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.

Children, Mozart and the Holy Spirit

April 12, 2010

John 14:16-17: And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him.

I have come to realize there are a few things you cannot receive unless you have learned to quiet your heart and listen: the gift of children, music and the Holy Spirit.

Children are with us. They are often loud, obnoxious, annoying. They speak a different language than grown adults: they do not care about money, time or efficiency. In the midst of a pedantic bedtime routine, they can ask the most profound questions: why is it so difficult to hear them?

Watching my children, from very tiny infants, and learning to listen to them, has taught me a whole new way of listening and communicating that has very little correlation with what we consider communication and language in the adult world. My baby, now 9 months, turns her head. I follow her gaze and see she is looking at the cat; I watch her eyes, and share in her experience of wonder and joy at this animal she has no name or category for, and finds new awe in every time she beholds it. So there is witnessing with them the new wonders of the world. Then there is also learning to listen behind their words to the pain they do not know how to express. Then there is learning to notice with them all the small things of the world: stopping for twenty minutes on a walk to watch a caterpillar climb up a tree, guessing which side of the fork in the trunk he will take—watching, awaiting that slow, slow crawl to see what he decides (do caterpillars decide?) Do carrots mind when we pick them? Does it hurt when we harvest lettuce? These are questions I answered gardening with my six-year old this weekend. Responding to a comic in the Sunday paper I said, “no one can live below the ground.” “Except the elves” retorted Hudson quickly. Who knows? If there is a fairy world of tiny quiet things, nearly invisible, it surely would be the children that would notice them, not us. We have grown so cumbersome and obtuse in our thinking; we steamroll and interrupt and run ahead. My children have taught me how to listen.

Which has been a surprising gift in regards to music. I have played harp and piano since I was very young. I know—have known—how to listen to a piece of music I am working on, its nuances and flavors. But to listen to a new piece; an unfamiliar piece… to make a new piece familiar—I had very little interest. What would I gain? How do I approach such a thing? And to what end?

But watching an infant work up—for three weeks-- the fine motor skills to roll over—prepares a person to sit and listen to the cadence changes in Mozart. Here is why: in both cases you set yourself down, that heavy bulky load of self-concern and narcissism. You must clear your mind (again, we are being prepared to receive the Holy Spirit) and watch and listen (how many times were we told this by Jesus in the gospels?) It seems so simple; it is directly in front of our noses: the baby rolling over; the bluebirds building a nest in the fern on the front porch; the slight variations in Bach’s musical offering. These things are spoken in a language that has become foreign to our tongue, because we have learned to only watch and listen to what serves us most boldly, efficiently and immediately. How do we expect the Holy Spirit to reveal himself to us—in our inbox? Message us on facebook?

But then I found this other language: this language that lifts up the small things and does not denigrate the little, hardly noticeable things of our world. I became interested in what the birds are saying in the mornings. I began to notice, with greater interest, the cycle of the leaves on the oak tree out back, and the birch out front. I became, over the months I worked on the Mozart, increasingly content with my job as keeper of the small things in our house: the quotidian tasks of laundry, cooking, cleaning. I saw with clear eyes how much work there is to be done with our children, and found fresh energy to bring to the task of discipline, relationship, physical, emotional and spiritual growth. And I discovered a secret—or what had been a secret to me—that it is the small, ever-present but nearly unnoticeable things of the world that do, in the end, shame the wise. It is the weak things of the world, the things that are tucked away in church nurseries and paved over for highways and heard only by white-haired concert goers that will, in the end, shame the wise. It is a secret I take so much joy in, because it is a secret by which I have found life: the Holy Spirit does not come in the earthquake, the fire or the wind. He comes, as we have always known, in a still small voice.

This is a secret I used to know as a child; I guess this should not surprise me, I imagine all children, if they are left to be children, know it one way or another. I was left to be a child for quite awhile: with very little media exposure and lots of time in the woods, I had an imagination and understood the importance of old trees. The old trees were wise and quiet. As I walked the mile-long one-lane road to our house, I would listen for their secrets. Gazing up at them, I imagined I could see their faces, hazy but present—and understood that they held their arms up in praise of their Creator, as an example for us to follow. As a child I understood instinctively the passage in Psalms, “if we do not praise God, the trees will raise up their arms in praise to Him”. All trees reminded me of our duty to praise God, and their quietness reminded me to listen. Until I left home for college, I continued to rise early in the morning and run the thin road that stretched east and west, watching the sun barely begin to make a dent in the darkness that was 5 AM. I would remember God’s promise to remove my sin as far as the east is from the west, and I could feel, in that barely sunrise, how far the east really is from the west. I am not sure I had ever even heard the term meditate; if I had, I would have been uncomfortable with the concept. But meditate was what I did every morning.

Now I am without the luxurious expanse of nature around me. Yes, we have the trees that form a canopy over our house. But we have freeway noise and neighbors and too much concrete. We have houses around us, and planned grass and shrubs. No more deer and porcupine and towering oaks. No more Mt. Rainier and Puyallup valley and expanse of clear blue and fog below, the river in the distance. But the listening is the same, even if the avenues are different: and the Holy Spirit promises that God is here. But…there is the caveat: The Holy Spirit is here, but the world cannot receive, because it neither sees nor knows. Do we see? Do we hear?

Invisible

You are invisible. Or so says my gmail header. But is provides an
interesting description for this stage of my life.

When I go to the grocery store with my three children, or to
Target--these are really the only two places I go with them, unless it
is to the park or the post office--I get the same sort of treatment,
non-verbal and verbal. I am a nearly invisible herder of three small
people who are adorable and annoying at the same time (I could almost
hear the man behind me at Costco yesterday... "really, she has to shop
with ALL THREE?") I am dwarfed by their liveliness, and by the
spectacle we make as a four-some. But I am assumed to be nothing more
than an at-home mom with concerns for her kids, her grocery bill, the
cleanliness of her home and her children's manners. I know people
assume these things about me because I assume them about other moms I
see when I am out: often wearing sweats, or the same old zip-fleece,
like me. Trying to decide and price-check and carry on a conversation
and herd at once. Talking on the cell phone in the grocery aisle. At
Target on Tuesday morning at 10 AM (who else is at Target on Tuesday
morning at 10 AM except us?)

Women like us, who go to Target at 10 AM on Tuesday morning, what more
could we have to say to each other--to contribute to the world--whose
concerns are limited to what kind of toothpaste our husbands prefer or
whether there is a considerable difference in the quality of Gold
Medal flour versus the generic market pantry label? Who ponders if it
is worth purchasing the cheaper cat food, wondering about salmonella and
food recalls and making impulse purchases on natural cleaning supplies
and gentle-smelling hand-soap. Those of us whose days are reduced to
walking behind small children and sweeping up their crumbs, putting
their clothes on in the morning and taking them off in the evening,
wiping their noses and bottoms and plates--acting both as nurse-maid
and dress-maid and cook and royal servant--what could we have to
contribute, after a day of this, to society at large? What about
after a week of this--or years?

Sometimes I feel like a fake listening to NPR. What does it matter if
I know about the state of the economy, or Barack Obama? Sure, it
matters since I am a citizen. But it is going to make my
son sit up and eat his carrots? Because then I would be interested.

I am interested, though--terribly interested. Which is the problem.
It would be easier to be so wholly confined to this private kingdom of
my home if I was not so interested in the outside world. I have
become curious about almost everything--physics, which I never paid
any attention to in high school or in college--biology, plants--my
goodness, how little I cared! How little I listened! I want to know
the names of the flowering plants in our over-grown yard, and the
trees and shrubs in our neighborhood. I am curious about the
neighborhood of birds that overlays ours, the hundreds of homes that
lay around and above our roof, and all the voices I hear in the
morning calling to each other--cajoling, mocking, annoyed. laughing.
inviting. I am so interested in what they are trying to accomplish
and communicate.

I know that it is out of the new stillness in myself that I have
become quiet enough to take interest in things like birds, and what a
baby means when it says hello without saying anything. These are the
things that have no place in the public square--babies, with their
drool and senseless babble. Birds, which tend to poop on our nice
cars, nest in our gutters and make themselves a general nuisance. Toddlers,
who are forever in the way and holding us up. I spent the first few
years of my time at home resenting that I was suddenly shut out of the
adult world, with the exception of watching BBC films and reading
novels. But even then, i felt more like a voyeur peaking in on
something that wasn't rightly mine, that I had no right to participate
in --than an actual participant. But suddenly, after six years at
this, I have discovered something: it is these small, things, these
shabby and overlooked and --to the world-trained eye--worthless
things--that are so full of brilliance.

Take, for example, the way my eight-month old baby looks at me
when I come in to get her in the
morning. She does not know words yet, but she speaks the most perfect
sentence of joy and fulfillment when I pick her up. Her eyes, her
whole face--her whole being becomes so bright with pleasure I am
caught in my tracks. Every time. More than once I have listened to
her grunting and complaining in her crib, and complaining myself about
my half-finished task, being interrupted, never having space or time
of my own... I march up the stairs, slowly--open
the door--and that look stops me dead in my tracks. I find myself a
five full minutes later smelling her sweet head, singing to her,
kissing her fat cheeks--when I remember I have a pot of soup on the
stove that has now boiled over, or one of the older kids is on the
potty, or my tea kettle is still whistling.

But this experience of seeing pure, unfiltered pleasure in the face
of a baby, is not something that translates easily as a thing of
value. It cannot be bottled and sold or marketed. It is not
interesting to bankers, investors, even pastors or lawyers or
teachers. It is a private communication, like a love letter, and,
like a love letter, loses its meaning when shared. Best kept private. As are toddlers, who don't know the difference between a personal question
and small-talk, and birds, who don't know when it is Saturday morning
and time to stop singing.

I wonder that now, after these six years, motherhood has become such a
joy to me.

communion of saints

February 11, 2010

The kids are asleep, or at least quiet for the moment. I am sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a bar of dark chocolate. It is my guilty pleasure, the nearest thing to an escape—when there are so many things I should be doing (like the mounds of dishes spilling out of the sink on to the counter and across the kitchen.) But instead I sit and write.

It is clear today, and very cold. A relief after yesterday, so windy the trees were shedding branches, and some giving up the fight entirely and laying down across the road in exaggerated surrender.

A piece of dirtied cloth, a rag of some sort—nearly transparent from use—flew down our lot and lodged itself in a tree in our backyard. Audrey spotted it this morning, asking me if daddy could get out his ladder, climb up and get the cloth down so she could use it in a skit that she and some of her friends are going to perform at minnows. She wants to tie the cloth around her, she told me, as a costume. It is, quite frankly, the dirtiest piece of torn-up cotton you have ever seen, and its origins I don’t want to begin to guess—my most tasteful guess is that someone used to to change the old on their car, left it outside and it blew away in the wind—but there could be other explanations…

But being four, Audrey couldn’t think of a single reason why it would be unsavory to climb up and take a dirty rag from a tree and parade around in it as a costume. And that is what frightens and bewilders and awes me about my children.

February is the hardest month of the year to be a Christian. Listening to advent music in February is bittersweet at best, and at times, downright painful. January is bad enough, but then you have all these excuses: post-Christmas blues, ate too much, paying too much for the gifts that were put on visas, the whole New Years thing. But February—here we are, supposed to be moving on in to spring, the marketers tell us—spring clothing out in the catalogs coming in our mailboxes, flowers in pots in the grocery store, and of course the proliferation of pink and red everywhere. But here we are, cold, perpetually cold. The earth is still dead and hard; there is not even a scent of spring in it. We feel so far from spring, and even farther from Christmas. Why is it that no one even talks about Christmas in February? It seems almost taboo —

O come, Emmanuel, rescue captive Israel… and we are still captive. We have not really made any progress since Christmas, have we? Here we all were: full of good intentions, gifts, parties, cards, saying our best and looking our best and being jolly and together and so very merry. We prayed and went to church and looked and waited and expected—and then Christmas came and went and here we are, still broken-hearted, still wanting our marriage to be better and our children to be better and there to be more money and less pain and no more cancer. If God is here, then why is life still so hard? This is an old question, I don’t pretend to be original. But it bothered me anew the other night: I had gone to play for a group of patients staying at a hotel-type home while receiving cancer treatments at the hospital. Most of them were far from home, some had family that had come with them and were staying there as well—and all were fighting some type of life-threatening cancer. I am always happy to bring my music in to those kinds of situations, because words are so small and cumbersome. They are too small to answer the big questions of “what next” and “what if,” and when employed as agents of comfort, they are ill-fitting and unwieldy at best, offensive at worst. And then I, being a creature of words, feel at a loss. Music, this other language we all share, fills that gap—though it is interesting how much it seems to be a forgotten language anymore.

As I stepped out of the warmth of the building to carry my things in from the car, I was struck by the cold, the distance of the tiny beady stars, and how hard it all seems. If we waited, and if God came, and is here, doesn’t it seem like things could be a little bit better? This earthquake in Haiti; these patients enduring the torture of chemo, hoping for a cure—

And I know all the usual answers, and most of the time they are enough, but this night, they were not enough. God is here, our comforter; he has taken our sorrows upon himself…is present with us. I want to see more of God here. I want to touch, and feel, and see with my eyes, so that if there is this overwhelming hope, I can honestly and with candor translate it to those who can’t see. Or maybe I am the one that needs God's obvious presence translated to me, as I am, at times, quite blind to it. I suppose that is why, in all wisdom, God gave us the communion of saints.