Outlaws and Rebels, Every One

Butch Cassidy and The Wild Bunch (Photo Source)

(To celebrate my new web page and in honor of Valentine's Day, I'm re-sharing some old posts this week focusing on the topic of love.  Today's post is from February 2013. Stop back tomorrow for another look at the many ways love finds us.)

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"They crucified two rebels with him, one on his left and one on his right." Matthew 27:38

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My 18 month-old twins saunter through the house with swaggering bravado like two black-hats straight out of the lawless west.  Working together, they form a mafia-esque crime-ring, a rebellious conspiracy against law and order and decency.  Trafficking in black market goods pilfered from the pile of floor-sweepings in the kitchen corner, they gather on the back of the love seat, perched in the window to inspect and trade their haul.  

They rip the heads off of their sister’s dolls and leave graffiti on the living room walls and every time I kneel to zip Isaiah’s coat, Levi circles around behind me and roots through my purse.  A gifted pick-pocket, he snatches my wallet and phone with such speed, stealth and precision that even I, the victim, have to marvel.  

When one is finally caught red-handed, and placed in solitary (ie. the corner) the other comes quickly to the rescue, crouching down beside him, chattering what I imagine are plans of daring-escape and revenge.  Like true accomplices, though, they quickly turn on each other when caught together at the scene of a crime – a mutually enjoyed destruction turns all finger-pointing and tears when the fuzz shows up.  

The other day I watched Levi running through the house with what appeared to be a little shiv.  It sported a jagged, plastic tip and looked capable of inflicting real harm, so I quickly confiscated it, tossing it into the trash.  

As we lay in bed at night, my husband and I hear a “scritch, scratch, scritch” on the bedroom wall near our heads.  Levi’s crib sits just on the other side of the wall, so we sleep head-to-head, divided only by a few thin inches of plaster.  We tell ourselves he’s rubbing the nubby bottoms of his footed pajamas against the wall, but as I lay listening late into the night, I think of that little shiv and wonder if he isn’t tunneling his way to freedom one tiny scratch at a time.  I picture him tumbling through into our bed some night, his face full of surprise and delight to find us there waiting.   

These boys are outlaws, I tell you.  Even so little, so cute, they have a rap sheet a mile-long.   Looking at their round faces, their hair all downy-fluff, I'm reminded that we’re all thieves, all outlaws of one sort or another, every last one of us.  We’re all Davids and Delilahs, Judases and Peters, bent on greed and self-preservation.  We're all convicted, but not condemned, chiseling our way toward freedom, one tiny crack at a time, until at last we fall through the walls built of our own resistance.  Imagine our faces, then, full of surprise and relief to find ourselves landing in the lap of a love so wide and deep even our darkest sins can never exempt us from its reach.   

Un-Disciplines: Do Something Foolish (#SmallWonder Link-Up)

I loaded three cartons of eggs and three ice blocks into our straight-out-of-the-eighties rolling cooler this morning.  We inherited the cooler from a friend because she didn’t need it anymore and we didn’t want to spend $20 on a cooler for eggs that might not sell.  Once the eggs were tucked in, I hauled the cooler out the front door to the little farm stand in front of our house. 

My husband built the stand, out of an old door and leftover lumber, at the end of June and we've kept it stocked with garden surplus ever since.  The hope was to keep from wasting the abundance of our little corner of Eden and make some spare change in the process.  We live on a fairly busy state road and I thought a farm stand would do well here. 

This morning I was surprised to find a dollar sealed inside a plastic bag at the stand.  I had left the Ziploc bag there with instructions for anyone who bought cherry tomatoes to “leave the container,” implying (I thought) they could use the bag to corral the tomatoes.  But someone bought tomatoes and left the money – a crisp dollar bill – in the bag instead.  

I'm happy to report that this new development doubled our year-to-date farm stand income.  That’s right, doubled it.  As in, we've made two dollars over the course of a month.  I quickly sent my husband a text with the heady news and started dreaming of a spending spree . . .

Not really.  

But I did feel a small spark of hope, which is no small thing when most days I feel like abandoning the stand completely.  

A few weeks back a woman stopped by the house unannounced and asked whether the stand itself was for sale – she thought it quite clever and said it would look amazing standing outside her store.  I told her no, the stand isn’t for sale, but took her number saying my husband could build her one of her own.    

We’ve yet to call her back, but in the weeks since her visit I’ve done the math - we could surely make more by selling the stand itself than we hope to make keeping it stocked by the road all summer long.  I thought about that math this morning as I loaded the eggs.  Maybe we should just be done.

But then there was the dollar and when I came inside carrying the overripe zucchini that didn’t sell, the tomatoes that aged beyond use in the carton, I found myself sorting more tomatoes for the stand and wondering what else I could set out.  Even now, I want to go cut fresh Zinnia bouquets to sell and gather some of our just-picked violet potatoes into a carton too.

 

I feel foolish most days, tending the stand while cars speed by.  There is, for me, a naked vulnerability in selling things along-side the road.  And, minor income aside, that’s why I persist in doing it. 

When I become aware of feeling foolish and vulnerable my tendency is to want to draw back and hide.  I'm not much of a risk taker by nature, not much of a let's-see-what-happens kinda gal.  But lately, when I feel foolish, some wisdom inside me awakens.  

//

"Ah," wisdom says, "what's this?"  

"I don't want to cut flowers that won't sell, don't want to pack and haul eggs fifty feet to sit all day by the side of the road," I snap.  

"Why?" wisdom asks, curious and eager. 

"It feels too much like waiting to be picked in gym class," I say, "I don't like the risk, the uncontrolled exposure.  I feel foolish."

"Oh, now that's good," wisdom says, fully awake now and delighted with my predicament, "that's something we can work with."  

I don't want to listen, but curious now, I do.  

"This stand is giving you something invaluable," wisdom continues after a moment of thought, "the opportunity to feel foolish."

//

What wisdom knows is that things like hope and faithfulness often feel foolish.  They aren't, but they feel that way quite often.  By practicing the ability to endure negative sensations, like foolishness or vulnerability, we forge a deep resilience that can translate to other areas of our lives as well, areas where the risk and reward are much greater.  

Somehow I know that voice is right.  I load the eggs, cut my lovely flowers, gather the red and orange tomatoes and offer them to the world.  Not because I want to get rich, but because I want to be enriched.  

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Author, Shawn Smucker and I are offering a one-day retreat this coming October 15 in Carlisle, PA.  Titled, Writing As Witness, we will explore the ways writing can position us to witness the presence of God in our own lives and in the world.  Visit link to learn more.  

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Welcome to the #SmallWonder link-up.  

What if we chose to deliberately look for small moments of wonder, the small sparks of presence, of delight or sorrow, of true humanity in which we meet God?  

That's my proposal - that we gather here each week to share one moment of Wonder from each of our days.  You're invited to link-up a brief post about a small moment of wonder.  Don't worry if your post is too long, too short, or not just right - you're welcome to come as you are.  

While you're here, please do take a look around and encourage at least one other blogger with a comment.  Thanks for being part of our community!  

Privilege: They Didn't Ask and I Didn't Tell

*Photo Source: Unknown

Sunday morning our pastor read the names of last week’s shooting victims, law enforcement and civilian, aloud during morning prayers.  The brick-walled room was quiet, sunlight streamed in through wide windows and I wondered what my oldest kids, seated at a table with us, would think about those names.  

Our older kids, just eight and ten, home for the entirety of summer vacation, are ensconced in a semi-rural white bubble.  John and I get most of our news online and, without the evening news hour on TV, our kids are sheltered from much of the world’s news save for occasions where we decide to intentionally break the bubble. 

We did so with the church shooting in South Carolina last summer, explaining about the shooting and its racist motivations over dinner.  Then we made a quilt square to send to a group in the south who were piecing a quilt for those impacted by the crime.  Still, we haven’t talked with our kids about the events of last week.  And they remained oblivious to our pastor's prayer, wrapped up in seeing their Sunday morning friends, doodling and folding paper airplanes.  

They didn't ask and I didn't tell.   

Monday morning I thought about it again as I worked to add yet another layer of paint to the dark wood paneling in our laundry room.  Would we tell the kids and when and how would we navigate the complexity of the discussions?  A new thought flickered in my mind like a light bulb - this is white privilege.  I get to choose when and where and if I talk with my kids about the complexities of racism because I believe it doesn't impact them and, more importantly, not telling them doesn't put them at risk.    

There are mothers across America who don’t have that choice.  To not talk about these deaths with their sons and daughters is to expose them to risk.  Information that feels optional for my kids is essential for theirs.  The idea that I don't have to address these issues and they do is a privilege born of the color of my skin, a burden born of the color of theirs. 

Later in the morning I read these posts by Lisha Epperson at Give Me Grace and Regina Stoltzfus at The Mennonite, both mothers to teenage boys wrestling with similar questions of when and where and how to talk about racism, but entering into the discussions with wisdom, bravery and fear because they cannot afford not to.  

I am a white woman raising three white sons along a stretch of road where pickup trucks of all shapes and sizes drive by with confederate flags proudly flying from the bed of the truck.  These aren’t unobtrusive confederate flag stickers pasted to a windshield, but a large 3x5 foot banners flying on a pole, statement sized flags.  I am a white woman who believes placing a #Blacklivesmatter sign in our yard would have real repercussions, so I don't.  
   

I want to preserve that bubble, to keep my kids safe.  But I understand now that doing so only keeps us all at risk.  No bubble that includes some and excludes others by reason of the color of their skin can ever be truly safe for anyone.  What appeared optional – talking with my kids about the realities of racism in our country – is, I now see, essential.  I cannot afford to say nothing.  

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I wrote this post on Monday and have sat with it since largely because I am afraid to say something wrong.  I now realize this hesitancy and the desire to "get it right" and not expose myself to possible ridicule or argument is another layer of privilege.  

//

I turned on the evening news while driving home with the kids Tuesday night.  They were wiped out from a day of swimming and sat quietly listening.  We listened for five minutes before the questions began.  I turned off the news and we cleared up confusion and I turned it back on again.  Eventually, as we pulled in the driveway, my oldest son caught wind of the shootings in Dallas.  

"What are they talking about?" he asked.  "Was that another shooting?"

I asked him to wait while the twins went inside.  Standing in the driveway, I told him quietly about the events of the past week and he filed it away like kids his age do.  

//

The conversation begins, it continues and we have no choice but to enter in for the sake of all our children.  

Please do take a moment to read the posts I've linked to above, both women share important perspectives.  Thank you. 

Broken Beloved (for everyone ashamed of the pills they take)

Photo credit

Often, it’s a restless night and bad dreams that tell me I forgot.

Other times it’s the way I snap and growl at my children in the morning.  It's not that they’re worse than normal, but I’m less tolerant, carrying my own internal agitation which they scrape against like matches, igniting a latent fury.

//

Before bed and after TV, my husband takes the dog out into the darkness to pee.  In the dim kitchen I grind coffee beans for the morning’s brew, adding water and a clean filter to the pot.  Then I open the hutch's glass cabinet and grab the red bottle.  Opened, little oval pills scatter across the palm of my hand like seeds. 

For months, maybe even a year, I cut them precisely with a pill cutter.  Then one day, in a pinch, I realized they could be broken by hand. 

One and a half pills daily seems to be enough to do the trick.

//

Toward the end of summer, for various reasons, I decided I wanted to cut down to one pill, decreasing the dose by a third. 

It would be simpler, I told myself. 

Maybe I’ll lose weight, I thought (as though the daily consumption of potato chips couldn’t possibly be to blame for a recent weight gain). 

I’ve been so sleepy lately, maybe I’m over-medicated, I considered.    

The psychiatrist, hearing my plan, looked at me with surprise. 

“Usually the dose that works is the dose you should stay on,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “I want to try.” 

What I didn’t say was that I didn’t want to be on medicine, I didn’t want to need it.

//

I’d done enough googling to know coming off of antidepressants can be complicated.  I decided to drop the dose by a third every other day for a while and see what happened.  One pill one day, one and a half the next, and so on.

The problem was, I was nearing the one year anniversary of my psychiatric hospitalization. 

And I was preaching again for the first time in a year. 

And we were in the run-up for the annual back-to-school transition which, with four kids in three different schools, lasts well-over a month. 

And transition makes me anxious.

I tried, though.  I did.

What I found is I was more anxious, more irritable, more snappy.

I was a worse mother without that little half pill.  Unreasonably irritable, yelling and stomping rather than “using my words.”  It reminded me of the months after the twins were born, when I struggled so with my oldest son.  He would have been better off if I’d had those pills then. 

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“It’s only been a year,” my counselor says, “give it some time.”

Ah, but me?  I want to not need.

Only now, what I want more, is to be a mother who doesn’t scream and shout in rage.  I want to be a little more able to go with the flow (which is the only way to go anywhere in a family of six).  Maybe if I had more control, more money, less kids I’d be able to structure my time, my life in a way that kept me from needing those pills. 

Yoga morning, noon and night. 

Health food. 

Meditation. 

For now though, when I look at the real choices before me, I pick up that red bottle and break the pills, like pieces of communion bread - grace I need, grace I cannot afford to do without.    

//

I have a friend who was wounded deeply by someone she loves.  After years of struggle and heart ache she considered breaking the relationship and felt God giving her the freedom to do so.  

Then, also, my friend felt God’s invitation, “Why don’t you try just loving the one who hurt you as God’s broken but beloved daughter?” 

I was thinking about that today.  

Thinking it's true, really, of all of us.  

We are God’s broken, beloved children.  

Maybe it would all go a little better if we thought of ourselves that way, as people who need.  I am God's broken, beloved daughter and I will take grace as it comes, however it comes, even if it arrives in a little, red bottle.     

Seeing the Psychiatrist (I Don't Want to Forget)

“The babysitter’s coming tomorrow.”  I say as we shuffle back and forth in the bathroom getting ready for bed.  “I have to see my Psychiatrist,” I add, drawing out the word in a way that makes it sound fancy.
 

Even now, seven months after hospitalization, I’m still uncomfortable with the idea of being one of those people.

“When was your last appointment?” my husband asks from his seat on the radiator, speaking over and around the toothbrush in his mouth.

“Um, I’m not sure.  Maybe February?” 

At the sink, I pull my toothbrush from the cup and squeeze out a daub of toothpaste.  “It’s kinda silly, I still have prescriptions I haven’t filled because I’m not going through them as quickly as I could.”  In fact I’d been tempted to cancel the appointment this week – it felt inconvenient, coming on my kids’ first day of spring break and unnecessary as I really didn’t need any refills. 

After a pause, I add, “I think it’s important, though, to help me remember.”  Then, in case he doesn’t know what I mean, I continue, “I was in the hospital, ya know?  It was a big deal.  It is a big deal.  I don’t want to forget how hard it was, how close we were to the edge.”

The edge of what, I do not say, but I feel it.  The edge of darkness, the edge of all-consuming fear.

“Do you feel like you forget?” he asked. 

“Yes, I do.”

I forget because I don’t want to remember.  I forget because no one wants to talk about it, hardly anyone asks.  I forget because I’m afraid – afraid that it happened in the first place, afraid it could happen again.

The pill bottles help me to remember.  Pulling the two red bottles from the cabinet, putting in the extra time to cut pills down to size for the days and weeks ahead, feels like a welcome humility.  

I continue to see a counselor, perhaps more often than she thinks I need.  Those hours set aside on the calendar remind me to look at myself, to come up for air and do a systems’ check. 

And the appointments with the psychiatrist who listens briefly before handing out her scripts, they help too.  Driving up to the building, I enter the same door I excited that bright August day.  Every time I face that place, I face the past; I face a part of myself that paid a price for being neglected for far too long and I remember.  

I don’t want to forget again. 

It may seem counter-intuitive or self-punishing in some strange way, but in the Christian tradition we acknowledge remembrance as a necessary part of the journey toward healing, toward resurrection.  This is what we do in Lent and Holy Week.  We re-walk the steps, re-read the texts, take, break and eat the wine and the bread.  We re-enact the suffering and saving so that we will remember.  

We don't want to forget.  

We tell the story of our own bondage and salvation; we return to the tomb if only to remember how cold and deep the darkness was before we saw the first piercing shaft of light. 

May your remembering be blessed.  May you find the courage to not forget.  

The Wood Is Slow (a poem)

The wood is slow

to burn this morning,

reluctant and stubborn.

Leaning into the stove’s

metal mouth, I draw

deep breaths and

exhale with force

in a steady rhythm.

This must be

how God hovered

over the still body

formed from the earth,

the slow, stubborn

dust pressed together.

God leaning,

breathing,

and the human

bursting into life,

like a flame. 

God coaxing

the fire

of humanity.

This post is linked with Give Me Grace, Playdates With God, and #TellHisStory.

All of the Things of Fall

 

All of the things of fall
are as beautiful in their dying
as they were in their birth,
as if it were a farewell party,
a last hurrah, a riotous wake.

May I also be beautiful
in my surrender, fading
from green to brilliant
orange or red, and may
the moment of my letting go
be as precious as the leaf 
that falls, unnoticed, 
to the ground
that catches it.   

Still, there always remains
those few leaves that cling
and hold on, withered brown
in their stubbornness. Refusing 
to fall, they face the stark white winter 
alone while, below, the others return 
to that from which they came; 
returning, as it were, to home. 

Photo Source.

Half Moon Heart (a poem)

My heart is like
the half-moon peaking
out of the mid-day
blue sky.

There is more, always more,
hidden; more than I can
know or see.

Lord, teach me to tend,
carefully, the shadow
places where deep
roots dwell.

Teach me to love,
tenderly, the cool
darkness, to prize it
along with the light. 

This post is linked with Playdates with God and Unforced Rhythms.

In a Direction Unexpected (a Birthday Reflection)

 

Thirty More Years, by Wendell Berry

When I was a young man,
grown up at last, how large
I seemed to myself! I was a tree,
tall already, and what I had not,
yet reached, I would yet grow
to reach.  Now, thirty more years
added on, I have reached much 
I did not expect, in a direction
unexpected.  I am growing downward,
smaller, one among the grasses.

April's showers are hanging on with tenacity even now, as time's hand is poised to turn the calendar's page.  Today, April 30th, is my birthday and the day promises to be every bit as gray as the day before, with wind, rain and even thunder.  There are flood warnings in effect and roads coming and going are sure to be closed, but I'm grateful to be spared the wind tunnels that have made their way through the south and midwest this past week.  

April does not seem to want to let go gracefully.

The Red Bud tree by our old house, the one that was always in bloom for my special day, is waiting still to open its blossomed fingers.  This I know because I drove by the old neighborhood the other evening, marveling at its smallness, the cramped corners on which we lived.  

I've long loved this Wendell Berry poem and its words resonate this year as I feel poised between the pages of my life.  Three years ago I was surprised by the doubling of our family, the exponential expansion of my role as mother.  And now here I sit, just days after registering those two tornado boys for a small and local preschool this fall.  Two hours, two mornings a week and freedom is looming on the horizon (hallelujah!). 

"In a direction unexpected," Berry says and I nod my head amen.  

Looking up these three years later I can't help but wonder at the way life moves us along, quiet streams unexpectedly expanded by torrential showers and we are carried somewhere new - made into someone new - just like that it seems.

//

"I think it's just that we keep getting slapped in the face by how hard life actually is," I said over plates heaped with ham and potatos, corn and fresh greens.  We were talking about this valley of middle life (which you may say I've yet to reach) and how it sucks the air right out of you with its sometimes fierce wind and rain, the kind of weather that moves through like a locomotive.  

We wondered whether it was because we were coddled as children, not the way children are today (of course) but sheltered none-the-less.  But now, some days out from that conversation, I know we have no one to blame for the way life hits you in the gut.   If we were sheltered it was a gift, a grace, like that garden so long ago and the garden itself and its maker bear no to blame for our leaving.  

//

Glynn Young, posted this poem on his blog the other day:

Unexpected Storm

He was expecting the storm
when it arrived, almost
suddenly, without portent or
warning, simply arising
in front of him.  He held on
as it raged, tearing at his skin,
sharp nails with stinging points.
They found him there, still
holding on.  He did not know
salvation was in letting go.

One of the keys, it seems, to being able to endure the "direction unexpected," is the willingness to let go, which is easier said than done.  

This, I guess, explains the wind and the rain and the rising water, all of the things of life, both good and bad, that push against us, moving us along, out of the narrow channels and into something deeper and wider than what we thought we might find or even want.  

It's out here, in the wilderness, the dessert, the wind-tossed sea, that we find God most often.  Not the small, safe God of our childhood, but the wily One, the One who plays hide and seek among the stars, the One who sings with a voice both deep and wide.  

It is here that we find ourselves again made small, as Berry says, "like one among the grasses." And on the days when our hands are open we can see that this is a good thing, a very good thing indeed.

Building Walls for Lent (This Is Not a Post About Soda)

Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall.  The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication.  It is the same with us and God.  Every separation is a link.  Simone Weil

I have a headache.

I'm tired.

I want a Diet Coke.

I gave up Diet Coke for Lent.

//

I cannot say whether it is my body or my mind that turns first toward that magic elixir.  I do know there are times and places - rituals, you might say - wherein I crave it most.

With pizza.

With Chinese food.

With pretzels and chips.

With four whiny children at my feet.

With headaches, severe and with stress and exhaustion - these make an excellent pairing.

//

Yesterday I sublimated my cravings for soda by eating the last, stale squares of brownie, prying them out of the glass dish with a steak knife.  Does that still count as sacrifice?

//

I'm not good at Lent, not very good at anything long-ish, although I can do deep on the spot.  Also, it seems a bit foolish, me here in my first world comforts, donning the proverbial hair shirt of a caffeine deprived existence.  Nothing noble, nothing brave.

Who knows, maybe this very evening I'll walk across the street to the little deli, a wrinkled dollar and five cents in my hand.  They're waiting there, chilled to perfection, black bottles lined up like soldiers waiting to be deployed.

Moreover, my discipline, should it endure, will not make Christ love me more.

Easter comes to us all, my friends, to those who anxiously prepare and wait and to those also who find it sneaking up like a surprise.

So, why bother?

//

I haven't given up yelling at my kids, as this friend has (let us all say a prayer for her now!), or looking in the mirror like this woman here who's leading a whole movement of women in smashing their idols.  I will continue to eat meat on Fridays and I will, mostly likely, slip-up when it comes to soda consumption.

With this relinquishment I'm building a wall, not the Great Wall of China, but something smaller, a facade you might say, between me and my good friend God, so that we can learn to communicate better.

I'm listening to my moods and how they swing, listening to what lies just behind the craving and, should I endure, what lies further behind.  I'm asking God about what I hear, what I see in myself, in gentle and non-judgemental ways.

//

"Oh, my God, this day is simply too much, I really think a soda would make it better." I say, knocking with some urgency.

"Yes," God says, tapping slowly in reply, "it's possible it would.  But really, let's stick with what's going on right here right now, you can get a soda later if you still need it."

Then and there, just like that, a conversation unfolds between the two of us.

And so it goes.

Knocking, tapping, banging at times, on that same flimsy wall for forty days straight.

//

It's not about what you give up or whether you make it forty days or not. 

It's not about earning or proving.

For me, it's about listening intentionally, opening myself to a conversation that wouldn't otherwise happen.

And, also, it's about Easter that comes to us all, slowly and surely whether we realize we've been waiting or not; Easter, when ALL of the walls came down.

For When You Need A Drink (of Love)

I've had a hard time finding words lately, or finding time for words perhaps. 

My husband says that what I need is some good old "normal," but I look at him wryly wondering what exactly normal might be.

Anyway, there are days, you know, when the words just don't come or they come but they're all so very wrong or they're simply lost in the stampede of everyone else's words. 

Yes, there are those days.

On days like that, then perhaps it's wise to borrow someone else's words.  This poem by Hafiz, a fourteenth century Persian poet, were sent to me by a friend and they seemed fitting to share on this weekend in which we all are made aware, again, of our deep, deep longing for love.  Enjoy!

(Maybe you were hoping for a Valentine's post?  If so, here's an oldie but goodie Love is Vertigo.)   

I Know The Way You Can Get

I know the way you can get
when you have not had a drink of Love:

your face hardens,
your sweet muscles cramp.
Children become concerned
about a strange look that appears in your eyes
which even begins to worry your own mirror
and nose.

Squirrels and birds sense your sadness
and call an important conference in a tall tree.
They decide which secret code to chant
to help your mind and soul.

Even angels fear that brand of madness
that arrays itself against the world
and throws sharp stones and spears into
the innocent
and into one's self.

O I know the way you can get
if you have not been drinking Love:

you might rip apart
every sentence your friends and teachers say,
looking for hidden clauses.

You might weigh every word on a scale
like a dead fish.

You might pull out a ruler to measure
from every angle in your darkness
the beautiful dimensions of a heart you once
trusted.

I know the way you can get
if you have not had a drink from Love's
hands.

That is why all the Great Ones speak of
the vital need
to keep remembering God,
so you will come to know and see Him
as being so Playful
and Wanting,
just Wanting to help.

That is why Hafiz says:
Bring your cup near me.
For all I care about
is quenching your thirst for freedom!

All a Sane man can ever care about
is giving Love!

~ Hafiz
From: 'I Heard God Laughing - Renderings of Hafiz'
Translated by Daniel Ladinsky 

Photo credit HERE.

Growing New Leaves in Fall (We Are Practicing)

“…I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life…The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way. I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!”  ~II Corinthians 6:11-13, MSG

*   *   *

[Often, walking through the fields] I would see a man walking his four Kerry Blue Terriers.  These were amazing dogs.  Bounding energy, elastic grace, and electric speed, they coursed and leapt through open fields.  It was invigorating just to watch them.  Three of the four dogs did this; the fourth stayed behind and off to the side of its owner, and ran in tight circles.  I could never understand why it did this; it had all the room in the world to leap and bound. One day I was bold enough to ask the owner.

“Why does your dog do that? Why does it run in circles instead of running with the others?” He explained that before he had the dog, it had lived practically all its life in a cage and could only exercise by running in circles.  For this dog, to run meant to run in tight circles.  So instead of bounding through open fields that surrounded it, it ran in circles."

This is a powerful metaphor of the human condition.  For indeed we are free …. but the memory of the cage remains.  And so we run in tight, little circles even while immersed in open fields of grace and freedom’.   - Martin Laird in Into the Silent Land

*   *   *

"I'm not thankful for very many things," he said.

Leaving my son's room late one night - too late as always - I mentioned the Thanksgiving chain we had yet to start and my son said he didn't want to do one this year.  When I asked him why, he told me he just wasn't very thankful and I replied, "Well, that's why we need to do it."

This is my boy who always wants More and who, every time he gets One Thing, notices the lack of Another.  But he's also the one who time and time again names that which I would rather keep hidden, whose voice so often puts into words the things we all feel, but dare not name.

You see, I'm in charge of the Thanksgiving chain at our house.

I'm the one who cuts long, thin strips of golden copier paper, who hunts down the stapler and markers, who remembers the way November sneaks up so quickly after the Mardi Gras madness of Halloween. 

But there we were, seven, eight days in, paperless, stapler-less, thankless.

Leaving my son's room that night I knew that if we weren't giving thanks, it's because I wasn't feeling very thankful either.

*   *   *

The bible never talks about "feeling thankful" though, instead we're told to "be thankful."

There's a discipline to gratitude, a discipline to opening this doorway to grace, to leaving behind the tight, familiar circles of our own making.  Gratitude often doesn't come easy, isn't natural, especially in this life where we so often want and need More.

So we practice.

We bow our heads and pray it.

We write it, walk it, say it - out loud.

We practice opening this doorway to grace, precisely because it doesn't come naturally.

And in the practicing our lives are changed, stretched, opened wide.  The memory of the cage fades as we're remade into something new, as we too learn the art and beauty of running, leaping, bounding through wide, open fields.

*   *   *

The next night, downstairs in the dim bare-bulb light of our dining room, I rolled out a long stretch of transparent contact paper.  Taping it to the table to combat the curl, I told the kids to leave me alone, I was working on something, a surprise and they needed to wait.

Of course, this is exactly the kind of statement that sparks children's curiosity and they swarmed as I cut and taped strange shapes all across the table top.  Drawing with a brown permanent marker I made the outline of a sturdy winter tree, branches bare, reaching. 

Piece by piece we lifted and carried that tree.  Peeling the backing, we stuck it from the ground up, right onto the bare, white living room wall.

"What's it for? What are you making? What are we going to DO with it?" they cried, circling me, leaping and bounding like puppies eager for a treat.

"We're going to write the things we're thankful for on leaves and put them on the tree," I explained at last, cutting a few quick leaves from smaller pieces of contact paper.

Then I added, to my son who wasn't very thankful, "Solomon, go get the permanent markers." 

If there's one thing my son loves, it's permanent markers.  They're the Holy Grail of craft supplies at our house.  Standing on end in an old yogurt container on the kitchen counter, they're off-limits, used only by permission.  Second only to permanent markers on the craft supply hierarchy of a five year old boy, is contact paper.  To be allowed to use both at the same time, to make and stick as many leaves as he wanted, was surely something to be thankful for. 

Slowly, over the days and weeks, we're watching that tree grow full and green with gratitude, while the trees outside drop wave after wave of leaves.

We're growing new leaves in fall which, I guess is a little bit what gratitude is like, especially when it doesn't come easy.  The green buds and leaves of spring are no miracle, but these leaves, chosen in the face of winter, these leaves, surely, will give us shade in the days and weeks ahead. 

We're practicing gratitude together.  Practicing opening these doorways to grace, practicing running and leaping, laughing and loving, in these open fields of grace. 

This post is linked with Playdates with God.

Like Corn in the Night

I grew in those seasons like corn in the night . . . Henry David Thoreau

“At two, they’ve grown to half of their full height,” they doctor tells us as our twin boys wriggle and squiggle through their annual appointment.  “It took them two years to grow this much and it will take them the next sixteen years to finish growing.” 

In two years they grew like flowers blossoming in a high-speed video, unfurling, stretching out and up toward the light.

Lying in their cribs at night, they're wrecked, passed out cold in the strangest positions, half-covered, while stuffed animals and binkies flung into the darkness lay scattered across the floor.   They sleep twelve hours a night and science tells us that their growth is fueled in part by this surrender to the long, dark night.

*   *   *

The natural world is slipping into darkness now , the last leaves are shaken from the trees with a stretch and a quavering yawn as life continues, quieted, in the deep, dark, subterranean layers of the earth.  Earlier and earlier every evening now, I walk the perimeter of our house switching on the lamps that push back the night.  Strategically placed in every corner, they stand tall and thin like toothpicks propping our eyelids open.  Outside the darkness grows, but the bright yellow eyes of our windows glow because we believe there is more to be done; we cannot rest, cannot embrace, willingly, the dark, still silence. 

Maybe we believe, as Parker Palmer suggests, that, “if we are not making noise,. . . nothing good is happening and something must be dying” (89).  We have lost the sense of the value of darkness, lost an awareness that there may be good and important things going on in it of which we are unaware. 

*   *   *

The butterfly in its cocoon, the cicada asleep in the belly of the world, the child in the womb, all of these and more rely on darkness; in waiting and surrender they're changed into what they will be.  Isn't it possible then that we too might grow in such a night? 

Perhaps we too are only half of what we have yet to become and so let us go, peacefully to our rest, while the great God who spun the night across the wide expanse of the sky, like silk, and who whirled the stars out wide in their orbits, works quietly within us to bring all things into completion.


This post is linked with Imperfect Prose and #TellHisStory.

The Grouchy Ladybug (I Died a Hundred Deaths Last Halloween)

 

(This post originally appeared here last Halloween.  It's one of my favorites, so I thought I'd run it again this year.  Enjoy!)

It’s rainy and cold and we’re all keyed up and worn out from being trapped indoors for two days by Hurricane Sandy. I wake up, too late, and squeeze in a shower while my one-year-old twins, still in dirty diapers from the night before, wander around the living room. Their whining amplifies to full pitch as my shower cues them in to the possibility that I’ll be (gasp!) leaving for the morning. The preemptive separation anxiety continues through breakfast and packing everyone into the van to take my oldest to school.

After drop off I cart the remaining three kids back into the house. We mull around, waiting anxiously for the babysitter who'll be staying with the twins while the four year old and I head to his preschool's Halloween party at a local nursing home.  I have been dreading this event ever since the October calendar came home. 

The twins seem to relax and almost simultaneously my son's anxiety about the party rises.  Peppering me with questions, he asks, 

“Will there be people from the nursing home in the party?”

“Um, I’m not sure, honey.”

“Will they see me in my costume?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to dress up?”

“No”

“I don’t want to wear a costume.”

I've been “against” this party from day one and I know that my son, so robust and cheerful at home, will be shy and clingy in a new place. So like a Good Mother I plan to accompany him, despite my own teeth-clenching, foot-dragging antagonism toward it all.

“Solomon,” I say, “what if I wear a costume too?” I emerge from the back room wearing the fuzzy black antennae from my daughter’s ladybug costume.

“Ok,” he says, brightening, “you can be a black beetle.”

Then, I can feel myself giving in, letting go a little more as the idea strikes and I say, “What if I’m a ladybug? I can steal Sophia’s costume.”

He approves and I have just enough time to gather the red and black-dotted wings and my camera before the babysitter arrives and the oldest twin dissolves into a raging stream of tears. I run in circles grabbing things, carrying the littlest one and nearly run out the door with him, before the sitter stops me and grabs him saying, “This one’s staying.”

Then we’re off to a party I don’t want to go to, but also don’t want my son to miss. We drive through the rain and find his friends in a large room coloring at a table while elderly people in wheelchairs sit in a wide circle around them. The residents watch, their eyes hungrily absorbing the beauty and innocence, the luxury of so much youth in one small space.

My son is clingy, shy and tired, overwhelmed it seems, by the noise, the crafts, the games.  

I do my best to get into the spirit of things. 

I help with glue and tear bits of tissue paper, I assure a fretful child that it doesn’t matter where he puts the eyes on his pumpkin. I laugh with the other Moms over the resident who rides in on a wheelchair, pretending to scare the kids with a mask, all the while giving a growing peep show as his robe slides further and further open. I take a smiling picture with my son, a little Iron Man snuggled up on a ladybug's lap.

By the time we get home, though, I’m over-stimulated and frustrated at my inability to love Halloween, to love loud parties and candy. The twins are exhausted and hungry when we walk in and they’re drawn to me like magnets, pressing their tiny bodies onto me in desperation. It’s all I can do to untangle myself, causing more tears and desperation, as I head to the kitchen to make lunch. Solomon is sorting and dumping candy, dancing and singing and blowing the whistle from his party bag and the twins are screaming in their highchairs, desperate to make it clear how deeply my absence has wronged them.

Then I’m yelling, “Stop it” as I throw an apple-peel all the way across the kitchen.  It bounces off of one twin and they both sit staring, shocked into silence and my son, that sweet four year old boy, offers to play his whistle to settle them down.

*   *   *

There are days when being a mother feels like dying a hundred tiny deaths. A hundred letting-gos, a thousand surrenders to more noise, more movement, more demands than I feel capable of handling.  I’m not complaining, I simply want to be honest about the stretch of motherhood and how quickly, how fiercely, I shrink back from it.

I died a hundred little deaths this morning and will surely die a hundred more before nightfall on this, the day of the dead. But I know, thank God, that this dying, this surrender, makes me new again. I may die a hundred times a day, but I'm just as often made new, reborn in the face of a chubby, gap-toothed grin, a gentle hand seeking mine for reassurance. Just today I was resurrected by the voice of my son calling cheerfully from the back of the van as we made our way home, “I can’t wait to be old so I can go to the nursing home to live.”

*    *   *

Later in the day as I'm making chili for friends who're coming to trick-or-treat with us and the twins again stand whining at the gate that divides them from me, my Dad calls.   He wants me to know that my maternal grandmother has died in the nursing home where she's lived for years now in North Carolina.  

As I stand over the stove, stirring the chili, I find myself surprisingly grateful. 

Grateful that, though I couldn't be there with her, I was here, at a nursing home with my son, the very same morning. I think of my Grandmother's life and the many little and big deaths she endured. I think of the ways I get so focused on what I'm giving up, that I nearly miss what I have right here, right now in front of me. It occurs to me that I live such a grace-filled life, full of opportunities for surrender, continually pressing me toward the edge. 

*   *   * 

The chili's done, waiting in a pot on the stove and everyone's home.  I sit in the living room during the brief lull before company and costumes and the poor older twin, who just can't pull himself together, sits crying on the floor. 

I scoop him up in my arms, settle in the rocker and watch as he drifts into a heavy sleep.   I love the moment, the rocking, the slow, calm hum of a sleeping child. 

He stirs briefly and lifts his head, looking around in confusion before throwing up all over both of us.  Then he leans forward, laying his head back on my chest with that pile of warm, smelly goo laying like a layer of glue between us.   I died and rose again in that moment, hugging him tight until my husband came to help us both get cleaned up. 

*   *   * 

Every day of the dead, every Halloween, gives way to all saints day and I wonder if we too, dying in our little and big ways, aren't also being moved, continually, from death to new life. This dying is a surrender, a stripping bare by letting-go until all that remains is love.

The Laundromat (and Self-Pity)

The only condition necessary for this state of self-surrender is the present moment in which the soul, light as a feather, fluid as water, innocent as a child, responds to every movement of grace like a floating balloon. - Jean Pierre de Caussade in The Sacrament of the Present Moment

I stood in the sunny back room squeezing soapy water out of the final load while flies buzzed in lazy circles.  The washing machine was dead, so I wrung the legs of my husband's jeans until my hands burned from the soap running out, then sent at text to my husband to tell the landlord. 

Laundry never stops for a family of six, so while we waited for the repair man to pronounce it dead and the landlord made up his mind about replacing it, the piles and baskets crept slowly higher until finally, I was forced to take matters into my own hands. 

I lugged two baskets, "pressed down, shaken together and overflowing," out to the van and filled my pockets with quarters from the change jar.  I remembered the laundry detergent (miracle!), my journal, and a copy of The Sacrament of the Present Moment, by Jean Pierre de Caussade. 

It was a beautiful day, sunny, bright and cool after summer's last stretch of heat and nap time to boot and as I drove off with a van filled with enough dirty clothes to clothe a small army, the temptation to self-pity welled up within me. 

The laundromat sits in the middle, two blocks from the house we sold and two blocks from the apartment we're renting and though I've passed it a thousand times driving and walking, I've only been in it once. 

I pulled up and parked, popping the trunk and made two trips hauling everything in through doors that stood propped open.  A mild breeze mingled with the smell of fresh, clean laundry and everything hummed with the steady breath of washers and driers.  I tested my knowledge and technical skills to get the machines running, then settled at a wide low table that stretched across an enormous window at the front of the shop. 

The view was beautiful - crisp fall perfection framed by bright leafy trees that spread out before me, wide and expansive.  It was heavenly and I relished the silence, with my journal and reading laid open, cast in autumn's natural glow.

I tried to take a picture, I texted my husband, "I found my new office," and I settled down to dine on a moment of unexpected delight.   

Self-pity can be a pleasure, a pleasing meal for the unhappy heart, but it requires a condemnation of the present moment.  This almost always cuts us off from the possibility of finding pleasure, joy and gift in places unexpected.  By absenting ourselves from the present, we absent ourselves also from God's presence there.

I turned my heart on purpose that day, away from desire for what wasn't and into the moment that was.  Or rather, I should say, the tug of that blue sky and spacious window filled with the low hum of silence, turned it for me.  Looking into what was, my heart was tuned to the "movement of grace" and lifted along "light as a feather, fluid as water, innocent as a child . . . like a floating balloon."

This post is linked with Playdates With God.