Category: Everyday

Creation

I woke with a gentle but urgent thought – I woke with something I needed to do, some kindness that needed offering, or some idea I needed to explore. I woke with a loose and blousy image; some new creation was tugging at a thread. Something I needed to know was trying to be known.

And then, while the gauze was still across my brain and my gaze was still soft, I sat down at my desk and checked the news.

Apparently, my airbag is a serial killer, salmon have been taking Lipitor, and a woman accidentally mailed her cat. Closer to home, my daughter was diagnosed with an anxious vagina and the peanut butter was gone from the mousetrap, (which, after day 4, should really be called a feeding station).

All of this astonishment before I even get to the real stuff, of Pakistan and poverty and cancer and cures and beheadings and bombs. The attention and gasp is all worn out by the time you even check your first email. That fleeting thought you had this morning is crowded out. Before you know the words you long to speak, or the dream you need wake from – you are swarmed by the news of dying bees.

And it’s essential, of course; those dying bees. But so is something else.
What’s close up, what’s within us, is so frequently swept away in a torrent of information and data from the outside world, that the universe that is you is drowned. Drowned in headlines and crushed by all the little bits from across the globe. The weight of it all, the power of the moving tide of media and markets takes us along, and soon we are so far away from that single thought – the one deep inside of us that needed to be known – that we know nothing, and nothing new is created.

Maybe that’s why we are all so weary. Even with headlines that make our hearts stop, we are weary because our own place in creation isn’t reflected in that raging world. Somehow, all the words we’ve heard before. Maybe when we long for original thought, it is our own that we are missing.

We are the creation that will and can change the world. But we must find time for the silence, and space for the tender truth of us to emerge.

Marching Orders

March is an untrustworthy month – you can count on nothing, except the rudeness of the clocks springing forward as we grieve our hour of sleep and shuffle through the halls of an amputated day. The apple tree is not reliable, nor is the greening of the grass. Even the shoots from the crocus are uncertain. Just when the air softens and you feel like your tennis shoes belong in the world again, you get an icy wakeup call and have to reenlist the boots. Just when the t-shirt forces you to confront your arm flab, you’re allowed to slip back into the long and sweatered sleeves of denial.

March kicks off a season of trickery, and can be appallingly inappropriate. You can be woken and told that your father died in the night. You can have a miscarriage, lose a job, read the news, and sit inside your stunned and wintered heart staring out a chirping window, watching bikes come out and play. Easter-purple hops brightly across the grimy snow. Down jackets rub elbows with wispy lemon scarves. Sun sinks into your skin but your bones are full of ice.

You think it’s here, and then it’s not. You believe it’s arrived, and then it’s gone. What you’ve known to be true melts, and before the world is righted again you find you are standing in some bunny-colored slip of a skirt in the middle of lumberjacked day stunned by how wrong you can be.

Some wear layers, but you can’t prepare for shit like this without losing something essential. Kids laugh while others drown; there aren’t enough layers in the world to make that right. The experience of being in this incongruous day is hard. But as time shortens, light arrives. The true call of March is standing in the both and the all. The true call of March is always here.

Eleven Prayers for My Own Wild Soul

My prayer is to soften our time together in the woods,
To open, allow and really listen to the voices that are not my own and not like mine,
And give them ample room to manifest
So they may grow mossy and green
In the wide or narrow spaces between us.
May I be softer, too, and land lightly on a humble branch
Choosing to enter the wilderness without my wicked shears
Deciding to follow, stand, or shelter
Without blazing trails or trampling all the holy ground
With my own wild and hungry child

My prayer is to let go of that which wasn’t meant for me,
And pile great degrees of literature, philosophy, theology, psychology and neuroscience,
And gather all the ice skates and ballet slippers and athletic gear and grand pianos and cellos,
And fold up celebrity and microphone and center stage
And place it all on massive floats,
Then push them out to sea with candles meant for others to light,
While I stand where I am with awe and respect
Bathed in the brilliant flame of another
Able to receive the generous gift of inspiration and learning and warmth
Because I finally dropped my own heavy robe of wishes.

My prayer is to be embodied,
Embraced, held, grounded inside the skin and bones where I was born and where I will die.
I want to follow the bend of my own desires to the nape of your neck,
And wake entwined by you,
But only I can nurture every organ with oxygen and kale
And strengthen all my limbs with sweat until I can dance again,
And lift small children and swing them in circles
And do yoga on my head when I’m 92 —
I want to care for my body as if it were bound to my soul
And not some secondary burden where pain lives,
Locked in all the joints of an immobile life.
I want to remember its flushing purpose and the miracle
Of thumbs and eyes and hearts.

My prayer is to lighten up and find my inner dapple,
To laugh and delight in the chuckle and the cheek
That crouches with a smile on its face inside
The small stuff of the ordinary day
Waiting for me to wind the handle and let it loose —
Popping all the weasels fearlessly!
And let me be okay with the way I clumsily arrive,
Springing briefly into shocking view,
Swaying back and forth with the glee that is my own tilty wit
And let me remember that when I disappear again inside my brightly painted tin
I’m just one crank away from rising – not far at all, really, and always ready to be summoned.
And finally, while I am here rummaging through the old neglected toy pile,
May I please stop being so suspicious of smiling adults, and instead ask them if they’d like to come out and play?

My prayer is to create,
Great or tiny works of art –
To show up at the altar of my one true heart
Before empty canvases and blank pages and long hours
And find god there, waiting for me to arrive —
To concentrate deeply by the shores of my own soul
Until all its astounding colors find their way up and out
By a grace that magically rises whenever
Creation is invited to stay.

My prayer is to move you,
To open the strangled box inside my throat
Where I’ve locked up all my jingles and jangles,
And sing my phenomenal solo;
The one I’ve practiced all my life, made from the notes collected along the way
A composition of yearning crescendo and soaring invitation —
A tune that is catchy and stays with you always,
or one that is new that you’ve never heard before, and especially one that
Turns you toward the music of your own awakening
And the lifted voices and choirs around you

My prayer is to be astonished,
To go bravely and frequently into the great unknown
Because I don’t know what I don’t know.
To drive to Boston, catch a flight to Borneo,
To walk down an alley without a map and just arrive.
To remember that if even one unexpected poppy can make my heart soar with joy
Imagine if I were to stumble across a field of rumors and find them all true!
I want to show up in all the unfamiliar rooms and gatherings of the world;
In the town where I live, in my own backyard gullies,
And on continents I can’t pronounce –
At the foot of a waterfall
In the dust of poverty
In places where my heart will be broken by a starving child
Or raised by an ancient wall
Or strengthened by an act of my own servitude —
Expanded by the gift of the undiscovered.

My prayer is to keep my mind off the reservation,
And thunder across open fields with buffalo and bonfires
Hunting far and wide for our native land —
For places where we are interested in one another
And in stars
And grief
And rituals of joy and communion
And to live unembarrassed by this fierce loyalty to the precious tribe of the soul —
To wear my tattered skins and feathers even in saloons and cities,
Even in the crush and call of comfort and progress
Even when I am pushed to the margins by careless claims
And named dangerous, or primitive, or unsustainable.

My prayer is to live by the sea with apple orchards and birds
With rolling hillsides, and old stone walls,
And twisted branches and peonies.
And with just the smell of the ocean,
And my bare feet in the June grass
And my hands in the dirt —
Hold all of god’s great glory in my own simple garden,
And after a long day kneeling on this heavenly earth
May I carry it back beneath my nails
Where it will rise like tiny moons at the end of it all.

My prayer is for a cup of tea,
Brought to me quietly while I write
Made from a kettle we share,
In a kitchen we clean,
In a world that is generous and kind.

My prayer is to love you,
And let that be enough.

Optimism Takes Guts

Optimism is not for the faint of heart. It may look like life dressed in tulle, one grand plié across your grandmother’s guestroom; it may seem all pink and fizzy and innocent; but more often than not it’s a girl at a barre with a shot glass full of blisters.

Skepticism is easy. Apathy is easy. Road rage is easy. Waking up and hating your job, that pile of bills, CNN, Fox, bullies, the IRS, homophobes, racists, rich people, Nickleback – all of that is easy. But coming face to face with a world that smells like Kardashian-ass and still believing? That takes guts.

Optimism takes guts. Hardcore, feel-the-bern, guts. It takes guts to stand up for the truly marginalized in this world: possibility, hope, change and the next generation. And because we haven’t found an adequate shared language for it, it’s not easy to speak on behalf of the glass-half-full without sounding like you have a brain-half-empty. But in fact, optimism is not naïve. It’s hard won.

Optimism moves against the tide of darkness — but the reason it can, I think, is because it was born there. It is born from a backstage story and has to feel its way to light, to arrive front and center just where it’s needed most; in a voting booth, in poverty, in prayer; in the collective conscious of an apathetic audience.

And while it doesn’t always look tough, optimism fights hard. So yeah — you may find it wandering around Mr. Roger’s neighborhood wearing a sweater. But it puts its sneakers on every, single, day. It shows up, it goes out in the world, it says good morning. And if that’s not fighting, I don’t know what the hell is. Just because you don’t hear about it on the nightly news, make no mistake. It’s not trapped on the Oprah channel wearing pink tights. Optimism is out there carrying a pitchfork and torch long after all the other villagers have gone home to watch the Sound of Music.

Optimism shows up, with or without an audience. Day after day with its blisters and barres, it shows up and stays on pointe. It’s where activism lives, where hope comes for lessons, where change comes true. And while others swan dive toward despair, optimism fights for balance, stands on tippy toes, reaches, and arches across a darkened stage to remind us why we live.

Cow

I have a lot of work to do today but I feel impossibly tired, like I’ve been standing all night in a crowded stall. It’s 6:00 am and my brain is absent; my body moves in single file toward the day, following the slow herd of morning routine.

Determined to wake more fully, I head out for a walk and bring along my garden sheers; I’ll carry back a handful of something wild and green for my soul to chew on while I work. But instead of walking, I plod and stand and dumbly stare, and manage to make it only as far as a roadside patch at the end of the driveway. And now here I sit, slumped at my desk staring at a blank page and a dusty tangle of half-asters. I’m only part way to industry, and nowhere near inspiration.

My head hangs lower.

You know how you take a drive and see a hillside of cows and suddenly feel connected? You feel so lifted-up that you find yourself squealing and pointing and screaming COW! as if you are whale watching in a pasture? Well the last thing you want to think about just then is how all of their relatives are shuffling and chuting their way toward the end of the world in some slaughterhouse 3 exits down.

It’s hard to hold two opposing thoughts, and today I couldn’t do it. I woke both branded and free, both cattle and cow, and ended so exhausted by the struggle that I got nowhere, just stood stock still; squeezed between art and commerce like Temple Grandin in her hug box.

Oh low is me, I know. But there is only one way to wake, and it’s not in single file. We were made to thunder across plains. We were made to wake up, and be free.

Lost

In the light of the Target bathroom I am startled and gray and really old, as if all proof of life was lost in aisle 6. Somehow I pushed a cart right past my purpose, and in this fluorescence I am undone and un-intentional. In this god-awful mirror I can clearly see that I left myself behind this morning, perhaps sleeping in a patch of sun at the foot of the bed.

I need to leave and start the day over. I need to go where I will recognize myself.

I need to find an October field, a garden, an island. I look my best in bonfire light, (though the occasional firefly is also flattering). I need the black of the darkest night so my teeth will shine like stars. I need a sea-salty wind so my hair can remember its wave. I need a beach and a blizzard for my skin to glow; a bouquet of peonies to make me blush; a heat wave to pink me up.

I come to life where I learned it best. I am shaped by the earth of my 56 years; my legs first danced in the African dust, my hips first curved around a California coast, and my voice still carries a little banjo from the Shenandoah Valley. I first knew silence in the tall Maine pines; I first prayed there, too. I learned to mourn at the base of a tree, to love in a field of lupine, to persevere in a blueberry patch.

Yes, I know I learned to drive in the glare of a 6-lane highway, to spin in the halls of DC, to profit in corporate boardrooms. I know how to bend myself until I break; I sold my first lie in a fourth grade classroom and slipped my first broken law into the pocket of a Woolworth coat.

But I am made of the world and belong best within it; out in the wild without aisle or cart. So put me on a boat, send me out to sea, set me adrift if that’s what it takes. Whenever I am lost, whenever I am old and gray, put me out to pasture so I will know myself again.