high school, a high school with corridors known to be steep.

DSCF1307 for one whole year, a year now gliding toward its close, big brother and little have entwined their hearts a little bit closer. there’ve been late-night runs for grilled cheese. and sartorial counsel unfurled at the bathroom door. there’ve been soccer goals saved in front of the cheering — and very proud — older brother. and shoulder-to-shoulder talks on the couch, in the car, on the all-night airplane ride.

it was into his big brother’s arms that the little one fell the morning our old cat died. the two of them crying, together. one of them wailing, “he was our third brother.” both of them wholly understanding the depth of that truth.

he was here for his brother, yes, but he was here, too, for the whole of us — night after night, as we sat, held hands, and whispered a prayer before picking up forks. not one single dinner for four did i ever take for granted. each one felt sacred. felt numbered.

he was here in this unforgettable year, this year of loss as much as gain. he was here the day we got word that his grandpa had died; that very night, he stood by the side of his papa, both wrapped in their prayer shawls, at synagogue, on the eve of the most solemn day of atonement. he was there, to hold his father’s elbow during the hebrew prayer of mourning. he was there to notice the tear that spilled from his father’s eye. i was too. i saw and felt with my whole soul the presence of father and son standing shoulder-to-shoulder, prayer shawl-to-prayer shawl, in the hour of that father’s deepest grief.

he was here, too, when friend after friend said goodbye before dying, in this year of hard loss. he was here to wrap his arm, and his laughter, around the grieving widower who has spent most every weekend with all of us, sopping up the pieces of his deeply shattered heart.

he was here for me, his old mama. the one who will never tire of long talks at the side of his bed, or chopping in sync at the kitchen counter. i never even minded the piles of laundry, knowing with each pair of boxers i folded that it was a task that wouldn’t last. i considered it something akin to charming to iron old shirts, to track down orphaned socks.

the what’s-next isn’t quite worked out. but the calls are out. the interviews, scheduled. a move will be in the mix. i know that. i’ve always known that.

which is what made this year the most priceless gift i could have imagined. a mother’s gift beyond measure.

it was all a blessing. all wholly unexpected. all counter to cultural norms that these days send kids sailing post college. he came home. he didn’t mind — not so much anyway — the questions from neighbors, the ones who might have looked askance at a kid whose only post-college option appeared to be a return to the roost. we knew otherwise. we knew the whole time.

he’d come home for one reason only: love.

he’d come home for the rare and breathtaking gift of stitching together two hearts. hearts born eight years apart. hearts whose plots on the lifeline had necessarily thrown them into parallel orbits — when one was learning to drive, the other was learning to read. when one was finding his way through a college quad, the other was starting out middle school. but this year — one starting high school, one a man of the world and not too old to remember well the poignant trials of this particular high school — there was much deepening to be done. they could laugh at each other’s jokes. play each other’s silly screen games. bolster each other’s hearts when either one was pummeled.

what they grew, over the shifting of seasons, over late nights and not-so-early mornings, was a brotherly love to last a lifetime.

i often flash forward in my mind’s eye, imagine them calling each other in the long years ahead. i imagine their faces, lined with deepening grooves, the ones that come from living. i imagine their manly voices, calling long-distance — just to laugh, simply to celebrate, to be the front line in each other’s rescue squad.

i once feared that the older one — long the only one — would be all alone after we’d gone. i know now, i pray now, that they’ll long have each other’s company — shared stories, shared love, unbreakable bond.

and so, on the brink of that second sunday in may that honors motherhood, i find myself sated. i need no toast points ferried to bed. no violets clumped in a vase. i don’t even need a hand-drawn card. i’ve lived and breathed a year i never expected. in the short story of my life there will always be this one radiant whirl around the sun.

and that’s more than i’d ever have dreamed when someone once showed me the flickering spot on the ultrasound, the one they said was his heart, very much alive. the one that ever since has quickened the pulse of my own. my very own metronome, come home, all in the name of pure love.

happy blessed day of mothering, to all who mother in the infinite ways of that certain brand of loving. to my own mama, and the mother of my heart, the one i was gifted through marriage. may your days be filled with the knowing that the children you birthed simply adore you. and may the memory of the mamas who birthed you, and loved you, fill your hearts on this day of honoring a mama’s rare love.

what one gift do you wish for, what one unimaginable gift? or have you found it already?

44 Comments

December 18, 2015

wintery blessings

cookie baking wintery blessings

it’s in the air, i know it. it seeps in through those unsuspecting places, the nooks and crannies of the heart that must be so hungry.

hungry for quiet, for the magic of christmas — the original hushed and hidden-away story, one that brings me to tenderest tears every time. every time i really truly stop to think the whole thing through, to absorb every blessed drop of a story that begins in deepest humility: travelers, bone-weary travelers trekking by donkey, who can’t find a room, who settle in the hollow of night in a shadow-laced barn, where a baby is birthed, wonder child, and laid in the feed trough, where the lowing of cows and the bleating of sheep fill in for the heavenly chorus.

it’s a story that begs silence, the in-rush of awe. it’s a story that begs us to listen. to stanch all the noise and perk up our ears. and our hearts.

i found myself nearly glistening yesterday, wrapped in the gray of the afghan day out my window. christmas-y tunes cranking loud and emphatically. dumping flour by the cupful into a bowl where eggs had been cracked, vanilla dolloped, and my grandma’s cookies once again were soon to be pulled from the oven. kitchens, of course, are magical places.

and this is the season for magic. this is the season that sparks the little child inside us all. maybe that’s why we wrap it in tissue-y papers, and tie it with candy-cane string. maybe that’s why we loop glistening lights onto already beautiful boughs from the forest. and dig deep in the recipe tin. to unearth a little bit of the child we were and always will be.

yesterday, i marveled at the circles of life: marveled that my grandma’s century-old recipe was printed onto a recipe card that came with a book that i wrote, and i was once again rolling out that buttery dough for those cookies, this year to be ferried to the school, the inner-city break-your-heart school, where my firstborn is now a teacher, teaching children from kindergarten to eighth grade how to read. i don’t think the layers of christmas get much more christmas-y, much more blessed, than that.

this year, especially, i’ve noticed that christmas — and with it a host of wintery blessings — comes whirling through the air, whether you’ve decked the house, or tucked away boxes. or not. this year at our house, not many boxes are tucked away. we’ve somehow slipped into a fairly box-less christmas. we’ve certainly dialed down the mad-dashing. i suppose i’ve spent too many christmases plum tuckered out by the time i panted across what felt like a finish line.

and the beauty of that — i seem to have discovered — is that i feel just as filled with christmas, with the essence of christmas, without all the noise. maybe because there’s so little noise.

there is simply a blanket of sumptuous calm — a gift in december, indeed. it’s rare, and it’s blessed. and it calls us by name, and by whisper. come, savor this hour; this hour is holy, this hour is yours.

in the spirit of quietly sharing this unfettered gift — the abundance of heart that tumbles down from the heavens (not unlike the few flakes that, on cue, just started to fall out my window) — i thought i’d bring to the table this morning a string of the wintery blessings my beautiful friends at abingdon press (the fine folks who published slowing time) made for me to sprinkle across the december landscape.

they must have workshops of elves who whip up these sweet little morsels. they’ve taken lines from the pages of slowing time, and made them into delectable little picture postcards (that’s how i like to think of them, anyway; in current vernacular they’re called “memes,” a word whose origins escape me completely). (p.s. of course i had to look it up, and my online dictionary tells me it’s a term coined by controversial evolutionary biologist richard dawkins in 1976 to convey the way cultural information is transmitted. aren’t you glad you now know?)

anyway, i thought i’d sprinkle a few across the table this morning. and they’re yours to keep, to do as you wish. you could print them out to make a holiday card. or tuck them into the pages of your favorite book. you could pin them on a cork board, of the actual or virtual variety. or you could simply scroll by, and think, oh, how nice.

here’s one… Meme-SavorWintersDream

and, oh look, here’s another…

Meme-ComeAlive-2

and then there’s this sweet one….

Meme-RedBird

and, at last, there’s this little bit of story time. so grab your mug, curl your toes under your bum, wrap in a blanket, and here’s little old me reading a wintery story……

those sweet elves made even more — a recipe card, among the stash — but that’s enough for this morning. if you care to see more, and happen to be on facebook, they’re being posted, blessing by blessing, on the Slowing Time page. or search for #WinteryBlessings.

for now, though, i’m slipping off to chase a few sugary sprinkles out of their hiding places. in the deep dark of last night, we had no real idea where the sprinkles were landing….

but first, deep-down wishes for the quietest, most blessed moments this season of stillness has to offer. may you find joy rushing into your heart, and awe filling your soul.

love, quietly,

bam

what do you count among your wintery blessings?

12 Comments

December 11, 2015

nine.

nine

we mark time to measure something far deeper than the number of days. we mark time to take stock of our soul. to plumb its depths. to trace across its undulations. to peek into the shadowy places, and bask in the patches of pure illumination.

tomorrow, the twelfth day of the twelfth month, this old chair will once again glide across the stretch of shadow and light on which it began. its ninth circle round the sun. nine years of keeping watch, of perking my ears to the faintest of whispers. the whispers of the heart, yes. but just as certainly the wind rustling the leaves. the blue jay’s squawking. the world holding its breath. the pounding of bare soles against hardwood planks, rushing to the door to welcome love home.

at the break of dawn on december 12, 2006, i tiptoed down the stairs to a little nook of a room where a screen glowed, a screen waiting to be filled with words, with pictures, with postcards from the front — the homefront, in this case. the heart and soul of the homefront.

i had no real idea how all of this would unspool. but i knew that i wanted to carve out a hollow of quiet, a tide pool along the rushing river of life, where you and i might plop our bottoms onto a rock, might dip our finger into the current, might watch the light shifting, listen for the crunch of the forest under the wee padded feet of the creatures who call the woods home.

i knew i wanted a sacred someplace. a place where kindness prevailed. a gentle place, a home for tenderness and telling the truth. a place where we could bring our brokenness, or, just as emphatically, our bold claims of hope.

it would be an enchanted someplace. or at least that’s what i prayed.

i’ve long believed in enchantment. long believed in the possible. and the power of divine imagination. you can, sometimes, if you’re spectacularly lucky and a whole lot blessed, will your way to the landscape of which you dream.

when i was little i spent long hours in the woods across the way from the house where i grew up with a motley crew of four brothers. i plunked sticks into the pond where the ancient turtle basked on a log. i splashed across the rocks in the stream where crawfish bobbed from deep down in the dark.

that’s where i learned to believe in so very much of what still matters — the sanctity of silence, the incandescence of heavenly light, the blessing of being alone, the joy of muddy boots.

and maybe, too, that’s where i learned to believe that, fueled by imagination and spiced with a good dash of faith, i just might carve out a holy place.

and if there’s come to be anything holy about this make-believe table, circled with so many old chairs, it’s thanks to the good grace of your company — your day-after-day, week-after-week, year-upon-year coming by to share a few words, or a story, or kindness or wisdom. and ladles of love.

looking back over the nine blessed years — and thanks to the wizards at wordpress who keep track of these things — i can see at a glance just where these 729 posts have taken us, a bit of a roadmap in reverse, a by-the-numbers snapshot of what’s captured our imagination: 39 posts have considered the angels among us, 16 times i’ve laughed at myself (clearly, no one was counting), stillness has been a subject 22 times, motherhood 101, motherlove 44, mother prayer 17. we turned to cooking — for comfort, for joy — 42 times. blessings have been the subject du jour 64 times, paying attention 51 times, worry 11 (yet another serious under-estimate), wisdom only once (egad!). savoring moments, at 89 posts, is solidly a leitmotif.

and in just the last year here at the chair, we’ve traversed death and grief, awe and hope and hearts that are shattered by the most intimate of devastations or those played out on the world stage. we’ve considered quiet and the eloquence of silence. and this year, blessedly, the trumpets blared at the prodigal homecoming of my firstborn. i’ve written of words and books and harper lee. but if i had to pick three posts that will stick with me forever, it would be the prayer of remembering, the day my little one tried his hand at healing the sick, and, more than any other this year, the magic day at the magic hedge, where my most beloved friend and i pressed each sacred hour against our hearts, knowing, too well, the hours — and she — would soon slip away, a hole in my heart will ache till the end of time.

bless you. and thank you. for every kindness. for every dollop of wisdom. for your patience, your faith, and your blessedness. for the times you make me laugh out loud. and for every time you’ve made me wipe away a tear. from my heart to yours, a never-ending embrace.

may we never give up on the promise to infuse this weary old world with all the love and goodness we can possibly muster.

much love, b. images

22 Comments

pull up a chair

Tag: blessings

January 17, 2025

hope diamond, all right