Monday Morning

Soccer Saturday

2011-10-22T17:54:00.008-04:00

Saturday birthed a perfect Michigan September morning: cloudless cerulean sky; clean, cold air; golden sun rays spotlighting pockets of newly turned leaves.

September Saturdays are soccer days. We had to chauffeur Marshall to an SAT exam and Micah to marching band, but after that Scott and I planned to park our lawn chairs in the mushy grass at the middle school and enjoy an hour of what he likes to call mob-ball (as anyone who has ever seen a bunch of 8-year-olds play soccer will understand). Our son, Ethan, is new to soccer this year and his exuberance is catching. He counts the days in between practice and games, and lays out all of his gear the night before.

After letting Ethan out in front of the school, we parked on the street and unloaded our paraphernalia (chairs, coats, blankets, coffee mugs). I waved as my parents drove up behind us.

As we walked toward the soccer fields, I scanned the scene for green jerseys. There was only one, Ethan, and he was running toward us. I smiled, but as he came close I could see that he was near tears.

“What’s the matter, honey? Can’t you find your team?”

“The game is done,” he said, restrained tears wobbling his voice. “It’s already over!” he gushed. And then the tears.

As a parent, the most perplexing thing I have to do is let my children feel loss. I feel as if I’ve put them on a roller coaster in a seat with a faulty harness or asked them to turn around and face an oncoming train; I feel their nakedness, their defenselessness, and I know they are about to have the wind knocked clean out of them.

As a human being, the most perplexing thing I feel is loss. I feel diminished by it, un-done by it. There is no question of whether it is natural; everything dies, everything passes away, making space for the new—new flowers, new puppies, new people, new moments, new ages. But there is also no question that loss is perennially impossible for us to accept. We want to hold everything at once. Life seeks homeostasis; in fact, all of the change in a living system could be characterized as an attempt to stay the same—to go on living, to retain its essence, to maintain. The organism remains so long as it keeps the upper hand on entropy, but this is a losing battle. If we plot it, life and entropy form an arc, of which life owns the beginning and entropy, the end. We walk this globe, dropping pieces of ourselves all over it. We know how the story ends. Loss engulfs us with our first breath and abates only when we have drawn our last. Every held breath, every sharp intake of air, every gasp in between is merely preparation.

Ironically, living—or maintaining—depends upon our ability to metabolize loss. We have to eat loss, spread it around like fertilizer and pull from this diffuse flatland the energy to create something new. Few do this well, but I like to imagine the best and wisest of us as magicians, waging entropy against itself; Abracadabra! A lack becomes a presence, loss turns into gain.

Saturday morning in the soccer field, seeing my son in the path of a moving train, I knew I had to tell him to turn around. It would be so much easier to distract him: take him out for ice cream, go to the movies or send him off with Grandma for a special afternoon. There is nothing wrong with these things, but they are candy for a scraped knee—mere distraction; a good tack, perhaps, for a skinned knee, but should he move on as quickly from this loss? Soccer is joy to him. Soccer—this morning, this game—was beauty to him, was life, and I could strip him of his loyalty to it with one fell scoop of lemon sorbet.

“Ethan, I am so sorry,” I said.

He let me hold him for a moment, but he was still crying as he got into the car. I explained to him that I must have looked at the wrong schedule (my refrigerator sports five, at the moment) and that I was really sorry. I asked him to forgive me and he nodded, but every so often a fresh sadness overtook him.

By the time we reached home he had turned from mourning to sulking. This is common with Ethan; sadness turns into acting out. He curled up like a pill bug on the back seat and refused to come out of the car, offering me only his hard exterior when I approached.

“Ethan, I already told you how sorry I am and you forgave me. There is nothing else I can do. It’s okay to be sad, but the way you’re acting now hurts my feelings.”

He rushed out of the car and into the house with a big, angry wail. I followed, feeling simultaneously exasperated and like a heel. I needed to get by myself for a bit, so I went to my bedroom. Ethan was lying in my bed, on my pillow, with the blankets pulled up over his head. I knew right away that his anger had shifted from his personal loss to his offense against my feelings. As adults, we don’t always know what to do with strong emotion, but for a child, navigating emotional territory is immensely frightening. When Ethan thinks he has hurt me, his compass goes completely haywire. He pushes where he wants to pull, he acts offended where he wants to be forgiven.

I climbed in the bed beside him and touched his back, but he shook me off, pulling the blanket tighter around his head. I put my arms around him, but he thrashed out of my grasp and wormed his way to the other side of the bed. He scooted nearer to me, then away again, nearer, then away when I touched his shoulder. “Ethan,” I said. “Are you angry with me? It’s okay if you are.”

“No,” he said. But the blanket went back over the head.

“Then why are you pulling away from me? I know you feel bad about making me feel bad, but I’m okay. I’m fine. I just feel sad for you that you missed your soccer game. I know how much it meant to you and I love you so much.”

He turned then, encompassed me with his arms and buried his face in my neck. We were still for what seemed like a long time, or not like time at all—like being, it seemed like being. He turned his face toward the ceiling but did not otherwise move.

“BEEP!” I pressed his nose with my finger, like I used to when he was little. He giggled.

“HONK!” He pressed my nose. I laughed.

“Do it again!” he said. I obliged.

“Cock-a-doodle-dew!”

After we had made our way through the farm animals, jungle animals and not a few random mouth noises, he said, “I’m going to draw a picture on your back.” It was a picture of me.

A few days later a card came in the mail from my mother to Ethan, telling him again how sorry she was for his loss and even recounting a time, of which I have only the vaguest memory, that she got mixed up and somehow missed my performance of a classroom play.

After he had read the card, he took out a pencil and wrote something along the bottom.

“Mommy, we have to send this back,” he said with a smile, and he handed me the card. In pencil, in 3^rd grade scrawl was written, Ethan does not care about the soccer game. My son, the magician.

Love swallows up death, love transforms loss. Love remains.

Oh, death, where is thy sting? Oh, grave where is thy victory?

I hope that in the end I will be able to summon a pad and pencil and write sincerely, in death’s-door scrawl, Rachael does not care about the loss.

Snow

2009-12-04T11:30:00.001-05:00

We packed 460 lunches for local school children in an hour and a half, assembly-line style: Pudding cup, juice box, apple, snack mix, cheese sandwich, bologna sandwich. Eliot was at the apple station, Ethan covered the snack mix.

As we left, the first snow was falling—wet pavement, white rooftops and lawns. “Oh, look at the snow!” I crooned to the boys. Ethan was already etching his name on the car window with a warm finger. This is the first winter he can write his name.

I let down my window; the snow clumped and stood four inches tall, where the glass had been. The boys found this spectacular. We rolled slowly down quiet city streets, held by the wonder of Christmas lights in the snow. “It’s a Christmas miracle!” Eliot said.

Depression is sometimes delineated as a negative schema the brain adopts, in response to childhood trauma or stress. There are other explanations: hormonal imbalance, insufficient levels of neurotransmitters. Cortisol, serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine. I have my own theories—general theories, including the unique nature of modern alienation, the corrupting power of affluence and consumerism; and specific ones I’d dare not apply to anyone but me. The truth is probably what it usually is: intricate.

Last night a volunteer coordinator supervised our lunch-making, on her birthday. “What a perfect way to spend your birthday, isn’t it?” observed a fellow coordinator.

A few days ago I let my tongue loose while it was Under the Influence of Negative Schema and in the vicinity of my older children. I lied. I said I didn’t believe in change, didn’t believe that people could change, didn’t believe it mattered anyway, and I didn’t believe in joy.

I don’t need to tell you what the last decade of my life has been—how I’ve squandered my time, money, talent, health or that I’ve lived in pursuit of the Great Sop and become ornery, unkind, and aloof. Is it enough, instead, to say that I awoke crying this morning before I knew why, wearing a powder-blue volunteer shirt and remembering the snow?

Meet Lucy

2008-03-05T22:11:00.003-05:00

She's eight years old, transplanted here, after her owners of seven years moved to an apartment with no room for a pet. We hope she spends her golden years well and learns to love us. She's a good old girl.

Winter Ending

2007-08-14T01:26:00.000-04:00

When skies conspire
to suffocate the light
and leaves wither
and breathing creatures crawl into
ground-holes and wait--
winter lays its stiff shroud
of snow; and all is silent.

This winter has been long,
Narnian: not wicked in itself
but ill-conceived.
There has been no war
for many years but
neither has there been
feasting. Our dim hearth fires
have not brought joy and have made
no gains upon the cold.

I discovered today, while
folding a child's shirt,
that I begin to want goodness;
not merely as a matter of course
but as longing.

Ah, the melt begins!

What We're Missing

2007-05-01T22:36:00.000-04:00

Lightening struck two of my neighbor's trees today; it was unlike anything I've ever seen--split a huge old Oak tree right down the middle. It's still standing there, stripped of most of its bark, a slit in the center, letting light through. Another tree next to it lost all its bark on one side. There are splinters and fragments all over the yard, but no big branches or pieces of the trunk fell at all, no chunks or slabs of bark--its as if the Looney Tunes' Tasmanian Devil roared by, or a sudden plague of locusts. Now you see it, now you don't. Pow! The trees stand naked and ashamed.

The power went out all over the neighborhood at the exact moment of the strike--a bright flash, a sizzle, and a pop--then all was dark. I prayed my new computer was safe. I hoped I'd have refrigeration again before my milk spoiled. Since our well pump is electric, I couldn't wash dishes or laundry or even flush my toilet more than once. I couldn't work (or dawdle) on my computer, I couldn't listen to radio or use the phone. So, I lit candles in my living room and did puzzles with my four year old son. He said the candles were pretty and was more excited than usual at finding where each puzzle piece exactly fit.

Later, while I sat with my legs tucked under me, reading on the couch where the light was strongest, everything turned on, again. I did take a moment--a long one--to notice the change, but I did jump up, then and check my email to see what I had missed while the world went on and my neighborhood slept. I had missed nothing. But all afternoon and into the evening, cars pulled off and stopped along my street and people stared, dumbstruck at the naked trees.

Stopping By Woods

2007-02-26T22:43:00.000-05:00

A poet could say many things

About a white wood;

I can only say

That I brought my heart here

And stepped mildly aside

There is a wound that only

A white wood understands,

With its eternal memory

Of bark and leaf and forest floor

Of the man and his dog

Who are back again,

Standing in the same place

But finding it new

More Qube Stuff

2007-02-23T13:25:00.000-05:00

My new blog at Qube Books has been filling my writing time, and this blog has fallen by the wayside. I plan to change that by finding more writing time. In the mean time, I am enjoying thinking and writing about Qube questions. If you read the blog or are interested in the idea behind it, you can join the qube books mailing list by emailing info@pencil-sharp.com

Birthday Boy

2007-02-07T17:42:00.000-05:00

Ethan turned four, yesterday. I asked him, "How old are you?"

"I'm three years old," he said.

"Nope. It's your birthday today. That makes you four years old." He giggled and looked at me sideways, the way he does when he can't figure out if I'm serious or pulling his leg.

"Silly mommy. I'm three years old," he said.

.......

Four years and eight months ago, a faint pink line announced him to me. He was a tiny parasite, with a beating heart; I was his host. I began talking to him when no one was around, as I had to each child before--beginning with the first, unwelcome one, who took root in my immature womb. I held the secret close, then, because I was afraid; but I let it sink deep into me and fill me with wonder.

I held the secret of Ethan, too. I talked to him, let him sink in and waited for the wonder. I wasn't ready. I wasn't well. I was afraid.

.......

His birth was a miracle, for the ordinary reason of new and tender life. His perfect lungs gulped up the air of our world--air polluted by cruelty and want, and made pure through love and beauty. He cried, and he purified the room with his trembling wails.

It was a miracle, too, because a holy stillness caught and held me, and I labored without pain. I fell silent, listened and waited for the wonder.

.......

"I'm three years old" is a phrase of definition and identity, which my son has applied to himself for a whole year--as long as he remembers. Yesterday, I took that away and gave him a new tag to wear. Four years ago, he had already re-named me by the time I blessed his wet head with my lips.

Ethan talked to his grandmother today. I held the phone to his ear and kissed his forehead. He said, "Hi Grandma. I'm four years old."

Ear Drums and Intuition

2006-12-19T15:41:00.000-05:00

I've had a cough for a month now, and three days ago I coughed forcefully enough to burst my ear drum. It isn't really painful, but I've lost a great amount of hearing in that ear. The Dr. says it should come back, as the perforation heals, but healing may take several months. The biggest inconvenience (other than being deaf in one ear) is that I get episodes of vertigo and nausea; on the other hand, it is nice to hear all my boys' crying and fighting at a muted level. I'm naturally keeping my voice down, too, because it is much louder to me now, inside my head. My neighbor put shock collars on his dogs to keep them from running into my yard or the street; my ruptured ear drum is my shock collar--if I raise my voice above a quiet, controlled tone, I pay for it. I think every frazzled mother should try it...

I've been reading a paper by Hubert Dreyfus, and it has me thinking about intuition. What is it? Where does it come from? Can it be developed or stifled? And what, if anything, does it have to do with the creative process? Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Genius Insomniac

2006-12-14T10:24:00.000-05:00

I believe this is the first time I have ever posted, just to post. So, if you don't like bloggers who ramble, hit the back button in your web browser, NOW.

So I'll tell you what's up with me. Over the past few weeks I have unintentionally developed a new habit, in place of some old ones. Insomnia! And, unfortunately, it has nothing to do with coffee or exercise or medication. Here's what's been happening: every night, no matter what time I go to bed, I sleep fitfully and wake at 5:00 A.M. My alarm is set to scream at me around 7, so when I wake, I lie in bed and try to go back to sleep. But I can't. I can't stop thinking. My brain fixes on a problem or a definition and I can't stop thinking it through, over and over, until I'm sure I've exhausted all possibilities and have left nothing out. Then I obsessively start the whole process, again. What makes this interesting is that I usually do fall into a sort of "wakeful sleep", and that really messes with my perceptions.

This morning, I was tossing around a philosophical theory, which I am sure is the key to the universe. It precisely and comprehensively explains the human predicament and much, much more. I do so wish I could remember what it was...I can tell you, though, that it was a sound theory; I tested it from every possible angle and against every possible situation--and it held like super glue.

My experience put me in mind of a Simpsons episode in which Homer asks God to tell him the meaning of life. God hesitates, but Homer insists that "after death" is too long to wait (even though God has just revealed that as six months). So, God caves in:

"Oh, ok... The meaning of life is..."

Cut to commercial. End of show.

Later this morning, I asked Scott if we had any aspirin (my arm was hurting from not sleeping on it). He started talking about Aspirin being a generic name, like Kleenex or Coke (in the South). What he said was: "Aspirin is the same as Kleenex and Coke".

Since I was about to give a logic lesson to Marshall, and I like to amuse him, I said:

Aspirin = Kleenex
Aspirin = Coke
Therefore, Kleenex = Coke
Kleenex is full of snot
Therefore, Coke is full of snot

Marshall thought this was funny; Scott sort of rolled his eyes.

I'll bet that was the grand theory I worked out, this morning.

Any tips on sleeping? Or on the meaning of life?

Qube Blog

2006-11-28T16:08:00.000-05:00

If you haven't noticed yet, I've added a link to Qube Blog, which is a project I've been asked to help out with. I think the idea is eventually to publish a series of coffee-table style books, featuring thought provoking questions paired with high-quality images, intended to generate interesting and important discussion in social settings. My job is to see how well the ideas discuss. I'm not sure a blog works best, because the discussion gets a bit long for the narrow column format.

Consider this your personal invitation to participate in the discussion (so I don't look like an idiot talking to myself) and also a request for feedback on the blog (what you like or don't; what works or doesn't). Feel free to email me re: Qube Blog at: qubeblog[at]gmail[dot]com.

Thanks. I Hope everyone is well. I've been sick since last Wednesday (yup. I was sick on Thanksgiving and couldn't smell or taste the turkey). I'm feeling somewhat better today, after sleeping fourteen hours yesterday, but I'm still not sure if I'm actually recovering or if the three cups of coffee I had this morning are masking the symptoms.

Peace.

Rain Baby

2006-11-14T15:56:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow Eliot will be seven. He was born six weeks premature, so seven years ago to this moment, I had no idea he was about to arrive. I imagine myself napping on our old, wood and wicker couch or staring out the enormous picture window behind it at city houses all in rows, and city children hanging lazily on porches and playing in the street. I remember rain, and maybe there was rain—as is common in St. Louis in November. But rain is almost all I remember that year.

In my thoughts of childhood, I am perpetually seven. I was seven when I hugged the white house on 8th Avenue and said goodbye to hay fields and country roads; to Johnny Height and Mindy Plumpton, whose straight brown pigtails I both adored and envied. I said hello to sidewalks, green lawns and neat suburban blocks. My heart widened that year. I sat on my swing set in the dark and told God a great secret-- I would love Him forever. I would love people, too; the hurt ones, the lonely ones. This was the great awakening of my heart to inner dialogue and large questions. Also that year, I split open my chin to the bone, while racing bikes with my brother. For weeks afterward, I could walk past Grace Bible Church and see my blood dripped all over the stony sidewalk. Once, I squatted near it and covered the brown dots with my hand. I wished until my stomach hurt that I could go back, and not glance sideways at my brother's tire. At first when I looked at the blood, my stomach always churned like that, but later, as the story spread, I grew sort of proud of it. That’s my blood there on the sidewalk; that’s a piece of me. It seemed like years before the rain finally washed away the last spatter but when it was gone, I knew I had lost something. That year I wrote my first poem.

I wrote a letter to Marshall the year he turned seven. I was away in England for ten weeks, and I wanted to tell him about being seven. Micah turned five while I was gone, and Eliot was just one and a half. I have a photograph of him: blond curls piled high on his head and a bottle hanging from his smirking mouth. His eyes are clear blue and as often as I’ve tried to find him in that picture, I can’t. This child isn’t in my memory. I wasn't there. It was only ten weeks, and I needed to go. Still, I imagine a churning hole of sadness in his middle, as my memory faded like blood stains on the sidewalk.

Tonight, I lay down on Eliot’s bed to kiss him and tuck him in. He asked me to sing The Meatball Song, so I laughed and started in,

"On top of spaghetti, all covered with cheese;
I lost my poor meatball when somebody sneezed."

He sang along with me until we came to the last line. He was quiet while I sang,

"It rolled down the sidewalk and under a bush
And then my poor meatball was nothing but mush!"

“That is such a sad song,” he said. “Do you know what I would do? I would run and catch the meatball and clean all the dirt off it and then I would put it back on my spaghetti.”

He asked me why the person in the song didn’t do that and then he asked me why anyone would write such a sad song and call it funny. I laid my head on the pillow next to him and smiled as he sang his very own continuation of The Meatball Song, which finds the meatball “pulling up its sleeves”, making its way back into the house and “onto the plate”, and wraps up neatly with everyone having a “happy day”.

It must have been a healing rain that November and it must have been enough, because Eliot is all flowers and sunshine.

And More...

2006-10-05T13:25:00.000-04:00

Ah, Michigan!

2006-10-05T13:06:00.000-04:00

To Will One Thing

2006-09-05T18:00:00.000-04:00

"...let us suppose a man wanted... a blue world. He would have no cause to complain of the slightness or swiftness of his task; he might toil for a long time at the transformation; he could work away (in every sense) until all was blue. He could have heroic adventures; the putting of the last touches to a blue tiger. He could have fairy dreams; the dawn of a blue moon. ...If he altered a blade of grass to his favourite colour every day, he would get on slowly. But if he altered his favourite colour every day, he would not get on at all. If, after reading a fresh philosopher, he started to paint everything red or yellow, his work would be thrown away: there would be nothing to show except a few blue tigers walking about, specimens of his early bad manner."
-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

I tend to think steadfastness or single-mindedness is useless, unless it finds a proper object. There are unworthy pursuits: for example, painting the world blue. Chesterton (elsewhere in Orthodoxy) seems to suggest it is better for me to pursue a path unswervingly, even though I am not sure it is right, than to waver and swoon around the truth, unable to start out in any direction, for fear that new evidence or tesitmony may arise to inform my decision. Of course, it is better to do something than to do nothing. But is it better to do something in which you are misguided than to do nothing? Better to steadfastly paint blades of grass blue, than to waffle and back-track and re-direct, following evidence in pursuit of truth (and making a big, colorful mess, in the process)?

I guess it was two years ago that I read Soren Kierkegaard's "Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing". I thought then as I do now, that in it, there is an answer to this question:

"So let us, then...speak about this sentence: PURITY OF HEART IS TO WILL ONE THING as we base our meditation on the Apostle James’ words in his Epistle, Chapter 4, verse 8:

"Draw nigh to God and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts ye double-minded." For only the pure in heart can see God, and therefore, draw nigh to Him...

Let us...come to an agreement on an understanding of this verse, and on what the apostolic word of admonition "purify your hearts ye double-minded" is condemning, namely, double-mindedness.
To will only one thing: but will this not inevitably become a long-drawn-out talk? If one should consider this matter properly must he not first consider, one by one, each goal in life that a man could conceivably set up for himself, mentioning separately all of the many things that a man might will? And not only this; since each of these considerations readily becomes too abstract in character, is he not obliged as the next step to attempt to will, one after the other, each of these goals in order to find out what is the single thing he is to will, if it is a matter of willing only one thing? Yes, if someone should begin in this fashion, then he would never come to an end. Or more accurately, how could he ever arrive at the end since at the outset he took the wrong way and then continued to go on further and further along this false way? It is only by a painful route that this way leads to the Good, namely, when the wanderer turns around and goes back. For as the Good is only a single thing, so all ways lead to the Good, even the false ones: when the repentant one follows the same way back.

...Instead of wasting many moments on naming the vast multitude of goals or squandering life’s costly years in personal experiments upon them, can the talk do as the life ought to do -- with a commendable brevity stick to the point?
In a certain sense nothing can be spoken of so briefly as the Good, when it is well described. For the Good without condition and without qualification, without preface and without compromise is, absolutely the only thing that a man may and should will, and is only one thing. ...The way this one thing is willed is not such that: one man wills one thing but that which he wills is not the Good; another wills one thing nor is what he wills the Good; a third wills one thing and what he wills is the Good. No, it is not done in that way. The person who wills one thing that is not the Good, he does not truly will one thing. It is a delusion, an illusion, a deception, a self-deception that he wills only one thing. For in his innermost being he is, he is bound to be, double-minded. Therefore the Apostle says, "Purify your hearts ye double-minded," that is, purify your hearts of double-mindedness; in other words, let your heart in truth will only one thing, for therein is the heart’s purity.

And again it is of this same purity of heart that the Apostle is speaking when he says, "If someone lacks wisdom, then let him pray... but in faith, not like a double-minded man" (James 1:5,6, 8). For purity of heart is the very wisdom that is acquired through prayer. A man of prayer does not pore over learned books for he is the wise man "whose eyes are opened" -- when he kneels down (Numbers 24:16).
In a word, then, there is a man whose mind remains piously ignorant of the multitude of things, for the Good is one thing.

Blogger Remorse and Other Fun Things

2006-09-01T13:50:00.000-04:00

Apparently, Thursday afternoons aren't the best time to think. I re-read my post this morning, and found that I completely disagree with it. Well, not completely, but significantly.

I'm tired of blogging. So what are all you lovely readers up to? What's on your mind? Take over my blog. I welcome you. I'm begging you.

I came home the other day to find my kitchen, newly-floored dining room, and newly-carpeted living room covered in two inches of standing water. My washing machine broke while I was out (yes, I left it running) and just kept pumping out the water, until I came home, waded barefoot through the pool, and turned off the machine. The water seeped under the wall, into the boys' bedroom, too, and it looks as though we'll need to replace the carpet.

I've got most of Marshall's curriculum, now, but I haven't been able to look at it in too much detail; I've been swamped. Ha, ha.

I can't wait to learn latin, though. And to diagram sentences, again. OOOOHHHH. I don't believe I've ever enjoyed anything more. Sentence diagramming may be the one thing I was born to do.

Thoughts on a Thursday Afternoon

2006-08-31T17:22:00.000-04:00

Maybe heaven is having both the freedom and the will to do that thing which your soul craves; the thing that crouches, like a word on the tip of your tongue; surges, like the ocean swell; fights, like a dog against a chain. Desire for it can be restrained but never vanquished. You neglect it for the sake of duty or for lack of time or out of fear, but it is the one thing you know is true, without doubt or demonstration.

It approaches each of us differently, and as a result we are forever misnaming it. It is Truth, but goes far beyond any account of the facts; It is Beauty, but is immaterial and unadorned; It is Love, but it is impartial. It is the wedding of what you long to be with that which you long to do; of what you desire to give with that which you desire to receive. Heaven is to act without self-thought and yet be satisfied; to abandon all else for the sake of one passion, and find that it is the road to everyone and everything else. It is exactly what you were made for.

We could call this passion, "God", and say that we find final purpose in "worship of God", and that would be true, though perhaps misleading. This suggests a uniform human experience of it, and leads us to think we may lose ourselves in God, as masses before a powerful orator, or a man before the muse. When you throw yourself into God, you journey from the collective to the individual, from the vague to the specific, not the other way around. God has specially named each one of us, and heaven will be, at last, finding out that name.

Dog Days

2006-08-03T10:26:00.000-04:00

I'm sitting in the family room, sipping tea, listening to a steady rain and blessing its Sender for the seeping, pooling way it cools the earth. The house is dark and I've left off all the lights so I can feel the rain work. My three-year-old son is running up the driveway in his underwear, puddles splashing at his knees and streams of rain wetting the curls on his head. Another day I might stop him, but today I'll welcome wet clothes and muddy feet.

Yesterday the heat index topped off at 106 degrees. I don't know for how many days the sweat has beaded above my lips and at my hairline, and run down the middle of my back, but the time has been sufficiently long to make me forget that t-shirts aren't perpetually damp and clinging and that I sometimes like to wear my hair down.

I didn't think we'd need air-conditioning in Michigan, after living in stifling St. Louis heat for six years. I also thought that experiencing and changing with the seasons was a noble goal or at least a grand idea. Two days ago I spent the better part of the day in my air-conditioned car. I called myself a wimp and a traitor, but I knew I needed to get out of the heat. I had already yelled at my kids and thrown a pile of papers on the floor and chucked a plastic cup at my kitchen counter, and used a few choice words without choosing to. I was just getting started on the "I hate everything/nobody likes me/I just want to die" stage when I realized I had to get out. So that's it. I am weak. But I believe concession is the wiser course than the one which crashes and burns.

And, today, the lovely rain. I'm looking around with eyes which seemed open before but must have been closed. I'm seeing my front garden, over-grown with weeds, my bookcases which want dusting, and I'm trying to remember where I have been these past weeks. The best that I can come up with, is that I was waiting out the heat, the way one waits out the flu or the way a woman in labor waits out the pain. Now that it is over, I can begin to move.

The Fruit of our Labor

2006-08-02T18:08:00.000-04:00

Trinitas Classical School is now online! Check out our website

Ahem.

2006-06-06T10:25:00.000-04:00

Yeah, so my little experiment didn't work out so well. But I get to have another go at it, as Scott is in Florida this week. It's also the last week of school for the boys, so it's my last chance to get everything in order before they descend on me for the summer. Anyone have any good organization tips for a scatter-brained woman living in a too-small house with a husband and four sons?

Metamorphosis

2006-05-23T14:10:00.000-04:00

Reading way too many books. Must stop.
Must clean toilets.
Must create space on kitchen counter to assemble and cut one peanut butter sandwich (make required number one at a time).
Must email friends.
Must find missing school papers before last day.
Must find missing library books before last day.
Must brave laundry piles to find Eliot's gym-shirt (close eyes and dive).
Must grocery shop (taco bell doesn't count).(Taco Boy also doesn't count- in spite of their "wet burrito" menu- mmmm.)
Must take shower (insert this item before item reading, must grocery shop).
Must garden.
Must take long walk.
Must not substitute for true and deserved satisfaction that false sense of accomplishment achieved by reading books on any or all of these subjects.
Reading way too many books. Must stop.

This is my "To Do" list for the next few days. Scott left this morning for St. Louis and won't return until Friday evening. I have a secret plan while he is gone and I'm letting you all in on it: I'm going to pretend to be a homemaker or housewife or executive familias or whatever they're calling it these days, instead of the scholar/researcher/philosopher/writer/VIP that I really am.
In fact, I am going to do more than pretend, seeing that while I am actively engaged performing the duties and rites of a homemaker, I will in fact be creating an environment which could, under certain circumstances, be called home; and thus, I will BE, in fact, a homemaker. The benefits of this, I expect to be both profound and multitudinous, the chief of these being that I will stop pulling out fistfulls of hair and screaming; I will be able think clearly again; I will be able to walk on nothing but the floor, all the way to my bed. Maybe the kids will even come back from the neighbors' house (Add to above list: call neighbor and remind kids not to forget toothbrushes.)
When all is complete, and I am a sane, clean woman in a clean and sane house, I will pour myself a glass of pinot noir, sit leisurely on my sofa, and admire my shiny new "homemaker" badge (I lost the first one ages ago, and haven't been able to convince any self-respecting institution to issue me one, since). I'll carefully apply a natural clay face mask, and paint my toe-nails pink. And I know just the book I'm going to read.

River Bank Run

2006-05-16T09:49:00.000-04:00

This past Saturday, on Scott's 36th(!) birthday, he and our two oldest boys ran the 5k River Bank Run, downtown.

Scott made it out, but not ahead of Marshall or Micah, who have been running consistently for a month. Marshall came in at 26:23 and Micah at 27:50, Scott at 28:48.

After the race, Micah said to me, "We should train and do races as a family."

I don't know about the future. But I do know that if I'd attempted a three and a half mile run on Saturday, my chances of being alive to write this were very slim.

In other news, a group of North Hills Classical Academy parents have decided to pull out and start our own school next year. I'm on the curriculum committee and have been swamped with reading. I've also felt ill. I have so much to do and so little energy or motivation. So that's why the lack of writing here (I have been writing, but not for the blog).

Be well. I'll be back, perhaps, but I don't know how soon.

Optimism, Unconquered

2006-05-03T20:47:00.000-04:00

I took Eliot with me to return movies this afternoon. At the video store or at the library, he takes pride as well as pleasure in his contribution to our trip: loading and dropping the due materials into the "drop box".

Today he had kicked off his shoes on the trampoline in our backyard and forgot to put them on again before getting into the car.

"Mommy, I really want to put the movies in the box. But I kind of don't want anyone to see me. They might think I'm kind of weird. Do you know why? Socks. I have socks on and not any shoes. They might think I'm weird because I don't have any shoes on. I don't want anybody to see me in my socks. " (This is really how Eliot talks. He's logical, organized, wordy, uses complete sentences, and says all of it very, very slowly.)

"Well, I don't think it matters," I said. "Just go straight to the box and come right back. Nobody will even see."

He did. He came back. As he closed the van's sliding door he started to laugh, "Nobody even noticed me!"

It was true. I had been watching. There were people all around and not one of them had looked at him, much less at his shoeless feet.

"Sometimes you'll be glad of it, Eliot, and sometimes it will make you sad. But people don't really notice each other all that much." I said.

"Why would it make me sad?"

"Well, you might be lonely and want a friend. Or maybe you'll work really hard to do something, and you'll just want somebody to notice."

"But Mommy, what if you're wearing socks while you're doing it?"

Contemplating Periwinkles

2006-04-25T22:06:00.000-04:00

1.
The path bends just here
Where a man stands ankle deep
In periwinkles

2.
In a space sweetly shaded by
Cherry blossoms and
Warming green leaves
Small, spry, undefiled;
In greening grass, edging beds of
Buttered daffodils and brave tulips,
Blue periwinkles peek through
Dark green foliage and deep brown earth;
Their small white centers
Twinkling stars
Fading into a morning sky

3.
The apple in his hand; half-eaten,
Now forgotten
In the simple sunny ecstasy
Of purple periwinkles

4.
There is stillness born of sweltering sun;
Equally of frozen hills
A still sigh at argument’s end
Forsaking resolution;
Equally
In the peace of decisive amends

There is the stillness of the wait;
For a bus
A child
A rare bird
For trust
A friend
A doctor’s word

There is stillness in the final rubble
Of great towers;
In earth which ceases to quake;
In bold flowers, which take
What bleeding sun and soil
Can give
And make it
Holy
With their benediction

There is stillness in the tight round belly
And rested eyelids
Of a baby at breast
At rest,
Sweet milk dried like sugar
On his parted lips

There is stillness in bereavement
When everyone is gone
And has forgotten
The Mother
Combing carefully
The stale terrain of sheets and pillow
For proof that he was there
A scent
A stain
A hair
Brushed loose from his head
Which smelled of Grace
And warm sand
And baking bread
And everything contained
In the very best dream
Stillness in that pull
Toward Tangibility,
For Physicality
To know that he is gone
And not merely hypothetical

And there is a singular stillness
In this man
Standing to the side of the path
Statuesque,
Head down,
Arm bent and raised just so
The stillness of the half-eaten apple in his hand
The stillness of marble
Contemplating Periwinkles

Rain or Shine

2006-04-08T10:31:00.000-04:00

Today is all blue skies and sunshine. Yesterday was grey and rainy and exactly the way I remember fall in England. My son, Marshall can't stand dark days; he says they make him want to do nothing. "Days like this are depressing," he said. Marshall has not been depressed a day in his life and I doubt he has it in him. But gloomy days make him less active and more prone to grumbling, as if the sky is a too-low ceiling and he has to duck his head.

Scott called me from his cell phone on his way home from work and I suggested we all go for a walk before a late dinner. He said, "Tomorrow is supposed to be sixty and sunny, much better walking weather. Today is so wet and cold."

I admit that I've enjoyed the blocks and slivers of sunlight playing on the living room floor and stretching across the walls these past few weeks, as we move into spring. But there's nothing like a steady drizzle and an unremitting blanket of grey pulled over the earth to draw me in; I yearn for long solitary walks along winding country roads and through soggy fields, my face growing dewy and my hair springing obediently into tight, frizzy curls.

Overcast days suit me. I'm low-keyed, easy-going, melancholic; not loud, flashy or manic like sunny days. Sunshine is wonderful and warm, and when I see it, unexpected, I feel a small jump of life inside my chest. But rain is the thing that feeds me; rain feels like coming home.

How It All Felt Today

2006-03-21T15:45:00.000-05:00

There's a photograph of me in a yellowed picture album, sitting under a backyard maple tree in the dirt, my legs folded at the knee so that I make a "W". I'm holding Boots, my grey-striped cat with white stockings, in my lap and I am looking down at her, not at the camera. The left side of my face is vulnerable, my fuzzy hair pulled together in a braid behind my ear. On the other side my braid has fallen out and I'm making the long blonde cloak of curls into a shroud.

That afternoon Boots was laid to rest by lethal injection, in life labeled with "distemper" for biting a boy when he dangled her by the tail; in death, a peace offering to irate neighbors. After the camera clicked I held Boots up against my face and cried into her fur in big, body heaving bursts.

There is a similar photograph of my little brother in the same album, several pages later. He is five or six and his face is puffy and red. He's holding a wild bunny that we fed with milk from an eye-dropper after our lawn mower upset a nest and put his mother on the run. As with Boots, this is a farewell picture, snapped just before we drove to the end of the street, crossed the creek at the back of Grandville Cemetery and watched Thumper disappear into the brush. Sometimes I would look long and hard at these pictures, reaching out with my index finger to stroke the glossy finish where a patch of fur showed.

I was ten or eleven when my mom took me to the store one evening to buy me a shirt. As a family of six, paying private school tuition on one blue-collar income, none of us expected new clothes. But this shirt was on sale and my mother wanted me to have it. It was a small checkered plaid pattern, long sleeved, button down, with a white cotton collar, croheted around the edges. It came in maroon and aqua blue, and I tried on both colors to see which I preferred. I stood there a long time, squinting my eyes so that my face became a blur and I could see the thing objectively. I wondered which color my school-mates would like. I didn't know if it was stylish, and wondered if the girls would laugh when I wore it to school.

"Which one do you like better?" I asked my mother. I was hoping she'd say aqua blue but she said maroon, instead. She waited for me to choose a color until the store closed, and in the end we drove home with a maroon shirt in a white plastic bag.

The year I went to public high school, my best friend was a boy who lockered next to me. When I met him he wore baggy drawers in fierce prints, silk screen logo tee shirts and a shock of blonde hair over one eye. He smelled of strong cologne and had a ready smile. He flirted with me and made me laugh and a friendship formed between us. I counted on his asking me out at least twice a week and he could always count on my saying no. We talked for hours on the telephone, we went to Campus Life and football games. That spring, I told him to ask me out again. And I said yes.

It started to go bad right away. I had never kissed a boy or had a boyfriend and everything was new to me. He stopped talking and took up acting shifty. One night he phoned me while I babysat and told me we were better off as friends. The next day the gossip was all over school: he had met a girl from my math class at the beach on Saturday, and they were the new hot item. I never really talked to him again. By our senior year we were exchanging "hello's" in the halls and he had started calling me "Roach", again. But it had become a nickname without anything behind it.

I get nervous when people tell me to look to the afterlife for joy and beauty, because I want to affirm what I see, here. Still, there is so much loss. We are all running around grasping at things and little bits of eachother, but we are only grasping at straws.

[Dorothy] Day liked to quote a retreat master who told the people in his care that they should start stripping themselves of worldly cares as soon as possible, because, no matter who we are, in the end "we shall be stripped"- stripped of health, wealth, body, breath, and, finally, of life itself.

-from "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" by Paul Elie

Just before my wedding my childhood best friend turned nasty. She accused me of being unfair, she complained that she wasn't chosen above another friend to be my bridesmaid, even though we'd grown apart after the seventh grade. One evening, in the middle of her driveway, she screamed at me, "You're just going to get married and run off to Chicago, and I'll never see you again."

We hugged and cried, and for the moment we were ten year old girls, again.

Yesterday I pushed Ethan in a stroller and walked with my mom. We passed the first robin either of us has seen this spring, dead alongside the path. "It sounds so silly," she told me, "but I could just cry at that."

She said she's been wanting more time to pray, more time communing with God. My mother cares for cancer patients at Butterworth Hospital, where I was born. She teaches "end of life care" to groups at her church. She visits the sick and sends cards in the mail to the elderly. She has close friends with mighty hurts, and she takes them all upon her chest. She told me she feels a growing cloud of sadness, as she ages, an "accumulation of all the sadness of the years".

The August I turned seventeen, I spent in bed. On July twenty-first I gave birth to a son, in the same hospital my mother birthed me, and on July twenty-third I put him in a nurse's arms and went home without him. My mom brought me garden fresh zucchini with melted cheese and toast, and on the days I ate it, I began to cry with the first taste, and I had to choke it down.

That fall I started school in a jungle-print jumper. In my student ID picture, I look like the social butterfly my friend Jeremy liked to call me. I started dating Scott that fall, and here I am, fourteen years later, a mother of four with perpetually empty arms.

I have suffered losses since. I have lost dreams, beauty, innocence. I have lost dear friends. Today I went to get my boys from school with red eyes and a swollen face. Today, loss caught up with me, entered, and ran out my eyes. Today, Ethan fought me when I told him "no", and flung himself to his bedroom floor, feeling loss of his own. I sat there on the blue carpet, my legs spread out in a "W", with Ethan's head on my lap and tears rolling off my chin.

Like my mother, I've felt a kind of sadness lately. Still, when she said it I wanted to say, "Yes, but what about the accumulation of joys?" But the two are connected, mysteriously, paradoxically.

Last month Ethan played with toys at the coffee table while I folded laundry beside him. He stopped playing, abruptly, looked me full in the face and said, "You have to die, to live." Then he said it again. I thought of Jesus' words in Matthew 16:

Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.

And that, again, is the paradox.

What we love, we lose, and yet we love again. I wept today, because life hurts and is beautiful, all at once, and because beauty slips through our fingers like sand, and only reaches us, mingled with loss.

Simplicity

2006-03-07T16:55:00.000-05:00

This afternoon as I dressed Ethan in his snow clothes I pulled him close to me and kissed his neck and his head.

"I love you so much that I just want to keep you forever and ever," I told him. "Can I keep you forever?"

"No." he said.

"No! What do you mean,'No'? Aren't you going to stay with me forever?"

"No."

"But where are you going to go?"

"I going outside, Mommy."

Peace on Earth

2006-03-03T09:57:00.000-05:00

I nearly saw death on Wednesday afternoon. Two ground squirrels chased each other over leaves and twigs, up and down trees. They raced, one on the tail of the other, up a small tree about fifty feet from where I stood. The surrounding area grew restless as half a dozen spectator squirrels gathered near; standing still, receding, turning again. I watched along with them, as one grafted in.

I hadn't known squirrels could make so much noise. One trapped the other on the highest, most extended branch of the tree, and held him there with loud warnings, periodically lunging at his ribs. The branch bent, quivered. The top of the tree stands lower than the aged oaks surrounding it, but it is high enough that a fall could kill.

At a school board meeting tuesday night, discussion turned heated. The school board and the administration stand on opposing sides of a financial question. At one point, an important finanical donor stood up. "I'm not going to let you use my money for blackmail!" He said. The next day one of the teachers shouted in the face of a parent who tried to broach the subject with her.

This week, a lengthy discussion on a religious web-site got heated, too.

"You are afraid to stand up for GOD and you will regret it," wrote Anonymous. "God will not put up with this kind of behavior from people like you..."

Someone else wrote, "When you stand before GOD he will make [the issue] quite clear. Good luck!"

Still another had this to say: "You will find out the hard way...And he will cast all of you into the lake of fire for your actions."

The other side didn't possess much more luck or skill in the game of kindness, in spite of their stand on the side of love and tolerance.

"God will punish you more than other people" said one.

"Who the hell are you to judge like that?" said another.

And then, the most ironic statement in the whole dialogue, "I love God with all my heart and my soul and I love my neighbor as myself, and I have nothing but hatred for you christians who think YOU are better than I am".

When Thomas Merton visited Alaska, in the last year of his life, he talked about peace.

"It is terribly important that everything we do should be done in a ground of peace within us, rather than in a ground of contention. So much that goes on in Church renewal tends to develop in an atmosphere of conflict where people are too keyed-up about what is right and what is wrong and are trying to prove that they are right and somebody else is wrong. This is not God's way. Naturally this conflict is bound to arise once in a while, but we must always have this deeper ground of peace and confidence and trust..."

I stood in one place as the squirrel drama unfolded. I saw that the underdog was not going to get on top again and would soon fall to his death. I spent what seemed a very long time captivated, in something like fascination or interest. I was watching a key turn in a door and I wanted to see what was behind it. Each time the victim's fall seemed imminent, one or another of the squirrels watching from the ground moved forward or backward, chattering. I expected to witness death at every moment; I dreaded it, I feared it - and all of a sudden I realized that I could stop it.

We are beginning the Lenten season of the Christian church, which I have chiefly understood as a time of repentence and renewal. It is a time to uncover in ourselves the arrogance and hatred which led to the greatest act of violence in the history of the human race: the putting to death of our very Creator. It is a time to reconcile ourselves to God and to one another. A time to put right what we can and fall on the grace of God for what we can not.

"Our Lord came to overcome death by love, and this work of love was a work of obedience to the Father unto death- a total gift of Himself in order to overcome death."

Says Merton.

"That is our job. We are fighting death, and we are involved in a struggle between love and death, and this struggle takes place in us...The work of creating community in and by the grace of Christ is the place where this struggle goes on and where He manifests His victory over death."

I moved toward the squirrels slowly at first, clicking my tongue. Then I moved faster and with greater noise. The pursuer backed down the tree and scrambled up a larger one. I waited, then stared, dumbfounded, as the squirrel whose lease on life I had just renewed exited the tree of death and scurried up the other one, pursuing his enemy. I had not stopped death; I had only delayed it.

The next day school started two hours late because of an ice storm. Micah and I were playing a card game on one side of the house when I heard angry voices on the other side.

"What IDIOT broke this?"

I arrived on the scene to find Marshall assaulting Eliot with words and a level of anger disproportionate to the offense. And it wasn't Eliot's offense. Marshall had left out a toy, and I had stepped on it the night before.

I didn't know I was angry until I opened my mouth. "Go to your room NOW!" I shouted in his face.

Listen to Thomas Merton, again:

"Never has the world been so violent and in many respects so insane, and so given to pressure and agitation and conflict. Although men have made brilliant technological advances, they cannot handle them or use them for good... In such a society there have to be specialists in inner peace and love."

Luke 2:8-12,14

"And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord...
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men."

Lord, have mercy on us all.

Records

2006-02-16T09:10:00.000-05:00

I have been unable to access my email all week.

Yes, I am one of those stupid, stupid people who does web-mail and does not back any of it up. Periodically I go through my Inbox (dating back to early 2000) and delete all the mail I don't want to keep. This generally creates enough space in my inbox for me to continue functioning on the "free" level, without having to upgrade my status to Preferred Member (which really just means I have to pay to do what I did for free, before).

My husband (who makes his living in computers) has been telling me for ages that I need to do my mail differently. And he has even offered to set it all up for me.

Now, I am one of those people who can't be bothered. And I don't mean that I won't work very hard to get something or I don't want to get a little dirt under my fingernails. I mean that I literally can't be bothered about certain things, much the way I described Eliot in my story, running.

Unlike ninety percent of America's women, I generally have only one pair of shoes at a time. I just can't be bothered to care about shoes. If my shoes are worn out, I'll keep wearing them without thinking about it, until one rainy day when I step in a puddle and have to live the rest of the day with a water-logged sock. And I will live the rest of the day with that sock, rather than run to my bedroom to change it, because, well, I simply can't be bothered. And even then, I am as likely as not to step in another puddle the very next day and the next week and the next month, before I finally, probably on impulse, buy a new pair of shoes. I am adaptable. To anything. This is good in some respects. But every now and then I'll see a stack of books on the floor in front of the bookcase or glance at the china cabinet where a game that we played a year ago still sits, or I'll take last-year's overlooked Christmas ornament from the top of the microwave to put it on this year's tree, and I'll think, "I really should take more notice of things. My life is all about reaction and not at all about prevention.

It shouldn't surprise me, then, that when I tried this morning, for the 6th consecutive day, to check my email, I was able to access my mailbox only to find that it had been wiped clean. All of my mail from anybody for the last six years is gone. And unless Mail.com finds the method and the generosity to restore it for me, I will never see it again.

I'm trying to decide if this matters to me. On the one hand, I kept all that mail for a reason, and my relationship with all of you who email me is important to me. Also, although perhaps somewhat sadly, most of my friendships and the larger part of those individual friendships have taken place via email.

On the other hand, how important is it that I hoard or revisit those conversations? I have my memory. I carry them with me. I don't remember many specific emails, but the whole of those conversations, over the years, has informed the way I know each person and the way I know myself, because of him or her. Life is organic. When we try to go back in memory to a specific place or time, it is all different, anyway, even if we've taken great pains to preserve it intact.

Several months ago I sorted through my "Treasure Box", a box containing memorabilia from my childhood and adolesence. The treasures therein did not give me the pleasure I thought they would, though many of them I would never part with, willingly: like the letter my older brother gave me at Summer Camp one year.

Camp Gitchee Gumee set up a "Secret-Brother, Secret-Sister" arrangement on the first day of camp. Every boy was given a girl's name at random and every girl was given the name of a boy. During the week each camper was to write friendly notes or give small gifts to the person bearing the name on his or her slip.

About mid-week I understood that whatever boy drew my name out of the hat must have asked someone to point me out and realized he'd drawn the short stick. I cried. I withdrew. I couldn't look in the mirror at my fuzzy hair and my awkward body draped with garage sale clothes. I knew that some boy had been sorely disappointed and didn't want to risk peer-taunting, even to send me a friendly note.

The next day one of my cabin mates handed me a folded letter. On the outside were the printed words, "From your Secret Brother." Inside were several kind paragraphs, replete with mis-spellings and poor grammar, but to me they could have won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

At the end of the week, when the Secret Siblings were revealed and nobody stood up and showed himself when my name was called, the truth slowly began to dawn on me.

Michael told me later that he had asked a girl to write the letter for him, so I wouldn't recognize his handwriting, and that he'd dictated the mis-spellings and grammatical mistakes so as not to arouse suspicion, because most pre-teen boys just don't know how to write.

I wasn't let down when I learned the truth. I was used to being overlooked, especially by boys. But not another girl in that whole camp had a brother who loved her the way mine loved me.

I still have the note, tucked away in a box somewhere in my garage. And I'm glad I have it. But what's really significant is that it did exist, and I read it, and I learned something because of it, and I carry that tender piece of my brother with me every time we talk.

Flu Reflections

2006-02-13T10:53:00.000-05:00

I spent the weekend with the flu and Dorothy Day's autobiography, "The Long Loneliness".

I am struck by the vast difference between the world then (early 1900's) and our current world. Has human life ever changed more rapidly than in the 20th century?

Dorothy Day was Catholic, a non-violent social activist and a writer, who lived in Chicago and New York during prohibition (though bootleggers were plenty) and in a time when women were not allowed to smoke in public or to vote. Day went to work on a newspaper, reporting social injustice wherever she saw it. Labor Laws and worker's rights were largely non-existent (a 14 year old boy working 90 hours/week, injured workers left without compensation to beg on the streets, the poor working themselves to death and relegated to unsanitary housing). Most young social activists of her day were Communists (or the more benign, Socialist) and Anarchists and sometimes resorted to violence in protest of the corrupt social order, but to a large degree they were peaceful protesters who picketed or wrote and spoke against injustice. Still, almost all Dorothy's friends were arrested multiple times, and during this time some Radicals were tried and sentenced to death.

We have undoubtedly made social progress since then. Women have voting privileges (and I can't believe how begrudgingly I accept this right), there are child-labor laws and, despite low wages and run-down housing for the poor, there are laws governing minimum wage and work-week hours and there is compensation for occupational injury and medicaid and food stamps and WIC. It is helpful to me, to look back at where we've been and appreciate how far we've come. I would not dare purport that our current system is in all points just or that our existing programs are sufficiently effective, but we do a disservice to the remembrance of all who worked and fought for reforms when all we manage is to sit back and complain.

At the same time, I'm in a bit of a quandary when I think about our responsibility to carry on their work. The climate has changed so much. The world has changed so much. As I see it, at least two major changes make responsible social activism very difficult.

First, we have "specialized" everything and everyone. When Dorothy Day left her parents' home at 16, she attended University for two years, on a scholarship of $300 (semester tuition fees at the University of Illinois were $12.00), which covered books, tuition, and most living expenses. She took various odd jobs and living situations to cover the rest. After two years she took a job as a reporter with the Call, a socialist newspaper . During World War I she joined a hospital nursing program, which trained its students on the job, with three hour breaks in the afternoon for lectures and training seminars.

Today, a minimum of four years higher education is required to get a job in just about anything, outside of the most basic customer service jobs, and the cost of education is unattainable for all but the wealthiest few. An untrained person can't just volunteer to become a nurse and an eighteen year-old with "some college" is not going to land a reporting job, nomatter what kind of paper or what kind of writer.

The second obstacle to social activism is a prevailing social attitude that equates radicalism with lunacy or barbarism. Dorothy Day was arrested for a peaceful women's suffrage demonstration on the White House lawn; today picketing is associated with crazy fundamentalists in front of abortion clinics (who are often hauled off to jail just as Day was). We look, in retrospect, at her activism as heroic and necesary for social reform; why are today's activists on both sides of the political spectrum (Pro-lifers and Environmentalists) written off as mentally imbalanced or intolerant or at best, annoyances to roll our collective, enlightened eyes at? We are told that we can't "legislate morality". But then how do we procure change? Weren't Women's Suffrage and Labor Unions and the Civil Rights Movement exactly that, attempts to legislate morality, so that society would run by more moral laws?

In general, I see my life as being full of restrictions. I found myself complaining to a friend just the other day that I feel stuck in the "this is how things are done" rut, and I lamented my deplorable lack of imagination. I want to do something, but I don't know what to do. Whereas the world of 1915 was wide open, almost begging individuals to stand in the gaps and shape the future, the world of 2006 feels closed to me. If I want to help the sick I need training in the medical profession. If I want to help poor families or orphans or victims of abuse, I've got to become a "social worker". I don't even qualify to counsel pregnant teenagers, even though I was one 15 years ago, and have felt the weight of it every day since.

Maybe I'm being obtuse and looking at the roadblock instead of the grassy bank that winds around it. I know I can donate food and clothing to charities and I can help serve meals at a shelter. I can give money. I can pray. I can vote. I can practice kindness. Am I the only one who feels immobilized in the face of it all?

Although she eventually converted to Catholicism in her thirties, Dorothy Day rejected Christianity for agnosticism in her college years. Here is her account of it:

I did not see anyone taking off his coat and giving it to the poor. I didn't see anyone having a banquet and calling in the lame, the halt and the blind. And those who were doing it, like the Salvation Army, did not appeal to me. I wanted, though I did not know it then, a synthesis. I wanted life and I wanted the abundant life. I wanted it for others too. I did not want just the few, the missionary-minded people like the Salvation Army, to be kind to the poor, as the poor. I wanted everyone to be kind. I wanted every home to be open to the lame, the halt and the blind, the way it had been after the San Francisco earthquake. [which she experienced in her childhood neighborhood] Only then did people really live, really love their brothers. In such love was the abundant life and I did not have the slightest idea how to find it.

I want to understand my place in all of this. Certainly, Christianity as I have known it is far from this abundant life. Is there even a line of demarcation between the church and the world? When I was small I thought as Dorothy did and I was full of zeal to be Christ to a hurting world. Popular culture must have a sinister goal- or perhaps it is merely a natural side-effect- of squelching virtuous passions, while feeding destructive ones to bursting. I have tried to close my mind to its inundations, and still I find I have been mesmerized, sedated, lulled into a life of dangerous conformity and appalling self-absorption.

And I will probably join you, when you roll your eyes at me and tell me I'm being overly dramatic. And I will probably agree with all your assesments of "youthful idealism" vs. the "wisdom of age". And I will probably laugh when you say that the flu "went to my head" and concede that I "shouldn't be too hard on" myself. But then there are those disturbing Biblical words:

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

James 1:27 (NIV)

Johnny

2006-02-06T15:06:00.000-05:00

When I was almost three, a dark man and woman knocked on the door of our gold, shoebox house on Locke Avenue and wanted to buy it, so we moved “Out to the Country”. We lived in a square white house with two levels and black shutters and a concrete front porch, sporting rectangular pillars. A Weeping Willow yawned in the front yard near the ditch that ran along Eighth Avenue; the ditch I squatted by and caught pollywogs and fat brown toads and made mud-pies with Johnny Height, my next-door neighbor with wild blond curls and a cap-gun. My brother and I weren’t allowed guns, so Johnny cut an unsettling figure, running around the neighborhood like a renegade, bare-chested with cut-off blue jeans and a holster slung low about his hips.

The gun wasn’t the only dangerous thing about Johnny. He never got spankings, for one thing, and he had a dirty mouth. He was an only child and I remember seeing his parents only a few times, when my brother was lost in a book and my desire for a playmate outweighed my fear of knocking on Johnny’s door. His mother was a left-over Hippie, with straight black hair that fell down in front of her shoulders. She had yellow teeth and a cigarette in her left hand and she never addressed me by name or seemed very interested in me, or in Johnny, either. I think she invited me in once, in the five years we lived there. The house was strewn with cigarette butts and dog hair and when I came home my mother scrubbed my hair and clothes to get out their smell.

Johnny’s dad looked a lot like Johnny, but bigger, and wore a bare chest with just as much ease. He parked a beat up Chevrolet in the back yard some time before my memory; put it up on cement blocks and left it there. Black-Eyed Susans and wild rhubarb grew up around it, in the thick, uncut grass. Johnny showed me the best patch of rhubarb, alongside the back wall of his house. He cut gigantic purple stalks with his jack-knife and gnawed on the juicy ends.

The Heights didn’t go to church and had an old hound named Reefer. Johnny thought this name was funny and liked to say it a lot, but once, when the subject surfaced at home, my dad grew angry and my mother’s posture drooped. She turned quiet and sighed and I thought she was going to cry. Johnny Height and his parents and his dog became my first demonstrable link to the word “heathen”.

One time while we were playing hopscotch in the driveway, my stomach knotted up with conviction and wouldn’t let go. I took Johnny by the hand and led him to a shadowed corner of my basement, behind a rocking chair, and made him pray the Sinner’s Prayer. He didn’t really want to, but my vivid explanation of the torments of Hell made him more willing. I could be pretty persuasive already at five or six. I waxed eloquent, like a tent-revival preacher and tried to measure my effectiveness by Johnny’s face. He teetered on the edge of decision, his eyes shifting from me to the marbled shag carpeting, to the stairway that led back outside. Time to close the deal:

“Anyway, I won’t play with you any more until you say it”, I blurted, thinking of mud-pies and tadpoles and rhubarb and hoping he didn’t hold me to my words, in the event that he was blinded to the truth and damned, after all.

“Okay.” He shifted his agile body awkwardly, and half-closed his eyes.

“Repeat after me,” I said.

When we had finished a sufficiently salvific prayer I told him we were done. He opened his eyes.

I looked for the bare-chested cowboy with hands quick on the draw, hands which caught twice as many frogs as mine and were both surer and freer with a Frisbee or the branches of a tree. Johnny’s hands lay folded strangely on his lap, his face was flushed and funny and he wouldn’t meet my gaze.

“Can we play now?”

“Yes”. I stood up, suddenly tired and wondering why my legs were shaking and why I felt so crummy when I’d just saved a soul.

It was maybe ten minutes before Johnny’s movements quickened again and the fire lit in his sky-blue eyes, but it was ten years before I tried my hand at Conversion again.

We played long into the summer evening shadows that day and many other days, and when my family moved, the summer I was eight, Johnny was the only one who saw me sneak around the side of my house to hug it at the back corner and to look one more time at the Black-Eyed Susan’s and the broad-leafed rhubarb in his backyard.

Maybe God Created Me to Get My Children

2006-02-01T09:46:00.000-05:00

My two oldest boys have found new respective occupations this past week, which has made the house much quieter.

While all of our boys love books, Micah (9) is sometimes difficult to coax into one. Micah is a man of action and interaction; he is drawn to computer games and board games and cooking and playing with friends and pushing his brothers. He is prone to nagging and boredom. He loses interest in a story more quickly than does Marshall, and will sometimes leave a book un-finished.

Last week he chose Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time" for an upcoming book report in school. He has read good books before, including the Narnia books amd Harry Potter, and he has enjoyed them. But something in "A Wrinkle in Time" caught him in a new way. He has finished the first book and is on to the second in the series. He's reading before school in the morning and after school whenever he is not eating, doing homework or playing piano.

My children's school, North Hills Classical Academy, is helping each grammar-school child write and "publish" a book, to be completed by the end of this year. Marshall (11) started writing and hasn't stopped. He's in the middle of two stories, one for the school project and one "just for myself". He is getting up early (6:30 a.m.) to write. (Oh, that his mother could acquire such discipline!)

Mark my words: within five years Marshall will be a better writer than I am. At least as concerns fiction. Here is a teaser:

Zecor was waking up. It was not terribly early nor terribly late, but the sun was shining brightly. Zecor, like everyone else in Platinum, was a robot.

Zecor half reluctantly rose from his bed. He put on his removable armor, which was only taken off during the night. This certain armor covers the head, back and shoulder area and is unique to this particular type of robot.

Continuing...

I must tell you that Zecor had long envied the position of Rash, leader of the group Sliver. Silver was a group of three robots who fought crime and protected the whole of Platinum.

Zecor suddenly had an idea.He came up with this idea without trying to. There is no way to tell how he thought of it but... he thought, "If I secretly kill Rash, then I might make it up to his position."

With this plan still fresh on his mind, Zecor rushed through the crowds, which were quickly gathering as the morning progressed. As he pushed and shoved through the population on the street, his plans grew greater and nastier.

At the Head Government Building...

Zash and Slash, Rash's two companions, were competing in their acrobatic and weapon-handling skills.

"Beat this!" yelled Zash as he ran toward the wall of the building, jumped, ran up the wall a ways, turned around on the wall, and ran back, brandishing his weapon.

"That's easy!" replied Slash. Then he did the same move, but in a slightly more impressive manner.

No, Marshall has never seen the Matrix.

Zash and Slash are twins, which is a complicated thing for robots.

Ummmm... Perhaps he knows more about reproduction than I thought? He seemed to think this line was funny.

Zecor has now infiltrated the government building:

It took Zecor very little time to reach the stairs. From the bottom of the stairs he proceeded to the second floor. Going up, Zecor went a bit faster than he meant to. It was a strike of luck that nobody saw him ascend.

And one more bit of humor, as Zecor confronts Rash, the leader of Silver.

"Hello! I believe your name is Rash?" said Zecor.

"Yes, it is. And, by the way, my name does not describe my personality. What do you need?" Rash said, kindly.

For anyone who's interested, I can let you know how the story ends, but it's shaping up to be a long one.

The Weight of Glory

2006-01-30T15:23:00.000-05:00

C.S. Lewis, in The Weight of Glory, says that human longing points to the existence of God and after-life, in which we will be made perfect or fulfilled. What follows is the relevant part of his essay to what I have just said about beauty:

"In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country,... I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you - the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our existence is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."

Fear of Beauty

2006-01-30T10:43:00.000-05:00

Why are we afraid of beauty? Here is the best explanation I can offer for my own fear. I'd really like to quote C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory, because, as with most things, Lewis just says it better. But, my answer first:

I fear beauty because it both requires something of me and shapes me into something.

Unasked for beauty surprises us in mundanity; I never escape the short walk from my house to my garage without a pang in my chest or a dip in the pit of my stomach. Earth and trees and sky are beautiful, in rain or sunshine, in blue, gray, brown or green. Sometimes, when I am far down and can't move my body from the couch, trees outside my window beckon me; squiggly-patterned gray bark and stark branches writhe atop stolid trunks, like Medusa's snakes. The trees know something that I do not. Or possess something. Something true; and they invite me in, to pass through them into this thing for which I do not have a name.

Other beauties call, too: kindness, deep laughter, a child’s smile. Beauty not only hints at a knowledge far beyond my own, it also calls me to be worthy of each special beauty, of the truth which beauty reflects. My most common experience in the face of it is pain- the pain of personal incongruity with beauty.

This is where I get stuck every time, because every time I choose not to answer beauty’s invitation. I can only conclude that I turn away out of fear. This second fear of beauty, I confess makes little sense to me.

Beauty, interacted with, makes us beautiful. Not much scares me more than this. I have gone to great lengths to define myself with words like depressed, unmotivated, unlovable, failed, confused, sinful, useless, lost. As long as I beat and imprison myself for past error, as long as I act as though I do not deserve grace or love or children or talent, my life is under my control, even if that control perpetuates self-hatred with bad choices and attitudes. When I am open to beauty my hands slip, I panic for fear of losing grip and being un-made, like Orual before the True God. And even more frightening, I will be re-made, and I will not be the maker.

Several years ago I had a recurring, half-waking dream. Just as I drifted into sleep, my body tingled, like a foot gone asleep or an epidural coursing through my veins or like regaining consciousness after passing out. Loud rushing filled my ears and both the sound and the numbness increased steadily. I knew I was coming to a point, a jumping-off point, but I didn’t know what lay beyond it: Death? Levitation? Ordinary sleep? I couldn’t move or make a sound or open my eyes when it began, but I fought and feared and fought some more. Each time I broke the spell just before sailing off the edge of the world. I’d wake up sweaty, heart thumping, and relieved, but terrified to go to sleep again. More than once I determined to embrace whatever approached; I’d jump and see what lurked in the great beyond. But I couldn’t do it.

Maybe it is too much to hope that God will welcome me. Maybe it is too much to ask that I wed my need to something as unstable as human love. Maybe it is too much to believe that I was made to drink beauty, to become beauty. It is too incredible. And it hurts.

confession

2006-01-24T17:33:00.000-05:00

Eliot is student of the week in his kindergarten class this week and I am trying unsuccessfully to put together a picture poster-board of his life for him to showcase before his classmates. I'm running into trouble because I have not put a single photograph of Eliot in a photo album.

I fell asleep seven years ago and I am not awake yet. I want to wake; I do. But waking images are sharp and cold and as vivid as the smell of rain in June. I am afraid. I will finally admit that I am afraid.

It has become easy for me to concede depression or angst; these adorn me like well worn clothes. But fear...

This afternoon as I flipped through jackets of long-abandoned pictures, I saw pieces of me and people I know or used to know, people I love or used to love.

Eliot is my favorite child because I have wronged him most. I was sleeping soundly when he was born and he withered away at my grudging breast. I roused enough to warm a bottle but then I slipped away again.

I came back when I had learned to sleep walk, and Eliot did not know me. He kept staring at me with a tentative grin. I didn't know him, either. I couldn't read what was behind his eyes.

Fear... I can tell you I'm afraid to fail; that keeps me and everybody else from expecting too much of me.

But really I am afraid of beauty.

"The Dark Half"? Not Here

2006-01-17T09:41:00.000-05:00

I've just finished Stephen King's On Writing and am eager to write fiction.
Part memoir, part instruction manual, often reminiscent of a personal letter, this book is the most helpful one "on writing" that I have read. King is practical, encouraging and friendly in a candid way which surprised me and bordered on downright vulnerability. I have never read one of his stories. I yet may. But whether I like his novels or find they just aren't up my alley, I wager I will retain a certain respect for the works, as the author retains respect for his craft, and respect for his readers, and respect for serious pursuers of writing.

Christian Fiction

2006-01-04T15:40:00.000-05:00

The November/December issue of by Faith magazine contains an article by Stephen McGarvey entitled, "New Direction for Christian Publishing?". In it, he offers an answer as to why so many of us find contemporary Christian fiction, the kind that lines the shelves of the nearest Christian bookstore, formulaic and unforgivably boring. We find it so, he says (if I may take the liberty of paring down his answer), because it is so. In support of this, McGarvey quotes Richard Terrell's essay, "Christian Fiction: Piety is not enough", in which the author calls Christian fiction parochial and pietistic, and Allen Arnold, who laments that Christian fiction is written to a narrow group of people and employs a pre-approved technique to create a "safe" story, ironically bringing about a dangerous loss of integrity in both the art form and the communicated message. Here's Allen Arnold on Christian fiction:

"Christian fiction has become a genre with a long list of things that each story should include and a longer list of what each story cannot include. It's often comfort food for the saved. It's billed as safe, as if 'safe' is a Christian virtue. But it's rarely culturally relevant or well written."

This reminds me of the gem I found the other day in Annie Dillard's "Living by Fiction":

"Sentimental art...attempts to force preexistent emotions upon us. Instead of creating characters and events which will elicit special feelings unique to the text, sentimental art merely gestures toward stock characters and events whose accompanying emotions come on tap. Bad poetry is almost always bad because it attempts to claim for itself the real power of whatever it describes in ten lines: a sky full of stars, first love, or Niagara falls. An honest work generates its own power; a dishonest one tries to rob from the cataracts of the given."

I was so glad Dillard said what she did in the way she did, because I spent a very unhappy hour the other week, trying to convince my husband that a popular Christian Christmas song was sentimental and lacked integrity, musically and lyrically, and that I was not merely engaging in my beloved and frequent habit of cynicism. (The fact that I could not put this intuition clearly and succinctly until I found Annie Dillard saying it does not bode well for me, as a writer.)

McGarvey goes on to quote author Bret Lott on the state of today's publishing industry:

"Lets be realistic. The world of books is run, by and large, by the notions of money... Christian publishing...is undoubtedly even less interested in the art [of writing] than [secular publishing], and... is most interested in... how deep the pockets are of the choir to which it preaches."

The article ends on a hopeful note, citing several Christian publishers who are seeking writers and works with more integrity. I wonder if there is even a place for "christian" publishers of fiction. If Christians own and run a publishing company, they should publish books that have integrity; if a Christian's work of fiction is written with integrity, it should be able to withstand secular scrutiny and be meaningful to readers, whether or not those readers are Christian.

I cringe that I must here mention authors such as C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Dostoevsky, T.S. Eliot, Walker Percy, Flannery O'Conner... because every discussion of Christian fiction clings to these few bright stars in an otherwise cloudy sky. However, Dr. Randall Smith of Bellhaven College says of them something that is worth repeating:

"They wrote seeking answers and their novels are artifacts of their search for meaning, not testimonies to the false belief that they knew everything before they began... When the writing of the book is not an exploration of the mysteries of the world God has made, it is merely the dressing up of a few scriptural truths. We know truth, but we do not know all the truth that God wrapped up into creation- we have to write with this in mind."

Katherine Paterson said, at a writer's conference, that whatever she doesn't understand, whatever bothers her, whatever she can't accept or wrap her mind around, that is what she writes about.

"I write to understand", she said.

January 3, 1959

2006-01-04T09:26:00.000-05:00

On Jan. 3, 1959, President Eisenhower signed a proclamation admitting Alaska to the Union as the 49th state.

Alaska is a land rich in natural resources and wilderness beauty. It has proven itself a profitable addition to the United States; however, both the purchase of Alaska and its fight for statehood were surrounded by controversy. Nearly one hundred years elapsed between the United State's purchase of Alaska in 1867 and the day its people were finally given the rights and benefits of statehood.

During that century, Alaska's natural resources were exploited by outside business groups and entrepreneurs, while Alaskans were denied self-rule and were taxed without representation in congress.

William H. Seward promoted the Alaskan purchase during Andrew Johnson's presidency, as part of an even more ambitious "manifest destiny" than the original hope of stretching from "sea to shining sea".

[Seward] negotiated a purchase price with Edouard de Stoeckl, the Russian diplomat. They settled on $7,200,000. This came to 12.5 cents per acre for a plot of land twice the size of Texas.

At the same time that he was negotiating a price, Seward was negotiating on another front too. The Congress of the United States hadn't yet made up its mind to make the purchase, but Seward finally convinced them. By one vote, the Senate appropriated the money, and the US bought Alaska. On October 18, 1867, the Russian flag was lowered and a United States flag was raised over the city of Sitka, Alaska.

Even though Congress had approved the purchase, many people still questioned whether it was worthwhile. They called Alaska "Seward's folly," "Seward's icebox," and the "polar bear garden."

Seward disagreed. One time he was asked what his greatest accomplishment was. He answered, "The purchase of Alaska! But it will take a generation to find that out."

The next hundred years saw pioneers and gold-seekers and timber companies and canneries and finally, the military, arrive and utilize Alaska's resources and position, while proposals for self-government were repeatedly denied. At first, Alaskan statehood was championed by individuals and politicians within the forty-eight contiguous states and the Alaskans themselves showed little interest. But slowly, the people became informed and engaged in impassioned discussion. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner printed parts of Edna Ferber's novel Ice Palace.

The passages featured the character of Thor Storm, the grizzled Nordic pioneer, informing his granddaughter, Christine, about the legacy of Seattle and San Francisco cannery operators' unmerciful exploitation of Alaska's fisheries. Ferber's book had sold well and widely. Ice Palace had such an educative effect on the nation's populace that one critic was moved to refer to it as "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of Alaska Statehood."

And finally:

No one savored the prospect of paying federal taxes yet remaining, in effect, a stranger to the Union. Another series of Congressional hearings about Alaska's situation instilled in many Alaskans an interest in more aggressive action. Such enthusiasm ultimately brought about the 1955 Constitutional Convention, held in the newly appointed "Constitution Hall" on the grounds of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. It was here that Senator Ernest Gruening delivered his galvanizing "Let Us End American Colonialism" address. The convention received phenomenal national exposure and was praised by numerous journalists for its idealistic attention to "the good of Alaska" rather than partisan politics. The convention was an intensely emotional event for all involved, as passions about the future of Alaska ran strong and deep among convention members. In 1956, the resulting Constitution--which the National Municipal League called "one of the best, if not the best, state constitutions ever written"--was overwhelmingly accepted by Alaskans.

- all excepts from "Alaska For Sale" by Sharon Fabian

Running

2005-11-30T10:47:00.000-05:00

It's Saturday, in the cold, first light of morning. I pull on a heavy sweater and jeans and move silently over the bedroom floor. I am obligated to the dawning day, not to speak. There will be time for that, later. There are errands to run, housework and meals and child-noises: piano practice, homework questions, tussles over chores and toys.

Three hours from now I'll say something before I think, for no real reason, and my words will slip unnoticed into everybody else's noise. Here, in the grey light and silence, a thoughtless word seems crass; irreverent. There is room enough for right words, but few find them, I think.

In the beginning was the Word… I imagine the first morning, when God looked into dark empty space, silent for ages, and filled it up with His words. Let there be light!

I am glad to hold my tongue.

…

The morning evolves from silence to hushed whispers to conversation, from the holy atmosphere of a prayer chapel to the friendly one of a church foyer. Everyone is talking and lively, but not raucous or silly just yet. Holiness lingers.

The whole family heads out early for a school fund-raiser, "Run for Funds". My three oldest boys recruited sponsors- grandparents, aunts and uncles- and are off this morning to run as many quarter-mile laps in the space of an hour, as their child-legs allow. It is near freezing weather, but sunny, crisp and cold like a Michigan apple.

Scott and I hit the track with Eliot and Ethan and I remind the older boys to pace themselves. An hour is a long time to run.

"I know," they both say.

...

It’s all I can do to keep up with two-year-old Ethan, who’s decided he’d rather run the track than ride it in a stroller.

I remember exuberance. It was mine once.

I follow the white lines with my eyes all the way around the elliptical track to where I began. Fire infiltrates my calves, my thighs and creeps into my brain. When did I become this?

A movie starts running in my head: there’s a camera close-up of my face- flushed, sweaty, distorted- smashed against the ground at the finish line. The camera pans up slowly to show Ethan, standing with one foot on my head and his arms in the air, his face smugly victorious…

"I running!" Ethan shouts.

"Yes, you are running, sweetie! You're doing a good job!" I say encouragingly, as I close the gap between us from behind.

Ethan looks delighted, smiles and does a little dance. "Mommy, you catch up with me!"

...

The fall morning is newborn-fresh: violent, dewy, tender and promising. Orange, fire-engine-red, purple and yellow lie cradled in arms of unbelievable blue. Everything exposed to earth and sky today is dipped into a giant vat of golden honey and brought forth dripping, sweet and glowing like the bursting, sun-lit trees.

I am no exception. Suddenly, I know that I am beautiful. I smile up into the painted hemisphere and it smiles warmly in return. I begin running, again.

...

After a lap or two I cease thinking about time. Time is irrelevant. My task is set: I keep moving in the same direction, keep my feet on the baby-blue track. I walk, I run when I can, but always circling, circling, like the seasons. You can argue that there is no point to it, no grand, over-arching purpose, not even a clear destination. We’re just orbiting a green-grass center as if it is our sun.

But moving my body is good, and beauties abound today.

…

A boy and girl in front of me are laughing together and trying to run. They hip-shove each other and tell jokes and I think how much this looks like flirting, but I know it’s not. Chris and Erin are in the fourth grade, and are good pals and they, with my son, Micah, are almost inseparable. I’m surprised he is not with them, now.

In the first week of third grade, Chris’s mom, Suzie, told me how much her son enjoyed mine. He said, “Mom, I think I like Micah as much a Joe.” Joe is a long-time best friend.

Also during the first week of third grade, Micah sat down to dinner full of grunts and facial contortions over a girl named Erin. He told us gravely, “she’s my arch-enemy”. A week later he admitted he thought she was smarter than he was. I told his teacher about their little competition and she laughed, “Yeah, well, I think Micah can keep up with her, too.” By Christmas they were best friends.

“Hi Erin, Hi Chris,” I call out. “Where’s Micah?”

“He’s up there, somewhere,” Erin says, flipping her hand out in front of her and her long hair over her shoulder.

…

When Micah laps me a short while later, his brown eyes are determined and joyful.

“I’m ahead of everyone in my class,” he tells me, and tries to hide the radiance oozing from his pores.

Of my four children, Micah is the one most like me. We fight. Sometimes I’m afraid my love will crush him and other times I’m afraid I’ll lose him, that he’ll just drift away.

I read his school journal the other day. In it, he says that he likes rain, and that his favorite way to spend a stormy day is lying on the couch watching, through the window. When I asked him why he wrote less, as the school weeks passed, he shrugged. “Mrs. Meadows always reads our journals.” He paused. “I don’t like telling people what I feel.”

When I was nine I wanted to be my own mother, because I knew what I needed and my mother rarely did. Now that my son is nine, I have no idea what to do. I know what he’s feeling and I know why he acts as he does, with hostility or flight, when he just can’t shake his need for compassion or to be understood. But I can’t get to him. Antagonism can not be comforted. I know that now and I blame my mom a little less. I search for a gesture or a magic word with which to penetrate his arguments, his pessimism; but the same tool doesn’t work twice.

Micah and I understand each other best when we are sharing something: walking, cooking, talking about a book we’ve both read. When he’s sad and doesn’t know why, he sits in my lap and twists my hair into knots, the way he did when I breastfed him, years ago.

I lost my temper the other day and said awful things, and Micah forgave me as soon as I asked.

“I’m sorry,” I said, again.

“It’s okay”.

“No, it’s not.” I said.

“It’s okay, because I forgive you,” he said. “That makes it okay and you don’t have to say you’re sorry, anymore.”

Micah's anger is intense; but his love is fiercer, by far.

…

Somewhere near the second-mile marker Eliot tells me his shoes are too small and have been for a long time. I buy new things for my oldest son and pull out stored-away boxes for my weed of a toddler. It turns out those kids in the middle grow, too.

Eliot is oblivious to things like too tight shoes. He wears short-sleeves and bare feet on winter mornings, when the house is chilled and the floor tile feels ice-cold. When he is sick, I know it before he does. He plays until he drops and I find him curled in a corner, sucking his thumb and shivering, with fiery skin.

I help Eliot take off his shoes. I carry the shoes in one hand and hold his cold hand in my other. We walk together, his stocking-feet padding the rubber track and his mouth chattering, as it always is.

I love that boy.

…

I’ve not seen Scott for a while, now. First he ran ahead with Eliot, while I lagged behind at Ethan’s pace. Somewhere along the way we switched out kids, but he is still ahead of me.

Scott is always several steps ahead of whomever he is walking with. This summer we met friends in Chicago and we all noticed it. He attributed this to our collective indecision. I attribute it to his eagerness to be, to move, to meet whatever is ahead.

When we walk together, he tells me I slow down when he does, keeping the distance between us. Maybe he’s right. When you’re eighteen and engaged to your first solid boyfriend, then married with a baby before you’re 20, keeping distance stops you from fading out. Still, there is more to it than that. Some Siren in his soul bids him on.

If I want him to keep my pace, I have to hold his hand.

…

“Ten more minutes!” I hear the lap-counters shouting to the runners.

I am crossing the finish line for the eighth time, hand in hand with Eliot, who’s in socks and making a game out of side-stepping goose droppings.

Marshall, who is eleven and still calls me “Mommy”, runs up alongside us. His face is blotchy; cold white skin accented with hot spots of puffy pink.

“Hi mommy,” he says quietly, and slackens his pace. He’s been running for most of the hour.

Marshall talks easily with anyone he knows well, and is remarkably blessed with an immunity to peer pressure. He shakes his head and laughs kindly at trends, the way an old married couple smiles at young love. He builds amazing structures with LEGO’s and designs medieval torture devices which, despite being frightening, are surprisingly well-designed.

I asked him once what he wants to do when he grows up and he said,

“I have this theory that dinosaurs still exist, and I want to prove it.” He thought for another minute, shuffled around a bit, smirked, and said sheepishly, “I don’t know if you can actually do that. You know, for a career.”

Marshall was born a little bit lop-sided. Whether it’s his spine or just his posture, we don’t know; we’ve never looked into it and it’s never been a problem. Scott and I joked about it when he was a baby. When he started running, he ran crooked, too, his left side dragging just a hair behind his right.

Because of this or because of his long, lanky build, or maybe because he’s had a quick mind from the start, our friends and relatives pegged him down right away as smart but un-athletic. When his brother, Micah, arrived two years later with a perfectly proportioned, compact self, he got labeled “athlete”. The truth is that both are misnomers. Micah is sharp as a tack and Marshall holds his own in most sports. As their mother, I know this.

Still, I am surprised. Marshall is running as fast now as he was when we started and I gave him that unneeded advice about pacing. We chat for a bit and then he pulls ahead. He says he needs a drink and then he’s going to finish strong.

I believe him. He has shed his asymmetry, like a too heavy coat.

…

Eliot runs his entire last lap in socks. We make our way to Scott and Ethan, who have finished ahead of us. Marshall and Micah stand a little way off, panting and gulping from bottles of water.

I ask Marshall for his final tally.

“Twenty-one,” he tells me.

“Wow,” I say, in all sincerity.

“Guess what?” Micah walks toward me with a grin. “I got 21 laps!”

The lap-counters confirm him. Marshall and Micah are officially tied as the top lap-runners of the k-6 school.

Micah is jealous and aggressive by nature and his chief competitor is his older brother. Marshall is self-contained and passive, and Micah is his only competitor. The tie seems to satisfy them both.

“Your boys did really well.” I look up to see Miss Albers, the first grade teacher and also the secondary school’s cross-country coach.

“Yeah, I think they had a lot of fun,” I tell her.

“Well, I hope Marshall comes out for Cross-Country next year.”

I’m trying to grasp that my boys just ran five and a quarter miles a piece, in one hour. They are eleven and nine and I am feeling much older than I am.

…

Scott wants to go to IHOP for brunch and we don’t really have money for that kind of thing. But the boys are hungry and they’ve just run their hearts out. We tell them they can have whatever they want to eat and we decide to order hot-chocolates, topped with whipped cream.

When we walk into the restaurant my children’s faces are flushed and rosy-cheeked. I ease myself onto a padded bench and wait for a table.

A man and woman are leaving. I’m not a good judge of age, but they are silver-haired and walking slowly. The man holds the heavy glass door and the lady ducks under his upheld arm. Her eyes take in my clan of disheveled boys and before leaving she turns, smiles toward me, knowingly.

…

Ethan’s legs are wrapped around my waist and his arms cling to my neck. He’s tired and his head droops, until some small pleasure lights his eyes, through the window, behind me. He clutches my hands with expert fingers and balances, stepping on my thighs. He jumps up and down on my lap, singing loudly.

I am weary from a night of little sleep and a morning full of feeling, but I do not ask him to stop. Instead, I fold my face into his hot cheek and draw in my breath. His smell is deep and sweet, the irrepressible scent of life.

The Men That Don't Fit In

2005-11-29T18:07:00.000-05:00

There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain's crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don't know how to rest.

If they just went straight they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;
But they're always tired of the things that are,
And they want the strange and new.
They say: "Could I find my proper groove,
What a deep mark I would make!"
So they chop and change, and each fresh move
Is only a fresh mistake.

And each forgets, as he strips and runs
With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones
Who win in the lifelong race.
And each forgets that his youth has fled,
Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead,
In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
He has just done things by half.
Life's been a jolly good joke on him,
And now is the time to laugh.
Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
He was never meant to win;
He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone;
He's a man who won't fit in.

-Robert Service

Change

2005-11-22T10:28:00.000-05:00

In the past few weeks I've heard from three (very) different sources that "People don't really change all that much" over the course of a lifetime.

I'm trying to think this through. This seems right as personality is concerned. But how far does it go? And what role do habits play? And are we prey to certain habits because of our personalities? If habit forms character and habit is acquired through natural proclivities, then isn't our character and very moral fabric determined before we are even born?

Of course, I know this is the old Nature vs. Nurture debate. And I know our families and societies play a big role in habit formation as well. But could I, for example, being a generally standoffish, keep-to-myself person, recreate myself through habit, into a welcoming, engaging, warm, social-butterfly kind of person? Interestingly, in high school I was this for one year. One year in all my thirty-one. What caused my behaviour that one year? Could that change have been sustained had I not suffered personal tragedy and recoiled?

I'm trying to feel out how far habit and will can really take us.

Each time I heard this week the idea of our basic unchanging nature, I became very uncomfortable. It isn't only because I'm scared to death that I'll have to be this for the rest of my life (which I am, by the way) but also because I've found hope and a reason to live and work hard in the idea that change is possible. And because I don't know how to believe in predestination, whether social or theological. ( I am not going to argue the finer points of reformed theology here.) To me, the possibility of change is what redeems the endless cycle of monotony and meaninglessness that Ecclesiastes talks about and which I have lamented over before in this blog.

Anyway, I have to run. I'm late (something which proves change is impossible) for a thanksgiving Feast at my children's school. No time to flesh this out. But I wanted to write something down, so I can think about it more clearly and get anyone else's thoughts on the matter.

Harry Potter and Micah King

2005-11-19T23:57:00.000-05:00

I took a painting break this afternoon and escorted Micah and his two best friends to the fourth Harry Potter film. I haven't come to any conclusions on the movie, yet. I sat right next to a 9 year old boy who couldn't stop talking, loudly, and replete with spoilers. Of course, I've read the book, so that was okay. Still,I had a hard time following the storyline and I don't know if that was due to the three excited chatterers in my company or simply because the movie failed to produce a solid one. I wondered several times if I'd be able to make any sense of it if I hadn't read it first. But then, the problem may have been my emotional involvement with a much more intricate story than two hours of film can portray.

Micah set up the whole outing. He called Erin and Chris and worked out the time and meeting place. I couldn't help chuckling to myself, watching Harry, Ron and Hermione with Micah, Chris and Erin. Micah and Chris will have to fight a wand-war to determine which of the two gets to be Harry and which gets to be Ron. But Chris has strawberry-blond hair and Micah's got a scar on his forehead, just barely hidden by his disheveled hair.

I wonder sometimes how my sons relate to girls, since there are four of them and they have no sister. Erin has been Micah's friend for about a year and they get along seamlessly.

When Scott went to buy tickets for the 12:50 showing, he found a 1:40 showing in "the big theatre". He phoned Micah to ask if he'd like to change times. Micah said, "Daddy, that's almost a whole hour later, and Erin wants to see it as soon as possible".

We went to the earlier show. He has no idea how cute he is.

Melancholy, in Brown and Grey

2005-11-17T14:23:00.000-05:00

Update:

To those of you who want me to write more than once a month, I have to tell you that I want to, also. Right now I am behind on several email and letter-writing tasks, which really must come first. Also, we're tearing out carpet in our dining/living room, flooring the former with something more proper to a dining area where four children eat meals, and painting all the walls before the carpet installers come.

Melancholy:

Fall has ended abruptly with six inches of snow. It is wonderful and I love snow. But I wasn't ready for it this year. The week or two after all the loud and glorious colored leaves have fallen and muted is, for me, a cherished time of rest. The breath-stopping world of many colors becomes reduced to a few quiet shades. Trees stand naked and grey and the ground along the sides of the road and on the forest floor is deep brown. The few leaves remaining on the trees and the ones which blow across my yard are chestnut- not orange, but hinting at what orange must be.

When I look out the picture window in my dining room, past my red barn and the woodshed and the sagging chicken coop, I see far into the wood, where there was only leafy closeness before. The hardwood trees are tall, twisted or leaning from years of untiring pursuit after a fleeing sun. These grey phantoms hover over the brown earth, playing endlessly with light and shadow. There's a finality, and a melancholy. But it suits me.

My world is so much bigger for this week or two- until the first snow, and then things close in again. But it is a cheery closeness; clean and bright and undeniably beautiful.

A Perfect Day

2005-11-04T15:24:00.000-05:00

"Today is just about perfect!" I told Ethan.

He was lying flat on his back on the living room floor. He wriggled and kicked, fought me as I wrapped him in a clean diaper.

"The sky is blue, the grass is green, the leaves are brown and yellow and orange and falling from the trees." I said, to distract him.

He relaxed, shifted his gaze to the large picture windows covering one half of a living room wall. The blue front door hung partially open, forgotten by a careless child. The wind ushered in a warm, autumn scent.

...

Fall smells quiet and faintly sweet, like a peaceful death at a good old age, with family standing near. Fall is a slow awakening of the collective human mind as it sobers and turns inward, hushed by the ancient earth as she puts on her extravagant show, and gently covers those who have fallen with her hand-made quilt of fallen leaves.

...

I pointed past Ethan, toward the open door, and we both strained our necks to see a slice of day beyond it.

"The wind is blowing, and the leaves are rustling, and the birds are swooping and chirping," I said.

Ethan giggled and simple delight sparkled in his eyes.

"Chirping!" He mimicked, and laughed again. Ethan is two and likes the sound of words. He considers the sound of a word, as much as its context, when he assigns meaning to it.

"Somebody is burning leaves in a backyard or having a fire in a fireplace." I continued.

"Burning yellow leaves!" he said.

"The day is absolutely perfect." I told him again. "It's gorgeous."

I wrestled him into small denim jeans, a quilted, plaid flannel shirt and sneakers, which his three older brothers wore before him, but which he calls "new", because I pulled them out of storage just a week ago. We walked together to the door and pushed it wide open.

We stood side by side in the threshold in an overabundance of beauty and turned our faces toward the sun, the wind, the rustling and chirping, and the open, fragrant air.

Ethan leaned into it with arms raised above his head and yelled loud, his voice a power of it's own, clear and strong and full of unambivalent joy.

"It's Gorgeous!" He bellowed.

Another Word from Barry Lopez

2005-10-21T17:14:00.000-04:00

...in case that first one didn't get your soul churning:

(At the end of his journey)

"I looked out over the Bering Sea and brought my hands folded to the breast of my parka and bowed from the waist deeply toward the north, that great straight filled with life, the ice and water. I held the bow to the pale sulphur sky at the northern rim of the earth. I held the bow until my back ached, and my mind was emptied of its categories and designs, its plans and speculations. I bowed before the simple evidence of the moment in my life in a tangible place on the earth that was beautiful"

Leaning Into The Light

2005-10-20T15:37:00.000-04:00

I returned the voluminous Arctic Dreams to the library yesterday. But not before committing to computer memory the author's reflections following a walrus hunt:

“No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself . If there is a stage at which an individual becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”

-Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

Oh No, She's Right.

2005-10-13T10:25:00.000-04:00

In reading Heather Lende's book, If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name, I came across something Annie Dillard said in her book, The Writing Life :

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing."

This is striking to me; the simple, straight-forward, clean logic of it. Why is an apparently self-evident truth so difficult to grasp? How can I repeatedly convince myself that the whole of my life will be greater than the sum of its parts?

I keep doing the same things and expecting different results. I choose the same sops and diversions every day, and every evening I swear I'll make tomorrow different.

I've lived long enough to know that change doesn't often descend like a blinding light on the road to Damascus. Most of us have to get there by the sweat of our brows.

I'm restless lately, scared. All the plans I had at ten or twelve or sixteen, lay fallen by the wayside, left to wither in the hot sun or snatched up in the beaks of parabolic birds.

I don't know when I became so weak.

I found a box of letters in the garage yesterday; all the letters I wrote my husband before we were married and were living several hundred miles and two states apart. I wouldn't know that girl if I met her and I'm sure I wouldn't like her. I browsed through the letters, read a few, reluctantly. The only more embarrasing experience I can remember is watching my wedding video.

I was barely nineteen when we married and between the ages of sixteen and eighteen when I wrote those letters, so I should be fair and give youthful naivete its due allowance.

The thing that wont leave me alone though, like a rug I can't shake out, is how happy she was, how self-possessed, how sure. And kind. Granted, she hadn't seen the world yet and knew as much about that life as a baby in utero knows about life outside the womb. But I give her a full ten points for sincerity.

I can't imagine anything less like me, now.

About eight years ago two things happened pretty much simultaneously. I stopped trusting God and I found out abruptly that I couldn't trust myself. That's when everything started to slip. It was the first time I ever yelled at a child. And he was mine.

It's hard to appreciate how far little steps can take us off the path. But I have to believe little steps can bring me back, too.

I'm going to pull out my compass now and head back. I don't know where I came from, so I can't retrace my steps. But when I am very still, I think I can feel my heart leaning True North.

Child Psychology

2005-09-30T09:58:00.000-04:00

Marshall (11), and Micah (9) were chatting it up in the back seat on our way home from school Tuesday.

Marshall: Hey Micah, you know how people who are really good with kids always try to get you to repeat something louder... like, "I can't heeeaaarr you!"

Micah: Yeah.

Marshall: I hate that.

Micah: Me too.

Non-Connatural Habit

2005-09-26T11:18:00.000-04:00

Several of you have inquired, at stops along the way of my blogging journey, into the nature of my relationship with writing. "I thought you weren't going to blog anymore?", “Why do you write?” and "Do you even like to write?"

I admit this is all very confusing, even to me. My comments about writing and the sum of this blog in general, are oxymoronic.

So let me try to explain one more time.

I'll start with a part of Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain, which I am still reading:

He's talking about a kind of knowledge the Thomists called "connatural", which is:

"... a knowledge which comes about as it were by the identification of natures: in the way that a chaste man understands the nature of chastity because of the very fact that his soul is full of it- it is part of his own nature, since habit is second nature."

And the practice of chastity is a habit. Right. Good.

But Merton goes on to talk about an opposite kind of knowledge:

"Non-connatural knowledge of chastity would be that of a philosopher who...would be able to define it, but would not possess it."

The problem for me comes in that I'm scared to death that my life contains only this second kind of knowledge- which may enable me to write a few things now and then but is useless to save my soul. I'm also afraid that writing will only perpetuate this situation because it is inactive. Sometimes I think I shouldn't write at all but should devote my time and energy exclusively to training myself in good habit.

The other problem I have with blogging (but not, specifically, with writing) is that I am a moody and impetuous woman. Some days (the ones where I feel like a relatively normal person) I enjoy putting down my thoughts and imagining that somebody likes reading them. Other days (the psycho ones) I know that I am not anything resembling normal and that nobody loves me and I am all alone in a hostile or, at best, indifferent world. It is on these days that I want to delete my entire blog and all my email correspondence from the past ten years, burn all my letters from anyone-all the way back to high-school, lock my doors, pull my shades, and stay in bed for the rest of my life.

Thankfully, I don't (always) do this. Today, for example, is one of the bad days. Still, I took my boys to school, read books to Ethan, and let a neighbor lady in the door against my will. And I'm blogging.

So maybe this explains, in part, the schizophrenia of my blog. (And gives pause to anyone wondering at my choice of the word schizophrenia.)

evolution.

2005-09-23T09:54:00.000-04:00

I've sometimes felt comfort in the thought that I can leave behind a written record of myself for my children, grandchildren, etc. all the way down through centuries. But even written words are temporary and elusive.

Siren Song

2005-09-22T12:42:00.000-04:00

It was still dark this morning as I drove the kids to school. Three months from now the sun will make a habit of sleeping in but today a stormy sky obscured its light.

I often wake to a lightening world. Light precedes the sun's rising, the way an introductory speaker precedes the keynote: it paints a general, if obscure picture of what's to come. Bulky shapes emerge where there was nothing before and begin to round out, to acquire features. If you watch closely these shapes morph into familiar objects before your very eyes. That hunched-over, unnatural thing to your right becomes an ordinary boulder; those tall moaning phantoms, wavering in a low, sad song are old, white pines swaying in the breeze - morning's breath- pushed by the first grey light, over the curve of the earth.

Today the world stayed dark, time suspended, hushed, as if it and everything in it would go on sleeping forever. If that was the earth's intent, she nearly had us all convinced- heavy on mattresses, legs curled, our minds on a skiff somewhere in the middle of a great, green sea, sounding the uncharted waters of our dreams. It was a beautiful deception- and it might have worked- but children, who still prefer life to dreams, began to wake, one by one, and laid warm hands on adult arms and shoulders. I started awake, gasped as I broke the water's surface, took in the sharp cold and shook out my wet hair. Marshall stood over me, saying something about the dark. He took his hand from my shoulder and went to dress for school.

"Just in the nick of time", I whispered. Or none of us would have ever come back.

Nature and Children

2005-09-19T12:49:00.000-04:00

In answer to a query regarding a previous post:

I've read the first two chapters of "Last Child in the Woods" but have put it down for a bit, since I own it (a birthday gift), and other books I'm reading have library deadlines.

However, FOUR of the books I'm reading are about Alaska (I don't know exactly why Alaska's become so important to me but the effect is a sort of baptism of mind and soul.) These readings also direct my thoughts toward nature and questions about my children's (and my own) interaction with it.

I could say so much about this, but I'm still forming my opinions on the matter and searching for truth. Should we move our family somewhere as dramatic as Alaska or Africa to get free from the groping hands of consumerism and pop culture? Is it enough to move to a midwestern rural area? How about living 10 miles from a city, 5 miles from a shopping mall, one mile from a giant movie theater with an Imax screen and a strip mall, on an acre and a half, backing up to County forest? (This is what we have now.) Is that enough? Or should we move to the city to foster community and social responsibility and take intentional excursions into nature? Is a city park enough?

I don't know. But here is what I think about when I try to determine what to do for my boys if I have to stay just where I am forever.

I told Scott yesterday that I think connecting our children to the natural world is like connecting them to the Christian faith. By this I mean that if we raise them with the right ideas about either one but we never help them "fall in love" with what's at the center, they will have no use for nature or for God.

Marshall and Micah moan and groan about going outside and act in other suburb-sick ways that horrify me. We've kept them largely from computer games and almost entirely from television, but made the mistake of assuming they would latch on to the natural world in place of those things, as we did (I didn't even have a television during my childhood). Something is different in today's climate than it was 20 years ago. "Last Child in the Woods" I suspect is going to investigate that difference.

So we've got to introduce our kids to nature. Sometimes it works to just send them outside. But you'd be amazed how little my boys explore our 1.5 wooded acres. They stay on the concrete and play with legos.

Some helpful books:

"Sharing Nature With Children" by Joseph Cornell - This is full of ideas for outdoor activities in all seasons. One involves lying down on a pine forest floor and covering yourself with pine needles. I picked this up at a used bookstore and was delighted with it. Apparently there is a "SNWC II" but I haven't read it.

Charlotte Mason's Home education series talks about nature and children and introduces the idea of a "Nature Notebook" to encourage early observation and drawing (or painting) of outdoor life. Finding Charlotte Mason used to be difficult, but Susan Schaeffer Macaulay resurrected Mason's educational ideas in her book "For the Children's Sake".

"A Pocketful of Pinecones" by Karen Andreola - this is a whole book about Charlotte Mason's nature ideas. The writing is kind of cheesy, as it takes the form of a 1930's Mother's diary (I think it's hard to do fictional diaries well). But thankfully Andreola wasn't trying to write great literature, only to communicate some great ideas in a way accessible to most mothers, and she accomplishes this.

One of the most helpful things I've learned about nature walks is to walk in silence. It's counter-intuitive because we feel like we always need to give our kids "information" if we want them to appreciate something. But I've seen this many times with my boys- the more I talk the less they observe. And when I'm silent the wind and earth and trees seem to knead at their souls and make them pliable.

Children also need to learn to identify and understand what they see when they are out being quiet in nature. I've got a great "Handbook of Nature Study" by Anna Botsford Comstock. In the beginning chapter she discusses why and how to teach nature lessons to children and in fact, the book consists of 232 lessons.

Field guides are wonderful- one or another of my boys and I often look up a visitor to our front garden feeder in our "Birds of North America" guide. I also picked up an unusual book called "Hand Taming Wild Birds at the Feeder" which we have yet to delve into in spite of Eliot's eagerness to "have a bird land on my hand".

LOL. I have so many ideas. It's a shame my emotional constitution is so weak- I almost want to homeschool again until I remember how close to insanity I was.

"Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something." -The Princess Bride

2005-09-12T14:19:00.000-04:00

Here's something I read today in Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton,

"The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and conciousness is his greatest torture. this is another of the great perversions by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviserate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves."

I wonder if this is one reason so many of us in privileged, affluent countries suffer from depression, in spite of lives of relative ease, which are often untouched by the kinds of suffering so common to man in previous ages and in other parts of our current world.

I have noticed this in myself before- for one reason or another I seem to think I have a right to a life which doesn't ruffle my feathers too terribly much. I'm soft on myself and indulge myself in little pleasures- the way one might spoil child. What I feel like doing, I do; if I smell suffering down a path I steer clear of it. In the end I don't even know how to answer life's little disturbances or minor annoyances gracefully, anymore. The littlest things irk me.

Update

2005-09-07T09:25:00.000-04:00

I'm painfully aware that I am very behind in my correspondence. I hope to get to most of your emails in the next day or two but I thought I'd give a short update here for now.

School:
The boys are back at it and enjoying it. Marshall is in 6th grade this year and relishes his position as "Upperclassman" at his K-6 school. He told me he was really looking forward to getting to know the new Kindergarten class. "They're so cute," he said.

Micah is in fourth grade and enjoying his 7:3 boy to girl ratio (in a few more years those 7 boys will be wishing that ratio were inverted).

Eliot began Kindergarten this year. He's always been a little hesitant going into organized social situations. But on his first day, while we were getting Ethan and supplies out of the car, he ran off without us. I looked for him and heard, "Mommy! Mommy! Good bye!". He was already disappearing through the double doors of the school, waving cheerily. The other day at a gas station Scott told him he could buy mints with his own money and when I turned around he was up at the counter getting change from the attendant. I guess Eliot decided he's ready to grow up.

Current Reading:

The stars, The Snow and The Fire - an Alaska memoir by John Haines

Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv

For the Life of the World by Alexander Schmemann

Current Obsessions:

Alaska: All things related to this last, vast, harsh, wild and beautiful frontier.

Finding a way to be healthy: 6 days smoke free (and alcohol free, since it's hard to have a drink without a cigarette), Cooking and eating healthful foods, looking for a sport to take up (a 34-year-old friend of mine is taking on her 6th Triathlon of the summer this Saturday).

Waiting

2005-08-24T19:43:00.000-04:00

We went to a little park today. It was green, shaded, clean, with playgrounds and picnic tables and a nice beach on Wabassis Lake. The day is sunny, blue and green in shocking hues.

We waded in the water, shallow for a long way from the shore, and gathered snail shells; hoped we'd catch a slimy inhabitant still home. Most of them had flown the coop. Or swam the shell. We paddled the blow-up boat between buoys, in and out of the swim area. A young girl stood a short way down the beach, knee deep in water with a fishing pole.

Later I stood outside a closed stall in the women's restroom, Eliot inside, chattering away: Was I sure it was okay for him to go in the girls' bathroom, since the door on the men's room stall wouldn't close? Was I sure that I was standing directly outside the door? Was I sure nobody would see him?

"It's okay for you to be here, Eliot," I said. "You're a little boy and I'm your mommy. You're with me, it's okay. And nobody is going to see you."

I heard the toilet flush in the large handicapped stall next to Eliot's, and a lot of shuffling around. The door opened and a woman emerged, fighting a wheelchair and an awkward door, in too close quarters. In the chair she carried her own son but he was not a little boy. I saw his eyes rolled back in their sockets, his mouth was crooked and drooling, and his head turned upward toward the sky, like he was waiting for heaven to come down.

I said excuse me and moved from the front of Eliot's stall. The woman tried to pass in too great a hurry and swiped a metal garbage can with the chair, sent it rattling across the tile floor and banging the concrete wall. She hastily retrieved the can and set it in a more sensible place, behind the door. Her hurry wasn't angry or unkind, just tired. There's a kind of tired that makes you hurry; you start out carefully washing each dish but an hour later when you reach the last one you merely grace it with a tired, half-soapy wipe.

I wondered how a thousand of these bathroom trips would wear me if I knew they wouldn't end or how many of my hairs would gray as the little body on the toilet seat grew into a man's and the man never showed up to claim it.

And then they were gone, the tired mother and her angel-kissed son.

"uh-oh Mommy. I'm going to have to unlock the door, do you know why? Because I can't reach the toilet paper and I need you to get it for me." I waited while Eliot rocked himself down from the toilet seat and fumbled with the lock.

I decided not to tell him that once he'd gotten down off the toilet he could have easier got the paper himself. He'll figure it out someday. For now I'll let him need me.

Mind the Gap

2005-08-15T15:19:00.000-04:00

Last night we watched Mind the Gap, a beautiful, if slow-moving film that is the best one I've seen all year. Well, that and Around the Bend (which imdb review I couldn't disagree with more).
Yes, I'm sentimental. And I'm a sucker for hope and redemption.

Visitors

2005-08-10T14:39:00.000-04:00

We had a nice couple of days with Laura and Liz. I'm still tired after a 12-hour-sleep last night. I stayed up chatting with Liz until four a.m. on Sunday night and repeated the insanity on Monday night with Laura.

It's good to have friends. Solid, comfortable friendships refuse to form now, as they did with the ease of youth.

Thanks to the two of them for enduring family life for a few days. And to Laura for choosing to spend her birthday with us. Happy August 8th, Laura.

Re: Your Comments

2005-08-02T12:59:00.000-04:00

Thank you, all. It means a great deal to me that some of my ponderings (and perhaps more often, my struggles) were in some small way helpful - or at least comforting, in the way that it's comforting to rub sore gums, where the tooth is trying to break through: the pain is intensified at first, but afterward comes a wave of relief; and it's this painful rubbing which coaxes the teeth in.

I will write again; it's an innate desire in me - but I'm equally sure of this hiatus. It wasn’t something I pondered very long; I just decided all of a moment but I haven’t wavered, as in my usual decision-making fashion. I know the given reason “to find my soul” is nebulous but that is intentional as well. (No, I am not shooting for obscurity.) I leave my explanation vague because my habitual self-examination and delineation of thoughts and personal roadblocks (usually presenting with the words, “My problem is…”) has acted for me as a place-marker, but no more. I know what page I’m on; I know it well, because I flip through the book and find it again every day. But I read no further.

I’m fasting from writing, the way one fasts from meat and wine during Lent: the absence of the thing leaves a space to fill some other way, and it shoves your face right up against the glass for a good look – and you have to look, because you can’t fall back on your usual methods.

I'd love it if you all would email me. I'm not quitting relationships, just blogging. ;)

Death to Words

2005-07-26T18:57:00.000-04:00

I read somewhere that the average blogger lasts three months at his endeavor, unless his blog is discovered, regularly read, and commented on, generating a sort of community in the little corner he has created.

I've blogged for five months now and have had a few good discussions with my readers. The best thing about it, I think, has been the openness it forced me into. My moods cycle like the seasons (although there are more of them and they are less predictable). I've always, since I can remember, withheld myself from other people, which often leads to severe loneliness and personal myopia and the natural consequence of not seeing past one's own nose (even if it's a long one, like mine) - depression. On several occasions some of you have helped steer me away from that jagged shore on my tempest-tossed sea. Thank you.

My original purpose for this blog hasn't up and flown away, but the first stated purpose has changed some. I no longer want to keep a personal journal. It's hard to explain, really.

What it comes down to is that I am sick of myself. And I'm sad. And I'm afraid. I'm afraid that I'm going to live another 40 years and still be sitting in front of my computer bitching about the world and philosophizing about life and theologizing about God. But none of it matters. I don't live.

When I was 10 years old I decided I wanted to become a writer when I grew up. The funny thing is that I stopped writing when I actually became an adult. I spent many years reading, filling in my missing education, and many more years (with some overlap) fighting the paralysis of grief. These past few months have brought me joy, as I returned semi-regularly, to my first great passion. I love writing. Nothing else so faithfully delivers an adrenalin rush (except maybe having babies, which perhaps explains why I keep doing that).

The first time I stopped writing it was to read and learn. This time it's to find my soul. I know it's somewhere buried inside me - you'll even catch glimpses of it in my writing. But at the end of the day, my words are just another shovelful of dirt I throw on the grave.

I don't think I'll stop posting altogether, but I'll be using it more for the second stated purpose: to keep my friends abreast of life happenings, etc.

Well, I guess that's about it.

Birthday Reflections

2005-07-25T15:41:00.000-04:00

Today my son, Marshall, turns 11 years old. It's got me turning reflective. When you first give birth to a child all you can think about is all the wonderful things you want to give him and that you will be a perfect parent (of course) and mold a perfect child.

Sitting here with eleven years gone and only seven to go (with this one, anyway)I'm feeling a bit battered, much less confident, and in many ways regretful.

Somehow in spite of me, Marshall is actually a wonderful eleven-year-old. He's kind, intelligent, creative, polite. Nothing shakes him. Sometimes I think he's altogether oblivious to darkness and pain. It's too much to hope they'll all be this way.

Loss of time is one of the saddest things I can think of. Life will never be again what it is right now. Time moves forward, limiting the future, even as the past is forged in stone. In the ten minutes I've been sitting at my computer I've just determined a little portion of my past and eliminated all other possible activities for these ten minutes. In doing so, I've also eliminated possibilities for the rest of my day. Which means that every day, month or year that passes, unnoticed, spent living in the same disinterested way, I'm designating a past to this one life I have to live and severely limiting what I can do in the future.

For example, I *could* (in theory anyway) be patient with my children from now on and never raise my voice or speak hastily or out of anger. But even if I managed to do that, I still don't have the possibility of never having done that. I've already determined, to a large degree, what kind of mother my children have and will have.

I'm sure this thought is supposed to motivate me to "make every moment count" but somehow it just depresses me.

Anyway, you're welcome for the cheery post. I've got to get over to my sister's house to cook Marshall's birthday dinner (Chicago style pizza) since my oven still doesn't work right.

I'll leave you with one of my favorite (and well-known) Robert Frost poems, which the current topic put me in mind of. I hear people snobbishly complain that rhyming poetry or poetry following form is outdated and trite. I disagree. I think poetry yields a certain unique beauty by confining itself to rules and regulations, yet still saying exactly what it wants to say. (Now I'll step down off my own high-horse.)

The Road Not Taken

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Done and Disgruntled

2005-07-24T17:24:00.000-04:00

I finished Harry Potter on Friday morning and I've been stuck in "post-book-let-down" ever since. Can't pick up another book. I'll have to choose another novel and force myself to read until the story pulls me in. I couldn't read non-fiction now if I tried.

So my final opinion of the book is much better than my initial expectations. As always, J.K. Rowling packs a punch of a story. I even fell into a few minor personal epiphanies along the way.

I won't say much else, so as not to spoil it for everybody else. But it's good and I don't know if I can wait two more years to find out what happens next.

The Half-blood Prince

2005-07-20T12:42:00.000-04:00

I've only got another 30 pages or so to go in How Should We Then Live? but I got way-layed by a sixteen year-old wizard.

My two eldest sons stood in line at Schulers Bookstore on Friday night from nine o'clock until twelve, at which time the sixth Harry Potter book went up for sale. They procured a copy of the book sometime after midnight on Saturday, and even though they spent the next two days camping with Grandma and Grandpa, Marshall finished the 652 page book on Monday morning. I think he reads faster than I do. If we both had the same amount of distraction-free time, it would be interesting to see who'd finish first. Well, anyway, I can still out arm-wrestle him.

I'm about half-way through the book and it's pretty good so far, in spite of the rather tedious explanatory digressions, placed to catch up a reader who may have missed the five previous books. I'm not sure it's as well-written as the others, but the plot is beginning to thicken (although, as I stated, I'm almost half-way through). I'll reserve my judgement until I finish.

Chicago

2005-07-20T11:16:00.000-04:00

Scott and I had a great weekend in Chicago with Stephanie and Alan. I'd post a few pics of the weekend but I, hideously, am in most of them.

We disputed the meaning of a sculpture in the plaza at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, and it's Stephanie who turned out to be right, with her optimistic perception that the car and trailer are emerging from the earth. The piece, called "short cut", is evocative of family vacations and wrong turns, and also is a statement about man's ability to traverse new frontiers, in this case, the center of the earth. I, of course (before reading the title placard) had a much darker interpretation. At fist glance I was sure the earth had opened it's mouth to suck the car and camper in (after all, how is a Fiat going to pull a trailer out of the earth at that angle?). I waxed eloquent about Mother Earth swallowing up Suburbia. Next we postulated the earth was reclaiming it's own (given that Man has taken the materials of the earth and produced cars and trailers). I think it was Alan who suggested, furthering this idea, that the earth sucked the traveling duo in and then spewed it out. I have to admit my surprise that a group of Artists thought more optimistically than I. Stephanie's interpretation bodes well for her, but what does mine say about me?

We found a great little cafe serving locally grown, organic produce. I relished a baby beet and greens salad, doused with a light vinegrette dressing, and sporting freshly shredded ginger and a slice of brie cheese on the side. MMM.... then for a main course I enjoyed a chickpea and sweet potato stew with freshly ground cinnamon on top - also excellent. Now to re-create these at home with my own locally grown, organic produce (I think I got some baby beets this week, too!).

All in all we spent way too much money and walked a marathon or two, saw some interesting things and enjoyed time spent with far-away friends.

Current Reading

2005-07-13T10:04:00.000-04:00

Ten years ago (can it be that long?) we moved to St. Louis, MO for my husband's studies in theology at Covenant Seminary. Part of what drew us to that particular school was the existence there of the Francis Schaeffer Institute. We didn't know a lot about Schaeffer, but Scott had read a book of his in College and I think had a professor who spoke highly of Schaeffer's writings.

During our time in St. Louis, we were privileged to benefit from (and sometimes help with) the offerings of the Institute, including: lecture/discussion nights at the corner Borders bookstore, several lecture series held at Covenant and various local churches, art exhibits hosted at the Institute, and a Life and Writings of Francis Schaeffer class taught by Professor Jerram Barrs, who knew Francis and Edith Schaeffer and worked for many years in L'Abri, the unique Christian work the Schaeffers pioneered in Switzerland in 1955.

What perhaps influenced us most profoundly, though, was our brush with the L'Abri workers and former students who inhabited or passed through Saint Louis' Presbyterian community (the seminary and its supporting churches are members of the PCA denomination). In these people there was, among other things, a willingness to face non-Christian culture instead of running from or merely condemning it. This was something I thought should be true of Christians, but had never seen in the environment of my Christian upbringing.

Five years ago, at one of life's low points, our family experienced L'Abri for ourselves, when we traveled to England and stayed at the Manor, where some friends from St. Louis had moved to work.

I returned to L'Abri, alone, several months later to study and recover from a serious crisis of faith and life. While there I made friendships with lots of other "L'Abri People" and since then Scott and I have attended several L'Abri conferences and visited L'Abri friends.

It may surprise most of you, then, that I have never actually read one of Francis Schaeffer's books. I've read several of Edith's and two of Susan's (the Schaeffer's daughter) and quite a few others by authors in the wider L'Abri community. But every time I have tried to read Schaeffer himself, I've been bogged down by his writing style. Even when I took the life and Writings class at Covenant, I only dabbled in the books instead of reading them through (I could do this because I was auditing the class).

The truth is I'm a C.S. Lewis kind of gal. I like everything about Lewis: his knowledge of literature, his love of mythology, his command of and playful fiddling with the English language, his clear-headed understanding (and exposition) of many great truths, and - perhaps most of all- his ability to create music with his words while employing metaphor as if he'd invented it.

Francis Schaeffer is a very different kind of writer. His choice of words is almost incidental; a lackluster vehicle for transporting his ideas. He doesn't draw word-pictures; he draws diagrams. He rarely illustrates his point with story; his works read like a history textbook or a philosophical treatise. And I suppose they should, since they are, in large part, histories and treatises.

Maybe my preference for Lewis is as simple as my preference for fiction or other creative literature, over academic works. But I don't think academic work is the only thing Schaeffer was shooting for, any more than I deem Lewis an irresponsible scholar. So I guess it just comes down to style. Someone who likes to get right to the meat will no doubt love Schaeffer's carnivorous style, whose language excuses its self politely while Content takes the stage, alone. Me, I like my meat with hearty potatoes, the poetry of wine and the verve of bright, tender greens.

However, being that I've heard so much talk over the years about Schaeffer's ideas- and especially his incisive look at contemporary culture- I started to feel a little bit guilty for throwing around his terms and analyses, without going to the source; water downstream from the fountainhead is always muddier. So about a week ago I pulled out an old copy of "How Should We Then Live" and began to read.

I'm about 4/5 of the way through it now. Yesterday afternoon as I read, I had that sneaking suspicion I always get, when I read something life-changing, that this book was going to be, well, life-changing. I picked it up again last night in bed, and read straight into the wee hours of the morning.

I've heard Francis Schaeffer criticized for his (mis) understanding of individual philosophers, but praised for his steady finger on the pulse of society, including his distillation of particular philosophies to their logical conclusions. I admit my relative ignorance of philosophy and philosopher, alike. But what I'm finding in this book is an uncluttered summary of the major movements of human thought (and its trickle down into art and popular culture), beginning with the Roman Empire right through to the 20th century.

This is proving unbelievably helpful for me, because I often have a vague sense of something looming beneath the surface of my discontents and disabilities, but I am never sure what it is. I point to personal habits or social tendencies or the changing nature of the world- but most of my accusations are hurled at a giant, shapeless monster, for which I have no name.

In reading How Should We then Live, I am finding, at every turn, another key to the room of myself. I laughed out loud yesterday, and said to my self, "the entire history of Western thought can be demonstrated on the microcosmic level of my own thought!" This, of course, isn't to say that I somehow intuited, by sheer genius, the thought processes of the most influential minds of the past 2,000 years. Rather, I inherited, by some strange anthropology, all the inconsistencies and dead-ends that their philosophies carried internally. (And, since I was born into a Christian sect that ruled with an iron hand and claimed absolute, divinely appointed authority, I started in a place not altogether dissimilar to Rome.)

So, my personal journey echoes the journey of the Western World, following the fall of Rome (and my personal Rome did fall in a devastating manner, like it's prototype). I'm not certain where I stand at present or how much weeding out of error I still need to do. A lot, for sure. None of us is born into a vacuum. We've got to look at our presuppositions up close and personal, to determine which are true and should be kept, and which should be thrown to the swine.

This process is harrowing, and an uncertain science. But I'm starting to see that, alongside the rope which ties together the history of human thought, is a smaller but much stronger thread of Christian truth, which stands out more clearly to me now, against the backdrop of human mistake.

More Thoughts on Meaning from My Tiring and Tangled Supply

2005-07-08T12:44:00.000-04:00

My husband laughs (kindly) at me because there are two or three themes that run through my thinking at any given time and I have a knack for always bringing everything back to one of these things. Right now the two most prevalent of these are habit (proper forming of them and the way our lives run in them and how the mere practice of habit can turn, into reality, that which was only pretending before), and something I like to call the "sacramental nature of the physical world".

Anytime I hear the word "habit" a little buzzer goes off in my head. So I throw the word, encased in its context, up onto my mental turntable and sit back, examining it in 3-D, to see if I can match it to an existing nuance of the word, already in my brain. Then I tuck it away for later use. I am constantly collecting scrap fragments pertaining to these two ideas, and fitting them into proper files, as if I am writing a book on the subject. (And actually, the more I do this the more these two particular strands of thought seem to converge. So perhaps some day- a long, long time from now- I will dust off the files and drop them into a book.)

I devoted two of my previous posts to habit and talked about the origins of the idea in me, personally. I don’t honestly know when this second idea, “the sacramental nature of the physical world’ began evolving in my thought, but I know I only started using it as a phrase a few months ago.

I think it came to me in an epiphany moment, but one with a small group of precursors, unrelated to one another, which somehow coalesced.

The idea stems from my belief that God created human beings as both physical and spiritual entities and that one is not more, in quality or quantity, than the other. In fact, I think that one is incomplete without the other, which is why death is such a terrifying and unnatural thing: it disembodies the soul.

As my friend, Stephanie mentioned recently, on this blog, the way we care for or neglect our bodies has profound effects on our emotions and mental well-being. We have more proof for this now than we ever have, because of our ability to study the components and functions of body and mind and environment in detail and with great accuracy.

This is why it strikes me as odd that the world is changing into the largely intangible one created by internet technology. There is talk of the next great evolution of humankind into disembodied mind (which sounds to me like the same thing as death), and this is heralded as freedom from our current restrictions of time and space and mass. (Didn’t we already reject this idea when it presented in Gnosticism?)

Many “communities” aren’t localized, anymore. I (to my shame) have not said more than two words to my neighbor in two years, but I exchange ideas and struggles with my friend, Andrew, in England on an almost weekly basis. I regularly read the weblogs of friends from far away, and even a few people I’ve never met in person. This gives me a sense of “connectedness”, which isn’t altogether false - and which I could fairly easily content myself with - but which is, nonetheless, lacking something essential to human life.

A very large majority of us, in the United States and the rest of the developed world, live lives which are disconnected from, and seemingly independent of, the earth. I have never seen an animal slaughtered nor hunted and killed one, yet I have eaten thousands of tasty, meaty meals. That cornflake covered non-descript shape of something called “chicken” bares no resemblance to the animal by the same name. And since I can buy it in the store, de-boned and de-veined and pumped full of preservatives, I don’t ever have to think about the connection between the two. I don’t want to be an extremist or to say that I don’t myself enjoy the convenience of this, but I can’t help feeling that it creates a loss of respect for animal life and therefore a loss of meaning to the human lives which subsist on the animals.

I saw a movie once (can’t remember what it was) in which a Native American shot and killed a deer for food. He followed the blood-trail to where the animal, lean and beautiful, lay dying. He held its head in his hands; I imagined he could feel its warm breath, coming out in shallow snorts. As the doe’s bright, innocent eyes turned glassy and opaque, the man, still kneeling in the dirt beside it, said a ritualistic prayer for the animal’s soul, bidding it to go in peace. I was so struck by this portrayal, because I had never seen the killing of an animal presented beautifully and with respect for its life. The man needed food and the deer’s life had to be sacrificed; but blood was not shed lightly. The pangs of death were felt by hunter and hunted, alike.

Very few of us grow any of our own food and none of us is going to starve if the rain gods refuse to smile on us. We don’t know what kinds of wood or stone are best for particular forms of craftsmanship. I don’t spin thread from wool and knit a sweater to last my son for the winter; instead he has so many clothes of every sort that I have to navigate around giant, never receding mounds of clothing in my laundry room.

Again, I am not suggesting that life in some falsely conjured “good old days” was easy or even ideal. I am only pointing out that the further we remove ourselves from the things which sustain our lives, the further we remove ourselves from purpose. And this is because the earth was given to us to cultivate and care for, and to give us a glimpse of something beyond ourselves; something holy and beautiful and meaningful. The way that my work becomes an extension of myself and I become the work that I am doing – the way soil feels loose and rocky or the way it smells when I pull out weeds: mineral-y, ancient and fresh all at once; the pungent taste of wine; the melodious laughter of a friend; the alien and yet familiar look in an animal’s eye- the inexplicable way in which all of these things inform and shape and administer grace to our souls: This is the sacramental nature of the physical world.

Like most things I think about and form opinions about, I am sadly inconsistent in my application of these things to my life. And, in great part, that is why I live in a state which continually pushes me to the point of despair. To restate a comment from a reader: Life is full of meaning and I am not living in that meaning.

An Age Apart

2005-07-07T16:33:00.000-04:00

Oh dear. My last post and the comments it drew have prodded my mind in so many directions that I don’t know which to choose. So I’ll ramble my way about over the course of a few separate posts. I can't presume to speak with authority or from a very informed position. Take these as observations which may (or may not) have pertinence to the current discussion.

In modern (meaning contemporary), affluent (American?) culture, we seem to have cut ourselves off from the past. Science and technology give us false confidence, so we ignore the lessons of history and act rashly, like a teen-aged boy who thinks his parents know jack-shit and then wraps his car around a tree.

Since the very beginning of mankind, we have told stories. We told them to our children and to each other and to our children’s children. We told histories and mythologies and poems and songs- and these instructed the youth in virtue and comforted the aged with hope, while inspiring those in between to a life worthy of such a heritage.

The stories that we tell today are stories of the present moment. We tell our own stories (which often amount to "poor me, my life sucks" - yes, I am guilty) instead of those of our ancestors. We discard ethnic customs or practices because they are out-dated (which somehow makes them irrelevant). Mythology is “archaic” (and that somehow means, “useless”).

Our arrogance is so profound that we even assert the right to extrapolate moral values from our own narrow experience of the world. We don’t encourage our children to love justice, we teach them to love comfort. We tell them not to play-fight. We censor violence in legends and fairy tales, creating versions mysteriously lacking courage and valor, as well.

We fear death inordinately, perhaps because of our inability to see time as circular, like the seasons. Again from Ecclesiastes:

¹ There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven:
² a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,

³ a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,

⁴ a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,

⁵ a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,

⁶ a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,

⁷ a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,

⁸ a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

Also, we are afraid of getting old.

In the past, as a general rule, old men and women were honored and considered wise. Today, we glorify youth and beauty and productivity and most other fleeting things. Our aged population becomes an inconvenience, a problem to be dealt with and tucked away so we who have our youth can get on with "going somewhere", though none of us knows where exactly that is.

And as we, who were once young, begin to age, we panic. We are without wisdom to still our frenetic minds and have no stories to tell ourselves for comfort and inspiration, so we grasp in vain at our elusive youth. Nip and tuck, here; a little filler there; a bigger boat, house, car; a younger lover. Lie about your age; color your hair; go on a shopping spree: anything to stay young as long as you can- because when you get old, the world doesn't have room for you. And why should it? We spent our lives making ourselves into a sad and shallow mass of decaying flesh; irrelevant, taking up space, using up resources.

Maybe these things contribute to my sense of disconnectedness or lack of purpose. The values upheld and forced down our throats are so empty. There is nothing beneath them. We've severed the iceberg at water-level and we, who are only the tip of a monstrous glacial mass, are floating away in indifferent waters.

Everything You Never Wanted to Know

2005-07-06T10:47:00.000-04:00

[Disclaimer: This post contains information which may be negative or de-moralizing in nature and may not be suitable for sensitive souls. The author cannot be held responsible for any resulting depression or despair.]

I haven’t posted recently. There are reasons – and I wish it was as simple as my kids being home for the summer.

Sometimes I have too many thoughts to get any of them down in any coherent form. Sometimes everything I'm thinking is bound and gagged in a tiny room of deep emotion and I'm not ready to let anybody in. Sometimes everything I think degenerates into pessimism and I don't want to spread the disease. Right now all of this is true.

Being very careful not to bitch and moan and to be as objective as possible, here's my problem:

Everyone who accomplishes anything, whether menial, daily tasks or great, world-changing things does so because of an inner motivation; a passion; an inspiration. I am categorically unable to produce such a thing.

My mother finds it in helping people; my friend finds it in his work; some women find it in mothering; couples can find it in romantic love; someone else will find it in friendship. Some of these things I have and others, I don't. But none of them seems to be enough. I wake up in the morning and ask myself, "why should I get up out of bed?" and I can't find a compelling answer.

I'm stuck in Ecclesiastes mode:

" What does man gain from all his labor
at which he toils under the sun?

Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.

The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course.

All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
there they return again.

All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing.

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun."

I'm forever trying to get at the thing behind everything we do: I get up in the morning so that I can fix and eat breakfast, so that I have enough energy to clean up after breakfast; and I wash up after breakfast so I have clean dishes for lunch, which I prepare and eat so that I have energy to clean up again. I launder my family's clothes so that we have clean ones to dirty again. I go to sleep so I can get up again.

"The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises"

I'm spending my life- all of it- raising my children, so that they can grow into adults who spend their lives raising their children, who in turn, will spend their lives raising children of their own.

This cycles back as far as time, at least as concerns my forbears, since they all have had children- which, down the line, led to me.

"Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever...
There is no remembrance of men of old,
and even those who are yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow"

I just can't seem to shake the feeling that we are all working to perpetuate life, but life itself consists of nothing but working to perpetuate life! When I think this way I start to get bitter, because life seems like a big, cosmic joke.

"What does the worker gain from his toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end."

God put eternity in our hearts, with no way to fathom it? In the face of meaninglessness, beauty and our sense of eternity become a burden too heavy to bear. It is too painful. It's mockery.

This underlying "inspiration" that I want - I've found various sops along the way, but they don't hold. I suppose I could say, with U2- "I still haven't found what I'm looking for".

Some people find it in a relationship with God. Augustine wrote: "Our hearts are restless 'til they find their rest in Thee." I think I have experienced this rest two or three times in my life. But I can't seem to stay there. Negativity sneaks up while I am sleeping and throws the blankets over my head; I can't see anything, I can't rest, I can't even breathe.

But I said I was going to try to be objective, didn't I? Okay, two thoughts:

First, there is a very good possibility that I need to be on anti-depressants. When I was taking Lexapro I did laundry just because it had to be done and didn't expect to find some grand meaning at the bottom of the pile. I saw my children as funny and delightful, instead of as part of a purposeless cycle of lives which are forgotten as soon as they end. And I altogether quit introducing myself (hand extended), "Hi, I'm Sisyphus".

(But if I need to chemically alter my brain in order to find purpose in anything, doesn't that just reek of denial? Kierkegaard, in A Sickness Unto Death, says the worst kind of despair is to not know that you are in despair. Do I want blissful ignorance?)

The second (and refreshingly opposite) thought I bring to bear on all of this is that, somewhere inside, I know this isn't the whole story. I know that there is beauty and meaning, because I have seen it before; and even if I can't now remember its shape, I can at least recall that I once saw it.

I’ve always believed the answer lies back with what Augustine said. But to rest in God, you have to know that He loves you. Sometimes I know that.

I mean, I can remember thinking, "I know God loves me", but I don't remember what it feels like. No, wait, that's not true. I remember-

It's tender and raw and humbling and satisfying; it feels like a slap in the face or unexpectedly stubbing your toe; it feels like repentance, it feels like beauty; like hushed words between lovers; like a newborn baby; it feels like all the reason I ever need for anything.

In that place, my little life is swallowed up in a sea of purpose ("What God has done from beginning to end") rather than one of meaninglessness. The nastiest human being becomes someone worth my sacrifice; the most thankless work can be done with joy; sunlight turns dappled and golden instead of scorching; raindrops roll heavily from the tips of leaves, infusing them- and the earth- with meaning.

But I can't hold this always before me in any significant way.

A chief fault of mine is that I don't allow people to love me. When I was about eleven, my best friend and I took a "how-well-do-you-know-your-best-friend" test in a teen magazine (because she was into those sorts of things). When the test revealed that I knew everything about her and she knew only the very superficial things about me, she was so mad at me she wouldn't speak to me for a week. And I guess it was my fault. I don't generally offer information that isn't asked for. I think most people do.

Blogging is strange for me because I am constantly offering unsolicited information about myself. I don't like it. But it's a casualty of writing that I'm willing to face, because I love writing. And I suppose it's somewhat safe, because all of you out there in the completely intangible cyber-space can read it if you want to-or not, if you don't- and if it gets too uncomfortable you can always read it and pretend you didn't.

All of this rambling is to a point: I don't know how to be loved. I've spent my life blaming it on my parents or on God or on other people (for not noticing) but what it all comes down to is that I have isolated myself. I hacked a lonely road out of the thicket and set out traveling alone. I don't know how to repair this and I'm not even going to attempt an answer right now.

Right now I’m going to pray for mercy. And the next time someone offers a hand, I’m going to grab it.

New Car

2005-06-20T14:50:00.000-04:00

Well, I've done it. I've switched to a minivan.

My 1988 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale died on me last Wednesday (with five boys and myself inside, on a busy boulevard). We (all of us) made our way through streams of traffic to an IHOP across the street and made an S.O.S. phone call.

On Saturday, Scott and I drove away from the Toyota dealership with a 3 year lease on a 2005 Toyota Sienna.

I hate having a car payment. Actually, I've never had one. And actually, we can't afford one. Afford is a relative word. But getting this car is part of a shift in thinking I've been going through for a long time.

I used to think anyone driving a new car was irresponsible and greedy, not to mention wasteful, what with all those perfectly good used cars out there. I've never paid more for a car than my first one, which I bought in 1992 for around $1,800.

What I've realised is that I've had a rather upside-down (not to mention hypocritical) view of money-management. I forego all the big-ticket purchases and squander my money on cigarettes or late-fees or drinks and an evening on the town.

Last year when we decided to put our boys in a private school, we fretted over tuition expenses, knowing we didn't have any extra $ to squeeze out (nor any place to squeeze it out from). But we faithfully (if not punctually) wrote out our check to the school each month and, strangely, our standard of living never really changed.

That's when it hit me: We were typical, American consumers, spending everything we took in. Unlike typical American families, we don't have any of the toys or even the necesary ingredients in the "American Dream". No new car, big house, boat, fitness club membership, not even a home stereo system. But, since our seminary days, during which we really were poor (I got dairy and juice and peanut-butter vouchers through a government program, for Marshall, and for myself, because I was pregnant with Micah) I've never felt significantly less "strapped", financially. We just sort of increased our spending on pacifying ourselves, without increasing our living standard.

So here I am with a spanking new vehicle, fretting a bit about the payments. I've had a little bit of post-buyer's panic. But I'm not really questioning the rightness of the decision. This monthly payment affords me the ability to drive my kids and their friends places, help drive for school, and mostly, it affords us (Scott was very particular and insistent on this) the reassurance that, if we must expose our children to dangers of the road every day, we're at least protecting them as well as we can. (Ten years ago cars didn't even have air bags, and in the more recent past, minivans have been rather collapsible). To be honest, I couldn't care less what I drive or how old it is or what it looks like. Which is probably why I've driven a paint-peeling, rusting, crashed-up, falling apart 1988 Oldsmobile for so long. But it occured to me at some point along the way that, every day, I was putting my entire life (my kids) into an unreliable, unsafe box of metal and driving at inhuman speeds, alongside other speeding boxes of metal.

Now that I've got all the obligatory (for me) reflections out of the way, let me be happy about it... It sure is nice to drive! I've got all the comfort and convenience I could ever want (in a car or in life!), even without all the bells and whistles (we went low-end options/high- end safety). It's silver in color and looks less like a minivan than the typical one (sort of a station-wagon/van/SUV hybrid). I feel a little bit out-of-place, like Cinderella at the ball.

The Relevance of Elephants: rambling thoughts on eternity and storytelling

2005-06-16T14:34:00.001-04:00

The first job of the writer is to captivate the reader.

It helps to have something to say. It’s even better if you have something important or exciting or inherently fascinating to say. In this respect, some writers clearly have an advantage over others: no matter how exceptional your imagination or keen your insight, there is no getting around the fact that we write what we know. And some of us have more, well, interesting lives than others.

That said, even the most intriguing subject can be made irrelevant, like too many elephants. Similarly, there is always (and I mean always) an angle which, if the writer takes it up, will make the dullest slice of life, enchanting. A good writer can make pork and beans relevant.

I think this is why we need writers and storytellers. Like magic, they toss a handful of eternity into the temporal salad. And, as aggravating as it is, most of us sense that we are eternal souls in temporary encasements.

Our temporal self only half recognizes eternity when the two bump shoulders, because we are too busy being part of our own story. It’s hard, for example, to know when you are being heroic (and when you think you are, you probably aren’t). It’s difficult to grasp that loss can morph itself into redemption or that a “series of unfortunate events” is actually funny. But writers, and stories, give us truth and beauty in whole form and coax us to hunt for traces of it in the flesh. By this means, other people’s stories (actual or imagined) – many of which have long since seen the curtain call – serve us in the fashioning of our own story.

Several years ago I read Annie Dillard’s memoir, An American Childhood. One night I tossed the book into my leather satchel, along with a pen or two, several notebooks, and enough cigarettes to chain smoke (with coffee breaks) for 4 or 5 hours. I drove to Discussions, a downtown coffee-house, where you can sit for hours chain-smoking (with coffee breaks) and no one will look at you crossways.

My intent to spend the evening reading dwindled, as I read. Heaviness settled on me, like oil settling on coffee. It wasn’t a problem with the book; not exactly. My life was the problem, inasmuch as I compared it to Annie Dillard’s own, presented in the book.

“How,” I thought, “can I presume to be a writer, when I have nothing of interest to say?”

I shut the book dramatically, took a resentful last drag on my cigarette, rubbed it out and rummaged around in my bag for a pen and paper. And then I started writing.

It began as a diatribe of my less than glamorous, less than cultured, less than eventful life. But just at that point, something curious happened. In order to portray my lackluster childhood, I had to choose appropriate descriptors. I had to scan my memory for examples. I had to add some biting sarcasm and self-effacing humor. I imagined my pencil going up in flames (difficult, since it was a pen). I paused to read over my last paragraph, chuckled under my breath and lit up another cigarette.

By night’s end I had six or seven pages of something funny, poignant, descriptive, sad, reflective, and - very accurately - my life. What’s more it was interesting. I couldn’t wait to turn the page.

I’ve thought for a long time now that, as a writer, I can’t do fiction. By that I really mean that I can’t write stories. I can write essays or papers or letters or emails. But story requires something more- imagination and a deep well of experience from which to draw. As for that, I figure I’ve got pretty darn near the same amount of experience as your average thirty-year-old. I’m starting to think it just needs an angle. And an angle is something I might be able to find.

There’s a relatively new genre of writing called Creative Non-fiction. I’d like to have a go at it. If I can’t spin tales of Middle Earth, I can at least tell you what it’s like here in Middle America, in the middle of my head. And who knows but that my efforts to infuse my temporal existence with eternity will act as a weird, self-referential means of grace, helping me to fashion my story.

The Story of My Life

2005-06-13T14:13:00.000-04:00

I've been reading a book of essays by C.S.Lewis and came on a remarkable bit of insight in one called, "On Stories". As with most remarkable bits of insight, once voiced, it seems ridiculously obvious. Probably my brain is a bit slower than most. I can almost feel the thick sludge ideas have to wade through, across synapses, to the relevant quadrant and particular neurons. What I take in usually makes it to the right place, it's just a long time in getting there.

In any case, what was a minor epiphany for me, or a key to unlocking a major, problematic theme in my life, was this: that life is linear and time-bound and we, therefore, can never experience the fullness of it in any one moment, but only isolated scenes within the larger plot of it.

This is important for me because, for as long as I can remember, I've had grand aspirations for my life, coinciding with relative dissatisfaction in my current position. I've imagined that if I could just learn to keep my house clean or be "Mother of the Year" or get an education or ascend to the level of spiritual guru, THEN I would be content, rich, full: like the ideal in my mind. But the problem with a dream of the future is that the picturing of it isn't the picturing of real life at all, but of a state of being. Here is how Lewis puts it:

In real life, as in a story, something must happen. That is just the trouble. We grasp at a state and find only a succession of events in which the state is never quite embodied. The grand idea of finding Atlantis which stirs us in the first chapter of the adventure story is apt to be frittered away in mere excitement when the jouney has once begun. But so, in real life, the idea of adventure fades when the day-to-day details begin to happen. Nor is this merely because actual hardship and danger shoulder it aside. ...Suppose there is no disappointment; even so- well, you are here. But now, something must happen, and after that, something else. All that happens may be delightful: but can any such series quite embody the sheer state of being which was what we wanted? ...In real life and art both, as it seems to me, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive.

This isn't to say that I can't create a measurably better or worse life for myself by tangible acts. But note this: that even if I am someday living a very good life, by all standards, I can only experience it in little snippets, moment by moment. The sadness that I feel in reaction to loss will not be fundamentally different than it is when I feel it now. And conversely, my moments of great joy will be moments very like ones I experience now.

When I think of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamozov, I think of the whole book, the themes and characters which, together, say something true and profound. No one character or one scene, though there are brilliant ones and ones which stand quite well on their own, embodies the novel as a whole. So with life, each scene develops key aspects of my character, the significance of which will only come to light when the plot is seen as a whole. So maybe now, thanks to Lewis, I will relax a bit, sit back and enjoy the read.

Making Maps

2005-06-10T20:15:00.000-04:00

I know it gets tedious for everybody if I keep talking about my kids. And I won't. But I just have to get down what Eliot said the other day, because this kid is seriously strange.

He's 5, he's never bored, he never stops talking, he's very obscure, and he's lately into cartography (map-making).

So he made a map the other day (two pieces of printing paper taped together, with the map extending over both) and proceeded to tell Scott and me all about it. Apparently every place on the map had a corresponding story. And apparently Eliot has been to places and seen things of which I have no idea. But that's not really surprising.

What was a little bit surprising (or funny, anyway) was part of one of his stories. He pointed to a place on the map and told us it was a "Book-tionary", which is a place like a library, but also a kitchen with dining tables. He said,

"I didn't know what a book-tionary was, but then I went in and 'book-tionary' was written on the blackboard and there was a table and I said, "Oh, now I know what it is! Because a 'nary' is a place that you eat, so a book-tionary is a place you eat where there are books."

hmmm. But it gets weirder. He entered a room at one of his buildings (I think it was a school) and, well, here is how Eliot told it:

"I went in and there was someone named Lean there. And I said, 'No way! Your name can't be Lean! I was just trying to invent someone named Lean before I came here!'"

When I asked him what he meant, "trying to invent", he said,

"Well, I wanted to make up someone named Lean, but I just couldn't. Then I went in the room and there was someone named Lean! So I told him he had to change his name to Stick."

Should I be worried???

Fair Play

2005-06-03T09:32:00.000-04:00

I was folding laundry the other day when something my 10 year old son said caught my ear. He sat on the floor, playing with LEGO "Knight's Kingdom" figures and, while I don't know exactly what dark plot was ensuing, I was glad to find that he knew just how to handle it. I heard,

"...whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government...."

-The Declaration of Independence

I wish I'd had that kind of trumping power available to me as a child. About the best I could do is clench my fists, screw up my face and whine, "No fair!"

Skeletons in the Closet

2005-05-26T21:29:00.000-04:00

We all have them: those things that, if anyone else knew, we would die for the shame of it. Even those people we genuinely trust, we wouldn't want to see how we act sometimes when we're alone, or what we think. It's a helluva lot easier to adjust to something nasty in ourselves if we never have to tell anyone.

Over the past 6 years or so of my life, due to depression in some part, I have increasingly let my private life become a mess that I wouldn't want even my neighbor (whom I've never met) to know. At home during the day, I rely on the fact that I have no friends and nobody is therefore likely to stop by. This means (uncannily), that I can do whatever I want during the day and don't have to shower or wash breakfast dishes if I don't want to.

Yesterday the unthinkable happened. Yes, someone stopped by. I was feeling very sleepy and was coming down with a cold so I didn't want to do anything (yeah, that's why). I had just flipped on the television to catch an old "Matlock" episode, when my friend, Kari, stopped by to pick up my milk bottles (we take turns going to the farm for milk on Thursdays). I opened the door in sweatpants and a food-stained t-shirt; fuzzy, matted hair, unshowered. The living room was littered with toys and papers and Eliot, who is five, was still in his pajamas at 10:00 in the morning. The t.v. was on in the other room and I know she saw it. She acted kind of embarrased for stopping by unannounced.

Today, even though Kari got the milk this morning and had to pick up her daughter at school, 3 minutes from my house, she didn't stop by. (And it's too bad, too, because I spent all morning cleaning for her.)

This morning around 5 a.m. I woke up and couldn't fall back to sleep. I was thinking about how symbolic that experience is of the way I live my life (and always have, as far as I can remember). I do just enough to get by. I take a shower 20 minutes before I have to appear anywhere in public, I clean my house when visitors come from out of town. But I don't do these things for myself. It's almost as if I do what's right insofar as everyone is likely to see, but give myself allowance to indulge in every sort of wrong on my own time.

What I couldn't stop thinking about this morning is how deceptive and hypocritical I've been. And it goes so much deeper than a messy house or laziness; these things are only symptoms of the disease. These verses from John 3 kept running through my mind:

¹⁹This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. ²⁰Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. ²¹But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.

It sounds very freeing. I'm going to try to get there.

San Francisco!

2005-05-18T17:26:00.000-04:00

I just want to congratulate my brother, Michael, on his successful move from Nashville to San Francisco. It's gutsy to uproot and leave everything you've known for most of your adult life. Many blessings to you there.

I also welcome your additions to my blog, now that you have the time to read it; until, of course, you land a job and work 80 hours a week to pay for that outlandish San Fran cost of living.

Rain, Rain

2005-05-11T09:39:00.000-04:00

It's raining today. The steady, relentless kind of rain that falls in solid lines instead of drops. I hope it lasts for days.

I hadn't taken note until I woke to a chill, stealing through my open window and a bit later, the first sprinklings of rain, that this has been an unusually dry Spring. The "April showers" never came. In fact, here in mid-May we're getting our first steady rain.

The whole outdoors smells fresh and wormy, raw, new. I can have hope today, as the water works its salve on the wounded earth. All the lovely things beneath rock-hard soil are burgeoning, lying in wait to burst through dirt, through stems, through tightly shut buds on tree branch.

Yesterday I was withering with the grass, scattering to the winds like the chalky earth. Today I will be silent and wait. I am being fed.

Putting My Finger in the Dam

2005-04-27T21:51:00.000-04:00

So far I'm holding depression at bay, thanks to several people in several different ways. I've also found that anger is a good way to fight depression, because there's no room for apathy. But I don't recommend it (anger nor apathy). But then again, a little apathy is good now and then; sometimes the problem in depression is taking (the dark things in) life too seriously. But then again, anger is the opposite of apathy, and sometimes that can give meaning to what seems otherwise vacuous.

lol. I sound half-baked, don't I?

It Lurks

2005-04-26T09:50:00.000-04:00

It's been 4 months or so since I quit taking my antidepressant medication. Lately I'm frankly quite scared. I can feel depression, as if it has physical substance, and it is pushing against the door to my room. I try to evade it by closing out thoughts about it, but it is starting to seep through, even without my conscious consent. I'm having fits of anger and bitter thoughts and Eeyore thoughts. It is getting much harder to shut down the engine of gloom once it starts up. I've been in a general malaise for a few weeks; I have to expend so much effort to do the simplest things.

I don't understand what causes this or why it seems to be a separate parasitic entity, sucking life from me. Isn't all of it just Me?

While I was on the medication I read a book or two about depression. A main emphasis in all the (good) books was on building healthy patterns into one's life while under the "protective" influence of medication, so that when the medication safety net is removed and depression lurks (and it will), there will be "checks and balances" in place to combat it with.

Yeah, so I didn't really do that.

I haven't wanted to write. I've been avoiding other people, public places, and personal hygiene.
An ironic aspect of depression is that it shuts me down and cuts me off from everyone but what I need is people and exercise and action. The thing is I don't want to do anything or see anyone or talk.

At this point, having known for a 3/4 of a year what it is to think like a "normal", relatively healthy person, I'm terrified of going back. I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do, but I need to make a plan. And part of that is writing about it (after all, a said purpose of this blog is personal journaling). Also (and this is new for me) it means that a few other people know my secret. That's uncomfortable. But maybe voicing some things outside my own head will propel me into action. Just don't anybody call me. ;)

My Son the Comedian

2005-04-19T10:33:00.000-04:00

The other day on our way to school, I told my ten-year-old son, Marshall, that he is a good writer.

"Really?" he asked, "What do you mean?"

"I mean that you write well. You use good words and know how to put them together."

"Oh." He paused long enough to let a smile twist his lips. "Mommy, you mean I have a 'rich vocabulary'?"

Orual and Psyche

2005-04-17T22:33:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine brought into a discussion on my last post, the story of Orual and Psyche, as told by C. S. Lewis in Till We Have Faces. I am reading a book in which the author retells the story of Orual reading her complaint angainst the gods. It's been a few years since I've read the story and it affected me again much the way it did the first time- like a slap in the face.

I am Queen Orual; angry, stripped of what what I love, jealous, jilted and for most of my adult life I've been keeping my book of charges against God. Yet when I stand before Him intending to read my book, I am uncovered, like Orual:

"Orual's nakedness and physical diminishment and her resemblance to Ungit [a false and malicious goddess] symbolize the ugly self-pity and self-justification that she has cherished at the core of her soul all her life. Now these are all she has left. She begins to read her book aloud but it comes out all different from how she thought she wrote it. Her accusation against the gods becomes a childish rant in which she simultaneously discovers and admits that her love for Psyche was not love at all but a fierce, possesive jealousy..."

Later, awaiting the true god, who is coming to judge her actions, Orual feels "terror, joy, overpowering sweetness." She describes what happens to her in his presence:

"I was being unmade. I was no one, " she says, and yet she feels genuine love for Psyche and sees a vision of herself as whole and beautiful for the first time."

(both excerpts from Debra Rienstra's recent book, So Much More: An Invitation to Christian Spirituality)

I think this is what my friend, Andrew, meant when he said, "Maybe that's how God responds [to our anger] sometimes - He returns it and says 'Look at the plank in your own eye'.

What is uncanny to me is that this ruthless stripping of our pretense is, at the same time, the most shaming, painful thing we have ever experienced and the most joyful and liberating.

Of Gods and Children

2005-04-13T21:48:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I curse the gods for pestering my tiny brain with so many thoughts, both useless and important. It's funny how the cursing of mythological characters cracks open the pot and lets some steam out, a second before the whole thing blows. I'm thinking of fashioning my own personal god and affixing him (of course he will be male) to the top of my brain, as a sort of steam-release valve.

I've spent years yelling at the real God and have decided it's no good; as recondite as He often is, He always pulls out the "Absolute Perfection" card and trumps my ( less impressive) run of moral failures.

In all seriousness and before I dive head-first into the shallow pool of Sacrilege (have I jumped already?) I'll get to my point: Life is maddening.

I wonder if human life has always been so difficult. My guess is that it's never been a cake-walk. Perhaps it's a bit more like Musical Chairs; we're all running around with a nervousness in our gut, looking out for a small slice of space to squeeze into, while keeping half an eye on the person with the boom box. When the music stops, we've somehow managed to miss the signs and stand enfeebled, shocked senseless; that mangled piece in our middles drops clear through to the floor.

Children's games are altered since I was a girl. Musical Chairs now boasts a merciful 1:1 ratio of chairs to children. Red Rover isn't a Keeping Out; it's a Welcoming In. Kids can't even be on a winning team, anymore; the Law of Opposite's would rear it's head and call the other team losers. This is all part of the big conspiracy we adults concoct to hide from our children the genuine, cut-throat nature of life. I don't know why today's parents try to hide it while yesterday's parents practically created it; maybe, in the face of near-miraculous technology, we're more optimistic about the future of the human race. Maybe, as we move into a global society, we're sure that education and tolerance is the sanity that delivers us from evil. Or maybe each of us is still the red-faced girl who knows the game is over and she doesn't have a chair to sit on.

Kids seem to know our little secret; with the adults gone back inside, they pick up a game of Dodge-Ball. The stronger children pelt the smaller, slower, weaker ones, until somebody bursts apart the illusion of a gentle world with hot tears. They all think this is great fun and will play again tomorrow.

I think there is a sort of counter-intuitive wisdom in this, as there is in most things children do and adults frown upon. While I'm stuck inventing gods to yell at and chasing my tail around inside my head, weaving an impossible knot, the neighborhood ruffians are learning that they've got to run with all their might to evade a hit; that everyone trips over his own feet now and then; that sometimes the little ones deserve a head-start and that a ball can only be thrown so hard before someone gets hurt.

Poem

2005-04-10T12:53:00.000-04:00

SEA

I love the sea:
the sea's great passion and mine
are of the same kind -
tempestuous
large
without mercy

A beautiful enchantress is she;
dazzling deep -
When I am standing
(as I am now)
under her great, towering hand
I understand
what the fear of God is

The Red Sea water-wall will thunder
and fall -
Sweep back into the great
Dark
Deep
I, limp, breathing liquid sand
my glassy eyes wide
and my skin cold

I love the sea -
and I fear her;
with that sort of fear
which prompts me to revere -
submit
acquiese
breathing steadily
until the air turns too thick
to exhale

Synopsis of a Writing Life

2005-04-04T10:24:00.000-04:00

I've always wanted to write a book. The only two really major hang-ups in the whole process are:
a) I rarely write
b) I have no idea what to write about

As you can see, the two things play on and off each other, creating one massive cycle of non-writing, which I call, My Life.

I suppose you could say I always knew I was meant to be a writer. I've been a bit crotchety, reclusive, depressed and a hypochondriac since the day I was born (just ask my mom). I wrote my first story when I was six and my first poem at ten. While my older brother devoured book after book, upside down on the couch, his head on the floor and a popsicle in his mouth, I sat in my favorite tree and wrote awful rhymes and stories that never went anywhere but had alot of fun getting there (adjectives, adjectives). An ironic twist to all of this is that my brother is now a freelance writer, with a book contract. Apparently reading books helps one to write them. Who knew? But I have better teeth.

Around the age of ten, when I began writing regularly, I decided it was better kept to my self. If other people saw an awkward, uninteresting, disheveled little girl with run-away hair and throw-away clothes, all the better. It kept me undercover. This is why careers such as Actor and Spy and Superhero appeal to so many of us; who doesn't want to be the unassuming genius? Admit it, you'd rather be Clark Kent, nerdy glasses to boot, than that really successful, good-looking, charming, popular, talented and obscenely rich guy that you work with. It makes being you not just okay but superior; a study in martyrdom, as you carry the cross of average-ness for the sake of the world. So I wrote in secret and tried to imagine the way in which I would one day be "discovered" and how all of humanity would be blessed because of me.

Pretty early on in my writing career I realized that happy things weren't worth writing about; they lacked a dramatic edge. Who wants to read about butterflies and lazy, green fields when there are Rodents Of Unusual Size just beyond in the Fire Swamp? Unfortunately I wasn't able to invent anything quite so interesting as an R.O.U.S. Instead I wrote into my stories something called "Character development" which really just means that they were devoid of plot and action and heavy with sentences like, "She felt sad and alone as she looked at the dark, stormy sky and she wondered gloomily if anyone would ever love her." Later I wrote poems and prose at moments of Great Despair, which always included the words dark, lost, pain, and death.

It was around this time that I discovered books. I read "A separate Peace" and "The Odyssey" and some Aurthur Conan-Doyle for a high-school class. Then we were assigned, "Crime and Punishment" by Fyoder Dostoyevsky and I stopped writing. I spent the next 10 years reading.

Currently I find myself wanting to write. I've outgrown (mostly) my delusions of grandeur and my fascination with the darkness. I still use way too many flowery, descriptive, crowding, inappropriate, superfluous adjectives. But in spite of all that, here I am looking at the dark, stormy computer screen, wondering gloomily what to write.

My Two (hundred) Cents

2005-03-23T08:56:00.000-05:00

I started commenting on a friend's post regarding the Terri Shiavo case and realized I wanted to say more than was appropriate for a comment (I've made that mistake before). So I figure, what the hey, everybody's sticking his or her opinion everywhere it will(or won't) stick (we Americans do this well), so I might as well throw mine out, too.

I'm not sure I can say what I want to say without seeming to come down in judgment on Terri's husband, which isn't my intent. He has undoubtedly suffered much and endured much and, to be honest, I have folded like a house of cards under much less. Be that as it may, I believe real judgment is possible in this case. Most of us probably think of the word judgment in a pejorative sense, being that the highest virtue of our day is Tolerance, which has somehow been neatly propped up across from Judgment and declared it's opposite. But the main definition of the word only implies an ability to discern or form an opinion based on available information. I suppose we feel that nobody ever has enough or complete information about another person and therefore is in no position to judge. I agree with that statement where it concerns the motive or intent of a person. But I also think it would be a big mistake to assume that we also cannot judge ideas, simply because they happen to be attached to a person.

What are the ideas in this case and can we separate them from the Shiavos? I think we can. So, without casting aspersions on Mr. Shiavo's motive or character, I'd like to explore the separate, ethological issues.

The first, most obvious issue is one of life: the quality and purpose of it and how these two things relate one to the other. There are two grids (other than the eternal one, presupposing God) through which to look at this issue; one is the importance of Terri's life to her and the other is the importance of her life to others.

Michael Shiavo claims that Terri's life is not worth living to her and that she would want him to let her die. This is no more than an assumption and is absolutely impossible to determine. I have seen individuals with Downs Syndrome or other mental/physical incapacities who have enjoyed life very much in their limited way. The funny thing about limitations is that we who do not have them assume that nobody could happily live with them (because God knows, we couldn't). I read an article the other day in which Mr. Miller, a deaf man, said (with regard to cochlear implants) , "I do not want one for myself. I am very happy being deaf. To me, this is like asking a black or Asian person if he/she would take a pill to turn into a white person." I, as a hearing person, could not understand what he meant. Doesn't he know what he is missing? Well, no, he doesn't. But it doesn't matter , because he doesn't know and therefore is not, to his mind, missing anything. My eight-year-old son cannot imagine or desire the experience of falling in love but this does not mean that being an eight-year-old boy is a less fulfilling life than being a grown man; in fact, it may be happier. Certainly Terri's case is different from that of a hearing-impaired man or my eight-year old son. But it is similar in this sense; that even if her husband had proof that Terri, when well, asked him never to let her live in a mentally and physically impaired state, it would only be like stating that a hearing person thought he couldn't bear not hearing or a boy swore that he would never kiss a girl. We don't actually know what life is like for Terri or if she wants (in whatever way she is able) to keep it.

The other part to this question of her life's value pertains to the people who love her. In this case, her parents love her and don't want her to die and are willing to sacrifice much of their own comfort in order to care for her. If her husband loves her, too, but is unable to care for her, he could hand her over to the care of her parents. Perhaps he truly believes that Terri would want to die and he is fighting for her good. However, she doesn't appear to be in pain, she smiles, and as we established above, there is no sure way to know that she does not want her life, given that she cannot communicate her desire.

The second ethical issue I see in this story regards the nature of human commitment or love. This is the area that I can hardly avoid seeming to condemn Michael Shiavo. So I will try to divorce it from him altogether and take the general question my friend posed, "how can anyone live with their life-partner being mentally and physically incapacitated for so long?". I understand this question and ask it myself. Still, when I try to determine the defining assumptions behind a term like "life-partner" or "marriage" or even one as general as "love" I don't find that our perceived ability (or lack thereof) to withstand hardship really has a whole lot to do with it. Many wedding vows still include the lines, "for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health". The love which first prompts two people to make this promise to eachother may be filled with emotion, good feelings, an appreciation of what the beloved gives or makes the lover feel, but it is not meant to stop there. It is meant to blossom into a deep and abiding love which always protects and always cares for it's beloved, even when the other is unable to reciprocate. That is why lovers marry and pledge to care for one another. Otherwise, why not just love until the fuzzy feelings fade (which they will) or until the other person gets fat or ornery or sick or difficult to care for? I even heard recently that couples are changing their wedding vows to say "as long as our love shall last", rather than the traditional "until death do us part". How can there be any real trust between people who are saying, in effect, "At some point in time, I will probably not love you. But for now, give me your soul and we'll make the best of it". Take a look at what Dr. Robertson McQuilkin had to say when he resigned his position as president of Columbia Bible College to care for his wife, Muriel, who had Alzheimer's Disease:

"My dear wife, Muriel, has been in failing mental health for about eight years. So far I have been able to carry both her ever-growing needs and my leadership responsibilities at Columbia Bible College. But recently it has become apparent that Muriel is contented most of the time she is with me and almost none of the time I am away from her. It is not just "discontent." She is filled with fear–even terror–that she has lost me and always goes in search of me when I leave home. It is clear to me that she needs me now full-time. The decision was made, in a way, 42 years ago, when I promised to care for Muriel "in sickness and in health, till death do us part." So as a man of my word, integrity has something to do with it. But so does fairness. She has cared for me fully and sacrificially all these years; if I cared for her for the next 40 years I would not be out of debt. Duty, however, can be grim and stoic. But there is more; I love Muriel. She is a delight to me, her warm love, occasional flashes of that wit I used to relish so, her happy spirit and tough resilience in the face of her continual distressing frustration. I do not have to care for her. I get to! It is a high honor to care for so wonderful a person."

I suppose this leads into a third consideration, which goes hand in hand with the first question of an individual life's value. We, the lovers, the care-givers, can actually become better persons through selfless and tenacious love of a helpless person. A 22 year-old severely autistic boy who attended my church died recently. I don't know what his mental capacity was but I know he couldn't communicate and couldn't be left alone. I watched his family (mom, dad, brother, sister) relate to him with unbelievable love. His sister held his hand and led him around, his dad rubbed his back to calm him when he began shaking and murmuring loudly. I don't know if their love made a difference to him (though I would venture to guess that it did, pretty significantly) but I know that it made a difference to them. The whole family radiated love; they were kind, patient, understanding, giving people.

The last question that came to my mind as I thought about the Schiavo Case is one of death and suffering. Terri is not being artificially caused to breathe and is not in a coma and cannot, therefore, be relieved of the life support and die unconsciously. Instead, she is being starved, which does not seem very humane to me even if we are talking about an animal and not a human being. I read today that Terri's parents are not allowed even to give her a sip of water to wet her dry mouth. This does not seem consistent with respect for human dignity and life, even if one takes the "right to die" position.

Yeah, so there are my thoughts on the matter. Much too long and most likely not very popular.

Ah, well.

Holy Spam

2005-03-21T11:38:00.000-05:00

I received an email forward the other day. To be honest (my apologies to those of you who spam) I usually delete these without reading them. Being that this particular mail came from someone unknown to me and was sent to all the parents at my boys' school, I skimmed it over. Here it is, mostly in entirety:

Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and insightful response (regarding the attacks on Sept. 11) . She said:
"I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?"

In light of recent events...terrorists attack, school shootings, etc. I think it started when Madeleine Murray O'Hare (she was murdered, her body found recently) complained she didn't want prayer in our schools, and we said OK.

Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school... the Bible says
thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as
yourself. And we said OK.

Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn't spank our children when they misbehave
because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their
self-esteem (Dr.. Spock's son committed suicide). We said an expert should
know what he's talking about. And we said OK.

Now we're asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don't know right from wrong, and why it doesn't bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.

Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the world
is going to hell. Funny how you can send 'jokes' through e-mail and they spread like wildfire
but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing.
Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace.
I'm not laughing, are you?
Funny how when you forward this message, you will not send it to many on your address list because you're not sure what they believe, or what they will think of you for sending it. Funny how we can be more worried about what other people think of us than what God thinks of us.

This enraged me. The more I thought about the ludicrous nature of the email the more angry I became. So instead of hitting "reply to all" and embarrassing the sender with angry ranting, I'm using my blog to vent some steam (what else, after all, is it for?).

I don't know what Anne Graham meant by her comment, but here's what I think:

Tragedy on the scale of the September 11 attacks or the recent Tsunami disaster is disconcerting for many reasons. All is not well with God's world and we naturally want someone or something to blame. Could these tragedies be Divine punishment for a people who
refuse to love Him? Do they signify the lifting of a protective hand (assuming it was there in the first place) from the United States of America? I'm sure I don't know. But, in the absence of proof, why would I want to believe or even suggest such an idea?

Could tragedy be the outcome of a broken world filled with nature gone awry, evil ideas and hateful passions? Certainly, it is. That is all we know. Speculating about the mind of God is not only fruitless, it gives the speculator a ticket to ride the "Smugness Express", standing around pointing fingers instead of digging them into to dirt.

This email purports to take the blame for the state of the world upon "ourselves" (ie. "we said ok"), but the tone is the angry, frightened one of judgementalism; not the wise, saddened one of compassion.

Internet spam almost always comes with an agenda tag, hurling insults and half-truths (or outright lies) at the perceived enemy, whatever group or individual that may be. In this case it's hard to tell who's the enemy (secularists? Christians? God?) but we know it isn't Anne Graham, and it doesn't appear to be the terrorists, and I'm guessing it isn't the author.

The first enemy identified is Madeleine Murray O'Hare, who was apparently murdered for taking prayer out of public schools (does the author realize who this implicates?).

Then "someone" took the Bible out of schools, which apparently led directly to moral decay, because nowhere outside the Bible are we taught that murder or theft are wrong or that loving others is important (the Israelites must have been running around stabbing eachother for stylish sandals until God wrote in stone "Do not kill" and "Do not steal").

Next we get to blame Dr. Spock, who dared to suggest that fathers stop dragging their sons out to the woodshed and that we should hug our children. I smelled something fishy here and found this dispelling the myth of Dr. Spock's son's suicide. In addition to this juicy tidbit being false, the attitude behind the telling of it is an insensitive, almost cruel gloating over a sobering and horrible thing, and strikes me as antithetical to Christian charity. Not to mention the fact that it uses faulty logic; a good man's son may despair of life for reasons which have nothing to do with the man or his parenting philosophy.

We get the invitation to blame ourselves somewhere in there, but by this time we are so angry at the Atheists and Liberals that we're ready to take them out to the woodshed. And to top it all off like a cherry on an ice cream sundae, the author slaps on some guilt, for good measure. "If you don't pass this on then you're as bad as they are."

I'm not sure an Atheist could compose email spam more contrary to the spirit of Christianity. As a Christian myself, I object to this representation of me. I object to this representation of Christ. I'm still angry. And I think I should be.

Creature of Habit - Part II

2005-03-09T11:01:00.000-05:00

Some situations we respond to by instinct and others we respond to by habit, like Pavlov's dog. We have free will. However, our will gets all but nailed to the floor by habit. An essential part, then, of exercising free will is to choose which habits we will form and which we will uproot.

I first encountered this idea while reading Charlotte Mason on childhood education. Well, no, it's inception for me was in C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, book IV, chapter 7, "Let's Pretend".

"When you are not feeling particularly friendly
but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do,
very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave
as if you  were a nicer person than you actually are.
And in a few minutes,as we have all noticed,
you will be really feeling friendlier than you were.
Very often the only way to get a quality in reality
is to start behaving as if you had it already.
That is why children's games are so important. They
are always pretending to be grown-ups -playing soldiers,
playing shop. But all the time, they are hardening
their muscles and sharpening their wits so that the pretence
of being grown-up helps them to grow up in earnest."

I read this and began thinking about behaviour and character. Which comes first? Does a man do good because he is a good man or is he a good man because he does good?

I'm sure I could credit many authors with contributing to the pot of this idea, as it stewed in my mind. But back to Charlotte Mason. She was a late 19th/early 20th century educator who is rightfully being saved from obscurity, mainly by home-schooling parents. In her book, Home Education, she writes,

"One of the great functions of the educator is to secure that actions will be so regularly, purposefully and methodically sown that the child will reap the habits of the good life, in thinking and doing, with a minimum of conscious effort."

Ms. Mason goes on to identify the most important of these habits, including the "habit of attention", the "habit of manners", the "habit of truthfulness", the "habit of gratitude", among many others. Children will leave home and develop their own philosophy of life, of course. But if a boy has been trained to the "habit of manners", chances are that he will be polite. If he has practiced the "habit of truthfulness" for many years, most likely he will be an honest man. Again, from Home Education,

"Educate the child in right habits and the man's life will run in them, without the constant wear and tear of moral effort of decision."

This is very important. As I wrote in my previous post, I have few good habits, that I can think of , which means that I am at a severe disadvantage as regards doing good. Good acts that I can choose come with tremendous, often dissuading, "wear and tear of moral effort". It is incomparably harder to develop habits in an adult than in a child but I owe it to myself at least to try. Here's a saying attributed to Thomas a Kempis:

"Sow an act, reap a habit,
Sow a habit, reap a character,
sow a character, reap a destiny."

Creature of Habit

2005-03-08T13:44:00.000-05:00

I quit smoking 5 weeks ago. It wasn't hard then, because I was too sick to move. It hasn't been hard since, because my sore throat only left this week.

A few nights ago I was feeling very bitter and a little bit sad. I grabbed a jug of merlot and tried to drink away my sorrows (never a good idea, since alcohol tends to send me on cynical, angry rants and the next morning finds me sad). Since I was smack in the middle of a rant when Scott went out for a smoke, well, of course I had to have one.

The next night we painted and everyone knows that smoke breaks are the best part of painting. And I was bitter and sad.

Last night, while bitter and sad, I watched a stupid movie and the best part of a stupid movie is irrefutably the smoke breaks.

I woke an hour early this morning thinking about habits. Habits of Doing become Habits of Being. I don't have good habits. I simply don't. I intend good. I sometimes choose good. I may happen upon good. I think about being good, and I hope that in the end everything comes out, well, good.

That just isn't the way we work. We can't do one thing and have it's polar opposite result. At least not as a matter of course.

Duh. It's time for some new habits.

Paint Stains

2005-03-07T10:52:00.000-05:00

Last night Scott and I dug our $1.00/can garage sale paint out of the closet and painted the laundry room /tv room/bedroom (Yes, it is only one room - we're packed in here like sardines).

As I stirred up the now three-years-stagnant paint, my eyes recognized the canvas tarp beneath it. "Oh look, " I thought, "There's the color of our kitchen on Botanical - that was a great color". Creamy Cocoa, I think they called it. I bought yellow first. Stephanie and Aiden came over to put it on the walls. "That's a bit of the yellow right there," I thought, "Way too bright." Flourescent, really. Yellow paints are risky... I re-did it in Creamy Cocoa.

I scanned the drop cloth for other colors and didn't stop until I'd identified every one; the gold (which I will never do again) from our bedroom, the moss green we used to cover the (very amateur, if creative) mural on the bathroom walls, blue and grey from the Milligan House basement and a black, spray-painted, rectagular outline, laid down in the making of the "Fallout Shelter" coffee house sign.

Moments, words, faces, laughter, music, conversation, brewing coffee, smiles, tensions, late nights, stale coffee, cigarettes... all these things rushed at me and I wasn't quick enough to chase them away.

Physicality is curious. Existence in space and time is curiouser. Every day I see my bookshelves and tables and photographs, and I can remember them in past settings. But they stand alone here, now, and I never think of them as connected somehow to a place or a time. This canvas drop-cloth is different. Each colored stain adhered to it's surface at a moment in time, during a period of time, in a particular house and a particular room. Particular people stood on it and painted. I stood on it and painted. I and this tarp were there, together; somewhere we can't get to now.

The tarp carries it's marks of the past. I carry marks, too; intangible ones. I don't like intangibility. I want to wear my stains, as the canvas does. Like Doubting Thomas, I'll put my finger in the scars so I can know that I am real and not a ghost.

I finished mixing the paint, stood up, wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and set about laying new stains on the drop cloth.

A Word for the Men

2005-03-02T10:06:00.000-05:00

A comment on my previous post drew attention to the body-image pressure facing women in America and suggested we might ease some of this pressure if men understood the food/body struggle that most women experience daily. While it might be helpful in some regards (my husband would finally understand why "I absolutely cannot go out looking like this"), I don't think the problem can be fixed by making men taste the same bitter drink. Whoever the ambiguous "they" driving this engine, I honestly don't think it is men. Yes, one could invoke the law of supply and demand and say that what men want is what is put out. But I think that men get caught in the claws of the monster, too. They are actually taught what to find attractive in a woman. And with advertising and film as sexualized as it is, it's hard to not want what we see.

Often, to be honest, we women perpetuate the feminine "ideal"; we claim to despise the idol and then bow down to it. I've several times quoted a female speaker I once heard who said "All mothers should be at least 15 lbs. overweight", but in the end I wouldn't mind too much if my children had to lean on a bony shoulder.

Women also make resistance to societal pressure hard for one another. We are very critical of eachother. We compare ourselves to eachother. We measure every woman against the Cosmo Goddess. When a guy is with a woman who is less than ideal we wonder "why is he with her?" but when we see a beautiful woman with an ugly man we assume he has "character". I am more afraid of what women think of me than of what men think.

Back to the "Ambiguous They". What it comes down to is the dollar. Men and women alike shell out extravagant amounts of money in pursuit of phantom perfection. But if gold is the fuel for the engine, who is the engineer? It's us, it's them, it's advertising firms, it's the fashion industry, the movie industry, it's the giant of consumerism itself; all of which are made up of ordinary men and women. The whole seems to be greater than the sum of it's parts. That's why it's ambiguous.

Flatulence

2005-02-23T17:00:00.000-05:00

Most of this week I've spent mulling over ideas and writing them down. I'm sick to death of my own voice. When I read over things I've written I feel sheepish, at best; physically ill and repulsed, at worst. I'm mentally exhausted. I sat down to read a book this afternoon and promptly fell asleep.
Most disconcerting in this is the fact that I have mostly been writing as part of an effort of discipline: writing daily because I enjoy it and want to do it.
I know writing is hard work but I never expected I'd want to disavow everything I write.
It feels like a collosial waste of time and effort, culminating in too much vapor.
I wonder if career writers ever feel this way. What do I honestly have to say that is worth coaxing into words and lines?
I need to go wash my dishes or talk to someone with something really significant to say (a child perhaps?).
Whose genius idea was it to start up a blog???

Everybody's Doing It

2005-02-22T13:57:00.000-05:00

So I've tinkered with the idea of setting up a weblog for a long time now. If you are reading this then you are probably one of the two or three people I created this for (myself being one). I'm hoping this blog will serve a dual purpose:
1) It will be a personal journal which, unusually, I will actually know where to find.
2) It will end (some of) the frustration of one or two people who hate me for my reclusiveness but, amazingly, still love me.

We'll see if I can consistently pick up the keyboard, as I seem unable to do with a pen or a telephone.