august 31 2020. what was supposed to be the start of the new school year. what i met (almost) every day of summer to plan. instead? kids scrambling to get on calls. me: leaning into the camera too close, making my forehead big and shiny and my eyes look tired. or maybe they just are tired. i am an english teacher who isn't bothering to capitalize. no, i am a literature teacher. who teaches english to american students anyway? aren't we all trying not to speak american anymore? most of my thought energy- and physical strength- when it wasn't spent on getting my kids on their calls, and helping them to keep from crying when they felt not smart enough for the math or reading or writing on their calls- was spent on the same conversation i have had since june 1. when will we reopen in person? how am i equipped to make this decision? i am not a scientist or doctor or expert. who is on the LT? and why is it called the LT? i have felt out of my league before, but the implications have never been so big. as in, i may let my baby cry through the night- but i dont'decide that for the whole neightborhood. or i may get divorced, but the col-d-sac doesn't have to follow suit. now suddenly the dominoes could start with me. what if it were different? where is my coastal town? where is that quiet place by the water where you are and it is blue and calm and i have this deep feeling of tranquility that seems to allude me these days... i guess blogger has gone to retro type. will i know when this nightmare is over? will it declare itself and run? show its grimy teeth and drool? or will it slip away slowly, like toddlerhood, until all is left is relief and an exhaustion so bone deep you almost forget to celebrate? i haven't written in so long i feel jagged around the edges. what did i used to write about, before i had work that consumed me? i wrote about v. maybe humans aren't meant for creative expoloration- most of us. maybe humans are designed to imprint the same form over, and over, and over again. maybe humans can duplicate and replicate and even add variation- but new forms totally freak us out and paralize us. maybe none of us really know what to do with something as unpredictible and unweildy as a pandemic- -- i am alternately bored and restless and vengeful. i check the news to see if covid has upended my school system and secretly hope it has. i am tired and heavy and uninspired. i hope to god there is something around the next horizon that makes me feel alive, again.

chalice

chalice I am not capable of spectacular personal holiness. I can hold the cup though, during Eucharist, and offer you the blood of Christ. I do not know what it means to attain the sort of set-apartness the bishop spoke of Sunday, but I do know the wren says something in her repetitive “ chee chee chee” that almost sounds like an blessing if I pay attention. And lifting the chalice to your lips, I recognized that look behind your eyes, the one of wanting and restlessness and fear--it id my look; did I leave it there for you to find? Or did we both happen to find it at the same moment (serendipitously)? What shapes are the shadows of the birch branches making across my table as I write? Are they spectral images or words from another tongue? If the tree was red, like the dogwood next to it, all aflame with Autumn, then I would say Pentecost--it means announcement and amen, arrival and approval. But no--these shadows disappear as I trace them, then reappear as something else. I know this though: the sun on my cheek is steady, and warms me to my bones, though by next week it will have given way to its weaker winter form. All things change, and of thine own unchanging have we known thee. If I walk this same path every day for a year, will a path be worn in my soul that is steady, reliable? Today the leaves are crunching under my feet; the sky is making such a display I wonder what all the boasting is about. But the air is calm, and it is the promise of safety that makes me know what is coming next must be close at hand: the upbraiding of the leaves, the stripping bare of the trees, the long cold nakedness of winter. Tell me your story again then, birch tree. When all your leaves have fallen--when your branches are stark bare. Will I be able to understand better then? Or will the meaning always be allusive? I would like to know why I feel the Autumn sun as human touch on my cheek, and the smell of leaves as homecoming. I would like to know why I find reassurance in the recitative song of the wren, and in the expansiveness of the nearly cloudless sky. I do know this: I feel gifted. Though they are not exclusively for me, because I am wanting, they are mine for taking. Like the bread and wine; and what do I need to know about the giver except his goodness? Maybe more will come, walking this same path every day. In time. Or maybe not. But for today, receiving is enough.

On Burying a Chicken at the Farm

On burying a chicken at the farm I worked at the farm with Audrey’s third grade class yesterday. It was the last light-hearted day of Autumn before this arctic frost came; the one that was supposed to arrive after dark tonight, but which came early, catching us without our jackets at noon. It was supposed to be a free day. The kids began by pulling radishes and playing with Gustov, giving each other wheelbarrow rides. Then Audrey and Olivia noticed a bantam not moving. After an anxious half-hour of watching her breath come in shallow gulps, she roused herself one last time and died. It is impossible not to feel the vulnerability of all living things when you bury an animal that weighs maybe two pounds. Her neck wouldn’t stay straight; her legs were curled under her iridescent feathers that caught the light with such radiance I wanted to say, “hush, you are dead, now’s not the time to glimmer.” It was the first handful of dirt we put on her body that made the kids start to cry; something about the permanence of it--I found myself saying, quietly, out of obedience to some higher order, “to dust we have come, to dust we shall return.” Because for the kids it was not just that tiny un-named chicken we were burying; it was their toad and guinea pig and hermit crab, their great-uncle and aunt and grandma. We make these lists, of those we love that have died or will die--and rehearse them at each new passing. I thought we just made them as adults, but of course we began them when we were younger. Clem, who’s father has lung disease and was on the transplant list until recently, said to me on the way back, his eyes shining, “I’ve dug two graves now, I don’t want to dig any more. I had to dig that one with my hands; look--I still have dirt under my finger nails.” What can I say? I know? Because I don’t. I don’t know what it has cost him to dig those graves, as he has considered the people that he loves. Nor do I know which way his father’s illness will go. I would like to say, Its alright, but that’s not a promise I can make. Ben Trueblood said he is not afraid of death, because he has been prepared well by the shape of his education in a Waldorf school in Chicago. And, he suspects, by an engaged observance of the Day of the Dead. Incredulous, I pressed him--are you not afraid of the void of death? The fact that you will be gone and all this will continue? I know my body will be useful, he said, and I don’t know what will happen to my soul, but I don’t fear it. I suppose if I believed this life was a practice run, I would not be afraid of death: if I knew I could have a second chance to do better, to be more wholly human, then I would not be afraid. But now, I do not feel ready to let go. In part my fear comes from shadows of my own making: the habit I have of using my small lamp of truth to project large spectral shadows behind me, making even the good things in my life seem haunted. And I imagine a re-ordering of desires is in order too, though I have only a faint idea of what that means. In the meantime, what if one of the best gifts we can give our children is a proper approach to dying? Steiner believed the ability to approach death without fear begins simply with learning to sleep and breath--coincidentally, two twin pillars of early Waldorf education. Are we then, in seeking a holistic education for our children, teaching them something about dying as well as about living?

Autumn Equinox

Saturday September 22 2012 Autumn Equinox Job 40 15 "Look at Behemoth, which I made just as I made you; it eats grass like an ox. Its strength is in its loins, and its power in the muscles of its belly... Its bones are tubes of bronze, its limbs like bars of iron. It is the first of the great acts of God- only its Maker can approach it with the sword. Is this the passage William Blake had in mind when he wrote “Tyger, Tyger”? And yet this is the God who has promised us an everlasting mercy. Yet I do not know anything that is everlasting. Not even memory is everlasting. Not even dust or the terra-cotta army men buried alive in China or books, set out like little toy ships at sea, carrying a persons words and thoughts from the afterlife, making it okay to die. (A person leaves behind something--a book--an idea--a photo--a letter--a child--does that person really die when the last person who remembers them dies?) Certainly of all the things that surround me, tangible and intangible, I am the least everlasting. The bowl that holds the apples we picked last week will, under reasonable circumstances, outlive me. It may venture to a different state; be passed down to my children, end up in a thrift store. It could see the invention of silent, waste-less automobiles and the extinction of the telephone. The apples in the bowl, ripe and smelling faintly of cider, probably will not outlive me. But the branches, the seeds, the flowers fruit and stem, the entire fecundate cycle of life in that one apple true will outlive me. My tea pot, which I use every day and never thank, will almost certainly outlive me. It will never need a root canal or see the physical therapist. It will never get sleep apnea or glasses, or arthritis. I have become so uncomfortably conscience of my own mortality I am sometimes surprised to find myself still living. My mailbox, made of punched tin, will sit and sit, wordlessly ferrying out my letters and opening its mouth to receive them back. It sits now, its red flag raised like an omen--not saying a word about the contents of the letter in its mouth, holding it still between its teeth like a baby hiding candy, not sucking, not chewing. Hoping not to be found out. It will not disclose what he wrote, or didn’t write, to his brother: about losing dad, and how the family seems without a guide at the helm now, how we can’t seem to find our way to say nice things to each other like we did before. Even that letter could outlive me. But if I am not here, am not around to hear it read again, what does it matter if the letter outlives me? Does a living memory of me effect me once I am dead? Can the dead, from where they are now, see and feel for us? If they are, as NT Wright believes, not yet in the new heaven and new earth (the last and final resurrection) what can they witness of us? Or do they care to witness? Have they already forgotten this “great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us?” Will, as Marilyn Robinson suggests, this world be Troy, and all that has passed here the ballad they sing in the streets? Or will it be a something fainter than a memory, like a dream you wake from and only vaguely recall--contours, maybe, and a feeling or a color--a pattern brings back something --or a face makes you think maybe you remember--but then you put it behind you as the day broadens with its realities (make the coffee) and demands (check email), the tangible solid things at hand put this other shapeless dream out of your mind--will that be all?

on shoes and dying

But what I keep thinking about, when I have time to think, is how incredibly fast a life can be spent. You spend the first few years clearing your vision, learning about your family and surroundings. You spend the next ten years or so striving against the forces around you, making your own way, head-strong and determined. Thinking you will live forever and have all the time in world and not seeing any end in sight at all. Intoxicated by youth. So free you could almost imagine you are a bird and will take off at any moment. Then the tethers come one by one: marriage, which turns out to be more of a stake in the ground holding you to one place than a launch pad. Children, who turn out to be more stakes in the ground rather than elements of self-definition. Then you are 32, and stare death straight in the face: it is sitting in your living room with that terrible death rattle, not blinking, not even opening its eyes, as quiet and demure as a church mouse. It is not the storm or emergency or accident of your nightmares, but serene and calm as the still small voice, taking the life of your father-in-law, hour by hour, without reason or explanation. And then there it is: the huge ragged gaping hole in your family. Mother, sisters, brothers, cousins. Father still in all the pictures. And his shoes now, scattered all around the house: cowboy boots by the bedside stand (why? but I don’t have the heart to move them), Keens by the backdoor, runners too. He had some beautiful shoes--when you wore the leather ones to church Sunday and offered me the chalice I looked down and saw those shoes and could barely lift my face to receive. Joel’s shoes are in our house, but he is not. His shoes have outlived him. There is a certain amount of comfort in having these physical reminders: they are heavy and feel substantial. They still smell of Papa, and have the impression of his feet marked on their sole. Shoes are not like impersonal undershirts, that you buy in bulk and throw in the wash every day. Nor are they too personal like underwear (what do you do with someone’s underwear when they die? Bundle it up and throw it in the trash? That seems somehow thoughtless...) But they are oddly intimate: here are these shoes, waiting patiently for someone to inhabit them. When I see the old leather cowboy boots sitting so lively by the bed, I can almost see the legs and torso of that dear person too--and it hurts to have such a clear picture of someone I will never see again. Sometimes it feels like the shoes hang around as cruel reminders that Joel is gone and not coming back, and yet they--a piece of leather and rubber stitched by a machine--get to hang around for the next 50 years to watch our children grow up. I will spend the next eighteen years, Lord willing, nurturing my children. Right now that is almost all I do: schooling them during the day, music lessons at night, reading before bed, brushing hair and teeth and throwing clothes in the washer--then preparing to do it all again in the morning. They grow so slowly it seems it will always be the same--but I have learned this summer that nothing ever stays the same. Last summer I watched the kids go out in the sailboat with Joel and Lindy; I took a few pictures, it was so pretty watching the flat water and the flapping sail, the small blue boat make turns in the cove. Lindy sold the sailboat this week. And she needed to; it is good she did. But I would be lying if I didn’t say there was a pang in my heart when I heard it was gone, that tangible reminder of their dreams together, that proof that Joel was there out on the cove. And I had no idea last year--could not have imagined that would be the kids last ride with Papa. Just as I’ve learned to find my way in the world, I now see death just over the hill. It seems not far off--make it through 30’s, then middle age--my body creaking more, graying. My parents going first, then following. How am I supposed to live when it seems you can no more hang on to a moment here than you can hold water in your hand? How can I go about my days so that when I look back (in the blink of an eye) I will be pleased? Or at least resigned? I know the Westminster Catechism. And I am in no mood to argue theology. But in practical terms, what does it mean to live in such a way that when you come to die, you are ready? And are you ever ready to let go of the people you love? My grandparents, much more experienced in this, seem much more ready to let go than I am. Have they not shared this secret because it cannot be shared--it has been to learned by each person individually, and can no more be communicated than a piece of music can be parsed out and exegeted?

December

Advent 2010
Dec 8 6:30 AM

"I am the root and the offspring of David, *
I am the bright morning star."
"Come!" say the Spirit and the Bride; *
"Come!" let each hearer reply!
Come forward, you who are thirsty, *
let those who desire take the water of life as a gift.


I am thirsty. Not only for the presence, and the stillness, but the understanding of true repentance. I am thirsty for a fuller, richer life that I feel is around the corner--that I sometimes glimpse when I stop in the afternoon and look up and see this place--this home--for what it is: a beautiful, busy nurturing ground, a haven for these sprouting humans, just showing green about the ears and not yet ready for the elements. I want: space for them to grow unencumbered. Space for us to have family time without feeling crowded by unwanted commitments and neighbors. I want to be able to see my family.
I want discernment, peace and resolution to this inner struggle.

The elements of your arrival were very unexpected. fantastical, even. a young unwed girl. a stable barn. shepherds and angels together; men from the east on camels. if you come in unexpected ways, fantastical ways, am i missing you if i am looking in the most expected ho-hum places?

I think I have now made my peace with full-time motherhood. I no longer wish, all that often, for the freedom of my unfettered self: though sometimes, a strain of a poem or a melody will send me reeling in to memory, and I am--for a moment--lost. But I am better able to recover myself. It is partly the wisdom of “even God, in proclaiming the goodness of creation with the foreknowledge of its downfall, was accepting imperfection.” There must be truth to this, though I don’t like to acknowledge it. I want to tighten and tweak ever area of my life to perfection: the floors mopped to a shine if I have my way, my practicing completed each day. The children respectful and orderly, my husband brushing his teeth his morning. Our budget tight and crisp, everyone eating their vegetables. Time for exercise each day; time for prayer and quiet.

Then their is real life: the baby wakes in the night, is soaked through, everyone rises in the morning tired and crabby. I forgot to buy dish soap, the garbage didn’t get taken up to the road in time; we are late getting up our Christmas tree. I feel rushed and unsettled: will Hudson learn to read in time? Are we doing enough to curb Audrey’s sass? Are we ruining the baby’s teeth by putting her down with a bottle? Will be we able to sell our house before the foundation settles and has to be re-built?

These are the questions that assail me at 4 AM when I am craving sleep but can’t find it. Why don’t I write more? I miss reading. I have thank-yous to say and send. I need to run another load of diapers.

This is the meat and potatoes of life, and I am thankful for it. When I consider the alternative--I barren house, no joyful kid noises, no protesting and rowdy kid noises--I am grateful to be caretaker of these budding human sprouts. But I am also, in the midst of the kinetic energy of growth, longing for stillness and rest.

shells

The kids and I began to tidy up the backyard yesterday from its months of summer disuse. I never thought I would say such a thing, but in the summer months, our back yard is vacant and despondent. Branches and sticks were strewn about, and there were piles and piles of leaves (we have a “natural” backyard--as in, no grass, just pine needles and mulch carpeting the dirt floor under our thick canopy of trees). We found a small forest of mushrooms sprouted overnight after days of rain: thin and translucent in their newness, their round faces cupped toward heaven like tiny fragile teacups, their stems hollow straws to drink down the autumn rains. They seemed to come from a different world entirely: a world where even the transient mushroom (for certainly with the coldsnap they are gone even this morning) receives such minute attention to detail that the ruffles and ribbons around their faces are fit for the bonnet of a dignitary. Watching these feathery miniature trees poke their heads through the mulch and dead leaves is almost enough to make you believe in the fairy world: their early shoots like alien antennas cautiously on the lookout for sympathetic intelligence.

We discovered something else as well: shells. Giant conch shells, large Pacific Northwest clam shells, twisted thick white listening seashells. I knew where they came from: my father-in-law made us a seashell mobile as a going-away gift when we moved here, and it blew down in a storm this summer. We packed up these shells strewn together with sturdy nylon string in a box along with our books and dishes and clothes when we said goodbye to our family and the Pacific Ocean and drove with these shells the three thousand miles to the other side of the continent: and hung them up as our home flag when we arrived. I guess you could say we hung the shells the way some folks hang up a confederate flag: to let people know where our loyalty lies. But sometime in one of those late summer hurricanes you never get in Washington state, our shells were strewn across the yard with the branches and long-leaf pine. What would an archeologist have made of these shells if in two hundred years they unearthed them here, in this mud and tar valley of North Carolina? They are without question from another world: thick as bone, bleached white, round as a child’s face. They have tumbled in the sea for how long--months? years? They could survive here, even, with this humidity and mosquitoes and hurricanes. They could bear the lightening storms and the rain and even the torrent of oak leaves and long leaf pine that tried to bury them in the week.

Then why did I feel like I was picking up the one thing I had thoughtlessly discarded when I placed them, one by one, in a straight row, on the deck yesterday--as if they suddenly had become fragile and in need of care, like little children? Why did I feel like I was reclaiming something I had nonchalantly discarded? Like a teenager who has not yet learned what is important; like a housewife who gives away all her china just to be rid of the clutter--I was suddenly discovering what was valuable again.

We have moved enough. This is not a journey I am eager to make again: the arduous pilgrimage of the soul where you agonize for months (years?) about where to plant your roots and raise your children. I think I have nearly had enough of going back and forth: now I think we almost know where we are from and where we are going.