Set Free

And Your Bird Can Sing

When I started blogging regularly over four years ago, it never occurred to me that I would have readers. That may sound a bit odd, but I hadn't spent much time reading blogs, and I did not understand that communities had formed around them. I blogged using my real name and my children's names and my husband's name.

And then I began to get comments, and also to read a lot of other blogs, and to realize that pseudonyms were about more than the fun of having a nickname. I might need to be thinking about my children's privacy, and mine, or that of my church members. So Martha's Musings, possibly the most boring blog title EVER, needed a new name. I mused and mulled and considered and contemplated and, well, you get the picture. I needed an image to guide me to a name. Where was I in my life, and what could I use to tell my story in short?

Aunt Mim did indeed have a gilt birdcage music box in her living room. We weren't actually relatives; "aunt" and "uncle" were the honorary titles given to many of my parents' friends. In a back room arranged for the delight of grandchildren we found blocks and other toys, but I nearly always wandered into the living room to wind up the music box and listen to the little songbird.

I wish I had a picture of the real one.

I only remember one bird, but perhaps there was only one that appeared to sing.

I've spent a good bit of my life building cages for myself and trying to make them look as pretty as the music box, hoping to suit the tastes of those who were most important to me, seeking to sing the tune that would please them.

I fear I mostly failed.

When I began writing at Set Free, I had a vague hope of writing my way out of the cage. Where could I go if I set myself free of the cage I had been rearranging and reconstructing to meet my own expectations of the right kind of life? For although there may have been others who liked me in the cage, I must admit to being comfortable behind its familiar golden bars, trilling the familiar golden tunes.

It's true I mostly failed at pleasing others with the songs I hoped they would prefer, but in the end that was a good thing. Because the people who really love a bird don't want to see her in a cage, and they are happy to hear the songs she loves and to take joy in them with her.

I believe I can finally let myself out of the birdcage. I believe I might be ready to fly.

(This is my final post at Set Free. I hope you will join me at Reflectionary. Old posts will remain available here.)

A Dog I Loved But Never Met

For Cub and her family, with love from Songbird and Molly...

“Love Dogs” by Rumi

One night a man was crying,

 "Allah, Allah!"

His lips grew sweet with the praising,

until a cynic said,

 "So! I have heard you

calling out, but have you ever

gotten any response?"

The man had no answer for that.

He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.

He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,

in a thick, green foliage,

 "Why did you stop praising?"

“Because I've never heard anything back."

"This longing you express 

is the return message."

The grief you cry out from

draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness that wants help

is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.

That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs no one knows the names of.

Give your life to be one of them.

(Translated by Coleman Barks, from The Essential Rumi, edited by Coleman Barks.)

A Little Break

Just a note--I'm taking a little break here and focusing my writing efforts over the way at Reflectionary. I am not sure if this is a turn in another direction (for writing or for blogging), or an experiment, or perhaps a period of re-defining, assessing where I am and what I'm doing with myself. It may be as simple or as momentous as leaving the birdcage, or as ironic as exchanging one for another.

Anyway, I'm over there, and if I reach any sort of decision about permanent moves, I'll let you know!

A Little Prayer for the Ministry Team

If you're the praying sort, would you think of The Princess this morning? After the bean supper at church last night, she expressed some feelings of sadness, and I realized that she misses the churches and people we have left behind. Interim Ministry is all about change, and we knew that, but this is the first time she has faced integrating into a new church without a brother or two along to make the adjustment with her.

My children made a shockingly smooth transition to being theological offspring when I graduated from seminary almost six years ago. They have spoken politely and with interest to countless adults, told the stories of where they go to school and about their extracurricular interests. They have done readings and worship dramas, but have stepped aside to let others have center "stage," too. They have sung and played instruments. They have waited patiently for their mother when "five more minutes" became thirty or forty-five or an hour.

Our new church family has been nothing but gracious; we're just experiencing a little homesickness for what we've left behind. And I guess that's the way it will be for us, if this is the path I'll be walking.

I guess you could throw in a little prayer for me, too.

(Sermon over here, if you are so inclined.)

Big Love

It's the name of the play, and it's the feeling this mother has about all three of her children, including the one who was far away while The Princess and I went to see #1 Son in his play at college.

As The Princess said, "It's the most inappropriate thing I've ever seen; it was great!"

After the show (which included brief nudity, lots of underwear, a fair amount of swearing and some very frank sexual talk, all of which overshadowed the violence...), the director moderated a question and answer session with the cast and designers.

#1 Son has been playing soft and/or smart characters all his acting life (since age 7). It was wonderful to see him take on the challenge of playing a forthright, macho "b@$tard @$$hole," as he put it, yet find that character's humanity. His big speech asked a question that has plagued me ever since we sent troops to Iraq: how can we expect people to turn on the fighting instinct when it feels expedient, then imagine it will be easy to simply turn that off when the war is over?

This morning we met early for breakfast at a Hiptastic town landmark. It's the first place I ever went in that town, years ago, and I'm delighted to see it open again after a fire in 2006.

The grandparents will see the play tonight; we do wonder how they will take it. But as #1 Son put it, "If I weren't in it, it would be different."

Indeed.

First and Last

The Princess and I will be on the road this morning to a Non-Contiguous New England State, on a visit to Hiptastic University. #1 Son is a senior there. How did that happen? Graduation is only six weeks in the distance. And this weekend marks his final performance as an actor at college.

Four student years ago, chubbier and softer, he played the nerdy assistant bank manager in a student-driven production of "No Sex, Please, We're British." His entire freshman dorm floor came, en masse, to the production I saw, and they cheered him to an embarrassing (for him) extent during the curtain calls. It was my first night out on a university campus since about 1982, and I was shocked by the wardrobe of the girls in the audience, which was similar to that of the working girls portrayed in the play. It was hard to imagine how my boy might be managing in that milieu, and I think he would tell you now, the first semester was tough.

But he found he had real friends on that dorm floor, some of whom are housemates this senior year, and he found his place in the Hiptastic theatre universe.

And he grew up.

The soft-cheeked boy can now grow a fearsome beard, has worked hard at school, on-stage and backstage, has formed into a young man, with more edges and a different kind of energy. He turns in his senior thesis today.

As a little boy, he had a way of folding into a hug, and that has not changed, for which I am grateful.

We'll have a late lunch today at one of our traditional meeting places in Hiptastictown, significantly called First and Last. Pure Luck will join us, and Dos (#1 Son's girlfriend) and a college friend already graduated and a friend from home who has been in the picture since middle school.

I anticipate some emotion, for me, anyway. Where will he be in six months, or a year? What will the future hold for a young actor whose life has been as soft as he once was? Will he learn to live in a world with more edges?

I believe he will.

My Little Brother's Birthday Party

My little brother is 45 today. Let's not talk about how old that makes a bird feel.

What's on my mind is another of his birthdays, the one in 1968. Our dad was in the U.S. Senate, and we lived in a suburban neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia, and a few days before my little brother's birthday party my parents decided it might be wiser to have it in the backyard than in a public park, as planned.

I was nearly 7, and I could tell something was wrong, that we were not simply changing our minds about the best venue for a party to suit five-year-old boys. I'm sure I asked my mother, more than once, why the plans had changed. I was a big girl, a first-grader, wise to the ways of the world, or so I thought, imagining myself as more of a colleague to my mother than her child.

Persistence paid off, and my mother, worn down, told me that she was afraid to go to the park. People are angry she said, because a man has been killed, a man people cared about, and there are riots going on, and people are setting buildings on fire. It's better for us to stay at home, she said.

What strikes me most about this memory is that there was no judgment against those who might be rioting, and no indication that race had anything to do with the troubles.

I lived in an idealized world.

 My little brother's birthday party took place in our fenced backyard on Belle Haven Road. It would be hard to imagine a more safe-feeling place outside a gated community. I went back to the neighborhood with Pure Luck several years ago, to show him where I had once lived. We stopped across the street from 2209, a house I dreamed about as recently as last week, and before we had been there two minutes, someone stopped to ask if we were lost? I guess we looked like we didn't belong there.

I never knew I lived in a place where some people didn't belong, and that is perhaps nearly as bad as believing people don't belong in the first place.

Ruby, my childhood friend, had some similar experiences. In our nearly apartheid-like hometown, Jane Austen's Village, we grew up in homes where we did not internalize the prejudice many of our peers did, but that did not prepare us for the real world.

I'm not sure how long it took for me to realize that Dr. King had been killed because he was a person of color.

I can't even remember hearing my parents say "Negro," but wasn't that the word then? I remember being 8 or so and hearing "Afro-American" for the first time and wondering why these words even mattered?

I fear there is such a thing as being too sheltered.

I understand now why my mother felt frightened. My father had received his own death threats for his political positions, and there were more to come. The world felt too big and too uncertain to her. I'm not sure what she thought of Dr. King then; she didn't say.  She was busy overseeing the play of little white boys who came to a birthday party in plaid jackets and bow ties.

But I have a vivid memory of sitting with her in the Bubble Room at the Children's Museum in Jane Austen's Village, many years later, watching #1 Son interact with the other children, the first place in my hometown where I ever white and African-American children playing together, the first place in my hometown I saw a hint of Dr. King's dream.

Signs of Spring, Mark II

  Signs of Spring, Mark II 
  Originally uploaded by revsongbird.

How do you like our mother-daughter Chuck Taylors?

A Quick Sharp Stab

For years they have been in my dreams, and the injury always comes in the same place.

I had a vivid dream some years ago of being in a Roman setting, and in that case the wound came from a dagger, delivered by the patriarch of my dream family.

Last night it was a spear, pinning me to the ground, every muscle in my chest in spasm, front and back.

Someone, a beautiful and eccentric woman doing some sort of sound therapy (I really can’t explain it) with me years ago, had a vision of me in a canoe, and the injury coming from an arrow. Her frame of reference might have been reincarnation, but whether or not I want to go there, I have to acknowledge that this motif appears again and again. What does it mean?

When I woke up last night, it all made sense. The wound is close to the heart, but it is never fatal, or not instantly so. The wound is painful, and my whole body reacts to the invasion of the foreign object. I convulse protectively.

I do this all the time. I sleep this way, turned in on myself, though the only threat to my peace is a 9 pound cat who wants to be as near to me as possible.

I’ve been told by a nurse that the sore place I associate with the dream wounds is actually tender for physiological reasons, a place where the trail of lymph nodes criss-crosses.

It’s not clear how I hurt my back, but it is clear that it happened at a time when my focus had been drawn to past emotional injuries, as I worked on learning to live in my changed body.

One encouraging note: in last night’s dream, for the first time, I was not alone when injured. A brave friend stood beside me. Since everyone you meet in a dream represents some part of yourself, I find that encouraging, to think there is some part of me symbolized by her particular heroic qualities.

Of course this also means I have some relationship to the assailant, sometimes seen and other times not…

More to ponder, naturally.

Appointment with the massage therapist at 8 a.m., thankfully.

Sunday Morning

Oh, Lord~

In a few minutes I will leave the house and join my new faith community for our first morning of worship together. My sermon is prepared. My prayer is written. My children's message is outlined. My outfit gives me confidence. My temporary tattoo is still visible.

Help us all in our moments of anxiety ever the details of the day or the direction of the future. Help us to see one another as we really are, and then to see each other through the eyes of your love  for everyone.

Help me to make YOU visible, to all who would see you. Amen.

(Caravaggio, “Supper at Emmaus”, painted 1601-02.)