Loving the Questions

Question:  What will you do when you're alone?

Answer:  Mom appeared at the Spur today, bought me a cup of coffee, and distracted me from my work.  We walked around Utica for a bit, down the middle of the streets.  I found a nail, picked it up and twirled it as the gravel crunched under my flip-flops eventually throwing it away and dreaming of the day someone had without a flat tire.  That person is going to love that day.  I like the surprise of seeing my mom sitting across from me sharing some forbidden gas station nachos with too many jalapenos when I had planned to be alone.

Question:  What happens when Nora rolls herself up in your exercise mat and you take one end and pull really hard?

Answer:  Nora spins down the length of the living room laughing hysterically, and you, of course ask her if she minds doing that again.

Question:  When do you know you are ready to teach a class?

Answer:  When you remember it's not about you.

Question:  What do you do when you write something you don't understand?

Answer:  Keep writing.  If it doesn't surprise you, why bother?

Phew. 

Piano in Knots

You know when you find the song, listening over and again because some knot in you came undone with the notes expanding, mapping the unravel, the denouement, the untying of the knot, and you let it do its work at the end of the day when all you can think is:  could I have done more?  Ah.

Song.  Song.  I need you to sing to me.  Your effort is enough.  I'm making peace from war.  

And you ask:  how you grew, how I loved you, how I found you surprised on a four-track cassette recorder I got for my 17th birthday, so I could hear the songs in wholeness and I turned it up loud enough I couldn't hear myself think through myself.

You were given love to love with.  You were given voice to sing, fingers on the keyboard stretching secret threads around the house when everyone had gone to the movies because you didn't want anyone to hear and when the house is empty, then go down basement stairs, the humid turning to chill and sit still on the bench and you know the notes by the ivory missing from the keys.  A visual player.

And thread binds heart and song works medicine in the kitchen when dinner plans are set aside for the place you found with your head resting between the corner cabinets so you can hear your voice and dream into the corn fields for something you've been missing to come down the road and pull in the drive and tell you how the song called the thread that led the question to you.

What is it you will do with this one wild and precious life?  You come back to this question, addicted to something good and terrified of what you are.

In class, we talk about the things we won't talk about and there is triumph in the speaking heart that jumps the gap to meet you there, holding hand and reaching:  the possibility that we can respond with generosity, even with ourselves, which we have a tendency to descend upon like a noose lowered around the horse thief, the one that stole your voice, that wild horse.

The Woman Who Took Herself Too Seriously or Who has two thumbs and was trying to get everything right again?

What you need you haven't written yet, but you're working on it, so keep up with the work, good lady.  You're doing just fine don't give up don't give up don't give up.

Watch that sun set and walk around the house and notice the weeds and flowers are all doing just fine and know you are as prepared as you can be, sweetheart, for everything, because He said He'd carry you, and He will.  Sometimes I watch you staying up too late or waking too early trying to "get it right" or "make sure you know enough" to do what the day requires, but did you know that you've got everything you need when you look out and you see those around you not as something to be afraid of but as people who all need a little love?  So get out of your way and open up that hand and that heart and get on with your work, lady, because these few days of belly-aching and feeling sorry for yourself are a chance for you to approach this issue aggressively, gently, with courage.

What's the issue?:  Ah, you know.  Just your basic fearworrydoubtanxiety thing, that creepy-crawly life sucking bindweed.  Makes me want to be perfect because it knows how much I want that, out of my own EFFORT.  Oh, good grief.  Give your best, surely, but mercy me, if you keep up with this thinking you have to know it all or do it perfectly or that you can't make a fool of yourself then you have a lot of lessons coming your way, honey.  Listen.  Whatever you've got, give it.  Unashamed.  I mean, let it go.  What are you so afraid of?  Being laughed at.  Heck, you've been through that.  Easy as pie.  

A lady flipped me off today while I was driving because I went the speed limit and slowed down for a bus that had stopped.  She wanted to ride in my trunk.  I could have taken it personally.  An older version of myself would have thought about my driving for a good 2 hours.  But, whatever.

Whatever, lady.  Whatever to you in your car.  I pray you feel better soon.  I've been there before, so caught up in it all that all I can see is how other people are in my way.  I've been there.  I've used that finger before.  Yeah.  I have.  And, sugar, that ain't the answer.  Not always.  Not ever, right?  I mean, there's whatever and then there's the other angrier whatever, which just seems to cut someone off rather than set you free.  

And I want to be free.  And this isn't perfect, and this is just right.

I Can Tell

1.  A day at home cleaning the house after church while listening to Sufjan Stevens.

2.  Peach and jalapeno jam.  Sugar.  Vinegar.  Sweet and spicy.  I can tell 7 half-pints won't last longer than a week.

3.  I can tell something is brewing.  Turned inward.  Thinking stuff.

4.  The sunflowers behind the house are as tall as I am, yellow heads so heavy they droop in midday narcoleptic postures, and the bees come up from below, tell them to lift their chins another day for their sake.

5.  A garden hose wrapped up for the last time.  The tomatoes, I am hoping, still have another month in them.

6.  I will admit that the end of the season is sometimes hard to accept.  This is a gentle way of saying it.  I can tell you that I need the pull of weed, hope of seed, obvious growth, rhythm and silence and movement and talking to God while I work.  I'll find another thing to do for the time being.  Crochet, most likely.  Hands require movement.

7.  Pastor's sermon this morning doing some heavy work in me, the kind that's made me inward turned.  And as soon as it has cleared out some of this "doggy doo" (Pastor's words), I'll have a lot to say about the poison of perfectionism and how the effort to simply move toward something right makes Him happy.

8.  I thank all of you for reading.  I can tell you are here because you give me courage.

300

1.  This is post number 300.  Ha!  And I can't think of a single thing to say!  Well, I guess my limit is 300 thoughts.  Now I know.

2.  In a bed, she will go to sleep knowing that her job is simply this:  to extend the reach of hope.  

3.  When I say this, I want you to picture me standing on a cliff yelling at lung's capacity:  I WANT TO LIVE!

4.  Over the last 3 days I have discovered something extraordinary:  I like getting older.  I think that saying about things getting better with age is actually true.  This isn't me bragging here.  I'm just saying, I feel a lot more mature, but strangely, I don't feel like living out the rest of my life in this safe little "mature" place--I think now, I can finally just...get on with things being me, this person God made me.  Now, what am I going to do first?

300.  Yes.  Habit prepares one to receive the gift.  Sending my love to you and hoping you are getting older, too.

Littles

A Smurfette puzzle at Et. Cetera
4 "new" butter knives for .35
Playing animal surgery/remove the tag with Nora this morning before school
Coffee.
How quickly the flowers recover after drinking a gallon of water.
How the cats lounge on the concrete slab until I bring them the leftovers from the day before.
Tossing lost and found items between cars in the preschool parking lot.
Frog stickers for jobs well done.
Nora's hug and kiss as she leaves her friend Daniel, "See you next time we're at school!"
Difficult revelations and sitting in the rocking chair at the end of the day letting go when no one can hear me.
A first week at school.  How exhausted I am.  How good it is to work even though it's hard.
Nachos and reading at the Bronco Spur.  Her company and listening heart.
Mom telling me she loves me.  I need this daily.
Plans to be in the garden tomorrow.
Salsa to freeze.  Rhubarb crisp to make.  Banana bread.
Being able to buy what I need.
Vintage push mowers.
Friends writing dissertations and songs and blogs and taking pictures and publishing poems.
Prayer.  Constantly.  Who is He?  A boat in which I sail through life, carried, rocked to sleep.
Being able to answer caller questions on the Backyard Farmer correctly.  "Well, that looks like your everyday garden spider...ah!  Yep.  Erratic watering.  You can hand weed anything but you'd be better off..."
A picture of my friend from a long, long time ago.  She's got a ten gallon hat, sitting on a horse, wearing a Western shirt, a gold trophy in one hand that's almost as tall as she is.  Suddenly remembering how we would play on the horse walker at her house, hooking the cinch on, riding around and around on our bellies as if we were flying.
Sitting on the couch.  I like that.  It's simple.
Friends telling me to rest.  I like having an excuse to sit still.  (See above mention of couch.)

One of the Reasons to Write

"Her eye, her ear, were tuning forks, burning glasses, which caught the minutest refraction or echo of a thought or feeling…She heard a deeper vibration, a kind of composite echo, of all that the writer said, and did not say."                    -Willa Cather

To write is to be thankful even when we are demolished.  To write is to continue searching for a true relationship between who we think we are and who the author of our lives made us to be. We put our marks on the page as a way of creating the map, outlining the traces of a life composed of a past we don't always want to claim, a future we have never even seen and a present that seems to slip away too quickly to claim, to hold.

Literature (the act of reading it) and writing (the act of creating it) are maps that help us navigate the intense terrain of this human experience.  Strangely, we learn through fictional characters that have never set foot on freshly mown grass, never once inhaled the apple colored light of Fall, we learn through people who have never actually existed that we aren't alone.  With them, we no longer fear our solitude because our solitude is met and demolished the moment we crack open the cover of a book or the blank, white page, allowing it to yawn and stretch until we too are more awake, more alive and less alone.

God gave us language and literature, the ability to create whole worlds with a series of sounds placed in the right order, so we might record the gift of this life, so we might say, "I was here, and it was good." 

Through the story, we are awakened, reminded that this is it, this one day, this one hour, this one chance to live, to REALLY live and, even better, to share this gift with some lonely reader somewhere with a broken heart and a silent tongue.

This semester (and always), let our pens be tuning forks that vibrate with courage, our hearts burning glasses that capture the layers of this life in radiant clarity as we encounter the gift of the story.

"Every journey, honestly undertaken, stands a chance of taking us toward the place where our deep gladness meets the world's deep need."

---Parker Palmer