mjae

Scheduling

2011-08-10T08:25:00.003-06:00

I found myself yesterday thinking this little gem:

"I wish I didn't schedule so many activities so that I could have more space in my calendar to schedule more activities."

And how, I wonder, does one do that?

Relationship Questions

2011-08-01T16:31:00.002-06:00

My homework in the next week:

What imbalance do you find in your relationship?
What might that imbalance represent symbolically?
What can be negotiated to lessen the imbalance?
How much do you want to fight for the relationship vs. maintaining the status quo?
Who much flexibility can you find in yourself to accommodate a change?
What are you doing to keep things imbalanced? (I think of this as - what barriers exist to change?)
What ideas or alternatives can you think of to change the imbalance?

And then the big one:

What does it take to be emotionally healthy in my marriage?

35th Year

2011-07-31T14:26:00.002-06:00

In my 35th year, the last grandparents' ashes successfully sprinkled in their final resting place, I find myself casting about for how to live.

I suddenly realize life is moving faster than my ability to learn from it or about it, and I can tell that for the rest of my life, I will never catch up. What to do with this expectation that life will someday make sense? That the choices you make will add up to a meaningful whole, resolve into a familiar picture, resonate on some level that means, "I've made it, and this is who I am, what it means, where I will live."

Having been a mother now for 2 years, it still strikes me more often than not as surreal, unbelievable -- sweet, yes, and deeply satisfying, yes. But not as grounding or as self-validating as I had expected somehow.

What does it mean that I love my life but can't feel that it's real on some deep internal level?

Some of it, I feel, is how fast friends spin outward from a center in the past that signaled our closeness. Time spirals people away faster than can be believed or processed. Even intense efforts at reconnection can't keep up with the days racing by or the moments that pile up when you're not watching. Who can watch everything?

I've been reading Greek and Roman philosophers and Carl Jung. Interesting that both seem to be reacting to a deep psychological need to stay on top of a rising tide of change. Marcus Aurelius -- emperor by day -- mad journaler by night, writing volume after volume of wise sayings and reminders to himself to stay calm, to stay grounded, not to let others dictate his mood or imbalance his equilibrium, even as his empire is threatened on multiple fronts, and his own rule must constantly be defended. Jung feels the same threats from his own unconscious, while watching a growing tide of world war rise up around him. Watch your dreams, he says, to understand your mind, to understand what your mind makes of you life and the world. Watch the world, Aurelius says, to understand yourself and your mind.

And inside me, a great silence but growing unease that I don't have a direction to follow that will lead me to the method by which I will know myself or my life or the world.

My laziness exceeds my ambition, so I disappoint myself daily. Self-flagellation is not enough to induce movement or effort.

Eric told me the story of our courtship and joined lives the other day when I expressed my profound feeling of disorientation. And his story grounded me for a while. It's a good one, and true. We do love each other. Our lives are good. Our life is good.

But I think about all the advice I'm not reading about how to live from civilizations long gone, from philosophers now dead, from strong men and women who were able to balance their lives to do extraordinary things, and I wonder -- how much am I wasting when I pretend to "rest"?

I believe writing makes it impossible to hide. Silence = disappearing. Years pass without comment, and they are lost to me. Lessons lost, people forgotten, places unacknowledged. To live is to pay attention, and the ultimate attention is description, documentation, synthesis. Bringing intelligence to perception and resolving it into experience and learning.

Tired of working so hard, I have been coasting so long that my abilities have atrophied. I feel weak, childish, a beginner again.

Better to begin than feel the guilt of delay.

Memorial for Jack & Judy Hart

2011-07-27T14:14:00.004-06:00

You were hard --
so rigid you never moved an inch
from each other
fused instead like two trees into one,
trunks locked in a death-grip
embrace
that flowered into love
mostly in winter.

Your stubbornness and strength
seeds your legacy.
We remember you unbending --
straight and unwavering
like two sentinels --
stubbornness you could set your watch by --
strength we can chart our course by.

We will labor to understand
how deep your roots must have gone...
Otherwise,
how did you weather's life's storms?

We will endeavor to wear love on our sleeves
like you did.
And someday,
more and more each day,
we'll free ourselves of the leaves of judgment
and righteousness
that you never tried to shed.

We remember your love --
strong as ice,
deep as glaciers,
sharp as your wit
and your criticisms
that broke the surface
but never your spirit.

We will remember you --
strong
loving
flawed
human --
our tree-trunk grandparents
so fused as to support forever
our family tree.

- Summer 2011

Working Principles

2011-07-15T08:31:00.001-06:00

Ten Principles To Live By In Fiercely Complex Times

BY Tony Schwartz
Wed Jul 13, 2011

If you're like most people I work with in companies, the demands come at you from every angle, all day long, and you have to make difficult decisions without much time to think about them. What enduring principles can you rely on to make choices that reflect openness, integrity and authenticity?

Here are ten that work for me:

1. Always challenge certainty, especially your own. When you think you're undeniably right, ask yourself "What might I be missing here?" If we could truly figure it all out, what else would there be left to do?

2. Excellence is an unrelenting struggle, but it's also the surest route to enduring satisfaction. There's no shortcut to excellence. Getting there requires practicing deliberately, delaying gratification, and forever challenging your current comfort zone.

3. Emotions are contagious, so it pays to know what you're feeling. Think of the best boss you ever had. How did he or she make you feel? That's the way you want to make others feel.

4. When in doubt, ask yourself, "How would I behave here at my best?" We know instinctively what it means to do the right thing, even when we're inclined to do the opposite. If you find it impossible, in a challenging moment, to envision how you'd behave at your best, try imagining how someone you admire would respond.

5. If you do what you love, the money may or may not follow, but you'll love what you do. It's magical thinking to assume you'll be rewarded with riches for following your heart. What it will give you is a richer life. If material riches don't follow, and you decide they're important, there's always time for Plan B.

6. You need less than you think you do. All your life, you've been led to believe that more is better, and that whatever you have isn't enough. It's a prescription for disappointment. Instead ask yourself this: How much of what you already have truly adds value in your life? What could you do without?

7. Accept yourself exactly as you are but never stop trying to learn and grow. One without the other just doesn't cut it. The first, by itself, leads to complacency, the second to self-flagellation. The paradoxical trick is to embrace these opposites, using self-acceptance as an antidote to fear and as a cushion in the face of setbacks.

8. Meaning isn't something you discover, it's something you create, one step at a time. Meaning is derived from finding a way to express your unique skills and passion in the service of something larger than yourself. Figuring out how best to contribute is a lifelong challenge, reborn every day.

9. You can't change what you don't notice and not noticing won't make it go away. Each of us has an infinite capacity for self-deception. To avoid pain, we rationalize, minimize, deny, and go numb. The antidote is the willingness to look at yourself with unsparing honesty, and to hold yourself accountable to the person you want to be.

10. When in doubt, take responsibility. It's called being a true adult.

Reprinted from Harvard Business Review

Formula for Change

2011-07-15T08:25:00.001-06:00

Alan Webber, co-founder of Business Week, wrote that change is a math formula.

Change happens when the cost of status quo is greater than the risk of change.

C(SQ) > R(C).

Invitation - Rev. Angela Herrera

2011-05-18T08:18:00.002-06:00

This is a prayer of invitation.

An invitation

To you there, with your happiness and your burden,

With your hopes and regrets.

An invitation for you, if you feel good today,

An invitation if you do not,

if you are aching—

there are so many ways to ache.

Whoever you are, however you are,

wherever you are in your journey,

this prayer is an invitation into peace.

Peace in your self,

and peace in your self,

and— with every breath—

peace in your self.

Maybe your soul is heavy.

Maybe it’s troubled,

and peace can take up residence there only in the corner,

only on the edge today,

what with all that is going on in the world,

in your life.

Ni modo. It doesn’t matter.

All that you need lies within you -

All that you need for the deep and comforting peace to grow.

May peace spread from your core into your life,

and may it pour from your life into the world

And in the world, may it shine upon all beings.

May it be so.

Amen.

Peace be with you.

Barbara Ras - Washing the Elephant

2011-04-28T16:28:00.001-06:00

Isn’t it always the heart that wants to wash

the elephant, begging the body to do it

with soap and water, a ladder, hands,

in tree shade big enough for the vast savannas

of your sadness, the strangler fig of your guilt,

the cratered full moon’s light fueling

the windy spooling memory of elephant?

What if Father Quinn had said, “Of course you’ll recognize

your parents in Heaven,” instead of

“Being one with God will make your mother and father

pointless.” That was back when I was young enough

to love them absolutely though still fear for their place

in Heaven, imagining their souls like sponges full

of something resembling street water after rain.

Still my mother sent me every Saturday to confess,

to wring the sins out of my small baffled soul, and I made up lies

about lying, disobeying, chewing gum in church, to offer them

as carefully as I handed over the knotted handkerchief of coins

to the grocer when my mother sent me for a loaf of Wonder,

Land of Lakes, and two Camels.

If guilt is the damage of childhood, then eros is the fall of adolescence.

Or the fall begins there, and never ends, desire after desire parading

through a lifetime like the Ringling Brothers elephants

made to walk through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel

and down Thirty-fourth Street to the Garden.

So much of our desire like their bulky, shadowy walking

after midnight, exiled from the wild and destined

for a circus with its tawdry gaudiness, its unspoken

pathos.

It takes more than half a century to figure out who they were,

the few real loves-of-your-life, and how much of the rest—

the mad breaking-heart stickiness—falls away, slowly,

unnoticed, the way you lose your taste for things

like popsicles unthinkingly.

And though dailiness may have no place

for the ones who have etched themselves in the laugh lines

and frown lines on the face that’s harder and harder

to claim as your own, often one love-of-your-life

will appear in a dream, arriving

with the weight and certitude of an elephant,

and it’s always the heart that wants to go out and wash

the huge mysteriousness of what they meant, those memories

that have only memories to feed them, and only you to keep them clean.

If You Forget Me - Pablo Neruda

2011-04-28T16:21:00.000-06:00

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

Knowing You're in Trouble

2011-04-28T15:50:00.002-06:00

I know I'm in trouble when I don't write in a journal or a blog or random pieces of paper in church.

I know I'm in trouble when I find myself thinking... uh-oh! I should be writing this down.

I know I'm in trouble when I hide even from myself.

I know I'm in trouble when a friend asks, "Do you love him?" and you don't know how to begin to know how to answer that question.

How can I know so little about what love should feel like? I know it's not passion, because passion means self annihilation. I know it's something to do with respect and appreciation and gratefulness that I can be small and vulnerable and loving and he will be there to feel it and be grateful in return.

The truth is, in the absence of family pattern, I don't know much about love. I know it's a verb not a noun, and that I haven't been doing it much lately. As a friend said once, it doesn't help to do jumping jacks to get a blind man's attention. For the same reason, I just haven't been doing much to get my work-addict husband's attention. His love seems to have nothing to do with me or with how connected I feel. He wakes up and loves me, goes to bed and loves me. In between, I don't think I much enter his thoughts.

And me? I just feel ... like I don't rate. I feel thin and tensile and hollow. High-pitched and vibrating before the break comes.

I'm far away and heading farther unless I see that he sees how far I am. And cares.

A pause for a moment while I read this last line to be sure I'm still talking about who I'm talking about. All of this has echoes of childhood, for sure.

I want to feel I have a partner who's working some fair percent as hard as I am. Who sees and feels that far away is a problem. I want to stop doing jumping jacks and hand over the pencil to keep the to-do list.

I want someone with spirit and imagination and engagement with the non-business world. Someone with friends who love him and commitments to those he loves.

For myself, I want to stop keeping a tally of what I do vs. all that he doesn't. I want to love him more than resent him. I want to let go of SOMETHING if it will mean feeling closer and more in love.

Who writes poems about this stuff?

A Tomb Is No Place to Stay - Richard Gilbert

2011-04-28T15:46:00.001-06:00

A tomb is no place to stay,
Be it a cave in the Judaean hills
Or the dark cavern of the spirit.

A tomb is no place to stay
When fresh grass rolls away the stone of winter cold
And valiant flowers burst their way to warmth and light.

A tomb is no place to stay
When each morning announces our reprieve,
And we know we are granted yet another day of living.

A tomb is no place to stay
When life laughs a welcome
To hearts that have been away too long.

Autumn - Rainer Maria Rilke

2011-02-23T23:32:00.001-07:00

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no.”

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We’re all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It’s in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands,
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

Translated by Robert Bly

West Wind #2 - Mary Oliver

2011-02-23T23:17:00.003-07:00

You are young. So you know everything. You leap
into the boat and begin rowing. But listen to me.
Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without
any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.
Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and
your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to
me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent
penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a
dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile
away and still out of sight, the churn of the water
as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the
sharp rocks – when you hear that unmistakable
pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth
and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls
plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life
toward it.

Biding Time

2011-02-23T23:10:00.002-07:00

One of my beloved friends wrote today about biding her time. Seems to have struck a nerve.

After all my waiting for months to find steady employment, I have job I'm truly loving -- challenging, engaging, interesting, detailed, big-picture oriented... it really is quite something.

But after getting tremendous support last month in a Herculean effort to submit a plan for review and approval, the next one in line is now due, needing just as much time and attention, but this time, I seem to be all on my own. Which is why I'm up at 11 pm worrying when typically I'm asleep by 9.

I feel needy and helpless and exasperated, none of which I like very much. But it's where I am, and Idon't see it changing in the next two days, when everything's due.

I'm trying to yoga breathe and focus on the good things or think about other things or do laundry or put together the shopping list.

But tick tock. And what I really want to do is put on a sweater and shoes and go to work and edit the plan that ticks like a time bomb at my desk.

Making It Last

2010-11-30T21:14:00.005-07:00

Making it last,
we put more faith
in the process than
in the fruits of our labor.
We love the hand-holding, embrace
the moments of confrontation
when perspectives clash, teach,
catalyze transformation of personal paradigms
to open the door to shared edens
or at least
worlds where the space between your values
and mine
is not so wide
your needs not as strange
our separation not so stark as to give us permission
to ignore each other’s far shore.

Having abandoned the need to bring you to my side
it becomes possible to
enjoy the feeling of movement
the breeze that travels between us
the scenery that changes with our perspectives
the sun that shines equally on us all.

Making it last
we accept the permanent truth of the journey
the immutability of change
the unending transaction between ourselves
and everything else
that makes it all so rich
so uniformly varied
so unthinkingly compelling
we can never be done.

Reaping What You Sow

2010-11-30T21:12:00.002-07:00

Thank god
some of what returns to us
is the bounty of our gratitude matured,
seeds of patience
flourishing to fall lavishly on the present
like mulberry leaves in autumn,
gentleness in full flower as marigolds bobbing with joy.

Parallel to history
our efforts bend toward fairness –
the plenty that leaves enough for all of us
at the thanksgiving table filled
with our good works and best ideas,
generosity finally
coming home to roost.

Building Relationships

2010-11-30T21:10:00.002-07:00

Nanoseconds
planted and multiplied
cultivate the shift
between my perspective and
what I can clearly see you need
when I step back to take in all of you
separate
from what I have asked.

Our garden of nanosecond shifts breathes
with the vitality of life celebrated,
our roots separate but entwined,
leaves spreading unabashedly for an unending sun.

Perspectives tilting like sunflowers to light,
we take turns sipping the water,
soil, space, inspiration
that allow each of us to grow.

Bringing in the Elements

2010-11-28T22:54:00.002-07:00

Our hands are built for digging in dirt
although we rush from soil to sink
as though wine-spilled,
time the only dam between
stain and the porcelain precision
of our unblemished boats,
as though we can learn more from
clean rooms
than the endless curiosity of laboratory
earth,
where organisms know enough to multiply
given space, one small advantage,
and permission to grow.

What would it mean
to let in the elements
instead of sealing ourselves
in immutable shells, impenetrable confidence,
and more often fear?

Nothing less than forgiveness –
a conciliatory embrace of our animal softness;
a return to the joy of dirt showers,
hands elephant trunking the earth over our heads, arms
rubbing the dry softness into our skin;
a ritual of rain shower dances,
running into the newness that signals change
we’ve been ready for,
open to, waiting
to celebrate.

Bringing in the elements,
we remove beaver sticks of difference
we’ve used to claim our territory, stacked
to prove our unique break with evolution’s river, forgetting
civilization is a man-made pool.
Expelling the elements,
we divorce neighborhood from environment,
belief from instinctual desire,
bodies from breath,
ourselves from the fullness of being.

We return to dirt and rain
as to the tending of green shoots
pushing from earth –
unquestioning –
so natural as to feel
destined
to feel destined.

Getting Started

2010-11-23T16:51:00.007-07:00

You will need more earth than you can imagine –
a topsoil self stretched two inches thin in each
direction, rotten lessons from years past
so mulled over,
turned so many times
in the heat of your compassion, your
fiery embrace,
they glisten now –
enriched loam returned
to eden,
ready for

growth. That and just one seed of an idea,
a gentleness that looks like hope
curled in an empty shell.
You do not have to believe yet.
The full flower
burst radiance
of this oak tree,
this carrot,
this miraculous wrapping of lettuce
around your core cannot
be suspected or even
coaxed into being with your want and especially
not your need. The best
seeds carry no notion of you, sprout
little gratitude for the water you shower or
your dreams. They rightly divine:
all that is needed to grow
is their birthright.
Fulfill
basic conditions of nourishment
and life begins.

It is not a matter of how to grow
or why.

Once begun
the only miracle is how often
we stop ourselves.

Open Enough

2010-11-20T21:55:00.002-07:00

It is enough
to be open and listening,
to be raw and broke open.

I am open to the sun,
open to the gathering of heat and light in me,
open to sharing with others what I cannot use.

I am thankful for all blessings
for the persistence of love
my tensile body of flesh

the life that overflows
with more meaning
than I can possibly gather.

Leverage

2010-11-10T23:31:00.003-07:00

We leverage our skills to catapault into grace
past what we can’t do
past our fears
past the worst parts of our nature.

We leverage grace to catapault past our weaknesses
waving hello to what we can now do
flying so high we have new perspectives
on the patterns suddenly clear, resolved like us to our fate.

Perpendicular
we poise for a moment
effortless
weightless
still
in the optimum exchange
between our gifts and what we are given
lifted, lifting
skilled at levitating in life’s grace.

Turning

2010-11-10T21:38:00.003-07:00

Had such a great talk with a dear friend this afternoon. It was one of those interactions that end up being a perfectly balanced dance between two people in two different places, both with concerns, both able to offer new insights from different perspectives. A wonderful surprise, especially because the date was set mostly for me. Instead, we found tender places, gathered wisdom from the last rays of a setting November sun.

I've been in the desert. Questioning my direction, my self, my career, my life - the meaning of it all. Closed to all but fear.

I feel poised on the edge of change, teetering on the peak of a wave that will carry me ... somewhere ... with power and speed and exhilaration.

Open to inspiration, it's beginning to pour in. Books on work turn out to be books about spirituality, about meaning, about authentic living. These led to poetry, to more poetry, to more thinking, feeling. Today, the book mentioned the old saying, "When a student is ready, the teacher appears." And vice versa. And that at the right moment, THAT moment, in the breath before all turns, coincidences happen. Maybe because you're paying attention for them. Listening. Focused. Open to miracles. Begging for them. And I realized I'd just experienced a moment of grace - a chance encounter with a woman who works where I'm hoping to work.

And later, talking to my friend, I realized one of the things I'm missing is confidence. More than experience, what I lack is the leap of faith it takes to try something new before you know whether you'll be good at it, before you know how steep the hill to climb, how exhilarating success will feel.

Perpetually the little sister, I constantly feel the need for more mentorship, more leadership, more ... protection. I believe I'm smart. I know I love to learn. I know I will be competent at the things I try. But managing others? Leading a project? Suddenly I falter. I lack faith. Confidence wilts.

What I'm learning from all my work books, though, is that work does not equal identity. Rather, it presents an opportunity to practice being your best self, living and acting with integrity. In the way that marriage should always be the verb and not the noun, work is the unending stream of action and intention, not a label or a product.

Perhaps easier to theorize than live, but still useful to reorient me from despair toward grace.

Sweet Darkness - David Whyte

2010-11-10T21:26:00.000-07:00

You must learn one thing.

The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds except

the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the

sweet confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

Keeping Quiet - Pablo Neruda

2010-11-10T21:20:00.004-07:00

Now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still.

This one time upon the earth,

let's not speak any language,

let's stop for one second,

and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment,

without hurry, without locomotives,

all of us would be together

in a sudden uneasiness.

The fishermen in the cold sea

would do no harm to the whales

and the peasant gathering salt

would look at his torn hands.

Those who prepare green wars,

wars of gas, wars of fire,

victories without survivors,

would put on clean clothing

and would walk alongside their brothers

in the shade, without doing a thing.

What I want shouldn't be confused

with final inactivity:

life alone is what matters,

I want nothing to do with death.

If we weren't unanimous

about keeping our lives so much in motion,

if we could do nothing for once,

perhaps a great silence would

interrupt this sadness,

this never understanding ourselves

and threatening ourselves with death,

perhaps the earth is teaching us

when everything seems to be dead

and then everything is alive.

Now I will count to twelve

and you keep quiet and I'll go.

-from Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Enough - David Whyte

2010-11-10T21:14:00.001-07:00

Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.

Until now.

2010-11-05T22:49:00.003-06:00

Eric's mom is visiting from Miami for the first time since Umea was 1 month old. It's strange, isn't it, how different people tax you? Each levies a unique fine. Some of course, give refunds. Others are like paying taxes for defense spending: a global calculus finely arbitrated, rather large bets against the odds.

We just watched Stranger than Fiction again with her. I think we watched it with her in 2007 after our wedding. She liked it then but didn't remember having seen it when we started it again tonight.

That movie transports me to a place where new is possible. A new screenplay by a new screenwriter that breaks the genre and somehow remains utterly charming and impeccably good. Makes me want to be brilliant with something.

I'm walking around like I'm waiting for the phone to ring. "Hello, this is your destiny. Turn right ahead."

Poised in my inbox are two job applications to complete. Three, actually. One part-time, one temporary, one a long shot with too little money to be enticing. Two other possibilities are floating in the ether, waiting for a yes or no to wend their way to me.

My work in this moment is to feel full, feel directed just by orienting my face to the sun.

On Belonging - David Whyte

2010-11-04T23:31:00.000-06:00

We are the one part of creation that knows what it’s like to live in exile. The ability to turn your face toward home is one of the great human endeavors and great human stories. No matter how far you are away from yourself, no matter how exiled you feel from your contribution to the rest of the world or to society, as a human being, all you have to do is enumerate exactly the way you don’t feel at home in the world, to say exactly how you don’t belong, and the moment you’ve uttered the dimension of your exile, you’re already taking the path back to the way -- back to the place -- you should be. You’re already on your way home.

The Opening of Eyes - David Whyte

2010-11-04T23:21:00.001-06:00

That day ... I heard the voice of the world speak out,
I knew ... life is no passing memory of what has been
nor the remaining pages in a great book
waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things
seen for the silence they hold.
...

It is Moses in the desert
fallen to his knees before the lit bush.
It is the man throwing away his shoes
as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished,
opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.

Everything is Waiting for You - David Whyte

2010-11-04T23:18:00.001-06:00

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone...

To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. ...
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come; the doors have always been there
to frighten and invite you...

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink; the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

Corner Talk

2010-11-04T23:12:00.003-06:00

And suddenly after months of floundering, it arrives - a corner around which something else will happen. A boundary between the way things are here, and how they will be after.

I still know nothing of the separating event. I cannot see the turn or the angle of light once turned.

But there is a corner where none existed before.

And that is soul-filling enough to grow patience and gratitude for the time to enjoy the sun here, now, before the turn.

The Journey - Mary Oliver

2010-11-04T22:45:00.000-06:00

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Love After Love - Derek Wolcott

2010-11-04T22:32:00.000-06:00

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

The Swan - Rainer Maria Rilke

2010-11-04T22:28:00.001-06:00

This clumsy living that moves lumbering

as if in ropes through what is not done,

reminds us of the awkward way the swan walks.

And to die, which is the letting go

of the ground we stand on

and cling to every day,

is like the swan,

when he nervously lets himself down into the water,

which receives him gaily

and which flows joyfully under

and after him, wave after wave,

while the swan,

unmoving and marvelously calm,

is pleased to be carried,

each moment more fully grown,

more like a king, further and further on.

translated by Robert Bly

David Whyte asks, "What is the elemental belonging in your life?"

Personal Renewal - John Gardner

2010-11-04T16:17:00.002-06:00

Delivered to McKinsey & Company, Phoenix, AZ
November 10, 1990

One of your most fundamental tasks is the renewal of the organizations you serve, and that usually includes persuading the top officers to accomplish a certain amount of self-renewal. But to help you think about others is not my primary mission this morning. I want to help you think about yourselves.

...I'm not going to talk about the special problems of your kind of career; I'm going to talk about some basic problems of the life cycle that will surely hit you if you're not ready for them.

...

Not long ago, I read a splendid article on barnacles. ... "The barnacle" the author explained "is confronted with an existential decision about where it's going to live. Once it decides.. . it spends the rest of its life with its head cemented to a rock.." For a good many of us, it comes to that.

We've all seen men and women, even ones in fortunate circumstances with responsible positions who seem to run out of steam in midcareer.

One must be compassionate in assessing the reasons. Perhaps life just presented them with tougher problems than they could solve. It happens. Perhaps something inflicted a major wound on their confidence or their self-esteem. Perhaps they were pulled down by the hidden resentments and grievances that grow in adult life, sometimes so luxuriantly that, like tangled vines, they immobilize the victim. You've known such people -- feeling secretly defeated, maybe somewhat sour and cynical, or perhaps just vaguely dispirited. Or maybe they just ran so hard for so long that somewhere along the line they forgot what it was they were running for.

I'm not talking about people who fail to get to the top in achievement. We can't all get to the top, and that isn't the point of life anyway. I'm talking about people who -- no matter how busy they seem to be -- have stopped learning or growing... I don't deride that. Life is hard. Just to keep on keeping on is sometimes an act of courage. But I do worry about men and women functioning far below the level of their potential.

We have to face the fact that most men and women out there in the world of work are more stale than they know, more bored than they would care to admit. Boredom is the secret ailment of large-scale organizations. ...

...How many people whom you know well -- people even younger than yourselves --are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits. A famous French writer said "There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives." ...

I've watched a lot of mid-career people, and Yogi Berra says you can observe a lot just by watching. I've concluded that most people enjoy learning and growing. And many are dearly troubled by the self-assessments of mid-career.

Such self-assessments are no great problem [when] you're young and moving up. The drama of your own rise is enough. But when you reach middle age, when your energies aren't what they used to be, then you'll begin to wonder what it all added up to... I have some simple advice for you when you begin that process. Don't be too hard on yourself. Look ahead...

...

The more I see of human lives, the more I believe the business of growing up is much longer drawn out than we pretend. If we achieve it in our 30's, even our 40s, we're doing well. ...

...When you hit a spell of trouble, ask "What is it trying to teach me?" The lessons aren't always happy ones, but they keep coming. It isn't a bad idea to pause occasionally for an inward look. By midlife, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.

We learn from our jobs, from our friends and families. We learn by accepting the commitments of life, by playing the roles that life hands us (not necessarily the roles we would have chosen). We learn by growing older, by suffering, by loving, by bearing with the things we can't change, by taking risks.

The things you learn in maturity aren't simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You leant not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions, if you have any, which you do. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent, but pays off on character.

You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.

...
You come to terms with yourself. You finally grasp what S. N. Behrman meant when he said "At the end of every road you meet yourself." You may not get rid of all of your hang-ups, but you learn to control them to the point that you can function productively and not hurt others.

...

You come to understand your impact on others. It's interesting that even in the first year of life you learn the impact that a variety of others have on you, but as late as middle age many people have a very imperfect understanding of the impact they themselves have on others. ...In some measure we create our own environment. ...

...

One of the enemies of sound, lifelong motivation is a rather childish conception we have of the kind of concrete, describable goal toward which all of our efforts drive us. We want to believe that there is a point at which we can feel that we have arrived. We want a scoring system that tells us when we've piled up enough points to count ourselves successful.

So you scramble and sweat and climb to reach what you thought was the goal. When you get to the top you stand up and look around and chances are you feel a little empty. Maybe more than a little empty.

You wonder whether you climbed the wrong mountain.

But life isn't a mountain that has a summit, Nor is it -- as some suppose -- a riddle that has an answer. Nor a game that has a final score.

Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one's capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.

...

The thing you have to understand is that the capacities you actually develop to the full come out as the result of an interplay between you and life's challenges --and the challenges keep changing. Life pulls things out of you.

There's something I know about you that you may or may not know about yourself. You have within you more resources of energy than have ever been tapped, more talent than has ever been exploited, more strength than has ever been tested, more to give than you have ever given.

You know about some of the gifts that you have left undeveloped. Would you believe that you have gifts and possibilities you don't even know about? It's true. ...

...There is no perfection of techniques that will substitute for the lift of spirit and heightened performance that comes from strong motivation, The world is moved by highly motivated people, by enthusiasts, by men and women who want something very much or believe very much.

I'm not talking about anything as narrow as ambition. After all, ambition eventually wears out and probably should. But you can keep your zest until the day you die. If I may offer you a simple maxim, "Be interesting," Everyone wants to be interesting -- but the vitalizing thing is to be interested. Keep a sense of curiosity. Discover new things. Care. Risk failure. Reach out.

The nature of one's personal commitments is a powerful element in renewal...

...You never get the impression that a cow is about to have a nervous breakdown. Or is puzzling about the meaning of life.

Humans have never mastered that kind of complacency. We are worriers and puzzlers, and we want meaning in our lives. ... [W]e are so designed to cope with [anything] if we can live in some context of meaning. Given that powerful help, we can draw on the deep springs of the human spirit, to see our suffering in the framework of all human suffering, to accept the gifts of life with thanks and endure life's indignities with dignity.

In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent communities and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today you can't count on any such heritage. You have to build meaning into your life, and you build it through your commitments -- whether to your religion, to an ethical order as you conceive it, to your life's work, to loved ones, to your fellow humans. Young people run around searching for identity, but it isn't handed out free any more -- not in this transient, rootless, pluralistic society. Your identity is what you've committed yourself to.

It may just mean doing a better job at whatever you're doing. There are men and women who make the world better just by being the kind of people they are --and that too is a kind of commitment. They have the gift of kindness or courage or loyalty or integrity. It matters very little whether they're behind the wheel of a truck or running a country store or bringing up a family.

...

We tend to think of youth and the active middle years as the years of commitment. ...People of every age need commitments beyond the self, need the meaning that commitments provide. ...

...I am not pessimistic and I advise you not to be. As the fellow said, "I'd be a pessimist but it would never work."

I can tell you that for renewal, a tough-minded optimism is best. The future is not shaped by people who don't really believe in the future. Men and women of vitality have always been prepared to bet their futures, even their lives, on ventures of unknown outcome.

...We have to believe in ourselves, but we mustn't suppose that the path will be easy, it's tough. Life is painful, and rain falls on the just. ...[F]ailure is simply a reason to strengthen resolve.

Nothing is ever finally safe. Every important battle is fought and re-fought. We need to develop a resilient, indomitable morale that enables us to face those realities and still strive with every ounce of energy to prevail. You may wonder if such a struggle -- endless and of uncertain outcome -- isn't more than humans can bear. But all of history suggests that the human spirit is well fitted to cope with just that kind of world.

....

"Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account."

Faith - David Whyte

2010-11-04T16:06:00.004-06:00

I want to write about faith,
about the way the moon rises
over cold snow, night after night,

faithful even as it fades from fullness,
slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
sliver of light before the final darkness.

But I have no faith myself.
I refuse it even the smallest entry.

Let this then, my small poem,
like a new moon, slender and barely open,
be the first prayer that opens me to faith.

(glimpsed in Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results because of David Whyte's tour of corporate America based on his book The Heart Aroused : Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America.)

The R-Ws at Home

2010-09-29T22:50:00.002-06:00

Marge Piercy - To be of use

2010-09-09T14:25:00.001-06:00

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Grace

2010-09-08T23:48:00.001-06:00

And in my angst, here is the quote that found me:

"[W]hen you are following ... [a] plan in community you'll never be an expert, just a person who can notice grace in earthy places."

--Lillian Daniel, from This Odd and Wondrous Calling

A Commandment

2010-09-08T23:33:00.002-06:00

The Oracle at Delphi said: Know thyself.

And even if you give yourself the wiggle room to say that this is an ongoing approach to life (a continual process) and not an afternoon's activity or a "You are here" X on a map you carry around, it seems a lot to ask.

I mean, so much has happened -- and more every day.

And in a bigger sense, what has really happened? It certainly makes no sense. There is no spine, no scaffolding, no progression. There is a series of days that happen to line up backward for years. So how can this explain now? Or me, now or then? Or help me recognize the me of tomorrow?

Is this why people go into therapy? Or is this why people have friends? To help remind you who you are, where you've been, what you love.

Is it just me, or is this self-knowledge quest getting harder to do in today's warp-speed world?

The Distance to Success

2010-09-08T22:58:00.003-06:00

Quiet tiptoes
in the space
confidence
should fill.

Disoriented,
my ambition
hesitates
at unfamiliar crossroads
indistinguishable
from the decision points
that got me here.

Xeno’s paradox
in reverse
means every step
marries me
to a destiny
I do not choose
and can never recognize,
since there is no “there”
to which to arrive.

In another time
faith would frame
the space
where confidence
dwells.

Hard-won knowledge
would scaffold my belief,
and the success of surviving each day
would catapult me
headlong into the next.

Instead
I lean into
the solidity
of sunshine,
pace forward
with the dread
of anticipated regret
for all that I am not doing
to get to where I don’t know
I want to be.

Authenticity

2010-09-08T22:04:00.002-06:00

What does it mean to feel authentic these days?

In a society where you have to have a license to drive, a degree to do pretty much anything, but no qualification whatsoever to be a parent, why is it that so many women still feel they're faking it?

Even when I'm good at what I do at work, I'm half waiting for someone to question my right to be there. "You don't really know how to do this," they'll accuse. And they'll be right. I don't. And somehow if I were a guy or a different kind of a girl, that would be okay. Or more okay than it is with me.

I have a running debate with many of my grad. school friends about who's more qualified for employment - them or me. It seems the grass is always more qualified on the other side of the fence!

I have a fantasy about being hired just because I'm smart, competent, and hard-working. I can't be hired for any other reason, because I swear to you I don't know anything about anything!

I started my college career wanting to know everything about everything. Somehow along the way, I learned only about context, not content. A postmodern dilemma, perhaps. Postmodern education to blame, probably. A postmodern lack of capacity for retaining information. My generation likes the shape of knowledge, not its heft. We understand the landscape of a theory - its genesis, the range of its applicability, its broad outlines. This mapped, we turn from it to the next big idea that we can sketch out and abandon.

And so my generation knows software - what technology can do, not what it should do. We acquire religious understanding voraciously but believe very little. We are full of empty boundaries.

Hermes was the messenger god in the Greek pantheon. He was also the god of crossroads, of borders, of humor (because what is humor but the intersection of 2 incongruous ideas?). He was a trickster, hard if not impossible to pin down. Hermes could get you out of a scrape with his ingenuity, the wings on his feet, yet few would pray to such an immutable, insubstantial, whimsical god. In this way, my generation is the Hermes generation. We map, we trade, we barter. We exist on the edges, eschew the possibility of center.

Maybe this bodes well for a war-free world in the future. Who would lose their life for an idea only loosely held, loosely sketched, easily abandoned? Who would find offense in someone else casting off such an idea when another seems to work better in their own circumstance?

Generational studies tell us that the new generation, the so-called millenials, are not paralyzed by prejudice in the way past generations have been. They have always lived in a world where diversity is celebrated, if not always achieved, where tolerance is demanded if not always granted. In some ways, this might make them more dangerous, more prone to repeating the atrocities of a history they don't seem connected to or inspired to learn.

And for me, it means angst about a career path shrouded in fog. Who will pay for my gifts? Is it enough to offer the skill of context, outlines, meaning without belief, without knowledge, without expertise?

The Space Inside*

2010-07-30T21:26:00.001-06:00

“Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” – Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”

Pay attention (work hard),
rest all that is not needed for the work,
relax into the effort,
feel how this pulse eases into hum,
contributes to all others’
to make our lives more rich
make us more joyful
more alive to our gratitude
more able to feel the ease from our troubles
wash over us,
leaving them sparkling, crystalline
with salt.

Invite them in,
all those you think you cannot feed,
who will fill themselves
with exactly what you can give
what they can receive
from the basket of your compassion –
your strengths,
the limber moments
between your daily plans –
who will spice each bite
with all you have learned
to let go.

Set the even table of your prayer for justice
with the spirit you bring
when flinging your loving arms
to all you can reach,
all you can harvest
in this season that feeds us
and the guests
who bring us so much more
than we can return.

I will open the dark doors
of my small home,
feel the rooms grow
as a vessel swells
each time the water
fills
then hollows
the space inside.

*Interesting that I had forgotten a poem from 2005 called "The Space Between Us" Chapbook, anyone?

Release

2010-07-29T23:25:00.003-06:00

In yoga we learn that our thoughts and feelings line our joints like hard water deposits. I never give this much thought, partly because I'm so inflexible that I never get to that layer and partly because I'm too busy trying to match my perfectionist tendency to my woefully imperfect poses ("practice" be damned).

But late in May I committed myself to going to a hot yoga flow class every weekday through July, which I've done with few exceptions. There have definitely been changes -- things I can feel, effects I can see, progress in good directions on many fronts. In the past week, I noticed an opening in my hips that has certainly never existed before and almost immediately heard a concomitant litany of past voices -- my voices -- saying all the things I say to myself when things are hard for me: This is impossible. How can anyone be expected to do this? I can't stand it for another minute. It's so hard I have to stop, etc.

The memory associated most strongly with these messages was a summer swim team, my first swim team, without ever having learned "real swimming" beyond 2-week YMCA classes when I was little. A seemingly irrelevant yet probably vital detail: my oldest sister was one of the coaches. We swam lap after lap, and as I struggled to breathe, I struggled harder against the growing panic in my lungs that this just wasn't FAIR. I couldn't do it, so by logical extension no one could do it: it just couldn't be done and therefore asking it of me (and us, I rationalized desperately) was fascist. Did I mention I'm a perfectionist? Yes, the ugly side of perfectionism is the utter inability to deal with not being good at something, even when it's YOGA for god's sake, as though being good at yoga is anything more than practicing it intentionally!

I know this, yet the voices are so distracting this week that I cannot calm myself, cannot focus, cannot stay in that hot, unbearable room. Today, cooling myself like a nuclear rod in the shower, I realized this simple truth: I do not know how to be gentle with my ... what? failure? It's not that. Imperfection? It's not quite that either. With my own inner fascist demanding that only perfection equals even "practice." Trying means giving 100%. Not trying means skipping the pose, leaving the room, checking out. There's some subtlety here that I can't quite finger. Throughout the class, I modify the poses to be less difficult, but then I give 100% within the modification. What I can't do is approach a pose half-heartedly knowing I can do better and (gasp!) choosing not to.

This seems like a life skill that I should know by now. Yet the fact that I don't clues me into why I'm so baffled -- and resentful -- at the majority of folks who seem to be floating through life entirely unfazed at their lack of exertion and unapologetic about ignoring expectations and responsibilities that affect those around them. Who was your mama? I want to ask them. And maybe that's another clue that there's a voice other than mine distracting me in yoga.

So I need another way to think about effort - a valid middle ground between all or nothing. A new way to be gentle with myself and the chasm between my intention and the unforgiving hardness cementing my joints closed, tight, and unmoving.

These adjectives no longer serve me.

Weather or not to be

2010-07-19T11:40:00.000-06:00

The rain,
staccato in me,
drums past any knowing
of the first drop.
Shifting puddles
cannot reflect their source.
Instead of a steady beat
lulling me into peace,
each drop swords
past capture,
slaps from my hand
what I grab –
the knowledge of self
life
spirit
I’m supposed to live in,
shoes off.

Shoes slushy,
I mush around,
confusion spilling
onto your bristling welcome mat
I hop on and off so quickly,
not wanting
you to ask what I don’t know
about what I left behind,
what sloshed out of unloyal shoes
when water realized I couldn’t hear
all it came to say.

Pre-resigned

2010-07-19T11:32:00.000-06:00

Until the pebble settles on my last rib, I breathe around the empty space at my core. I am not yet resigned to what’s next. Without knowing the shape of my gifts, I cannot tie the ribbon or wrap the box filled with quiet resolve and generous layers of plenty. The swell will come, juicing my fingertips, levitating the hands that can hold all I love.

Existentialism vs. Job Hunting

2010-05-27T20:42:00.003-06:00

Lately I've been thinking about how the existentialists got things right. I'm struck these days by the absurdity of our lives - the absolute craziness of our careening trajectories. Blink - you're five, feeling thirty. Blink again, you're in high school acting thirty. Blink blink, you're past thirty, still with no better idea of what you want to be or even who you want to be than when you were five. And does it matter? The minutes will pass, shooting quickly past days and months and years until a sunset stops you, stuns you, humbles you and your groping brain searching for personal meaning. Yes, we create it, but yes, it's also just ... not there. Not anywhere it can be discovered or stumbled upon or even worked toward.

I do think we're living through a new era, where adulthood is not coupled with a career, in the true sense of that word, complete with a goal and strategic shifts toward some step on a ladder you chose when you were in your twenties. Now we hop from job to job like so many lily pads, hoping for more shade or more flies or less wobble.

It is strange to feel you have gifts but no avenue to get paid to use them. It is disconcerting and unsettling and fundamentally questions your worth as an adult.

I can already sense how little sense my life is going to make in another thirty years. I could be wrong, of course. I might be heading to the culmination of all my disparate experiences that will resolve into crystal clarity how each contributed some vital skill toward some perfect, well-paying, secure job.

I just don't see it. Maybe I won't until it gets here.

Blessings

2009-09-22T20:44:00.003-06:00

With much calmed, what I have to say is this: Thank the gods for Netflix Instant Viewing.

As my husband would say, I am not an early adopter (almost typed adapter - same difference). I resisted a cell phone, resisted Netflix, resisted watching movies on the computer, am still actively resisting Facebook (oh but the pictures! The connection with Snapfish and printing at Walgreens in Miami, where Eric's mom can finally keep up with her granddaughter's changing face...).

But after months of depression watching whatever the gods of mercy or torture put on late-night tv, I am now four seasons in to Law and Order: SUV. It is absorbing enough to take the edge off late-night feedings and early-morning pumpings. It's quality enough not to resent the minutes taken off my life watching it. It's gruesome enough that I remember to count my blessings instead of sheep.

There's the IT Crowd for family feedings and Word World for morning dressing time. There's movies and movies galore - so much that you never have to worry about running out of things to watch or re-watch.

And so, baby time is blissed-out media viewing time. Add a little reading during pumping before bed and suddenly, life's not so bad.

Now if only libraries delivered...

Hot, Calm Night

2009-07-27T21:42:00.002-06:00

Realizing again how much the world is governed by entropy. Being a homeowner really keeps this foremost in one's thoughts. The carpet that was new upon moving in is ... dingy and spotted. The fans that were so cheery and industrial-cool last summer are dusty and in one case, broken. Baby swing? More of a baby statue memorializing fun. Toilet? Constantly moving from order to chaos. Clothes? One day from dirty.

I know I should be focusing on the joy in my life. All the blessings. A healthy, easy kid. A loving, kind, thoughtful husband. (But ... even though ... )

In the face of all that's right with my life, I'm starting to wonder if my tendency lately to dwell on dissatisfaction indicates a chemical imbalance from the roller coaster ride of pregnancy and nursing and a return to fertility, so mother nature tells me.

I've got an acupuncture appointment tomorrow, and I've been talking to the practitioner in my head for the last few days. He diagnoses that I have much imbalance, many little cancers of the mind, but, he says reassuringly, "We will fix."

So I try to do what I can to move toward health. Clean the kitchen. Clean the bathroom. Fill the water pitcher in the fridge. Sit outside with the Christmas lights on. Light a candle. Turn the fan to blow over my set jaw. Write.

As my boy Eliot whispers in my ear, "Anything is better than nothing." (But he still killed himself, my dissatisfied self complains.)

I spent half a day and some hours this weekend putting together a list of poems that other people list as their favorites (Love Amazon.com!) and saving them to my poetry file. I invited two of my poetry-loving friends to have an evening of poems. I will come well-stocked!

I wonder how much I'm not learning about myself by not keeping up better with the friends of my heart. Mordechai just jumped in my lap to remind me that I'm not learning from my pets, either. He's got a lot to teach me about going where others can take care of you, where you can love unconditionally, no matter how many times you get thrown across the room (yikes!) or ignored.

And so, time to pump, read a bit of Wonder Boys, maybe a B.H. Fairchild poem or two. And sleep for a few hours until it's time to wake and pump and watch bad late-night t.v.

Such do the blessings continue.

Mommy Moment

2009-07-24T11:06:00.002-06:00

Let me start by acknowledging that I've always struggled separating "real" emotions from chemically-induced similacra of feelings. In the end, does it matter whether what you're feeling is a response to real stimula or just manufactured because of hormones? Maybe it matters in terms of how seriously to take it. How much to base decisions off it.

But even if it's "fake" emotion, doesn't it come from somewhere? Isn't it you, too? Just you hyped up on life's greatest little gift to women?

I've got this on my mind for two reasons.

1) I've got my first period after having a baby just 4 months ago in April. Some of my girlfriends are getting their first period after 2 years! I'm guessing the difference is that I'm back to work and therefore pumping instead of nursing during the day, which my body knows is not nearly as good as the real thing.

Because of #1, coupled with post-pregnancy hormones and breastfeeding hormones, I'm having intensified fears, anger, and feelings of helplessness around my job situation, which is not so viable right now. I'm not sure what to do about that or what I can do about that, hence the panic.

2) I had a dream two nights ago that I decided to cheat on my husband with this guy we know. We were at a party and flirting, and in the dream, I consciously chose to make plans to meet up with him later that night and do it in a bathroom somewhere in the house. (That's the language of the dream - very high school somehow...)

I stood in front of a mirror and went back and forth. Is this worth risking my marriage? I pictured Eric's face, tried to feel what it would be like to lose him, tried to rationalize the fact that I was going to make this horrible choice. I decided maybe I wouldn't sleep with this guy, but I would make out, and if things got out of hand, I'd deal with it then (and that meant I'd probably go all the way).

So there we were, lounging in the bathroom, not touching. It was awkward for both of us, and we knew the stakes were high. It would take a lot to get over the hump and actually start touching. But the air was electric, charged with what might be anticipation if we let it become that. We talked, laughed, and somehow got on the subject of puppy poop. We made joke after joke about stepping in poop on the lawn. And ... the dream was over, spell broken. My brain hadn't been able to go there.

But I woke up totally guilty. I had decided to cheat! I imagined it! I played the scenario out in my head in detail!

Do I tell? It means nothing. Was a dream. Is not real. But my feelings of guilt are real, and I was still soaked in the dream, like cigarette smoke on your clothes after an evening in the bar.

So I told. Apologized. Said I felt guilty. And do you know what my fabulous husband did? He wrapped me up in a big ole hug and said, "Oh, honey. I'm so sorry!" Sorry I had that dream and felt bad about it! What a guy! And so I felt close to him again and knew that I wouldn't make that choice in waking life. And knew that our relationship could weather my dream indiscretions.

But still, what does it mean that I went there in a dream?

And the job thing? I just don't know. It's one of those decision points - what do I want to be when I grow up? What am I capable of? What's realistically possible, given this economic climate?

I feel my best when I'm facilitating public involvement processes. Could I find enough work to make a living doing that?

I also like using the technologies of project management - budgets, spreadsheets, schedules. Is there a job that allows me to mix a little of this in, or would this just auger well for owning my own business?

I love putting together documents - desktop publishing, editing, technical writing, etc. Are there jobs where you get to do that? Jobs that I can still do bits of the above?

I love teaching. How does that fit into all this?

And if there is no perfect salaried job out there ... am I brave enough, smart enough, saavy enough, connected enough, and motivated enough to make a go of it? And is it a viable idea given the craziness out there? Given that I have a newborn and a husband whose job is similarly unstable?

Good lord. Is it any wonder I'm emotional?

Self-Portrait by David Whyte

2009-07-12T16:25:00.000-06:00

It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back with firm eyes saying this is where I stand.

I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living falling toward the center of your longing.
I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of sure defeat.
I have been told, in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God.

Finding Stillness

2009-07-01T21:15:00.003-06:00

I've been thinking lately about singing meditation, mostly because the only time I have to connect with my deeper side on a daily basis is as I sing to Umea -- while she's eating or close to sleep. I find that I'm not all that patient with nursing. After the first few minutes -- when she's cute, and smells so good, and if feels so good to hold her -- you have to just sit there, thinking of all the things you need to do and could do if you didn't just have to sit there, being the producer of milk and inducer of good baby/momma hormones and general inducements toward intimacy.

I've found some hymns that always seem to break into my unending stream of should-be-doings and take me to a more conscious place. One is almost postmodern in that its message and effect reflect each other.

Find a stillness, hold a stillness, let the stillness carry me.
Find the silence, hold the silence, let the silence carry me.

In the spirit, by the spirit, with the spirit giving power, I will find true harmony.

Seek the essence, hold the essence, let the essence carry me.
Let me flower, help me flower, watch me flower, carry me.

In the spirit, by the spirit, with the spirit giving power, I will find true harmony.

That one's just for me. Then there's another that Umea seems to like.

Come, come, whoever you are,
Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving.
Ours is no caravan of despair.
Come, yet again, come.

That makes a beautiful round, as does this one, which I also sing often to Umea:

And everyone 'neath a vine and fig tree,
Shall live in peace and unafraid.

And into ploughshares turns the sword;
Nations shall learn war no more.

Then there's this little ditty, oddly uptempo:

Soon the day will arrive when we will be together,
and no longer will we live in fear.
And the children will smile without wondering whether
on that day thunder clouds will appear.

Wait and see, wait and see,
what a world this will be,
when we care, when we share,
you and me.

Some have dreamed, some have died to make a bright tomorrow,
and our vision remains in our hearts.
Now the torch must be passed with new hope and new sorrow,
and a promise to make a new start.

Wait and see, wait and see,
what a world this will be,
when we care, when we share,
you and me.

How about this one? Sung to the classical Finlandia tune.

We would be one as now we join in singing
our hymn of love to pledge ourselves anew
to that high cause of greater understanding
of who we are, and what in us is true.

We would be one in lving for each other
to show to all a new community.

We would be one in building for tomorrow
a nobler world than we have known today.
We would be one in searching for that meaning
which binds our hearts and points us on our way.

As one, we pledge ourselves to greater service
with love and justice, strive to make us free.

I feel that if I could learn these well enough, I might carry more stillness with me into the stream of moments that have been carrying me ever faster through my days. I might be filled with more ... spirit, gravitas, calm, meaning.

I feel a slipping lately, a widening gap between where my days carry me and where I feel my strengths are, my source of power, my sense of myself.

I told a friend that I have this feeling about myself as though I'm expecting a friend to come in from out of town. I can't wait for all the great conversations we have, staying up late into the night, all the catching up we have to do. But she's not here yet, and I must gather my stories to make the most out of each moment she's here.

So I must sing. Gather my stories, and sing.

Umea Comes

2009-05-16T07:59:00.002-06:00

Umea was born six weeks ago on April 3. We've made it this far, and I'm just starting to feel that we're getting used to each other. I didn't have that bolt of lighting love that some mothers feel. Instead, I felt wonderment that this thing that I've been wanting for so long -- a child, a daughter -- is finally here and a simultaneous effort not to try to turn this into anything I dreamed. I know she is her own person and that our relationship will take its own shape despite any dreams or intentions I might have. I wonder sometimes if I'm trying too hard to stay unattached to outcome. It may be interfering with my ability to enjoy these moments fully and to bond with her in a way that's unapologetic to what she might feel when she's a teenager.

I find myself thinking often that nothing is permanent, and while I enjoy her now, she may not always be here. I'm not sure where this macabre reasoning is coming from, but it does signal fears that I never would have expected of myself.

I actually had a dream the night before last that she was dead. It was right before Halloween, and some friends asked whether they could use her body for their haunted house, and I agreed, because, well, there was nothing to be done. It wasn't until her head was separated from her body that I collapsed into sobs on the kitchen counter, finally feeling the loss.

Part of it is feeling overwhelmed with the responsibility for caring for such a helpless creature, especially when I feel I know so little about what to do. There are so few options when she cries -- feed her, burp her, put her to bed. The relentless repetition of days tends to remove the portent of a brand new life and precipice of a new love.

Yet there are moments, of course, when it all comes crashing through all these defenses and excuses and life patterns. She's very much smiling these days. After naps, when she's lying propped up on my knees, she breaks into a crooked grin as we stare at each other. She's begun exercising control over her hands, and sometimes at the breast or when she's on my shoulder, she'll knead me or grab my hands. In these moments, it's as though she's breaking through to my dreams of what motherhood would feel like, what it would entail. This both frightens me -- what if it ends? -- and surprises me -- how did I know how this would feel? It's as though I'm becoming a mother in reverse.

It's perhaps as a wife that I'm learning the most. That part of life is much more surprising than motherhood, somehow, as though I didn't imagine it as fully as I imagined having children and therefore aren't as familiar with its rhythms and edges. Not that it's hard. In fact, it's much less dramatic and much richer than I ever dreamed. The chemical badness that always attracted me to my favorite boyfriends is replaced with an intense trust and appreciation. He follows through -- most of the time -- and when he doesn't, he either intends to or tries to on hearing its import to me or to us. I can trust that, which is so awe inspiring. I'm much better than I would have thought at phrasing requests plainly and positively. I hardly ever think about whether he knows me or not; that hardly seems the point, somehow. He loves me and has agreed to share a life. As long as I keep up my end of the bargain and keep tabs on myself, then he'll know me as well as I make the effort to teach him. As well as I make the effort to teach myself.

Everything else fades to background. For me, having a kid is like living in a land of Platonic forms. It's all the essential building blocks of life, evolutionarily speaking. Caring for an infant, securing a partner to support us, sleeping, eating, walking.

There are friends, too. They bring food and ooh and aah appropriately over our sweet girl. There is the tacit acknowledgment that I am now, suddenly and irrevocably, a woman, where before I was playacting at it. Now there's no question I'll be 50 and round and pudgy and worried about hosting visitors one day, as my mom does.

As for Umea herself, she's amazing. Utterly charming. Mecurial, with a twinkle in her eye from the first week. People commented on it. They tell me all the time she looks like she has stories to tell. She's got a great voice already -- low and pleasing. Even her noises are professional-sounding, as though she's a real performer already. She's got a temper, and she doesn't have much transition room between humor and anger. She can go from a smiling session with me to unconsolable crying in the space of a few breaths. But she's also in love with the world already, staring intently at everything for minute on minute. She's got achingly long fingers, long feet and long toes, a cute pug nose, rosy cheeks, high forhead, great, blue eyes that are so intense as to be disconcerting -- people tell me that, too. And lots of dark hair that always elicits a comment. We don't know where that came from, and yes, we think it will change.

I wish, somehow, that I could love her more, but it feels like I'm waiting for something. For her to grow up more, or to become conscious of herself and therefore able to differentiate herself from me, or for a promise that she's not going anywhere? I'm not sure. Maybe all these things. Maybe love and trust take time. I do notice that reuniting with her after we're separated for a while gets me closer to feelings of adoration than anything else. Maybe I just need perspective, a little distance to see the picture clearly and know -- this is love. This is our family. This is it.

Push and Pull

2008-11-14T08:49:00.002-07:00

It's interesting to me how being pregnant has affected my relationships. I'm suddenly much closer to my stepmom, who's been the biggest cheerleader since she was the first one I called. Setting me up with free ultrasounds, asking around for cribs and other necessary items, and generally cooing and oohing and ahhing and not questioning every decision we make.

Other new moms have been similarly generous and wonderful -- telling me all the little things no one bothered to tell them, sending on lists of pediatricians and daycares, sharing their own worries and triumphs.

Friends who've been closest previously haven't really been there, most likely because I've never needed much from folks. Still...

And all the stereotypes I've ever had about church people and babies have come true -- from knitting to overwhelming generosity and special care. One woman offered me a winter poncho for when I get too big for my own coats. Another offered to dig out her pregnancy books -- from 20+ years ago! It does make me feel supported and blessed to not be facing this alone.

In general, I'm feeling really good these days. We know it's a girl -- Umea. Perhaps Umea Marie if I can get Eric to cave in. I'm getting big and unwieldy, slowing down, having a harder time sleeping. But generally in good spirits and good energy during the day, at least.

Life is sweet and about to get sweeter. And I have the the sweetest husband of all.

Any Night - Phillip Levine

2008-10-30T16:50:00.000-06:00

Look, the eucalyptus, the Atlas pine,
the yellowing ash, all the trees
are gone, and I was older than
all of them. I am older than the moon,
than the stars that fill my plate,
than the unseen planets that huddle
together here at the end of a year
no one wanted. A year more than a year,
in which the sparrows learned
to fly backwards into eternity.
Their brothers and sisters saw this
and refuse to build nests. Before
the week is over they will all
have gone, and the chorus of love
that filled my yard and spilled
into my kitchen each evening
will be gone. I will have to learn
to sing in the voices of pure joy
and pure pain. I will have to forget
my name, my childhood, the years
under the cold dominion of the clock
so that this voice, torn and cracked,
can reach the low hills that shielded
the orange trees once. I will stand
on the back porch as the cold
drifts in, and sing, not for joy,
not for love, not even to be heard.
I will sing so that the darkness
can take hold and whatever
is left, the fallen fruit, the last
leaf, the puzzled squirrel, the child
far from home, lost, will believe
this could be any night. That boy,
walking alone, thinking of nothing
or reciting his favorite names
to the moon and stars, let him
find the home he left this morning,
let him hear a prayer out
of the raging mouth of the wind.
Let him repeat that prayer,
the prayer that night follows day,
that life follows death, that in time
we find our lives. Don't let him see
all that has gone. Let him love
the darkness. Look, he's running
and singing too. He could be happy.

Clearing the Pile

2008-10-30T15:50:00.003-06:00

I'm definitely seeking solace these days.

What is it about us that sends us seeking ourselves at every turn in our lives? Or is that special blessing of an instinct reserved for a certain segment of the population? And what would that be -- intelligent, curious, egotistical, self-absorbed, un-insightful, unbalanced, or is it, much more to my liking, a not unwelcome side effect of choosing to live an authentic life? A life examined. At least, from time to time.

I think about my childhood more than most people, I think. I had the same best friends from age 2 to 13. I had lots of childhood trauma, which helps things stick in your memory. I read books over and over and over, helping to imprint them and myself thinking of them in my mind.

My mother recently cleaned her garage and finally got us girls to take away all the stuff we'd been storing there, including boxes and boxes of books. Much to my delight, I did a great job as a kid knowing which books to save! I have so many of my favorites now, and I've been reading them voraciously in one or two sittings, night after night. They're exactly as I remember them, and there's such a warping feeling of rightness and strangeness between how I feel now reading them and the illusion of being different while reading them.

Is there continuity in consciousness? In experience? I have to say no. My memory is much more like packets of life [ha, meant to type light] operating as particles versus a wave. Maybe that's just a factor of what I use it for: occasional introspection to get me through the next transition.

Now there's the biggest one and probably second to the last one: dying. Parenthood is more than just about inviting a kid into your life. It's about the last chance to finalize your independent identity as opposed to your soon-to-be always-relational identity of you-as-mom, you-despite-being-mom.

I see Eric facing the same challenge but played out slightly differently. While this new life twist does have me wondering about my professional identity, it's not tied to my worth as a person in the same way as it seems to affect Eric as a man. He's thrust neck-deep in the question of: "Am I a good provider? Am I doing what I want to do in my professional life? Because I'm about to lose the flexibility to make changes easily very very soon."

As an aside, something I've learned about myself recently. I follow through. I used to think of this as being anal or having a high work ethic or being a perfectionist or something. Now, I'm thankful every time I find myself bending down to pick up a string on the carpet and throw it away, or unpack that box even though it contains a bunch of junk that I have no idea what to do with.

My mom came over to help me around the house for a couple hours -- bless her -- and I found her the same way, only more annoyingly so. She kept saying, let's just do a little more so that it feels good to have it done. And I knew just what she meant.

When I was little, I used to clean my room by piling up everything from on top of my dressers, everything out of place around the room, etc., into the middle of the room. Then I'd dust, make the bed, generally clean all the surfaces I could suddenly see. Then, one by one, I'd start to put things away from the pile. If I couldn't find a place for it, I'd throw it away. It was a painstaking process, and pretty slow. But it felt good from the beginning. Good to see cleared off surfaces. Good to have portions of the room done (if you could ignore the gigantic pile in the middle of the room). Good to restore order piece by piece as the pile shrunk.

I sometimes feel I take the same tack with the rest of my life, trying one by one to clear off my commitments, trying to make the other pieces of my life feel good and set and clean, even as I work to shrink my pile of should's and have to's.

I only have another 4.5 months to shrink my pile before it leaves my control more than ever before.

On Prayer - Czeslaw Milosz

2008-10-30T15:39:00.002-06:00

You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word 'is'
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
And knows that if there is no other shore
We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.

No Time for Introspection

2008-10-21T17:07:00.002-06:00

Suddenly find myself in an internal cycle once again. I should be able to recognize the signs by now, but ... life is too immediate to see sometimes.

Coming out of the most intense project at work - high pressure, fast deadlines, huge expectations, historical import. The whole shebang. It's laying in wait at the moment. Gathering comments. The onslaught will ensue next month, I'm sure.

In the midst, I discovered I've got new life growing inside me. No time to think about it, I mostly tried not to focus on how intensely uncomfortable pregnancy is!

I'm 4.5 months in now. Bought a house and moved. Still living out of boxes. Worrying about how to pay for new bills and a new mortgage. Wondering how other people do this, when we can barely do it, and I know we're better off than most. The financial collapse. The blazing political contest.

I have to admit it feels like a world in its last days. Biblical. Epic. Death throes of ideologies. All that.

And such internal silence! Amidst the sound and the fury, such thin worries! Such interim thoughts, bridging the gap between days with grocery lists. House needs. Future expenses.

What I do for myself personally these days is study "planning" to pass a certification test in November. Edifying...

It is a comment on where I am these days that my biggest joy is television shows: Pushing Daisies. Heroes. Others too embarrassing to mention.

Facing the most traumatic, life-changing times possible in life, I feel the rising panic to reestablish friendships and support networks. All after November. All in the future. All tomorrow when the pressing of today is not quite so insistent.

Several high school friends contacted me recently, which felt like a sign, but I haven't followed through. I'm not sure what I have to give, and having felt like I abandoned them before, I'm hesitant to promise what I won't or can't deliver.

But maybe all of it is crap. And life's moving so fast, there's no time to take anything back. You just have to try to do as much as you can right in the first place. Try to make the heroic efforts to fight the relentless succession of days. I wrote a graduation paragraph once that said Baudelaire was right: time is the enemy.

I am such a sad soldier. Doesn't really matter. There's always the marching.

Navajo Chant

2008-04-25T14:12:00.002-06:00

I see the Earth
I am looking at Her and smile
Because she makes me happy.
The Earth, looking back at me
Is smiling, too.
May I walk happily
And lightly
Upon Her.

couple(t) - Chris Blakeley

2008-04-23T12:08:00.000-06:00

three blocks later

they're still kissing

Reincarnation - Phebe Jewell

2008-04-23T12:07:00.001-06:00

When I am born again
make me a drum,

make me an anchor
of rhythm for your hands.

Make my song
break locks,
open windows,
fill bellies.

Play me
til I shudder and break
between your knees.

Set me afire.
Watch me spark,
rising, twisting,
returning
to darkness.

Why Dreams Are Like Babies -- Erin Malone

2008-04-23T12:04:00.001-06:00

Otherworldly, they may be naked
& speaking a language
you can’t understand.

They test you
on long division.
You’re unprepared—

This one is familiar
but wears another’s face.
You can’t run. He wakes you,
wakes you, wakes you.

Erin Malone

Courtesy Seattle's Poetry on the Bus

2008-04-23T11:53:00.004-06:00

See more of these gems here.

I think this would make a great poem to "workshop," swapping out your own place-words to achieve a new feel.

Great Jones Wide Awake Now

dreamlife at
the great jones café
was more bar
than chow
more smoke
than booze
more t.v.
than jukebox
more motel
than barstool

now & then
a regular escaped
more sparrow
than keepsake

the rest of us
were hammered
into place
more vinegar
than oil

more fencepost
than jailbreak

April De Nonno

EVERY CASE —Wislawa Szymborska

2008-02-08T09:55:00.000-07:00

It could have happened.
It must have happened.
It happened earlier. Later.
Closer by. Further away.
It happened not to you.

You survived because you were the first.
You survived because you were the last.
Because you were alone. Because you were with others.
Because to the left. Because to the right.
Because it rained. Because there was shade.
Because the day was sunny.

Fortunately a forest was there.
Fortunately no trees were there.
Fortunately a rail, a hook, a bar, a brake,
an embrasure, a curve, a millimeter, a second.
Fortunately a razor was floating on water.

As a consequence, because, and yet, in spite.
What it would have been if a hand, a leg,
within an ace of, by a hair's breadth
saved from a combination of circumstances.

So you are here? Straight from an abrogated moment?
The net had just one mesh and you went through that mesh?
I am all surprise and all silence.
Listen,
how quickly your heart beats to me.

Except that there's this career thing...

2008-01-30T08:51:00.000-07:00

If you have been working toward a promotion or a raise, things might finally start to loosen up on the job front now that Mars is again pushing forward in your 10th House of Career. But don't expect too much too fast or you will be disappointed. Your rewards could fall short of your desires, but it may take a few more weeks until you see the full results from your efforts.

And I have been, and oh boy does it help that the stars are aligned to make that a bit less painful and arduous...

Today and Every Day. Amen.

2008-01-25T08:47:00.000-07:00

From tarot.com:

Perhaps you have reached a phase in your life when work starts to lose its prominence. Of course, you must be dutiful enough to meet your responsibilities or everything could fall apart. But in order to do something extraordinary, you might have to push your own personal envelope and take a risk. Talk about your fears now, for it will be harder to deal with them later.

The Next Two Years

2008-01-23T13:13:00.000-07:00

January 2008, here's what the stars have in store for me:

You are in a transition in which you are fundamentally coming to terms with yourself. That change is about getting relief from nervousness and instability, and calling your life into focus. It is about having the confidence and substance to stand up to the world, which is so rare to find. Finally, this transit is about finding the ability to go deeper into yourself, your ideas and your sense of existence. These things have life on more than the level of thought or concept. Ideas are powerful, and you have reached a point of maturity that you have been working toward for a long time.

To the extent that you are fundamentally passive, Saturn will compel you to take an active role in your life and in your relationships. To the extent that you understand that authority is something we embody or we don't grow, you will be granted enormous assistance in taking on your true role in the world. In doing so, we take away the authority that others seem to hold over us, whoever they may be.

In ordering our lives, we liberate the energy we need to persist in our creative work and our service to the world. You are, by nature, a sober and sensible individual. You understand that life is an opportunity and a profound responsibility, only magnified by our commitments to others.

My Father with Cigarette Twelve Years Before the Nazis Could Break His Heart -- Philip Levine

2008-01-18T13:56:00.001-07:00

I remember the room in which he held
a kitchen match and with his thumbnail
commanded it to flame: a brown sofa,
two easy chairs, one covered with flowers,
a black piano no one ever played half
covered by a long-fringed ornamental scarf
Ray Estrada brought back from Mexico
in 1931. How new the world is, you say.
In that room someone is speaking about money,
asking why it matters, and my father exhales
the blue smoke, and says a million dollars
even in large bills would be impossible.
He's telling me because, I see now, I'm
the one who asked, for I dream of money,
always coins and bills that run through my hands,
money I find in the corners of unknown rooms
or in metal boxes I dig up in the backyard
flower beds of houses I've never seen.
My father rises now and goes to the closet.
It's as though someone were directing a play
and my father's part called for him to stand
so that the audience, which must be you,
could see him in white shirt, dark trousers,
held up by suspenders, a sign of the times,
and conclude he is taller than his son
will ever be, and as he dips into his jacket,
you'll know his role calls for him to exit
by the front door, leaving something
unfinished, the closet light still on,
the cigarette still burning dangerously,
a Yiddish paper folded to the right place
so that a photograph of Hindenburg
in full military regalia swims up
to you out of all the details we lived.
I remember the way the match flared
blue and yellow in the deepening light
of a cool afternoon in early September,
and the sound, part iron, part animal
part music, as the air rushed toward it
out of my mouth, and his intake of breath
through the Lucky Strike, and the smoke
hanging on after the door closed and the play
ran out of acts and actors, and the audience --
which must be you -- grew tired of these lives
that finally came to nothing or no more
than the furniture and the cotton drapes
left open so the darkening sky can seem
to have the last word, with half a moon
and a showering of fake stars to say what
the stars always say about the ordinary.
Oh, you're still here, 60 years later,
you wonder what became of us, why
someone put it in a book, and left
the book open to a page no one reads.
Everything tells you he never came back,
though he did before he didn't, everything
suggests it was the year Hitler came
to power, the year my grandmother learned
to read English novels and fell in love
with David Copperfield and Oliver Twist
which she read to me seated on a stool
beside my bed until I fell asleep.
Everything tells you this is a preface
to something important, the Second World War,
the news that leaked back from Poland
that the villages were gone. The truth is --
if there is a truth -- I remember the room,
I remember the flame, the blue smoke,
how bright and slippery were the secret coins,
how David Copperfield doubted his own name,
how sweet the stars seemed, peeping and blinking,
how close the moon, how utterly silent the piano.

-- from The Simple Truth

My Life Coming to Get Me

2008-01-18T10:49:00.001-07:00

Been pretty unhappy w/ work for a while now - up and down, certainly, but more often down than up.

Been vaguely dissatisfied with the way I've been living my life, too -- too much sitting around and not enough digging deep. I've told myself I'm still resting up after 20+ years in school and working, running myself ragged and so busy as to be blind to most everything else.

Took the time to attend a meditation retreat, with Rilke by my side and on my mind. What rung through me clearly is his admonition from Sonnets to Orpheus:

"You must change your life."

And this one --

I am too alone in the world, but not alone enough to make each hour holy.
I am small in the world, but not small enough to simply be like a thing -- just as it is.
I want to know my own will
and to move with it.
And I want, in the hushed moments
when the nameless draws near,
to be among the wise ones—
or alone.

I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed,
for where I am closed, I am false.
I want to stay clear in your sight.

I would describe myself like a landscape I’ve studied
at length, in detail;
like a word I’m coming to understand;
like a pitcher I pour from at mealtimes;

like my mother’s face;
like a ship that carried me
when the waters raged.

- From Rilke’s Book Of Hours translated by Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy

So of course, the universe opened up, testing me with new opportunities, throwing my current life into bas relief, forcing me to question just how dissatisfied I am with it, and which parts I wouldn't, couldn't, shouldn't throw away.

There are things I want more of --

Money to save and not worry about each purchase and unexpected expenses/emergencies
Time to meditate, to read, to follow my interest & development
Focus to study and pass my AICP exam for planning, which opens the door to project management and career advancement
Teaching, because it rockets me to understanding and challenges me to question everything -- and write about it
Inspiration -- to go where my life takes me, joyfully, fully, present
Kids

And so, what path will lead me toward these things, and which path will make it harder, or impossible? Which lets me ride the wave, and which leaves me paddling on a calm ocean, trying to surf?

It's a blessing to be presented with this moment to make choices. That is clear to me. And even the opportunity to do nothing, change nothing, except my attitude and gratitude at what I already have, is valuable for me now.

Still.

It's such a huge opportunity to change so much that it's hard not to feel fate's hand.

I must listen and calm myself in order to hear clearly -- both what the universe whispers or shouts to me and what my own instinct says.

What's the biggest move I can handle that would make Rilke proud? Isn't it interesting that the more you allow for the possibility of fate, the more you feel the press of its hand?

Rilke's Book of Hours -- Selections from Barrows & Macy Translation

2008-01-10T08:41:00.000-07:00

God, give us each our own death,
the dying that proceeds
from each of our lives:

the way we loved,
the meanings we made,
our need.

*****

You who know, and whose vast knowing
is born of poverty, abundance of poverty --

make it so the poor are no longer
despised and thrown away.

Look at them standing about --
like wildflowers, which have nowhere else to grow.

*****

I thank you, deep power
that works me ever more lightly in ways I can't make out.
The day's labor grows simple now,
and like a holy face
held in my dark hands.

*****

You too will find your strength.
We who must live in this time
cannot imagine how strong you will become --
how strange, how surprising,
yet familiar as yesterday.

We will sense you
like a fragrance from a nearby garden
and watch you move through our days
like a shaft of sunlight in a sickroom.

We will not be herded into churches,
for you are not made by the crowd,
you who meet us in our solitude.

We are cradled close in your hands --
and lavishly flung forth.

Troublemaker by Wilson Diehl

2007-11-01T17:10:00.001-06:00

Every family has one -- usually the one
who writes, the one who spills family secrets
onto the page like so much grape juice
on beige carpet -- creating continent-shaped
stains that are slow to fade and never disappear
entirely.

Brocaded Life (For Eden) by Hagar Shirman

2007-11-01T16:43:00.000-06:00

from Poetry on the Bus

My mother's hands are silken gloves
Woven of the warmest thread,
Embroidered by the day, year, life.

Each caress a flower,
A vine ...
Strength etched in lines.

For this I strive,
This tapestry of life accomplished:
Instead of gold, a softly callused cloth.

Wedding Vows

2007-10-07T22:42:00.000-06:00

Eric & I got married last Saturday, Sept. 29, 2007.

I still can't bring myself to tell the whole story -- Friday night welcome dinner for family and out-of-town friends, a day-long treasure hunt, Volcano fiasco in the wind and rain and hail, two-hour rain delay, and backyard ceremony by firelight with friends all around.

I'm proud of all of it, despite the fact that my family will make me pay for each and every moment of discomfort, inconvenience, and unconventionality. Almost more than anything else, I'm proud of the vows we wrote and recited to each other.

Our officiant, Mindy -- a friend to both of us and partner of one of our closest friends -- cued us with the bulleted word, and we provided the rest of the vows. We did the whole list in turn.

§ Kindness: I promise to give the highest priority to the kindness that our connection deserves.

§ Growth: I agree to take responsibility for my own happiness, health, and growth and help as much as I can, as gently as I can, with yours.

§ Gentleness: I will try to understand myself first in silence and speak the hard things softly in order that we both may hear.

§ Connection: I will continue to learn and respect who you are and search out points of connection.

§ Humor: I will do my best to appreciate the moments of humor and celebrate moments of joy that we may lighten the darker times.

§ Responsibility: I promise to take responsibility for the quality of our life together.

These rings, which were once symbols of your private commitment to one other, now become public symbols of the larger commitment you are making to your friends, to your family, to your larger community, and to the work you will continue to do together in this world.

Do you, Eric, choose Mikaela to be your family from this day forward?
I do.

Do you, Mikaela, choose Eric to be your family from this day forward?
I do.

Do you, Eric and Mikaela, agree to be the best partners to each other that you can?
We do.

Do you, Eric and Mikaela’s family and friends, agree to support this couple, individually and together, from this day forward?
We do.

Do you also agree to take responsibility for your relationships and the work you will do in the world and in your communities?
We do.

A Philosophy of Connection & Autonomy

2007-10-07T19:08:00.000-06:00

Ever since flirting with being an Objectivist my first year of college, I've been fascinated with the idea of philosophy. I wanted to know everything about everything, a trajectory that led me to try to write an undergraduate thesis linking T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets with quantum physics and William James' pragmatism. The thesis never quite came to fruition, but the idea is still a good one, and I come back to it all the time.

Although I've outgrown Ayn Rand and her very thin, black-and-white fanaticism, I still admire her tenacity of mind and organization to bring followers with her in her thinking. Back in that freshman year of college, I had the poster on my wall listing her main tenets, covering the major branches of philosophy:

Ontology: This is the only reality there is.
Epistemology: We know what we know because of reason.
Ethics: Self-interest.
Aesthetics: (Can't really remember other than to say she hated emotional music ala Wagner or sentimental art ala Monet, which I discovered when the President of the Objectivists came to my room and tried to argue with me about why I liked the Monet poster hanging on my wall)
Social Organization: Democracy. (Not sure but must have been Representative Democracy, because she wasn't very optimistic about the intelligence of the masses or trusting of their ability to go beyond emotional pleas to reasoned voting patterns)
Economics: Capitalism. Period.

There's an objectivist institute. Objectivist books. Objectivist positon papers on current events. Alan Greenspan was an acolyte. This woman had followers. She did for philosophy what Frank Lloyd Wright did for architecture. She made lay people fans.

There was a time -- years, actually -- when Atlas Shrugged was the second-best-selling book in the world, second only to the bible. The bible.

Ever since that time, and after reading quite a bit of lay person quantum physics (Brian Greene and Heinz Pagels, high among them), I've flirted with my own philosophical structure of belief. Ayn Rand was a modernist, but we've moved to the postmodern age. A quantum age.

What holds it all together? Why do Rilke and Heisenberg both describe the same thing, and why does it resonate so powerfully?

I've written about connection, and implicitly about autonomy, but recently while reading the introduction of Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism, I realized these two form the basis of what I believe about everything. Together, they form my ontology.

Ontology: Connection & Autonomy

Gravity operates at all levels, pulling us toward leaders, attractive people and ideas. Where our autonomy is overpowered by this influence, we are sucked into the black hole and lose ourselves. Where our autonomy overpowers our attraction, we lose connection. In the balance, we find growth, health, and love.

From these, all things can be derived, from the atomic level to that of political systems, love, family, etc.

So how do we know what we know? How do we know what's real? What are the building blocks of how we live, how we think, how we reason, how we love?

I think there's a hierarchy, or at least a progression. I believe it goes something like this:

Epistemology:

Awareness
Kindness
Respect
Impulse toward meaning
Choice
Identity
Family
Community
Culture

How do you know how to act?

I think there's an ethics that flows from the balance between connection and autonomy, too.

Ethics:

Sharing - information and resources (the balance to find here would be leverage -- maximizing connection in a way that capitalizes on the autonomy of both sides to benefit both
Listening/receiving - needing both openness and acceptance -- vulnerability being as important as strength
Prioritizing - ordering our connections, our own needs, our values, and our actions
Valuing/celebrating - the ability to appreciate and be grateful is one of the ultimate purposes of consciousness. Think Color Purple: "Everything wants to be love. Trees do everything people do to get attention accept walk. It pisses god off when people walk by the color purple without noticing."
Cultivating/sustaining - we take our celebration of the world one step further when we plant, kern, harvest -- cultivate and perpetuate what grows, in our fields, in our families, in our communities.

Consciousness is our ability not just to notice the world but to construct narratives about it, adding lyrics to the melody of what grows and the rhythm of what is. Plants can dance; we sing.

Love is the degree to which we can strike the balance between our respect for others' autonomy and our attraction to the connection. Where those two things enrich both -- it's healthy love.

Power is the extent to which we can manipulate gravity and pull others into our sphere of influence through both space and time.

Given this definition, what makes a good politician? What's the difference to the universe between Hitler and Martin Luther King, Jr.? Those who strike a balance between protecting the rights of the individual with the good of the community. Beware of any leader who asks for personal sacrifice for the good of all -- or asks that individuals compromise what they know to be right for a bigger cause.

So what is justice? That which maintains the balance between autonomy at the small scale and connection at the large scale over space and time. What is expedient in the short-term but doesn't lead to a sustainable connection over time? Not just. That which asks the community to bear the burden of negative impacts for what's good for one little capitalist at one point in history? Not just.

There are implications for faith that I'm still trying to explore. This is the first pass. As Prof. Claudia Isaac would say, it's the first pass at creating the groove in the head. Each pass makes it deeper.

Voces Book - coming this Spring!

2007-10-03T13:15:00.001-06:00

This is the cover for the Voces Program Anthology coming out from UNM Press this Spring.

I am sooooo excited!

Dare to (Just) Be

2007-09-24T15:03:00.000-06:00

Realize the strength
in weakness

in the space between
stronger forces.

You do not need to be the mountain
or the man rolling the boulder up its hill.

You can be the stone resting
the apple already fallen

the shade that gives comfort
because it is not the sun.

Thought 3 - Visions by William C. Martin

2007-08-24T13:13:00.000-06:00

A wise [planner] does not inspire people
with grand visions
for the visions will become [illusions].
A prudent [teacher] will not call attention to achievement
for that will separate people into “achievers”
and “non-achievers.”
The follower of the Word will not encourage
displays of wealth [or power]
for all will be dissatisfied.
But the one who serves the Word
will quiet the noisy heart,
clarify sight,
simplify the busy life,
and reduce the plethora of needs
so the people may see clearly and with purity
without being pushed or pulled.

The [community] becomes holy on its own.

Thought 2 - Priorities, by William C. Martin

2007-08-24T13:07:00.000-06:00

To consider your preaching
of more importance than the opening of a flower
is to leave the narrow path.
To value certain appointments on your daily calendar
and resent others as intrusions
is to misunderstand the Word.
To esteem and enjoy some people in your [life]
and to discount and dismiss others
is to wobble blindly.
To meet the needs of others
and ignore the whispers of your own soul
is to succumb to the illusion
that there is a time more precious than now,
and a place more heavenly than here.

Thought 1 - The Word by William C. Martin

2007-08-24T12:56:00.000-06:00

You are a minister of the Word
but not of words.
The Word was in the beginning before words
and beyond words.
And whether they weave sophisticated patterns
of intellectual magic,
or they strike with passion
at the heart of the people’s emotions,
words are not Word
for the Word is inexhaustible.
One can only stand in wonder
and point.

from The Art of Pastoring: Contemplative Reflections

I connect with this poem on two levels.

I think this goes beyond pastoring to any writer who seeks to connect at the deepest levels with a reader.
It matches my notion of the most we can know and the best we can live.

Things I Still Want to Be

2007-08-10T13:55:00.000-06:00

I've found out that I'm going to have my name on not one but two books coming out next Spring from UNM Press. Both poetry anthologies of sorts -- one a collection from the Voces Program for teens from the National Hispanic Cultural Center, and the other a collection of Slam poems from Albuquerque poets and others here at the National Poetry Slam in 2005.

So I'll have published a book. Check.

Next Spring I'll be taking the exam to become a "certified" planner. That will mean an opportunity to become a project manager at work. So I'll be a real, live community planner for real. Check.

I'm getting married, so I'll be a ... gulp ... wife. Ick. Still sounds horrible even in my mind's back of the throat. Except for the being married to the best partner ever. That part's palatable...

There are things I still want to be, though. A poet, which for me means publishing a poem somewhere "real" where I wasn't a shoe-in.

A teacher, which I'm sure will come in time. Lots of groundwork laid here.

I'd like to be a writer in the morning, maybe a meditation in the morning if I can make that happen. Exerciser? Yogi.

I'd like to ride horses. Read more. Be a mom. Photographer? Researcher.

I want to know more about Native Americans and uranium mining.

Be a cross-cultural mediator.

An author who writes about multiculturalism in place and planning across it. The title: Place & the Politics of Freedom & Inclusion.

I want to be a real-live facilitator. Get hired just to do that.

I want to be ... home right now, cleaning my house.

This weekend, the backyard will get overhauled, and then you know what I'll be?

A gardener.

Two Countries - Naomi Shahib Nye

2007-08-10T13:54:00.001-06:00

Skin remembers how long the years grow
when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel
of singleness, feather lost from the tail
of a bird, swirling onto a step,
swept away by someone who never saw
it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,
slept by itself, knew how to raise a
see-you-later hand. But skin felt
it was never seen, never known as
a land on the map, nose like a city,
hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque
and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.

Skin had hope, that's what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Love means you breathe in two countries.
And skin remembers--silk, spiny grass,
deep in the pocket that is skin's secret own.
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travelers, that people go places
larger than themselves.

Bosque Meditation

2007-06-26T08:47:00.000-06:00

We are cotton
blowing in the winds of time

atoms with empty centers
spinning through space

lending electrons
to those we touch.

We buzz through energy
throwing sparks.

We think
we think

but only when we feel
the balance of our changeability

can we control
our reach

our clumsy
whirling hands

our scissoring feet
our tensile connection

to all we are not
until we are

edges permeable
energy credited

motivation our imagination
life a light of consciousness

in a flickering world.
System within

a system
we echo an understanding

that only all together
can hear.

All that is
shadows all that is not

matter
dark matter

holding pressure on the wound
pumping existence

to our universal body
blowing air into our collective lungs

so we can sing
so light can dance to our music.

Our frequencies play
so quantum reality

can flash from time to time
space to space

erupting into our moments
as we drift

cottonseeds shipping our futures
dizzy or purposeful

into the next second
we are.

Today we listened.
The sun held us calm.

The river let us be
realizing it is not yet time

to reclaim
what we have taken.

Today we learn
how to live in place

strengthen our culture
to protect our city.

Today our centers
shake our hands still.

We
touch

through focus
on this place

our bodies
the bosque

our home
third planet from the sun

warming
with light of a brightening dawn.

Communing

2007-06-06T08:58:00.000-06:00

Voces has started up again, the creative writing class I help teach at the National Hispanic Cultural Center the month of June.

This year, I've scaled back my involvement and turned over my daily mentoring position to a student who started the program six years ago. Now he's the mentor. Pretty great.

On Monday, I led the 25 brand new students in a mental meditation where they were supposed to visit and feel in their bodies a space where they felt totally safe and then one in which they felt the most powerful. Then we wrote about it. Here are my thoughts:

I am safe in the silence of concentration
when even those far away
are here, present, trying.

I am safe in my skin
stretching past thirty
touching and pushing others moving
through teens.

In this courtyard
with water pouring past memories
we belive in our imaginings
and it is alright to write

to be here
to be scared
to be bored
to be.

Tomorrow will come without me
the grass will push past the bottom
less the pit
that falls in the stomach of fear

when voice catches up to faith
and we are all powerful.

Back Bending

2007-04-23T13:25:00.000-06:00

“A life develops in spirals: It always passes through the same points, but at different levels of integration and complexity.” – Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, 1960

At 31
adulthood bends me backward
with a flexibility
born of a strong spine
open to fun
stitched to vertebrae
ground with work,
buffered by acceptance,
flowing in joints
connecting me to what happens
loosely.

My cells gather themselves taller,
brace for mini-me’s needing support
that grow in my imagination
in the space love makes,
illuminating a path toward life
through my belly
even as all of me sees death
coming slowly
and begins the readiness
to say goodbye.

My hands
lining themselves up
itch between the balance
to grasp, to work, to knead,
to let go,
doing each
in turn.

Love arches in my bed,
rolls out in the kitchen,
looking exactly and nothing like
the shadow pictures in my sharp-cornered
childhood room.

Time flattens me
until my understanding
looks like a line
even though it extends
in an infinite plane.

Everywhere I go feels directional from here
although more likely I circle myself,
circumscribed in Sartre's tilting spiral of life –
sometimes climbing up,
often sliding down,
backbending the whole way

as I slinky myself to that cool, calm lake
where life ends
and memory begins –
time’s thickness approaches forever
and I am suspended,
remembering.

Passover - Lynn Unger

2007-04-11T15:54:00.000-06:00

They thought they were safe
that spring night when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?

Forty years in the desert
without a home without a bed
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.

But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.

Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the night sky.

Comings

2007-03-23T14:40:00.000-06:00

Life heats up again, and now it's about words and how they string together to spell community.

On the burner are books -- compiling books, editing, choosing the order of paper. A Voces teen poetry 5-year anthology, a 15-year Slam poetry anthology, a 2-poet chap book. Floating in the back of my head, settling to the bottom of my to-do list, my own book of boys. A closing chapter, one might say, before closing myself off to new boys. Maybe it's just me, but how does one publish poems about old boys when one's first married? Maybe after twenty-five years, it would be refreshing to return to your past. I can see an old married ladies collection. How quaint. How vital she still is!

But a bride? Such a slut. What a mistake! What's she regretting, anyway? These guys sound awful.

Ah, the mantle of bridedom settles close in the night.

This bride shit is getting old, and I'm not even close yet! It's seriously distasteful, and all I can do is push against the tide and try to make this thing something I would still choose to participate in. I've checked, and he's okay living in sin. There's that option. Elope still sounds deliciously simple until one checks the hangover factor. Years, they say.

Between those two stones -- books and weddings -- life slips like sand.

If only days were as long as they once were. I grew lifetimes in the summer. Now? The year comes in two bite-size chunks: Days getting longer, days getting shorter. Everything between? All relative.

From Childhood to Here

2007-03-09T08:55:00.000-07:00

It was a time when solitude grew on me

grew me

like the breeze blows on seedlings

kindling them skyward.

The sadness weighed me

adding wisdom not yet lived

acceptance of grief not yet given.

It was breaking,

the way earth pushes through chickenwire

the way crème brule offers itself to the tongue

the way lovers are coaxed open

the way wise men are pried from their families.

I knew then this stillness

that I’ve found again in faith

in the courage to feel everything

ripen under my witness

to feel sad and grounded and broken

all at once

and know I am home

that I am here to greet me

that I never left

yet know more now

having been away.

Commitment Sunday

2007-03-01T09:16:00.000-07:00

Forgive me the repetition, but I wanted to post the "pulpit editorial" [oh boy...] I gave last Sunday. It was a hit. I have to say that writing it was easy. It seemed to have a circular structutre that rang true to me. When I was practicing it, it started to seem thin. I was pretty worried! There was so much that I wasn't saying (even though it was way longer than it was supposed to be!).

I read it during both services, and the 9:30 service is much more reserved and traditional than the 11 am. I got laughs (which I was going for) at the later service, but Christine assured me she saw some people wiping some tears away during first service, too, so I guess that's good.

I want to post it here to honor the bravery I could muster to say any of this at all -- to myself not to mention to the whole church.

I'm very much wondering where I'm going in my life at the moment. It feels like there are a lot of big things in motion -- glacial shift, I like to tell myself. Pick a continent or be ready to stretch into the splits... There's work movement and poetry community movement (thanks to those supporters there to see me read TWICE this month -- crazy -- after not having read at a public poetry event in, well, fourteen YEARS) and personal movement (thanks, by the way, to my crazy heart-friends who just presented me with the Anti-Bride Planner). I feel like I'm preparing for something... who knows what ... but something big and good.

So here it is in its entirety.

Christine asked me to share with you today the story of my finding this church and making myself a home here. It’s a long story, so I hope you’ll bear with me through the twists and the turns.

When I was little, I used to sit at my window, watching the rain and feeling myself filled with the overwhelming beauty of the world. My little cup runneth over, and I cried and cried with the aching power I felt in witnessing and connecting to … well … everything. Looking back, I realize that was my own kind of meditation. I did it a lot.

At the time, there was plenty to cry about – the usual family griefs, being an American in the 20^th century – namely divorce & family financial stress. Maybe I was crying about those things, but what I remember about those moments is feeling simultaneously bigger than myself – elevated above my personal worries – and suitably small – recognizing the importance of being that single witness in that particular time.

I went to church a lot as a little girl. Always the over-achiever, I liked going to school even on the weekends, and there was something compelling about the stories, even though I didn’t believe them to be literally true. When my family stopped attending, I went with friends and neighbors. My sister remembers me begging my mother to take me.

When I was twelve or thirteen, a family friend asked me about my faith. I told him what I believed – that everything in the universe is connected through energy, almost as if every particle were an instrument that together formed sections within the universal symphony playing time. I thought it was a beautiful description; he said it wasn’t faith at all – it was science – and that I didn’t believe in God. I never knew that was an option!

As I was approaching the teenage years, I embraced it with a passion that mortified my non-church going family when I announced to all of Albuquerque that I was an atheist in response to a reporter’s question about a lawsuit barring the invocation at my high school graduation. My family still brings that up. In my own defense, it was true at the time, and I was siding with freedom from persecution and the separation of church and state! (See – latent UU even then!)

I stayed an atheist a long time, but an atheist who believed fervently in the power of community, the transcendence of connection through language, and in the beauty of quantum physics. I pretty much gave up the idea of ever finding myself comfortable in a church again.

Then my sister had children. Her husband’s family is Christian and were quite sad that their grandchildren would grow up without a religious community. Maybe it wasn’t what they had in mind, but my sister decided to bring them here, for the religious education. She was pretty surprised, I think, when she started learning as much as the girls from attending church. She kept telling me about these amazing sermons by Christine. We’d talk about them for hours. I knew I had to check this out.

I was not prepared for the visceral shock of going to church – how familiar it would be and how different: The singing, the silence buzzing among us during meditation, the compassion and acceptance that underscored every word. I kept waiting to hear the things I would disagree with. This was church, after all. But they never came. Instead, I felt broken open time and again, feeling the power of connection that feels a lot like faith. When my sister and I sit together on Sundays, we can’t stop looking at each other, checking to see if the other one is crying, too.

My exploration of belief keeps getting broader the longer I’m here, and for a girl who went to college to learn everything about everything – and then stayed there for 13 years trying to do just that … it’s a blessing I can hardly believe.

I’m telling you this because I think the story itself is enough. But there is more. Two weeks ago, I signed the book and became a member after attending church here for over four years. It was so hard to join a church – even one I agree with as much as this one. But this community, this church, the work that we do together – in the RE program where I’m helping these fabulous mid-high students, the social action group, our ministry that keeps getting bigger and bigger – is important enough to me that I’m pledging part of my fledgling career salary to help support it. I can’t thank you enough for helping to support me. And to my sister, who’s been there for so much for so long, I say: thank you for giving me back the memory of my faith. It’s been a long time gone.

Space-time Jello Joy

2007-01-24T08:52:00.000-07:00

Since the universe
wriggles like space-time jello,

we two carrot sticks
puddle somewhere in the vicinity of Mars,

meeting on the marshmallow
called North America.

The earth streaks backward/below/before us
as our pickup carrot sticks cross in AD 2006,

random as atoms smashing
like party cocktail glasses for a good toast.

We agree
after months of squirming around Albuquerque

to braid futures,
entwine our nows.

If you hold the universe in your hand
all ice-block frozen,

you see us only as blur,
all of our moments fuzzed into an unclear picture

or perhaps only one
harmonized buzz.

What will feel like years to us
won’t even bubble air in that spacetime block.

Our dance of experiences shared and unshared
will only look like our lives

when you zoom in close,
layered with invisible emotions

that show up as color,
or perhaps as song

accompanying the visual light
of molecules vibrating themselves

to connect forward and backward
in space, in time.

What my mind loves is taking the tour
again and again

from disconnection –
singular perception –

to connection –
there is no space, all is fabric –

from small – we are molecules –
to large – all is all –

knowing now,
experiencing later,

treasuring always,
forward and backward in time,

this dance
with you,

my carrot stick
tasting a lot like joy.

Growth & Changes

2006-12-19T09:42:00.000-07:00

I've been silent for a while.

Lots of internal and external changes that I wanted to sit quietly and feel. Sometimes it feels like ice melting. Sometimes it feels like a kaleidoscope shift of ice patterns. Either way, I believe beauty has grown in me, and it's a little startling.

The thaw began with graduating from school after 30 years. Then falling in love. Then opening myself to faith (of sorts). Then entering into an engagement. All life changing events. All in the last 6 months.

This thing, this pairing, this delicate seed of happiness and a future together has been a quiet miracle that unfolds a little more every day. I've hesitated to tell people. Part of that is knowing that what it means to me will be lost in the translation, and in that crack can enter all kinds of assumptions and judgments that I don't yet want to hear.

Part of that is having time to deal with my own overwhelming fears regarding marriage -- what commitments mean and whether I am actually capable of intimacy over the long haul, regardless of the fact that it's always been what I've wanted. Wanting and ability are two very different things. I've got a lot of baggage about marriage from my own family, from what our society tells us the confines of that designation are, etc.

While much of these fears have grown quieter over the last few weeks, the one that's still roaring in my ears is resistance to the hierarchy of love. What I don't like about marriage is the sense that this relationship suddenly has primacy above all others. That assumption justifies the atomic family's isolation in a suburban home. This is not what I want. It's one reason why I'm adamant about keeping my current living arrangement of sharing a house with a dear friend, living close to my sister, spending multiple evenings with other friends.

Even so, I feel the bond between Eric & I solidifying, stabilizing ... which really just means that I'm coming to trust its reality, its permanency, its gravity. Maybe at some point, I will come to terms with a relationship of 2+ in every situation. Maybe there's safety there, maybe love, maybe even freedom. I don't know. At the moment, I'm still holding out for other possibilities.

Thankfully, there are months and months before a ceremony making this connection even more real. By the time laws are involved, I hope my uneasiness has been resolved in me. Until then, I grow, and the seed continues to sprout.

Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

2006-11-20T14:31:00.000-07:00

Oh my.

I've found the poet that fuses physics and spirituality in an intricate dance. I'm so infused with spirit, I think this is what people call conversion. Terrifying and so unbelievably beautiful.

Rilke denounces a personified god and instead talks to the universe. He sees human beings as the great witnesses to beauty -- celebrating and loving all that exists. In that sense, we are creators -- touching things with life so they can be seen. Heisenberg would agree; we touch all that exists when we witness it, and both are changed. Rilke says it better.

The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my sense ring with it.
I feel it now: there's a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

If you accept that the entire universe is connected in the way that particles witness each other when they interact, then the totality of that universe becomes whole in a way that some would call God. This feeling of connection and being bound inextricably to all that exists is what others would call love.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Naming God

2006-11-12T20:17:00.000-07:00

Having come full circle on "going to church," I find myself trying again to name the thing that I'm once again admitting to myself as spiritual belief.

I used to love going to church as a kid. My family was Episcopalian, and I enjoyed the somber ceremony and formal beauty of our services. For a while. Then I just really liked being somewhere as a family where we couldn't fight. And Mom always had Breathsavers wintergreen when we just couldn't sit still. For the most part, we kids were ushered off to Sunday School -- they weren't kidding when they called it that. We had lessons to do and worksheets to fill out, and after completing each one, you put a star on this little chart showing your progress. As a compulsive overachiever -- I learned a lot in a short amount of time. I had to! We were incredibly intermittent church goers, and more often than not, I had to dig up my folder from a separate box, where they put all the little-used folders of all the kids whose families didn't come all that often. Very embarrassing. I don't remember interacting with anyone, but I still loved learning all the stories of the bible.

Then when my parents got divorced, neither one would go back to the church. Too embarrassing, I guess. My father stayed episcopalian until his new church decided they wanted to be bigoted and separated from that denomination in order to keep out gays. My mother turned to New Ageism. She's now a curandera and a white witch -- subtle distinction to be sure, but it's there. When she planned to miss the birth of her first grandchild, she instructed my sister to squeeze a crystal that she'd infused with her good energy whenever my sister needed her. (Needless to say, that crystal never made it in the room.)

I begged to go to church with friends and neighbors. For quite a while I attended a Presbyterian church. I liked the optimism and good cheer, but I was always a little suspicious -- where were people with dark sides? Certainly I couldn't fit in here, coming as I did from a broken home with secrets. And the emphasis on Jesus was a bit much. I never really thought he was a personal friend. Still, there was a tape of songs about God that I loved, and I remember singing one at night and crying because it was all so beautiful -- this whole world and our being here to love it.

Then an adult friend of the family told me once that I didn't believe in God because I only believed in the universe and energy. I accepted that I was an athiest for years, especially because as a teenager, I wanted as much distance from those happy fanatics as I could get, going so far as to announce on tv at my high school graduation that I didn't believe in God. I didn't think it was a big deal, but I found out quickly how theistic my non-church-going family really was.

Now, I go to the UU church, and I find myself tearing up almost every Sunday at the power of people coming together in a spirt of support and hope. UUs are realists; we talk dark side. We talk politics; we talk war. And so I search for books and sources of inspiration and sustenance to grow this little spiritual side of mine. I haven't found much that moves me. The affirmations and sermons provide the most steady stream of soul food. Being a scholar, though, I want the printed word.

Christine challenged us to create our own book of revelations, a compendium of readings that speak to us -- nurture, calm, inspire, console, and sustain. That seems daunting, so instead I'm going to compile the names for this "god" of mine that can sum up or shed light on what it is I do believe, if it's not a personified being.

impulse toward love and growth
powers of healing
spirit of peace
place of sustenance
community of the wakeful

In this space of indirection, I'm thankful for the time to hear my breath and listen for a soul.

Song of Hope and Despair -- Norbert Capek

2006-11-12T19:40:00.000-07:00

Now a popular hymn, this poem, "Mother Spirit, Father Spirit" was written by a Czech minister after he was taken by the Gestapo to a death camp in World War II. He died in Dachau in 1942.

You can hear the melody here. It's haunting. Quite literally. The same minister invented a yearly celebration of life and renewal used in many UU churches -- the Flower Communion.

Mother Spirit, Father Spirit, where are you?
In the sky song, in the forest, sounds your cry.
What to give you, what to call you, what am I?

Many drops are in the ocean, deep and wide.
Sunlight bounces off the ripples to the sky.
What to give you, what to call you, who am I?

I am empty, time flies from me; what is time?
Dreams eternal, fears infernal haunt my heart.
What to give you, what to call you, what am I?

Mother Spirit, Father Spirit, take our hearts.
Take our breath and let our voices sing our parts.
Take our hands and let us work to shape our art.

This is my song -- Lloyd Stone (1934)

2006-11-12T19:28:00.000-07:00

This is my song, o God of all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating,
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
Oh hear my song, o God of all the nations,
A song of peace for their land and for mine.

Hear a beautiful a cappella version here.

Letters to a Young Poet -- Rilke

2006-11-06T10:02:00.000-07:00

I forget how much wisdom is out there to remember. From his amazing Letters to a Young Poet, the ever-wise Rilke:

[H]ave patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

A Religious Iconoclast's Melancholy Recollections of Childhood -- Michael Meyerhofer

2006-11-06T09:53:00.000-07:00

Courtesy Lisa (thank you!):

How would it have been for us
had they who taught the universe
every bleary Sunday morning
included with Hebrews and Acts
the lost Gospel of Thomas,
the death poetry of Zen monks,
Einstein's theory of relativity?

How would it have been to see
women in the same robes as men,
preaching philosophy alongside
those same fearful cliches of hell-
to know Jesus as olive-skinned
with hair like thick black thread,
a boy who suckled and liked it?

How would it have been to touch
the common chalice of our bodies
and feel without reproach the blood
roaring inside us like boiled wine,
to know God as wind and the atom,
to accept a universe that swells
and contracts like a beating heart?

How easy it would be to believe
that all our terrible doubts are born
from hearing only half the story,
that they in an inexcusable madness
rob or ignore what they cannot
understand-- that if we had it all,

we'd actually be closer to home.

Teeth: Exposed, Decaying Bone

2006-11-02T13:41:00.000-07:00

Several trips to the dentist to replace a crown, and I'm left spinning thinking about teeth.

Bones protruding from our fleshy gums. Washed with bacteria. Crevices hiding all manner of gunk.

Devices for tearing at other animals' flesh. And chomping plants.

And smiling.

The opening quote from the Secret Lives of Dentists sums this up perfectly:

Teeth outlast everything.
Death is nothing to a tooth.
Hundreds of years in acidic soil just keep teeth clean.
A fire that burns away  everything else, hair and skin...
even bones, leaves your teeth dazzling.
Open.
Life is what destroys teeth.

When do transitions end?

2006-11-01T22:09:00.000-07:00

I'm underwater in another life-transition stage.

But suddenly I feel like I'm always saying that. It's a perpetual state, and I'm starting to understand ... it's life. And it's a fatal condition.

I cannot believe the pace with which the weeks and months fly by, even as I curse the slow-ticking clock some days at work. Viktor Frankl, holocaust survivor and author of Man's Search for Meaning, describes the same phenomenon for camp victims. The days lasted eternities, but the months flew by.

Not that my life is in any way comparable to that ultimate horror, but the human perception does have similarities across time.

What's Rational

2006-10-09T17:13:00.000-06:00

“As we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.” -- Congresswoman Barbara Lee, in voting against the resolution for war in Iraq

Thirsting for the Spiritual

2006-09-29T09:31:00.000-06:00

Having come to the end (for now) of my academic quest, I'm finding myself thirsty these days for spiritual stories. There's a deadness or a dryness or a distance that I'm trying to spark back to life. It feels cyclical and maybe chemical, in the way that you need different things at different points of your life.

So, an atheist most of my life, I find myself deeply involved in the First Unitarian Church here in Albuquerque. The truth is that as a kid, I loved going to church. I'm a community junky but somewhat of an introvert, so the structured interaction paired with some degree of enforced anonymity (because not many people are who they REALLY are in church -- you're just your Sunday church self!) always felt really good and really safe to me. The only thing I didn't like was hearing so many things I didn't agree with -- things about god or sin or obedience or judgment...

So imagine my surprise and elation when attending the UU church for the first time and hearing messages of social justice, individual reason, support of diverse beliefs. Almost every time I go, I find myself weeping because something said taps this hollow place inside where the fullness of spiritual communion -- with people of peace from all over the world -- should be.

This Sunday, Christine will talk about a UU minister during WWII who risked everything to help Jewish refugees in Prague escape from the Holocaust.

Sunday, October 1
"Love Will Guide Us"
The Rev. Christine Robinson

In the years before World Wart II, a Unitarian minister and his wife traveled to Prague to help the Unitarians there deal with refugees from the developing Holocaust. The Israeli government honored them this year as among the "Righteous of the Nations." I was honored to be present at the ceremony in Washington, D.C., last month, and will reflect on these two heroes and what their story has to say for us in these days.

Click here to read the story from the Washington Post.

There's a dearth of sources for good stories these days: occasional news items, Democracy Now, good friends, some literature, and now, for me, the occasional sermon. I'm happy to have one more place to go to feel full and supported and free to think, feel, and begin to understand. Overwhelmingly, the message is one of hope -- for peace, for acceptance, for tolerance -- despite a resolute acknowledgement of all that we face in the world today. I need that.

Change

2006-09-21T13:23:00.000-06:00

From a beautiful sermon (9/10/06) by Rev. Christine Robinson of First Unitarian Church:

When you embrace change as the not-always-easy fundamental of life, you are aligning your energy with reality, and that in turn will not only make things flow more easily for you, but will give profound meaning to even the most painful changes you will encounter.

Much of the pain of change is self-inflicted. It’s caused, not by the change itself, but by our reaction to change. It’s caused by denial and resistance, how we stiffen up and harden our attitudes as we face change, rather than mustering our curiosity, softening our wills, and embracing the new.
...
All that resistance we put up to just making the change that we need to make suggests that we’re not really ready and are not taking care of ourselves in the midst of change. And how do we do that?

Whole books have been written on this subject, but here are three important strategies that have a spiritual bent to them. They are:

acknowledge your losses and deal gently with whatever in you feels it is losing,
be appreciative and show your appreciations, and
keep what you value and believe uppermost.

There’s huge wisdom in the comment that most of us spell the word “change” L-O-S-S, and it often surprises me as I talk to people during times of change in their lives how reluctant they are to acknowledge what they have lost and to let themselves feel the pain. Instead, they often beat up on themselves for “living in the past” or “wallowing in sadness,” or, alternatively, and men are particularly good at this, for channeling their feelings of loss, which they find unacceptable, into actions of anger.

But it is OK to feel loss. We are hard-wired to hang on tight to the things we think will keep us safe and happy…to love what is mortal and hold it to our bones as if our lives depended on it, as Mary Oliver says. We don’t need to go through the trauma of change beating ourselves up for feeling bad. Usually our grief is like a little toddler who tugs on your pants for attention over and over again until you think you’ll go crazy…but if you just bend down and pay her a little bit of attention, she’ll be soothed and go on her way. Ignore her, though, and there’s hell to pay in the end.

Secondly, be appreciative and share your appreciations. When we’re stressed out, this doesn’t come naturally to us; we often have to do it by discipline. It’s worth it though. Voicing our appreciations gets us out of ourselves, if only for a moment, puts us in a better frame of mind, influences people to be of assistance to us and even, believe it or not, research shows this, puts endorphins in our system and helps us to be more effective in dealing with stress.

One thing I did while on sabbatical was attend training sessions to equip me to debrief people after traumas and disasters, something that I’ve meant to do ever since 9/11. As a part of that training, we listened to the dialogue between air traffic controllers and the pilot of a plane that had lost its controlling mechanisms. We then watched the plane land, and then crash; about 200 people died in that crash. That was disaster debriefer training boot camp. One of the things I most vividly remember about that experience is that, as the pilot approached the runway, knowing that a crash was likely, he said to the air traffic controller, with just a little catch in his voice, “Thank you for your help. You did the best you could.”

Now, this might seem to you like a breathtaking display of spiritual maturity…a pilot, facing the most unwelcome possible set of changes in what had been a routine day’s work, in the midst of bringing every ounce of training and skill he had, stopped to thank those who had done all they could.

The pilot survived that crash. Due, no doubt, to all that skill and training, and to the physics of the impact, but perhaps also in some small part because of the endorphins of gratitude and ability to relax into all that was his life in that terrible moment.
...
Thirdly, know, as you struggle with your chosen or unchosen change, that when you soften your attitude and let yourself go with the flow that is all that is your life, you are aligning yourself with the great force at the heart of things, which we call by many names. ..

[M]y theology tells me that the great powers of healing and renewal…hear those words about change…the forces that fuel the great radiance that was at the beginning of time and space, the most basic, fundamental reality we can ever know is alive with change. And when we relax into the changes that are required of us, we’re not just living ploddingly effective lives; we are partaking of and swimming in the reality of realities.
...
God is the mess itself, the evolution, the shove we get to grow, more like the exquisite beauty of trees growing through seasons and loosing their seeds to grow in new places other than the perfect statue of a tree, solid, pure, and never changing. God is more like the dying person who learns, at last, to say thank you and really mean it, the new parent who says goodbye to childless freedom and embraces the responsibility of growing another human being, the man who inventories his life and decides to give up the demon drink, the victim who makes the best of her life in spite of her oppressions and uses what she learned to help others. That’s God’s work in the world. Even more radical, that’s God’s being in the world. In creation with the rest of us, moving slowly and with plenty of losses and reverses, toward greater love, gratitude, and
understanding of mystery.

So. That unwelcome change that I need to make? I’ll still grieve my losses, soothe my inner child, and mope a bit. I’ll still count my blessings and focus on my strengths and move on into all that is my life. And I’ll do it with a sense, not of fighting off my faults or being on a hopeless journey toward perfection, but of simply being a pilgrim on life’s path, deeply participating in the precious mystery at the heart of the universe…that change is perpetually in the air, that it is what brings us not only delight, but growth in spirit, and that that is not just the condition of our life, but its very meaning.