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April 26, 2024

bibliotherapy: of fictional nature

i tend to ground myself in the world in all its nitty-gritty. that mattered (critically) when i was a nurse (don’t you dare inverse a systolic for a diastolic, when it comes to blood pressure reading), and in all my decades of chasing after news, the truth—and every grimy detail—was what we sought. thus, when i peruse the bookshelves of my local free library (the world’s most generous invention, to be sure), i am nearly always in the down-low where no windows are, where the endless rows of fact not fiction reside.

i’m decidedly non-fictionally inclined.

but this week i was lulled into the rooms upstairs, the rooms where sunshine streams through sky-high windows, and where make-believe is the order of the room. in other words, i crept up to where the fiction is. and in the writings of one irish novelist, a fellow i’d give anything to sit with in any irish pub, or better yet to stroll the rocky coastline of the continent from which half my peoples come, i found the surest cure for running from the blues.

niall williams is his name, an irishman, who is but a year younger than me, and who has gathered wisdom as an old stone takes on a mossy coat. i can almost see the glint in his eye, as from some quiet post in the corner of a dimly-lit, crossbeamed room, he’s kept closest watch on the quirks and comedies of human nature. and on the heartbreak too. as the tenderness he kneads into his prose and paragraphs has left me gasping more than once (and i am only eight chapters in).

the book is this is happiness, as prescriptive a title as a girl in search of antidote might want.

the irishman had me at chapter 1: “It had stopped raining.” (that’s the chapter in its entirety.)

chapter 2 picked up where 1 left off: “Nobody in Faha” (the fictional irish town that just happens to be a spot on the map not far from where my non-fictional peoples hailed) “could remember when it started.” by the third sentence of that second chapter, i was ready to shove up my shirtsleeves and not move an inch till i’d turned the last page. it went like this: “[Rain] came straight down and sideways, frontwards, backwards, and any other wards God could think of. It came in sweeps, in waves, sometimes in veils. It came dressed as drizzle, as mizzle, as mist, as showers, frequent and widespread, as a wet fog, as a damp day, a dreeping, an out-and-out downpour.”

and on it goes, plip-plopping along, this incantatory passage that soon enough tells us that the unrelenting rain came “like a blessing God had forgotten he had left on.”

this is nothing less than bliss in garamond font (a literary typographic detail nearly always spelled out at the back end of any book); and most certainly for a girl who penned a paragraph of her own, in her most recent book, that unfurled in uncannily kindred ways. c’est moi:

“Rain, like most of us, has its moods. In its more laconic hours, it comes on unsuspectingly, without folderol, timpani, or cymbal crashing, the barest slip of a presence and suddenly you’re bespattered. On the days when rain is tempestuous, furious, raging, it rattles the heavens, cleaves the night, pummels the trees, and sends all the world—even the puddle-paddling robins—running for cover. Betwixt and between, it’s the master of a thousand voices, from the salubrious plopp—the drop with a splatter—to the militaristic rat-a-tat-tat, when the rain tries to pretend it’s a handful of pebbles thrashing your windows, and on to the audible gulp when a downpour is frothing your gulleys. The Brits, reliably saturated in the subject, offer a lengthy lexicon for precipitation’s multiple personalities: there’s a basking (drenching in heavy shower); a drisk (misty drizzle); a fox’s wedding (sudden drops out of clear blue sky); a hurly-burly (thunder and lightning); a stotting (rain so hard it bounces up off the ground); and, for closers, thunner-pash (heavy shower with thunder). Because it’s so elemental, the life stuff of our very existence, the celestial surge that fills our rivers and waters our crops, rinses away the detritus, bathes all the woods, and the sidewalks as well, it’s been the subject of intense preoccupation and prognostication for a long, long time. time. Since ever ago.”
(p. 85, The Book of Nature)

is there not a hint here of shared joy in precipitatory romps? can you not feel the two of us––niall et moi––luxuriating in the many, many wondrous ways to say “the rain is unrelenting”?

i am hardly alone in my enamorment of mr. williams. my best best friend, a longtime children’s librarian in the los angeles public schools, couldn’t stop texting me pictures of its pages this week, and, soon after, when i mentioned to a beloved literary friend (a sister chair, who might reveal herself below) that i’d fallen into novel love, she reminded me that she’d told me so a few years back. as always, i am late to my own party.

in any case, here’s what the new yorker had to say back at the dawn of 2020, in the year of our covid, when happiness whirled onto the world stage.

This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams (Bloomsbury). This elegiac novel is as unhurried as its setting: Faha, a village in western Ireland, “unchanged since creation” until, in the late fifties, electricity arrives. The narrator, now elderly, reminisces about that time; having come from Dublin as a teen-ager, to live with his grandparents after the death of his mother, he conceived a hopeless passion for three sisters. “We spend most of our lives guarding against washes of feeling, I’m guarding no more,” he promises. The novel’s description of a lost rural life style, and the gaps between a young man’s romantic expectations and the inescapable letdown of reality, is comic and poignant in equal measure.

all of which is to say that bibliotherapy is one of the world’s great cures for whate’er ails you. and even more so when it ferries you off to a wee irish village “where story was a kind of human binding,” where church pews were filled as if by unwritten order, where front doors were never closed in daytime nor backdoors locked at night, and where, we’re told, “religion lasted longer … because we were an imaginative people, and so could most vividly picture the fires of Hell.”

and wherein the self-described antiquarian narrator notes in passing, “i know it seems unlikely that Faha then might have been the place to learn how to live, but in my experience the likely is not in God’s lexicon.”

the world these days is wearying. and worrying, too. my week began with a funeral, a breathtakingly beautiful one that wove buddhist and roman catholic threads but was tragic nonetheless, and was followed by a seder where the weight of gaza and jerusalem bore down on every heart. by week’s end, i’d heard tell that my kid was nearly carjacked, and a dear friend who lives alone (and has borne already more than too much suffering) is on the cusp of twelve rounds of godawful, pray-to-God-it-works chemo for the newly-diagnosed cancer in her lungs.

the blooms outside my kitchen door were doing all they could to boost the perfumed quota in the vernal air, and the robins busied themselves constructing scrappy nests in my window box along the alley. (do not ask me to tell you the tragic tale of the mama robin who was tangled in a dessicated grapevine, nor of the nest no longer in the works.) all the earth’s wonderment––glorious as it is as winter erupts into spring––is ephemeral, is here, then, poof, it’s gone.

but what i find on the page is lasting. can be read and read again. can be indelibly inked into the files of our mind.

and so, this week, a newfound balm and friend was found. and i’ll be tucked away in faha, on the fictional irish coast, for as long as the pages will carry me. bibliotherapy rarely fails me.

what carried you away this week?

here’s a jolt of joy that took my breath away this week: the great christian mystic richard rohr, a franciscan friar and ecumenical teacher, and his new mexico-based Center for Action and Contemplation saw fit to surprise me by clipping an excerpt from The Book of Nature in his daily meditations on wednedsay. that he chose a favorite passage, the story of brother lawrence, the barefoot monk who saw God in the pots and pans of his parisian monastery kitchen, and was struck by the innate holiness of a nuck-naked little tree, only charmed me all the more. here’s a peek at the preaching of the trees.

and from this week’s commonplacing. this morsel from DH Lawrence:

The vast marvel is to be alive… The supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul… There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

this, from mary oliver…

Morning Light

by MARY OLIVER

Every morning
the good news
pours
through the field

touching
every blossom
every stem
and each of them,

on the instant
offers to be part of it—
offers to lift and hold, willingly
the vast burden of light

all day.
In my life
I have never seen it to fail—
flower after flower

leaf after pearly leaf,
to the acre,
to the massy many,
is silvered, is flooded;

and such voices
spangle among it—
larks and sparrows—
all those small souls—

are everywhere
tossing the quick wheels of pleasure
from their red throats
as they hang on—

as though on little masts
of golden ships,
to the tops of the weeds—
and that’s when I come—

that’s when I come, crying out to the world:
oh give me a corner of it
to lift also, to sing about, to touch
with my wild hands—and they do.

and this from annie dillard‘s the writing life, prose laid out as a poem by my friends at SALT Project:

One of the few things I know
about writing is this:
spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it,
all, right away, every time.

Do not hoard what seems good
for a later place in the book,
or for another book;
give it, give it all, give it now.

The impulse to save
something good
for a better place later
is the signal to spend it now.

Something more will arise
for later, something better.
These things fill from behind,
from beneath, like well water.

Similarly, the impulse to keep
to yourself what you have learned
is not only shameful, it is destructive.

Anything you do not give
freely and abundantly
becomes lost to you.

You open your safe
and find ashes.

and finally, this goodbye to “poetry’s colossus,” helen vendler, whom i was blessed to call my teacher in our year of sumptuous thinking…

and blessings to you, and thanks for whirling by….

p.s. the other two books in my bibliotherapy stack (above) are william’s history of the rain, which had me at the title, and letters from max: a book of friendship, an epistolary collection between a poet and a playwright: sarah ruhl, the twice pulitzer-finalist playwright who was once teacher to poet max ritvo and quickly became dear friends, and as max’s cancer grew worse, their connection deepened. suleika jauoad ran an excerpt the other day in her isolation journals, and i ran to the library to grab a copy.

7 Comments

April 19, 2024

solitary vigil

there are days we mark in silence, days best kept in solitude, in the quiet deep down places where only we can trace the contours of the shadow, the weight of how they’ve changed us, cleared the lens through which we see.

they’re the days that have left their mark on us, indelibly. the days in our lifetime that will forever inscribe the demarcation, time divided starkly––before and ever after.

one by one, or one alone, they’re the days, the dates, the hours that constitute our subterrain, the strata by which our soul is shaped and stretched and textured. it’s the timeline that draws us into depths, to keener understanding of what it means to be alive. or our life, anyway.

it might be a death or disfigurement. it might be birth, or betrothal. a beginning or an end. most often, both at once. to close one chapter is, by definition, to open the next. and while some of those days are duly announced, and bracketed with anything from helium balloons to holding our breath, it might be the weightier ones––the ones whose mark is most unexpungable––best kept in solitary vigil.

it is in the profound spaciousness of unspoken thoughts that we find the room to grope for consequence, that we fumble toward those few faint stirrings that draw us closer and closer to what becomes our truth. we can’t really find our way without the grace of our aloneness, the room where knowing comes. in the beginning and the end, we tread the thin-bare thread of life with but our God to take us by the hand. or so i believe.

and here’s a truth: by the time we’ve hobbled through a few decades (or less or more, depending on our lot), we all accumulate those days. the days whose dates we don’t forget. the day we met our one true love. the long night of our first miscarriage. the house fire that chased us out. the last look into someone’s eyes. the first time the doctor put breath to the word cancer, and quickly added how surprised he was they’d found it deep inside us.

we keep those days in cloak of silence because we are sifting still through all the ways they’ve reconfigured who we know ourselves to be, and how we move through time.

yesterday was one such day for me. one year since i awoke on a gurney, my surgeon by my side. i shudder now to remember it, though at the time i didn’t shudder at all. i was brave that day. it hadn’t sunk in so deeply yet. ever since, and all year long, i’ve had glimpses both of bravery and brokenness. i’ve cried buckets and, then, i’ve set my shoulders firm; i’ve faced the worst of my fears with unflinching questions, endless hours reading, and airplane rides to doctors i wish i’d never needed to know. i’ve slowly, slowly, tried to imagine adding numbers to my years.

april 18 is a date i’ve uttered umpteen times in the last year. date of surgery: date of diagnosis. date of new beginning. date of counting time with deeper intention and attention.

maybe the date will dim, as i move on from it. as 2024 fades to 2025 and . . . (and hallelujah for the 4 that now sits firmly where the 3 began.) a year ago today was the first time i saw my life measured in the span best known as five-year-survival rate, the chance you’ll be around five years hence. believe you me, it’s a bracing thing to count forward and hope and pray you cross the line to––bing! bing! bing! your magic number is….––04.18.28. the date now yours with odds attached.

i’m going for broke here, and placing bets. but that’s only because at this very moment what swells in me is hope. quick as the clouds scuttle across an april sky, i might flinch, get scared, and pull my money from the table.

my point is simply to say that there are days that define who we are, and we keep those days in silent vigil, wrap those days in certain grace. and we pray to God we come out the other side, with lessons learned and underscored, as we reach and reach toward that one repeating prayer: dear Holy Gracious God, let me make of this one most sacred day every iota of blessing that is mine––and yours––to give.

some mornings are so much clumsier than others; this is a clumsy one, but my vow to try–even when i mostly miss–is one i take to heart. to write raw is its own peculiar dare. but here’s the why: because every fleeting while you just might catch a dust mote of life as you know it. and thus i will keep swatting at the passing motes, in hopes of putting words to those ineffable pieces of the puzzle. because we are all bumbling along together here, and in good company we find light and air.

as you look back across the plane of your life, are there days you’ve not forgotten, days you note alone and without mention, because you know how lastingly they’ve marked you? and that’s a questions whose answer you needn’t give voice to here. but just a prompt.

24 Comments

April 12, 2024

amid the dizzyings of springtime…

i imagine it’s been well-established that i am of the homebody persuasion. the sort of girl who thrums inside the cozy confines of space and time i know by heart. to plop behind the wheel and point myself in a direction i’ve not been is, well, to stretch me. to accelerate the tempo of my little heart, to bring on the rumblies in my tummy. and so it was as i set out for The Driftless (a topography that deserves every drop of its capital consonants) a week ago today.

for starters, i got lost. yes, yes, after dutifully trying to follow my index-card directions through country roads and farmer fields, i decided maybe it was safer to let the little voice tell me where to go rather than glancing down and trying to find the numbers i had scribbled. well, news flash: there are TWO mineral points in ol’ wisconsin, and the one i was steered toward was the one in otherwise unmarked farrow field. that little voice announced, “you’ve arrived. your destination is on the right,” whilst i looked up and saw literally nothing but an undulating plot of shaved-off stalks. hmm. this must not be, i intuitively surmised.

i was miles from nowhere, and 67 miles from where i needed to be. where the world’s loveliest host had a turkey meatloaf in the oven, and asparagus steaming in a skillet. ah, but in due time, rollercoastering along country roads, past baby calves (yes, i know it’s redundant, but i like to say it that way) all gathered under little calf-ling igloos, which must be the latest in dairy husbandry for each baby calf had its own domed shelter, and a place to escape the drifting snows, past rock formations that felt prehistoric or laid there by ancient peoples, through towns that time forgot and that i prayed still stuck to old ways, and not the toxic juice that’s infected so very much of old america, i pulled in the gravel lane that was my destination.

and, from the first footfall inside the charming farmhouse, i was home. daffodils and aldo leopold awaited on the bedside table, and the bed itself was a cloud of comforters. each morning that sunrise above greeted me from the kitchen windows. and each morning, it took my breath away, and filled me with holy airs.

the folks i met were as fine and fluent in the poetries of earth as any souls i’ve met along my way. i met a farmer who plows his field with draft horses, and writes letters back and forth with wendell berry (be still my heart!). and another farmer who used to cook at chez panisse. (yes, that chez panisse, the one in berkeley CA, where alice waters revolutionized the kitchen.) i scrubbed pots and pans beside a woman whose heart must pump in gold. and i heard tales of keeping watch on eagles’ nests.

and then, come sunday morning, after hiking through the woods, and talking books in a charming indie book store (where croissants were rising in the ovens behind me), i took to the pulpit in a little country church to deliver what you might call the sermon, but which the priest referred to as a “reflection” since i’ve not passed the sermon-licensing exams. and as i wove threads from the doubting thomas gospel and the book of nature’s sometimes tangible God, i looked out on a congregation of fine souls who were listening in a way i’ve never known: heads cocked, a posture of deep attentiveness, eyes on the pulpit, you could hear a pin drop in that blessed church. and i saw how good souls are hungry for a word of wisdom with their sunday-morning coffee. if this is church, and i do believe it is, may we become a people who know to carve out time to put down phones, dial down the pings, and find our way to wherever it is the holy wisdoms come.

not an hour later, the whole adventure in soul-stretching reached its crescendo when every last soul at the basement coffee hour stood and raised an arm toward me, or laid a hand on my shoulders, and at the behest of the priest, father christian was his name, blessed me with a prayer that had me all but gulping back a walloping sob. when i felt the tiny hand of father christian’s little boy, a kid with special needs, squeezing my left arm, i really truly nearly lost it, as they say. instead, i held his hand and together we squeezed and prayed all the way to the last amen.

and then i motored home, not quite the way i got there. and forever deepened and shifted by the glorious goodness of my new friends who dwell in the driftless.

i came home, of course, to sunlight-blocking moon, and a garden erupting in springtime’s accelerandos. and i spent a good bit of week deep-breathing all of that, and getting mighty muddy too. but i also came home to friends who are grieving inconceivable losses. and when i found this prayer-poem from jan richardson, i knew i needed to pass it along. so, here, too, for all of you is a poem to keep for when grief comes to you or someone you love, or even someone you might not know too well at all. jan is a poet, artist, ordained minister in the united methodist church. i was introduced to her years ago now, by my very own night chaplain (slj to all of you, a regular visitor here at the chair). and as jan’s life was torn open by the sudden death of her husband, she has only deepened. and her work all the more mesmerizing. this is from not long after the death of her husband, when she was coming up on her first valentine’s day without him. her words are among the truest i’ve ever read. she is pure blessing.

Blessing for the Brokenhearted

There is no remedy for love but to love more.
—Henry David Thoreau

Let us agree
for now
that we will not say
the breaking
makes us stronger
or that it is better
to have this pain
than to have done
without this love.

Let us promise
we will not
tell ourselves
time will heal
the wound,
when every day
our waking
opens it anew.

Perhaps for now
it can be enough
to simply marvel
at the mystery
of how a heart
so broken
can go on beating,
as if it were made
for precisely this—

as if it knows
the only cure for love
is more of it,

as if it sees
the heart’s sole remedy
for breaking
is to love still,

as if it trusts
that its own
persistent pulse
is the rhythm
of a blessing
we cannot
begin to fathom
but will save us
nonetheless.

—Jan Richardson

This blessing appears in Jan’s book, The Cure for Sorrow.

gremlins seem to be lurking here this morning, so let us see if we can fling this to the cyberwires that carry this from my kitchen table to yours. question for the day, besides “will this work?” is where did you find holiness this week?

and here is a special wink and nod for the great good souls i didn’t get to mention above: the glass sculptor who sailed the world before planting herself on high street, in downtown mineral point. the ones who’d taught for years and years in alaska before sinking deep roots in driftless loam. the bibliophile who opened an indie bookstore, and thought to attach a cooking school besides. and most of all to jane, my storytelling hostess whose graces left me nothing short of gobsmacked.

8 Comments

April 5, 2024

the pretty way

long a proponent of “the pretty way,” the winding way to wherever i’m headed, i am up against the GPS current, the Waze current, those little voices that come out of the ubiquitous boxes in our lives that try to tell us what to do––and the shortest, fastest, sometimes blandest way to do it.

it’s one thing when running late to a doctor’s appointment on a rainy afternoon when the roads are under construction. but not so when the afternoon is a span of time unmoored from anything else, except an eventual need to show up somewhere.

i am seizing one of those days today, as i drift north and a little bit west and steer myself toward a corner of the world i’ve never seen, a corner called “the driftless” (and if i ever employed my caps lock key, that d would be a D, as in a capital proper-name letter). it’s a corner as dramatic as any in these middlelands of the continent, a chunk of 8,500 square miles described as “a sudden maze of hills” and bluffs and valleys below, rising out of the flatlands of southwestern wisconsin.

it’s the land that time (or at least a good chunk of the ice age) forgot. while the glaciers of 500 bazillion years ago steamrolled the behoozies out of the rest of these parts, they never rolled through the driftless, leaving time to do its thing: cold water streams kept on carving through rock, sculpting and clearing and doing as they pleased. the meltwater from parts beyond incised valleys and bluffs, sinkholes and springs, caves and labyrinthine cave systems. and so, in the midst of a topography best described as pancake, suddenly there is capital D drama.

i could do with a good dose of topographical drama. and today’s the day i’m making it happen. because there’s not a Siri in the world who will point me the ways i want to go, i’ve had to revert to pen and ink, and scribbled my route onto an index card. 90 to 20 which turns into 69, quick right onto 81, then city road G/N and, at last, onto 23. u.s. highways and state roads, roads with alphabetical options, and streets with no names at all. that’s how i’ll get where i’m going.

and all the while i will marvel, and gawk. might even put the car in reverse, to gawk all over again (don’t tell the designated “careful driver” in the family, he who would insist on seizing my wheel).

it’s all a way of seizing time. of gulping down as much as you can of the wonders not too far beyond our very own windows. for the most part, my days trace and re-trace old, familiar routes. and for a homebody like me, that’s a very fine thing. if given my druthers, i’d stay curled in my window seat for hours on end. but, when distant parts call, i’m intent on getting there my way.

which is always, always the wiggledy way.

the way that makes me so blessedly thrilled to be drinking it in.

luci shaw is as dear a soul as she is a fine poet. and this morsel from luci fell on my path this week, in a resurrected interview with Image Journal. here’s luci’s take on why we write:

I have a magnet on my file cabinet that says, Write to learn what you know. So often the physical jotting of words in a journal or on a screen is like a key opening a lock. We know more than we know. When that door is opened, we find unsuspected treasures that can become available to others in our writing. This is a mystery. Because words and ideas have been recorded for centuries, they are available to enlarge our own thinking. We can connect with the words of the great writers of the past—Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Dante, Donne—because they were written down and preserved. It is magical to realize that their ideas are still flying, reaching over hundreds of years into our lifetimes, and as we read them, their revelations are transferred into our modern minds. I just wrote a poem inspired by a saying of Tertullian, an early church father, about birds, and the cross they make with their wings when flying.

and a little dose of poet and zen monk jane hirshfield to wind up the week….

To Drink

I want to gather your darkness
in my hands, to cup it like water
and drink.
I want this in the same way
as I want to touch your cheek—
it is the same—
the way a moth will come
to the bedroom window in late September,
beating and beating its wings against cold glass;
the way a horse will lower
his long head to water, and drink,
and pause to lift his head and look,
and drink again,
taking everything in with the water,
everything.
––Jane Hirshfield

how might you make the most of time today?

p.s. i’m headed to mineral point, wisconsin, for a weekend of Book of Nature extravaganzas, beginning with a saturday morning nature hike through a wooded (and likely muddy) preserve, followed by an afternoon book talk in a charming book store called The Republic of Letters, followed by a gathering at a new cook shop, followed by my first from-the-pulpit sermon at Trinity Episcopal Church on sunday morning. then it’ll be back home the windiest way i can wiggle…(here’s a little recording the mineral point chamber of commerce posted who knows where…)

22 Comments

March 29, 2024

in the silence . . .

in the long tradition of seekers and sages, silence is a constant. a leitmotif maybe. a rhythm that ebbs and flows. it is into the silence that we surrender to enter the depths of our soul, the unencumbered spaces where whispers are heard, where the stirring comes.

in silence, the earthly noise is muffled. we tune our inner ear, the one that’s tied to the soul. the one that allows the sacred to find its way in.

and so, on this day, this good friday, a day long held in silence for me, i will make room for that long quenching that comes when i am alone in the depths, in the stillness.

this is the first holy week in a very long time where the braiding of the two traditions that animate this old house — jewish passover and christian easter — are not entwined. easter i only recently learned falls on the first sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. passover, though, always begins on a full moon, the 15th day of the month of nisan on the hebrew calendar, and because the lunar and solar calendars are marching to their own separate tunes, every once in a while there is a good bit of moon between the two holidays.

so this year, i will be deep in good friday all day, as i was deep in holy thursday last night, the breathtakingly spare hour when, in a nod to jesus’ last supper, a seder in which he knew he would be betrayed by one of his closest twelve, and retreated to the garden of gethsemane to weep and to pray, the whole church was stripped of ornament and color. the altar was washed, the vestments of priest and deacon and choir were removed. every candle was snuffed. we left the church in thick silence.

my own blessed mother held this day, this good friday, in a reverence that seeped early on into the depths of me. silence was kept from noon till the hour of jesus’ death on the cross, which we somehow had determined was three in the afternoon. and so, all these years later, i keep that silence.

most often i take to my window seat, the perch looking out into the trees. i will pick up my caryll houselander, the 20th-century mystic whose words penetrate me like no other, her meditations on the stations of the cross, the dusty desolate path of jesus’ walk to the hill of golgotha, the hill where he would die.

there is much to pray on and for this year. the brokenness, the darkness, is plenty. and all we’ve got to begin to mend the brokenness, to kindle a flickering light in the darkness, is the small but inextinguishable capacity of whatever antidotes we can muster: the smallest kindness; the rare attention to someone else’s suffering; the unexpected delivery of joy.

we can, in our pointillist way, drop dot upon dot of goodness onto the canvas that is our moment in time on this planet. hope stirs as long as we can stand in the face of darkness, and muscle our few and feeble yet insuppressible defiances: we will not surrender to those forces we know to be counter to the sacred; we will not let all the light be extinguished. we are our own last best hopes for the world we imagine. and i will enter into the silence and the depths of the sorrow today to chart my way toward whatever light i can muster.

so help me God.

because it is increasingly my way to bring you the voices of souls far wiser and deeper than i might ever be, i have gathered up a few who stirred me this week.

first up, henri nouwen, restless seeker, priest and theologian, comes along, as antidote to so much suffering, reminding us–in one of his most indelible passages–to be surprised by joy:

Learn the discipline of being surprised not by suffering but by joy. As we grow old . . . there is suffering ahead of us, immense suffering, a suffering that will continue to tempt us to think that we have chosen the wrong road. . . . But don’t be surprised by pain. Be surprised by joy, be surprised by the little flower that shows its beauty in the midst of a barren desert, and be surprised by the immense healing power that keeps bursting forth like springs of fresh water from the depth of our pain.
henri nouwen

and praying this isn’t too dark, this epiphany from louise erdrich‘s the painted drum:

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
louise erdrich

and, bon mot for all who love poetry and find it endlessly a wonder, this from david hinton, chinese literature scholar:

Poetry is the cosmos awakened to itself. Narrative, reportage, explanation, idea: language is the medium of self-identity, and we normally live within that clutch of identity, identity that seems to look out at and think about the Cosmos as if from some outside space. But poetry pares language down to a bare minimum, thereby opening it to silence. And it is there in the margins of silence that poetry finds its deepest possibilities — for there it can render dimensions of consciousness that are much more expansive than that identity-center, primal dimensions of consciousness as the Cosmos awakened to itself. At least this is true for classical Chinese poetry, shaped as it is by Taoist and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist thought into a form of spiritual practice. In its deepest possibilities, its inner wilds, poetry is the Cosmos awakened to itself — and the history of that awakening begins where the Cosmos begins.

where were you surprised by joy this week? and — only to ask yourself — what might you bring to this world today to turn back the darkness, to begin to mend the brokenness?

this is the little hyacinth that surprised me this week. a bulb tossed aside at the end of last spring, she decided to bloom amid an otherwise forgotten patch along the alley

6 Comments

March 22, 2024

when springtime lives up to its billing: equal parts shadow and light

according to celestial alignments, the shadow now is equal, light and dark. the sun has crossed the equator, and here on the northern half of the orb, spring is upon us. except that as i type, snow is blanketing my tender spring tendrils, and the walk is slick, and, well, tis the very picture of springtime here in the heartlands, where you’re wise not to count your blooms before the ides of may.

my heart too is heavy, beating in time with that of a mother i know who is off in the mountains of northern california searching for her blessed daughter who went hiking from the tassajara zen mountain center on monday, and five days and cold dark nights later still has not been found. i ask for prayers for caroline.

motherhearts are a communal collective. we cannot pause the pounding against our own chest wall, we cannot sleep soundly, when we know profoundly of another mother in unimaginable distress. be it the mothers of syria, or gaza, or israel’s kibbutzim, or my long-ago newsroom compatriot now strapped into her hiking boots, hearing only the echo of her own cry as she walks the remote yet exquisite topography where, somewhere, her firstborn is lost, is lying, is awaiting her mama’s arms and a wrapping in blankets.

my prayers have been looping nonstop, clouding out most other thoughts, since i first heard word. caroline’s mama is a woman of incredible, unbreakable faith. the notes she is sending back home, here in chicago, bolster my faltering. “my gratitude and hope outweigh my fears,” she wrote in her last short update, teaching me a thing or two about how to be strong in the face of the unbearable.

because the promise of springtime is, indeed, equal parts shadow and light, i turn to the poets for a dappling of light. and we begin with emily, the belle of amherst, and quickly turn to the little-known artist who inspired her:

“to be a flower,” emily dickinson wrote in her 1865 poem, “bloom,” considered a pre-ecological work, “is profound responsibility.”

a passionate lifelong gardener, emily D (“a keen observer of the house of life who made of it a temple of beauty,” as cultural critic maria popova once put it) had fallen under the spell of wildflowers as a teenager while composing her herbarium of 424 blooms native to new england. but, writes popova, it was an “uncommonly beautiful” book her father gave her just before she turned thirty that rocket-blasted her poetic passion for nature’s own garden: wild flowers drawn and colored from nature by the botanical artist and poet clarissa munger badger (may 20, 1806–december 14, 1889).

published in 1859, the same year charles darwin’s on the origin of species shook science, badger’s book “contained twenty-two exquisite scientifically accurate paintings of common new england wildflower species — violets and harebells, the rhododendron and the honeysuckle — each paired with a poem bridging the botanical and the existential: some by titans like percival and longfellow, some by long-forgotten poets of her time and place, some by badger herself,” writes popova.

seven years later, badger brought her brush to the beauty of wildflowers’ domestic counterparts, the blooms of greenhouse and garden: the pansy and the lily, the day-blazing geranium and the night-blooming cactus, the tulip and the rose, and once again pairing her paintings with poems, she celebrated garden flowers as “brilliant hopes, all woven in gorgeous tissues,” as “stars… wherein we read our history.”

another poet, one i dream of sitting down to dinner with, or more in keeping with her ilk, plopping on a porch swing, she with cigarette burning orange against the black of night, me, merely pumping my merry little legs. dorianne laux is her name, and you’ve seen me write of her here. she has a brand new craft book, companion of sorts to her earlier the poet’s companion, and the new book, finger exercises for poets, is “an engaging invitation to practice poetry alongside a master,” and it’ll be out this july from w.w. norton & company. (they still send me advance reader copies; bless them.)

here’s a passage i knew i needed to share, from glorious, glorious dorianne’s introduction:

“My instrument is the immensity of language, the techniques and effect of crafting images, shaping sound and rhythm, creating new combinations with the single notes of words, each colliding or coming together, meshing or crashing, standing firm or tumbling. There are eighty-eight keys on a piano, six hundred thousand words in the English language. The patterns, the sequences, and permutations of both are endless. For me, language is another kind of music.

“I practice poetry. This book invites you to practice along with me.”

and i close, this snowy spring morning, with yet another master of language, and truth-telling: james baldwin. (this comes to me from a french monk whose writing i follow; laurence freeman is his name, and here’s a bit of what he sent this week from the bonnevaux centre for peace, in the southwest of france): “toward the end of his life, baldwin gave a television interview in which he was asked to reflect on the essential subject of his classic, groundbreaking novel, giovanni’s room. baldwin’s answer is an extraordinary meditation on love, and in particular, how it can serve a kind of educational purpose in our lives.” here’s what baldwin said, laid out as a poem.

Q: What’s the novel, Giovanni’s Room, about?

Baldwin’s answer:

It’s about what happens to you
if you can’t love anybody.
It doesn’t make any difference
whether you can’t love a woman,
or can’t love a man —
if you can’t love anybody,
you’re dangerous.
Because you’ve no way
of learning humility.
No way of learning
that other people suffer.
No way of learning
how to use your suffering,
and theirs, to get from one place
to another.

In short, you fail the human
responsibility, which is
to love each other.

+ James Baldwin

what are the lessons of love you learned in this week of shadow and light?

p.s. illustration at the top is indeed one of clarissa munger badger’s beauties. and i will ask once again, please please offer up prayers for rescue for blessed, blessed caroline, her mama, her papa, and all who are holding their most sacred breath…..

14 Comments

March 15, 2024

saved by the dust bunnies

dear reader, fear not. at last writing, as i bemoaned the absence of progeny in this old house, and awoke to the relative quietude of life as empty nester, i might have seeded worry. what will she do, that poor blithering mama, you might have wondered. will she clock her time staring out the window, awaiting the return of said progeny galloping in from distant plains, in need of laundry, grilled cheese, or any other assorted task for which a mother is distinctly schooled?

worry not: purpose has arrived.

yes, indeedy. in the form of unknown possibly invisible creatures lurking in the chamber where the recently departed (from this house, that is) now attempts to sleep. these invisible and invincible forces seem intent on making the boy rub his nose and eyes and sneeze. all night long. and well into the daylight.

and so, the call has come. i am (somewhat) needed. or, at least my vacuum is. and i, taking no such task lightly, i’ve equipped myself with a whole battery of dust-bunny-battling weaponry. just last night my friends at amazon delivered the air purifier deemed best in class by the folks at wirecutter, that band of trusty testers at the new york times. and i’ve a gallon jug of vinegar, a mop, and microfiber dust cloths, enough to wipe out legions of pesky mites.

dust buster am i.

dust bunny under microscope: what we’re up against in the dust bunny challenge

all of which points to the foregone conclusion that ol’ mothers never ever pass their expiration dates. we are not sent off to distant pastures. our aprons and our mops, never really set out to dry. we do not wither on the vine. we are, if not invincible, indelibly anchored in the domestic equation.

why, just this week the kid who mostly dashed in and out of the house whilst he was living here, has seen fit to call me for instructions on: a.) how to work a wet mop; b.) what to take for allergies; c.) what else to take for allergies; and d.) all of the above.

it’s a reassuring thing to know the worry chambers of my mama brain need not turn off. i can still muster up a storm in there, scheming up the options, imagining the worst. and, then, as i’ve done since the first note of first pregnancy, i leap into action. if i can slay one dragon––be it lost mitten in the long ago, or dust mites under the bed today––i sidle one inch nearer to indispensability. or so i pretend.

the truth, as i’ve long known, is that love––in any form––does not subscribe to geographical or chronological bounds. i can love as fiercely and devotedly whether you’re under my roof or far far from here. ours is a world in which distance is a given. we are no longer a people of the shtetl or the lane. i only wish those i love lived nearby enough to rap at the door and sidle in for tea. or late night storytelling.

be it by the powers of imagination or a polished knack for empathy, the human heart is the inexplicable muscle with unbound capacity to stretch from here to eternity. and in so doing, we can fiercely and fine-grainedly love the ones too far away or the ones who are no longer, for their essence burns on and on as long as we are breathing. and, sometimes, in the uncanniest of ways: in reaching for my mother-in-law’s signature-red coffee mug on any morning, i can suddenly hear her singsong way of telling me her faith in me has never dulled. and she’s been gone now for nearly three years.

the resurrective powers of love are without rhyme or reason. and, indeed, they save us.

i’ve thought plenty in recent months about the muscularity of love. how it has propelled me up steep inclines, ones i might not have found the nerve to climb had i not felt some forcefield behind me. i’ve a never-ending fascination with this ineffability we know as love, not as valentine ephemera, but love as true physical force, love as divinely inspired. with the power to heal. the power to quell. and, sometimes, the power to slay a bunny made of dust.

your thoughts on the mystical powers of love welcome here:

8 Comments

March 8, 2024

coming home to an empty nest

a desk cleaner than it’s been in a long, long while…

the house i walked into the other day, upon return from faraway, was not the house i left. mostly, it looked the same. same pair of stools at the kitchen counter. same loose brick on the backdoor step. but here and there things were missing: coats no longer weighing down the coat hooks; size 12 shoes, all gone; the big ol’ speaker with the disco lights, the one parked beside the birdseed bin ever since last springtime’s college graduation, it had up and vanished.

and the silence was the loudest i had heard in a long, long while.

whilst i was away, there arrived an absence.

my beloved and i, for the first time in nearly 31 years, now dwell in an empty nest.

the younger fledgling has flown the coop. and we, the grownups, haven’t much clue what to do with the newborn stillness.

while i was off in the nation’s capital, puttering about Boy No. 1’s apartment, planting myself in the way back of his law school lecture hall, motoring about the countryside in search of sought-after antiques, Boy No. 2 set south for the ‘hood to which he was born.

he left behind a room that would be described as empty, if not for the torrent of assorted trinkets strewn in his wake. (it’s a collection of castoffs that counts among its contents a box of not-yet-dusty college paraphernalia, a half-burned chicago-scented candle (who knew?!), the oddest assortment of half-empty bottles and squeezed-dry tubes, outgrown clothes, and, yes, a tall stack of various welcome-home placards we’d penned upon his many returns over the years.)

as of one week ago, this old house boasts an official population of two and only two.

i, though, only stepped into the stillness the day before last––late to the game, as i so often am. my mate, the boy’s papa, has had a six-day jump on the vast emptiness, and he deems it a “sad, sad” state of being.

we just plain miss the kid, is the gist of it.

and while a piece of me is feeling the pangs, i’m just as keenly approaching this new endeavor as if a room to which i’d never before entered. i’ve always known it was there at the end of the hall but the knob hadn’t yet turned, and so as i now tiptoe about, peeking into its nooks and crannies, i am still getting to know my way.

for starters, the quiet. the pared-down daily rhythms (no more nightly shuttle of the old sedan to park it near the train once the meters dozed off at 9 p.m., and where it awaited the boy’s 1:05 a.m. arrival from downtown, thus sparing him a long-enough walk in the cold and the dark and whatever the weather gods chose to hurl on his route). no more rushing to throw some semblance of breakfast in a rumpled brown bag as he raced off to work and we all held our breath that he’d beat the train to the station. (and, yes, yes, if you’re starting to catch on that we might be among the dotingest parents that ever there were, we plead utterly guilty.)

did i mention the newfound dearth of laundry? or the fact that the cupboards look to be barer than ever before?

in that way that the mind plays tricks, as it wraps itself around those episodes in life it’s not before encountered (after a birth, a death, a diagnosis), i find it playing a form of peek-a-boo. an almost haunting hide-and-seek. i forget the kid is not asleep behind the bedroom door. wake up and skip a beat or two till i remember not to check that he made it home the night before. remind myself there’s no need to leave the porch light on when i tiptoe off to sleep.

in this day and age, where youngins come and go till their middlings or older, this new empire of emptiness cannot be called an inevitable geography. while the college years gave us a taste of it, this time round it seems a sharper, bolder border, a less permeable line than the empty nest of yore, when the emptiness ebbed and flowed according to academic calendar.

this time the kid is paying his own utilities, and sending off a monthly check to the landlord. and except for the comfy armchair and the rug he whisked from his upstairs room, he needs us not in his domestic equation.

and while he whistles the freedom song, his papa and i are fumbling in a fog across the contours of this new state of being. largely, i find myself deeply curious, and admit to something of a relieved sigh that i no longer will wake in the night to be sure i hear him clomping up the stairs.

time turns and turns in labyrinthine spirals, and with every twist we see ourselves from whole new angles. though i know full well that parenting is a post without pause, and one i intend to hold onto till my very last breath, this empty nestiness allows for––begs for––a whole new deepening. we’re a duet again, his papa and i, and on our own to chart our days. indeed, it’s solitude i’ll oft befriend.

which makes me think that now must be the hour in a lifetime when our soul begins its quickening, something of a leavening, with more hours to read, more years to remember, heavier questions to ponder. my prayer is that with the quiescence there comes a gathering of deeper grace.

of course, it aches a bit to think we’re past the years where cacophony was a daily occurence. where my hours were filled with comings and goings, and assorted bunches of kids clumped in the basement or were planted in sleeping bags or stuffed in the way back of the old red wagon. where an hour to myself was both rarity and marvel.

but maybe, just maybe, the quiet that’s tiptoed in will point the way toward the wise old lady i’ve always wanted to become.

and let us indulge in a glistening bit of mary O here this morning. an old favorite, something that indeed kills me with delight….

Mindful
by Mary Oliver

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It is what I was born for—
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world—
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant—
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these—
the untrimmable light,

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

how did you navigate through the rocks and shoals of those uncharted landscapes life has surely thrown your way?

10 Comments

March 1, 2024

time travel

the other morning, when the clouds were especially bumpy, i boarded a plane, paid no mind to the bumps, and flew 612 miles to turn back the clock to “before time,” and seize a few of the most important days of my life.

what might those days be, you wonder? those days are nothing so fancy as plain old ordinary quotidian days side-by-side with a law professor who happens to be my firstborn. and whose life all those hundreds of miles away from where i usually lay my head on my pillow feels too far for a mama trying to seize every blessing from every old day.

i count myself among the blessed, having birthed a human who happens to be one of my favorite of the whole species. he is 30 and i am double that-plus. and all these decades in, i still purr like a happy cat when he and i are curled like bookends on either side of the same couch. or side-by-side in the front seat of a car, him at the wheel, motoring hither and yon as together we trace some curiosity. or attend to a plain old errand.

a year ago at exactly this time i was here slicing open boxes, stacking sheets on shelves, and filling a fridge, moving him in at the start of his professorial life. it was just weeks before i had surgery, and before i had any idea what the surgeon would tell me as i lay there coming out of an ethereal fog. in fact, it was during my week here in DC that i tried to casually mention that i was going to be having a little surgery. and so, this week in time and place holds some sort of magical power for me: it allows me to suspend time, to return to “before,” and to savor the simple insatiable union of mother and manchild.

only, truth is, there’s a twist this time round. and that twist takes it up a notch. or many a notch.

i know now, in a way i didn’t know then, how very precious even one day is. and how, if you told me i had only a certain number of days, and then asked me how i would want to seize the most of those days, i would tell you the one thing i wanted most emphatically was to be as close as i could be to the people whose lives have left the deepest mark on me.

this year, i know a bit more about the arithmetic of life. and how, no matter how many days there are, there are a precious few categories for which there are never enough. and how, simply hearing the sounds––even the humdrum ones, maybe especially so––of someone you love shaking off the bedsheets in the other room, awaking to another day, watching that someone in real time, in the flesh, go about the unspoken routines that make for a day––grabbing the keys from the bowl, looping back for one last chug of coffee, turning down a particular street to get to work, all those incidentals that make a life a life––those are the things i want to take in in real time. to press them to my knowing. to be entwined with.

and so, as the calendar rolls back to that seminal season when everything changed, i wanted to slip in between time and enter a netherworld in which i could plant one foot in “before time,” when i wasn’t someone who’d been told she had cancer, and “after time,” another name for now, when i do know that the blessing of cancer, or any leaden-weighted diagnosis, is that nothing means more than time. unfettered, ordinary, spectacular, magnificent hour-upon-hour doing the things that make a life a life.

because these are the hours i will never ever regret or forget. and i don’t ever want to wish i’d made more time for time.

while i marinate in the hours and days before me, before i board the homebound plane, here are a few things worth pondering. all of which make for this most beautiful mosaic we call our sweet fine lives. . .

this sweet gem is an excerpt from the very lovely susan cain’s Bittersweet:

Franz Kafka was one of the great European novelists of the twentieth century. But there’s another story, this one written not by Kafka but about him, by the Spanish writer Jordi Sierra i Fabra. This story is based on the memoirs of a woman named Dora Diamant, who lived with Kafka in Berlin, just before his death.

In this story, Kafka takes a walk in the park, where he meets a tearful little girl who just lost her favorite doll. He tries and fails to help find the doll, then tells the girl that the doll must have taken a trip, and he, a doll postman, would send word from her. The next day, he brings the girl a letter, which he’d composed the night before. Don’t be sad, says the doll in the letter. “I have gone on a trip to see the world. I will write you of my adventures.” After that, Kafka gives the girl many such letters. The doll is going to school, meeting exciting new people. Her new life prevents her from returning, but she loves the girl, and always will.

At their final meeting, Kafka gives the girl a doll, with an attached letter. He knows that this doll looks different from the lost one, so the letter says: “My travels have changed me.”

The girl cherishes the gift for the rest of her life. And many decades later, she finds another letter stuffed into an overlooked cranny in the substitute doll. This one says: “Everything that you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form.”

and, lastly, this: wisdom from The Dhammapada, a collection of sayings of the Buddha in verse form and one of the most widely read and best known Buddhist scriptures.

With gentleness overcome anger – with generosity overcome meanness – with truth overcome deceit – Beware of the anger of the mind – master your thoughts – Let them serve truth – the wise have mastered body, word and mind – the wise harm no one.
The Dhammapada*

“the wise harm no one…” let us be wise, be gentle, be generous.

and speaking of generosity one of our beloved beloved chairs who lives not far from where i sit typing here in DC motored over yesterday to spend a good chunk of the day traipsing through a franciscan monastery that took our breath away (and not only because of the paths up and down hills) and who delivered this glorious berry-filled galette to me and my sweet professor, whom she knew when he was a mere wee lad of kindergarten age…generosity abounds at the chair, and i love you all for it.

pjt’s very magnificent very-berry galette

and how might you choose to seize a day, any old day, in the magnificent story of your sweet and blessed life?

11 Comments

February 23, 2024

poster child for fear

be not afraid is the instructive. it comes in a hymn we belt from our pews, and in one form or another it’s spelled out in sacred text in most every religion. i’ve belted the words to the hymn with voice cracking, and tears running down my cheeks. i’ve belted out those words as if in singing them loudly i could muscle up to the task.

to be not afraid, we’ve been told, is to be certain of faith. what then of us wafflers? the ones with wobbly knees?

i sometimes think i’m the poster child for fear. and the fear i’ve felt in this whole last year is a whole new subterranean trembling. it’s one that wakes you in the night. and one that sends you and your worries catapulting off into nevernever land. all it takes is a headache that won’t go away. or a pang in the side that’s not from cold ice cream.

sometimes i think it’s only fair that i find myself in the company of fear so very often these days. it’s an unerasable fact of my life that not quite a year ago i awoke from a surgery and heard the doctor say, “i was so surprised, it was cancer.” and then, as if needing proof there on my gurney, i reached down to where the holes were, five of them––front, back, and side––the slits from which they pulled out a good chunk of my lung.

surprises like that are a bit hard to shake.

so now, for two long weeks, a curious constellation of queasies has been pinned to me like a shadow, and i am pretty much wide-eyed afraid. last night my doctor sent me for blood tests. a whole slew of them. i almost thought they’d grab a jug off the shelf and start to fill it.

for someone who doesn’t like talking about my medical woes, i am wading in a bit too deep here. but i am someone who takes to heart the knowledge that i’m not the only scaredy cat in the litter. and sometimes i think it’s the right thing to do to put voice to the truth that there are times when we aren’t so brave. there are times when we wish we could hide under the covers, or under the bed, and wait for the bogeyman’s footsteps to turn and go away.

does it mean i’m faithless because i’m afraid? i don’t think so. i think it means i’ve been keeping watch long enough to know that stories don’t always end with happy endings. and God can love you to pieces, but not write the story quite the way you’d plot it out. i mean, i’ve been to funerals of souls so breathtakingly good, you sit there gasping at the hole now left in their absence. at how the world without those particular angels living, breathing, and wafting among us is a far sorrier place. at how you can’t quite fathom a world without their showing us day after day just how magnificent the human species can be.

turns out the words to the song, “be not afraid,” were written by a jesuit priest-in-training who was deeply afraid when he wrote it. he was quaking with fear. the fear of not knowing what lay ahead. would he be any good at this priestly existence? where in the world would it lead him? was he hours away from the biggest mistake of his lifetime? well, father dufford was his name, and, on the cusp of his ordination, he was sent off to pray all by his lonesome. and that’s when he opened the nearest book to his elbow, which happened to be a Bible. flipping through chapter and verse, he turned to the story of the Annunciation, when the angel gabriel is said to have come to the Blessed Virgin Mary––an unmarried teen, you recall––to tell her she was “with child,” and gabriel said to her “do not be afraid.”

father dufford had his first line.

a few weeks later, as father D tells the tale, a friend of his told him she was being sent to ghana to do missionary work. and that made him really want to finish his hymn before she left. but hymn writing is not always easy. and despite his determination, he could only come up with a second line: “i go before you always.”

it would be a whole year before he got to the last line: “and i will give you rest.”

it’s a hymn that since 1975 has poured into the brokenness that defines so much of history, both the intimate personal history we know to be our very own, and the collective history of us as a people who’ve been crushed and shattered and brittled by so, so much.

it’s a hymn sister helen prejean, the great saint of death rows upon rows, often sings to those inmates she walks to death’s door––the last words they hear before their last breath. it’s the hymn bill clinton chose for his first inauguration at the morning prayer service. father dufford says that he’s gotten notes from people who lull themselves to sleep humming it on those nights when sleep won’t otherwise come.

when father dufford’s own father died some years later, he added one last verse:

And when the earth has turned beneath you and your voice is seldom heard,
When the flood of gifts that blessed your life has long since ebbed away,
When your mind is thick and hope is thin and dark is all around,
I will stand beside you till the dawn.

maybe i should remember all the words.

and on the subject of fear and holding hands in the face of fear, here is this excerpt from naomi shihab nye’s “EVERY DAY AS A WIDE FIELD, EVERY PAGE,” a poem in which she puts word to the one sure thing i know that takes away my fears: when i picture ones i love huddled right beside me, squeezing my hand; when i remember that all of us together can keep our knees from buckling. isn’t that why we’re here? given that the world these days has plenty to knock us off our rockers, it’s a blessed thing to picture wide-eyed tender-hearted folk all around the globe, looking up into the night, holding hands in a virtual steadying circle. here’s naomi’s take on that, a thought that came to her watching fireflies blink in the dark of night….

We didn’t have to be in the same room —
the great modern magic.
Everywhere together now.
Even scared together now
from all points of the globe
which lessened it somehow.
Hopeful together too, exchanging
winks in the dark, the little lights blinking.
When your hope shrinks
you might feel the hope of
someone far away lifting you up.
Hope is the thing …

when i am afraid, i look to the stories and the strength of ordinary folk whose hurdles are daunting, and yet who lope forward with grace. i seize on the kindness of strangers, the lady at the immediate care check-in desk, the schedulers on the hospital phone, the sweet woman who tied on the tourniquet and borrowed those many tubes of blood. in the past year, i’ve bumbled into a troupe of brave souls whose fearlessness takes my breath away. some of their roads are far bumpier than mine, and yet they press on, shedding their light on all who are blessed enough to take a few steps beside them. maybe the gift of being afraid is that it makes you reach beyond your own trembling walls. it makes you take a deep breath and step into the darkness. and in time, you find your bearings, and you look down and realize you’re stronger and braver than you ever imagined.

where do you turn when you are afraid?

p.s. in poking around just now, looking for a photo that wasn’t hokey, i stumbled on this bit of intrigue: apparently the words, “do not be afraid,” appear in the bible 365 times. (i love the folks who count these things…) so, apparently, that’s a reminder a day. except for in leap year. which is this year. which is six days from now. so we’ll have to remind ourselves: do not be afraid.

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