Once there was and once there was not

They say that in the very old days the Sleeping Ute Mountain
was a Great Warrior God who came to fight against
the ones causing much trouble and the Great Warrior
defeated the trouble-ones but was badly hurt and lay down and
fell into a deep sleep and became a sacred mountain with the
uncanny shape of a giant body lying on its back, arms folded
across its chest, each crest and fall in the mountain tracing the
profile of a nose or elbows or knees and this is not one of those
landmarks you have to squint and tilt your head just so to see,
this sleeping Warrior God who lets rain clouds slip from his pockets
when he is happy and who would one day awaken and rise up
to help in the fight against the enemies, or as some kids would whisper
on the playground or at the pool, that the Warrior would awaken and stomp
on the whiteman, and I was a white kid living at the base of the Warrior God
mountain and the shadow of that giant sleeping body would catch my eye
on the way to school, the pointy toes itching to move.

Note: The myth of the Sleeping Ute Mountain is from the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe utemountainutetribe.com.

First appeared in About Place: Geographies of Justice.

Creeping Bellflower

There was a June in which my soul was asking me to know something I wasn’t ready to know and so I waged a tedious war against the creeping bellflower that crept the perimeter of our patio and each morning and afternoon I dug in the dirt for roots and the jackpot rhizomes, a skinny, pale, turnip-carrot-looking-thing, and I hooted with glee, gotcha little fucker, each time my fingers followed the shockingly white shoots and roots deep enough into the dark soil, past the earthworms and millipedes and even into my dreams where I dreamed of the rhizomes, wanting so desperately to peel them out of the ground, fingers groping through the earth and my brain lighting up each time I found one, until I overheard a whisper from the dirt or the creeping bellflower and the whisper said come close and do not stand or sit but fall here on the ground where your limbs have brought you and pinch between thumb and index finger a thin tangle of roots—a coaxing of the palest truth.

First appeared in Third Wednesday Journal: Spring 2020.

Although I see the stars, I no longer pretend to know them

I’ve been thinking about the ways that art and writing return us to our internal home. As the poet and editor Christian Wiman writes: “Who knows what atomic energies are unleashed by a solitary man or woman quietly encountering some arrangement of language that gives their being—shunted aside by chores and fears and who knows what—back to them?” Yes, who knows. When we create, our work reveals reasons and rewards we could not know any other way.

Poets and storytellers and mystics remind us of the unknowable, of our longing toward that which is larger than ourselves. They speak and create in precision and approximation, where wiggle room and story and metaphor tell the unsayable truths. “Although I see the stars, I no longer pretend to know them,” writes the monk Thomas Merton. More than fifty years later, the poet Joy Harjo has a reply: “Beneath a sky thrown open / to the need of stars / to know themselves against the dark.” 

Given the space to move, our creative acts become a waltz of flexibility and courage, of generosity and perseverance, of discipline and lightheartedness, of making a turn and being frightened, of making a turn and feeling yourself in synch with the universe. It’s serious work and it’s holy play. It matters desperately and it matters not at all. And sometimes it matters simply because where there was nothing now there is something. 

And making a life is no different. I once heard two women in a cafeteria talking, strangers fumbling over topics and silence like hikers searching for a riverbed to follow. And just when the food was finished and it looked like it was only dead ends, they found it. It was something about St. Louis and a question and the other exclaiming “Yes, I know the Smarts!” with such enthusiasm it was clear this was only a stand-in for “Yes, I know you and you know me!” or whatever that is called when strangers become kindred become rivers become one. Which is to say mutuality, which is to say these lives we’ve been given and the stories we tell about them are far more baffling and connected than we imagine.

First appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 53

Reminding yourself of who you are

Thich Nhat Hanh was asked in an interview “Is there a purpose for wearing the robe other than to clothe your body?” He replied, “To remind yourself that you are a monk.” 

I wonder if one day you or I might also be asked a question about reminding ourselves of who we are. And you might say something about tying a strand of yellow yarn around your finger or tattooing the lines from a poem across your forearm, wrapping saffron silk and sashes around your body, wrapping your hijab around your head, hanging your crucifix over your heart.

You might say something about embodying this time and space and presence, lest you look down at your hands or heart or up at your head and see no reminder. Lest you forget that you are sacred. 

And you or I might go on to say that if we still miss our own embodied reminders, there will be a morning where we will wake early and see how the sun is rising and sending streams and sashes of purple into the dim blue-lit sky.

Or there’ll be a night where we fall into bed and meet the story that has been waiting for us, an afternoon where we turn a corner and greet the well of wonder.

First appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 50

Exposed

My dad said this might be the big cottonwood’s last fall if he can’t get some more water to it. He said he needs to buy a bunch of fifty-foot hoses and line them up and out and down to the dying tree. 

My mind flashes to an image of a makeshift fire brigade passing buckets of water from hand-to-hand, water sloshing painfully over the side of the bucket with each passing hand. The urgency is there, and so is the likelihood of failure, and so are the other priorities of greater concern than the great half-alive tree.

It breaks my heart, how this earth will grow you and then let you die. The letting-you-die part goes something like this: an old irrigation ditch that used to flow runs dry and stays dry for decades too long, the rainwater that used to be enough no longer is, what once was the right location now is not. 

But still, the green-and-gold branches mix loudly with the gray branches and those black birds, I don’t know what kind. We want so much to live even when we know what we’ve lost, even when we practice the little deaths each day.

Teach us how to die now, so that we do not have to wait until our final death to learn what it means to live, I say, mumbling some version of a prayer I’ve held. Sleep is a little death. So is surrender. And they are offered to us each morning and night. Even with all that water, it may die. Even with all that water, it may live.

This morning the La Platas are turning a dusty purple and the sun is breaking through the clouds and the smoke from all the fires, streaking down on it, shimmering even. Spruce, piñon, cottonwood, greatest love. All here. And me, with my hand over my heart, wanting to touch the part that has been broken by this tree. 

We get to be here, exposed, if we’ll let ourselves, in this place where the blue sky is always contrasting what is dead and what is alive

First appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 48

Attending to the Sun

January|Night  The word sun is only three letters. When St. Francis was dying, he wrote a poem to the sun.

January|Midday  The sun is high, and I’m racing her. She doesn't waver on her steady path across sky in my place on this earth in the northern edge of the square that is Colorado. And the steadiness is maddening to someone who is so prone to fits and starts. Sister sun, it hurts to watch you make light across the day so faithfully. My soul wants to make light faithfully, too. Will you teach me?

February|Midafternoon   The way you warm my feet with your blessed sunshine coming through the universe and this window and onto my cold toes, it makes me grin.

March|Midmorning   Everyone in this house has colds, but the sun, the sun is bright-eyed and clear. No runny nose, no wheezy cough, no achy muscles. Just clear, taut, and ringing with the day.

March|Midday   No wind. Blue skies, with just the smallest wisps of white clouds that promise not to be any trouble, and you’re unfurling this pocket of a wound, so tenderly whispering over it, clicking and clucking and shushing and murmuring like the mother of all mothers.

April|Evening   Every day the sun is dying a little more. Only 5 billion years left.

April|Midafternoon   I am tired of the spring wind and the bright, cold sun that keeps creeping across the sky. I am tired of myself today, tired and frustrated enough to let out a scream, like a child—a real howling aaahhh! My dog is startled and pokes his head up, his muzzle and eyes rising out of the blanket he was burrowed under. He looks at me, and I look back at him, suddenly grateful for his witness. He holds his gaze, alert and attentive, until I soften, smile, and say something in the everything’s-okay voice.Then he goes back to his nap—tucking his face into the burrow he’s created, and it looks so nice, sister sun, with your afternoon light hitting it just right. So I walk over and put my face in the blankets that are warm and put my nose against his wet nose and breathe in the boredom and the anger and the sunshine. This.

May|Dawn   Thank you to the soft gray light tripping into this window and across my body, making me here.

First appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 47.

Begin to play

We are given changes all the time. We can either cling to security, or we can let ourselves feel exposed, as if we had just been born, as if we had just popped out into the brightness of life and were completely naked. Maybe that sounds too uncomfortable or frightening, but on the other hand, it’s our chance to realize that this mundane world is all there is, and we could see it with new eyes and at long last wake up from our ancient sleep of preconceptions.
—Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

And now the bells are ringing and the ear of my heart is too. First three rings. Then silence. Three more rings. Then silence. Three more rings. Then silence. Then in the dark of the sunrise that hasn’t yet happened the sister is pulling hard on both ropes, and both bells in the bell tower, the large bell and the small bell, ears ringing, and it is a flurry of dings, so many rings, far too many to count with no rests in between, lasting for what feels like the longest time you’ve ever held your breath.

I used to be a percussionist, counting all the notes and all the rests, playing the bells, the chimes, the cymbals, the gong, the vibraphone, all types of metal reverberating against mallet, mostly in gyms and auditoriums and football fields and recital halls, playing even in Switzerland once, but I never played to a mostly-dark valley like this. I never threw off the counting mind and started swinging with flurry and delight, moved by this offering of reality: this dim, cold day, the bruised sunrise that is beginning just like it did every day before

It’s a way in and under and over and together, a way to move through this life. To ring in this day and the next, each and every one, simply because it is here and so am I. We can ring in this day for whatever our version of the beautiful valley is, for whatever rests in the dark and listens. There is too much delight under this sky and under each of our small roofs not to grab a mallet and begin to play.

First appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 46.

Unfinished

I’ve been writing this since
the night I pulled off the road
at Big Sur and my eyes caught
the insanity of the stars, since
the months by the kitchen window
watching the snow come down
like fallout from a despair I had
no word for, since I stopped
searching for a name and found
myself tick-tock in a hammock
asking nothing of the sky.

—from Richard Blanco’s “Since Unfinished”

I, too, have been writing this. I’ve been writing this since I first learned the words done and undone, finished and unfinished. I’ve been writing this since taking piano lessons from my grandmother in that room with the red velvet wallpaper and the fancy armchair next to the piano, since feeling her respect for the piano and herself and me—taking all of us seriously, giving me permission to do the same.

And I kept writing this when I entered middle school and then high school and our lessons became less of a lesson and more of a marveling over music as I would play a little and then she would play a little and then my grandfather would come in and turn on the brass lamp on top of the piano, saying don't you ladies need a little more light? because this was his way of joining us, his way of adding to the beauty that is never finished. I’ve been writing this since my babies were born and I, as Mother, was born with them, and so much love and so many fears for tomorrow and the next day were born too.

I’ve been writing this since I started feeling the shy edges of my soul, like a body in the dark running her hands across the wall, searching for the light switch. I’ve been writing this since yesterday when I began to wonder if my grandmother purposely left the light off so that my grandfather could come and turn it on. 

I've been wondering how we leave so many lights off, so many pages blank, unknowable, wondering if that’s an invitation rather than a curse, an invitation for others to create light, or for ourselves, tomorrow or ten years down the road, to reimagine.

I’ve been writing this since this morning when I read a line in the Psalms that asked God to “turn to us in mercy,” and my heart flip-flopped it and read “turn us into mercy,” and I whispered, yes, turn us into mercy. I’ve been writing this now—since, yes, our lives are never perfectly resolved or reconciled, since we go on holding our clumsy and beautiful multitudes in all our unfinished ways

First appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 45. 

Bouncing back

One day in May, brother winter sent his stuff falling with so much ferocity and volume that the sky was a mostly white sky with only tiny specks of gray appearing every so often.Which is to say it was a lot of snow. 

A middle-aged man wearing black rode by slowly on his bike, his bike! His face was lowered, his back hunched under a ridge of white.

Our three-legged dog hopped by the window and began eating something on the ground, digging through the snow with his nose while balancing on his three legs.

A few minutes later, another man walked by with sunglasses on and something tucked under his arm—a golf club, a metal detector, a cane?

And the snow kept falling.

And the neighbor’s cat ran from the barn to the garage for some purpose unknown to me, gathering a nice pile of snow on the ridge of her spine in just those few seconds.

But perhaps most miraculous of all that morning were all the trees that had leafed out, opening the door to spring even in the danger of heavy snow. One of the branches from the chokecherry had already broken under the weight, so I went outside with a broom to whisper good luck dear brave ones to the mountain ash and the hawthorn and the crabapple and the rest of the chokecherry branches and to shake their low branches free of snow and watch them bounce back and up into the sky. And all throughout that day, I went out to shake the branches, to notice what I could notice.

First appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 43.

When books put us back together

Here’s one way of telling you this story: I was looking in a book for a line I needed to hear again and had forgotten. I hadn’t underlined or marked the sentence, and I was chiding myself for it now. If you just would have grabbed a pen and marked it. It would have taken just a few seconds. You could have at least dog-eared the page. Argh. 

I kept skimming the same couple of pages over and over, knowing it must be there. I got more and more frustrated, even angry, at the book, at myself, my fingers even beginning to tremble. I imagined throwing the poor book against the wall, watching it hit, the pages splayed, then sliding down and landing on the ground with a thump. Yikes. 

And then finally, there, at the bottom of the page I’d skimmed a dozen times, I found it. And yes, the line was good, just like I remembered it. And yes, it would have taken me less time to read the entirety of the pages I had been frantically flipping through. But I couldn’t slow down for that. In that moment, I saw a soft, white portion of myself that was, and is, so frantic, so afraid. Afraid of what it means to love and lose my place. Afraid of being loved and still forgotten. Afraid of never finding all the lovely things. So afraid of it all, that I would toss a beloved line, a beloved story, my beloved heart into the air and against the wall, splayed, landing with a thump.

To find the line I had to find the page, find the thread of the story. I needed to slow for myself and hear the still voice already always inside me. I needed to take my trembling hand in mine. Instead, to borrow from Rumi, I wandered from room to room, hunting for the diamond necklace already around my neck.

***

Here’s another way of telling you this story: A writer wrote a line that spoke to me so strongly that I heard it in the midst of my panic. The words sparkled so brightly that I knew they reflected the truth, and what I remembered of their beauty turned me from my trouble towards that light. I rushed towards that light so quickly that I forgot to see if there might be a path I could follow, plunging in without a map. And just as I thought that light would be lost forever to me, there, at the bottom of the page, the author’s good words returned me to myself.

Now, I could rest. The words settled in and helped me pause enough to go deeper and wider. I needed this dear, brave author to tell me her story in those precise words, to take my trembling hand in hers. 

I keep coming back to Father Gregory Boyle’s idea of kinship, of the necessary act of being returned to ourselves by another. Sometimes, I cannot slow myself. Sometimes, I do not remember to pause. Sometimes, I crash through my life in a panic, forgetting my precious self. In these moments, I rely on the remembered beauty of words, art, and kindred souls to bring me back to myself and breathe, trembling, in my own life.

***

I need both ways of telling this story: the forgiveness that comes from glimpsing my own soul's worth and the affirmation of that worth through another's words. Both ways bring me toward the path of wholeness and seeing the worth of the people around me, myself, and the things that we make together. 

First appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 41.

Are we ever at home?

I love discovering a new name for something. This happened recently when I was reading Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk. Macdonald writes about really knowing a plot of land and having specific markers—the wood ants’ nest, the newt pond, “a huge, red underwing moth behind the electricity junction box.” She writes, “naturalists call this a local patch, glowing with memory and meaning.”

As soon as I knew there was a name for intimately knowing a bit of land, I immediately found myself longing for “a local patch.” And then I quickly decided I’d never had a local patch, and not only had I never had one, I’d also never given my kids the opportunity to have one. Yep, that’s where my brain went. Except that’s not true. I’m not a naturalist and my “local patch” may not be like Helen Macdonald’s, but there is a circle of dead and fallen cottonwood trees behind the house I grew up in, and this spot glows with memory and meaning for me. It had a history—I remember my dad telling me he used to play among the trees in that very same spot when he was a boy. In elementary school I tested my strength and my courage and my balance on those trees. And when a friend and I were playing near the trees and became frightened by a new horse rearing her hind legs, neighing and stomping, we ran and hid behind one of those huge trunks, thinking we were invisible. When my husband proposed to me, it was in the snow and the presence of those fallen trees.

And here, now, my kids are making their own local patch—the street corner where my son fell off his bike into the cactus, the irrigation ditch where they catch crawdads and frogs, the tumble of green where strawberries always grow. These landmarks are being etched onto their hearts. Even now, years later, when we pass the street corner with the cactus, my son will mark it, saying, “That’s where I fell off my bike into the cactus.” When we pass the tree where we once saw an owl take flight, without fail one of them will say, “Look, the tree where we saw the owl!”

Yes, we all need the gift of a plot of land to ground us, to mark our wonder, our places of fear and pain, our discoveries, our abundance, our wholeness. I know I long for this. And I think my longing for a local patch is rooted in this question: Will I ever feel truly at home in my body and mind, in my relationships, on this earth? On my cynical or low days, I’d probably say no. But on my lighter days, I can hold both my squirmy, uncomfortable feelings of not belonging as well as the little glimpses of feeling truly settled and whole.

Maybe claiming a local patch is ultimately an act of hope and imagination—that we can and will experience glimpses of coming home to ourselves, our community, our spirits, and our earth. And this claiming also involves paying attention and noticing the spot where we saw a red underwing moth, because it matters. 

So now I pick up a new truth—that we’re all moving toward our truest homes inside the Spirit in whom we live and move and have our being, facing the scariest lies we tell ourselves and the hottest desert sun along the way, holding our longings and feelings of isolation and belonging, and naming our local patches. Yes, together we’re moving, expanding, healing, breathing our way home.

First appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 40.

Tricksters

First of all, my grandfather was a playful man, a trickster, in the wily and subversive and mythological sense of the word. Second of all, when I was a young girl, my grandfather taught me how to blow into my hands to make a whistling sound that he called an elk call. He cupped his great big hands around mine and showed me how to fold my fingers together, how to purse my lips into the gap between my two thumbs and blow steadily, raising and lowering my fingers to change the pitch up and down, puffing my warm breath into my hands to make music. I loved it.

I loved imagining the power of this newfound skill. That I could go into the mountains and make this eerie flute sound and magically summon elk. I assumed they were drawn to the music of it, so I practiced different notes, making up my own little snippets of song—pinky, pinky, ring finger, index, index, pause, all four fingers, repeat, etc. And then I would finish with what seemed like the perfect dramatic flourish for the ending of an elk song—I would take a deep breath, begin blowing, and then make a fluttering trill with all my fingers moving up and down—getting faster and faster, like a pianist playing a glissando, gliding the back of her hand up and down the piano, playing all the notes, until there were no notes or breath left, or until all the elk had been called. 

A few years ago, I was remembering this little trick at a family gathering, and I asked my uncle, who is a hunter, if my cupped-hands-whistle-thing really calls elk. He laughed and said no. Perhaps my grandfather knew that someday I would discover that this breath-into-my-hands is not, after all, an elk call. And that when I made that discovery, I would get to rename it myself, choose what or whom I most needed to call. Or maybe not. Maybe he just knew it made it more interesting to an eight-year-old if he called it an elk call. Or maybe he never called it an elk call at all, and I just imagined that. Regardless, I’m grateful. 

Because now that I know my call  is not an elk call, I’ve decided I must play it for myself. I’ve decided that it’s me and the fragile, fragmented parts of myself that I want to summon. After many years of intense neglect, it’s me, all of me, that I want to gather and hold—especially the depressed me, the frantic me, the scared me, the part of me that says it’s selfish to focus on myself, the controlling me, the goofy-awkward me, the afraid-of-disappointing-everyone me.

So, I’ll walk into the mountains or into the backyard and call to myself. Like the elk, first some, then more of me will emerge from behind the lodgepole pines or the lilac bush. I will make the call back to me, and I will gather myself, and I will offer my prayer for the ordinary woman that is me, for the wounded me, and the holy, other woman that is me, all of me blowing warm breath into my bony hands, making a beautiful sound for myself, playing the most magnificent fluttering trill my body and mind and heart can play.

Yes.

And, I’ve decided that I’ll teach this call to my children, and like my trickster grandfather, I’ll give it a name that holds their imagination until one day they are ready to name it themselves, to name what they most need or most want to call forth in that moment. And I say in that moment because I’m sure our calls change over time. I look forward to them changing over time.

I've been reading Elizabeth Gilbert's book Big Magic, and I loved discovering her section on the deep connection between creativity and "the way of the trickster" as she calls it. I agree with this connection, and I think our artists and writers are tricksters, too, giving us these calls and stories and images that capture our imagination and invite us to lean in toward one another with all the fragmented parts of ourselves cupped together, laughing and weeping over the beautiful paradox of who we are—gloriously brave and magnificent frailties.

First appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 39.

Avoiding meditation

Why do I love to meditate and also put off doing it?

I talk to my meditation friends about this and I know I’m not alone. So many of us experience this tension—we yearn for the peace but we also avoid it. Sometimes our to-do list seems too long, or “pulling in” feels too self-absorbed or indulgent, or we tell ourselves it’s better left to the yogis, monks, and introverts. 

Let me tell you, I get this tension. It is scary to be still and sit with yourself and all of your wild thoughts. Goodness, I started a magazine for art and contemplation, and most days, I find it easier to tackle the inbox than to be still, physically or mentally. I find the thrill of problem-solving and checking items off my list more immediately satisfying than the awkward embracing of ambiguity. So I get it. But I’m starting to think these concerns and distractions that keep us from contemplation are really just fear in disguise.

Richard Rohr, scholar, Franciscan priest, and founder of the Center for Contemplation and Activism, writes in his book A Lever and a Place to Stand: “Contemplation waits for the moments, creates the moments, where all can be prayer. . . . Contemplation is essentially nondual consciousness that overcomes the gaps—gaps between me and God, outer and inner, either and or, me and you.”

This is scary stuff! Moving into the gaps, into the gray! And I know this phrase “nondual consciousness” is a mouthful, but stay with me. Rohr goes on to explain that he sees it as a compassionate posture of embracing mystery and paradox, the difficult and the unknown, and the realization that we don’t understand everything. Gulp. A mind open to contemplation is a mind open to possibility and to curiosity. Yes, this feels true to me.

I also love that Rohr invites us to integrate action and contemplation in our lives, recognizing that we all have both aspects, and we needn’t choose one or the other. I also suspect this welcoming of both action and contemplation would release us from some of that fearful tension we often feel. Rohr writes: [Action] is surely the first half of life for almost all of us . . . We learn, we experiment, we try, we do, we stumble, we fall, we break,and we find.” If we fearfully stay in this stage of action-only oriented living, “We will settle for being right instead of being holy and whole; for saying prayers instead of being one.” 

So, yes, it’s scary, but it’s worth it to keep stepping into the gaps, to keep practicing a posture of compassion and yeses. I’ve also learned that simply being quiet and alone or avoiding people does not make me a contemplative. I can be alone with an inner war going on inside, or I can be quiet because I feel numb and shut down. And yes, I have definitely experienced this. Picture me trying to pray and meditate oh-so-peacefully in my favorite chair when I hear my kids bickering in the other room. I’m immediately annoyed, snapping at them to stop fighting! And then I’m annoyed with myself for snapping at the kids. Whew!

I’m learning that to be mindful and contemplative is to be compassionate toward others and myself. And one last beautiful thing . . . always we begin again in this contemplative posture.Thankfully, it is never simply a task to be mastered and forgotten.


First appeared in Issue 38: Ruminate

The Power of Laughter

When my son was in first grade, his Spanish-speaking friend Omar was just learning English, and my son knew very little Spanish. I remember asking him what they talked about, how they would decide which games to play during recess, or who was “it.”

“Well, he knows some English words,” my son told me.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like hello,” he said. And then he paused, smiled, and said, “But mostly when he laughs it’s in English, and I know just what he means… And Omar laughs a lot, Mom.”

Yes. For my son, laughter is a word that transcends barriers. Laughter is written in water.

• • •

Father Gregory Boyle recounts in his book Tattoos on the Heart a story from his early days of priesthood. He was serving in Bolivia and was asked to give Mass at a mountaintop Quechua village where locals harvest flowers for their living. He was just learning Spanish, so he starts to panic on the drive up the mountain because he realizes he forgot his Spanish prayer book for saying the Mass. He ends up fumbling his way through it, lifting the bread and wine whenever he runs out of things to say. He writes, “When it is over, I am left spent and humiliated. . . . I am convinced that a worse priest has never visited this place or walked this earth.” Like a scene from the picture book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No God, Very Bad Day, Father Boyle then realizes that he missed his ride home. He begins the long walk down the mountain when an old Quechua farmer or campesino approaches him. He writes:

I think of something to say, but nothing comes to me. Which is just as well, because before I can speak, the old campesino reaches into the pockets of his suit coat and retrieves two fistfuls of multicolored rose petals. He’s on the tips of his toes and gestures that I might assist with the inclination of my head. And so he drops the petals over my head, and I’m without words. He digs into his pockets again and manages two more fistfuls of petals. He does this again and again, and the store of red, pink, and yellow rose petals seems infinite. I just stand there and let him do this, staring at my own huaraches, now moistened with my tears, covered with rose petals.

I love this story, how it takes a defeated priest who doesn’t have the right sacred words and places him before an old campesino who is blessed by his presence and wants to bless him with rose petals in return. Yes, our simple presence can transcend barriers, can be written in water, flowing perfectly into gaps or over barriers. When I see my life as writ in water, my stance naturally becomes more open and loving and receptive. I can remember that everyone is doing the best they can, including myself. My focus on right and wrong is lessened and my capacity for delight is multiplied. I can marinate in mystery and laughter.

Or, as the 14th century poet and mystic Hafiz writes: “God and I have become like two giant fat people living in a tiny boat. We keep bumping into each other and laughing.” Yes, with my son and Omar, and Father Boyle and the campesino, and Hafiz and the entire Ruminate community, may we all squish in close to God and keep bumping into each other and laughing.

With an infinite amount of rose petals.

First appeared in Ruminate: Issue 36

Grief and the Unsayable

There are no words I tell my dear friend whose husband has been in a devastating accident. It’s silent for a few long moments on the phone. Then I ask how I can help, because that’s what we know how to do, right? She tells me: prayers for hope and joy to keep the discouragement at bay, prayers for a soft heart, for the damn neighbors to stop parking in the handicapped spot, for energy and endurance. And then she pauses, tucking into the other prayer requests a neon blue one. She tells me that her husband has asked her to pray for healing for his body, to pray for a miracle.

I’ll join you, I tell her. And then we hold our phones to our ears and sit in more silence. She’s teaching me how to be in the mystery.

*

In her collection of essays When I Was a Child I Read Books Marilyn Robinson writes about how much she loves what she calls “the frontiers of the unsayable.” Robinson writes:

. . . as a writer, I continuously attempt to make inroads on the vast terrain of what cannot be said—or said by me, at least. I seem to know by intuition a great deal that I cannot find words for, and to enlarge the field of my intuition every time I fail again to find these words. . . . The frontiers of the unsayable, and the avenues of approach to those frontiers, have been opened for me by every book I have ever read that was in any degree ambitious, earnest, or imaginative; by every good teacher I have had; by music and painting; by conversation that was in any way interesting, even conversation overheard as it passed between strangers. . . . We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself.”

Robinson also points out that science, too, is ambitiously exploring the unsayable through “dark matter, dark energy, the unexpressed dimensions proposed by string theory, the imponderable strangeness described by quantum theory.” She says that the science articles exploring these topics might as well be titled “Learned Ignorance” or “The Cloud of Unknowing.” I agree! What a great cloud of curious and compassionate folks reflected in all of these disciplines. I love picturing poets alongside scientists and musicians and strangers earnestly conversing—all of them humbly reminding us to imagine the reality of the great unknown, all of them saying there is so much more than we can ever say, and we must still try.

I love the mystery that is implied in our common phrase “a loss for words.” It means we’ve come to the end of ourselves, which is both frightening and good. It means that no matter how much talking, examining, or even deep pondering we give, some things are simply imponderable. This is certainly true in our response to tragedy, as we are often rendered silent before the painful mysteries of our world, to be still, to remember how small, how inadequate we really are. And then sometimes we get the chance to act, to say I’ll join you to those suffering. The poet Christian Wiman writes: “Silence is the language of faith. Action—be it church or charity, politics or poetry—is the translation.”

Yes, we live on a little island of the articulable, and sometimes howls or groans are all we can utter. Admitting this and offering our silence can be sacred.

First appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 35.

Wholeness

During a recent meditation retreat at the nearby Benedictine Abbey of St. Walburga, I was reflecting and journaling on all the many “hats” I wear and how I can sometimes feel scattered and fragmented as a result. I also thought about the latest national conversation around women balancing work and family and the supposed myth of “having it all.” 

I imagined diagramming my body to reflect this feeling of disjointedness: a marriage curled into the small of my back, a daughter on my left shoulder, a son on my right, a little magazine called Ruminate tucked under my chin, a platter of to-do lists balanced atop my head, and a chain of urgency wrapped around my feet.

This exercise soon took a turn as I found myself imagining a cloth of despair draped across my chest, a cloth too heavy for breath, for lungs, for air. For me, this cloth weighs heaviest when the periods of depression hit. And, I realized, it also weighs heaviest when I’m feeling distracted and pulled in too many pieces or places, and especially when things feel urgent, whether the urgency is real or imagined. 

I recently read that many 12-step recovery members know to take special care of themselves and be on guard for the potential of a relapse when HALT occurs, which stands for hungry, angry, lonely, and tired. I would add fragmented to that list. And, I think we are all vulnerable to our version of a relapse when any one of these factors appears.

I suddenly thought of the words “Your faith has made you whole,” which Jesus utters to a couple of souls throughout the Gospels. This simple statement stopped me still; no more diagramming my body. So I held these words, like a mantra—rolling them around my tongue and against my cheek and inside my breath, asking for faith, for wholeness—for myself, my family, my community.

It  also feels right to remember other pilgrims are walking along with me on this journey, and through their words and their paintbrushes, they are seeking wholeness, too. And yes, I know wholeness is a big word, a big dream. Sometimes it seems impossible. But what does feel possible is holding a word in my mouth, savoring it, reading a story that gives off light, pondering a poem that tells the truth, being for wholeness and against fragmentation, doing small things with great love as Mother Theresa insisted. Yes. Small things. Great love.

First appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 34.

What clearing out gives us

the chance to pay attention
a blank page
freedom from what wears out our hearts
a clean fridge
the bare and sometimes lonely
space to make
appreciation for strong packaging tape
the essentials
surprises
a lifted veil, a clearing of the smoke
space to pray
truth telling
wide vistas
silence
a reminder of what to keep and what to toss
room to dance in the kitchen
perspective
an openness to change
a floor to sweep

First appeared in Ruminate Issue 32 and inspired by Marilyn McEntyre’s “list” poems