Gratitude List:
1. A delta of snow geese flying above the River last night.
2. The sunset: first a tangerine glow that seemed to shimmer around us, then magenta, and finally crimson.
3. Dandelion tips growing in my brother’s flower beds. Persephone rises.
4. Teaching myself to go back to sleep. (Knock on wood) Not only have I not had midnight insomnia for ages, I have been sleeping until 6:30 lately.
5. Dreams that remind me I’m okay.
May we walk in Beauty.
My sister says that there is a building somewhere in Virginia which was designed to confuse the sense of direction, to force people to stop each other in the halls to ask, “Do you know the way to Conference Room C? Or even how to get to the third floor from here?”
The labyrinth of halls and underground passages and stairs and places that seem to go nowhere is designed to force the wandering souls to interact, to find their way together. I find the idea intriguing, and something in my waking self steps forward with excitement at the challenge, at the genius of creating a space which intentionally unmoors people in order to force them to depend on each other.
But on the other hand, this is the landscape of my most deeply frustrating dreams. I am always wandering down hallways, running up flights of stairs, only to find that I’ve arrived at the wrong end of the building, my appointment was set for an hour ago, I’m late for class, and I haven’t studied for the test. The year is nearly over and I forgot to go to class all year, and if I could just find my way through the halls to the office, I could set everything straight.
Perhaps those dreams lie at the heart of my own anxieties, social and otherwise. There’s a structure there that everyone else seems to get, to understand. I seem to be the only one in the dreams (and sometimes in life) who can’t find my way, who can’t figure out how it’s supposed to be laid out, who has forgotten where to go and even why I was there in the first place.
Next time I find myself lost in the labyrinth of an institution in my dreams, perhaps I’ll stop and ask someone for help, see if I can inject a new way of interacting with the space of the dream. Perhaps that will in turn inform something in my waking life, give me a new perspective on my own ability to wake up more fully to my own story.
Gratitude List:
1. Simple Musings, a new booklet written by a whole group of friends–reflections on the season of Lent
2. Snow Geese: a large flock (hundreds?) circling a corn field north of Columbia
3. This image: Just a few fields down from the geese sits a farm that is bisected by an old railroad siding. The siding is raised on a little bank to keep it level, and a fringe of trees grows along it and in front of a farmhouse. This afternoon an old long-horned bull was standing on the siding as we passed.
4. Storm downgrade
5. Benediction, blessing.
May we walk in Beauty!
There was going to be a poem about the little birds,
but that didn’t happen. Of course, all the poems come back,
at some point, to the little birds, so there’s that.
And then I would have been writing about shame,
or rather, I did write about shame. For days.
But then I never took it past the messy draft,
and so this big space opened up and then the bit about grief
started to rise like dough in the back of the oven
near the pilot light. But I’m sort of an amateur myself
when it comes to grief. And I don’t want experience–
please, Universe, keep me naive on that score–
but I want to know how to hold it, because it’s always there
in the soup we swim in, always edging up to someone,
somewhere. And I want to know how to hold it,
because it is part of the essential story, yours,
and someone else’s, too. Not just Mary watching her son
die up there on that hill. It is, well, part of the soup.
And then there are, of course, the little birds,
and the way they hover over the flowers at sunset
or dart through the brush, whisper-like and timid.
The way shadows grow over the fields in the afternoon
and the breezes begin to settle into the hollow.
Gratitude List:
1. Friends who, intentionally or inadvertently, light a fire under me when I need it most.
2. Considering the semantic shading of gratefulness and gratitude.
3. Vermilion
4. The wild excitement of coming down the home stretch on a long-term project.
5. Re-fashioning, re-crafting, re-purposing, re-making, and not just in the realm of the physical, you know?
May we walk in Beauty!
Somewhere in the wood,
mourning dove sings of desire:
“Who and who and who?”
Then, from deep in the bamboo,
the owl answers, “You, you, you.”
Gratitude List:
1. Synchronicity. People in very different places of my life this week have recommended that I read the very same two authors.
2. Owl and dove
3. Sun and thaw and thaw and thaw.
4. Will forces
5. Poppy jasper
May we walk in Beauty!
I always have to think a moment before I say that one.
Is it transpiration or transubstantiation?
Perhaps it doesn’t matter.
The snow is transmuted before our eyes
from one sort of substance into another,
mystical and magical, a sacred event,
rising like a breath in a haze above the white fields.
Trans-spire.
Change of spirit.
Altered breath.
I know my own spirit rose,
transformed,
to watch the wraiths of haze lift
upward into blue sky
where gulls were flying
south to north and north to south.
My heart joined them in that dance.
Gratitude List:
1. Collaborative art. This one began as a squiggle. “I’ll draw and you color,” said Joss. I took a little heat for interpreting it into a drawing instead of keeping it abstract, but he’s satisfied now that it’s done. The scanner washed out the color a little. It’s called “Checkers Turtle climbs the ladder to the stars.”
2. Kombucha
3. THAW
4. Helping out at Preschool today
5. Left foot, right foot, breathe.
May we walk in Beauty.
Today was the day for me. I hit the winter wall. I have been able to remain positive and relatively not-whiny so far, but today did me in. I want to stay inside and sleep. I had to do an awful lot of self-talk just to get myself out the door to go check on the chickens.
I don’t write this to be whiny or to beg for pity, but to place in context again the fact that sometimes I desperately need to find my way to gratitude. And having practiced during the easy times definitely helps me to use the muscle in the days when it doesn’t come so easily.
Oh, but there’s always Beauty to find, even when I’m all curled up and cringing inside.
Gratitude List:
1. Blue shadows on a white field.
2. Bird footsteps and wing prints like hieroglyphic writing in the snow.
3. Slippers and layers and the knee socks that I have turned into an extra pair of sleeves (these do an amazing job of keeping me warm).
4. My many wise friends. Wise and compassionate. You.
5. The sun is returning. The sun is returning. The sun is returning.
May we walk in Beauty.
Gratitude List:
1. So many faerie diamonds a-dazzle in the sunlight on the ice on the River in the morning.
2. Prepositions
3. Holding the polarities
4. Valuing my work
5. This poem by Rilke:
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
May we walk in Beauty.
Last year, I read something by Rob Brezsny, in which he challenged people to look at that Rilke poem and use it as a template for their own poem. Here’s mine for today:
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across time and space.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around the Mystery, around that ancient tor.
I have been circling all my many lives
and I still don’t know: am I a the dancer,
the crone, or the ineffable fool?
Gratitude List:
1. The way the kids tucked into the alecha and injera this evening at supper. It’s gratifying to see them enjoying interesting food. No matter that the yellow peas never got soft enough to make the chana dahl. I must not have kept the heat on them enough. They’ll feed the chickens tomorrow. The rest of the supper was good.
2. Watching my second grader get lost reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe to himself. I had to stop myself from stopping him: I wanted us to read them together! Ah, but he was overcome by the magic.
3. Graces to be found in the challenging times.
4. How sometimes the network works. You put it out there and people grab it, and suddenly there’s a groundswell and momentum.
5. Sleep.
May we walk in Beauty.
I have been seeing a lot on the internet lately about compassion and empathy, about empathy and sympathy. That makes me happy. I’ve been reading Judy Cannato’s Field of Compassion, which posits that these times we are living in are marked by a new upwelling of compassion energy. And that makes me happy, too.
Today I looked again at that little cartoon video that accompanies Brene Brown’s TED talk on empathy and sympathy. I love in-depth semantic discussions, the sharp and precise clarification of terms, and part of what I like so much about Brene Brown’s work is that she gives us precise language for feelings. It’s like those feelings charts that people sometimes use for helping children understand their emotions, but on an adult scale.
So I do not intend to critique Brown’s view of empathy and sympathy here, really. Nor yours, either. But it struck me that part of what is moving about the presence of the Bear in the video (go up there and click that link and watch it now, please) is just that: his Presence. He witnessed the Little Rabbit’s pain, and when the Rabbit fell in the hole, he climbed right down in there with her. Aside from the label of his approach as empathetic rather than sympathetic, he was Present. He gave her the gift of witnessing her pain.
I haven’t had much experience in my life of terrible pain and trauma, but in the places and times when I have been hurting, I know that empathy was a great help when it was genuine. “I know how you feel,” can feel like a great comfort, or a violation: How dare you presume to know how I feel? “When I went through this. . . ” can be a relief to hear (You walked this road and you survived!) or it can be patronizing. Sometimes a sympathetic “That must be so hard” is as refreshingly Present as an empathetic “I know how it is.”
I wish I could say I get it right all the time, this business of being Present, being a Compassionate Witness. It’s hard to be awake enough to one’s self and the Universe to know how to muddle through this bog of the heart. It’s a challenge to be present when the Little Rabbit is lashing out in her sadness. I love that the meta-conversations lead us into the discussion. I’m grateful for the people, like Brown, who are working at the semantics, drawing us all to a deeper understanding of the compassionate heart.
Gratitude List:
1. The sweet, soft brush marks of wings on the snow
2. Satisfying mechanical tools: my apple peeler corer slicer, for example; an efficient non-electric tool that does its job well.
3. The way Jon hums to himself all day as he’s doing his daily tasks
4. Two people whom I love a great deal were in an ice-related traffic accident this morning, and emerged mostly unharmed. I am so grateful that injuries were relatively minor, and hope for a speedy and complete recovery from the aches.
5. Napping. This afternoon, as I was dozing off for a much-needed nap, a small person of the house came and snuggled up beside me and fell asleep too.
May we walk in Beauty.
In Honor of Ruby Bridges, Who Walked a Gauntlet and Turned it Into a Bridge
She did not click her ruby heels
and walk across that bridge of rainbow
home to Kansas. No, this one had the ruby
in her heart, and set her black patent leathers
schoolward, with federal marshals
at her corners, like framing a house.
She made a bridge, this one.
She might have quaked–
who wouldn’t, with the vitriol
of a nation tossed her way
like the tomatoes on the wall
in the Rockwell version?–but
she walked her pathway daily,
built that bridge with daily walking.
Gratitude List:
1. Ruby Bridges
2. Martin Luther King, Jr.
3. Rosa Parks
4. All those who fought and marches and sang and endured to bring about civil rights in our country.
5. People still doing the work to confront and transform racist thinking in self, community, nation
May we walk in Beauty.
Mockingbird Chronicles 