Image Credit: Laura Makabresku

It is probably impossible to love any human being simply ‘too much’. We may love him too much in proportion to our love for God; but it is the smallness of our love for God, not the greatness of our love for the man, that constitutes the inordinacy. | C.S. Lewis


"Everybody has a home team: It’s the people you call when you get a flat tire or when something terrible happens. It’s the people who, near or far, know everything that’s wrong with you and love you anyways. These are the ones who tell you their secrets, who get themselves a glass of water without asking when they’re at your house. These are the people who cry when you cry. These are your people, your middle-of-the-night, no-matter-what people." | Shauna Niequist


The most important thing in all human relationships is conversation, but people don’t talk anymore, they don’t sit down to talk and listen. They go to the theater, the cinema, watch television, listen to the radio, read books, but they almost never talk. If we want to change the world, we have to go back to a time when warriors would gather around a fire and tell stories. | Paulo Coehlo 


It’s that thing when you’re with someone and you love them and they know it and they love you and you know it but it’s a party and you’re both talking to other people and you’re laughing and shining and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes. But not because you’re possessive, or it’s precisely sexual, but because that is your person in this life and it’s funny and sad but only because this life will end and it’s this secret world that exists right there. In public. Unnoticed. That no one else knows about. It’s sort of like how they say that other dimensions exist all around us but we don’t have the ability to perceive them. That’s what I want out of a relationship. Or just life, I guess. | Frances Ha


Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room. | Cheryl Strayed

What Stays: A Response In Notes

[this]

 
Fall is the time of death. What I think I love—toasty fires, wool sweaters, frosty noses, bronzed falling leaves, burnt marshmallows, red ears, hot cider, apple crisp and chai lattes—they turn into sickness and death... Bare and empty trees, vacant spaces in our hearts, runny noses and a chill that wraps its frigid fingers around my heart and keeps me from ever getting warm....

October six years ago our grandfather died.

Funny how the dates blur; funny how we slip back into life after life itself is shattered. What does it say about our place in the universe that we humans fight so fiercely to survive beyond the blows a natural order brings us, that when our comrades and our wise men and our soulmates go down we go on, and that we recover in us (all but the most brutally ravaged by circumstance) a sense of beauty and joy despite the severance of all happiness? Why do we survive? When the blow falls again, will we? These are the questions I'm asking myself over dishes, over impromptu baking projects, over stretching out a back wrenched and twisted, in the darkness over a damp patch in the couch. And you, little sister, you must be asking your own. Fall is the time of death. Some days I half believe it. Most days, I am convinced autumn is the season in which we're granted to be most alive.

Autumn is calligraphy on parchment, autumn is a leaf-covered bough acknowledging the motherhood of the earth, autumn is a quickening of the lungs; it is the excitement of holidays and family and reunion. We grow darker and colder in autumn, we remember our own mortality, and as a result we wake up to what we love most about the earth and about our existence. Yes, part of autumn involves dying. But the eternal ice it ushers into our world is a myth. Autumn doesn't bring ice, it brings change—sometimes we, being humans, can't tell the difference.

Where is the line drawn between changing and dying? We look at the former and see the latter, but what if it isn't that at all? How are we even to know? Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone—the one speaking was the one chosen to conquer death, to shatter the binding alienation of it. But He was afraid. Death is still alienation. It is separation, it is the dashing of hopes, it is the severing of a connection. It is change in its most brutal and elemental form: spirit being torn from matter, a heart that loves being wrenched away from so much that it loved (wrenched away from all that it loved? only the heart itself can answer that, never we who look on).

I can't remember how October looked six years ago when the call came from Mom to tell us that when she got home from work she had something to tell us. She seemed so calm in her urgency, so steady. I can't remember what summer felt like last month when she called again and asked me how I was doing, and the moment she inquired I knew the pathology report had come in and knew it was bad. Then too, calm. The worst bit about all of this is having to tell people. They're going to be so disappointed, and I hate to disappoint them.

It seems all the leaves are falling at once. Three days ago I drove twenty minutes to sit for an interview, and a scant patch of brown greeted me along the way; yesterday I went in for orientation and rust-coloured woods thronged the road. If summer and autumn paused at the door to have an affair, that affair is ending; autumn moves on. Autumn always moves on. Does that make it a harbinger of death? Maybe. But I can't see it that way, not every day. I can't live with an autumn that only ever embodies dying.

Because here's what comes with the sharp drop in temperatures, in the shriveled leaves of a Pennsylvania fall season: hope. Hope that the suffocating humidity of the summer months is to itself terminal. Hope that all of the priceless moments of an irrational season will infuse the rest of the chaotic year with a sense of order beyond the mess. Hope that everything alive when the air is quickened will be present still when an array of colours gives way to a washed-out brown. Autumn shows us the bones of things; it teaches us what can be grasped to keep us anchored and what can only be carried with us. The leaves go with us wherever we set foot, and people are like the leaves: they come, they flourish, they fall, and we keep going, holding their imprints sacred in our hearts and silently yearning for the day when impressions in our souls are set aside for the real thing before us.

If autumn murmurs one thing, it is that the real thing is as present as it always has been. Not because we see it in front of us as we think it should be, or because it isn't crumpling and decaying with horrifying speed, but because beneath all of that we know that the seed of renewed life is thriving, because autumn begets winter and winter has never failed to beget spring. The leaves come back. The grain of wheat sown produces offspring by the hundredfold. And we go on living.

Stay Alive

I had expected the revolt to be louder after the news came; instead, it seemed to enter and slip straight into our reality, too definite to be left unconsidered, too nebulous to yet be named. They say that the process of grief has five stages, and the first is denial. Is this denial, or is this merely the absence of grief, the calm before the storm, the announcement of something still part of the distant future without its unrelenting consequences sinking in?

Tuesday I stopped by a former client's house for a signature, and she told me that the children still cry when a storm comes. They remember the tornado that took their barn down three years ago, and time has softened the memory but it remains. She said that this past summer her husband was in the barn and a freak twister came down the cornfield on the hill and moved the barn wall—a brand new solid thing—ten feet. Then it stopped. If it hadn't, they aren't sure if he would still be alive. She said that they felt the force of the twister coming, that when it touched down their hair started to stand on end and they could feel it pulling towards itself; all around them the storm had gone and the farm was unearthly silent, but for the rush of the wind tearing a path towards their barn. They never made it to the basement.

Coffee cannot seem burnt and bitter enough these days. I have a cold, and trouble savouring things.

For a long time chocolate and beer was all I could taste.

When Kitten watched Garden of Words she spoke most of the beautiful shoes. Yesterday I saw her in a crowd, and she wore open-toed wedge sandals, bright ones, with brown and mauve stripes. Their gaiety lied about the circumstances.

Is gaiety always a lie about the circumstances?

Last month I finished reading Annie Dillard's For the Time Being, and in it she spoke with a kind of appalled interest of bird-headed dwarfs, children who are born and grow, but stay infant-sized in their development and frail, children whose mothers could tuck them into their oversized purses like small dogs. She mentioned other genetic conditions, but the bird-headed dwarfs left their imprint. On page fifty-three of the book she wrote, "I saw a beached red dory. I could take the red dory, row out to the guy, and say: Sir, you have found a place where the sky dips close. May I borrow your maul? Your maul and your wedge? Because, I thought, I too could hammer the sky—crack it at one blow, split it at the next—and inquire, hollering at God the compassionate, the all-merciful, WHAT'S with the bird-headed dwarfs?"

I should feel that way about Mom. I should feel that way about a lot of things. And sometimes I do, but this time not so much; this time it feels less like screaming and more like silence, more like that small quiet room people call acceptance. Or perhaps it's only the stillness before the strike of the tornado. Until that point comes, is there any way to know?

Of course, nothing is set in absolutes, or even in definite prediction. Maybe that's the softening element in all of this, that we don't really know anything: we have a pathology report and statistics and the jarring reminder that life isn't what we decide it will be. Apart from that? Nothing. Nothing at all.

More than one person has told me that faith is consolation, that the situation is in God's hands and that all will be well, but C. S. Lewis said better words: "They tell me H. is happy now, they tell me she is at peace. .... How do they know she is 'at rest?' .... 'Because she is in God's hands.' But if so, she was in God's hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? If God's goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine."

And then there is Job. Job, who lost all he had, who in one day found the entirety of his vast domain burnt, slaughtered, crushed, stolen, and poisoned. There is no safety anywhere at all, not even in God. God as protection from anguish and loss is a lie. God as guard round about our lives is a lie. Life happens as it will happen, or as it is made to happen, and the cry of  "Of course he's not safe, but he's good," means something entirely other than "I'm not afraid," or "It won't be unbearable," or "He wouldn't do that to me [or allow that to happen to me, or whatever else might be said]."

The breaking will happen, one way or another. It always does. We start out struggling and fight our way in varying degrees through an existence weighted against our survival, and some of us come out the worse for wear than others. I can foresee so little, but when the shattering happens, give me no promises of a benevolent God. Tell me nothing of how safe He is, or how reasonable, or how great the rewards He gives. He is not reasonable, and He is not benevolent, not by my standards, and talk of gifts in the yawning vacuum of loss is like trying to placate a child abandoned by his parents with Smarties. I will not defend Him to myself on my terms, I will not make up a plausible excuse for the allowance of anguish. "But who wants a comprehensible God in the aftermath of an incomprehensible accident?" If God and nightmares can be defined in one breath, how can there be any good in the world at all? When faced with hell, we need something bigger.

This Time Last Year

Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein."  

Mark 10:15, KJV

The soul is healed by being with children.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There is something so compelling about the small ones.

One Morning In March

 

Fragments of My April

 

 

i. just a desk corner and my dusty keyboard
ii. bathroom convocation over the mascara tube; my girls play so nicely together
iii. the princess in the hall of mirrors
iv. my small charge's preparations for dabbling in devourable zoology
v. no better time than a sunny afternoon to undertake a vivacious career as a pirate

Yellow Laughter, Knee-Scraped Trees

She entered, wringing winter from
her hair, dripping petals on the carpet.
We welcomed her with arms wide open,
brought her steaming tea to warm
her translucent bones.
Her fingers spelled out spring under the mug
and her eyes flashed dogwood.

Funny, how we forgot so quickly why she came,
pale laughter fading to grey, followed by rain.
In the silence, bark peeled from the trees.

In the morning we found that the wind had blown her away,
leaving April to occupy the orchard.

a note from the past

Some days there are headaches and fights in the kitchen and long afternoons and aching hip joints and the demands of undesired (but obligatory) travel and over-browned cinnamon rolls after a series of technically inconsequential failures of performance and being that pile into one heap of miserable memory.

And some days—the same days, even—there are fingers sticky with cream cheese glaze and cartwheeling lessons in the back yard just before dusk and pancakes and climbing to the top of the swing set and a host of small moments that somehow seem to counterbalance all of the distress of existing.

Provided, of course, I bother to remember them.

We're still working on that—the remembering.

04.07.2015

Easter

The house of my soul is too small for you to enter: make it more spacious by your coming. It lies in ruins: rebuild it. | Augustine, Confessions

—

There's no easy way to face Easter. Not today. Perhaps not ever. If I have been guilty of flippancy, it is only because the weight of emphasis lies uncomfortably close to what is hard to touch on a good day, on a day when the sharp edges blur through sunlight and water and discouragement ebbs beneath a rush of contentment. Pleasant as platitude and prayer might be for a holiday centered around acknowledgement of a supernatural gift (is that not indeed what the Resurrection was and is?) there is neither here for the offering. Instead, I am wrestling with the idea of acceptance. With the idea of being cracked open and hollowed and reshaped. With the raging battle between the absurdity and the appeal of renewal. 


The house of my soul....lies in ruins: rebuild it. 

His mercies....are new every morning.

Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared....and they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus. And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments: And as they were afraid and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen—


The dichotomy is enormous; it is an age-old struggle: death against life, trust against suspicion, promise against a vast entity called pain. What myth more potently represents that contrast than the sequence of events between Good Friday's night and Easter morning? Somewhere between the blackout of an afternoon and the sunrise of an ancient morning is nested a whisper of a consummate fulfillment — there is a deeper magic.

And just like that the gap closes.

 —

The house of my soul....lies in ruins: rebuild it.

I can't claim to understand, not really, not all of it, not nearly all of it; but right now maybe this is enough: that in the honouring of a long-spoken myth the clarion call summoning one heart to its home is heard. Maybe this is enough: that even if the story is beyond me I believe, I believe that there is resurrection.

More than that, I believe in His resurrection. 

In life against death. In trust against doubt. In promise.

I believe that He will rebuild this house.

This is Easter. This is hope.

Life.


There is a deeper magic.

Sticky Notes

my shadow; photo credit goes to Koala

Spring is coming, and with it a thousand plans and a new venture in life. For our little flat, these are the things that I crave:

... kombucha fermenting in clear glass jars, lining an aged shelf in the kitchen

... a little brown crock filled with cookies

... bookshelves, at least two, filled with the sort of books to be pulled out and perused on both cozy autumn nights and sweat-stained summer afternoons

... houseplants in the windows and spilling from the corners

... hand cream and tissues on a tiny end table

... space, high ceilings, the illusion of freedom

... a piano and a stereo so that we can always, always have music

... candles and window light

And foremost on the list, never a dearth of warmth and welcome, for all.

01.06.2015

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. | Rainer Maria Rilke