Smoke

1.  I suppose it's like this:  never let me assume I know the whole story:  the cut up parts, the ones that smashed the matching coffee mugs on the kitchen floor or cut up the dress worn to prom, dumped fragmented and stolen in the trash, or the one who took the stack of oil paintings done when she lived above the bar and went to high school and wrote her own excuses and lit them on fire, the paintings and excuses, in the big oil drums outside where her family burned trash, the black smoke rising like a signal above Silt Mesa.  The wedding dress tasted bitter.  Even so, divorced people have empathy.

2.  In the basement, we write poems while Laura smokes the cheap cigarettes outside, and I listen to her black eyes and her son who saw it all, so I start smoking, too.  And what we exhale together makes a prayer in the sky about eyes and ashtrays and voice and voice and voice.  Let it rise.

3.  Just the truth.  The whole truth.  Walk a mile walk a mile walk a mile.  Do this until you see the smoke signals above her, spilled ink in the last glass of water.

Then tell her who she is, if you think you can.




...

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.