seeking stillness | pull up a chair

etched on a map, you might not notice; its tucked-away nature is but the flint of its charm: a treasure in almost plain sight. i might have zipped by a thousand times. it only took once for curiosity’s lure to draw me into its fold. and now it won’t let me go.

i’m coming to think of it as my footpath to the wellspring where the sacred stirs me, a nowhere-else-like-it sanctuary under the arbors, carved into the banks of a slow-flowing channel, a serpentine zig and a zag, through patches of woodland and birdsong.

as far back as i can remember, the woods behold wonder to me. my biography would be laced with a trail through woodlands and ponds and gurgling creeks. the never-ending acres of lily of the valley where my papa once drove me as a wee girl of three. the woods across from the house where i grew up, a copse that came to life in my imagination, one day a pioneer’s outpost, the next day a place to pretend i’m laura ingalls wilder in the big woods.

trailheads beckon. the barely-noticed aperture into the brush, where suddenly suburbia is leagues and leagues away. maybe it’s my imaginative overdrive, or my storybook tendencies. but give me a path, and a parting of trees leaning this way and that, and my feet cannot but go forward.

so it was on mother’s day morn when at last i found myself at the trailhead i’d vaguely noticed in the making. trees had been felled, and buckthorn burned by the wheelbarrow full. logs were yanked from where they’d fallen, and laid in a line, woodchips carpeted the paths in between. a woodland trail that meanders along and through a woods both ancient and newly imagined.

enchanted at first footfall, the only way to describe it. the ups and the downs, the dappling of light, and the peek-a-boo shadow. i walked with my eyes and my mouth wide open. over and over i marveled.

it’s a woods best described as delicate, at least in the moment—a petit point of vernal ephemerals stitched into the hillsides. springtime at its tenderest, springtime in may when it’s no longer tenuous.

it’s a place that suddenly holds inexplicable pull on me. enough to lurch me out of my wintry posture, curled over a book or an alphabet keyboard, snug in the nook by the wall-to-wall windows. it’s a place that lured the prayer right out of me. a place to dwell in my quietest stillness.

it’s my axis mundi, you see.

my friend chelsea steinauer-scudder, a breathtaking writer and author of the new book, mother, creature, kin: what we learn from nature’s mothers in a time of unraveling (broadleaf), explains: “i’ve heard countless stories of what i’ve come to think of as axis mundi experiences: encounters that have pulled someone into a deep experience of felt belonging upon the tiny bit of Earth that they find themselves upon.

“…within the study of religion, an axis mundi is a sacred pole, literal or figurative, which is fixed in a particular place, connecting Earth to the realms of heaven, underworld, and divine. “

these holy places might be a mountain (the Mauna Kea on Hawaii’s Big Island, known by the Indigenous peoples to be the umbilical cord, “the place from which the world emerged”), a cosmic tree (Norse mythology), the Ka’aba in Mecca (which pilgrims encircle seven times, as within it is the stone believed to have been handed to Adam as he was banished from Eden, so his sins would thus be forgiven).

or, in my case, an undulating woodland path along what in fact is a sanitation canal, though i pretend for the life of me that it’s an idyllic stream or a creek. one that just happens to shimmer an odd shade of aqua, a phosphoresence that might signal toxins astir.

my friend chelsea goes on to write that “we are a species in need of centers,” and within us there is encoded “an inherent capacity for place-based awe.”

those are the places with gravitational pull. a pull from the deepest well. the sacred well.

or, as chelsea distinguishes between the capital-A Axes Mundi (the most sacred of places so recognized by cultures or religions), and the small-a axes mundi (the ones you and i might call our own), the ones i know best are the quotidian, intimate ones, defined as “small, daily irruptions of majesty, those any-place encounters with the sacred.”

no surprise then that i can’t stay away. it’s an itch that can’t be scratched till i double-knot my sneakers, and try to remember sunscreen (i never do).

and it’s walking through a poem, quite literally. the soundscape a montage of birdsong and trill, punctuated with quarter notes and a screech that scares off the feeble.

these are the verses i walked among on just one of my mornings traipsing along the trail: common yellowthroat; red-bellied woodpecker; swainson’s thrush; red-winged blackbird; northern cardinal; blue jay; goldfinch; baltimore oriole; rose-breasted grosbeak; gray catbird; and a hairy woodpecker to boot. it’s as if the crayola crayon box was suddenly feathered in flight.

and in the flora department, a whole other poem: bloodroot, bluebells, celandine poppy, and columbine. lily of the valley, trout lily, spring beauty, wood anemone, and blue cohosh. jack-in-the-pulpit, shooting star, mayapples, and dutchman’s breeches.

all these names, which whirl in me thanks to the Original Mother Nature who schooled me, got me to wondering who in the world gave the names to the winged flocks and the leafy ones too. the stories behind names are their own wonders. the ones from folklore and legend are the ones that charm me most: jack-in-the-pulpit is said, of course, to resemble a preacher spreading the Good Word; the trout lilies’ mottled leaves resemble the markings of the freshwater fish; and dutchman’s breeches clearly resemble the pantaloons of one who’d also wear wooden shoes.

those, though, are merely the preamble curiosities, the ones that loosen my soul, open me up to the prayer that burbles up whilst sauntering deeper and deeper, per God’s gravitational pull, unwilling to pause till i get there. to the place where i go to feel as saturated with the sacred as i do of the sun when at last i plop onto the stump of a log, and consecrate the most blessed moment of being.

where is your axis mundi?

and before we part, a poem worth pondering, from the late, great polish poet and nobel prize-winner, wislawa szymborska

Life While-You-Wait

Life While-You-Wait.
Performance without rehearsal.
Body without alterations.
Head without premeditation.

I know nothing of the role I play.
I only know it’s mine. I can’t exchange it.

I have to guess on the spot
just what this play’s all about.
|Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,
I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.
I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.
I trip at every step over my own ignorance.
I can’t conceal my hayseed manners.
My instincts are for happy histrionics.
Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.
Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.

Words and impulses you can’t take back,
stars you’ll never get counted,
your character like a raincoat you button on the run?
the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.

If only I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,
or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!
But here comes Friday with a script I haven’t seen.
Is it fair, I ask
(my voice a little hoarse,
since I couldn’t even clear my throat offstage).

You’d be wrong to think that it’s just a slapdash quiz
taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.
I’m standing on the set and I see how strong it is.
The props are surprisingly precise.
The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.
The farthest galaxies have been turned on.
Oh no, there’s no question, this must be the premiere.
And whatever I do
will become forever what I’ve done.
~ Wislawa Szymborska ~

(Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, trans. S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh)

not all gravitational pulls are without hazard

8 Comments

May 26, 2023

catching my breath . . .

catching my breath is something i do quite often these days. my breath runs away from me. or it gets lost deep down inside me, down where the sacs of my lungs are no longer, i sometimes imagine. and i steady myself in ways i like to think are inconspicuous: i lean against walls, i grab onto the arm of whomever i’m walking with. i plop swiftly onto the nearest flat plane. i lurch to a pause in the thick of a sentence, one that never would have stopped me before.

but the breath i’m catching this week is the breath that comes from deeper than lungs. it’s the breath of being home, of feeling swept into the holy embrace of the nooks and crannies you know by heart. the ones on which you’ve been keeping watch for whole long decades. the ones you sense keep watch on you.

especially the ones in the garden, the patch of earth you call your own. where every square inch is a story unfolding, a story that bedazzles me, that fills me with wonder, a story that feels like watching the impossible prove the possible: like how, after three years of being nothing but prickly canes and leaves, does the raspberry bush know to put forth teeny tiny clusters of what will be sunbursting shades of fat juicy berries? or how, out of the stark and bare ground, does the fern know to jut forth frill upon frill of feathery fronds, tight curled into commas that only slowly relent? and how, pray tell, does the red-breasted robin know right where in the grass to pluck out a worm? (here’s a hint: the robins can hear the slithering of the worm underground. how’s that for astonishing wonder?!?!)

because i’m sauntering at the slowest of paces these days, i find my long silent spells in the garden particularly punctuated by questions like these. and the answers that come, given their long-winded meanders and the places they take me along the circuitous way, give me plenty of time to consider how all of creation proclaims the one certain truth i need in these days: there is an animating force, beyond comprehension, and as it choreographs the turning of this holy earth and the unfolding of wonder, so too it keeps watch over me. which is just another way of saying the God who greens the world is the very God who, so too, keeps me so tenderly, tenderly close.

being home, being back in my garden, is the closest i know to curling into the palm of my God’s holy clutch.

we’re only home for the shortest of spells, which is why i’m so busily catching my breath here. last week we were away for a longer stretch of days––truth be told––than i’d felt ready to be, but it was the graduation of that boy i so love. and it was, uncannily, at the very same time, ultimate frisbee, the national championship. for three days in the sun, and the rain, perched on the sidelines, and under the power lines, in picturesque obetz, ohio. and in a few more days we are going away again: to the city of lights and baguettes and the eiffel tower. it’s a rare trip for the whole motley lot of us, and i can’t think of a quartet to which i’d rather belong. even if it means this ol’ homebody is going to have to uproot her slowpoke of a self once again.

a part of me aches to leave so soon. i am, after all, the queen of the homiest homebodies. but, as i work to absorb the wisdoms this hard chapter brings, i will trust my ferns to unfurl, and my not-yet berries to fatten. i will leave the robins and cardinals in charge. and i will inhale the city of lights, and a few baguettes besides.

i long to be home again. home for a long quiet summer. where my breath will be caught, and my lungs will be filled, and, holy God willing, i will be deeper than ever before.

a few treasures before i go….

And I am thinking: maybe just looking and listening
is the real work.
Maybe the world, without us,
is the real poem.
Mary Oliver (an excerpt from “The Book of Time”)

and this from my friends at SALT Project, who this week bring us denise levertov’s poem about caedmon, the earliest english-writing poet whose name we know, though only one of his compositions—translated as “caedmon’s hymn”—survives. caedmon was a seventh-century northumbrian cowherd, our SALT friends tell us, “who took care of the local monastery’s cattle, and who wasn’t much of a talker or a singer (cowherds would sometimes sing to pass the time, keep the cattle close, and keep predators away).” but “one night in the cowshed, the story goes, an angel inspired him to sing about creation—and he never looked back. convinced he was divinely called, the monastery took him in as a monk, and he wrote lyrics for songs on Genesis, Exodus, the New Testament, and more, always honoring God the Creator. so when it comes to the English language, the earliest poet we know of was a composer praising creation.”

in “caedmon,” levertov imagines that fateful night, to tell the story of an ordinary, humble person who’s given the courage to speak, create, and sing.

*one other note, from SALT: “a twist / of lit rush” refers to a rushlight, an old, inexpensive sort of candle (essentially a wick of rush drenched in fat).

Caedmon

All others talked as if
talk were a dance.
Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet
would break the gliding ring.
Early I learned to
hunch myself
close by the door:
then when the talk began
I’d wipe my
mouth and wend
unnoticed back to the barn
to be with the warm beasts,
dumb among body sounds
of the simple ones.
I’d see by a twist
of lit rush the motes
of gold moving
from shadow to shadow
slow in the wake
of deep untroubled sighs.
The cows
munched or stirred or were still. I
was at home and lonely,
both in good measure. Until
the sudden angel affrighted me — light effacing
my feeble beam,
a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:
but the cows as before
were calm, and nothing was burning,
nothing but I, as that hand of fire
touched my lips and scorched my tongue
and pulled my voice
into the ring of the dance.

+ Denise Levertov

how do you catch your breath?

a heavenly friend arrived at my door with a library of my books, in miniature.

p.s. i promise a few picture postcards from paris….

happy blessed day to my beloved jan, safe harbor for so many years. may this year bring you those things of which you dream….

14 Comments

January 20, 2023

when the quiet you get isn’t quite the one you asked for. . .

maybe i mumbled. maybe the universe mistook what i’d been thinking aloud. or maybe i’d be wise to watch what i wish for.

yes, i’m the one who mentioned just last week ago that i was wiped out; low tide had come with no hint of refueling. so i might have muttered something about how a few days of monasticism would suit me just fine.

i guess i forgot to note that i sought a quiet that comes without quarantine. one that’s not particularly de l’instant, of the covid moment.

till late last night, it was the other one in this old house who’s been behind closed doors (with a bath towel stuffed into the under-door crack –– just for good measure!) since sunday night when first he sniffled and then asked if i might fetch a thermometer. it seems his two years dodging the red-ringed virus came screeching to a 102-fahrenheit halt.

turns out he might be living proof that sauntering into a sauna isn’t quite on the recommended list for things to do during pandemics. (not for nothing did i go to nursing school!)

till late last night, i was the nurse and he was the patient. the little pink line — the one from our friends at abbott labs, the one the government is kindly mailing to any household that asks — hadn’t shown up under my nose. but then it did. covid 2.0 came knocking. and let itself in.

might as well hang a shingle outside the house –– warning: covid at work.

i never really thought i was going to end-run it. might as well have been watching a sand dial. knowing any minute the sand would run out. and my number was up. again.

for the record: it’s a very odd thing to be home alone on the other side of a quarantine room. we’d a lovely little routine, choreographed by the mother of invention. there’s an upturned milk crate just outside the room where he’s holed up (the very chamber i’d scrubbed top to bottom soon as the college kid moved out and back to college). i deposit deliciously cooked breakfast, lunch, dinner and even bedtime snacks there in the tray on the perch, fully masked every time (meaning the mask’s on me, the one doing the depositing).

i’d become so attached to my mask i never traipsed up the stairs — or near the stairs — without it. given the odds, it might have been a fool’s charade. even KN 95 can’t erase what’s already invaded.

for the most part, i stuck to my pre-meditated monastic agenda all week: stirred simmering soups, mopped the kitchen floor (with no worries that big soles would be soon slopping across it), and got to the end of a (brilliant) 400-page tome. i did add plenty more lysol to the cleaning equation, and enough alcohol wipes to get a bit woozy.

but honestly, there is something comforting about not needing any excuse to cower indoors. as long as a few other people i love stay in the clear, i will more than forgive the masters of the universe for muddling my one little wish.

because i had lots of time for reading this week, i found one or two things worth passing along. from vietnamese zen master thich nhat hanh, who died a year ago sunday (january 22), here’s one of his ten love letters to earth. as i look toward the end-of-march publication of my next book, The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text, i find myself endlessly drawn –– with deeper and deeper attention –– to those who’ve penned sacred devotions to the wonders of this holy earth.

II
Your Wonder, Beauty and Creativity

Dear Mother Earth,

Each morning when I wake up you offer me twenty-four brand new hours to cherish and enjoy your beauty. You gave birth to every miraculous form of life. Your children include the clear lake, the green pine, the pink cloud, the snowcapped mountain top, the fragrant forest, the white crane, the golden deer, the extraordinary caterpillar, and every brilliant mathematician, skilled artisan, and gifted architect. You are the greatest mathematician, the most accomplished artisan, and the most talented architect of all. The simple branch of cherry blossoms, the shell of a snail, and the wing of a bat all bear witness to this amazing truth. My deep wish is to live in such a way that I am awake to each of your wonders and nourished by your beauty. I cherish your precious creativity and I smile to this gift of life.

We humans have talented artists, but how can our paintings compare to your masterpiece of the four seasons? How could we ever paint such a compelling dawn or create a more radiant dusk? We have great composers, but how can our music compare to your celestial harmony with the sun and planets—or to the sound of the rising tide? We have great heroes and heroines who have endured wars, hardship, and dangerous voyages, but how can their bravery compare to your great forbearance and patience along your hazardous journey of eons? We have many great love stories, but who among us has love as immense as your own, embracing all beings without discrimination?

Dear Mother, you have given birth to countless buddhas, saints, and enlightened beings. Shakyamuni Buddha is a child of yours. Jesus Christ is the son of God, and yet he is also the son of Man, a child of the Earth, your child. Mother Mary is also a daughter of the Earth. The Prophet Mohammed is also your child. Moses is your child. So too are all the bodhisattvas. You are also mother to eminent thinkers and scientists who have made great discoveries, investigating and understanding not only our own solar system and Milky Way, but even the most distant galaxies. It’s through these talented children that you are deepening your communication with the cosmos. Knowing that you have given birth to so many great beings, I know that you aren’t mere inert matter, but living spirit. It’s because you’re endowed with the capacity of awakening that all your children are too. Each one of us carries within ourself the seed of awakening, the ability to live in harmony with our deepest wisdom—the wisdom of interbeing.

But there are times when we have not done so well. There are times when we have not loved you enough; times when we have forgotten your true nature; and times when we have discriminated and treated you as something other than ourself. There have even been times when, through ignorance and unskillfulness, we have underestimated, exploited, wounded, and polluted you. That is why I make the deep vow today, with gratitude and love in my heart, to cherish and protect your beauty, and to embody your wondrous consciousness in my own life. I vow to follow in the footsteps of those who have gone before me, to live with awakening and compassion, and so be worthy of calling myself your child.

—Thich Nhat Hanh, Ten Love Letters to the Earth

you can listen to all ten love letters being read by the editor of Emergence Magazine here.

and only because i will always and forever love the imaginative world of alan alexander milne, born january 18, 1882, in hampstead, london, here is this most precious mirrored image of father, son, and bear.

so now my quarantine continues. only this time fueled by advil. how would you spend a quarantine?

22 Comments

June 3, 2022

retreat to mothering earth…

my not-so-secret skinny rail of a garden

mothering, a verb that has always spoken to me for its broad application, its attachment to acts and not to a particular gender, doubles its duty as a descriptive of those acts as life-giving, as loving. now attach it to earth, allow it to describe the essence of so much of creation––and our place in it––and the whole shebang snaps into sharp focus: mothering earth embraces us, wraps us in her proverbial arms, allows us to rest our weary head against her bosom, her heartbeat. she holds us till the shaking ceases. she brushes the nettles from our hair, sets us back on our steadying way.

it’s a notion i found in pablo neruda’s “i ask for silence,” a poem that speaks to the stillness––the oasis from sound, from stirring––my soul is seeking.

. . . But because I ask for silence,
don’t think I’m going to die.
The opposite is true;
it happens I am going to live.

To be, and to go on being.

I will not be, however, if inside me,
the crop does not keep sprouting,
the shoots first, breaking through the earth
to reach the light;
but the mothering earth is dark,
and, deep inside me, I am dark.
I am a well in the water of which
the night leaves behind stars
and goes on alone across fields.

It’s a question of having lived so much
that I want to live a bit more.
Pablo Neruda, an excerpt of “I Ask for Silence” from I Explain a Few Things: Selected Poems

and, as neruda knows, so my unspokenness knows.

i find myself pulled into the garden, and soon down to my knees. muddy knees, grass-stained knees, be damned. i go down to the lilliputian place. where a dragonfly the color of limes is hovering; his shadow eclipsing the fat bud of a peony who might think the hoverer an alien from outer cosmos. where worms wriggle, endlessly defying geometries; i sense their delights, the deliciousness they find in the loam i’ve kneaded and kneaded over the years.

it is the apothecary without pills, mothering earth and her patches of garden. its potions are in the perfumes of the peony, the fading scent of the lilac now past bloom, past seduction. mothering earth’s elixirs are the stillness so still you can tell when the breeze barely moves. it’s the air, unfiltered. chilled or warmed by rivers of winds surging around the marble that’s ours, the blue marble. its dramas––ones that delight, ones that stir sorrow––are the openings and closings, the risings and fallings, of all that makes its home there, a cast not limited to botanicals. a cast of birds and butterflies, those wiggly worms and the many-appendaged crawlers (some call them creepy, i do not).

i retreat to mothering earth when the world all around and within gets too vicious, too ragged, too worn. my preferred posture is bent, and down low. i want to put my ear to the thrum of the grass growing and the roots deepening. i want to catch the morning light as it first drapes across the fronds of my ferns now at full mast.

i’ve been wobbling for weeks now with a dizzying, one that comes with heart pounding and queasiness in waves that feel pacific-sized. i’m convinced it’s the aftermath of christmastime’s covid, the red-ringed virus that finally caught up with me, never-minding my double masks and double boosters. it’s slowing me down, some days more than others. and being out where the breeze blows, and the sun shines in unbroken beams, it steadies me. long as i don’t do backbends or bows from the waist.

once a child of make-believe times and places, i retreat to that familiar fiefdom even now. even now with my own children long past making believe, long past six-feet, if anyone’s measuring. all week i’ve been building a gurgling fountain, a simple one, made from a moss-covered planter, filled with river rocks i’ve gathered from magical places over the years. in my imagination i’m building not simply a gurgler but a cavalcade of sound that will soothe me, cast its magical spell upon all who catch the music of water plashing on rocks. i am building a way station for birds and chipmunks, a place for even the hosta to dip her thirsty leaves. and i can get determined, refuse to give up, refuse to order a ready-made one from a catalog. determined is sometimes a polite way, a watered-down way, of saying i’m a wee bit obsessed. i can hear the gurgle in my mind’s ear, and despite a shorted-out extension cord, and a pump that gave up the ghost, i’ve not yet abandoned my plot. i’ll get to gurgling before the sun sets to signal shabbat this evening.

it’s all the perfect balm after weeks of editing, weeks of being torn by the news. i pay no attention to news when i’m flesh to flesh with mothering earth. my news of the day is which bloom is on the brink, and which is waning. the choreography of this mothering plot, it’s ceaseless.

sometimes we all need to be mothered. mothering earth mothers me.

and i bask in her stillness.

where have you found your stillness, your healing balms, of late?

well, here’s a first for the ol’ chair: a talkie, in the old vernacular. in other words, not just a picture but a gurgling picture……

9 Comments

December 18, 2020

archipelagos of calm amid a roiling sea

ar·chi·pel·a·go /ˌärkəˈpeləˌɡō/ noun

noun: archipelago; plural noun: archipelagoes; plural noun: archipelagos

a group of islands. “the Indonesian archipelago”
a sea or stretch of water containing many islands.

early 16th century: from Italian arcipelago, from Greek arkhi- ‘chief’ + pelagos ‘sea’. The word was originally used as a proper name ( the Archipelago ‘the Aegean Sea’): the general sense arose because the Aegean Sea is notable for its large numbers of islands.

alternative definition: calmus interruptus, in which rocky protruberances, barely discernible in dimension, arise from roiling fluid surface, providing flash of terra firma before which desperate swimmer loses grip, plunges once again into tempestuous sea — alone, afraid, intent on staying afloat. sanctity provided, ephemeral at best.

we turn to the mapmaker’s lexicon — complete with dictionary definition and etymology — because it was the faint and far-between dotted line of rock piles (aka the archipelago) that leapt to mind as the fittingest metaphor for an otherwise nearly indescribable heap of twists and turns, as i tried in vain to keep from keeling over amid this week’s drama of near historic family proportion.

it went something like this:

round about the middle of tuesday, the geography of my interior life morphed suddenly and without warning from restless squatting on the shores of big-enough occasional islands of calm (the sort where you might slow your breathing for as long as five-minute stretches, and in which you might temporarily put at least a shred of worries to the side) to swimming breathlessly through an archipelago of tiny anxious island dots, each one offering maybe a moment’s lull before the waves kicked up again. before i found myself paddling madly to not go glub-glub-glub.

while awaiting the biopsy results of brother No. 2 (see last week’s news), beloved brother No. 3 up and had a heart attack. a real one, a not-so-small one. oh, lordy. (i only have four brothers, so these odds are getting stiff.)

brother 3 — four years younger than me, the father of two young and glorious children — had called mid-afternoon that day (as ordinary as a tuesday might be when awaiting a second biopsy of someone you dearly love), wondering what to do about a terrible case of heartburn, a dyspepsia he was blaming on the banana pepper and hot sauce he had tucked into his lunch and the preamble pot of coffee that had started his until-then ordinary weekday. next thing we knew — and i mean within minutes — there was an ambulance and ER, swiftly followed by OR and days in ICU, all deeply laced with prayer upon prayer.

and i mean hard-knees-against-the-floorboards prayer. the highest octane of beseeching known to this prayerful sister.

as of this writing, brothers 1 and 4 are idly sitting in their homes, where they’ve been instructed to not move, not lift so much as a pair of scissors for fear of fate tap-tapping at their wintry windowpanes.

quite frankly, i’ve found it hard to breathe at various twists and turns in this wildly unspooling narrative. i was reportedly circling room-to-room-to-room the other afternoon, muttering, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” in more exclamatory than prayerful tones. (and i was not previewing the Christmas story.)

a mere week ago, i was finding episodic solace in simple kitchen tasks — slicing onions, plucking cloves. this week, that all went whirling out the window, and i could not have cared less if we swallowed air for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

there is only so much adrenaline one’s itty-bitty fight-or-flight pump can spurt and swoosh through veins. and i’m about to call a truce, to leave my shaky nerves stranded on some unassuming island. which is where the archipelago — or interrupted line of splintered refuge — comes in.

cling is the more appropriate verb in describing my posture when, amid hyperventilation or dizzying projections down the pot-holed road ahead, i catch my breath via one of my ever-shrinking litany of soothing balms. (hot bath; hot bath; hot bath.)

we humans do seem to have a godly bottomline default, a trapeze net for those stretches of our lives when all hell seems to be breaking from the quiet room where we try to keep it handcuffed to the chairs. in those rare quiet spells, when i might be sitting in the dark watching the dance of the candle flame, or folding one lone shirt from the dryer, or glancing toward the moon while taking out the trash, i find my inner gyroscope settling still. i manage an in and out breath. i might even think of something that makes me laugh. (gallows humor is a saving grace; brother 3 mentioned in a text from the ICU that, after a weekend conversation about Faulkner, he’d requested “As I Lay Dying,” from his local library. and then he drolly mentioned “it awaits me now,” fully acknowledging said gallows. God bless his never-ceasing wit.)

the reprieves were short, so short, the fractions of a minute when breath was caught, when fog of fear fugaciously lifted. the rocky seas between made it seem i might not ever get there. might be swallowed whole by swirling waters, pulled down by stubborn riptides.

i’ll get through this tight passage, as we always have before. but, oh my, this december at the start of the twenty-first century’s third decade…it’s a doozy.

here’s hoping we return soon to more quotidian rumblings round the chair.

i mean not a word of this lightly, and fact is, the palpitations just beneath my ribs have not yet quelled. i seem to have twisted myself into a knot of nerves that, as the author of a tome on stillness, is making me feel a wee bit silly. i am employing all my stillnesses, and for the momentary peace they bring, i am deeply deeply grateful. my brothers and i are deeply blessed to be so close, to march through life (especially of late) arms locked and bent into whatever winds we face.

all i need now is for child No. 2 to turn in the last of his string of finals, to prowl the Christmas tree yard for the humblest branches on the lot, and to await the word that things are taking turns for all that’s good and blessed and ripe with hope.

i wish the same for you.

when you’re at wits end, what wraps you in a cloak of calm?

30 Comments

October 18, 2019

i missed the moon

missed the moon, so gillson

…not just any moon, the great warrior orb of autumn, the hunter moon. round and orange and overwhelming, like a dreamsicle melting from the night sky. and i missed it.

well, at least i caught a peek, the skinniest sliver of a peek, as i was darting here or there or nowhere.

but it takes some work to miss the moon that bathes the world below in luminescence. i must have been holed up inside a world of worries, of syria and betrayals and beheadings. i must have been nursing the tender spots of a mama who’d just packed up her youngest and dropped him at the jetway that would carry him 300 miles from where i’ve doted over him all these years.

in the house where i grew up to miss a moon — or a cardinal, or a loon, or the frog’s croak rising from the pond across the way — to miss any of the sighs and moans and spectacles of god’s creation was what amounted to a sin. in my mama’s book of rules, anyway.

you daren’t let on that you were too busy with your nose in the news. or worrying about the dustballs under your bed. too distracted to notice was not allowed. or so’s the truth as i absorbed it.

chased in part by guilt (a guilt that unlike the moon never ebbs), but even more so by an unquenchable thirst, a sense that i’d strayed too far from the thin-spun silken thread that ties heaven to earth to what passes for my soul. if i missed the moon, the great wide-cheeked nightbeam of october, i wonder what else i’d missed, what stirrings of the earth that were sure to launch my own deep-down stirrings, remind me of my own still small place beneath the immensities of the one who’d carved us — and all creation — from the depths and heights of divine imagination?

so i strapped on my sturdy walking shoes, and found myself crouched down low amid the grasses that swish and sway against the sand mounds, the ones that catch the wind off the lake, and rustle as do the faithful in the pews when sabbath comes.

i sank low and lower, not to hide so much as to immerse myself in lowliness. to drench myself in the posture of humility, of raw-edged vulnerability so necessary for reverence.

to behold the miracle of heaven above and all around, i find i need to grow small and smaller. ours is a world of oversized ego, oversized hubris, oversized oversize. the bigger the better. except, quite frankly, in matters of the blessed. to be willing to hear the holy whisper. to find satisfaction in steady footfall, one after another. to partake of the arithmetic of saints, by little and by little, by little acts of kindness, of courage, of hope. to relish the infinitesimal, the dew drop of the dawn, the twilight song of the red-bird preacher on highest bough, the flutter of the heartbeat when love swoops down, wipes away the loneliness, the ache of the empty vessel.

i stayed long enough to walk the beach, playing catch-me-if-you-can with rippling waves. i walked and watched the roiling sky. charcoal gray, i find, is supremely lovely up above. it portends drama just ahead. and, indeed, when raindrops came in dime-sized plops, i picked up my pace. ducked beneath a maple tree whose boughs had just been daubed by autumn’s crimson paintbrush.

i inhaled a quart or so of morning vapors. filled my lungs, my heart, my soul with God’s most necessary ingredient: quiescence, the underlay of all the richest risings, the prayers that wend their way past worldly noise, the ones that from the deepest stillest dancepoint of our earthly selves ascend. to there, where prayers are heard, even in their wordlessness. and the One Who Hears echoes in kind the blessing, sating us in ways no other ever will.

how do you drink up all the holiness you crave? where’s your deep down quiet place?

gillson row of trees

6 Comments

April 26, 2019

off to the woods

st. mary lake

i’m off to the woods, soon as i pack the wagon, stash the little library next to the umbrella, make sure i don’t leave behind the binder with the pages and pages of notes and thoughts and scribbles.

i’m doing something i’ve not done before, not for this many days and nights anyway. and i’m doing it in a sacred splotch of woods, a place so quiet you can hear the cardinal talking to the blue jay, and you can hear the bullfrog leaping off a log so wrapped in odd-planed fungi it looks extraterrestrial. i’ve walked these woods before, and the miles and miles of trails that snake around the lake, st. mary lake. it’s all on the grounds of an old seminary, and if you listen closely you can hear the murmurs of years and years — whole decades, a century and three quarters, actually — of prayers unreeled in all these woods.

last time i was there, i was one of the ones who’d gone to be quiet. it was a two-day mostly silent retreat. this time, i’m the one who needs to talk. who needs to weave and wend the soulful into morning, noon, and night. or try, anyway.

i don’t know anyone who will be there. not yet anyway. i’m told 16 soulful women have signed up, packed their bags, and will be looking to me for sustenance of the spiritual kind. oh, lordy. help me. (it’s why i’ve spent weeks reading, thinking, writing, scribbling all those notes.)

i keep wishing it was a chair sisters’ retreat. that all of us were finding our way to the woods, gathering in the kitchen to cook ourselves a feast, kindling logs in the fireplace, taking moon walks under heaven’s star-stitched dome. i wish we were all bringing pages we found soulful. or worthy of deeper study, thoughtful consideration.

maybe this is just the first step. a trial run. to see how i fare across three days, two nights.

i imagine there will be moments of blessing. once i chase away the butterflies. i worry i won’t be “churchy” enough. hope my turning to mary oliver, and celtic poets, to ralph waldo emerson and good ol’ thoreau — my pantheon of poets and shimmering souls — is enough to sate the thirsty.

the idea here — or at least the thread that weaves this all together — is rooted in that old Book of Nature i’m so intent on reading closely. the eruptions and raptures of springtime, this season that explodes right before our eyes (while typing here i spied my first goldfinch of the season, and this morning the redbud that reaches across my backyard is twice as swollen and pink as when the sun set last night) it’s a season rife with lessons and wisdoms and wonder, and we’ll be walking the woods in search of all of it. (snow is in the forecast for tomorrow, but i’m going to pretend i didn’t see that.)

we’ll weave in thoughts about the spiritual practice of paying attention, and carving out hours of stillness. and really, truth be told, these are all ideas i could spend a lifetime considering. my deepest attentions are drawn toward the liminal, the thin places and craggy edges where secular and sacred intersect. shimmer radiantly. come unexpected. i like it slant, as dear emily (dickinson) might prescribe.

so i bring my slanted theology to the woods today. and i pray my heart meets each and every one who finds me there. in between the five titled talks, simple shared conversation — over meals, during walks, curled in armchairs in the library — will be where souls are sparked.

and as always, the bookshelf offers hope. here, in the spirit of soulful edification, is the litany of books i’ve gathered and packed and will soon be tossing in the old red wagon.

BOOKS:

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:
Hildegard of Bingen, Doctor of the Church: A Spiritual Reader
The Cloud of Unknowing

Ralph Waldo Emerson:
The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Modern Library); edited by Brooks Atkinson

James Finley:
The Contemplative Heart

Richard Higgins:
Thoreau and the Language of Trees

Pico Iyer:
The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere

Gina Marie Mammano:
Camino Divina: Walking the Divine Way

Thomas Merton:
Literary Essays of Thomas Merton

Mary Oliver:
Devotions
Upstream
Long Life

Christine Valters Paintner:
The Soul’s Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred
Dreaming of Stones: Poems

Jan Richardson:
Sacred Journeys: A Woman’s Book of Daily Prayer
Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons
In Wisdom’s Path: Discovering the Sacred in Every Season

Joan Sauro, CSJ:
Whole Earth Meditation: Ecology for the Spirit

David Steindl-Rast and Sharon Lebell, introduction by Kathleen Norris:
Music of Silence: A Sacred Journey through the Hours of the Day
gratefulness.org

Simone Weil:
Waiting for God (essays: “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with View to the Love of God;” “The Love of God and Affliction”)

may your weekend, wherever it is, and however you spend it, be something of a soulful retreat.

what books might you pack for a string of days and nights of soul stirring?

off to the woods

12 Comments

December 7, 2018

season of stillness

not so many years ago, my writing room at this time of year took on north-pole proportions: spools of ribbon, bags of this and that to slip inside other bags or boxes, layers and layers of tissue papers, itty-bitty cards. lists abounded. i was a walking-talking maker and checker of lists.

not so much these days. and not because i’m scrooge.

simply because the sanctity of stillness is what i’m after in this season of deepening darkness. i punctate the night — the shroud of black that grows with every passing whirl around the sun — with my litany of sacramental simplicities.

the dawn is longer, blessedly, giving me more time to stitch those hours with the fine few invitations to bring in what’s hushed, what’s holy. i scoop my old tin coffee can with fat black seed, slide my toes into clunky boots, my arms in puffy sleeves. as the shock of morning cold splashes up against me, i fill my lungs with one quick gulp. then i march across the frozen stiff blades of grass, the mud that’s now succumbed into icy form, and perk my ears to hear the flutter of a wing, the rustling of a bough. i pause to scan the heavens, count the stars, spy the fraction of the moon. i’ve written a thousand times of how i make like i’m a farmer filling my trough, as i pour the seed in the feeder high above my head, stretching my arm far as it will stretch, raising up on tippy-toes, too. i’ve come to realize that the rush of pouring seed must be a call to all the birds, akin to “coffee’s on, come and get it!”

on the stillest mornings, the holiest ones, a cardinal or a junco might flutter in before i’ve stepped away. as if the gentle creature knows we’re in communion here.

perhaps i’ve learned, in my years — now three decades — of braiding jewish threads with catholic ones, to sanctify time, even more than place. abraham joshua heschel, whom i count among my constellation of north stars, writes: “judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year.” he goes on to draw out that point: “the Sabbaths are our great cathedrals; and our Holy of Holies is a shrine that neither the romans nor the germans were able to burn; a shrine that even apostasy cannot easily obliterate…”

point, well taken. point, deeply taken.

i consecrate the holy hours — the ones of dawn and dusk and deepest night.

and so, this season is no longer a mad dash, but a countercultural adventure in stitching in stillness. in simply kindling light, one by one, an arithmetic of brightening, night after night, as both menorah and advent wreath burn against the darkness. our house is not filled with shiny boxes. santa’s list is not an annual exercise in accumulation. hanukkah at our house is brisket + latkes + jelly-filled donuts on the first night, candles and dreidels each night after that.

year by year, i dial down the noise, and amplify the hush that ushers in the stillness.

how do you consecrate your holy hours?

12 Comments

May 25, 2018

ordinary time

noddling bells of spring

deep in the recesses of my DNA, these knowings lurk. those little bits of knowledge slipped in once upon a time, those bits that order time, that frame the paradigm, the window frame, through which i watch the passing picture show called life.

somehow this week there was a whisper barely heard that told me ordinary time had come. technically, liturgically, it had come because the church i grew up in, the catholic church, ordains the monday after pentecost sunday as the opening of the long chapter of the year called “ordinary time.” and so, this week, as i slipped into this time, i couldn’t keep myself from considering the folds and undulations of just what ordinary means.

all around me, as lily of the valley sent up its flagpoles of perfume, as apple blossoms drifted down like vernal snowfall, as songbirds in feathers shocking pink and golden yellow darted in and from my feeders, i hardly thought things “ordinary.” the world’s in exultation.

and in my daily everyday, there was no relenting from the news that never stops and never slows to a trickle, nor was there quelling from the firehose of bumps and bangs that comes with loving widely, deeply. one night had me up till 2 a.m., making sure a young typist came to the end of his bibliography and junior theme (aka massive term paper) before we clicked out the lights. that same night had me dispensing nursing cures to a long-distance patient whose neck was in some spasm. all while keeping track of a train chugging to st. louis, where my sweet mate and familial co-conspirator drew more distant by the minute and the mile. by day, i somehow managed to turn in — on deadline — my own newspaper assignment, the first such one (a cookbook tale, complete with half a dozen lively interviews) in quite a while. none of this seemed “ordinary,” if by ordinary we mean “having no distinctive features,” as the oxford american dictionary tries to persuade us.

oh, around here, it’s distinctive all right.

i even plopped my bum on the old cedar slab i call my prayer bench, amid the ferns and bleeding hearts of my secret garden, intent on keeping watch on this so-called ordinary time.

lured by curiosity to the pages of old books, i dug around to learn a thing or three about this ordinariness. here’s a bit of what i learned: the church, in all her wisdom, divides the year into chunks of time (perhaps to fine-grain our focus, knowing full well we’d succumb to blur if not for demarcation). the church knows, according to one wise writer, “that human psychology desires the marking of moments.”

there are, apparently, two liturgical mountain peaks in the year, easter and christmas, each with preamble (lent and advent, respectively) and in between (here comes “ordinary time”) “the pasture between the mountains,” otherwise referred to as “vast verdant meadows,” of ordinary time, of tempus per annum (my church loves its latin, and, according to my resident latin translator, this literally means “time throughout the year”).

it must be the quiet season, the chunks of year when — inside the church and beyond — there is not the cacophony that comes with birth (christmas) or death and dying and its glorious resurrection (easter).

in one lovely meditation, i read that God, in infinite wisdom, invented the notion of seasons (not unlike the kaleidoscope that turns a notch and explodes in all new shapes and colored bits) as “invitation to reflection,” to jostle us awake as the all-around ever shifts. yet another meditation opined that God uses seasons to “translate wisdoms into a language of purpose for our lives.”

what that means, i think, is that it’s no accident that some of us walk around fully willing to be klonked on the head by the 2-by-4s of revelation that have us extracting lessons from earth and sky and trickling waters in between. it’s why a vine that blooms long after deadline (the week before thanksgiving, one year) might speak to me of undying courage, and the quiet of the dawn reminds me to settle my soul and breathe deep before the launch of day. it’s why the springtime stirs me full of hope, and all but insists i power up my rocket blasters.

ordinary, i read, comes from “ordinal,” or numbered, the weeks of the year simply counted off, one by one. amid the canvas of quiet, without profound distraction, our task in this stretch of time is to think hard and deep about the mysteries in the weft and warp of being alive. as this is the longest time of year, a full 33 to 34 weeks of ordinary time, depending when the feast days fall, i suppose the point is to settle in, sink deep, into the extraordinary work of living, with our attention meters cranked as high as we can muster.

all of that is literal, is what the books i sought spelled out. i tend to veer off the page. and that’s when i began to really contemplate the power of unencumbered ordinary. as if we’re given unfettered canvas on which to quietly and without bother absorb the sacred simple. the gift of being alive without all the inner chatter. the charge to scan the hours of the day for those moments that break us out in goosebumps. the blessing of deep, slow breathing. the chance, scant chance, to catch God in the act….

of late, i’ve become intrigued by what i call the theology of the sacred ordinary. not the loud bangs and pyrotechnics, not the stuff that comes at the end of miles-long, desert-crossing pilgrimage, but rather the stark and quiet notion that we are living the Holy right now.

it’s the hush of a whisper, the percussion of the rain, those are the sounds that call us in, call us to behold the simple pure sacred. it’s the humility of the moment that belies its grandeur, its magnificent majesty……

and perhaps that’s the invitation of ordinary time, to dwell amid the plain-jane, stripped-down quotidian of the everyday. to awaken our deeper senses, our fuller attentions, to behold the Beautiful, the Wise, the Profound amid our daily stumbles and bumbles. to live as if the Book of Wonder has been placed upon our open palms, its pages spread akimbo. to extract, inhale, deep breathe its mighty and eternal lessons. the ones that whisper, the ones we hear only when we truly, truly listen.

what does ordinary time mean to you?

this morning’s writing came in fits and starts, as it sometimes does, as somehow this morning this old house clattered like it was grand central station, locomotives and the people who aim to board them rushing in and out the station, barely and noisily keeping to the clockwork schedule.

5 Comments

December 1, 2017

december’s whisper

red berry

the december i am drawn to, the one that most emphatically, insistently, invites me in, is the one that beckons in whisper.

the apex of my counterculturalism, perhaps, i take my month of longest night in slow sure sips. timpani belongs to someone else. my december—our december, perhaps, for there is evidence we’ve found each other, kindred spirits here—is one that calls for quiet.

long stretches of hours in which the simmering on the stove, the ticking of the clock, the occasional squawk of the jay at the feeder, those are the preludes, the quarter notes and half notes that i take in.

there will come, i’m certain—because year after year it comes—the one annual carol i play over and over, cranking the dial till the house shakes, and i worry the next-door neighbor might come running to see if all is well. (“mary, did you know?” a leading contender, third year running…)

gingerbabies and so i’ve spent the week preparing, whisking away autumnal vestige, ushering in soon-to-come winter. i’ve stockpiled seed in 20-pound sacks (several, so far), and vats of ice-melting pellets for the dawn when the ice comes. i’ve piled pumpkins and gourds in the old trough my squirrels and possums (and occasional uninvited skunk) depend on, the autumn’s feast now theirs for winter keeping. i’ve snipped boxwood and spruce, tucked branches of both into window boxes just below the ledges, where jack frost will soon anoint the panes. i’ve strung italian star-lights around and through the posts of my picket fence. when the sun drops down, i won’t be alone in the dark. there is twinkling at the edge of the yard, front and back. and a candle flickers atop the kitchen table.

it is all a part of the coiling in. the nautilus of deepening prayer.

the prayer that fills me most is the prayer that slowly and silently seeps to the tucked-away places, the ones that await the season of stillness, the places unlocked by the smells and the bells of december: pungent clove, star anise, hissing wick, crackling log, twilight’s first star and the night’s last ember at dawn.

it won’t be long till somehow i crank the oven, haul out the canisters, bang my grandma’s old maple rolling pin against the cutting board’s edge. my coterie of cookie cutters each play a role in their own sugarplum suite.

zoup one day this week i hauled a turkey carcass from the fridge, and plunked it in my deepest pot, the vessel for soup-making for a dear dear friend whose newborn is just home from the ICU, and for whom i’ve cooked up all the sustenance i could imagine: brown rice, pulled-from-the-earth plump knotty carrots and fennel and garlic, savory stock, handful of parsley.

i’ll deliver my brew well before sundown, and in return i’ll drink in the newness, the perfection, of a babe just birthed, cradled more tightly and tenderly than ever imagined because ICUs do a mighty fine job of reminding how blessed it is to be finally sent home, untethered from the web of too many tubes and the fright that shakes a new mama and papa—and all those who love them—down to their rickety bones.

(there is, of course, no ailment the balm of day-long simmering kettle won’t cure; even a newborn mama’s terrible tremble is certain to be chased away at the very first shlurp of that omnipotent zoup.)

indeed, these are my december liturgies, day after day. intercessions of prayer, punctuated by plain old worldly deadlines. i attend to my errands and chores and assignments—laundry is folded and ferried, empty shelves of the fridge re-stocked, sentences are typed and essays submitted.

but the work that’s most heavenly, certainly, is the quiet work of the soul come december. the making way, making room at the inn, in the heart.

the grace of december, the gift of december, is in the quieting, the hush of the sacred whisper. the vespers that hallow—make holy—the heart. make room in the heart this quiet december.

i’ve been saving this poem, “winter grace,” for the whispered beginnings of the season of stillness….

Winter Grace
By Patricia Fargnoli

If you have seen the snow
under the lamppost
piled up like a white beaver hat on the picnic table
or somewhere slowly falling
into the brook
to be swallowed by water,
then you have seen beauty
and know it for its transience.
And if you have gone out in the snow
for only the pleasure
of walking barely protected
from the galaxies,
the flakes settling on your parka
like the dust from just-born stars,
the cold waking you
as if from long sleeping,
then you can understand
how, more often than not,
truth is found in silence,
how the natural world comes to you
if you go out to meet it,
its icy ditches filled with dead weeds,
its vacant birdhouses, and dens
full of the sleeping.
But this is the slowed down season
held fast by darkness
and if no one comes to keep you company
then keep watch over your own solitude.
In that stillness, you will learn
with your whole body
the significance of cold
and the night,
which is otherwise always eluding you.

how do you make room in your heart, in your unspooling of the day, for the whisper come december?

12 Comments

pull up a chair

Tag: seeking stillness

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January 20, 2023

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June 3, 2022

retreat to mothering earth…

December 18, 2020

archipelagos of calm amid a roiling sea

October 18, 2019

i missed the moon

April 26, 2019

off to the woods

December 7, 2018

season of stillness

May 25, 2018

ordinary time

December 1, 2017

december’s whisper