1.  On campus they have a "no walking on the grass" rule (weird, eh?), which kills me this time of year when the leaves are falling and make a gorgeous sound underneath my boots like opening the wrapping from a birthday present .  I park on campus and Nora and I hold hands while using the crosswalk to get to her school (it's right across the street).  We do her morning work together practicing the muscles that make the letters.  And then I go out and cross, but I don't use the crosswalk when it's just me--and the direction toward my office is east and the sun is breaking the trees apart in red and gold light and the leaves respond under my feet, and I'm surrounded, flaming.  And I'm thankful to start the day on fire because this is what it requires.

2.  Every semester a theme develops in all of my classes.  This semester's theme seems to be this:  You never know exactly who you are.  But don't let that stop you from making important decisions on your own behalf.  Don't stand, deer in headlights style, in front of the difficult maneuvers each day requires and think you'll mess it up if you choose a direction.  Act.  God will work with it.  And this is the process of letting the old self die in order to be born something else.  The leaves open the gift under the path I choose.  I have always loved movement.

3.  I'm so thankful for Prof. R who walks the halls with his coffee pot, too, filled with water from the bathroom.  And he shakes my hand.  Then I run into Pastor J and he makes Rocky style boxing moves when he sees me.  And Farmer Ben reminds me that I'm "the man."  Like the fire in the sky, the people around me lift my hope and this makes it easier, in turn, to choose.

4.  And I choose to open to this movement.  I know you don't get biceps like these staring at the five year old or the rock salt or the dirt or the seeds as light as light.  I'm not bragging.  I'm just saying.

1.  For girls with blonde hair who live and love and fight strong for themselves.  In chapel today, I notice four young women with gold curls on shoulders and think of Nora and Amelia.  I think of my Grandpa Smith saying that a woman's hair is her glory, and I am loving the girls surrounded by golden crowns.  Help them over the hard spots.

2.  I wish we could all rest more.

3.  Everything is going to be okay.

1.  Fourteen juniors and seniors dressed to the nines with resumes and portfolios in hand.  Fourteen professionals from the area who spent two hours of their day doing three mock interviews with each student.  We circle around afterward and laugh about the trick questions:  "How would you fit an elephant into a refrigerator?"  "I'm glad you asked that.  May I demonstrate?"  The student who shows up with his fly duct taped together, a last minute fix to an unexpected problem.  The story of the shoe sent after an interview in order to "get a foot into the door."

They are good people, and I'm wishing them well into future where they will continue to Become and Be under the guiding protection of the Gift Giver.

2.  Laughing with old friends about ending up like Stanley Kunitz, growing old and bent over until eventually I'm simply plowing the garden with my forehead.  And "everything is going to work out just fine" and "can we come visit on Sunday?"

3.  Nora's teacher stopping me to say how much Nora is learning, how she's doing well, making progress.  For the last two weeks, there's been a major change in her:  she is thriving, no longer cries when I leave her, gets dressed in the morning without grumbling (much), and can write her alphabet.


Extras:  And surprise text prayers from friends, my mom's unchanging love of me (tyrant that I was and can still be at times), another friend's brave admission of change and growth and the unknown--the tears in her eyes and the smile that says, "I don't know, but I will anyway."

Threes

To break into it again, to get back Home, to make a note, to speak it out, to say it and be it and become it, to handle it and hand it over, to take it up, to hoist it, to more than manage, to negotiate the sound of it, to pick it up and believe in it and kiss it better and wish it more than well, to write it:

Gifts.

1.  The song found its own notes and whispered to me from the small confine of my heart: you are bigger than this.  And the note spreads into five and the fifth remembers the fingers and the fingers remember the hand and the hand remembers, puts back together, the face it holds.  You are beautiful.  Yes YOU.

2.  I want her to be well.  I send love across the room to her.

Because I haven't written in awhile and I don't know where to begin, let's start with:

The garden is dismantled but for the chard and the fall planting that may yet yield red sail lettuce, spinach, radish and turnip, sweet peas.  The field mice had made a home in the herb bed.  I found the downy milkweed seed gathered into a soft bedding pulled across the hole they dug.   My yanking and pulling woke them, and they jumped out scampering for cover.  The cats immediately went to work, grabbing one and flinging it high in the air.  I ran after the brute yelling, "Leave it alone.  It's just a little thing!" And then I remember that I caught seven of them in traps last month.  And I wonder about context.  The day I bought the mouse traps, I also bought food for Henrietta, Nora's hamster.  And it just seemed silly and uncomfortable in some ways looking down in the grocery cart and seeing small rodent food next to the snapping mouth of the trap.  What is this strange world with all its strange rules?

Release

The kitchen counter is covered:  a large basket of apples gathered from the ground below the tree suffering from lack of rain and cedar rust, still making fruit that will be cooked into applesauce for small mouths and bodies.  Three large boxes of tomatoes picked from the vine of a friend whose garden last year succumbed to chemical drift and deer; this year her garden truly was a victory.  The woman beside me who holds her new son, the one she prayed and prayed to have when she wasn't sure she could.  The woman with new boots raising her sons and her songs and the place where she belongs; she never stops moving toward these riches.

And Nora running into the double doors of her school, blessed going in, blessed coming out.  I marvel at the size of her adult teeth, delighting in the "beaver" stage all kids her age go through.  I'm watching her talk.  This is a new person I'm meeting every morning, and some mornings we argue over putting on clothes and getting to school on time, and some days we just sit next to each other on the couch, my head on her shoulder, her hand twisting a piece of my hair.  Just being.  She's growing into her size, into her self.  And I am moving through the letting go, sometimes gracefully, sometimes still clinging to the way things were when she was my little one.

And I have been meditating hard on the difference between forging ahead and following.  And I am realizing that in order to follow, one must accept both protection and a new, unimagined life.  This is a mystery I'm still trying to understand.  Let go and come to Me.  In return, the gifts of yielding that space will be abundant.  

From one moment to the next, we are being asked to let go even as I watch the summer garden wilt back to the earth and the trees, already dried from lack of rain, release their leaves early so they might move into the death of dormancy to prepare themselves for next season's waters, the limbs already offering their naked entreaty toward the sky.  Let me live again.

Trees

Willingness lives somewhere at the edge of the Wilderness, where she wandered to find the light hidden between the limbs (her own?  the trees?), bare feet and branches snapping as she cut her way through to the center of it.  Terrified, she did it anyway.  Like many women, she owned a pair of boots but she hadn't thought to put them on as she was woken from her dream, called out the door, still half asleep, and walking toward what she couldn't name.  God's voice touching in the trees like a mother calming her child, shhhh...shhhhh.  Trust this.

Seeds

She was not negotiating the days of her life in order to find out more about her life, nor was she truly interested in knowing more about herself through the "work" of self-examination.  The difference would be this:  The seed can not be saved if she digs down into the earth with shaking hands to pull it up, examine it, name its parts while at the same time tearing it lose from the dirt that holds the fragile tail of a shoot inside its mouth, warm and dark and necessary.  Speechless.  A seed pulled this way can't be put back into the earth and expected to recover, to grow.  The vulnerability of such a creature (a life, a person, a child) must not be compromised by our desire to possess it or give it a name smaller than the one it was given in the Beginning.

Instead,  she will leave the seed of herself alone, allow herself to show herself in her own time and in the fruit she produces, what she is, what she dreams possible for herself, what she fears, how she moves, how she is called beyond her fear of the dark wilderness of her past, sustaining herself on the desires of her heart written there for her by God, for what she can know of light and air and love because it is being given to her.   She lifts to receive these blessings.  Let her lift to receive these blessings.

Sometimes I am this brave.  Sometimes I am not.  And this is to be expected.