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.)

At the Core

Yesterday I found myself lying on a table in an unfamiliar examining room talking about how I breathe, how I use my body to accomplish the tasks of living.

A man I had known for 30 minutes or so extended his arms and made circles with his hands, saying, "You use these muscles to do everything instead of moving from your core."

It's easy to reduce a core to the piece of the apple we throw away, or the part of the nuclear plant we fear will melt down, or the term from Pilates we've heard people use but isn't that a weird expensive form of exercise for wealthy Californians having nothing to do with middle-aged pastors in New England?

Busy and troubled about many things, like my Biblical namesake, Martha, I feel a moment of resentment at this suggestion, but I quickly recognize its essential truth. I learn that I have a big, broad muscle at the center of my body that I have not only underdeveloped, but ignored, failed to recognize, despite pressuring it by carrying developing children in the womb and growing children on my hip. I have stressed it by weighing too much and by exercising too little and by depending on something I did not know existed.

And we all need attention, don't we?

I came home with breathing exercises that take me back to the vocal training I had long ago. I expand my diaphragm, but this time I inhale and exhale through my nose. Five minutes a day, he says, five minutes a day for the rest of your life, these will be your exercises.

I try it in the car, for like so many of us I seem to live in the car most days. I am on a mission to stop eating in the car, even though it sometimes seems to be the only opportunity, so I decide to breathe instead. And I soon understand why he has instructed me to do this for a minute at a time. My body is not used to so much oxygen! My head begins to feel light!

I breathe at the gas pump. Lord knows we need to breathe there, to look away from the numbers spinning past and pay attention to our breath, to the life force of our breath.

What will I find if I keep breathing, if I strengthen those muscles at the core of my physical being?

I arrived in his office due to a complaint about back pain and numbness in my hands, and he asked me, "When does it NOT bother you?"

"Ah," I said. "When I am sitting still, doing absolutely nothing." Except breathing, theoretically.

All my life I've carried the image of the Biblical Martha, frowning in the background while that nice Mary sits at the feet of Jesus. Wearing her name felt like a burden. Surely I was not really like her? Or surely she served in her own way? I've written sermons and essays about it, about how much it meant that she is the one to proclaim Jesus as the Messiah in John's gospel, a job performed by a man in the other three. Martha must have mattered a lot, even if she was blunt and practical.

And I am not all that practical, really, I'm not.

But the image of my new adviser standing beside me waving his arms in the air is a strong one, and although I have always pictured Mary as soft and maybe even a little bit useless, I now have an image of the kind of strength it takes to sit upright, and attend to someone, and to breathe.

In my bag today there is a beautiful Crispin apple, one from a bag given to me by a church member. When I bite into it, I will look at the core differently. I will not see the useless part, the inedible segment, the rough bits and the seed to be discarded. Instead I will see the center of what is, the source of being, the promise of health and the potential for new life.

And I will breathe, deeply, expanding that muscle I did not know about yesterday, finding my own center and paying attention to what God might have to say about it all.

(This is my piece for Saturday's paper.)

Covenant

I am no longer my own but yours.
Your will, not mine, be done in all things,
wherever you may place me,
in all that I do
and in all that I may endure;
when there is work for me and when there is none;
when I am troubled and when I am at peace.
Your will be done
when I am valued and when I am disregarded;
when I find fulfillment and when it is lacking;
when I have all things and when I have nothing.
I willingly offer all I have and am
to serve you, as and where you choose.

Glorious and blessed God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
you are mine and I am yours.
May it be so for ever.
Let this covenant now made on earth
be fulfilled in heaven. Amen.

That's the Wesleyan Covenant Prayer, which is being prayed and examined by some of my Methodist friends, as I understand is their habit at the first of the year. Although I come from a long line of Methodists on my paternal grandmother's side of the family, and although I spent some time in Methodist churches, I can't remember ever hearing it before this year.

Funny how things come into our lives when we need to hear them, isn't it?

I believe I have a 21st-century American tendency to feel I'm only being properly used by and for God when I am valued and finding fulfillment and when I have all things and when there is work for me.

That last one is most powerfully pulling on me at the moment. As my time at Main Street Church winds down, and whether it is two months or four months or more before I leave them, my mind is naturally on where I will go next. Where may I give all these things to God?

And why am I so focused on employment?

For practical reasons, it's easy to understand. There is a mortgage. An oil bill. Tuition. All the rest of it.

But on a spiritual level, this prayer gives me a different kind of work to do, the inner sort. Am I so identified with my work, with my job, with my pastoral role, that I cannot imagine being valuable to God, or faithful, for that matter, in any other way?

I suppose when a person feels called to something, there is always a risk this will be true. Employment would seem to be an affirmation of the calling. In fact, in my tradition, we do not ordain without a call to a particular job, and a pastor without that kind of call will eventually be asked to consider whether she is really "called," in the spiritual sense.

"when there is work for me and when there is none'--I find that part not just hard but terrifying. When I read it, when I roll the words over in my mind, I feel a gnawing in my guts.

I'm not a Methodist, despite my heritage, and I could blow past this prayer and look for one that suits me better today, this year, but it feels important. I can't exactly say I've prayed it, yet, but I am mulling it this morning.

Heart of Stone

"I would rather my heart be pliable and open to all...not hard and incapable of receiving God's messengers when they arrive."  Tripp Hudgins, on his blog.

"A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." Ezekiel 36:26

Let's just say there have been some disappointments on the vocational front in terms of what the future may hold, and I am wondering what God is up to at the moment. Each time I have gotten a bit excited about seeing, perhaps, the way ahead of me, something has happened to shut me down. And when I begin to brace myself for disappointment, and brace myself I do, the only way I know how to do it is to close down.

I know very well that closing down is not the way to facilitate the arrival of God's messengers, or more importantly the recognition of their arrival.

I guess I'm comparing this period of discernment to the time I decided to go back to seminary, and finding it wanting. Then I kept seeing doors closing, and I finally got the message that I ought to be finishing seminary, not trying something else altogether, and once I made the decision, all the other things that seemed so impossible or unlikely fell into place. I want that to happen now, too! But the human element is not so cooperative, or perhaps I'm simply impatient.

What I do know is that I am wound tight and that doesn't help in figuring out what is next or what is right. My soul posture is entirely closed. Being open feels too scary, too vulnerable.

I feel a bit like the witches in Stardust, reading the entrails of a rejection e-mail received tonight, trying to see the signs and portents that will guide me to the heart of the star, to the source of renewal. The settled job it represented would have been just the opposite of what I really hope to be doing, but because of my geographic ties, it seemed important to put my name in for everything possible. I knew all along it was an unlikely match (though there were those who encouraged me to apply), but even when we know that, there is a sense of "Huh, what's so wrong with me?" that comes with such correspondence.

For now, I remain on the risky path of potential unemployment when this interim ends, and I find that discomfiting, to put it mildly. Any work on a new church start, other than distant planning, would not happen until next year, so I have to hope there will be another interim to serve. It all feels very uncertain.

Which brings me back to the heart of stone. Which I realize will get in the way of receiving the messengers. But for the moment, it's what I have.

Divertissements

How do you amuse yourself in an airport?

I found myself making an extra stop yesterday, and I thought about how we try to plan ahead for the day we are expecting to have, only to be diverted by reality.

In the airport I saw a couple with six children, and another on the way. The mother looked, not surprisingly, tired. They boarded the same plane I did, and it was a plane full of children even without theirs. We flew east and north-east, and I was enjoying watching an episode of Studio 60 on my iPod (my first foray into this particular diversion), when I heard the chime that signaled a message from the cockpit.

As best I could hear, the ice on a window had not responded to de-icing, and the weather conditions in City By the Sea were not suitable for this particular plane to land. On this little plane with 50 seats, with somewhere in the neighborhood of two dozen children, there was no frustration at the news, only relief that the problem had been discovered.

At Beantown Airport, we waited to hear whether we would move to another plane or find ourselves on a bus on New Year's Eve. The children, some of them, began to decompensate a bit, until their parents took them to the Dunkin' Donuts stand near the gate where we settled for the interim period.

My iPod out of batteries, I took up my knitting again, a sock for #1 Son, the second sock.

The night before I stood on the little hot tub deck at St. Casserole's, looking up at the stars. I thought how often I strive to occupy myself, to divert myself, instead of simply being where I am.

I'm not one for making a list of New Year's resolutions, although I sometimes hold an intention for the coming year. This year I plan to continue my change of life, and today I started again, getting out to exercise, tracking the food I am eating. It felt good to leave it alone for ten days, and it feels good to take it back up again. But in some ways that is all diversionary, too, in the sense that it keeps my mind busy and perhaps allows it to be closed.

This year, I hope to find more time to simply be where I am, to listen to what is around me, to let my hands be, at least for short periods, idle, and my heart open to what comes next.

Ice

It's icing outside.

I hear the ice hitting the windows and feel relieved to be inside.

The technical definition, according to Weather.Com is "light freezing rain," but I prefer to say ice.

Our tree, decorated, stands by a window, and the ice is just on the other side of the glass. The tree is inside, the ice outside, and I am somewhere else in my mind but pulled back by the tapping of sharp drops, pellets of winter on a dark, cold night.

The past three days, full of conversations and contemplations, have left me in a mood to hibernate, but Christmas is coming, and that sort of deep drawing within will not be possible. I will finish editing bulletins, and try to get ahead on sermons, and fulfill obligations and hope to find a way to get the shopping done. For the first time in many years I will watch a Christmas Pageant in which I had no hand. I will celebrate Christmas with a community for the first time and the last.

I wonder where next year will find me? We are passing into a new phase of our lives here, with no assurance that our oldest will be home next year at Christmas or even that this will continue to be our home. We are passing into a new phase of life, in which young things believe they can tell their parents what will be, and this parent does not know how to respond other than to feel shocked and hope to handle it better when the inevitable next time comes.

I think of all the years I did not spend Christmas with my parents, because I lived so far away. I hope I won't seem as expendable to my children as they move into adulthood, although today I fear I might be.

There is something about being 25 or even 30 and thinking all the same people will always be available to you, that you will be able to stop by the same houses and drink the same eggnog no matter how many years go by.

It's quiet outside now, although the computer tells me we are now experiencing sleet, that wetter version of the earlier ice. I'm still glad to be inside the house.

Inside my head, I hear the tapping of time and have an odd desire to freeze the thoughts in my head just where they are, in order to study them more deeply. I want a snapshot of the characters skating on the surface of the inner landscape, some waltzing gracefully and some stumbling around the edges, some racing and shouting joyfully while others struggle to do up their laces.

Change of Season

The eight days of Snowman's visit home seemed to evaporate like mist on a damp fall morning when the sun appears suddenly, and yesterday it was time to take him to the bus station.

I've put a son on the bus before, but never have I put a solo-traveling 17-year-old on a bus to the airport, where he is on his own to figure out how to check in and retrieve his e-ticket. Certainly, he did this on the way home, but the little Barbie Doll Airport near Land O'Lakes Academy has only six gates and two airlines, so I really had no worries about his ability to get on the plane there.

But it felt different to send him off to Beantown Airport alone.

At the bus station he asked, "Are you going to stay to the last possible moment?"

"I'm going to see you get on the bus," I answered. Not that I wanted to see it happen. I waited with him in the line to put his bag under the bus, and then he turned to me and smiled, but he looked a little concerned, too. I imagine he wondered whether I would grab his hands and begin to pray as I did the night we said goodbye at school.

I gave him a kiss and watched him board the bus. I must admit there was a little crying in the car as I got on the highway to head to work.

Last Monday we went to the barber shop, the one in City By the Sea famous for its lady barbers. The woman in the corner chair cut his hair. On the wall behind her was a chart for people to guess the birth date of the baby she is expecting, and to estimate the weight. All around her station are pictures of her toddler and her husband, a man in uniform.

When she heard that Snowman was only in 11th grade, but going to school in faraway Mitten-Shaped State, she almost could not believe it. She asked us for clarification more than once, and then she said to me, "You'll have to have another one!"

No, no I won't. I'll have to learn how to let this one go. And then the next one.

Just two years ago, I remember thinking, "I'm tired of tying other people's shoes for them." I didn't mean it literally, of course. Those days were far behind us. But I realized that in my mothering and in my ministry, I attended to all the little details in a way that if not smothering to others felt smothering to me. I told myself I did not believe in a micro-managing God, but I seemed to believe only a micro-managing mother or pastor could "succeed," whatever that meant to me. Strange how hard it is to change our way of operating, even when we know it needs changing and want to act differently.

I told Snowman to call me from Beantown if he had any trouble, but all remained quiet through the afternoon. I pictured him changing planes at Toddlin' Town Airport, perhaps meeting up with other students along the way.

Last night the phone rang about 9:15, and as we scrambled to find the cordless phone, mislaid as usual, I heard his voice coming through the answering machine: "Hi! I'm in Cherry Capital Airport, and I'm not dead!"

Pure Luck found the phone and handed it to me, and I talked to him briefly, hearing the background noise of students happy to be reunited. I feel relieved that he has found his right place, for this time in his life, as I have found mine.

For the next three weeks, I will turn my attention to work and preparations for Christmas. Snowman will practice and write papers and study for exams. Soon I will be meeting him at the airport and bringing him home for a longer break, which will also surely seem too short. It's hard not to think ahead. It seems to be the time for it. It is nearly Advent, that season of waiting and watching, hoping that all will be well, wondering what comes next, when it will happen, how our lives will unfold.

Somehow I must find a way to pray those prayers alone, the ones that come so easily to me when I am with another person. I regard the dawn of new possibilities, not sure where life will lead me, only sure it is to something different.

Something Beautiful

The weather finally got cold, although it was warm today for November, but last weekend I decided I really needed a scarf. I felt just cold enough to want one, and I looked around among the fluffy hand-knits of past years and did not see anything that felt substantial enough. I wanted something more like the scarf I made for The Princess two years ago, a knit-in-the-round scarf, therefore of double thickness.

In my stash I had a skein of Cherry Tree Hill yarn of absolutely gorgeous pink and blue and lavender. I spent an evening winding it into a ball, which of course meant snarling it along the way any number of times, and then I got it on the needles (size 8 double pointed) and began. I had to guess at the number of stitches and eventually settled on 48.

I don't often make things for myself. I have one pair of bad socks and another pair of much better ones. I have a sweater intended for Snowman that was re-formatted, so to speak, when he didn't like it (including unraveling sleeves and knitting them again). And, yes, there are scarves and hats around, but most of the former are flimsy, and most of the latter just didn't turn out as hoped for (and some may be finding themselves unraveled this winter and turned into higher and finer creations).

I love knitting. I love the colors and the textures, the decision-making and the execution, the finishing and the presenting. I love making something beautiful (or I hope beautiful) with my own hands.

In planning the scarf I look ahead to a winter in which walks outdoors will remain part of my life. You can't walk outside in our climate without the appropriate gear, and I am going to be sure to have it. It's a commitment to care for myself.

I'm also reflecting on the human relationships that require some gear to be faced, whatever the season of the year, but perhaps particularly at the holidays. Whether at church or in a family setting, I will have contact with people who are stressed, who are overwhelmed, who may wish not to have me around for perfectly good reasons of their own. I will negotiate event-planning and execution, whether it's worship or a family party, and in all those circumstances, I hope to strive for something beautiful.

Now, I realize that there are times when I want to contribute or create that beauty to prove a point about my worthiness, to the other person or even to myself. I have a tendency to rework old patterns, even though they never really suited me in the first place, sort of like a pair of gloves you make again because you know they fit, even if you never really liked them.

But I am trying to live more consciously, so I will knit something beautiful not only to warm me when I am walking a dog in the woods or circling the path around the boulevard. I will make something beautiful to remind myself that I have made a choice to care for myself at this season of the year, despite its tensions and demands and temporary insanity. I will wear something beautiful, embracing myself with intentions of love and joy and embodiment, the spirit of the incarnation.

For My Mothers

To my mothers~

Today is your birthday.

One of you, if still living, would be 82. I wish I could imagine you at that age, but you have been gone for 14 years, and you are imprinted on me at that younger phase of life, the mid-60's, a time when I wish you could have been enjoying your grandchildren rather than succumbing to cancer.

One of you, wherever and however you are, turns 66 today. I don't know your health, or whether you have retired from your work, but I know there's an equal chance of hearing something this Christmas or never hearing anything again. It's been like that between us.

I used to wonder if maybe a Scorpio was just the worst sort of maternal match for this Taurus. I looked for excuses everywhere I could find them to explain my apparent inability to please or communicate with either of you. I'm doing work I love, work of which both of you, for your different reasons, disapproved.

For 46 years, I have been carrying the grief of one of you and the shame of the other at the core of my being, in my bones and muscles, in the cells of my body. I don't believe that either of you meant to lay those burdens on me, but I carried them, and until recently, no one invited me to remove them and leave them behind.

It seems I have a choice. Those deeply sad feelings have been a powerful connection to both of you, one that stretches across time and in one case, beyond life. Those feelings have at times fermented into hopelessness or resentment or self-recrimination. I have felt it coming for almost two years, the need to cut those particular cords, to stop feeding on the shame and letting the grief breathe for me.

Such a change feels drastic and unsettling, but ultimately it feels necessary.

I have compassion for you both, so unreachable and remote in your different ways. I've been trying to form relationships with distant, inaccessible people all my life, your grief and your shame, carried so unconsciously, creating barriers to those connections I so dearly wanted. I could not see the difficulties emanated from me.

So today, on your birthdays, I choose to put down these burdens, gently and with respect. I am a mother myself, a mother of a daughter, and I want to model consciousness and clarity for her. I want to mother myself, giving myself the same permission I would give my daughter: to be herself, to walk her path, to recognize any heaviness she might carry that really belongs to someone else. Our own burdens, our own losses, are enough.

With love,

Your daughter

Imaging a Mother

Last night, my new therapist gave me the following homework:

 

I want you to spend a few minutes before you go to bed at night imagining a mother who loves and accepts you completely. She can take any form you want. And in that form she will cradle you and love you, just as you are.

 

Okay, sounds easy enough. 

Except, no. Not so easy. Absolutely terrifying. I go home, and I look at my allotted points for the day and I begin to tell myself that this would be a great opportunity to use some of my weekly “flex” points, the “splurge account” as some Weight Watchers folks call it. 

And I know in that moment why I want to use those points and how it differs from a planned “splurge” event. I try to get my mind on something else. I don’t succeed. Finally, I eat the little dessert treat that is certainly within the confines of the overall weekly plan, except that it wasn’t part of a plan, it was a reaction to an emotional challenge. And I came home feeling afraid of that challenge and looking for a way to numb the feelings. 

Yes, it’s better to choose something that I can “count” and make room for, but I really don’t want to be using food this way. I really, really don’t. I wasn’t physically hungry. I was emotionally unsettled. 

After eating the little dessert (3 points, so again, not complete craziness by any stretch of the imagination), medicated by even its relatively small amounts of sweetness and fat and chocolate, I decided I wanted to go to bed early. When it was time to do the homework, I blacked out. I wish I were kidding. I’m a person who takes time to fall asleep, but I just went unconscious. When Pure Luck came to bed later, I woke up and tried to do the work then, but again, blackout. 

In a well-lit room, it didn’t seem like such a hard thing to attempt, except that it did, but I knew it shouldn’t be—dig that, it “shouldn’t” be—but I have to admit that it was, it is. 

I’m reading a book about a woman who worked the 12 steps through OA, and I am rebelling against the idea that a person has to eliminate sugar forever, and there are definitely days that I plan on treats—no, really, I plan for them in some small measure every darn day—but there is a difference between planning them and “needing” them as I did last night. Isn’t there? Or maybe there isn’t. Maybe I’m medicating a chronic emotional condition with a low daily does of sweets and only noticing it when there is an acute flare-up. 

This troubles me. I want to believe what is taught at Weight Watchers, that you can learn to live with food in moderation, eating the things you love without going around the bend. Moderation sounds so much kinder and more humane than abstinence. 

But after last night, I am questioning myself. 

And it's all about the mother, or perhaps I should write The Mother, my dysfunctional relationship with the Cosmic Nurturer and the earthly ones, too. In my mind, I sense a glimpse of what that Mother might look like, who She might be, but in my body I twist away from the thought and wonder where are the cookies? For I nurtured myself that way, with the cookies and the glass of milk, an escape from real life in the 3rd grade and the 4th, from that time until now, evading the torturers--Shame and Guilt and Fear and Self-Loathing, those Four Musketeers of misery and dissociation, the Knights of the Blackout, the Servants of the Cookie Mother.

I guess I'll try again tonight.

Last Night I Dreamed

Last night I dreamed of being pregnant.

The setting: a hospital.

The pregnancy: advanced.

The outlook: mixed.

I had a sense of being too old for what lay ahead, while at the same time excited by the prospect of new life.

A colleague I admire, who is probably ten years my senior, was also in the dream, also extremely pregnant. I recognized her pregnancy first, only caught on to mine when the baby kicked me.

I realized I was very close to delivering and began looking for a nurse, to try and get some assistance. I passed a ward of young women in labor, and then a ward of grey-haired women receiving some other sort of treatment and realized I did not belong with either, neither a likely new mother nor an impossibility.

I do find myself in a strange middle place in my life. I recognize that the bulk of my parenting time is over. I feel some freedom in considering what might come next in my career, but I also feel the responsibility of two remaining college educations (plus one final semester for #1 Son). I fantasize about living in a smaller house with more land, and then I feel a pang for even considering leaving the place my children and I have lived longest in any of our lives.

I ponder an exciting possibility for ministry that would be a step away from the conventional track, and I wonder if I don't owe it to my family to do what will support them most securely?

This is the midlife wilderness of the modern mother, pregnant with her own life but a bit afraid to give it birth.

(Painting by Cindy Sherman.)

Losses

Molly is quite lame at the moment. She does not want to get up and walk around. I had a hard time getting her to go out in the backyard this morning, and an even harder time getting her back inside. This was true last night as well. She stayed in her cool spot under the forsythia until late in the evening.

When Molly was a puppy, about 9 months old, she was diagnosed with bilateral hip and elbow dysplasia. At that early age, she already had arthritis in both elbows and one hip. We took her to Tufts' Vet hospital for a Triple Pelvic Osteotomy (to shore up the better, non-arthritic but also dysplastic, hip), followed three months later by arthroscopy on both elbows. She really had a great recovery and four excellent years following the surgery.

But this is not the first time since she turned 5 last February that we are seeing more lameness. She takes Metacam, a Non Steroidal Anti-inflammatory (NSAID) each day as well as Dasuquin, a chewable form of Glucosamine and Chondroitin intended for dogs.

Every time I see her laming around, and particularly when I see her walking with one paw in the air, as has been going on this past week, I wonder how much longer we can keep things together. There are some other options, I learned last time: pain-killers that are in fact narcotics, which I hate to start using with a 5-year-old dog, or perhaps trying acupuncture, which is practiced by one of the vets formerly affiliated with the vet we use.

I'm feeling guilty because I don't know if this lameness is due simply to aggravation of arthritis or an actual injury. I wish I had taken her in to be checked last week. But these things usually pass with her.

I find the idea of losing her absolutely terrifying, in part because I feel it's so likely that her eventual end will be euthanasia. (In fact, I dread it so much that I left this sentence out and had to come back to type it.)

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of my father's death. October 8, 1997, was a day I had been dreading as it was the first occurrence of my wedding anniversary after my divorce. I woke up feeling a little sorry for myself, planning a morning of moping and a little studying of Church History while my children were at school and preschool. My father, far away in Virginia, woke up that morning and felt unwell, tried to reach his lady friend to take him to the hospital and couldn't, so called 911. They delivered him to a hospital that could not respond to his aneurysm. He could not be transported because the journey to the proper hospital included a tunnel, and they could not get him stable enough for the ambulance ride. I never got to talk to him, to tell him I loved him, to see him and touch him and be present for him.

And although I was saddened, I was not surprised. From the time my mother died, four years earlier, I had a sense that I would not have the same opportunity to be with my father when his life ended. Like our Old Man Cat, he did his best to hide his ailments, something my mother could not do as metastatic melanoma ran its course.

At the same time I'm working so hard to lose weight, I am aware that I am holding on tight to other things, creating a mental climate of containment, and the two are in obvious conflict. I'm strategizing, or trying to, when it feels "safe" to grieve for the Old Man Cat. I'm learning to live with just one other person for the first time in 21 years, and it's a major shift even if a temporary one. I'm pondering a very different way of being in ministry than I imagined five years ago or even one year ago. I'm sorting through both the outer and the inner closets, deciding what to give away, what doesn't fit anymore, what fits but does not flatter, what is marred beyond repair and ready to be discarded, once and for all.

Some of that feels like loss, and it makes me a little anxious about holding on to the things, the roles and the relationships I know belong in my life, but over which I do not have complete control. You may, for instance, strive to be a different sort of mother than you believe your mother was, but some other configuration of temperaments and interests and life circumstances may lead to similar feelings of distance or aggravation or dissatisfaction. You may understand yourself to be in love with a person who ceases to love you. You may love a dog or a cat, knowing full well that they will not outlive you, and still find yourself shocked when the possible becomes reality.

When I lost a baby in 1992, a loss complicated by my feelings of anger with God and a mixture of relief and guilt about the decision to end the pregnancy in the face of a bad prenatal diagnosis, I found it nearly impossible to grieve. It was so much easier to find a place in my mind to put the feelings, and to close the door on them. I'll get back to these later, I told myself. I'll go to the beach and sit on the rocks and look at the ocean and cry then. But I never did that. Instead I began to draw tighter and tighter boundaries around what I designated as "safe" territory, the places where my feelings were not too frightening and too powerful and too potentially destructive to allow myself to feel.

I'm trying to make room for those feelings, but I must admit I am still a bit cautious, still inclined to set them aside the way you might a bill you can't afford to pay this week and put in a "safe place" on the kitchen counter, and then cover with a magazine or a book or a box of dog treats.

The Female Form

This is the female form;    
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot;    
It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction!
Walt Whitman, "I Sing the Body Electric"

Everywhere you turn, someone is making someone else over. On TLC, Clinton and Stacey tease and cajole. On Bravo, Tim Gunn opines. You can become Ten Years Younger, and the Fab Five return for their final season in a few weeks. Where women who have underrated themselves are concerned, there seems to be an overwhelming emphasis on being "hot," perhaps even "smokin,'" a word that appears to have lost its "g."

Sometimes I hear the people they work with say, "I thought this was all going to be about the outside, but things happened on the inside, too."

I hope that's true. I know that for me, working on the outside disrupts many comfortable habits and patterns. Familiar means of coping with stress or sadness are not available to me now in their long-practiced forms, if I want to be true to my pledge to myself to take care of the body I have and not continue to run it into the ground the way I do my cars.

Somewhere inside me resides a demon who doesn't feel good about being in a body, not just this body, but any body. Somewhere else inside me resides a fiend who has a very particular idea about what looks good in a human form and doesn't happen to think this body ever has or ever could, at any size. Those two would cringe and hoot, respectively, at Whitman's words. As instruments of torture, they wield shame and denigration.

These are hard words to write. I don't write them to ask for pats on the back or reassurance that a form more Venus of Willendorf than Venus de Milo can be beautiful. I write them because it's not enough to applaud myself for working out on the $10 machine. I need to record, for myself, the challenge of being at war with these dark spirits.  They represent old attitudes, old relationships, old rejections. Why do I still hear them? When does the day come when the old voices cease? Do we simply learn to live with them and pay them no mind, turn an adolescent's deaf ear toward them? Or is there some way to remove them?

I met a man who believed I could climb a mountain, who gave me for the first time in my life the feeling of exhaling that divine nimbus. I wish I could fully inhabit that form without being censured by spectral tormentors. I believe I will climb the physical mountain again, but I know that exercise is no guarantee of exorcism. The new form I seek cannot be measured in pounds and inches alone.

So...

I'm sitting in my therapist's office (we meet once every three weeks or so), and I'm telling her how well I have been coping with our various transitions and how poignant the gospel lesson about loss was in light of Snowman's departure and our Old Man Cat's disappearance and some other things, too, and then she says she's closing her practice in mid-October.

Yep, we're all about the transitions here.

The Unknown

Have I ever mentioned what is likely to send me into a panic?

The unknown.

I rail against the unknown.

Yet as a person of faith, I live in the unknowable every day.

It seems to be the unknown aspects of the material world that make me feel most uncomfortable, and I believe it's because I like to do things well and cannot predict the possibility of doing things well when I cannot perceive the parameters.

When Pure Luck and I met, I had been a faithful exerciser for a couple of years, and when he invited me to go hiking the following spring, I imagined myself to be ready. Surely 45 minutes on a treadmill three times a week added up to preparation, didn't it?

But he warned me that hiking could not be approximated in a gym.

(This was back in the day before he had used a stair machine.)

Our first hike took us to a 2000-footer, not much of a challenge to him. I'm not sure how long it had been since I walked uphill for much more than a block, and we hadn't gone far before I realized I had gotten into something so unfamiliar that it set off my internal alarm system.

"I can't do this! I can't do this!" Those were the words of the voice in my head. If I didn't say them out loud, it was likely because I couldn't speak!!! I still had no concept of what the elevation gain would mean, but I knew almost immediately that I had undertaken a challenge beyond my expectations.

We hiked and hiked and hiked and hiked, and it got to be lunchtime, and I needed to stop more often than Pure Luck would have liked, since he wouldn't have stopped at all on such a little mountain. We reached stretches covered with small rocks, and I wondered how I would keep my footing? We reached  height that I felt sure must be near the top, and I asked, "How much further?"

I'm not sure what measurement of a mountain would have meant anything to me. I had no concept of how feet of vertical gain compared to minutes/hours needed to achieve the summit. A quarter of a mile uphill would have meant little, since I had no experience with my own feet.

Pure Luck said, over and over, "We're almost there."

Yesterday we celebrated the life of a church member who saw his journey toward death as a climb toward an unknown but inevitable destination. I'm not sure if I put that idea in his mind or if he put it in mine, but it formed the core of a prayer we shared soon after he came home to die. At that moment, we thought days remained, but as it turned out, he survived for eight weeks, sitting somewhere near the top of God's holy mountain, cared for by his loving family.

I suppose there are people who can see their paths clearly and who follow them without question, and find nothing surprising along the way. They seem to have it all together, to have everything under control.

I feel a little sorry for them.

Oh, I know it's easier when I return to a familiar trail. I can pace myself in a way that isn't possible when you really have no idea what else you might need to climb or for that matter survive!

But some of the richest moments and the most satisfying relationships in my life have been found on the unfamiliar paths, at the times when through choice or circumstance I found myself in the midst of the unknown.

Maybe this is the day I'll embrace it willingly instead of anxiously frittering away possibilities for joy.

Sunday Morning

I left Land O’Lakes in the dark this morning, packing the last few items quietly while Land O’Lakes Public Radio brought the BBC into my tiny room. Having opted for the least luxurious accommodations on campus, I walked around a cot for three days after my son left for the dorm. The friendly woman who checked us in Wednesday night checked me out before dawn. Like so many other faces at the school, hers has reassured in a variety of locations, including during a breakfast we ate together in the cafeteria on Friday.

Loaded down by middle-sized duffel, laptop, over sized purse and shopping bag full of Land O’Lakes swag, I made my way to the parking lot, where I put my duffel inside its larger rolling mate and packed my purchases around it. Still in the dark, the dark of the middle of the night, I drove from the woods to the little city, finding my way back to the adorable airport I have never seen by daylight.

It’s strange to come to a place in the dark and leave it again the same way.

In between, the sun shone, the rain fell, and the sun shone again. We arrived in languid summer and moved possessions against our impulse to fade away in the humidity. But this morning fall offered its cool hand in blessing, signifying the school year, the New Year, has really begun.

There is some light as we lift off, and I gaze down at a landscape of lakes, lakes and more lakes, of all shapes and sizes, with the not-so-far-away coast of Lake Michigan curving sea-like from one edge of my window view to the other. I wonder which lakes belong to the school and vow to study a map when I return home.

In years gone by, eager to control my universe in order to keep it safe, I would have studied maps in advance, allowing no room for doubt about the lakes or the roads. When did I become so fluid? Yet, like the lakes, I flow in a contained fashion. I know when to get to the airport, what airline counter to approach, how to find my way home.

Perhaps I came to believe in grace, saving and sustaining, an expression of love that moves with us and holds us, wherever we journey.

Grace Deficit

During the counselor training at summer camp, my group undertook "challenges," really opportunities to work on communications skills and to get to know each other, too.

Led out into the woods, we arrived at a slight clearing where a wire ran between two trees, about 18 " off the ground. The object of the exercise: to start a person at each end, have them cross in the middle and then get them each successfully to the other end.

In my higher mind, I saw the purpose of the exercise, but in my clumsy bird's heart, I determined the best I could do was help keep others from falling off the wire and hitting their heads on a neighboring rock. When we handed out jobs, I took that one.

I remember too well the terrible surge of toxic adrenaline that comes with physical failure, with shame at my lack of coordination--my grace deficit.

We moved from the  first setting to another challenge, something called "The Zig Zag." The challenge in this case? To move the whole team from one end of three zig-zagging narrow boards to the other. The problem? The three boards had to be used in four places, which meant leaving team members teetering on one board while another was passed back and forth.

The boards were very low, a mere hands-width from the ground, but staying on board proved to be a problem even for some young and lithe members of our group.

I watched and waited and hoped and prayed.

I worried about my inappropriate footwear. (My sneakers had been forgotten at home.)

I really wanted to do well, and I had a sense that if I could curb my own self-critical feelings, I might be able to make it across.

It felt like a long wait, wavering on the middle board as the moving piece transfered from one end to the other. We had to hold onto one another, all these strangers, learning to work as a team. I focused on balancing and on helping my neighbors do the same.

As I came across the last board, now in its place, the young man waiting at the end high-fived me!

There really is no deficit of grace.

Sense of Direction

When I was a teenager, my family moved to Historic Billsburg, and in those days just before cable TV became an expected household feature, we discovered we were living in a vast wasteland. The major TV stations came from cities 60 miles away in different directions, and our only hope of connection, a fuzzy one at that, was the antenna on the roof.

That antenna had a guidance system, a box with a dial that sat on top of the TV in our family room. No one in the family could master it, save me. I was the one called when we really needed the CBS affiliate from State Capitol instead of the one nearer Jane Austen's Village. I became known as the family member who knew how to make the technical things work, and the person with a sense of direction.

How my parents might have laughed to hear me calling home from my cell phone last week after I drove to turned up Left Hill instead of going straight through Small Town to my destination of Right Hill Road! I gave my location to the helpful Global Positioning System Agent (my patient husband), and he helped me navigate cross-country to Right Hill Road without going all the way back into Small Town.

It was not the first time recently I needed just that kind of help. After church a couple of weeks ago, attracted by a sign declaring “Fresh Corn” I detoured out to the country on the way home. After leaving Spectacular Corn Farm, I didn’t want to go all the way back to my original route, so I started driving vaguely eastward. I knew I would hit something familiar eventually. That time it was Snowman who helped from home.

These were relatively simple problems to solve, and if my Vacationland Map and Gazetteer had been in the car and not on my desk, there would have been no problem in the first place. But there are times when finding our direction is more complicated, especially when we are searching in the dark.

Pure Luck had to find his way back to his campsite in the dark this week, after his very long hike, and he was frustrated when first one flashlight and then another gave out. He ended up using his cell phone as a flashlight, instead. It gave him some ambient light, but none of those sources could really show him the grade of the earth beneath his feet. None of those lights shone bright enough to keep him from falling into a ditch too close to the trail. 

In life we all have times where we find ourselves walking a path that is unknown or hard to see clearly. That’s the time when we need to call on the Universal Positioning System, the One who helps us no matter how confused our direction. God will be ready to shine the light; we only need to call.

"To the Lighthouse"

While at camp I read Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. How an English major managed to read so little Woolf as a young person is a mystery. But perhaps she is better read by a person in the 40's anyway. This quote from the dinner party scene spoke to me:

Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her. Again she felt, as a fact without hostility, the sterility of men, for if she did not do it nobody would do it, and so, giving herself a little shake that one gives a watch that has stopped, the old familiar pulse began beating, as the watch begins ticking—one, two, three, one, two, three. And so on and so on, she repeated, listening to it, sheltering and fostering the still feeble pulse as one might guard a weak flame with a news-paper. And so then, she concluded, addressing herself by bending silently in his direction to William Bankes—poor man! who had no wife, and no children and dined alone in lodgings except for tonight; and in pity for him, life being now strong enough to bear her on again, she began all this business, as a sailor not without weariness sees the wind fill his sail and yet hardly wants to be off again and thinks how, had the ship sunk, he would have whirled round and round and found rest on the floor of the sea.

How often do I feel the responsibility to keep the pulse going? Much too often, I fear. There have been too many times I have found myself at the head of one table or another, neck quite literally stiffening with the effort required to hold up my Big Giant Head. Perhaps I need to do a little less minding of the collective pulse and a little more caring for the personal. There are many commitments in my professional life that require me to do the former, and I have determined to let them end in their natural course, as soon as possible. It's time to clarify which things really require ME and which simply require SOMEONE. As a painter stands back to gain perspective, I too will seek a vision for the next portion of my life.

Last Saturday, at Camp

(Written on the shores of Lake Cobbosseecontee)

It's quarter past 7, and the sun, while setting, shines into Cabin 13. I see its light flicker on the surface of the lake. From the waterfront I hear laughter; the other counselors are taking a swim. An early evening breeze moves the trees; I hear and see them.

When I arrived, I updated paperwork, and the young staff member asked what me what I expected of this week?

Why am I here?

On a certain level, I'm here because someone asked months ago, because there were no other pastors coming this week, because they needed me.

But without knowing it, I agreed to my own salvation, a break from all the roles I play at home, at church and on the web.

The only webs here are woven by spiders, beautiful and intricate, easily broken yet strong enough to be a home and a trap at the same time.  I've created my own web of connections and responsibilities. Sometimes I worry whether it will break, whether I will.

Why am I here? I am here to see what God, the Divine, the Creator, would have me see, to be open to grace; to realize, perhaps, that if one web fails I can still spin another, learning from both the loss and the re-creation.

Birds are singing. God help me to understand the song.

Time Out

When #1 Son was a little fellow, I read a book about discipline that promoted the use of "Time Out." We set up a chair in the corner of the dining room, and it became The Time Out Chair. Briefly, we succeeded in curbing some little infractions. Honestly, this many years later, I have no idea what my little boy was doing wrong. I imagine we were having a battle of the wills.

Soon, though, he began having nightmares about, you guessed it, The Time Out Chair. In these terrible night visions, The Time Out Chair chased him around the house. (You'll have to ask him if it laughed maniacally, MWAHAHAHAHA!!!)

I grappled with how to discipline him after that. I grew up in the South at a time when spanking was not only permissible but encouraged. How else, parents wondered, shall we keep our children in line? Because in line was exactly the place children were supposed to be kept.

I have raised children in a much freer and therefore more challenging time. Always, always I wonder, what sort of discipline is truly necessary? I want them to find themselves, to flourish and bloom, to make their way in the world unhampered by conventions for their own sake.

Churches used to employ discipline, and maybe some still do, but in the free church tradition that is part of the mainline, we have come to a point of expecting to have no boundaries at all in terms of the behavior of church members. I think it is in part a healthy openness, but also in part an enormous fear of asking anyone to do anything that might cause them to leave.

Some years ago I belonged to a large church in conflict. A letter came to my house, many pages long, listing all the things for which a certain group of people blamed the pastor.

The letter was anonymous.

Somehow this collection of professional couples had organized a mailing, using all sorts of then-popular direct mail techniques, but not a one of them would put his or her name on the letter.

I once read a book on discipline that said, "Never spank in anger." I thought to myself, "When else would you want to?"

My eventual approach to discipline, cobbled together from books and experience and love, revolves around stating expectations and naming consequences. Rarely have we reached the second point. I am therefore baffled when I meet people who do not understand the principle that actions have consequences. I am baffled when I meet people who think that whatever they might like to do is okay simply because they feel like doing it. And yet I grapple with this in myself, the tendency to justify a choice or a desire, and I realize that my own decisions are not always ideal.

I grew up with discipline comprised of shaming and physical punishment. My own children found it just as painful to be sent to their rooms. I wonder what the future will hold for them? Will they be more open-minded and find some clever new means for raising civilized and compassionate children? Or will the pendulum swing back?

My own self-discipline tends to be like the discipline I received as a child, much as I would reject it for another. A childhood of getting the blame for everything makes me want to avoid taking responsibility unless I feel sure I can get it "right." This does not always work out, naturally.

Maybe I can learn to give myself a time out instead.

In Transit

(written on the airplane Monday)

At the security gate, the attendant takes a long look at my driver's license picture, then a searching look at my face. The picture, just over four years old, shows a woman with long, wavy hair no glasses. I stand before her in short grey hair, wearing my now necessary progressive lenses.

I am no longer young.

I may wear my hair long again someday, but I am no longer young.

In the Ladies Room I regard the person looking at me from the mirror, a woman whose hair has been many colors, letting a severe eyebrow waxing job grown in again, face still relatively unlined, visage sober. When did I become *so* serious? I make an effort to smile at people I meet, but I'm not sure how often I smile at myself.

Near the gate I search the other passengers for people who look like me. Who is my age? Where do I fit in the general categories of humanity? An elderly woman comes off the plane in a wheelchair; I'm not there yet. A mother seeks a gate claim check for an umbrella stroller, carrying a sleeping toddler adorned with a pink hat made of balloons. She seems much younger than I, though there are women my age with 3-year-olds.

A young couple waiting for our delayed stand so close together I can hardly see where she begins and he ends.

Lord knows, I am no longer one of them and perhaps I never was.

Of course they are my seatmates on the plane, which continues to be delayed on the ground -- weather and traffic --a threatened "ground stop" -- is that when the Earth stops turning?

The last person to board is a woman I would guess is my age. She wears a salmon-colored sweater with a little hood, dangling earrings, a flashy watch and chic hair. Nervously she checks her boarding card; she expected a window seat and does not want to believe that "D" is on the aisle. Eventually convinced, she remains restless, jumping up to ask for a blanket, then for the bathroom, finally guided back to her seat by a flight attendant as eager to take off as we are.

In line for the runway, she pulls out a magazine, Guideposts: a talisman against disaster?

The plane inches forward, each turning of the wheels raising false hope that we have finally reached the runway. From the galley I smell food that I know will not be served in my section. We will wait a long time for a Diet Coke and some crackers.

My seatmates snuggle, and I remember that not so long ago, after all, I did the same with Pure Luck on our great Southwestern excursion of 2001. he says that was a long time ago, but here on the plane it feels near in memory. We flew that night through a thunderstorm, watched lightning outside the window. We held onto each other, and if his hand occasionally rested in the neighborhood of my knee, at least it was under the airline's insignia blanket.

I had a second chance at being young. At 39, I met a new love, who took me to unexpected destinations, inner and outer.

In front of us a thirty-ish couple patiently entertains two very small children.

Suddenly it doesn't seem so bad to be no longer young. Here in the middle of my life I have leisure to explore the cast of characters surrounding me, to observe and remember, to learn something about myself.

We take off. Above the clouds, a bright sky waits.

At the Beach

There is a beach in town that allows dogs after 5 p.m. We took a ride over before supper tonight. Molly bounded toward the water, thrilled, because it has been at least a year since we visited there, and I'm not even sure we went last summer.

Judging by Sam's puzzlement, it may well have been two years. He danced along the shore, sniffing at the gentle little waves coming to ground. We wished for the camera, doubting he'll ever react quite that way again.

I enjoyed the expansive view of the bay and the islands not far off in the distance. The sun retreated from our Eastern location, while clouds of hues both white and grey decorated the late afternoon sky.

Meanwhile, assorted retrievers enjoyed themselves, bringing back sticks and balls over and over again. Molly worked the crowd, taking a seat next to various beach-sitters and giving them a look-see as potential new homes. In the end, no one had the treats in my pocket except me, so she came home with us.

When the time came, 20 years ago, to look for a place to live after The Father of My Children finished law school, I agreed to consider New England, but I preferred to be on the coast. My childhood included regular summer visits to the ocean, and although I am not a sun worshiper, I said, "I just like to know it's there."

One of my most powerful experiences of God took place on a beach, and a dream set during a storm on a beach convinced me to return to seminary. My children's experience of the beach has been on day trips, and as my life has become busier, fewer of those. I hope I can reverse that before it is too late. I well remember the feeling of sleeping with the ocean just a little way off over the dunes, the smell of the air and the sand between my toes.

Pure Luck grew up on the coast of Maine and now prefers the woods and lakes. When we go anywhere, we head in that direction. I don't mind those places; they are certainly beautiful. But my life has been full of going where it suits other people. Maybe this summer I can make my own way to the place that feel so wide open and elemental, so positively divine.

Extreme Makeover Street Edition

A little over a year ago, we received a notice from the city saying our quiet dead-end street was on the list to be made new in all significant ways. City By the Sea comes in and re-does everything under the street, then re-paves. They never got around to us last year, but over the weekend, the No Parking signs appeared taped to our lovely maple trees, and while yesterday was a washout due to rain, early this morning the crews arrived and the work began.

Water, sewer and gas lines will be replaced, so there is a lot of digging ahead.

Part of living an examined, reflective life is doing just this kind of digging and examining and re-laying. I'm watching the Search Committee and other leaders at Main Street Church engage just such a process in this interim time, looking beneath the surface to see what needs addressing. Last night we had a lively discussion about conflict and past difficulties and how they ought or ought not inform the search for a new pastor. There is a difference between knowing what troubled you last year or ten years ago or twenty years ago and being troubled by it now. We need awareness, not stuckness or, worse yet, denial.

Our street, though charming, has been in need of this paving job for quite a few years. When it is all over, it will have been worth the trouble. We'll know where we were and where we have arrived and what had to happen to get us there, too. We won't want to be defined by the the old-fashioned terracotta water pipes that allowed roots to grow through, but we can be informed by them, learning new ways to get the water we need in our homes and not insisting that the old ways were the only ones we could possibly tolerate.

What is happening on my street can reflect the inner landscape, too. Old ways of being need not rule us, need not rule me. Suppose I were to go beyond the digging phase, the one that always seems to interest me most, and actually replace the old with some new materials? Instead of digging and making a stopgap repair, as I have so often done, a repair covered over with hot top? Suppose I actually changed on the inside, as my street will be remade this summer?

The Lilac Moment

  The Lilac Moment 016 
  Originally uploaded by msongbird.

Today the sun shone, the temperature rose, and the fragrance...oh, the fragrance! The fragrance filled the backyard.

Seven years ago, in a spirit of hopefulness, I decided to try meeting someone through online personal ads. The lilacs filled the air, and I took a screen name that expressed my love for lilacs.

The lilacs had gone by when I met Pure Luck in early July, but I will always smile when I remember that spring and the surge of desire to begin seeking a new life that coincided with their blooming.

More pictures at Flickr.

What We Need

We need a few things from the store.

As the weather grows warm, afterschool ramen loses popularity, and Snowman puts in a request for cold cuts. The dogs have worked their way through the little bags of food I bought the other day, thinking Pure Luck would buy a big one when he got home. We are out of the special trash bags without which City By the Sea will not collect our garbage. If you asked the children you would get a longer list of desired items not to be found in refrigerator or cupboard. I sent Snowman to 7-11 today for laundry detergent.

Of course that is only a list of ordinary things a family needs.

My friend, Linda, shared a question about the idea that sometimes what we fear is what we need.

I need a fair amount of human interaction. I like to talk on the phone, or be with people, or check my e-mail or have lunch out somewhere. Sometimes I positively need to touch base with someone, as if it's the only way I know I exist. I wish I could say I have evolved past that point, but perhaps it's progress to be conscious of the need.

I'm afraid to be alone, you see. I imagine that is not an unusual feeling for an extrovert with an abandonment complex. But it's odd, because after a day spent doing all those things I listed above, I feel exhausted, drained, overwhelmed, ready for a monastery where the inhabitants have taken a vow of silence. Give me a box of sharpened Dixon Ticonderoga #2 Soft Lead Pencils and a pad of paper or a notebook and send me into the woods, I think, or let me sit by the lake.

But, really, I manage to avoid those opportunities. On retreats, I seek out the other extroverts and talk instead of sitting quietly. I pray on the fly, I write best in the midst of distractions (or so I think), and as the time of being apart from my husband has stretched longer than originally planned, I feel myself fragmenting. The brave effort to manage all things well usually runs out of steam when his return is in sight.

It has been the work of the last decade, the years since my divorce from The Father of My Children, to learn to be alone, but on some deep level I still fear it the way a baby of a certain age fears being left alone forever when her mother leaves the room.

I think the motif of basic insecurity--and by basic I mean essential, something so deep as to be at my root--is my story to live over and over in this life, to revisit time and time again, in memories and in the present. Somewhere there is a balance to be found between being alone and being actively engaged in relationship; perhaps it's possible they may exist alongside one another rather than excluding each other's possibility.

So, to answer Linda's question, I fear being alone, so I suppose I need a little more of it.

The Yard Guy

Yard Guy stopped by the other day. I can't remember anymore how I first met him. I think he came to cut the grass for me after I got divorced, when I realized I didn't have any lawnmower other than a push type and couldn't manage the yard in the house I was renting (too many bumps). He did the big yard cleanup so desperately necessary when I moved to this house in 1998 and went on cutting my grass and doing the fall leaf gathering for several years, and even stacked a cord of wood for me that I could not manage (and that we are still burning many years later), until Pure Luck came into the picture and asked why in the world I didn't have a lawn mower?

"I do," I said. "His name is Yard Guy."

Needless to say our next errand involved buying a lawn mower.

I still see Yard Guy occasionally. He does yard work for one of my elderly neighbors. Since Pure Luck is often away at the height of yard clean-up (spring and fall), I hire him to do the work if the timing is right.

Conversation with Yard Guy always includes an update on his romantic life, which has the same themes each time: girlfriend with children of her own, great fondness for said children, can't make up his mind to get married for one reason or another,  relationship ends.  I've  heard it play out at least three different times.  This week I heard about the latest, a story involving multiple fathers of children, a particular love for the youngest child, an effort to comprehend the multitudinous life issues of the girlfriend, some unwillingness to admit his own, but a better grip on things than he had ten years ago when we first met.

These conversations are really more like monologues, and they go on for a very long time. When I first knew him, I had time to listen. When he came by the other day, I had work to do, but it was hard to cut him off without appearing rude. So, I listened.

After describing his girlfriend's traumatic childhood, he said, "I kept telling her, you have to stop living in the past!!"

Given her circumstances, it was probably not the best thing to be saying.

But for mine? Perfect.

I felt like I should write him a check. But that will wait for the yardwork. Meanwhile, I'm examining ways in which I can set myself free from old patterns of relationship and self-evaluation. There are some people from your past, and in your present, too, who you will never figure out and who can never make amends to you. Your only choice in those cases is to decide how to relate to them (or whether to, depending on the circumstances) and to make a commitment to silence the inner voices that want you to keep giving in or playing nice or compensating or enabling or whatever your particular self-protective tendency might be.

The broken branch on my apple tree will not get better, and the broken trunk of the round arborvitae will not revive. Sometimes you have to prune; sometimes you have to dig out and replant.

Rolling Admissions

Our garden needs cutting back and down and digging out and starting all over again. Just like the 80 year old pipes with valves that no longer close all the way, the overgrown rhododendrons have gone past charm and usefulness and threaten to meet each other across the front steps, blocking our way into the house. I meant to do something about it last year, but what seemed so obvious and important in the spring had fallen off the visible list of priorities by the time fall rolled around, the right time to be cutting down and digging out and re-planting.

In the backyard, an overgrown lilac and a flowering apple tree in need of less drastic pruning also wait for human touch.

These are just the first few items on my list of things and creatures requiring my attention.

On the table is an application for faraway Land O'Lakes Academy, with sections I must complete. In files on Microsoft Word are sermons begun for Maundy Thursday and Easter. There is a call to return to my accountant about quarterly payments and excise taxes, and I must try and reach the plumber again, and clothes need washing, and I need to leave again in fifteen minutes.

Time goes by too quickly. I feel my middle agedness today, the speed with which my children grow, the frightening pace at which the weeks and months and years seem to whip round me. Six weeks is no time, but if time goes by so quickly, six weeks matters.

I love my family.

I still have mother issues.

The dogs need petting.

We're getting something that looks like snow but isn't sticking.

Here on the kitchen table, the Old Man Cat nudges me away from typing.

I want to peel an orange for my lunch.

Are all these things holy? They feel so as they roll past me.

I Need You to Survive

I picked The Princess up from her choral rehearsal this afternoon, and for once I arrived in time to hear a bit of singing. The room was darker than usual. The director came to work suffering a migraine and conducted the rehearsal with minimal light while wearing dark glasses. The girls, seated in their chairs, sang a song so unusual for their repertoire that I wondered if I could really be hearing them as I came down the hall outside the rehearsal space.

I heard these words first, repeated over and over:

I pray for you, You pray for me. *
I love you, I need you to survive.
I won't harm you with words from my mouth.
I love you, I need you to survive.

Their voices pitched low, they sang the phrases over and over, and the music modulated and the key changed, but the words remained the same, and I rolled them over in my mind. Are we praying for someone's survival, or for our own?

I came home and found the rest of the lyrics, a gospel song about our interdependency as part of God's plan. "We're all a part of God's body," read the words, and I agree, or I want to agree. If we all could see ourselves as part of one creation, perhaps we wouldn't kill each other. Perhaps we wouldn't commit atrocities against the helpless. Perhaps we wouldn't view life as one great competition for success or worthiness or importance or dominance.

My understanding of God is relational. That word, relational, became the key to keeping me in the Christian fold in seminary. I found myself in what I would call a unitarian-wannabe phase. The Trinity seemed only to be a platform for dogma. I related to Jesus, but did he need to be divine for me to feel that way? Or any more divine than the rest of us? I had a few issues. Maybe everyone who takes Systematic Theology needs to have a few issues.

One day my professor used the word "relational," and my ears perked up, or perhaps I should say my heart did, since I was certainly paying attention with the bluestocking portion of my mind. But something about the word "relational" touched me.

I need you, you need me.
We're all a part of God's body.
Stand with me, agree with me.
We're all a part of God's body.

God, he told me, is relational within God's Own Self. The Creator and the Son and the Holy Spirit, three-in-one, model relationship. That sounded strangely mystical and non-dogmatic to me. I felt receptive to the relational Trinity and began to rethink my, well, my thoughts.

Meanwhile, all through that year of Systematics, I was in love, rather madly, with someone who first was far away and then was unavailable and then miraculously, became someone who loved me, too. All through that first semester, he hiked further and further South and away, and I became more ridiculously impassioned over someone who had made no promises or vows or professions of any kind. Meanwhile I read Augustine and Luther and Tillich and wrote papers about the persons of the Trinity, and came to understand how much being relational meant to me.

I don't know about you, but as a person with high relationship needs, I sometimes share things with people I might shouldn't. In doing that I give part of myself away, by which I mean that I both reveal something of myself that I probably wish I hadn't and that I lose something of my wholeness in the process.

I think it's possible that on a personal level there are people I don't need in order to survive. Yet I have broken off pieces of myself to maintain or establish relationships of a sort with them. I wish I could have those pieces back, because I fear they are not treasured where I left them. I wonder why it's so hard to take my own advice, the counsel given to others who are not treasured?

It's almost Holy Week, and if you're reading John's gospel, you'll read about a Messiah who chose a path of suffering love to save the world.

If you're out there thinking you have to be like Jesus, stop it right now. Please. Love, yes, and pray, yes, and suffer, because that is inevitable if you're human, but don't fall into the trap of feeling that your own suffering love will redeem others. Walk away from the people who perpetuate the lie that you are somehow responsible for everything bad in their lives; I promise you they are the same people who are never responsible for anything.

I remember sitting in Systematic Theology and UCC Polity, another class from that semester, and making lists in the margins of my notebooks, what I might need to pack when I ran off to see my hiker, my love, while on the center of the page I gathered thoughts about God and in the back of my mind I wondered if I would ever see either of them again. As it turned out, I needed both of them to survive, the man who helped raise the questions just by walking South and returning home again, and the God who had seemed so certain when I was young and who came to feel certain again although enormously different.

*Hezekiah Walker and David Frazier, as best I can discover.

New Reeds

It's 4:49 p.m. Do you know where your children are?

Mine are practicing. At the same time. One is playing the clarinet (upstairs) while the other is playing the piano (downstairs). I know from experience that the clarinetist focuses so intently that he does not hear his sister at all. She once played on her practice xylophone in the adjoining bedroom while he rehearsed in our upstairs den, and he never knew it.

The Molly Dog also thinks this is a fine time for singing "Wroo Wroo!!"

Today we bought new reeds for the clarinet. The reeds make a difference, as Lisa Simpson once tried to explain. I guess there is a break-in period, and I must admit that as much as I admire Snowman's effort and musicality, he's not sounding his best this afternoon. (Don't tell him I said that; he likes the one new reed he has tried.) He is preparing for two concerts and one big audition, and we have the pleasure of hearing his music for many hours after school and in the evening. We hear Schubert and Mozart and "My hat is has three corners," but please don't ask me for the real title of the last piece. We hear scales, and scales, and more scales. Tomorrow night he plays with the combined orchestras of City By the Sea's high schools; in two weeks the youth ensembles at the University of Southern Vacationland have their spring concert; and the following week he jets off for an audition at Land O' Lakes Arts Academy.

The new reed, just as the possible new situation, require time to be considered. The clarinetist changes the reed simply by playing it, and those who know how make adjustments with sandpaper or a reed knife.

Sometimes I feel like the reed when I am learning to live with new circumstances, polished by the sandpaper of reality, cut by the reed knife of loss.

It's 5:16. The clarinetist lays down his horn and hunts up his musician's black suit and bow tie for tomorrow night. The pianist, after a break, resumes her Mozart. The dogs have an after-dinner treat and go outside. Time to get the macaroni and cheese out of the oven; further polishing of the mother must wait.

Testing Her Disposition

Long ago and far away, in Jane Austen's Village, Commonwealth of My Birth, a young lawyer asked a young social worker for a date. After they had been seen around town together a few times, the young lawyer ran into a friend from high school days, the unfortunately named Stuart Farrar. I say unfortunately because Stuart Farrar had a harelip, and he lisped both his S's and his R's.

Stuart saw the young lawyer (who would someday be my father) downtown on High Street. They were near the Commodore, a movie theatre, when Stuart inquired about my father's new romance. Before you get any more serious, Billy, said Stuart, "you need to tetht heuh."

"Test her, Stuart?"

"Yeth, Billy. You have to tetht heuh dithpothition."

(At this point in the telling of the story, my father would grow amused with his imitation of poor Stuart. Let's cut my dad a break, because he was really a nice guy all things considered.)

"How would I go about doing that, Stuart?"

"Well, Billy, firtht you athk heuh to go to the movies. Be thure to athk heuh to a movie she really wants to thee."

"All right. Then what?"

"Then when you get to the theatuh, you tell heuh you weally don't want to thee the movie afteuh all! That'th how you tetht heuh dithpothition!!"

I'm glad to say my father never tested my mother's disposition in that fashion, although he may have tested it every time he told the story about Stuart Farrar.

On days when my disposition is tested, I think of Stuart.

After much difficulty getting through to the doctor's office due to a glitch with their phones, I finally saw the Physician's Assistant this afternoon. She listened to my lungs and determined that we are not dealing with bronchitis or pneumonia, just the sequelae of the flu combined with my notoriously reactive airway. She gave me a prescription for an Albuterol inhaler.

Off I went to the pharmacy, where they were short-handed and there was a long line. The assistant suggested coming back in half an hour. Rather than go home I went next door to the wacky pagan items and spiritual healing store (complete with a clairvoyant doing readings and something called an angel portal). I dawdled around looking at books, which ranged from really cool books about women's health and Buddhism to some fairly wacky stuff we won't name. I saw a sand finger labyrinth that I hope someone will get me for my birthday. 

I looked at  dozens of decks of Tarot cards.

It's one of my not-so-guilty secrets that I love Tarot cards. I appreciate archetypes and symbolism, and I like the images as a meditation tool. I found a deck I hadn't seen before, once you can color in yourself.

It includes 8 pencil crayons.

Standing there not feeling particularly well and wondering whether I may not end up spending tomorrow on the couch, they looked like an attractive companion.

So, I bought them.

Then I went back to the drugstore, and here is where the tethting began to deepen. I asked for my prescription and heard these terrible words: "Your coverage expired on February 1st."

I got right on the phone to my insurance company, which referred me back to the office within the denomination