Who is responsible for the mess in my closets?

As my brain has been thawing the last couple of days, my pulse regulating itself to a rhythm opposite that of "Flight of the Bumblebee"--as all these tiny, necessary undoings take place, I've been looking in my closets.

Okay.  I know what you're thinking here.  Given my usual sense of symbolic import while waxing and waning about life's deeper mysteries, you are thinking I am talking about something other than a closet.  But, dear reader, I assure you I am actually talking about my literal closets (though they will probably be held under a symbolic lens at some point in this post...)

What I want to know is this:  who has been coming into my house and throwing stuff in my closets?  I mean, seriously, I would never create a physical hazard like the ones I am discovering here in my own home.  The only person capable of this kind of chaotic, potentially deadly, anti-feng shui, tetris meets jenga nightmare would be my sister Julie.  (Julie, you know it's true.  Remember when we lived together in college, and the strange apartment we rented was designed so that I had to walk through your room to get to my room?  Remember how I missed an entire semester because I couldn't find a way out of your room?)

It appears that anything I couldn't deal with over the last few months got thrown in a closet:  60 pounds of stuffed animals?  No problem.  Throw them in the closet.  Limited edition VHS box set of The Terminator.   Well, I might need that later.  (Opens door, throws object into dark space of closet.)   75 bubble wrap envelopes from .01 +3.99 shipping amazon.com purchases--I hate to waste them.  Shower curtain rod?  Empty picture frames?  Shrunken sweaters?  Surely I can unravel those and make a scarf.  (Pile lands on floor of closets, obscuring view of Terminator box set and rolled up poster of MADD race car.)  Why are there rocks in there?  I mean, why did I throw rocks in my closet?

I can only guess what the skeletons are saying about the kind of landlord I've become.

Christmas Break(down)

When I am not runningaroundcrazy (shout out to Teagan for the word convergence) while classes are in session, I find I am easier to be around, relaxed, quicker to drop to the floor for a game of "Don't Wake the Monster" with Nora, a better conversationalist while on the phone with my sisters, a discerning shopper, a book reading, biscuit-and-gravy-eating-at-the-gas-station-in-Utica-local and a better cook.  I show signs of slightly improved muscle tone.  I become a skilled crossword puzzle-ist, a crafter-- a stare into space for as long as you like woman at (not) work.

And when I am at work, I am all those things, too.  Just faster.

Let this break unwind the places wound too tightly around the world.  Remember there is work being done you can't even see, and this is your real work.  Now is the time to connect with that and when it begins again, never let go.

Love and Work

Tonight getting out of the car after visiting Ila at the retirement home, the moon glows through the clouds over the grain bins and the windmill, and it smells like pigs.  A man's work left behind for his son and then who?  Three generations now.  And I stand there too long making patterns out of the tree branches--a kite a cross a shovel a hand extended.  "Mommy.  Mommy."

There was a man, Merle--Ila's husband, born in a house where the garden sits now.  Tomorrow he would have been 92.  I found out yesterday that he passed away a week ago.  And there was a stillness there in the tree as I stood with the smell of his legacy, his father's too, not a bad smell at all, really.  And our lives aren't separate.  If anyone ever tells you they are, they don't know how much of our love and work takes place for years and years after we've died.  It goes on in me, in you.  Strangers are working in you now--the apple tree planted 130 years ago.  The cathedral that took over 100 years to build.  The cobblestone streets in Seward.  Merle's fields and pigs.  This house.  I put together some Rhubarb and Apricot jam we made in August from the things growing here on the place, a couple of colorful dishcloths I'd crocheted while watching Westerns, a card asking that the His love comfort her now.  "He was so quiet.  He was like my mother-in-law, so quiet, and a saint.  I suppose I talked enough for two."

I will do my best to pull the weeds, plaster the cracks, prune the trees, plant a few new ones, keep the soil rich where you were born almost 100 years ago.  The apples are sweet.  The ground is good.

Home Making

I'm feeling fragmented but in a joyous kind of way--when life sparkles, reflected in pieces.

Reading my friends' words of making homes and traveling, moving things, gathering objects--reading of leaving things behind, what we can keep, what we must take with us until we've "worked through it"--until we've convinced the ghost to go home.  Making a living space large enough for our lives, for our friends, for our soulmates, rewiring, removing, letting go.  The temperatures and textures of our arrangements.

Everything must change.  We reach for our own lives placed high on a shelf.  "Higher.  Reach higher.  Higher still.  I know you can do it."

It hurts--taking it down, peering into the shape of it.  A remarkable thing.  So new.  I remember feeling this terror and awe the first time I held Nora, her tiny arms flailing in the too large universe, her skin so new, afraid the air would burn, the sounds would deafen.  The light would blind.  This life is too much.  And yet, it is everything I can and must do.

Love without fear of it not returning.  Love--because it is what eases the space into itself like your body slowly being lowered into the unbearably hot water of your own life.

Good night, friends!

Tomorrow:  because I did the dishes, because the coffee will automatically start brewing at 6AM, because I still have miles and miles of papers to climb, because it took turning on every light in the house and singing, "I Will Survive" at the top of my lungs.  (You may be thinking, "Hyperbole?"  Not in this case.)

Because of this:  I will wait for that miraculous transformation that takes place between who I am now and who I will be after a few hours of rest.  And then, I'll try again.

Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing, Mama

Too much on my mind:

1.  The madness of shoppers and the parking lots surrounding them.

2.  Nora wanting to talk (shy, hesitant, afraid to uncover it) tonight before bed about what to do when kids make fun of you.  My nose stings.  I bury the tears before they emerge (the awkward girl-self, the too tall, too strange looking, high-water pants, gap-toothed, wallflower, third wheel).  You tell them this is how God made you and He doesn't make mistakes, Nora.  In my mind I'm thinking: run.  Run away from them.  Get as far away from those words as possible.   Tell them this:  Go defeat someone else.  I've got work to do.  It took me so long to learn this.  I learned it from you.

3.  Art and motherhood.  Motherhood and art.  Who first said there was a conflict there?  Again, I say:  Go defeat someone else.  They are one and the same.

4.  I paint.  I plant. I write.  I see.  I love.  I pray.  I cook.  I listen.  I long.  I sing.  In me, there is no difference between my life and my art, my prayer and my life.

Everybody needs a change
A chance to check out the new
But you're the only one to see
The changes you take yourself through 

Don't you worry 'bout a thing
Don't you worry 'bout a thing, mama
Cause I'll be standing on the side
When you check it out

I must be growing up.

I'm not sure what to write about tonight.  There is a sort of hum inside me that can only be explained by a week filled with the warmth of loving company, with prayers passing across tables, music and language filling a room, opening my (fragile-hoping) heart.  And it's only Wednesday.  It's only December.  It's only 2010.

Nora's birthday.  A night on the town.  A first Christmas program.  A song lifted.   A train constructed.  A word read.  Cookies made.  Grading in tandem.  Language left in love.  Healing and recovery.

I am usually introverted, born quiet.  Preferring the quiet space of a mesa, a page, a field.  This is so new, this feeling that I am more myself around people than alone.  (Still--I hear Him calling me to shut the door of the closet and listen.  Look.  Be still.  This servant is listening.)  We meet Him in both situations.

Talking to a friend this morning over bisc(q)uits and gravy, we both agree that as time passes, we become better at being who we are.

I am grateful for this realization.  I am grateful for those people who continue to teach me how to love.  (Including you.)