The Weight of Glory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

...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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.