An Invitation Like You've Never Known

I am so incredibly honored and excited to share space here today with Erika Morrison. Erika is one of the most vulnerable writers I know. It is evident that she keeps intimate company with the Holy Spirit and thus I implicitly trust what spills out on the page as a result of her deep and genuine soul searching. Her words have always--always--reached down into my hidden spaces to reveal the scared, yet shimmering truth of who I am.  

Today, her book Bandersnatch: An Invitation to Explore Your Unconventional Soul releases. Please hear me when I tell you this: you must read this book. 

In Bandersnatch, it feels as if Erika has taken the intimacy of all her previously written whispered truths and plumbed even deeper.
And yet she does it all with a gentle yet persistent voice. She writes just like she talks in real life--drawing you in close, welcoming you in. 

Bandersnatch illumines the truth that we are weird and wonderful and beautiful and completely unique artist souls and that our fully living into and out of those creations is the very essence of our life's work here on Earth. The world needs us to be avant-garde, to practice alchemy and to be anthropologists who "gaze at humanity with a love that is an eternity long and wide and high."

Erika declares for us (because most of us don't believe it) that we are artists. We are made to create and the Kingdom of God is depending on our doing just that.

"So take your molecules and your moments and your unprecedented mess and the intoxicated music of your life and make a masterpiece that reflects the truth. Because on the other side of Jesus, art is a revelation of the kingdom, a kingdom revealing God through billions of different kaleidoscopic expressions. Art, your art, is absolutely vital because your art is how Jesus is made known to the world."

Erika and I want to know: Do you believe it? 

Please join me in welcoming Erika here today and please get a copy of this book.

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The cardinals make it look so easy. The honeybees make it look so easy. The catfish and the black crow, the dairy cow and the cactus plant, all make being created appear effortless. They arise from the earth, do their beautiful, exclusive thing and die having fulfilled their fate.

None of nature seems to struggle to know who they are or what to do with themselves.

But humanity is the exception to nature’s rule because we’re individualized within our breed. We’re told by our mamas and mentors that--like snowflakes--no two of us are the same and that we each have a special purpose and part to play within the great Body of God.

(If your mama never told you this, consider yourself informed: YOU--your original cells and skin-print, guts and ingenuity--will never ever incarnate again. Do you believe it?)

So we struggle and seek and bald our knees asking variations of discovery-type questions (Who am I? Why am I here?) and if we’re semi-smart and moderately equipped we pay attention just enough to wake up piecemeal over years to the knowledge of our vital, indigenous selves.

And yet . . . even for all our wrestling and wondering, there are certain, abundant factors stacked against our waking up. We feel and fight the low ceiling of man made definitions, systems and institutions; we fight status quo, culture conformity, herd mentalities and more often than not, “The original shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out of all our other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather.” ~Frederick Buechner

So, let me ask you. Do you know something--anything--of your true, original, shimmering self?

I don’t mean: Coffee Drinker, Jesus Lover, Crossfitter, Writer, Wife, Mama.

Those are your interests and investments.

I do mean: Who are you undressed and naked of the things that tell you who you are?

Who are you before you became a Jesus lover or mother or husband?

Who are you without your church, your hobbies, your performances and projects?

I’m not talking about your confidence in saying, “I am a child of God”, either. What I am asking a quarter-dozen different ways is this: within the framework of being a child of God, what part of God do you represent? Do you know where you begin and where you end? Do you know the here-to-here of your uniqueness? Do you know, as John Duns Scotus puts it, your unusual, individual “thisness”?

I can’t resolve this question for you, I can only ask you if you’re interested. (Are you interested?)

I can only tell you that it is a good and right investment to spend the energy and time to learn who you are with nothing barnacled to your body, to learn what it is you bleed. Because you were enough on the day of your birth when you came to us stripped and slippery and squeezing absolutely nothing but your God-given glow.

And who you were on that born-day is also who you are now, but since you’ve been living on this planet long enough to learn how to read this article, then it follows that you’ve also lived here long enough to collect a few layers of horsefeathers and hogwash.

So, yet again, I’m inquiring: What is it that you see before the full-length bathroom mirror after you’ve divested of clothes and masks and hats and accessories and roles and beliefs and missions and persuaders and pressures--until you’re down to just your peeled nature, minus all the addons mixed in with your molecules?

Do you see somebody who was made with passion, on purpose, in earnest; fearfully and wonderfully, by a Maker with a brow bent in the center, two careful hands, a stitching kit and divine kiss?

Can you catch between your fingers even the tiniest fragment of self-knowledge, roll it around and put a word to it?

Your identity is a living organism and literally wishes to unfurl and spread from your center and who will care and who will lecture if you wander around a little bit every day to look for the unique shine of your own soul?

One of the central endeavors of the human experience is to consciously discover the intimacies of who we already are. As in: life is not about building an alternate name for ourselves; it’s about discovering the name we already have.

Will you, _______, rise from your own sacred ash?

Because the rest of us cannot afford to lose the length of your limbs or the cadence of your light or the rhythm of your ideas or the harmony of your creative force. The way you sway and smile, the awkward this and that and the other thing you do.

These are the days for opening our two clumsy hands before the wideness of life and the allure of a God who stops and starts our hearts. These are the days for rubbing our two imperfect sticks together so we can kindle another feeble, holy light from the deep within--each of us alone and also for each other.

There is no resolution to this quest; the only destination is the process. But I hope there’s a small spark here that will leave you wanting, that will leave you with a blue-fire lined in your spine, that will inspire a cellular, metamorphic process in you; an odyssey of the soul unique to you and your individual history, organisms, and experiences.

There is maybe a fine line between being lethargic about learning ourselves and not being self-obsessive and with that tension in mind, how do we begin (or continue) the process of unearthing and remembering the truth of our intrinsic selves?

Bandersnatch: An Invitation to Explore Your Unconventional Soul was written because sometimes we all need a little hand-holding and butt-nudging in our process; someone or something to come alongside us while we pick up our threads of soul discovery and travel from one dot and tittle to the next.

We are the Kingdom people and learning your own fingerprint is something of what it means for the Kingdom to come in response to an earth which groans forth it’s rolling desire for the great interlocking circle of contribution to reveal the luminous and loving Body of Christ and slowly, seriously--like it’s our destiny--set the world to rights.

Kingdom come. Which is to say: YOU, [be]come and carve your glorious, powerful, heaven-appointed meaning into the sides of rocks and communities and cities and skies.

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Without being formulaic and without offering one-size-fits-all “how-to” steps, Bandersnatch is support material for your soul odyssey; a kind of field guide designed to come alongside the moment of your unfurling.

Come with me? And I will go with you and if you’re interested, you can order  wherever books or ebooks are sold.

Or, if you’d like to read the first three chapters and just see if Bandersnatch is something for such a time as the hour you’re in, click HERE.

All my love,

Erika Morrison

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If Erika's words above struck something deep in you and you feel yourself longing for more, you must check out her book trailer, here.

It is hauntingly beautiful.

Thoughts on Wild in the Hollow AND a Giveaway

I haven't written much about my journey towards faith in this space.

It infuses everything I write, yes, because I am stained by its touch and born again into its glory. But sharing the journey before and during and after? I've been pretty quiet.

Perhaps it is because that part of my story is, at once, innocent and convoluted and fiery and fickle and it just feels too messy to wrap words around. There is definitely fear of judgement present. And not just from those who might read it.

Perhaps it is because I struggle to see where I am on the spectrum and I don't know how to trust the spaces where colors bleed, one into the other.

Perhaps I am just tired of trying to hold it all together and I don't trust that anyone else really wants to help me carry the burden.

But maybe that will change now that I have read Amber Haines' book Wild in the Hollow.

This, here, is why:

"There will always be ways I'm learning to let God love me, but maybe I inherited more than desire for the knowledge of good and evil from our Eve. Maybe I inherited her memory, the echoes of the garden. There was the faint memory of the cadence of his walk in the cool of the evening. There was the settled stride I remembered. Oh yes, I remembered that he had seen my freshest skin. He had seen my naked heart. There was a memory in my spirit that he had called me beloved. His smiling on me what always his original intention...
I saw this potential for others also. I knew God was everywhere and knew there were glimpses of him in all people, because he showed me his kindness and his mercy in all creation. Even in the great sin and shame of other, I saw him, or at least I saw the groaning for him. In this, I learned to recognize the hollow, the search for God, and the deep longing for him (for fulfillment) in the needles, the skin, and the bottle. I recognized his wooings in every metaphor. I saw the desire for skin on skin as the soul looking for home, for intimacy. I saw the body, made for God, as an original intention, as a belonging.
Our lives are made of metaphor, and we can recognize Jesus throughout creation and in those who have never heard his name. The apostle Paul wrote in Romans 1 that no one has an excuse. God is everywhere. Yoga poses and Gregorian chant, buttermilk cornbread, the Grand Canyon, and the picture of a rainbow drawn by the hand of my two-year-old all speak of him if we're looking. Don't make a mistake and hear that I worship those things; no, instead I worship the God of the universe who is. 'For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.' His scent wafts through tent cities, jail cells, granite kitchens, and marble palaces. He beckons us in all places. Where can I go from him? The echo of him in metaphor throughout the earth is undeniable when one wakes to him.
When I first believed, I walked around in a clumsy prayer, so awake, listening for God in the falling acorn, in everything. I was free to lapse into long spiritual metaphor simply by hearing my alarm clock. Some might accuse me of being led purely by emotion. Let it be so. It was the feeling of love, of very first love. Let it also be understood that I studied Scripture like a brain on steroids. I studied homiletics. It was a mind transformation, a decision as best as one knows how to make in the midst of being overcome. I was ridiculous really, and I didn't need cigarettes or anything else--not a cute tush, no nightlong blitzes, and certainly not a fella to keep me company.
I didn't have the language for it then, but I saw the Imago Dei everywhere and in everyone. I saw myself as a child of God, Abba letting me come to him, boldly and with ease, in the gentleness of relationship. I was confident, and I saw God as one who loved me completely as a good Father. And Jesus--he, my love, my brother--became my friend. He was becoming the only place that made any sense to me, the only way to see the world."

You see, Amber Haines' story feels like my story, in so many ways. The idyllic childhood wrapped in church culture, the rebellious adolescence, the rabid desire for significance and being known, the running to and falling away again and again and again.

But Amber's story never feels all cleaned up. And that, my friends, is the beauty of this book.

This book isn't just for those who know and love Jesus and have made mistakes along the way--although it will touch those folks deeply.

No. It's more than that.

I believe that this book can sing over those who are hell bent on living but are killing themselves in the striving. 

It whispers in the ears of those who desire connection and have reached for flesh on bone but come back empty handed, every time.

It cradles those whose arms are riddled with tracks that lead to dark spaces and smooths the hair of folks sick on bitterroot.

It shakes out the quilts of those who have wrapped themselves up so tightly with the hope that nothing will ever touch them. There.

This book invites.

"Come, everyone who thirst,

come to the waters;

and he who has no money,

come, buy and eat!

Come, buy wine and milk

without money and without price.

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,

and your labor for that which does not satisfy?

Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good,

and delight yourselves in rich food.

Incline your ear, and come to me;

hear, that your soul may live."

Isaiah 55: 1-3 ESV

Wild in the Hollow is a book for those who long to be known in the way that we were created to be known--beloved, gorgeous, quirky, ripe, alive. I think that is why I couldn't put it down. I drank these words like a woman parched. I sat with the all of it and let the truths of God's infinite and lavish grace and love pool around me.

At times, I went under.

But I was not afraid.

This book speaks to places deep and important and it opens the door to much needed conversation about brokenness and redemption.

I would love to talk about those things with you in the comments:

How have you found beauty in the brokenness?

How has your brokenness actually led to your healing?

What have been your experiences with the church and how has that contributed to your brokenness and/or your healing?

Everyone who leaves a comment by Friday, August 7 will be entered into a drawing to receive a copy of 

Wild in the Hollow. 
Free copy of Wild in the Hollow has been gifted.
Thank you for your comments.

If you don't win a copy of the book, I hope that you will buy a copy for yourself anyway. Wild in the Hollow can be purchased here. To read more of Amber's beautiful words, subscribe to her blog.

In closing, I'll let Amber tell you about her book in her own words.

Thorns, Joy & Holy Braids

It's so natural, intuitive even, to settle one's vision on the rough parts of anything. It's the way we protect ourselves.

Whenever we know exactly what we are dealing with, we feel we are better prepared to fight against it or rise above it or bring it under our control. When there is an enemy, it is always better to have the upper hand. And the way to gain that advantage is to know every side of the evil.

So, we study it. We caress it's edges. We keep it close at hand so, in the moments between other moments, we can pull it out and remember how it wants us.

And oh, how it wants us.

Its pursuant tendrils silently wrap and curl into our shadowed folds and feed on the darkness. And the rough and the dark? They become silent, parasitic partners.

We believe we are armed for battle when, really, we are wasting away in our deepest places.

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In nature, thorns are fortifications that protect a plant from being eaten by predators. A great many fruits and edible flowers are kept alive by the trails and rings of thorns surrounding them.

My life this past year? It has been rife with trails and rings of thorns. Walking alongside my mom through her illness and chemotherapy and eventual death was the most difficult thing I have ever done. And my default? More often than I care to admit, it has been to succumb to the vacuum of scarcity that Life's defense manufactures. Because when all I see and feel and experience is prickly and nettlesome, I can't help but feel shut out from the beauty.

But that's exactly the arc of the great ache--that our experiences that are often strewn with thorns are but stations on a path ringed with beauty and joy. If a thorn's design is to protect, then it follows that their presence is purposeful and necessary. They remind us that all the things that are true and noble and reputable and authentic and compelling and gracious are prized and sought after. They remind us that joy and pain are profoundly intertwined. 

For me, this is where my faith in a God of grace and mercy becomes manifest. For when I am willing to take the joy and the pain in both hands, God's immense love and care for me provide yet a third cord. Taken together, they become a holy braid that is not easily broken. 

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Where are you, today, friend? Are you knee-deep in the pain and struggle? Do you feel wrapped in thorns, as if Life wanted to "protect" you from the good you see and that others seem to have in spades? Perhaps, your go-to response is bitterness, anger or, worse, indifference. What if there was another way?

I wrote today's post as a way of partnering with Margaret Feinberg and to help spread the word about her latest book Fight Back With Joy. 

This book began as an intense study of the over 400 references to joy in Scripture. Margaret was in the final stages of writing her book when she received a cancer diagnosis. Suddenly, all the sources of joy that she had discovered were turned on their head in the shadow of her illness. In an instant, her understanding of true joy was called into question. In writing Fight Back With Joy  Margaret "discovered facets of joy that no one ever taught me—more than whimsy, joy is a weapon we can use to fight life’s battles."

Fight Back With Joy 6-Session DVD Bible Study Promo Video from Margaret Feinberg on Vimeo.

You can purchase the book at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Margaret has also created a 6-session DVD Bible Study kit that is available for purchase. 

Sometimes you have to poke holes in the darkness until it bleeds light. 

#fightbackwithjoy

Of Things That Have Been

I finger them mindlessly most days,

These tokens of thanksgiving.

In some familiar corner of my brain I am

aware of their weight and

the anorexic string that

keeps them connected to a well

untended.

But something has shifted

inside of me and

I can’t remember

how to see.... 

To keep reading this poem, please follow this link

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I am writing today over at my beautiful friend Elizabeth Marshall's home, 

Poetry & Prose Through A Lens of Grace.

She extended a gracious invitation to several of her friends that write poetry and I am honored to be included in that circle.

Elizabeth and I have a history of mingling words and images and stirrings of the heart.

Together, we created Adagio, a writing "pas de deux" of sorts where we wove our words together to pen poems. 

Quite a bit of life has happened between that last project and now, as well it should have. But we are both very excited to join together again in the new year. It is our hope that you will journey with us.

How To Make a Life

Her absence rings most empty at the breakfast table.

Every morning, my dad starts the coffee maker, drops his raisin bread in the toaster and slowly opens the blinds covering the window over the sink. Squinting through the glass, he takes note of the temperature outside, the amount of bird seed left in each feeder, the slant of sun on the deck.

At various points along his morning choreography, when an observation worth sharing arises, he feels it—the slight hesitation of breath, the parting of lips, the turn of his head to catch her eye. And then, in a suspended moment of remembrance, his heart and mind swirl confusedly, and then settle.

She’s not there.

It’s difficult to abandon sixty years of morning rhythms that are redolent with unforced grace.
When one half of a whole goes missing, every day becomes a step towards restoration. And when wrestling through such holy work, it’s difficult to emerge without a limp.

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I'm writing over at SheLoves Magazine today and would love for you to follow this link so that you can read the rest of this story.

Photo credit: Nicole on flickr

A Curriculum of Compassion

As you may or may not know, we are a family that has chosen to "do" school here at home (and in the car and on the road and in the grass and under trees...). As you also may or may not know, this endeavor has been the source of both great joy and personal angst. 

Throughout this journey (officially seven years but, in reality, twelve) I have struggled with maintaining autonomy in our learning practices, all the while not succumbing to the demon of comparison, approval from others, or a general yet, ginormous, fear of failure.

It is true--homeschooling is not for the faint-hearted. But neither is parenting so I'm not so different from any other person who has chosen to walk with young people.

Oh, how I need these hands to hold.

Additionally, I bring to this educational endeavor all of my mixed up, conflicted selves -- The good girl who likes to please those who are watching as well as the rebel who will do what she wants anyway. I want structured chaos. I want to disciple and detox. I want to set a course and then take the fork when it presents itself. I want to showcase and shelter. I want good behavior and wild abandon.

But most of all?

I pray that my scattered deposits into the lives of these gorgeous people will be my gift to the world. I hope that our journey in loving and learning will be a polestar for my children and that its light will always fall across their paths.

Generally, we are very relaxed and eclectic in the way that we do school. I've always shied away from curriculum in a box and, if pushed, have just let go and handed over the reins to my boys. My oldest son prefers that approach anyway. He has declared, on more than one occasion, that he would rather "just be in charge of [his] own learning", thank you very much. But then time will pass and I will look around me and I will wring my hands over the fact that we haven't mastered times tables or spelling and suddenly I become all business.

It is this hemming and hawing that feeds the angst. This has been the cycle.

And then last October I had a baby and in April my mom died and suddenly I find myself staring down an entire year that has spun wildly off its axis. Navigating the last eleven months has been like stumbling around in the dark and all I want is someone to turn on the light and point the way. But here we are, almost to September, and I need to hunker down and lay down some semblance of a map for us to follow.

Even if all I have are some crumbs.

And then #Ferguson happened and, once again, there is that wild spinning...

And I am forced to lay it all before the One that knows it all. Because, if I know anything at all, it is this:

I cannot, and will not, 

separate our slow steps forward 

from the truth that is #Ferguson.

This "learning" that we do?

If it is to be all that I desire it to be, if it is to leave marks that cannot be rubbed away from the hearts of my little men, if it is to offer anything to the globe upon which we dance--then it must open space for the suffering and lament of others. Because, in the end, all we have is each other, friends and so we must enter into the hard places. Together.

It came to me in the quiet of the morning, in that corner of space that gives birth to light and dew drops and revelation.

From now on, from this day forward, in this spot of a place that houses boys and weeds and love, we will study a curriculum of compassion. It will be the sound of our feet stepping into the suffering of others that will tune our hearts to what changes the world. It will be our willingness to hang everything of value onto the framework of brokenness that will cut open our shuttered hearts and make us open vessels for renewal.

This must be. I know this with a certainty that belies my usual conflicted self. This must be because this is the way to glory.

The truth of my heart doesn't want to walk that way. Not really. But the desire of my heart is to walk in this way and I want my boys to walk this path. I want to grab those hands of theirs, squeeze tight and confess that I have no idea what I am doing--what we are doing--but here we go anyway.

Because to continue on as if #Ferguson was just an anomaly and not indicative of a greater experience for an entire group of people is to purposely choose the garb of privilege. I'm ready to risk my position and call out the Emperor. I will no longer pretend that the clothes fit.

Instead, I want us to choose threads colored by sacrifice and suffering, humility and hospitality, love and loss and weave them into new wineskins.

I want my boys to learn that nothing in the Kingdom is earned. Not a single thing. Life together is about grace upon grace and mercy untold. The value of a person is not based on how forcefully they pull up their boot straps or under whose roof they are born. No, this Kingdom living? It is directed by how well we share our weaknesses, how willing we are to reveal that which we do not know, how empty we are willing to get. This is where we must begin. This is where love is born.

So this weaving we will do? It will begin small.

The weft and the warp threads will be set through the silent and often unseen actions. We will fill the bird feeders and water the zinnias. We will continue as a family to read aloud books like Wonder and A Long Walk to Water and then sit with the difficult questions that stir up from their truths.

But my prayer is that we will keep walking forward, into the foggy valleys. I want us to hone our vision so that our eyes become keen to the needs of our community. I hope to move closer to an "us" mentality rather than one that hisses "them." May it come to be that we seek to grow smaller so that others can grow taller. We will study History by listening to all of the voices--Bauer, Zinn, Douglass, Steinem, AND Schweickart--no matter how uncomfortable they make us feel.

But most importantly--I need your help. I need your voice. Every last beautiful one of you. Because this course of study is a river and it is fed by many sources. You and your life? Please speak into ours. Let us ripple into each other.

"It is from the numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." 

-- Robert F. Kennedy

For such is the way of peace.


Photo credit: Andrew Hyde

A Litany of Next Things

I am forcibly willing myself to sit in this hard wooden library chair.

Right now, as I finger this keyboard, the sky above my roof has been cooled to a deep cerulean and is being occasionally scrubbed to gleaming by wave after wave of cloud stuff. Every tree is heavy with leaves and shadow but, hidden deep within each, is the glory of birdsong, trilling like so much music.

This day is one I will not soon forget. It is just too beautiful to let slip into the ether, as if it was nothing remarkable that the sun broke free of the horizon and unleashed this beauty on all whose eyes fluttered open this morning.

This day is the sort from which dreams are spun.

So to purposely sit here, in this chair, on this day means I am trying, with all of my might, to finger the threads of thought that have been fraying frantically in my head for months. These last weeks and days have often felt unmanageable, heavy with grief and bewilderment and seeming idleness. I have done my best to muddle through, pulling on joy when I couldn't handle the dark anymore and praying that sleep walking was better than standing still.

But the honest truth is that I have often felt as if I was screaming, mouth wide open, throat scraping raw, screaming. Silent and piercing, all at once. The core of me, the one that must write to figure out what she is thinking, has felt imprisoned by grief.

If, a year ago, you had tossed out the question of how I might one day deal with the pain of losing my mother I would have, most assuredly, said: writing.

So, when confronting the reality and heartbreak of my mother's actual death, I've hardly penned a word in response? Well, it has been disconcerting, at best.

And the longer the break, the more days that pass and words fail to appear?
The more I
have felt
as if I
am
disappearing.

I have felt like a glass jar full of silt shaken and left alone, shaken and left alone, shaken and left alone
again
and
again
and
again.

That is why today's clarion beauty has felt like such a gift. The morning's lighter air and gentle rippling set a precedent and the waters upon which chaos floated have started to settle. A separation has begun and I am beginning to distinguish sand and rock and crystal. What used to be only a muddied swirling now contains flecks of gold dust.

This might just be where the words have been hiding.

All of today has been like one slow remembering. I realize that grief has kept me from noticing like I used to notice. When you are trying to simply put one foot in front of the other, you don't often bother to spend time studying vapor trails or listen to the way grass stretches as each drop of dew slowly evaporates. You just seem to focus on the next thing.

But today gifted me with a litany of next things and I have discovered that the gnarl of frayed and woolly thoughts languishing in my head have begun to spin. Along their edges there seems to be a thread forming. The beautiful and terrible things of this world are working together to draw out the fibers in my mess and the twisting and whirling of the last few months don't feel quite so in vain.

I think that, tomorrow, I will follow the beauty.

Again.

When God's Face Is A Technicolor Zinnia

In ways familiar and comforting the Earth has tilted just so these last few weeks. 

At times, I have stood quiet, feet planted still, eyes peering into the woods just across the way. The barren tree limbs—skeletal and brittle, worn from a winter long and brutal, bark stained ebony against the leaden skies—they began to pulse. And deep in the hidden places, there was a quickening, a return to life.

I watched as naked branches swelled with promise, and like outstretched hands with fingers unfurling, the tips glistened as they caught the deeper shafts of sunlight. Their buds, like strings of pearls, gave way to festoons of leaves and in a twinkling, the woods were suddenly verdant and alive.

The seasons of the Earth, they are saving me these days.

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The rest of my words can be found today over at SheLoves Magazine. Join me there by clicking this link?

After your leaving

The days spin silently

and I am vacuous

in their wake

mindful of the practice

of living

but bereft 

nonetheless

 

I was not aware 

the depth of

minor rituals

and how our speaking them

to each other

pulled taut

at my sacred spaces

hemming me in

behind and before

The morning sun

falls flat 

stretching just long enough

to find the dirt smear

on the tile

I rub it halfheartedly with my toe

but nothing changes

Today

however

I heard about the hummingbirds

how they have returned

seeking nectar 

how they eat just enough

to fuel their flight

each minute

So I retrieved the feeders

their red bases 

faded from so many days

in the sun

and I filled them to the brim

sweet and dripping

A small but mighty

offering

The land of the living

is full of such sacraments

evidently

Soon I will walk

stronger 

Until then

I will just gaze upon my

Ebenezer

 

On the passing of my mother

She is from a white clapboard house with a wraparound porch, claw foot tub and Dove soap smack in the middle of Macon, Georgia.

From the streets of Madison and Carling, up and down Coleman Hill, where she walked to Whittle School and the Public Library, and boldly asked for a library card at the age of 5.

She is from playing under fig and pear trees, soft scented pines and shiny leaf magnolias, red clay staining her bare feet and the smell of paper mills filling her nostrils.

She is from Berry and Sallie Belle, Wiley, Sister, Doris, Roger and Jimmy.

She is from strong as oxen Shero aunts who farmed cotton and worked in pants plants in Wrightsville, Georgia.

She is from the Depression and Tuberculosis and a family that took in folks who were down on their luck. From fish on Friday and First Street Methodist.

She is from picnics on Stone Mountain, Finchers BBQ, NuWay hotdogs and LaVista Catfish.

She is from poise lessons and perfect posture and words dripping honey sweet from her mouth.

She is from a hair-brained idea involving a midnight double date rendezvous to Aiken, SC, a half drunk justice of the peace, and a 4th of July celebration that included one very busy rotating fan.

She is from moves to Indianapolis, Indiana and then St. Louis, Missouri that took her from her beloved South.

She is from north of the Mason Dixon line where she took it upon herself to soften the edges of every nasal accent in the Midwest.

She is from bacon grease on the back of the stove and dog bowls at the back door
and champagne bottles that toasted births all lined up in a row. She is from Boston Ferns and summer deck parties.

From coffee and cherry chip birthday cake and hands that smelled like onions.

She is from chuck roast in the electric skillet, onion soup mix brisket, Jello salads, massive pots of spaghetti, liver and onions, green enchiladas, asparagus disguised as green bean casserole, sweet tea and Hallelujah banana bread.
She is from “I love you a bushel and a peck” and “Gimme some sugar” and, perhaps most famously,  “Tim Smothers, you will nevah, nevah, evah drive that Aspen Station Wagon again!”

She is from Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass, the Johnny Mathis Christmas album, Dionne Warwick, George Carlin, Flip Wilson, Bill Cosby, Cheech and Chong, Fiddler on the Roof, James Taylor and that Classical Music in the background.

She is from You Are My Sunshine and Everything Is Going to be Alright.

She is from “To Thine Own Self Be True” and “It’s Your Mama.” From “All Is Well” and “It Is What It Is Grandma” and “Live Well, Laugh Often, Love Much.”

She is from dancing jitterbugs across linoleum floors and slapping her knee at every guffaw.

She is from birthday cards and notes in school lunches and throwing kisses and standing at the door until your car was out of sight.

From “psspsspsspss” and “chum on” and “doodlebug” and “Honey Bob.”

And forever and ever and ever, she will always be from shooting stars and fireworks and every smile shared by those that loved her best.

 ++++++++++

There you have it. The world as we have known it, all the days of our lives. We were molded and shaped and created from that celestial brew of whimsy and joy and strength.

We have never known ourselves or our world without our mother in it.  I am here, my brothers and sisters are here, because of her.  We are who we are, because of her.

Our mother was a curator of a welcome life.

To live in the orbit of our mother was to always be invited, received, entertained, accepted.

But perhaps above all, to have known my mother was to have been loved.

Her life was a lesson in loving.

What she taught us all was to always run hard after love. In all circumstances, by every means necessary, even when we screw things up or we do the exact right thing--we need love to be what is standing between us and everyone else. When love is what we choose to weave in among the fibers and snags of our everyday life, when love gilds the edges of tired joy or stretches across the chasms of unspoken fears then we become Love lived on purpose and that breathes life and one can catch glimpses of glory come down.

In the wake of my mom’s death, we are sad, yes. We feel carved out and empty and the truth of what we are left with actually aches in ways deep and long, yes.
But this, too, is also true:

There is still life, despite the loss.  There is still love in the world, despite the severing.  There is still light, despite the darkness.

And that gives me hope.

Because, if it is true, that we are who we are because of our mother...
then it means that this whole dance, all of the goodness and light spun dizzy with all of the defiance and angst, all of the ways that we continually fall down and help pick each other up, all of the beautiful and mundane, the fascinating and the trivial, the whole and the half?

It's part of us too, now, tucked away in the obvious and secret places, planted in soil made rich with her love and care for us.

It is through loving and singing with our own children or grandchildren, by partnering with kindred souls or living alongside people that challenge us...all of it ripples on and on and on.... people are continually made and remade because we are in their lives...which means that our mother lives on.

And I pray that one day, when the pictures are pulled out and the chronology of our becoming is on display, the one thing that will have leaked out all over, dripping from the corners of our eyes and the edges of our smiles, is the amazing truth...

that we were loved by her.

Here

I’m cooking dinner and

only because the days are getting longer

does the light still filter in

through the clouded window that

needs replacing

The pane is nearly opaque

but not muddled enough

to keep my eye from catching

the fluttering of a bird at the feeder

repositioning himself

to find more seed

While I cut broccoli

the baby sits on the counter

flapping his arms

like the bird outside

screeching with glee

drool dripping like honey

from his mouth

the bud of a tooth peeking

out from swollen gums

I set down the knife  

and sip my wine in the pause

while through the tilted glass I can see

the edges of the room stained

crimson and swirling

catching light

glowing

The rest of this poem can be found over at Elizabeth Marshall's beautiful blog

Poetry & Prose Through A Lens of Grace

where Elizabeth weaves wonder and whimsy on a regular basis.

Elizabeth and I collaborated on Adagio: A Poetry Project,

an experiment in writing across the miles, twining words and heart thoughts together.

You can read those pieces here, here, here and here. 

I am so very thankful for the opportunity to share, once again, with Elizabeth.

The Folds of Grace

photo credit

Some days just ring hollow
as if all the hopes I’ve thrown long and wide just
swirl round and round
slower and slower
from the weight borne upon them

And then there are days
that the black bird returns
flash of red upon his wing
his call creaky like an old iron gate
causing me to squint upwards
into the still bare tree limb in silhouette
the strengthening sun finding new fire
behind it

Some days roll in atop the
pink foam of fitful nights
and the sandy grit bristles hard
against the murky glass
leaving an etched line that will take
hours to polish out

The rest of this poem can be found over at SheLoves Magazine where I am writing today. Follow this link and join me there? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments, either here or there.