living on both ends - an exploration of best and worst

best and worst 2008

Good-bye 2008

You were the worst of times
Cancer, half-deafness, magical
And stinking thinking
Job loss, the unknown
Became known instead of lurking
Around the edges of life.

You were the best of times
Meeting for Worship with a concern for vocation
The present of the present
Savor, celebrate, revel. Puppies, detachment
In its proper context, not as stoicism
Becoming the shortest in the family
And acceptance of the paradox of
Life as exile and life as gift.

what do you celebrate?

won't you celebrate with me
by Lucille Clifton

won’t you celebratete with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

The Moment of Release

The moment of release, of orgasm, whether it is achieved
in anger, connection, love, despair, or joy opens the possibility of life.
Life can be gestated in care, in love, in shame, in neglect,
in fertile soil, in abused soil, in barren soil.
Life still happens, and, for the most part,
comes to fruition of some sort.
Birth happens in pain, in joy, with tears, sweat and blood, with cries and singing and support. Or it happens in silence, with ripping, a pushing, a pulling.

Penetration, orgasm, conception, gestation, birth. Life happens always.

part of the truth of my condition...

So, I was all apocalyptical the other night. Does it matter what triggered it, or why? It is the same feeling I used to get walking out of my therapist’s office after a hard session dissecting tribal codes or automatic responses, and align myself with Chicken Little – “The sky is falling, the sky is falling.” So, I know that I am drawn to those also who like to run around and shout or sing or whisper “The sky is falling, the sky is falling.” And I had been indulging in some aligning.

Of course, it was late at night, L was already snoring, the boys nestled snug in their beds too. There was a different tenor to the sky falling than there had been in the past, apocalyptic but without the overwhelming fear that used to arise in me. Just a vague uneasiness, and as I sat and held it, there was a strong sense of “There is no life here for me; there is nothing to see, time to move on.”

And, as I often do, I picked up one of my current non-fiction reads, and opened it to see what might speak to me. Here is what I found:

“the essential thing, the great spiritual teachers constantly remind, is to see oneself in the proper perspective. “Pay attention to yourself!”

This approach was imprinted irrevocably on the tradition of Evagrius Ponticus, one of the more influential of the Egyptian monks.. Evagrius…emphasized honest self-knowledge. He set himself the task of detailing the different traps and temptations that can distort understanding by imposing on the mind some false perspective. Evagrius called these traps logismos – thoughts that bewilder and befog the mind so that slowly, bit by bit, we drift into a world of self-destructive fantasy.

The problem, Evagrius took care to point out, lay not in “bad thoughts” but in a process of bad thinking that is really wrong vision- seeing things from the perspective of our fears and fantasies (unrealities) rather than seeing things truly…Logismos are the arch-enemies of the soul, the demons from within that destroy proper perspective on the world, and thus prevent us from concentrating on the actual reality of our life, leading us further and further from our actual condition, making us try to solve problems that have not yet arisen and need never arise.”

Well, that is not the part I opened up to, but I did read it later, to help further understand what I had actually opened up to and read. You see, I knew that my actual condition was being spoken to by the words that follow:

“Avarice, or the love of money, is the third type of logismos. Evagrius’ concern is not “materialism” as we moderns usually think of it, but futile planning for an unreal future.”

Yep, that was it – futile planning for an unreal future. I don’t know what our future holds. Where we will live, how we will support ourselves and the boys. In a very real way, I do not know what the spring will look like. We have been like the squirrels, we have nuts stored away for the winter, we are debt free other than a mortage, we are very fortunate. But we cannot live without jobs for ever, and we are trusting that Way will open.

I read on, “He defines avarice not as pure material greed but as “the principle of thinking about what does not yet exist,” a preoccupation with hopes and fears, with imaginary or future things. Hoarding money (or anything else) reveals lack of faith, Evagrius counsels; leave the future to God.”

For me, one of the main tenets of Friends is George Fox’s statement:

“And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, Oh then, I heard a voice which said, "There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition," and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy. Then the Lord did let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my condition, namely, that I might give him all the glory; for all are concluded under sin, and shut up in unbelief as I had been, that Jesus Christ might have pre-emninence, who enlightens, and gives grace, faith, and power. Thus, when God doth work who shall let [prevent] it? And this I knew experimentally.”

For a long while, I have been holding this apocalyptic tendency in the Light, asking for Christ Jesus to speak to my condition. In different ways, in silence and through others, I have been delivered from the overwhelming gripping fear that was a core part of my being. And I have still waited, to see if there was more.

I know my deepest deepest desire, at the core of who I am and who I was created to be, is to walk in truth. I know the seeking for truth is another reason why I was drawn to Friends. I know that Meeting for Worship and my daily retirement times of silence allow the Light to expose where I believe lies, and where I live far from the truth.

For me, this apocalyptic tendency was to live far from the truth. To quote Evagrius “a preoccupation with hopes and fears with imaginary or future things.” With that which is not real at the moment. Futile planning for an unreal future.

I remember, as a child, being terrified of a teaching I heard on the end of the world. The truth is that even if I knew the world was to end tomorrow, that would not change one bit of how I live today. Because how I live today is seeking to be faithful to that which I believe I am called to do. Each day. Each moment. I live it imperfectly, of course. Nevertheless, it is still what brings meaning to my life.

I pray, as I walk in this reality of knowing the truth of avarice in my soul, that grace continues to set me free.

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Quotes not from George Fox are from The Spirituality of Imperfection, Storytelling and the Search for Meaning, Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham.

sixth grade love

I remember the first time I discovered it. It was in my elementary school library, and I needed to write a biography on a famous person. For some reason, although it was not required I wanted that person to be African-American, and the librarian had recommended a certain name, a certain section.

"Poetry" I thought. "I don't even like poetry." But I pulled the book of Langston Hughes poems off the shelves and started reading. I was a little girl who mostly tried to hide my tears, that day, with that book, in that library there was no hiding the way those words touched and moved me.

Langston Hughes, the man who introduced me to poetry, remains one of my favorite poets.

I was happy to read that poetry will be a part of the January 20th Presidential Inauguration. An congratulations to Elizabeth Alexander who has been chosen as the Inaugural poet.

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

love actually

I feel it in my fingers,
I feel it in my toes.

Incarnation is all around me
It’s everywhere I go.

Part of the vicissitudes of my day to day has been to experience com(with) passion(suffering). That part of my journey started with a Lenten contemplation, long before Mel Gibson did the movie, the query “why it was known as the Passion of Christ?”. It was brought to an experiential plateau in a Meeting for Worship where I felt I was invited to join Jesus Christ on the cross and invited to “Open your arms and live in the wound of the world”. Of course, that meant the crucifixion and resurrection went from something I had read about and lived at one level, to something I know experiential and live at a different level. That bit of the journey is not over, by any means, but there is a new understanding that permeates me, a new way of being in the world as I know it.

It has already been a process of many years; and I have never felt led or called to explore the Incarnation in the same way. I guess I thought I ‘got it’. So it was a surprise to me last Sunday at Meeting for Worship when a song that was an integral part of Love Actually, one of our favorite movies from last weekends ongoing Christmas Movie Project, ran through my head, and down to my heart, around my fingers and my toes and then resided in my gut with a very small change in words.

I feel it in my fingers,
I feel it in my toes.

Incarnation is all around me
It’s everywhere I go.

How ironic is it that in all the years I spent waiting and celebrating Advent, tied up in rituals to bring the meaning of the incarnation into my life and the lives of my children, that I was so far from experiencing the truth?

Instead, in a dimly-lit, cold meeting house, sitting on hard uncomfortable benches, the statement “The Word became Flesh and dwelt amongst us” became meat and drink to me, and pierced my heart and my belly in a new way. I know the Incarnation to be relevant and true now, not because someone explained that “Jesus is the reason for the season” or showed me in the Bible where it is true, but because in the silence that is the Spirit’s first language, a raunchy rowdy sweet movie became the impetus for an Opening into further Truth.

I feel it in my fingers,
I feel it in my toes.

Incarnation is all around me
It’s everywhere I go.

The second part of my Meeting for Worship, with tears rolling down my cheeks, simply consisted of my response to this invitation – “yes” I said in my head and my heart, over and over again.

time

WORST- It is not the committee meeting that I attended. I love Quaker business practice, the pauses in silence to re-center and re-focus and listen to each other and to Spirit. The communal effort that is way more than consensus to come to a sense of the meeting, each individual laboring to make truth heard and known, each individual laboring to hear their neighbor, and the deeper call of Truth.

No, it was not the process that was the worst. Sometimes, though, sometimes in the writing of that darn minute we seem to lose the plot. It becomes less about the sense of the meeting, and more about perfection.

It took us forever to write that minute. Well, it seemed forever to this Quaker newbie. There is beauty in the process; we left with great clarity on the sense we were brought to, and the different issues we were considering. We left with a deeper knowledge of who we were and who those we labored with were. We left in the glow of Holy Presence.

But darn it, sometimes that minute is really difficult to get on paper.

christmas time in the city

Best – It was a dark and stormy night; and as I stepped out of New York Yearly Meeting’s office space, I had twenty-three minutes to make it to Penn Station before the NJ transit train left. The next one would not leave for another forty-nine minutes. I popped up my umbrella, adjusted my wool beanie and gloves, checked my all-weather boots, and wished I had worn my Wellington’s.

As I stepped from the entry, my breath was caught again with my delight of New York City. I walked through the torn up Union Square Park, on my way to a Metro Stop, and realized how hard I would need to push to make my train. I thought of the potential move, and remembered a similar situation with L when we were courting.

At the time, seventy percent of his job was travel, and I had taken the day off whilst he was in town. We were in the car on Hampton Street in Denver, before the T-Rex road construction was started. We needed to get to the boys school, on Mississippi Ave, to grab them, then on to DIA, and traffic was stalled.

I started to rev up; alternate routes came to mind, people who could pick the boys up from school, how to get a message to them to attend their after-school program although I had promised them I would pick them up as I had the day off. Instead, L reached for his cell phone, and called the firm’s travel agency.

“Yep, I can’t make that flight,” he said. “When is the next one?”

“Tomorrow morning, okay, put me on that one.”

It was my first introduction to no-drama life. I was unsure how to respond. Speechless, actually. We picked up the boys, went to my house, made dinner, and had a peaceful evening. The world did not end and I’ll never forget it.

Last night, I remembered that moment in the car. I thought about a potential move and how I would miss NYC. I walked the remaining three long blocks, and sixteen short ones.

Most of the way there, I hummed Silver Bells under my breath.

remember when up was down?

WORST- The 16 year old did really well on his PSAT’s. He is struggling a bit with that.

poignant moment

BEST- It was a crazy half-hour of scheduling. The 14 year old needed picked up at school, the 16 year old needed a ride to work, and the husband needed picked up at the train station. Impossible. In the near past, I might have stressed, tried to find another ride for the 16 year old, told the 14 year old to find a ride home, told L to take a cab. And stressed over being unable to meet all the requests that were asked of me.

As I write that last sentence, I struggle between the words, meet the demands, or meet the requests, and I realize, my freedom in renegotiating the specifics of time yesterday came because I heard and felt these as requests, not demands. As “Could you’s?” instead “You have tos.” It is a simple difference, but one that made a huge difference for me and my family yesterday.

The 14 year old rode with the 16 year old and me as we dropped him off early, L was picked up late, so he chose to walk across the street and have a drink at a local landmark tavern/restaurant. When the 14 year old heard that was what his father was doing, he asked if he could have chili when we went to pick up L, it seemed reasonable to me that the three of us would just eat there, and discuss L’s trip into the city to seem some recruiters. So that is what we did.

As we pulled up chairs beside L in the curved area of the long bar, the conversation naturally moved to the job hunt, and a possible re-location. At this point, we are still unsure what this next stage in our lives will look like, or where it will be lived out.
The uncertainty is hard for all of us, and it would be my natural wont to shield the boys from that hardness. Except they know it is there anyway, and they want to know what is going on, and be able to talk about it. So, we are open, and we talk.

Last night, though, was the first time I told the 14 year old that there were possibilities we might move to where they didn’t play lacrosse, and that was part of the reason I was looking at boarding schools, so he would have an option about that sport.

He was sitting in between L and I, and he looked straight ahead, and said “Lacrosse isn’t that important. I could always do track.”