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Tag: keeping watch

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?

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April 21, 2023

waiting. . .

i decided to give you a pretty picture of this season erupting, but doing it in slo-mo. this is korean spice viburnum waiting to open wide its little throats and let out its intoxicating perfumes. this is waiting, the spring edition.

waiting is the word of the week. word of the year, in fact––so far, anyway. i’m on the other side of surgery––and have the tic-tac-toe board crisscrossing my side to prove it. they got out what they needed to get out (i hope), though it was more than we’d been betting on. so now i’m waiting.

waiting is a quilt of many textures. sometimes it washes over me, with a calm that takes the sting away. sometimes i feel my heart kick into higher, faster gear. i try hard to turn off the nozzle that lets the worries out. but even my secondborn tells me i do too much of that. and he’s only been keeping watch for twenty-one of my years (and he is 300 miles away right now, so he’s out of range for any current worries; job one for me is to project calm to the one with the very, very giant heart). it’ll take two weeks for the blessed souls in the pathology lab to do what all they do to lay out the specifics of this little dervish that somehow found its way to the bottom of my lung. and that gives me time to sink slowly into the bath of this new reality.

waiting gives the human species time to settle in, to realize you’ve taken more steps into the unknown than you’d ever imagined you would. and you’re calmer––and maybe braver––than you’d ever ever imagined you could be (most of the time anyway). of all the worries i’ve worried over the years, i never added lungs to the list.

just the other week, i read a lovely line from a 96-year-old, a woman who knew she was on the last pages of her life, and so she scribbled out her truths for her children, her grandchildren, and her many greats. when asked what might be the most important thing she’d realized as she rounded the final bend, she simply said: “i wish i hadn’t spent so many hours worrying, cuz most of those worries never came to be.”

mostly, what waiting does is make me savor every minute. stepping out into the balmy springtime air. tucking my nose into the soon-to-be blossoms. listening to the owls hoot at 5:15 a.m. marveling at the miracles of modern medicine that can do so very very much, and for the most part do it so very lovingly. (i fell in love with my nurses, emily who stayed all night with me, and clare who worked by day. the care with which they changed dressings, filled syringes, listened to my questions, they made me so so proud that i was once one of them. and they made me realize how very much even their most basic medical tasks translate into a language that feels like love. i was a stranger to them when i was rolled into my cubicle of a room, but by shift’s end i was sad to see them leave. if you’re a nurse, believe me when i tell you you’re a living saint. to make the scared and fragile and confused feel safe and tended to is a sacred act, is sacramental, in that it lifts even the most perfunctory of duties into the closest thing i know to benediction.)

a few of things i marveled at this week, while idling in my wait station: my friend the nurse practitioner who, when she found out how much it hurt to try to lie down in bed, ordered up a giant wedge pillow that made last night a whole lot less bumpy. having two of my three boys right by my bedside all week long. one of ’em had me laughing (sidesplittingly is not such an apt description here, though it might have stretched some stitches) within hours of getting to my little room. (i was on the heart transplant floor, and, believe you me, i did not miss for a minute how blessed i was to be there only for a chunk taken out of my little lung.)

yet another surround-sound marvel in this week one of the two-week wait: the promise of springtime, that life bursts forth year after year after year. we live in an eternal spiral, and i am on for the holy blessed sumptuous ride. stepping into the still soft air, watching the goldfinch nibble at the thistle seed, rejoicing as the daffodils tossed off their snowy caps to rise and shine again, golden periscopes of spring. it felt to me like the arms of God were wrapping round me in the form of this gentle greening world.

in book world, one fine thing happened: there is a lovely lovely journal, the EcoTheo Review––a quarterly put out by a collective of poets (mostly), writers, and artists who plumb the depths of wonder and beauty in this world, and who claim as their mission, to “celebrate wonder, enliven conversations, and inspire commitments to ecology, spirituality, and art.” and they published a conversation we’d had a few weeks back about The Book of Nature, which you can read here. the editor who spent hours in our exchange of thoughts, Esteban Rodriguez is his name, is himself a poet, and one of the kindest, gentlest souls i’ve been blessed to come to know. it more than more than made up for the half dozen book events that got wiped off the calendar.

while i wait in these days ahead (and try so hard not to worry!), i’m going to be on watch, to soak up and see every blessed wonder and beauty in this holy world. i don’t want to miss a drop. i am following the instruction of richard rohr, the modern-day mystic, who asked:

Where is this God being revealed? Not in the safe world, but at the edge, at the bottom, among those where we don’t want to find God, where we don’t look for God, where we don’t expect God.

i’m going to look for God in every nook and cranny along this waiting way. because i’m fairly certain God comes in a thousand thousand forms: in the gentle touch of the nurse who poked my arm, in the bouquet dropped on my front stoop, in the tub of soup that now takes up a shelf in the fridge, in the box that’s on its way from zingerman’s deli in ann arbor, and in every last note and gentle text that simply says, “you got this, and i am here beside you.”

God comes most certainly in the hours when our waiting gives God more than plenty time to tap us on the heart, the soul, the noggin. i’m on watch while i wait…

where did you find God this week, or whatever is the name you give to the all-embracing goodness that i call the holy Author of it all?

she blossomed, my olfactory factory….
18 Comments
May 20, 2008

fading…

her teeny-tiny trumpets now have fallen to the ground, a carpet down below of brown-skinned souvenirs of what was.

her perfume, too, is lost. dissipated. lost to world beyond. the world of car exhaust and dryer fumes, lawn mower smoke and bacon burning on the griddle. the world of spring parading on.

lily-of-the-valley’s up next, the beauty queen whose reign is on the rise, demanding our attention as she sticks up and out her tender neck, heavy with those nodding bells that lure you to your knees so you can get a whiff.

she, my sweet viburnum, is just barely hanging on. my fragrant friend, on her final exhalations, and then she’s gone.

i thought it worth returning one more time. to pay heed to the notion that sometimes, oftentimes, we lose what left us dizzy. besotted. utterly and simply with head up in the clouds.

it–the thing that had us swooning, considering a cartwheel–is but an interlude. precious. sacred. it’s here and then it’s merely memory.

and it is the evanescence, the here-then-gone, that yanks our hearts, and stirs us, whispers in our ear: bless this moment, it is fleeting, always. like the tide, it washes in, trickles up the sand, and spills again, returning to the sea, the lake, the deep beyond.

but you knew that already. and so did i.

somehow, though, pausing, bowing as she passes, seems the thing to do. she is beauty fading, waning, drifting to the earth below in perfume-petaled snowflakes.

left behind, up where once she preened, she is little more than one last trumpet and a clutch of stubby little necks, each with head cut off, not unlike a clump of grapes denuded of its succulence. naked, as my mother calls the plucked-off concord stems, can’t abide them, cleans the mess with scissors, reprimands those who dare to leave behind a skeleton of what had been the clump of grapes.

so it is with viburnum on the distal end.

it is time then to genuflect, to drop our heads and thank the hardy bush, the one that asks for no attention, makes no demands all year. except for that single week or two when she is joy ascending, bursting, beckoning all who wander by within an acre of her puff-puff-puffing tailpipes, spewing ’round-the-clock, top-secret nose-bewitching formula.

she reminds, as she fades from foreground to unnoticed backdrop, that we all, all of us, have our shining moments, and then for 50 other weeks of every year we simply breathe and reach for sunshine, and swallow rain, because without it we’d be parched.

and she signals, too, this passing thought: even when we appear as ordinary as a bush with plain old leaves, we have, somewhere deep inside, what it takes to be a momentary, holy, neck-craning, oh-my-goodness-did-you-see-that-smell-that-sense-that source of radiance.

most of the time, day in and day out, we are not so much something to write home about. we are ordinary. waking. chewing. making beds. chasing after dreams. hauling out the trash.

but in any given moment–depending on what’s asked of us, how deeply we dig down into the luminescence that dwells inside–we, like sweet viburnum early in the month of may, can become holy transcendence.

we can exude a sweetness, and all that’s truly wholly fine. step out from our ordinariness and remind the world: even a plain old bush, when given half a chance, can assume a stance of unabating beauty.

and when she fades, she is radiant still. it’s only that she cloaks it beneath her humble plumage.

come her turn again, she’ll show the world of what she’s made.

and that, it seems, is why she’s more than earned her post just beyond my kitchen window. she never fails to wow me, even in her faded, lasting wisdom.

once again, the gospel of the garden.

fading. coming and going. rise and fall. these are the universal themes of life, and surely of the seasons. ecclesiastes, i believe, spells it out. and year after year, the lesson is repeated and repeated. what lessons does the springtime bring to you? who are your teachers in the world abloom around you?

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