Smartwoods

If I can see a tree outside my bedroom window, blood flow to my brain will be different than if I was looking at a view without vegetation. Right now, I have a rectangular perspective of deciduous trees and evergreens making their home next to sidewalks and steep neighborhood staircases. The Italian restaurant across the street is shaded by bare-branched trees adorned in twinkle lights. I have lived in Seattle, Washington, for four years, the most urban place I have ever called home. Wildness and development exist as two tangled lovers, bound by each other’s bodies. I came from Arkansas, and there was a forest in my backyard. I went to the woods as often as I could.

Nature is unscripted. There are no directors, writers, artists, activists, scientists, or programmers predetermining my experience. No one is cuing or staging events. I get to be surprised on nature’s terms, and with thousands of variables at play, the possibilities are limitless. In Seattle, this means a sea gull suddenly appears. Occasionally, a bald eagle will soar. I wonder about the village life of microorganisms dwelling in the rosemary bush that Chef Paul uses for his pasta dishes.

On clear days, I can see beyond the Italian restaurant and the undulating Seattle neighborhoods, all the way to Puget Sound and the Olympic mountains. Though I have never penetrated the heart of its wildness, glimpsing the glacial-capped mountains from my home perch offers its own kind of exhilaration. I know there are six species of shrews and four species of bats. There are flying squirrels, marmots, and Pacific jumping mice. Wolves and black bears, elk and porcupines and cougars are living somewhere in the folds of the land I see from my living room window. River otters share territory with both the spotted and the striped skunk. And those are just a handful of the mammals. Amphibians, reptiles, invertebrates, birds, and marine animals breathe the same air. There are six kinds of salamanders, four kinds of frogs, one toad, and one newt, the rough-skinned variety.

Yes, humans are part of nature. And, humans are influencing nature in terrifying ways. And yes, there are no longer any places on the planet untouched by anthropomorphic choices. We’ve altered the chemistry of the atmosphere after all. But still, I know that walking through my childhood forest is vastly different from using a painting or sketching app on an electronically-intelligent, handheld device. The toolbox on the iPad was decided for the “user” by someone else. The forest’s toolbox is up to your own imagination. You may decide the forest is a place for solitude, reflection, adventure, or escape. It may be a place to play, learn, draw, plant, crawl, climb, cry, laugh, or pretend. There is medicine. There is food. There is sanctuary. There are tools and potential tools. There is paint and clay. There are nuts and crystals and vines. There are bones and long branches dotted in lichen hamlets. All in the forest. All free.

The forest is not framed as a box. It did not arrive in a box. Imperfect spirals and curves and edges separate one thing from another. Nature lives and breathes. Smartphones are not vital organs. Swamps are the lungs of the Earth.

Though it’s possible to reduce ecological processes to precise scientific explanations, nature is miraculous just as human life is miraculous. It is no wonder I secretly hope trees may speak a human language. Or maybe the trees strain for us to hear them. The skin of the Earth and all the wild things thriving from its body are the souls keeping us alive, holding us, sheltering our sanity, giving us hope and inspiration to be more than users. We are creators. We are imagineers in ways most opposite to Disney’s brand of employment.

And here I am, writing this missive on my MacBook Air, created by a wildly imaginative person who loved art and calligraphy and beauty. I am listening to music on iTunes. It is an instrumental piece titled Become Ocean. I gaze at trees and buildings framed by 90-degree angles. The music calms and transports me away from the gray dark winter of Seattle. Given these ironies, I still know with all that I am that walking through the woods gives my heart delight unlike any cyber-styled comfort. No, delight is not a correct description. The euphoria of breathing without worry for what may happen, knowing something exquisite could transpire at any moment and a shimmering wave of endorphins will sparkle through the body—that’s the feeling. That’s the surprise I long for amidst the predetermined criteria of computer-generated beauty. Give me a fungus-infested tree over a perfect sequence of Fibonacci numbers, which produce the ideal pixelated tree. I want the freedom to not understand everything. My body needs mystery and mistakes.

There were only a handful of parents at our daughter’s ballet recital. We were all dressed in jeans and jackets and shoes, our phones recording, sitting in the corner of the YMCA studio, our backs to the full-length mirrors. After the recital had begun, one mother began crawling across the wood floor, from one end of the studio to the other. Her scramble immediately struck me as unnecessary and annoying. Get up and walk.

“What kinds of reality are considered prerequisites for compassion?” Leslie Jamison asks in one essay in her excellent collection The Empathy Exams. How dissimilar does a person’s life have to be before we fail to show them compassion? Jamison’s essays present us with people who believe they have worms emerging from the their skin, who drive themselves insane in highly competitive adventure races, who have abortions. When the realities grow farther apart from our own, it’s likely the capacity for compassion shrinks, she suggests.

But being a writer, I’m willing to wonder about others who inhabit a different reality. I relish this getting up and going outside of my own world. Crossing along a bridge as tenuous as a lone plank between cliffs. In doing so, I find myself unwilling to return the way I came. Maybe that’s a necessity for genuine compassion? You should be altered by the encounter.

Jesus was in constant fellowship with those who’s reality differed greatly from His own. But often when compassion eludes me, it’s when I share the prerequisite experiences and resources. When I find myself frustrated that similar realities don’t yield the same approach to a situation. Shouldn’t they just get up and walk? Jesus had a very specific image for this.

At home after the ballet recital, I voiced my frustration to my wife, a physician: It was ridiculous to crawl like that. But she’d seen this woman walking around at ballet class and noticed her gait was awry, maybe because of severe hip dysplasia. And if so, then it would’ve been easier for her to crawl than to stand and walk. And possibly hardest to watch her daughter tendu and relevé and plié, knowing her own limitations would prevent her from ever sharing in that reality.

I think Jamison might say even meeting the prerequisites can sometimes obtund compassion as a plank left in the eye blurs sight. In those cases, it’s best I do a little crawling about in my world, looking for that piece of wood. It’ll make a good bridge.

The Sky’s Blue, Ain’t It?

It’s amazing the difference A bit of sky can make. — Shel Silverstein

In the 1965 movie A Patch of Blue, blind teenager Selina D’Arcy burrows her bare toes in the grass at the neighborhood park and begs her grandfather to describe what green is like. Blinded at age five when her mother threw chemicals at her face, the only color Selina remembers from the elusive days of her seeing self is a fleeting bit of sky. “I remember about blue. The sky’s blue, ain’t it?”

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Selina remembered the sky. She’d known only poverty, and life with a sadistic, prostitute mother and an alcoholic grandfather. Our guess is that in her sighted years she might have gazed as often as possible into that mysterious blue dome, out of some innate spiritual reflex, into that salvific realm the ancients recognized as the connector between this hard material world and the transcendent one beyond it.

My own earliest memory is also of the sky, of myself on the front lawn in a pale blue organdy dress at no more than age three. I was trying to locate the source of a sound I heard coming from the impossibly cerulean Colorado sky, probably an airplane. Though I didn’t find the plane, the sky itself suddenly captivated me—its depth, its enormity, the intensity of that color. In that moment my childlike mind captured what I would later “understand” as something like eternity. I knew absolutely, right then, that a never-ending being beyond myself existed, and that I, like that being, would go on forever.

This isn’t coincidence either. In their vulnerability, their humility, the spirits of children are porous, unconsciously attuned to complex realities big people don’t know how to teach them. In that brief moment in the front yard at age three, I received with ease something theologians write books about. No experience of my life has been more authoritative in stirring consciousness about my own encapsulation within the mystery we call infinity.

The sky’s blue, ain’t it? There is a portal of hope for us all. In the year ahead, when we’re small within life’s tricky largeness, all that may be needful is remembering a patch of blue.

(Painting by Magritte)

On Balance

Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.

—Rumi 

I teach literature and writing to students at a modern Orthodox Jewish high school. In a school where students take as many Judaic Studies classes as General Studies classes, they are regularly pulled from class for assemblies that have to do with holidays I am only beginning to learn about, even in my third year of teaching at the school—Sukkot, Purim, the Fast of Esther, Shavuot.

Parents enroll their students in our academy because the school mission proposes a balance between religious studies and academics. In fact, Modern Orthodox Judaism itself invites a balance between the life of the Jewish community and the life of the secular world; between religious observance and modernity (which includes academic studies); and between strictures and leniencies.

In terms of definition, “balance” is the result of two equal weights offsetting one another. Any extra weight added to one side disturbs the equilibrium. So the task to find harmony between religion and academics is necessarily delicate. Often General Studies teachers, myself included, proclaim frustration at the lack of time to teach a college preparatory curriculum to our busy students. Yet I know that my students will matriculate into colleges and universities based on their academic strengths; their Judaic classes “out there” in the secular world will be evaluated as “electives.” And so we have this argument always in play at the school—especially when students are pulled from class for assemblies—as to whether or not Judaic Studies are being privileged over General Studies and vice versa. All teachers, whether academic or Judaic, are constantly working to persuade the other “side” as to the value of our classes.

And yet I have to admire my students and colleagues who seek to weigh religious life with secular life. If pressed, I would say that I am a modern, progressive Christian. Lately, I have been seeking equilibrium in life similar to the Modern Orthodox Jews. Being a teacher at this academy has made me aware that while “balance” may look static, it is an active state. In contrast to Modern Orthodox Jews, I am coming at the problem from a decidedly different perspective because my life frequently feels defined by heavy engagement in the secular world, with a little spiritual activity on the side.

Not long ago, several friends introduced me to the work of the Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr. He advocates finding balance by setting aside time for contemplative practice daily, either early in the morning “before your brain has a chance to begin its list-making and judgments,” or in the evening, when you might examine the “God-encounters during your day.” This is the sacrament of Sabbath, which, he tells us, is “offered by the Jewish people as a gift for all humanity.” The sacrament of the Sabbath means surrendering one-seventh of your life to resting in awareness of a sacred presence. This practice makes sense to me, a way to give symmetry to my spiritual and secular lives. While I am usually averse to New Year’s resolutions, I am going to try to incorporate more contemplation into my life this year, an offset to my daily concerns.

Extreme Ways

In the spirit of the Christmas season, I’ve been thinking about my four decades as a Christian. During the Christmas holidays, that first year I had become a Christian at college, I received a letter from our campus bible study leader. I remember nothing of what it said, except that he closed it with this notation: “Eph. 3:20.” The verse was new to me, so I looked it up: “Now to him who is able to do exceeding abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us.” There was something about that combination of superlatives, exceeding abundantly beyond, that moved me. I was 18. What might God do through me to bring himself glory?

My sister had given me a plaque that first year. It read, “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.” I put it on my desk at school, a thousand miles from home, a thousand miles from knowing what God would do through me. I soon threw the plaque away but only because the glue under its porcelain flower had begun to run across the verse. I wish I had kept it. In retrospect, it’s a bittersweet metaphor. Sometimes in the day to day, it’s easy to wonder where the exceeding-abundantly-beyond qualifiers of God’s work went. God has done amazing things in my life, but like the defaced plaque, there has been a lot of goop I hadn’t expected. In his song, “Extreme Ways” Moby conjures the mood with his own adjectives:

Extreme places I had gone But never seen any light Dirty basements, dirty noise Dirty places coming through Extreme worlds alone Did you ever like it then?

Instead of feeling like I was stepping into some grand plan, it often felt more like stepping into wounds. It’s messy and painful to struggle humanly. But the wounds are Christ’s “extreme ways,” and in his hands they are redemptive.

In The Simone Weil Reader, editor George A. Panichas explains Weil’s thoughts this way: “Affliction, malheur, she believes, is necessary so that ‘the human creature may un-create itself.’ Along with beauty, it is the only thing piercing and devastating enough to penetrate the soul. It marks the occasion of a supernatural process when one hears the Word of God and has a part in the Cross of Christ: ‘Affliction, when it is consented to and accepted and loved, is truly a baptism.’” As Paul says, “For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen.” C.S. Lewis says the weight of glory is the “divine accolade;” being called by God a good and faithful servant. It answers all the questions wounds raise, and the exceeding-abundantly-beyond yearning. We long to glorify our Savior. While I haven’t always welcomed God’s ways in my life, I find myself saying with Moby, "I'd stand in line for this.”

Reading for Connection

In December, winter finally feels real. Our yard is a red field of pine needles I can’t keep raked. Even in Louisiana, the air has turned cold enough to hurt. Today, my daughter and I walk around our neighborhood. Ellie wears her new blue coat and last year’s pink scarf. She twirls and leaps between the pinecones and acorns that garland the road. Sometimes, we hold hands and leap into the leftovers of autumn, pressing against what has fallen away, hoping for a satisfying crunch beneath our soles. Our neighbor’s chimney unfurls thick woolly plumes. We suck in the good and cold smoky air. Everywhere we are bombarded with choices to notice and connect, to make contact with the season we are in.

On our walks, Ellie and I read the sounds and smells and images surrounding us. I want to teach her how important it is to notice well, to expect to encounter the sacred and profound between the lines of sidewalks strewn with acorns and leaves. As we walk, a poem spins in my mind, and connects itself to this moment I am 34 years-old and holding the hand of my six-year-old daughter as we walk slowly down our street. My mentor and friend, Jeanne Murray Walker, wrote the poem. I can hear her voice in each line as I whisper the poem to myself.

“Connections” By Jeanne Murray Walker

After, against, among, around. How I admire prepositions, small as they are, nothing but safety pins, their lives given to connecting. They are paid help, maids in black uniforms who pass hors d’oeuvres. Or better, they’re the joy that leaps between us when we get to know them. Without connection, what can survive? Because the lawn waits for the sun to wake it from its winter nap, we say sunlight lies on the grass. Even the simplest jar connects – jar under moonlight, on counter, jar in water. It was prepositions in the Valley of Dry Bones that stitched the femur to the heel, the heel to the foot bone. And afterwards, they got up to dance. Between, beside, within may yet keep the chins and breasts from tumbling off Picasso’s women. If I could, I would make prepositions the stars of grammar like the star which traveled the navy sky that night sweet Jesus lay in his cradle, pulling the wise and devious kings toward Bethlehem, and us behind them, trekking from the rim of history toward Him.

In its long smooth threading, Jeanne’s poem reveals both how small and resilient are the bridges that connect moments and people and object. Words pull “the wise and devious kings / toward Bethlehem, and us behind them, / trekking from the rim of history toward Him.” Something as small and fragile as a preposition seams time and place and person together. Something as small and fragile as a baby in a manger connects mankind to the miraculous.

When I’m finished whispering the lines, I call Ellie to me and long to remember this moment the way I remember the lines of the poem. I wonder if Ellie will remember any of it at all. The sky darkens, and patchy strings of Christmas lights flicker here and there in neighbors’ yards. Ellie and I follow them like stars. We breathe the cold air and hold bare hands until the cold forces them back into our pockets. In a moment, we reach for each other again.

Digging in the Dirt

There is a stranger in us—a naked, needy, hungry portion of ourselves, a lost brother or sister of our own soul—to be reclaimed by being accepted consciously and allowed expression in life. — John A. Sanford, The Kingdom Within

A man I know was murdered on Sunday. I didn’t know him well, but our paths crossed, and our circle of friends overlapped. His circle was wide and encompassing. TC Edwards was passionate about music, rock n’ roll to be exact. He was African-American. I loved the contrast of his long dreadlocks with his passion for heavy metal. But then, TC was a person of contrasts. He was on the autism spectrum, which close friends noted was mild. It is not clear if his autism or his sweet, gentle heart made him vulnerable to bullying. It is not clear yet if the man in his neighborhood who burglarized TC’s home and assaulted TC is the same person who shot him in the back of the head. Here is what I do know. The person who shot TC hid from his own inner darkness, and the hungry, ailing stranger within him got sicker and sicker until the shooter thought homicide would kill the now-monstrous part of himself.

I don’t pretend to have answers or sophisticated arguments about our epidemic of violence. TC’s murder was cruel. The childhood violence that was possibly inflicted on the shooter is cruel. The violence he continued to inflict on himself is tragic. He is part of the walking dead. He left hundreds reeling with grief.

John Sanford writes that unless we are willing to face the naked, needy, and hungry stranger within us, what Sanford calls our unconscious, it will turn even darker and eat us alive. If we can invite the stranger in, “we bring Christ into our lives. Christ himself is in the lost part of our souls.”

For my friends who may not believe in a Christian god or are not inclined toward a faith tradition, may I suggest substituting the words, Love or Hope or Gratitude, for the word, Christ.

In the muck of our fears and pain and revenge fantasies is the chance to find something new. The muck is the place of dirt, scraps, feces, and bones. In other words, compost. The stranger within each of us begs for creative renewal. It wants to be something beautiful.

Advent and the Absence of God

In the bleak mid-winter, Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone. 

– Christina Rossetti, “In the Bleak Midwinter”

The raging, fertile excesses of summer are long gone and the world lies deep in Advent, this wending of the human heart in prayer and penance before the Nativity of Christ. In the spare gray-gold light of these mornings just shy of the winter solstice, we might sit where we sit each day to “meet with God,” our Bibles, rosaries, or prayer books at the ready. Outside, bare branches clatter against a wide, windy pewter sky, nature’s brittle resonance with the bewilderment and hardness of heart toward God many of us feel, hardly knowing where to begin to find his presence amidst the external noise that seems to increase around Christmas time.

We worry about having God’s presence, like it’s something to own. And in Advent, adventus, the season of coming and arrival, shouldn’t I expect even more of this presence, like a sparkling early Christmas gift sliding into my hands? We are consumers and we gotta have that presence, just like we gotta have a bunch of other things to feel significant and successful. But what about God’s absence? This Advent, I’m considering that Christ’s perceived absence is as much a gift as presence is. In his heartbreaking and passionate meditations on God and prayer, Prayers by the Lake, the Serbian bishop Nikolai Velimirovich says this about God’s absence: “You promised, and I bear the seal of Your promise in my soul. If You have not come yet, it is not Your fault, but mine. You are tender and compassionate, and would not wish to make me ashamed of my unpreparedness. Therefore, you approach slowly, and continuously announce Your coming.”

Relinquishment to God’s perceived absence seems to have very much to do with the nature of Advent itself. The natural world lies in faded dormancy, its glory stripped until spring. We too can accept dormancy, until in God’s good time the manger of our hearts is filled with the holy One who will make us fit for heaven.

Re-reading the Same Story

A recently divorced friend told me how he and his ex-wife have different stories about how they met. His version is that he approached her at a party. Her version is that she introduced herself in a class. They fought about what actually happened not because they wanted to be right, but because of what the versions meant. Their unique stories portrayed each other in different lights and reflected what they believed about themselves and the other. A different story gave them a different interpretation about their past and that interpretation had influence on their future.

What if we used multiple interpretations of the same story to our advantage? Judaic literature and religion provide a long history of a hermeneutic approach. What if we applied the same hermeneutic approach to our own past? The Midrash, for example, is full of multiple interpretations of texts, each one providing a new perspective and light into the deepness of the text. The stories begin to have more power than they did before; as if a black and white television show suddenly displayed itself in full high-definition, three-dimension color. The psychologist Mordechai Rotenburg terms this a re-composition. It’s a re-reading of one’s past and history that allows a new future to form.

If I can re-read my past, then I can start to write a different future. Christ’s resurrection was a complete re-write of the world’s history. A re-interpretation of what God was perceived to be doing in the world. But where do I start? At the beginning? Somewhere in the middle like a deus ex machina? I have a personal stake in this concept. With my own recently divorced past, I have a story that tells me I’m a good-for-nothing failure. I’m tired of this interpretation and its powerlessness. I need a re-write, but — like sitting down at one’s desk to edit a long manuscript — the task feels overwhelming. The real work isn’t correcting the grammar or the misspellings; it’s finding the new story within the old, the one that gives new life. I need an expert editor to sift through the ashes and bring to life the small burning ember.

(Painting by Neil Simone)

On Laughter

I was saddened like most of the world, when I heard of Robin Williams's death. I was sad not only because he was gone, and I would never be delighted anew by his acting or his comedy or even his smile, but also because of the way he died. To take one’s own life is such an admission of hopelessness. It was hard to take.

Since I write and speak a lot about films, I often think about the various participants in the filmmaking process, and beyond film to the entertainment business in general. It always bothers me when someone from that industry dies. Like their lives, their deaths are so public. They sought fame by being in the film business; I get that, but the point is that their particular job meant that they became a part of our lives, too.

They came into our living rooms and made us laugh or made us weep or entertained us in another of the thousand ways they were so skilled to do, but we chose to see and hear what they did. We are the ones who let them into our lives, often paying money to get them there. And now they are gone.

The week Robin Williams died, Lauren Bacall died, too. That week, Robin Williams was on the cover of every entertainment magazine in the country, and Lauren Bacall wasn’t on any of them. He was even on TIME magazine’s vaunted cover and probably a lot of other covers I didn’t see. Why Williams and not Bacall?

The answer is not obvious. Of course she died a “natural” death, while he died with years left, and that is a tragedy we all mourn more fully for one who still “has something to contribute.” But Williams wasn’t that young; other, much younger, entertainers who have died by their own hand have not been mourned as widely.

While Bacall was a great actress and appeared in many great films, her time with us was largely past, but so was his. He had not been the lead in a successful movie in years, and who knows when he was last on a late night TV show. It was rumored that he was doing another stint as Teddy Roosevelt in the next Night at the Museum sequel because he needed the money.

I think the answer is that he was a comedian, perhaps the best that ever lived, and he made us laugh. Lauren Bacall enthralled us, but everyone knows that happiness is what we live for, and Robin Williams could make us happy. No matter the circumstances, no matter how sad we were, no matter how bored, no matter how despondent, we only had to put on Mrs. Doubtfire or catch a glimpse of an old Mork and Mindy episode, and we were howling in minutes. Yeah, Robin Williams could make us laugh, and nothing could be more important than that, could it?

We so worship feeling good, we simply don’t know how to handle it, when one who brings so much laughter departs this life the way Robin Williams did.

Getting It Wrong

I. The first time I tried Centering Prayer, I did it wrong. The teacher warned us we might hear outside sounds — buses, car horns, construction — and to keep an open heart because life is never quiet in the way we desire. She rang the meditation bell, and I closed my eyes. Within minutes, I heard dishes clanking from the nearby kitchen. I knew it was the white-haired church volunteer. She was preparing our noontime snack. I imagined baby Jesus in the kitchen with her. She gave him a bath in the stainless steel sink. She dried him with white cotton tea towels. She anointed him with olive oil. He got a little older. She opened jars of herbs for him to smell. Each time a plate smacked the table, Jesus giggled. They took water glasses off the shelf and set up an artist corner. Jesus dipped brushes in the glasses and made little paintings. When I opened my eyes, it was time for our snack. I saw the church volunteer in her apron, speckled with water, and I was overcome with gratitude.

II. The second time I tried Centering Prayer, I did it wrong. My husband downloaded the app on my smartphone, so that I could practice anytime, anywhere. I clicked the icon, and the bell rang. I kept my eyes closed for twenty minutes and repeated the word, create, until I saw hundreds of things creating. Petals unfurling, flowers blooming, children emerging from the womb, trees rising skyward, fingers on piano keys, enemies embracing, wounded creatures standing for the first time with their scars. No, no, no, someone said. You are supposed to pick one sacred word, a holy word, and just focus on that.

Oh, I said, No one ever gave me instructions. Is there a list somewhere of sacred words? Besides, it was all so beautiful.

III. The third time I tried Centering Prayer, I did it wrong. By then, I was too captivated by images and words that dance to discipline myself into picking a solitary sacred word. Maybe one day I will have this ability. For now, I am smitten by getting it wrong. Too enamored of surprise. A noisy tableware devotee. Oh, the danger of young love!

The Tracks of My Tears

I was better after I had cried, than before — more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. ― Pip, Great Expectations (Charles Dickens, 1861)

Those who do not weep do not see. ― Les Misérables (Victor Hugo, 1862)

In the end, this round of antidepressants didn’t do me much good. I tried the latest kinds, upped and downed the doses with my doctor, and stuck with the most promising for a year and a half before deciding to ditch them at the end of the summer. Sure, there were days when they evened me out a bit. But ultimately I received a different diagnosis that explains much of the anxiety which has been my lifelong companion. (Stay tuned here for my first efforts at writing about that.)

So my symptoms would not be subdued with meds. A good thing, as I had grown tired of the side effects: weight gain, fatigue, bouts of insomnia. And a more insidious development: I couldn’t cry.

For a year and a half I could not summon a tear. This, though I endured the death of a beloved family member, celebrations of new births, and a hundred small scenes that may otherwise have prompted wet eyes of sorrow, nostalgia, or joy. Though I don’t cry that often, I’ve appreciated the cathartic release when it was deeply necessary. And I’ve noticed that for me, it’s often connected to prayer. As the Dickens line above suggests, tears can be something of a reset button, grounding our next action in a richer compassion. For one who needs all the help he can get, the loss of this gift truly hurt. Since I could not cry, I felt I could no longer see rightly.

But this story has a hopeful ending: I’ve reclaimed the gift of tears. And the way recent weeks have been, I’m thankful — though the tears have shown up much more frequently than ever before, as if making up for their absence. I’m sure it will even out again, but for now, I’ve coveted each one.

I cried in prayer over the open heart surgery performed on the six-month-old daughter of my dear friends — and again when I got the news that she pulled through and is flourishing. I cried alone after a student sat in my office, looked out at the campus water tower, and told me of some personal atrocities endured at the hands of an oppressive administration in the country she came from.

I cried sitting next to a recent cancer survivor at a performance of Margaret Edson’s one-act play Wit. And when my beloved creative writing students came over to watch Anne of Green Gables, I found myself crying (though I’ve read the book and watched the movie many times). I was caught off guard by one of Matthew’s great lines.

Marilla, surprised at the appearance of a girl where a boy was expected, thought immediately of sending Anne away. “What good would she be to us?” she asks her brother.

Matthew quietly turns the tables: “We might be some good to her.”

Yes, I have a sentimental streak. But in that moment, Matthew’s shifting the focus from his own needs to those of someone far worse off came to stand in my mind for every act of selflessness and grace our world desperately needs. So, in the dark room, with salt streams trickling down my face, I prayed for each one of my students hugging pillows on the couches and floor. I prayed that when things got bad, they could find someone who would be some good to them. And I prayed that we’d all decide to be some good to the people around us.

Though I could barely make out the TV screen through blurry eyes, I could see again.

Of an Age

Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.~ Wallace Stegner, Crossing To Safety

There is a grace in the way our bodies are made that lets us avoid looking too often or too long at the evidences of our years. Our parts are arranged so that we look out and reflect on life around us. This may be a comfort lost on younger readers. There are a couple of things about aging that take aging to appreciate: first, all the excitement of first experiences pales in the slow burn of getting it just right; and second, humans are beset with the appearance of age for about twice as long as the appearance of youth. (See other reasons to celebrate aging here.) Still, mirrors become less important and smiles become the essential accessory.

References for age, then, are in how we feel and where we take our cues. And even as hours and days seem to fly and the future seems unsure, the rhythms and reminders of seasons and Nature's reticence to change allows us to see the past in the present and to imagine a life celebrated beyond our small measures of time and being.

One of the memories my wife and I made around our thirtieth anniversary was worshiping at the Congregational Church of Boothbay Harbor, Maine. The church was founded in 1766, decades before the town and ten years before the U.S. This seems remarkable to us from the south, but in the small towns of coastal New England it is ordinary context. Boothbay Harbor is 2,165 people, 1,084 households, and 550 families who put the value of place over the vagaries of economy and life in community as their ring on Time's tree. This ethic is almost absent in the culture of urban centers and is continually eroded by the force of our media-driven lives. And here's a statistic: today, 83 percent of Americans live in urban centers and numbers are increasing.

While in Boothbay Harbor we spent a morning at the lighthouse on Pemaquid Point (banner photo). There, the glaciers of the last ice age have raked the beard of Maine’s southeastern granite chin. Since then, the incessant crashing of the sea has done little to change its storied appearance. I am sure it has everything to do with what it’s made of. What do you see around you that is old, sturdy and slow to change? What is it saying?

A Red Onion

I didn’t know exactly what would come of it: I was washing lettuce under the cold-water tap, separating crisp fans of it from a few shapeless leaves. The fans would soon line a new green bowl. Into that, I would throw cuts of onion, tomato, more lettuce, avocado, and jicama. And all those pieces would make something that had not existed until that moment.

The outer skin of a red onion peeled away easily enough. I cored one end of the onion with a sturdy black-handled knife and cut half into slices. The other half rested on the scarred cutting board like an overturned bowl. From the radio in the next room, a deep voice I strained to hear was calmly announcing the death of a comedian, followed by a recording of some his famous jokes. Then with hardly a break, that same voice turned to some new horrors in the Middle East — missle strikes, a beheading, the slaughter of innocents. An onion slice fell into rings when I poked my finger into its center. My eyes filled with the sting of onion and the images forming in my head of death and carnage, torture and execution, what unimaginable thing might come next.

At that moment, when my daughter arrived home from work, I was grateful for the onion, and for not having to speak of those images in my head. To speak about those, I would also reveal the grief in my voice, the edge of my own powerlessness. Right then, I would need strength I didn’t have. I would appear vulnerable to my daughter.

It takes a leap of faith to feel deeply and then to show one’s powerlessness. Vulnerability can be mistaken for weakness and sentimentality. As a writer, I’ve learned to take that risk on the page. But how do I make sure my voice is heard? It’s more difficult for some of us to speak aloud with worry or sadness, to voice our concerns, especially about events that are out of our hands. A friend once told me that she’d turned to writing because she felt things so deeply — from darkness to joy — and she needed to do something creative with those emotions. She had already accepted her strong feelings. Calmly. The acceptance had made her more certain of how to go on after a recent loss. She made me think about my own deep feelings and about owning those feelings. But as I said, owning up is sometimes easier on the page.

To speak aloud would take heart. Author and professor Brené Brown has written extensively on subjects that seem hard to pin down—whole-heartedness, shame, courage, and vulnerability. In Daring Greatly, she writes of vulnerability that it is “the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, accountability, and creativity. . . . If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.” That’s a startling statement, especially because it is hard to be vulnerable among people who generally prefer us to present ourselves in a can-do, positive way.

A line from Rilke’s “Lament (Whom will you cry to, heart?)” comes to mind at the moment when I want to cry out, when I know who I should cry out to. But can I, when my daughter asks me how my day has gone? If I want to be authentic, if I want to tell her exactly what’s happening, if I want to tell her my urgent sadness about the larger world, that there is little I can do about it, then I need to find the words. I need to peel away the layers of my reticence, form an utterance that hasn’t existed until this moment, and tell her.

The Art of the Commonplace

I’ve been thinking of having my students keep commonplace books. In notebooks of their choosing, they would copy out passages and quotations that they encounter in the year to come that are seen to fit within predetermined topics (what the Greeks called topoi, or “places”) that we will cull from Renaissance-era teachers who popularized the practice (thematic places like “Fidelity," "Beneficence,” or "Gratitude”). They would also be free to write out their own thoughts, and to discover themes of their own naming as they find common places that writers, artists, theologians, and scientists inhabit, such as the ones W.H. Auden came upon in the making his commonplace book, which he later called A Certain World: “Prayer,” “Tyranny,” “Love,” “Friday, Good.” 

The art of the commonplace was once considered essential for the formation of a writer’s sensibility and style; it brought his mind into the same space as the minds he admired; it forced his hand, when copying out others’ sentences, to move the way another’s did, and so taught him, even as he learned stylistic possibilities and alternative turns of thought, that his own sway was not supreme. What’s more — at least to the Renaissance writers who promoted the discipline — it became a storehouse of material for one’s own writing. Or, to liven the metaphor, as Erasmus did, in Latin, in his popular primer on the art of rhetoric, de Copia, “The student, like the industrious bee, will fly about through all the authors’ gardens and light on every small flower of rhetoric, everywhere collecting some honey that he may carry into his own hive.” Montaigne’s industrious work in the essay form retained the topical organization of his commonplace book (“Of Constancy,” “Of Idleness,” “Of Liars”). Milton, too, sought the language of common places. So did John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, Emerson and Thoreau, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy.

The form has largely fallen out of favor in our time. I wonder if the ascendancy of journaling — which tends toward a chronological order and the explicitly autobiographical — has come to eclipse it. If so, I think it all the more reason to bring the commonplace back into view. It is an essential companion to autobiography, for it shows the values and ideas that animate the actions of the daily. In this way, the commonplace book can be as penetrating and revealing as any biography, which is perhaps why Auden —who famously disdained writer’s biographies (“Biographies of writers, whether written by others or by themselves, are always superfluous and usually in bad taste.”) — felt compelled to address the issue in a foreword to A Certain World. After admitting that what follows — a unique anthology of thoughts and images that struck him as worthy of note — forms “a sort of autobiography,” he quickly puts miles between himself and that term: the book, he says, is a “map of my planet.”  The metaphor comes from G. K. Chesterton, whom he quotes:

"There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander, the strange flora and fauna, his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or a structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied.”

By deliberately seeking the places that are common — the shared space of minds across distance and time — we come to discover the richness of our own world.  The growth of Chesterton’s garden depends on Erasmus’s bees.

(Painting by Jan Steen)

Notstalgia

You count all your heartaches.  ~ Terry Scott Taylor

You know the experience: hearing a song takes you back to where you were the first time you heard it. Suddenly, I’m not just hearing the song in the car, I’m on a crowded beach with my high school friend, and we’re listening to the song on a transistor radio. Just as quickly, my eyes refocus on the road and the way the trees make a V toward the horizon.

As the Roman god of beginnings and transitions, Janus presides over time. He sees both past and future, which is why the Romans named the first month of the year in his honor. Janus is depicted with two faces, one looking back and one looking forward. I like to think of Janus in terms of nostalgia; he would be the god of the time-travel gateway we enter through nostalgic reverie.

Music transports us back in time but, ironically, sometimes it cautions us against nostalgia. That’s because nostalgia, like Janus, has two faces: it can take us to cheerful reverie, or to the darker side of regret. Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” cautions against dwelling on past mistakes: “Why not think about times to come/And not about the things that you've done.” On their 1983 album Doppelgänger, Daniel Amos in “Memory Lane” chides:

You have gotten much thinner You're lookin' like a shadow It's from dwelling on the might-have-beens Living in a time-warp.

Researchers who have studied nostalgia see its brighter face as they discover it can yield a sense of safe harbor in difficult times. This is why many of our fondest nostalgic moments predate loss: we go back in time to better memories before the death of a loved one; to times of greater independence and less responsibility; before the fire, the hurricane, the accident.

Job time-travelled in this way. Deep in nostalgic reverie, he makes a long list of what was better before his excruciating loss of loved ones, health, and property. We can almost feel the bitter-sweet aspect of his memories, full of love and loss, as we read. We know from context that this reverie has a double benefit for Job. It helps him hold on to memories of those dear to him, and assures him that God is faithful by remembering times when it was easier to see it in external realities.

Sometimes loss accumulates in our lives and becomes what paradoxically holds our life together as W.S. Merwin says in his 3-line poem “Separation.”

Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.

Here the nostalgic past carries into the speaker’s present and we can assume, since it’s now part of the fabric of his being, that it will continue to mark his future. Job longs for the old days but even though he sits in the ashes and scrapes boils with shards, he keeps an eye toward God’s promised good (“I know my Redeemer lives…”).

The dual Janus nature of nostalgia shows us looking to the past, but also, like Job, to a future hope. This is best seen in the word’s origin which meant not just “wistful yearning for the past,” but “severe homesickness.” In its backwards glance, nostalgia can make us long for those times and people dear to us. But nostalgia as homesickness looks forward. It’s the expression of our yearning for our true home.

The Only Courage We Need

All other creatures in my house are asleep — man, baby, beast. The thought crosses my mind that I am the one deserving an afternoon nap. But what do I really deserve? Do I deserve a handsome and loving husband, a beautiful child, home appliances, books to read, and a pantry full of food? 

My culture tells me I deserve it. I deserve to get my nails done, to buy expensive coffee drinks, and especially, to make my own choices. The cup holder on my expensive coffee drink even proclaims, "The only courage you need is the courage to live the life you want."

How could a thinking person possibly make that statement? Do those refugees watching their children die of starvation need only courage? Does that legless man begging on the street corner need only this courage? Does the orphaned girl left to fend for herself in the street or brothel need only this courage? Do I, faced with challenges and struggles great and small, need only this courage?

I could perhaps live the "life I want" by withdrawing from all relationships and commitments, living alone. But the suffering that flows from this fallen world and my own sin will still find me. However, thankfully, it doesn’t just find me. Suffering takes me out of myself and points me to my need of grace. Without that grace, I would just be more self-centered, more self-absorbed, and more self-focused.

The only courage I need is to enter each day with my sleeves rolled up, ready to get dirty — but not with a "can do" attitude. I can't do it. Someone has to do it for me. Someone has to be my strength and courage, receiving my praise and thanksgiving for choosing the “life I want” and need.

My thoughts drift back to the stillness of the house, and I realize that this quiet moment was a given beat of rest — a chance for a breath before diving back into the open water in which I live, move, and have my being.

(Photo by Martine Franck)

“Try to Praise the Mutilated World”

For me, autumn is the season of association. Perhaps, it’s in its ghostliness, in its smoky, leafy Halloween flavors that remembering becomes important. I’m really not sure. I only know that today, when I inhaled that first crisp earthy hint of autumn in the air, I began to remember.

For most Americans, remembering in autumn means lingering on the autumn of September 11, 2001. I remember, particularly, that I was studying abroad in London, shoving my way toward a better view of Queen Victoria’s portrait in Buckingham Palace when security guards escorted our group out onto the lawn, and my sister and I squeezed clammy hands and waited for news of our family, of our country. I remember riding the Tube to class across the city and feeling shame for fearing everyone, the old man and the teenage boy, the woman whose eyes were cast down on the gritty subway tile. I remember huddling in a hotel lobby on Bedford Square, the smell of taxi exhaust and street vendors roasting chestnuts wafting through the open window, while professors weighed the dangers of our class meeting in a threatened area of the city.

Mostly, I remember not knowing how to reconcile my existence in what seemed like two very disparate worlds. There were the smooth arching corridors of The British Museum through which I walked and gawked each week. And there was the rubble of the World Trade Center blaring across every paper and screen. There were the extremists fleeing London to join the Taliban. There was the kindness of British strangers who, upon hearing an American accent, would draw near to touch our shoulders, tear up, and offer condolences.

As is often the case for me, a poem offered me another way to think about the world:

Try to Praise the Mutiliated World by Adam Zagajewski

Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June's long days, and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world. You watched the stylish yachts and ships; one of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others. You've seen the refugees going nowhere, you've heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain fluttered. Return in thought to the concert where music flared. You gathered acorns in the park in autumn and leaves eddied over the earth's scars. Praise the mutilated world and the gray feather a thrush lost, and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns.

Christianity’s most universally recognizable image, the crucifix, embodies how horror and mercy, evil and goodness can be nailed together in the same mind-blowing frame. We live in a world in which “executioners sing joyfully,” a world with exiles and ships that sink into “salty oblivion.” And we live, too, in a world of “wild strawberries”, where we must remember when “we were together / in a white room and the curtain fluttered.” Zagajewski’s poem offers a view of a difficult world, a mutilated world in which violence and beauty often linger near one another, as well as a world which has the capacity to astonish the careful witness with the way the “gentle light … strays and vanishes / and returns.”

Lost in Translation

All my fine things are starting to unravel, and I know why. It’s the Holy Spirit.   Or rather, it’s the vintage Guatemalan Espirito Santo ring I bought in Santa Fe. There’s a dove perched on the silver band, and its beak, wings, and tail deftly pull at my seams.

• My purple lacey bra.
• My favorite powder blue washcloth from Anthropologie, the one I found on sale.
• The lining of my red silk robe. (Okay, actually it’s polyester, but still, it shimmers and feels like cool water.)
• The pocket of my pinstriped “boyfriend” jeans.

I didn’t know the spiritual significance of the ring. I asked the shopkeeper for the ring’s story. The words, Espirito Santo, sounded vaguely familiar, a distant echo of something I knew I’d heard before. Yes, I took Spanish in high school and college, and yes, sometimes things will stare me in the face for hours, days, weeks, and years before I wake up to the plain-as-day meaning. Internet research led to a cornucopia of images – stained glass windows of doves, paintings of doves, sculptures of doves – often linked to the words, Veni Sancte Spiritus, which is what we chant during the Gospel procession on Sunday mornings. (I took Latin the one year I attended an all-girls Catholic high school. Whether it was the itchy uniforms or my own rebellious nature, I think I will ever only know how to conjugate the word for farmer: agricola, agricolae, agricolarum, agricolis, agricolas, agrilcolis. The daily Hail Mary never stuck.) Still, this more recent invitation slipped past. Once a week, I’ve been chanting at the top of my lungs for the Holy Spirit to come into my life, and I had no idea. Now I have a little bird on my finger, plain as day.

Also, I am a cradle-born Episcopalian, yet I somehow forgot that doves are a symbol for the Holy Spirit. It comes upon people in Hebrew scripture. It dwells within those who put their faith in Christ in the New Testament. Personally, I like the stories about the Holy Spirit and fire. Maybe they appeal to my forestry background. I like these stories from a safe distance where I can appreciate the theoretical wonderfulness of God arriving as a fire, perhaps a slow, controlled burn allowing for regeneration. Certain pinecones require fire to open and seed. The best morel mushrooms are found in burned areas. I’ve never lost a home to wildfire. I’ve never witnessed my world reduced to ash and rubble, so perhaps my perspective is a bit romanticized.

Here is what I know. My ring looks beautiful and perfect on my right middle finger, and it is messing with my Feng Shui and fashion sense. My fine things now have dangling, off-kilter strands. And, I can’t take the ring off. I don’t know why exactly, but I’ll take these loose threads over not wearing the ring. Perhaps this is the beginning of the Great Unravel. I remember learning once that the Navajo people often intentionally create a mistake in a weaving. Nothing is perfect, and the mistake, known as a spirit line, allows just enough room for the spirit to move through. I like that.

My fine things are fleeting. Even this ring will someday slip free.

I want more. I want more than correct translation. I want more than the sudden realization that these things do not matter in the grand scheme, though it’s not likely I will ever stop seeking beautiful objects.

Perhaps it’s possible we are enveloped by the Holy Spirit without ever realizing it. Perhaps it sneaks in when we are least aware. Are there Bible stories about this happening without some declaration like, “Hello, this is the Holy Spirit here, and I am entering you” or “I am going to descend upon you in waves of tranquility” or “I’m gonna wipe this forest out”?

Sometimes, I need a mundane reminder for the ridiculously abundant gifts of being alive, for the freedom to be a child of God and to stumble with an open-heart in all my daft and clueless ways.   Perhaps I am even more foolish when I say: the ring can have all the threads it wants, but this is my incomprehensible desire.   Hope is an elixir in the not knowing. There is a slight fearless daring to move forward. Each day, I hope to be born again and again and again.

Landscape

About a month ago I was back in New Mexico finishing my MFA. I drove out to Taos while I was there. I took the high road, through towns slumped in the valleys and perched on peaks.

I was the only visitor to the San Francisco de Asis Mission Church, made iconic in Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings and Ansel Adam’s photograph. The heavy-hipped adobe church was silent. The mud and hay exterior held the heat at bay so the sanctuary was cool and rich with the smell of carved wood and old incense. I thought that I would write inside, or draw the elaborate altarpieces I wasn’t allowed to photograph. But I couldn’t bring myself to do either. I just wanted to sit. To be inside a building that seemed to breathe.

I have visited Cathedrals in Europe, with soaring buttresses opening the nave up to the sky. Rooms filled with colored light and air. But the Mission Church is not like that. It is made of mud. It is close to the earth. It is raw and its beauty is in the baseness of its materials. Sitting inside the church is like being inside a turtle shell.

Every spring, parishioners and community members gather together to add a fresh coat of mud and hay to the exterior of the church. This annual ritual is called enjarre or remudding. It takes two weeks to shore up the walls; to strengthen the adobe that has shrunk and expanded over the course of the last year. With each addition, the building is stronger.

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On my drive back home from New Mexico to Jackson I detoured through Hondo, New Mexico. This small town is not famous. Built in the narrow seam between two mountains, its best feature is that it has the only gas station between Ruidoso and Roswell.

But to me, driving through Hondo was worth the extra two hours added to my already 19-hour drive. From my desk in Jackson I had written about Hondo, had researched its history and geology and agriculture. Each poem was just another layer painted on the mythos of the town. It had become larger than itself. With each layer it grew and came alive.

In a letter Willa Cather wrote of Death Comes for the Archbishop: “I did not expect to write a book about the Southwest. It was too big and too various…You see, the story of the Southwest involved too many individuals—little related to each other.”

But it was in two priests working to found the church in Santa Fe, two French missionaries in the act of uniting disparate parts, that Cather found the common ground for her novel. These priests began a tradition that continues to unite communities every spring, to add another layer to the church.

In the sparseness of the landscape, rituals are extraordinary.

Clouds build mountains that crumble as soon as they reach their peak. The century plant blooms, shooting a firecracker of white petals into the sky. When it rains, the desert erupts in green, frogs hum in the night, the cholla speckled in burnt red pepper the landscape. Another layer.

(Photo by Ansel Adams)