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.

Mt. Rainier

Isaiah 55:6-11

Seek the Lord while he wills to be found; *
call upon him when he draws near.

This verse implies something that makes me uncomfortable: if there is a time when God draws near, then there must be a time when he is away. This concept of God’s distance is puzzling because we have been taught since Sunday School that God is right in our hearts and any time we want to speak to him day or night he is like a genie--pop!-- right out of our heart in to our minds and we can have this private little tete-to-tete with him. Anytime. All the time. Ultra, omni-accessible, like our i-phones and cells--ready always at our fingertips to take our calls or requests. Is it possible that God is not “at our fingertips” like we imagine? Are we doing God a disservice by imagining him to be at our beckon call any time we are doing sinning and ready to repent, or afraid and in need of comfort, or in distress and need wisdom?

We know throughout scripture God is present to his people. And we are told he desires nothing more than for us to be reconciled to him. But still: Isaiah clearly implies that there are times, or seasons, when God draws near to us. An example from nature: I grew up in the shadow of Mount Rainier. Mount Rainier is no small hill; at nearly 15,000 feet, it was the first thing I saw out of my bedroom window in the morning, and the marker I used when learning to drive my way around town (ie, the mountain will be behind you). Though the mountain was quite stationary, our experience of the mountain was constantly changing. There would be entire weeks when, blocked by clouds and rain, we would not even get a glimpse of Mt Rainier. When we had out of town guests and this happened it was particularly frustrating, because without the mountain’s large bulk peaking over the Cascades, you can’t even imagine it was there. We would point and say “right there is Mount Rainier” but really you could not even see a hint of the foothills: it made us feel rather foolish. But then--one afternoon you look up and the clouds have suddenly melted and the mountain is there in all its splendor. And also: sometimes, around sunset, the mountain would appear to have grown so much bigger--it would seem to have crept right up to our doorstep. There were times it actually looked like it was sitting on our back porch.

Does the mountain draw near? Does God move away from us? Or are there seasons when our view of God is less obstructed and we can access him with more ease? Are there times in our lives when we see God more clearly, times he actually appears--like Mt Rainier--closer at hand? Give us grace, God, to look up and see you at those times you reveal yourself to be sitting on our back porch.

autumn

Endings are good. Maybe that is why I find autumn so satisfying. The days of this year have come and gone; some have been productive, some have been wasted. We spent some in sorrow, some fighting, many we flitted away thinking about something else. But now the year is nearly spent, we can see the end in sight: the turning of the leaves indicates that we are in the home stretch. It always seems to me that the earth is very satisfied with herself this time of year. Yes, we have committed many wrongs, to the soil, to each other. To ourselves. And so on. But if you look at a maple tree in full golden bloom, it is hard not to understand transcendence. This shortest season is certainly the most magnificent, even if the real beauties are the quiet ones: the crisp foretaste of the air, or its woodsy aftertaste. The way the fallen leaves make another roof over ours, covering the skylights and making shadows dance across the kitchen table.

I do not understand how judgement and joy can coexist. Throughout scripture we are asked to accept this: God’s perpetual joy in his people, his continual judgement of his people. In autumn, it seems for a minute the judgement holds it breath (waiting for the death of winter, perhaps) and there is pleasure in all things, a space to breath without fear of the harsh biting winds of winter or the driving rains of spring or the suffocating heat of summer. We open our eyes, blink, finding the world so much more habitable than we remembered last week. We are grateful, perhaps even more so because we know this autumnal stillness is fleeting.

crumbs

The sheets are running in the wash. There is construction still underway next door, and the shrill call of birds as they prepare for the sunshine today will bring.
I am trying to figure out what the light playing on the leaves of the newly green trees reminds me of: transcendence? A certain otherness, a knowing. The sun has come down to rest, with a newness and gladness about itself, about fifty yards out between our back yard and our neighbors, in a patch of dense and newly leafed-out oak and elm trees. The leaves look white and silver in the brilliance of the early morning light; they tremor, a bit, with the wind, and seem to whisper a secret I can just barely make out: this is the stuff of real life, the life that matters the sun glint off the spring oak leaves. The dappled sunlight falling through them, making patterns, faint and indiscernible, on the kitchen table—through the skylight, on the hardwood floors amongst the bits of rice still resting there after dinner last night.

These are the things we would be wise to notice: the pattern of the brown thrasher as it turns and returns to its nest in our boston fern on the front porch. The slight sigh of the wind as it rustles through our yards, past the hammering and lawn-mowing and industrious work of the day. Where are you, Lord, amongst all these trees and all this sighing? We are so weary of ourselves and our work. We labor—all day—at the most meaningless tasks. Then we lay down at night and dream that the ocean has come up to our front door and now we have an ocean view: ocean liners, freight liners, tug boats and sails line up with lights on for a race in the morning: and I am standing in the kitchen trying to explain (to myself?) how we got all the water there: “our view is much better when there is an ocean to look at.”

My dreams tell me I am homesick for water. For the expanse of it, its vastness. The perspective it brings to our small doings; for the quiet it brings with its noise.

Lord, I want to notice the little gifts you give today—the crumbs. May they be enough—more than enough—to nourish me. I have not watched, looked, listened. I have not paid enough attention. I know that your attention to Tabitha was not a dip in the action of Acts. The Gentile woman who asked you to give her the crumbs from under the table was not being overly self-debasing: she knew a secret I have forgotten: your crumbs, even the tiniest of crumbs, are enough to nourish us for a lifetime. They are the only substantial sustenance we get –the rest of our meals are glorious pretending, like peter pan’s feeding of the lost boys in Neverland: all the right gestures, places set, words correctly spoken—but no nourishment actually consumed. I want to get to the place of nourishment, to the place of secret crumbs.