Grief #6

Grief is a wild and howling wilderness, and you can only wander it lonely. By definition, any attempt to form a comforting company and traverse it together will set it somewhat at a remove.

But a word of warning: if you attempt to avoid the crossing altogether by surrounding yourself constantly with crowds of busy companions, it will grow in your gut and slowly take over your whole body. Or if you think you can cut the journey short, or hurry through, holding your breath and rushing past as though avoiding an unpleasant sight or smell; this is useless. Grief is inevitable. It will hunt you.

It is better to find one or two companions who are lost in their own wastelands, or who have wandered through theirs in the past, and then you can cross lonely-together.

Side-by-side, but each silent, alone, and lost in their own loss. This way, each dulls somewhat the pain of the other and the journey is made bearable.

A moment for explanation

 I rarely write with no sense of an audience. I don't exactly write FOR a specific audience, I just generally write knowing that eventually someone will read it. 

The numbered pieces on Grief that I've been posting this year were all written knowing that they would eventually be read by an audience, but it has taken me five years to be ready to share them. I'm sharing them because I wrote them to be read. Thank you for reading them. 

I am also writing the story of the initial impact, but I'm not ready to share that just yet. I used to have a very clear picture of who my readers were, but that's become murky, hence the hesitation, the delay to hit "publish". 

I think I'm mostly writing for myself these days, but still always knowing that eventually, someone will read it.

Grief #5

Grief is repeated suffocation. 

The sudden blow of memory is not so much a painful one, but rather a sensation of having all the breath expelled from your lungs at once. A stumbling cessation of that essential rhythm: in-out-in-out-in-out. 

Then... remember THIS? 

Nothing. 

 --sucking for air--gasp--

BREATHE, dammit. 

Life must go on.

And then you do. You breathe. The wet, hot air of grief and misery slowly gives way to clearer, fresher breezes and your heart goes on shoving oxygenated blood through your arteries, in spite of yourself. 

You go on breathing and living.

Grief #4

When you encounter grief-- an inevitable, unenviable part of the human condition-- you have a choice, I think. Defense seems imperative. The instinct to throw up a brittle wall of counter-emotion is universal, it seems; cynicism, anger, hurt, stoicism, heroism. But there is possibly another option. 

It may be possible to soften to absorb the impact.  What if instead, you unlock your knees, don't brace for impact, don't try to withstand the force and flood. What if you drink it in? What if you swirl your fingers through the flood of it and watch the eddies ripple outward, back towards the shore? What if you wade along, through it? Perhaps with your nose barely above the water line, your toes barely scrabbling along the stony bottom, but not fighting the current. Let it sweep you inexorably forward through the days, weeks, months. Then slowly, it may begin to ebb. You may find yourself washed gently up onto an unfamiliar shoreline, soft, re-formed.

Maybe this new destination will be Redemption.

A Woman in a Box

 Before I became a woman, they handed me a box.

Here, they said. This is for you to stay safe in.

This box is too small, I said. It’s the wrong shape for me.

But don’t you want to be safe? If you put yourself into the box, everything will be all right. You will be safe– you’ll be a Good Wife, and a Good Mother. This box is the only way to know for sure that your husband and your children are happy.

But what about me? Will I be happy?

You’ll be safe.

So I climbed into the box.

It doesn’t fit, I cried! Look, I stick out over here, and this leg is too long, and my breasts are too large and and I have questions, ideas, things I want to see and do.

From outside the box, they handed me a knife.

Here, they said. This is for you. Cut off the pieces that don’t fit in the box.

I took the knife, trembling.

That will hurt, I whispered.

But it’s the only way to be safe. It’s the only way to be Right and Good. Cut, they cried!

So I cut.

I cut off all the parts of me that didn’t fit. I held my breath and made my largeness small. I made my small tender parts big and tough to fill the empty corners. I pulled the lid down tight, so I could be safe inside the box. 

And I painted a laughing face on the outside of the box.

Grief #3

Grief is a canyon with no bottom. At first you are just falling away eternally, deeper and faster and into thicker darkness every moment until the light is almost gone.

Then at some point you find that you are only dangling over the edge, hanging on by your fingernails, dangerously close to falling, but still somehow attached to solid ground. For now. For as long as you can keep your hands clenched, clawed desperately into the crumbling edge of routine, habit, daily existence. All your energy is focused on just not letting go.

And then maybe, hopefully, eventually you are able to get an elbow up and maybe a knee over the ledge. You might lie, gasping for a while on solid ground. You might be able to crawl away, and then sit on a bench a little distance from the cliff and observe the canyon and remember and marvel at its awful, beautiful depth.

If I could, I would tell you...

Here are some things I wish you heard every day.

You did a good job.

You are a gift.

Your ideas matter.

I am listening to you, I hear you, that makes sense.

You are needed here.

You are right.

That was hard, but you did a good job-- you did the best you could and that was enough.

I am so proud of you.

I can't wait to hear your thoughts on this.

What do you need right now?

This won't last forever, it will get easier, it will pass away.

It's good enough now, you can stop trying.

We've been waiting for you.

You're really good at this.

What do you wish you could hear someone say?

Grief #2

Grief is having all the skin on your body ripped off in one fell swoop. Now you are walking around in your flesh and bone, bleeding steadily from all over your self. Even the slightest carelessly reassuring touch can be excruciating. 

If you would comfort this naked, bleeding wreck of a human, sit quietly a little apart and listen to the story. Don't try to touch them, or bind their wounds, or apply healing salves. If you must do anything; merely breathe, gently, as our mothers did when applying stinging bright red mercurochrome to a skinned knee when we were children. 

But most of all, sit and wait for the weeping, which will come suddenly in the middle of otherwise normal conversation or daily routine. Then just be there. A silent witness to the Thing That Happened; the moment that excoriated your friend.

Grief #1

There’s an initial impact, a blow: what you saw and felt and heard causing such a reflexive flinching back inward, that you find your Self shrunken down to a whisper, far from the windows and doors of your eyes and ears and skin.

Grief is heavy.

It’s exhausting.

It weighs down the back of your neck and your shoulders like a lead scarf, heavy and poisonous. Holding you there, hunkered down in the basement of yourself, so far away, so much burning space between you and the Real outside. You can hear life happening, faintly, from far away. Unable to communicate with the outside world except ineffectually, with great effort.

Will you ever re-inhabit the entirety of yourself? Ever return to fill yourself from the core all the way to the outside edges and have enough Self left to overflow outward to affect the world around you?

A Treatise on Grief (work in progress)

 I'm moving my writing to Substack-- just to try something new. Blogger's been good to me for over a decade, but I like the social media-esque features of Substack. I'll double post for a while and see how that goes. You're welcome to follow me over there (is anyone even still reading on Blogger these days?). Here's my first post 

I have a theory I want to share.

This is the point when people who know me settle in to endure a long, unhinged rant based mostly on vibes, with a dusting of podcast science. Just so you know what you’re in for.

I want to talk about the loss of societal context/ritual/vocabulary for grief. Emotional intelligence has become a more widespread topic of conversation recently, so hopefully you already know what that is. In an anthropological sense, you observe a society’s level of emotional intelligence within the context of their shared context, ritual, and vocabulary around emotions. This is me, the nerdy lay-person talking about this, though. So take everything I say with a grain of salt.

I’m going to start by laying out some basics. 

1) Humans are intrinsically emotional creature. This seems obvious. Emotions are part of being human– they are part of what defines us as human. 

2) Humans are social creatures. We’re mammals, and we are in addition *highly social mammals* Shared experiences help us understand ourselves, define ourselves, and generally form human society at a foundational level. Without shared experiences, you don’t really have a society. 

3) Historically, society has always had appropriate ways for expressing/experiencing/sharing human emotions. They change over time, of course. For example, we no longer consider it appropriate to challenge someone to a duel when one’s honor is offended. Now we just use social media to ruin their reputation.

Context: I’m going to start by talking about context because this one is the hardest for me to explain. The context of the emotion Grief usually involves a disruption, a tragedy, a breakdown. Something negative, possibly violent, definitely “wrong” has occurred. Because of this inevitable context of wrongness, Grief is highly associated with anger, guilt, blame, and probably a handful of other secondary negative emotions I’m not thinking of right in the moment. These emotions are so much easier to deal with because they sort of intrinsically contain Something to Do About It. Anger, guilt and blame all have a direction to go. They call you to action– to take revenge, to call out the perpetrator, to seek justice. Grief does not. Grief is just sitting there, in agony, waiting for the emotion to subside. Anger is easy. Grief is very very hard. In our modern American society, we take anger, blame, and guilt to Facebook, or the bash-the-boss Slack channel, or the girlfriend group text.

Ritual: But I want to acknowledge that this situation where Grief is passive is not always/has not always been the case. In ancient and indigenous cultures, there were/are socially acceptable Actions for Grief. There were manufactured rituals that gave us a place to act out our Grief, even if they were merely symbolic. Sackcloth and ashes, the rending of garments, shaving heads, weeping and wailing loudly in the street outside your house, or in the city gates. Or perhaps more familiar to our modern minds, a wake or a vigil. Those are still around in American subcultures, I realize, but they are much less visible or prevalent. And even where those practices still exist today, they are not the same welcoming space for openly and loudly expressed grief that they were once.

And so instead, grief is bottled up. Pressed down. Hidden. In our society, we don’t see people who are grieving. There is no public face of mourning. We don’t wear black, or rend our clothes, or shave our heads. We post a shared memory on Facebook about the dear departed, and then we move on with our lives. We offer “thoughts and prayers” to our devastated neighbors and then shower and go to work. But grief doesn’t work that way. Grief takes time. And the less time you give it, the longer it takes.

Vocabulary: At the most basic level, grief has been denied us in our very vocabulary. For real though: when was the last time you heard that word before you read the title of my blog post right here? When did you last hear someone share that they were mourning? Have you ever used the word “weeping” in a sentence? In a moment recently when I needed more vocabulary for grief, Brene Brown’s book “Atlas of the Heart” reminded me of the word Anguish. That word has pretty much disappeared from modern vocabulary (unless you’re like writing a paper for English class, or something), but I desperately needed it to describe what was happening to me.

Words have power– as any decent grounding in fantasy literature will tell you. When you can name something, you take away much of its power over you. Losing our shared language around grief has robbed us of too much of our ability to endure its power over us. If you are grieving, here are some of the words I wish I could give back to you:

Weep, sob, keen, wail, rend, ache, desolate, yearning, bereft, lost, unraveled, lament, mourn, hollow, shattered, echo, longing, anguish.

Kayaking Blackwater Creek

It was a beautiful afternoon on Blackwater Creek... Did you know there is a canoe launch at Hollins Mill Park? 

Did you know you can paddle up the Creek? In and out of shadows and the relentless Southern July sun, thru the mimosa arches dropping their fluffy pink Dr Seuss puffball flowers into the water...

You can watch a wood duck lift his improbably large body into panicked flight, barely escaping gravitational pull long enough to make it to the further bank and make a comical, beak-first crash-landing into what may be his winter house. Or weekend condo. Or batcave. Or whatever wood ducks have on the opposite banks of creeks, across from the nest you surprised on this side as you paddled past.

You can paddle up and up until the kayak bottoms out and you have to step out and sink ankle deep into the softly clinging silt, filling your sandal, gritty between your toes. You can haul your kayak up over your head like the intrepid explorer you are... only today. Not usually this much of a risk-taker, preferring mostly to read about intrepid explorers, rather than emulate them. You can rock-hop your way past the shallows to the next stretch of deep water and keep paddling on.

Or you can slowly turn around and float back down the current, surrendering to the elements, eyes unfocused, slightly drunk with the heat and the motion of the water. You can let the blazing southern sun burn the fire of hurt and grief out of you and float along the water and stop trying so damn hard for one lazy hour of the week. You can take selfies under the mimosa tree and admire the pink-fluff-covered water and breath in the mud-wet-pollen-laden air, and be for a few effortless minutes a Harper Lee heroine, or a William Faulkner character who has a predetermined story arc already written for them, instead of a 44 year old woman still trying to figure out how to write the next part of this insignificant story.

Resignation to the New Year

 And so the New Year limps up my front walk-- no fat jolly baby, is 2022. This Year is thin, gray, wet, and naked. She shivers on my porch, hesitant as to her welcome, as well she might be. The past two years have felt little welcome here, bringing grief upon grief upon loss upon loss. No wonder that she hesitates, dripping.

I stand on this side, and she on that, and we glare at one another through the doorway. The mat on the floor in my front hall says 'Welcome,' and we both understand the inevitability of her entrance. I am no fool, thinking I can hold back the march of time across my doorstep, but for just a brief moment we hesitate and pay homage to the power of the threshold and a householder's invitation. 

"Fine," I say. "You might as well come in." She gathers up her stringy, sodden hair, wringing out streams of brackish water and steps gingerly onto the Welcome mat. I can see her give it a brief side-eye. "Well," I say, "You definitely aren't quite what we were hoping for, but now that you're here, we might as well get to know one another."

I hand her a towel, and a blanket, and a glass of rum. She may not technically be old enough to drink yet, but she's probably going to need it, if past experience is any indication. Her two predecessors were quite the boozers-- with good reason. We sit, more or less next to each other, by the fire, and I fill her in on what she's up against, feeling a little sympathy, in spite of my resentment. This poor kid. Is it her fault, really?

"Hey, listen," I say. "I'm not blaming you, exactly. It's just that were all a little worn down, you know? Maybe you could just try and go easy on everyone. At least maybe a couple gorgeous snow days, and then an early spring? And fewer wildfires? Or maybe just only ONE new variant? If  you could arrange that, I bet we could come up with some fireworks, or maybe even a parade for you when you're on your way out next December. What do you say?"

2022 looks at me through her lashes (is that a glint in her eye?). She wets her lips gingerly (or did she just lick them?) and gives me a grave, quiet smile (are her teeth POINTED??), and holds out her glass for a refill.

"No promises," she says (is that a low growl??), and stares into the fire.

what have i done

Joy #6

 It's a slow spring this year...

 In Virginia, spring is often a "wham, bam, thank you, Ma'am" affair of two weeks' gorgeous weather in between blizzards and suffocating heat and humidity, but this year we've been gifted with a slow trickle of perfect days. It's almost as if Lady Spring understands what we've all been through in the last ten months, since she last left us. Perhaps she understands that our bruised selves would startle and shy away from her usual sudden glorious appearance and equally spectacular departure. We are all, like abused children, a little nervous of the sudden, the glorious, the spectacular. Afraid to trust, after long-deferred hope, the glimmer of a new horizon ahead.

So this year, Spring is dropping two, or maybe three, beautiful days into each week. Chilly nights, followed by clear, bright mornings-- like waking up inside a watercolor painting. We keep forgetting where we are in the year and leaving the windows open all night, waking up to a legitimate need for fuzzy bathrobes and slippers. By early afternoon, we're shedding sweatshirts and hauling t-shirts and tank tops out of drawers, and heading outside to soak up all sunshine we've been starving for this long, dark winter.

In deference to our precarious emotions, Spring seems to retreat every so often-- a night or two in the 30s and 40s threatening the dogwoods, the lilacs and the pears; giving us a moment to collect ourselves, to acclimate to the danger of hope. Or, perhaps gives us a foretaste now and then of what's to come-- an afternoon of blazing 80s and sunburn, firming up some weak resolve, stiffening up a spine here and there. She dances in and out, teasing gently, slowly lifting our bowed and weary hearts toward the summer, asking us to trust her promise of a coming end to our long ordeal.

Joy #4 and #5: bending and letting go

Through my entire life I've been surrounded by the metaphor of parenting as archer, launching his arrows (a quiverful of them, ideally) into the world; by faith, extending his/her influence into the generations to come. That metaphor came to define my life, as it progressively inspired, challenged, eluded, and then tortured me, as it became evident that God and I didn't see eye to eye about the size of my quiver, and I realized that arrows can frequently (heartbreakingly frequently) fall from quiver, straight to the ground, un-launched, never held in the archers hand.

Today a friend shared this poem with me. I read it, ugly-cried for about twenty minutes, and realized for the first time in my life that I have long misunderstood the metaphor. 

I'm not the archer.

I'm the bow.

All that is required of me is that I bend, to the breaking point perhaps, and then... Let go. I do not need to see the target. I do not need to aim anything. I do not need to make the arrow, hold the arrow (my heart!), string it correctly-- no skill of mine is required. His is the quiver, his is the watchful eye, the strength to launch, the wisdom to test the wind, proof the arrow, and guide it true to the heart of chosen target. All that is asked of me is that I devote my life to bend and bend and bend under the hand of the Archer; who loves me, and these Arrows, which are His, not mine. Bend, and then, by God's grace, let them go. 

On Children

Kahlil Gibran - 1883-1931

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
     And he said:
     Your children are not your children.
     They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
     They come through you but not from you,
     And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

     You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
     For they have their own thoughts.
     You may house their bodies but not their souls,
     For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
     You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
     For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
     You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
     The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
     Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
     For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Joy #2

 Foundations are comforting. 

Our house is closing in on its one hundredth birthday and, while the pipes are leaky, the floors are creaky, and the electrical system is one you really only want to look at with your head on one side and one eye closed; the foundation is solid. It's drafty and worn-down, but the walls are thick and you can tell it's weathered many a violent thrashing from both inside and outside weathers of various kinds.

The last three years of our first twenty years of marriage have been difficult, to say the least. We've tested our relationship in ways I never imagined, or wanted, but the foundation is solid. We're both exhausted-- soul-weary-- and we're definitely in a mood to circle the wagons and hunker down with our small brood inside this tight protected center of five. But I've realized that what we have created over the years through mutual sacrifice of self and willingness to bend and mold to accommodate each other is a solid, intertwined foundation of shared beliefs, priorities, ideals, and experiences that is still weathering this season of heartbreak and testing-- from both inside and outside weathers of various kinds.

The deepest testing this year has come, fittingly, to the foundation under the foundation; the bedrock on which the foundation was laid nearly twenty years ago. My faith has taken a beating this year. Brought fully into the glaring light of public demonstration and public scrutiny, my faith in the church and her people has been turned upside down and shaken hard. A lot of dirt fell out of places I wasn't aware existed. I gradually realized that my Christian identity had  been set on a layer of quicksand; cultural similarities, community of common experiences, and comforting notions of easy externalities. The problem with wearing Christianity like a mask is that when push comes to shove and the masks fall off, sometimes you just don't recognize the faces underneath. Sometimes they are hard, shiny, and unsmiling.

But. Also. Under that layer of shifting sand, my faith in the Father of lights, with whom there is no shifting or shadow, found a solid rock. A cornerstone. This foundation, too, has withstood millennia of violent thrashings from both inside and outside weathers of various kinds. It is good to remember that this latest storm, although the first for me, is only another in a long series through which Christ has brought His Bride. Battered she may be, and worn, with painful truths revealed and laid bare; reviled and rebuked for her sins, but Redeemed and continuously Reclaimed, nonetheless. And the promise remains:

The church’s one foundation
is Jesus Christ, our Lord;
we are a new creation
by water and the Word.
From heav’n he came and taught us
what perfect love can be;
through life and death he sought us,
and rose to set us free.

Still, schisms, tribulation,
and hatred fuel our war;
we wait the consummation
of peace forevermore.
The saints their watch are keeping;
their cry goes up, “How long?”
And soon the night of weeping
shall be the morn of song.

Joy #1

 The sun comes up every morning over the mountain ridge outside my living room windows. It slowly creeps across the floor, the angles changing slightly, minute by minute. As it unrolls its golden way along the planks; dog hair, bread crumbs, paper scraps, and dust mites are revealed in sharp relief. 

These windows face the back of my house, so they aren't top priority on those absent-minded window-washing episodes while I'm on the phone with a friend and need something to do with my hands that doesn't require my brain to pay attention to any other than the talking and the living together that's going on in my ears. So these windows... they're a little rough. You can see that I occasionally get to them, maybe at the tail end of the phone call-- there are some hazy swipes and swirls through the grime that prove they aren't totally neglected. 

But all over the double panes there are small hand prints. Full on, five-fingered, un-blemished; the perfect hand prints every Sunday School craft teacher dreams of. They are beautiful. The Thursday morning sun catches the edges and lights them on fire and my heart dances in the blaze for a moment, before I turn back to my humdrum, every day life.

Sincere, if a little dramatic.

For a full decade, the year 2010 has stood out as The Worst Ever, but 2020 has topped that. And then some. Besides all the national and international crap going on, there's plenty of personal grief and struggle-- ghosted friendships, broken relationships, illness, financial struggles, strife, and loss. But the most critical and devastating loss of all has been watching the widening crack in the foundations of an institution that I have loved: the American Evangelical Church.

I've watched, heartbroken, in disbelief, as men and women that I would have considered brothers and sisters have sold their souls for political power under the guise of "protecting the unborn" and "maintaining the rule of law" and "defending the traditional family". Y'all, you begged God for a King and you got a King Saul. You forgot that the way of the Gospel is the low way, the way of humility, weakness, and sacrifice. You wanted a shortcut to Salvation and an easy way to establish the Kingdom of God, but you forgot that only God himself can change minds and soften hearts and you can't vote in a strong man to establish a judicial version of the Kingdom. Y'all, if you want to grab the jawbone of an ox and start slaying Philistines, you better read the whole story and make sure that Samson is really who you want leading that fight. Remember, Samson was a symbol of the depths of Isreal's fallen state. That story isn't telling us to go out and find us a Samson. And you better make damn sure that you're getting Samson and not just a Philistine king who wants a patsy to take care of his political rivals for him.

'Cause, y'all? With love... you've become a patsy. Maybe it started out right. I'm willing to concede that at some point your hearts were in the right place, your intentions were good, but dear God in heaven, look where we've come! Y'all got drunk with power and then you ran amuck and now you're just the shills of a unscrupulous huckster who knows all the right words, sweet nothings, to whisper in your ears to bring you running to his side: "Protect the unborn" he says, and you close your eyes to the weeping children severed from their families. "Defend the rule of law" he says, and you turn your backs to the abuse of your disenfranchised  brothers. Like a gas-lit abused spouse, you're heatbreakingly easy to trigger and control, tagging along, docile, behind the very power that is wreaking your undoing.

Y'all, read the history of the church; every damn time we try to do it our way, every time we try to use political power, force, and militancy to "do God's work" it goes terribly, terribly badly. From the Crusades to the Spanish Inquisition to Colonial-Missionary-ism (or whatever you want to call that)-- whenever the Church has sought to spread the Gospel without humility, sacrifice, suffering, and personal loss, we have failed; utterly and miserably. Christians with political power are a terrifyingly dangerous thing for God's creation. 

And this is why I have to write this... History tells us that God won't stand for it. There's a day of reckoning coming. Y'all, humble Jesus is still in the business of turning over the tables of the rich who take up the space in His temple meant for the foreigners and the social outcasts. He's still in the business of whipping out the greedy men taking advantage of the poor, the widow, and the orphan. At some point, y'all started assuming that the point of that story was that it's ok to pick up a whip now and then, but I tell you what, I'm pretty sure it was way more about warning US not to pollute the House of the Lord. We've got the story backwards in our heads and hearts. At this point, we're the Pharisees. We're the backsliding Isrealites. We're the Phillistines. We're Babylon.

So this is me, shaking the dust of Babylon, the American Church, off my feet. "Come out of her, my People" (Revelation 18:4, Jeremiah 51:6, 45), -- I'm hearing that in my soul. I love the church and I love her people, but for now, I'm going to stand over here, out of the line of fire. 

Paradox

 Every parent is likely familiar with the subtle desire to recreate your children in your own image, but with all the bits you don't like about yourself corrected. We all do this, right? And of course, as autonomous entities, individual souls made in the image of God, they resist this with a mighty will and eventually forge their own paths forward. The ultimate test of the relationship we so carefully molded in their early years: can those loving ties survive the stretching? Will we all enter our new roles of adult peers with all the cords still intact, strongly connecting us to one another, albeit at a mutually respectful distance from one another? That is the question. The final marker of parenting success or failure. It's a little scary.

On the other hand, it can be exhilarating. Every day I'm surprised and delighted by what my children are becoming. And I'm trying more and more to lean into that delight, rather than focus so intensely on the bits of my own sin nature that I want to erase in them. One truly delightful surprise that's emerging as they grow-- something I only notice when I stop trying to make them better than I am at art, sports, music, personal devotions, math, etc--is their affinity for writing. Oh my. While I was busy trying to make them smarter, kinder, stronger, and less addicted to screen time and sugar, they were busy becoming Writers, behind my back. 

And so this morning, in the sideways light of an early fall Sunday morning, I'm sitting side by side with my youngest as we both play with words-- creating new worlds and telling new stories. How funny, and how humbling, that while I was preoccupied with preventing him from becoming something less than I want him to be, God was busy making him something more than I even thought of. Something a bit akin to the best in me...

On surrender.

If I could travel back in time, there's a thing I desperately wish I could tell my twenty-two year old self: newly entered into motherhood, overwhelmed with the immense stretch of required selflessness and sacrifice that unexpectedly opened up before me with the birth of my daughter. I was vastly unprepared for the unraveling of the Self I thought I had known for so long, or for this awkward, almost violent remaking of myself into Mother. It felt as though I'd fallen, unawares, into one of those whirlpools that draw swimmers into deep underground caves and then, if the swimmer has the smarts to simply surrender to the current, spits them out again onto the sunny shores of sparkling blue waters, in delightful hidden coves.

I wish I could go back and have a long talk with that slightly bemused, but adapting-nicely young mother on the beach of that secluded cove. I wish I could impress upon her that those whirlpool currents repeat themselves again and again throughout life. I wish I could have prepared her for the repeated un-makings that lay ahead of her in the journey of being made more like Him.

I wish I could impress upon her the necessity not to get too comfortable here, convince her that the period of time spent in that space of continuous mothering was, mathematically speaking, such a tiny fraction of her life-- the time of being large and in charge, while feeling so inadequate and drained was really just a moment of her life. I would try to warn her that this drastic stripping away of illusory shreds of self-determination and independence was only the beginning...

Would that have changed things? I don't know. If I had realized then that life is really a series of these whirlpool roller coasters from one level of self-loss to another, from one unmaking and rebirth to the next, would I have been better prepared?

He who seeks to save his life shall lose it. He who loses his life, gains the world.

I doubt it would make a difference then. I know it now, and I still fight the current every time. I still arrive on the new beach fighting to swim back to the one I've left, the one I'd grown accustomed to. I lie there, utterly undone, exhausted, wrecked; for far too long, considering how often now I've experienced this remaking process as God's grace to me. Why can I still not trust that the change is, as he promised, from Glory to Glory?

I'm never ready for change-- no matter how sought after, how intensely pursued. I always find myself doubting in the moment of achievement, struggling against the pull. My labors were a physical manifestation of this. Days and then weeks past my due date, I'm still vastly pregnant. Irritated with the delay, exhilarated by every twinge that might signify the start of labor, and yet so doubtful, so afraid. Finally reaching that terrifying middle where one MUST go forward, through, because the backwards way of escape is no longer an option. There's nothing else to do but push the baby out. Die to the past, be reborn. Forgetting what is behind, striving forward to what lies ahead. 

I can only hope that eventually I will learn to surrender to those terrifying currents and anticipate the next stage of growth with something a little more gracious and dignified than my current frantic thrashings and protestations. Hopefully, as I age, I will learn to trust the loving currents, and wait confidently, expectantly for the landing on the next shore.

This is my prayer.

the secrets of simple things

standing still for a few moments by the window, I force myself to notice the world outside. And my heart is warmed-- a touch of healing.

There's been rain this week, and we finally raked an entire tree's worth of leaves from the yard to the curb, so now the birds are in Paradise-- our barren muddy yard their cornucopia of insect delight.

There are still one or two scarlet leaves in the towering maple, slowly floating to the ground, here and there, on a breath of wind in the early morning sunlight.

Birds flitting. Leaves falling.

I shift my weight from foot to foot, resisting the urge to get moving, be doing, and undoing, the pressures of work, family, life. The floorboards creak, protesting. In their voice, I hear the hundred year old bulwark of this house reminding me that there is nothing new under the sun. No new threat to my peace and security-- this is all part of the human condition: condemned, redeemed, renewed.

and the birds dance across my window

An old man strides down the sidewalk, intentional, but unhurried. He has that upright, lanky movement men sometimes use, every leg joint contributing to increased forward energy-- like a marionette, freed from his strings to pursue an independent purpose. Men's purposes are forever the same: love, security, fame, and sometimes evil. But only sometimes.

and the leaves are spinning lazily down

a downy woodpecker hangs head first from the dead limb in the dogwood. There must be a buffet of insect life in that old rotten branch I meant to cut off, but never seem to get around to. The bugs eat the dead dogwood. The woodpecker eats the bugs. Death to life, and death to life again. Ut semper.

and the whole flock riots joyously from limb to grass