Marching toward Soylent Green and other such idyllic futures

It makes perfect sense. Right now, many things work together to cast a bleakness on the look of ordinary life. Maybe that is why as we walked through the exit doors of Walmart this morning, I reacted to your statement with genuine grief. The kind of grief you feel when a favorite pet dies; you know--the little creature who had the power to make even a dark day have its bright spot. For as we left, you pointed out a placard written in pure white lettering set on a non-confrontational blue background, and you commented on its content. "Oh, yeah. Did you hear? Walmart got rid of their layaway department."

I hugged my paltry bag full of things like hair color, contact lens cleaner and envelopes...those raw personal needs that take me to Walmart...and I felt myself deflate a little. You see, somewhere inside me, I've kept a ledger of the demise of things that I took for granted as free services afforded in our society over the years. Even in this capitalist country, there persisted an overlay of something softer than pure capitalism...but in the end, free layaway at Walmart seemed to stand alone, a last bastion of free service. But come December, no more layaway. I read somewhere that many of the big stores (I don't remember which ones specifically, but places like Sears, Target, etc.) now earn the bulk of their income off the credit card interest people pay for past purchases, while monies earned on current sales serve as secondary profits. I think it was Readers Digest that brought this to my attention, but the actual percentages were too depressing to commit to memory. I know they were enough to alarm the financial analysts who wrote the article.

So it feels like I take my children walking in the cemetery behind some old abandoned church, and I point to the tombstones, and we read them:

"This is the head stone of the one who pumped gas and checked your oil for free.
And this one, it is the doctor who made housecalls and understood that you might need to pay with a basket of eggs.
That whole hillside of graves over there...those are the housewives. They're the ones who did a myriad of jobs and could have garnered more respect for their work as care-givers, cooks, lawyers, nurses, psychologists, etc. by simply claiming each job title and attaching the words pro bono to the work, but they didn't think it necessary to draw attention to the obvious good of public service. They're probably spinning under there, appalled at the lack of weight and significance given to the label housewife in this present day."

And lifting out of my reverie, I hear you ponder as we cross the parking lot.
"I wonder what the kids will miss when they are grown? What's left for them to look back on as free services lost between their youth and their adulthood?" And I'm afraid to wonder that with you.

The libraries? The public schools? Or will it be less cultural, more in the nature of primal need. A plot of grass outside the door? Running water? Part and parcel from the Bill of Rights? Or will it be the whole shebang, those things our forefathers considered "self-evident?"

If the deepest quality of this life is tied to our willingness to embrace gratitude in all circumstances, then we must dig deep. Gratitude is all relative. I remember once we laughed because several in the family were in "dire" enough physical condition that we realized we were having to reach deep to find things with which to console ourselves, thoughts like, "At least we're not battling ebola or the black plague." We found our well of gratitude.

Now we're becoming aware of the same negative imbalance in our social, national, economic world. So we, ever the ones to look for that thing to appreciate, we step out and say like the Puritan who bowed his head over his bread and water: "All this and Christ, too." And somewhere, God in His infinite eternal book of accounts notes our recognition of this seemingly low ceiling and reminds us of other people in other times and places who felt equally powerless to keep a grasp on things. He reminds us that some times and places are given the power to show why hyper-control by even a benign authority runs amok. These are the ones given the assignment of living in the days when the veil of deception is lifted and good is revealed to be good, and bad to be bad. To play a part in that scenario carries a profound dignity, but also a great strain in the days of its occurring.

So above all else, we discover we can thank God for this infinite spiritual freedom, even as what seems to shackle our hands and feet rattles merrily away while we sing and encourage each other, unnoticed, seemingly passive and obviously frail in a dark dungeon...for now. (smile)

Dewey's visit to the International Arts Festival

We have a project this weekend. Dewey came home from school with Nolan, the Kindergartener. Dewey is a class bear that "visits" each child. We were fortunate enough to get him for a whole weekend. Now Dewey comes with an old-styled black and white composition notebook, his diary of his travels if you will. I wonder how we will translate this evening into Kindergartenese for Dewey's journal?

It all began when we took the 5th grader to a friend's house for a camp-out. Dewey came along for the ride. After dropping off the camper, we stopped by the grocery store. That was when we noticed things turning strange. Nolan, Dewey and I remained in the van as Scott ran in for a few things we needed for supper. When he returned, he commented. "There's going ot be a blizzard. Or at least people are shopping like one's coming...huge loads of food rolling down the checkouts." We shrugged it off, not realizing they knew more than we did about what had happened since we drove across the city to drop off the camper. Our town had subsequently closed, and we never saw it coming.

As we continued down the road, we hardly cast a glance at the traffic cops at first. Lately, every other street corner has a new townhousing complex or a trendy artsy strip-mall under construction. (We're trying as a community to become known as the arts and design district for the north side of the city. A wealthy suburb like ours has delusions of "arts patronage" grandeur in its bloodline, I guess.) In any case, at first the flashing lights and traffic cop did not alarm us. But as we took the first side jaunt, we realized that these detours were now in layers, like an onion. First, there were the basic construction detours that we'd learned to maneuver from days gone by. But layered over this today were the detours prompted by the International Arts Festival street closures. It will be going on all weekend. Never mind that road work and torn up parking lots make parking a nightmare, and never mind that there is a home football game going on tonight that will draw away potential festival attenders, and just ignore that electrical storm with high winds that is already invading town. We WILL patronize the arts because that is what cultured people do! (Nouveau riche, I'd say, if I weren't a bumpkin myself and therefore outside both arenas: the one for preeners and the one for snubbers.) Finally, after several false turns we got hopelessly lost in a residential community.

I made the comment to Scott. "You know this is one of those good ideas gone bad because it was too narrow-minded. The idea was to make these cul-de-sac, no-through-way communities as a way to keep the children safe. In these places, they aren't supposed to be run down by the people who simply want a quick cut through. But when the through-ways are all closed down, you get trapped in these things..."

"...and then you get mad and drive too fast and run the kids down anyway," he said.

Eventually, we found a route that gave us a chance to ask a cop, "How do we get home if we live back there?"
He referenced a road that was the one route he thought still open.
"Nope, the ones doing construction closed that one," we said. He being a festival traffic cop instead of a construction traffic cop told us, "I don't know then. Ask a city cop."

Finally, we found an open road that led home, but because people had decided to park on this road, it was now, in effect, a one way route on which thousands hoped to venture around the festival closures or else to park. When we managed to navigate to our own driveway, we breathed a sigh of relief and then set ourselves up to watch the show: the line of frustrated drivers taking their cars hopefully down and then angrily back up the cul-de-sac road that passed in front of our own house. Rats after cheese, Scott decided. "You know, we could probably make some money if we set up a stand that sells maps showing how to get away from here," he said.

And we salved our bitter nerves with wry comments like:

"I know what the International in the naming of this festival is all about, it describes how far you have to go to find the end of the detour around the festival."
"...or describes the trafffic patterns being used, like ones commonly found in places like Mexico City."

Rain dropped by the bucketful on the back deck, and lightning struck. We couldn't help but laugh. You'd have to know the history of the snobbery that drives a lot of community projects around here to truly appreciate how nakedly ironic is the failure of this festival.

"I can't tell you how much I hope it's still raining tomorrow morning," Scott said, envisioning trying to leave the house on day two of this entrapment in order to take the Kindergartener to play soccer. Dewey will be disappointed if he misses watching Nolan play the game, but I expect we can find some other way to entertain him...until the "blizzard" passes.

Christ's Climbing Companions

Twice we've caught pictures of our son in precarious places, high atop the monkey bars. Now we, too, are in such a spot for the second time, hanging in midair, looking for the most appropriate foothold. The first time we were positioned to learn something. But now, we seem positioned to demonstrate that we learned it, which makes such a difference in the peace factor this time around!

We have made great strides these last three years in knowing the heart of God, but "knowledge makes no difference in a life unless it is lived out" says my Bible's footnotes. King David knew the Lord intimately...after all he wrote the Psalms...but he also lived out that knowledge through many actual trials. So we, too, shall stand in a blowing place not unlike a desert, standing under the glaring, unfamiliar brightness of primal light, the light that was first of all creation, the light that came before sun and stars, before land and sea...stand there at the place of the beginning and offer ourselves as part of the end. This is the place and the position of reality for us. I found a nice, sane, succinct devotional about this difference between actuality and reality...which is something I think we've brought to light a lot in this blog. Here it is:

By actual we mean the things we come in contact with by our senses, and by real, that which lies behind, those things we cannot get at by our senses. The fanatic sees the real only and ignores the actual; the materialist looks at the actual only and ignores the real. The only sane being who ever trod this earth was Jesus Christ because in Him the actual and the real were one. Jesus Christ does not stand first in the actual world, He stands first in the real world; that is why the "natural man" does not bother his head about Him--"the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness to him." When we are born from above we begin to see the actual things in the light of the real. We say that prayer alters things, but prayer does not alter actual things nearly so much as it alters the person who sees the actual things. In the Sermon on the Mount the Lord brings the actual and the real together.
Daily Thoughts for Disciples, by Oswald Chambers

The Sermon on the Mount happened after the people had literally climbed "the Mount" with Jesus. No easy, broad grassy plain ministrations given there. Or in today's language, no comfy-chair-while-holding-a-latte-from-the-youth-group's-coffee-cart service there.

We've taken the red pill, as Morpheus would say, and accepted the actualities that come with our awareness of our God-given reality. And so we find the deepest sort of peace available to man. Therefore, it shouldn't surprise me, even though it does, how easy it has become to live out this verse that always before I looked at it with such dread:
"We are hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed but not in despair." 2 Corinthians 4:8

Nearly Robin Hood...

...except that you didn't rob from the rich, you just had to exercise your ingenuity to retrieve their cast-offs in a most fitting fashion. In so doing, you made my work life so very lovely this week. For I am indeed back at work, well into another school year. And while you lick your finger and lift it to test the winds of change over your own career-future, you're nevertheless flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone, bonded to me such that it shows up in all places. This week was a prime example of how your desire to care for the underprivileged can be met through my own work contacts.




You heard me on the phone with parent after parent, discussing the ramifications of becoming a newbie band student. But then you heard the heart-breaker call. On the road, you would never have been able to do what you did for that mother and child.

A mother who works hard long hours, whose heart is pure and graceful, but who has very little in the way of monetary gifts.
A daughter who was excited, hopeful to be in the band, just like many of her classmates.

The little girl signed her name on the class list, requesting I make a call to her home. But when I made that call I learned this mom had finally told her little one no, because these instruments don't come cheap.

That was a few days ago. Then yesterday, when I came home from school, you looked at me with a gleam in your eye. "Did you see what I got?" you asked. Taking me into the living room, you opened the case to a clarinet, the very instrument the little girl hoped to play.

You were appalled that life should deny opportunity to a child who wanted to learn to make music, so you took it upon yourself to go to the nearby wealthy high school where our own son is a senior band student, indeed with dreams of becoming a third-generation music educator. You went there and chatted with the directors about the program I started last year...a toddler band program at best, housed at what has been touted in strangely glowing terms as a "hippy Christian school" with no budget and no reserve of instruments. You presented a need that might look ridiculous to those who worked in that lavish band wing: a myriad of practice rooms, rehearsal halls, offices; all bustling with hundreds of well-supplied youths and resident band directors. Still you stood there and told them about the little girl who would not be playing.

In fact, you spoke with such eloquence that the director took you back to a storage closet full of instruments. These orphaned instruments had not belonged to people with lives like that of the little girl. These people are nonchalant with material goods, so nonchalant that when their youngsters decide they are finished with band, the instruments are simply left behind. Neither they nor their parents see it as a grievous loss to have that investment abandoned.

So the director gave you one of the clarinets, free of charge. God is indeed good to orphans and widows, for He provided the tools for this child's dream to come true free of charge, I'd almost say miraculously although it depended on your willingness to be used. (Well, OK, she'll have to pay a buck for a reed and $10 for the method book, but that's considerably less than the $600 that this clarinet was worth in 1999, or so the sticker on it says.) The mom's response revealed her familiarity with the intimate care of God when I called to tell her of the musical "windfall" available to her, for she commented: "No...You're joking? Well, it's just God getting the job done."

How cool that we were part of it, got to see be involved in the whole process, from receiving the embarrassingly personal details of the need to receiving the idea for the solution: and then what's more, getting to be the hands that delivered the goods! How incredible is that!

In fact, I'm going to say it again, I think you are called to be some kind of channel for the reappropriation of justice according to some divine directive. And, what an exciting thing it is for me to have the privilege of participation in it with you.

Evolution of Traffic, Part II

Another generation took to the road
a couple of years ago.
Soon he'll drive away less often,
Because soon he'll be here less often.
The many college contacts filling the nooks and crannies of life prompt me to wonder:
What do I tell him--before he's just a set of tail lights--about the best ways to drive?
Really drive.
What do I say, looking back
At my first poem on the evolution
of traffic?
Is there hope even yet to pass on to one who has years of driving ahead of him?

Yes there is!
I found it this way:

I sat at a stoplight.
Only this time,
in the early morning drizzle,
I was waiting to turn right
instead of left.

Green lights, yellow, red
directed traffic across my path.
I waited...not so much from obedience this time,
It was early.
I was sleepy, is all.
Then the left-turn lane beside me
Did its business by the law of the light.
Left arrows red, green, and yellow...
Still I waited, until it hit me: this was all there was.
Straight was not an option,
And my right turnhad no arrows:
It existed completely outside the light system.
I went when I thought I should.
So I did...but much later than I needed to.
So deeply ingrained was my conditioning
to lights.

So here, I think,
Is my best advice:
Want freedom?
Want to live outside the world of governed stop's and go's?
A yielded heart is all you need.
...
"Or to go around the world to the right."
(The practical, quirky dry perspective, as given by my husband, who although he's not here right now, is ever chiming around in my head.
Recognize him?)

Long Live King Hezekiah!

When I confessed my envy of your long-standing active friendships, my love, you countered my blog with your own confession of your own great envy of me: my long-standing active relationship with God. You used words like genuine, dynamic, interactive, meaningful both directions...and you made me cry. I cried because these words--when I received them from a witness--made these truths truer. I'd be too afraid I was becoming proud if I allowed myself to perceive things this special from God Himself about my relationship with Him, but because He used you to convey the message, it became another thing entirely for me to accept the words. You were the voice of God giving me hope and comfort. I didn't conjure up what God said to me through you, so thank you for being willing to give me this gift, especially since you felt like you were giving it from a position of lack on your own part.

Now here is God's answer, I think, to this ache you admitted for a more interactive, dynamic, genuine, meaningful both directions relationship for yourself and Him, as well as the answer to another ache you've felt, about your own mortality. He just this morning gave me understanding of that strange night when time went backwards for you. Again it is one of those how-did-I-not-see-this-meaning-before things. If you remember you woke to go to the bathroom and get a drink in the night, looked at the clock, came back to bed and slept. Later when you woke again and glanced at the clock, it was an earlier time than it had been the first time you got up! You swore you'd been awake; it wasn't a dream, etc. We packed it into the box of mysterious night activity we've both been having for the last year or two and left it there. Since then, many things have happened...you've had dreams of impending change, gone through a massive spiritual testing time, now been driven into a state of involuntary unsureness, and through it all you've have a nagging suspicion that death might wait for you the minute you finish everything assigned to this particular venture God has laid at our feet.

The time moving backward event answers your question of just how "impending" is death for you. In Scripture, King Hezekiah was given the word by the Prophet Isaiah that he would die. He sought the Lord to change that. God agreed to add to Hezekiah's days, and the sign that He gave of His agreement to this was that the sundial would move backward 10 degrees.

Now we could do the math and see how many "minutes" that backward movement translates to be, and I could dig back in my journal to find the exact times you said the clock showed, for you exactly remembered these...another pertinent thing, and I expect we'd find the times match up. But I hardly think it necessary to look for such proof, not at this point in our faith-walk with God, it would only be wasting time, for the message is still the same: years have been added to your life. God said so, in a way so intimately associated with Him as to leave no doubt about it. God bless all those years, my love! Starting today!

Being your Barnabas again...regarding change

I'm thinking back over your musings, my love, about God running you on a treadmill of perpetual change. You're right in one respect...the circumstances of life have not afforded you much continuity. I know you worry about how you now pull us in tow with you as you navigate change after change. But I also look at what your friend writes to you in response to your latest blog on this topic...how those words along with his request that you officiate his wedding are evidence of what you have as a counterbalance to all the change in your circumstances.

Your life also has its areas of profound continuity: in the world of your relationships. Even where there was one great breach--with your firstborn, you are making headway toward repair. And in many places, minor breaches have not changed your relationships at all...no matter how much "life" tries to take this gift of relationship continuity away from you, your foundation remains unmoved.

It may not be a thing you notice, because it is so much a part of your life and alway has been; but I notice it. I could spend the rest of this blog becoming self-pitying, making a teeth-gritting dissection of my own numerous losses in this area, but I'll try to keep it illustratively brief. You see, I am the living antithesis of this gift of yours. Whereas your mother calls every week on Saturday morning, my dad doesn't even remember my birthday half the time; and this not due to lack of love, but simply due to his temperment.

But moving outside the example of family, look at my history of ongoing contact with friends from my youth. While your childhood friends are a palpable presence in your life, my two friends that I'd say really cared about me as something other than a commodity, these two are completely lost to me. One became a farm-wife without ever going to college. When I visited her some 10 years after high school, she was tired and bitter, and I--even in my position as a divorcee with all the failure that broadcasts--represented the life she'd skipped, to her deep and hopeless regret--so I was literally painful for her to see.

And then there is my dearest friend, Francie: she who is ever lost to me. Absorbed into a cult. You know how she wrote me off entirely when I didn't embrace her elitist religion. The one time you actually met her she had her newborn baby with her. She was so surprised that I knew the scriptural reference she used in naming her child. She assumed it to be far too obscure a reference for someone on the "outside" like me to catch. But the name Caleb is not that obscure a reference in my opinion. To me, the only obscurity was in her new perception of me. She was just so sure that I'd never have the understanding to relate to her now that she was so much more knowledgeable in the Way. That was what...8 years ago? Not a word since; not even when I contacted her mom and said I'd love to hear from her.

You're right, I could contact my old boyfriend...he'd love to hear from me. In fact, a couple of years ago when I ran into him in Carbondale with my sister, he made the comment to me, "Don't stay away so long!" But his common-law wife is not even comfortable with the fact that he is still close friends with my sister (who he considers like his own little sister) so how would she handle me showing up saying, "Gee, I miss contact with my old friends."

Besides, even if I repaired all the breaches, it would be too late for what I'm talking about here. The continuity for me has been broken on every line. "Catching up" could happen, but the presumed conclusion to that catching up would be more long years of silence. A sudden resurgence of involvement would be unlikely.

As for my adult life, many friends have popped up over the years who quickly grow to be very close and even somewhat reliant on my heart and soul and mind and who offer me a similar support; but only for a brief season, never in that way that walks through the years and abides.

Brief seasons of companionship have always been the norm for me. Only you and God have afforded me continuing interest...which, as an aside, I think may be part of why I may have seemed to recoil at the idea of you being heavily involved in daily life again, because it broke the mold. I feel quite normal running a script where people appear in my life with overpowering presence, but prove transient, disappearing before I lose my subtle "essence" to their more pungent ones. By having the strong personality you have and then taking jobs that always kept you at a distance, you artfully ran the script I know so well, but now you are changing the last act, which simply means that it is time for me to grow, too. Time for me to say I won't be lost in your shadow. How do I make you understand this? You have a strong personality; one that is not overcome by others--the closest you could come to understanding this, I'd expect is your relativity through your relationship with your ex-wife, through and after that marriage. Imagine that type of "surprise capture, bondage and escape" being a common life-theme, and you'll see a little deeper into my relationship history. You'll see why I look for continuity in things like land and heirlooms, seeing the same tree and flower bed every year instead of longing for the continuity you have: by seeing the same people. But still, your talk of "coming home again for good" makes me think of these things...makes me face my weakness, so I thank you for that. But it all leads back to the idea of this gift I want to remind you is yours...like the last one hidden under the back branches of the Christmas tree, almost forgotten. Here it is:

Imagine if your friends had gone the way mine did. Imagine if your parents really didn't call every Saturday, but only quarterly, and generally only if you called first and left a message saying please call. (smile) This is a tremendous gift you have been given: John, Doug, Robert, Tad...all of them more than memories...all of them living lives full of contemporary details that you know, despite the fact that you don't haunt the same neighborhoods anymore. All of them people who didn't have to stay in touch just due to blood connection. Their continuing contact makes them a true testament to the value of simply knowing you.

To me, that is one of the best examples of changelessness that a person can receive in this lifetime. It is a gift from God. So I'd say don't be afraid of the changes that do come and don't be discouraged, just pull out that treasure box of attentive friends and family and be consoled by their abiding presence; then you can tell me to get over my maudlin self, and we can start shopping for something to replace your company cell phone.

Contrapuntal themes

Lately you've dreamed of airplanes,
Lately I've dreamed of flies...
Today, I came across this little set of instructions for a kit that involves both our dream obsessions in a joint project. Check it out:


If it doesn't blow up enough to read, it is about taking flies, numbing them in a freezer and then pasting them to a matchstick airplane, as you breathe warm air on them, they come alive again and "Start the plane. If you did things correctly, it will fly! Sit back and enjoy the happy flies playing with the plane! None of them will have experienced anything like this before! ENJOY!"

Too funny!

Here I am again....

Hola, old friend...it's been a while, huh? I really don't remember the last time I had (found) the time to blog. As I had stated somewhere in the relatively short history of this blog, writing is something you do because you want to...putting finger-pads to keys seems for me to be something I would like to do more, but it's just "too darn hard"....thank God I don't have a daily column to write...I have heard that writing a daily colum is like being married to a nymphomaniac....really fun for a few weeks, but ultimately the pressure to preform gets to be a burden....

Once again, I find myself in front of the computer at some ungodly early morning hour, the sounds of the trucks on the interstate droning on and on...tires circling in a never ending loop. I am only 42 years old, and really much too young to be having insomnia problems. I am a firm believer in bio-rhythms, and mine are on Guam time, evidently.

I am home, and that is something (actually a big something), and I know that when I finish this, I will climb back into bed with my wonderful wife, trying not to wake her, and spend some time writing songs to the rhythm of her heartbeat. I look forward to being able to do that every night.....

The job front is in the air for now...I keep getting the feeling that, want it or not, change is going to happen soon. I make more than anyone at my job "level", and seem to be the tallest tree in the forest, an easy target for any budget trimming that my clueless (sorry, just how I feel) president decides to impose. He has proven himself to be a myopic, bottom line kind of boss, one that I don't have confidence in that he will see beyond a few dollars saved by cutting my salary (never mind that we just finished spending 1000 dollars flying one of our trainers to SLC for 20...TWENTY...minutes of training...the same trainer that lives 45 miles from both myself and Tierry G....sigh.....). Yes, I am looking for something that will keep me home more, so my worry might just be that I will be beaten to the punch (kinda like when your girlfriend breaks up with you the day before you were going to end it....same result, but not the way you wanted it). I am really putting some time into prayer for help discerning the right path...not for a job, or money, or anything...just guidance....

...can you blog a prayer?

Labor Day...

...and all my poor husband is laboring with is a horrific migraine headache. So what do I do to keep from worrying about him? (We once had to go to the emergency room with one of these things, but I know that right now he wouldn't permit such an expensive jaunt, especially with a costly hernia surgery appearing to loom on the horizon for our five-year-old.) What do I do when I'm not checking his temperature and pulse? I sit outside and draw a tree, something I haven't done in years. It was going pretty well until the five-year-old came out and asked me to draw the dog just beyond the fence, also in the scene. My artist's eye is far too rusty to make much of a dog on paper, but I tried. Drawing was soothing and a flashback to my younger days...as was my follow-up activity to the sketching: I came inside and watched An American in Paris.

Funny what watching a musical from the early 50's does to someone like me. I felt so achingly nostalgic for the simplicity of it: for the days when the label "avante garde" could be carried by something like the musical ballet sequence in this movie rather than requiring a further reach say toward a jar of urine and a crucifix. I ache for the way the dance sequence impressed the innocence of my childhood when I watched this movie with my parents, themselves avid fans of the golden age of the Hollywood musical. But at the same time, I see with new eyes--eyes a little misty from a tear or two--how well the dance that Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron do in the fountain on Concorde Square (I think that is the fountain it is to represent) portrays intimate love between a man and a woman...something my child-eyes did not see as I sat on my parents living room floor and imagined myself as the dancer.

I ache in a way that seems to disconnect me from the world of today even as it reminds me that the world I "feel" at that moment is, after all, the one that is forever gone. It is something I wrote about once before, after driving through a little town that appeared still locked in an earlier time. I said seeing such a town was a trigger that opened a doorway to a mystical place. Today such a trigger took me again, the door opened through this movie as it followed that visit to my own quieter past days: days of sitting and drawing as I stare at a tree.

I've been thinking about this doorway and I've found that it does not appear to you until you have lived through a few life-eras. First, there is the one of being sure that the generation older than you have all the secrets to "what is cool." Next comes the era of presuming you and your own generation have all the secrets to genuine coolness (later known as pretension), you have this coolness (--or to avoid making my own point, should I say phat-ness, or is that passe now too?) In any case, you are sure you have these pretensions formed with more original flare than any other generation ever has had or will have. Finally, you are on the verge of the doorway when you make the shocking discovery that the next generation is of the same opinion about themselves that you were about yourself. This is a thing you never considered possible! You were sure the generation following yours would automatically respect the wonder of your ultimate pretension. And now, because they don't feel this way at all, their pretension looks utterly stupid to you. The thing is, they don't care. In fact, your "stuffy" attitude in disrespecting their originality only supports that "new cool" self-perception they have of themselves; so finally you sigh and rub an aching place...any aching place will do...and say, like Old King Solomon: "So, all is vanity under the sun. I get it now."

But then you look to the generation before yours and see them wink at you as if you have made some new rite of passage. It is as if they are congratulating you for coming to see that you live that ancient wisdom: you are part of a human progression that has gone along this very route for generations. At the moment of that wink, you recapture something a little higher than what you've been feeling, which would be pride after its fall from lofty heights, now squashed flat into a steamy heap of depression on the sidewalk but not quite dead, an occasional flutter of self-pity and melodrama can be found at the pulse points--until that wink; then all that is left that needs to die does die, and you find your sheepish humility regarding your own pertinence. The benefit of all this is that you regain some hope for the next generation, knowing someday you'll be able to give them a similar winking lift back into genuine pertinence.

...It is then that you can go to this magical timeless place...timeless because its existence doesn't depend on reality, only on your perceptive memory. And magical, well magical for the same reasons. You know it as the place where you still believe, stil hope all the things the young ones still blindly believe and hope about themselves, but now you believe these things without pride and disunity toward other generations, rather you believe in oneness with them.

But now, my love, you come stumbling out from your state of feverish sleep to a state of feverish waking, so I'll come back to reality and be with you. The one drawback of the magical world: you can't do anyone there any good, the most you can do to honor all those there is to bring their magic that swells your spirit into the world of the real and the do something good for someone.

More trees felled...

Like a rhythm, like a heartbeat--holy communion visits me through thematic repetition again today. As an end cap to my youngest son's discovery of the debate over whether falling trees make sound without listening ears to hear them comes this: a quote I read tonight in a book by Henri Nouwen called Life of the Beloved.

In this book, Nouwen--an aged Catholic priest who taught at Notre Dame, Harvard and Yale; a man considered by many to be an outstanding spiritual writer--is petitioned by Fred Bratman--a young journalist, a secular Jew settled in the heart of the secular world: New York City--to write a book intentioned for people like him, rather than one for the people who "least need to hear it."

Fred said, "Speak to us about the deepest yearning of our hearts, about our many wishes, about our hope; not about the many strategies for survival, but about trust; not about new methods of satisfying our emotional needs, but about love. Speak to us about a vision larger than our changing perspectives and about a voice deeper than the clamorings of our mass media. Yes, speak to us about something or someone greater than ourselves. Speak to us about...God."

And when Nouwen made an abashed comment that his voice was not the one to speak to such things, Fred said: "You can do it...You have to do it...If you don't, who will?...Visit me more often; talk to my friends; look attentively at what you see, and listen carefully to what you hear. You will discover a cry welling up from the depths of the human heart that has remained unheard because there was no one to listen."
What was that last bit again?

You will discover a cry welling up from the depths of the human heart that has remained unheard because there was no one to listen.
Trees are falling. Who can hear?


I think of the things You've been pouring into my life lately, God, and I catch Your voice floating on the wind--with a strange mix of a chuckle for some and a sigh for others--as You say: "Let's just see who's not listening now..."

"If a Tree Falls in a Forest...

and no one is there to hear it, does it really make a sound?"

My youngest just became acquainted with this old adage while he was eating waffles and watching cartoons this morning. He was quite disgruntled with what he perceive as a lack of cleverness in that cartoon. His response to the question: "That's too easy! Of course, the answer is yes. It's just too easy."

Leave it to a child to accept--or even allow--that the laws of physics and acoustics do not hang on him as the giver of relativity. Do sound waves travel whether my ears are positioned to receive them? So what changes in us, changes so much that this adage became one universally known? Is it faith? Humility?

Whatever it is, somewhere between 5 and 50 we grow "wise" and "understand" this joke; we lose the ability to say such a resounding (pardon the pun) "of course it makes a sound!"

The Mystery Woman

Here I lift verses that have haunted me the last week or so. I happened upon them this morning during today's Bible study. Particularly this first one has been stuck in my mind, making me think I should look it up, remembering it was somewhere in Isaiah, then happening upon it as it was referenced in the part of Galatians I was reading this morning, (a New Testament reference that used it to compare differences in divinely decreed covenant ages.) Whether she is an individual or a people I do not know...maybe she is both.

This verse--this woman--is important, but I don't think she knows who she is yet, or else maybe I'd be able to "see" her. Still, she knows her grief well enough, for I've felt compassion toward her for a long time, although her personhood is as elusive as the Fly to my comprehending mind. Nevertheless, my heart reaches out to her. Maybe someday I'll know more about who she is...and my prayers for her will then become more concrete and maybe more than prayers. For now, I bask in the verses given to recognize, honor and reassure her. I feel them strongly and would hope my prayers open a door that will touch her spirit with hope and reassurance that this love gift will be made, despite its being beyond conprehension; it will be made because God is its author and finisher, and so it will move forward as smoothly as a hot knife cuts through whipped butter.

“Sing, O barren woman,
you who never bore a child;
burst into song, shout for joy,
you who were never in labor;
because more are the children of the desolate woman
than of her who has a husband,”
says the Lord." Isaiah 54:1 New International Version © 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society

"Fear not; you will no longer live in shame. The shame of your youth and the sorrows of widowhood will be remembered no more," Isaiah 54:4 New Living Translation © 1996 Tyndale Charitable Trust

"The Lord will call you back
as if you were a wife deserted and distressed in spirit—
a wife who married young,
only to be rejected,” says your God." Isaiah 54:6 New International Version © 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society

For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed, says the LORD, who has compassion on you. Isaiah 54:10 Revised Standard Version © 1947, 1952.


And these verses, are they also connected to her, or connected to those gathered around her, somehow?

Let no foreigner who has bound himself to the Lord say,
“The Lord will surely exclude me from his people.”
And let not any eunuch complain,
“I am only a dry tree.”
For this is what the Lord says:
“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me
and hold fast to my covenant—
to them I will give within my temple and its walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that will not be cut off.
And foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord
to serve him,
to love the name of the Lord,
and to worship him,
all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it
and who hold fast to my covenant—
these I will bring to my holy mountain
and give them joy in my house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and sacrifices
will be accepted on my altar;
for my house will be called
a house of prayer for all nations.” isaiah 56:3-7
New International Version © 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society

Still, so much is dark. It is funny, a friend was asking me to go to God recently about his venture into ministry, and I sent him back my sense that I saw him like a priest in an Exodus moment, offering up the bowl of sweet-smelling incense to the Lord as was done every morning and evening by the ancients. This morning, I see as I amble over to peruse another friend's photo blog that on the same day I sent that email, the photo blogger, too, had olfactory stuff on the brain, although the "bouquet" he referenced and lives with is not so very sweet. Still the point stuck in my mind: channels of thought are led to bring all into focus on God's point of view, whether we recognize it or not. I feel so small and incapable of much comprehension in these things. I feel like Solomon:

Who is like the wise man? And who knows the interpretation of a thing? A man's wisdom makes his face shine, and the hardness of his face is changed. Eccl. 8:1 Hebrew Names Version 2000 Info

But--
then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all his efforts to search it out, man cannot discover its meaning. Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot really comprehend it. Eccl. 8:17 New International Version © 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society

So I finish like I always do, saying: Thy will be done...both in the places illuminated, and in the ones still dark.

More from God for Mr. Fly...

Strange that only a few days after the Fly invaded my consciousness, I come across this in my reading...and strangly like God's economy, how it melds my dream of the Fly with your thematic ones about the airplane flights, my love. This is a quote from a Max Lucado book called Come Thirsty that I read beside the pool Thursday:

Come and keep coming. Drink and keep drinking. Ask and keep asking. "Your heavenly Father will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask and continue to ask Him!" (Luke 11:13).
Don't make the mistake of the fly I encountered in the airplane. That's right, on a recent flight a fly buzzed about in the cabin. How odd. A fly flying inside a flying plane. Why would a fly fly during a flight? Was he helping the plane? Doing his part to keep the craft airborne? Why did the fly in the plane fly in the plane?
I asked him. Catching his attention, I inquired, "Mr Fly, why do you fly? Why don't you sit down and enjoy the journey?"
His reply smacked of smugness. "And let the plane crash? Why, this craft needs me. My wings are essential to our safety." And with a puff of the chest he flew toward the front of the plane. As he returned some moments later, he didn't look so confident. Fear flickered in his tiny eyes. "I don't think I can keep it up!"
"Keep what up?"
"The plane! I don't think I can keep the plane up. I'm flying as furiously as I can. But my wings are weary. I don't know how long I can do this."
I opted for frankness. "Don't you know it's not up to you? You are surrounded by strength, held aloft by power that is not yours. Stop flying! It's not up to you to get this plane home."
He looked at me as if I were crazy and told me to buzz off.
I so hope you won't. Some of you need to sit down. You fly furiously back and forth, ever busy, always thinking the success of this journey is up to you. Do you fear letting up?
Look out the windows. God's wings sustain you. God's engines empower you. You can flap like a fly and not accelerate this flight. It's your job to sit and trust: to receive.
Accept his power. You be the glove and let him get his hand deep into your life.
Surrender to his plan...

So if this is prayer-guidance for me to offer for us and for this one revealed as the Fly, then I offer this:

May we open ourselves to You, God, and become less self-reliant.
May we open ourselves to You, God, and become less locked in a hopeless sense of responsibility.
May we open ourselves to You, God, and receive all that is in Your hand to give us.
And,
May we open ourselves to You, God, and accept the assignment of being early starlight in a twilight world.

The Call to the Fly

(Another one of those stories/affirmations I'd give you on the phone because it is too freaky for the blog, except you're so busy this week, I'll put it here for you to read at your leisure. I wonder if we'd ever blog--particularly this stuff--if you didn't travel so much?)

You dreamed your airplane dream again the last time you were here at home...where you sat in the front of the plane and you and someone else voluntarily moved to the back when a need for such a move arose. This time, the cockpit was open so that you could see the pilot's activity when you were in the front. Your evaluation of the dream was that as God calls another alongside us to accomplish His purpose through us, you may not be the one chosen to convey the information to this other person...maybe not be the one to recruit, but rather be one to step back and accept this person's assignment in our mission. Maybe that person will hear directly from God, I responded, and will come to us by some strange providence. I can now say that I have had a dream, too, one that may confirm these assumptions of our forward progress in this thing.

I dreamed one of those short, mysterious-image dreams. In this one, I simply saw my right hand holding a cell phone, but my hand was surrounded by flies. Flies moving lazily, not exactly swarming, and never landing on me, but staying there around my right hand...the electrified hand of activity in the bread-cutting covenant dream I had, the hand marked by God in another dream...but here: flies around it and a phone in it.

I was considering this idea of flies, thinking Lord of the Flies, Beelzebub, all kinds of dark morbid things like that--a common starting point for a trek of faith: it starts slogging forward from a swampy entry point on its way to better footing soon enough. But then, I put just flies into the concordance of an online Bible and I found two verses that seemed to explain the dream...one a warning the other a prediction.

Eccl 10:1--"Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savor so doth a little folly him that is in reputation for wisdom and honor." Good warning there: no folly. Been there, done that, didn't like it...so keep me from folly, God. Easy thing to ask. But then comes the mystery.

The flies in this dream were alive, not dead. So there is also this verse:
Isaiah 7:18--"And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall hiss (also translates whistle, call) for the fly that is in the uttermost part of the rivers of Egypt and for the bee (literally Deborah, as in my name, which is Hebrew for bee) that is in the land of Assyria."
I am the bee and you are the land, a rock crushed to mingle and mix with the water that marks the river of my baptism, things I blogged about not that long ago...the water that is apparently the home of the Fly. As I try to understand how this verse is being used to communicate with me, I feel like praying for this one here described as the fly: that the Fly might recognize himself as such, might hear the hiss of God even as we do...and not only that the Fly wil hear the call of God, but also that the Fly will respond, thereby giving honor to the One calling.

Chocolate Dreams

A few nights ago, I had a dream that never quite made it into my conscious waking mind. In it, I saw a globe with 3 or maybe 4 spots marked for activity. The only one I can remember is the last one: somewhere near the coast of China. But I know as each spot was marked, activity was accomplished there, resulting in the giving of a marvelous piece of chocolate. The chocolate was cylindrical in shape, with the two ends of solid chocolate and the middle section softer, with a crispy filling. It was wrapped in bright and colorful metalic paper. After each red dot showed a "mission accomplished" mark, a piece of chocolate was given. I woke regretting that I could remember no more than this. Partly, I wished I could remember the first few places marked for activity; but mostly I remember wishing I could remember the sensory impact of that chocolate. It had that hyper-reality quality that comes with these types of dreams, so the taste of it was literally divine. (smile) But I had a sense of God telling me that this dream wasn't really for my conscious mind at all, that sometimes a road must be made, a channel dug in the mind that is for later travel. So I appreciated what little I did get over in the conscious arena.
That was a couple of nights ago. Now today, I see this in the Saturday morning online news:

FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Calif. - As a chocolatier to the rich and famous, Martucci Angiano has posed with many celebrities — but on Thursday she held in her hand a figure that dazzles her more than any Hollywood star.
Workers at Angiano's gourmet chocolate company, Bodega Chocolates, discovered under a vat a 2-inch-tall column of chocolate drippings that they believe bears a striking resemblance to the Virgin Mary.
Since the discovery Monday, Angiano's employees have spent much of their time hovering over the tiny figure, praying and placing rose petals and candles around it.
"I was raised to believe in the Virgin Mary, but this still gives me the chills," Angiano said as she balanced the dark brown figure in her hand. "Everyone should see this."
Kitchen worker Cruz Jacinto was the first to spot the lump of melted chocolate when she began her shift Monday cleaning up drippings that had accumulated under a large vat of dark chocolate.
Chocolate drippings usually harden in thin, flat strips on wax paper, but Jacinto said she froze when she noticed the unusual shape of this cast-off: It looked just like the Virgin Mary on the prayer card she always carries in her right pocket.
"When I come in, the first thing I do is look at the clock, but this time I didn't look at the clock. My eyes went directly to the chocolate," said Jacinto, dressed in a hair net and apron as she paused from her work. "I thought, 'Am I the only one who can see this? I picked it up and I felt emotion just come over me. For me, it was a sign."
The chocolate, on display for most of the week in the front of the company gift shop, now rests in a plastic case in a back room and is brought out only for curious visitors.
The stack of hardened confection has a wide base and tapers gently toward a rounded top, giving the appearance of a female figure with her head tilted slightly to the right. The dark brown melting chocolate hardened into subtle layers that resemble the folds of a gown and a flowing veil.
A tiny white circle, about the size of a pencil eraser, sits in the upper center of the creation, just above a slight ridge that runs across it. Cruz says the white speck is the head of the Baby Jesus as he is held in Mary's folded arms.
For Jacinto, the discovery came just in time. Raising a son on her own, she has struggled with marital problems for months and says she was about to lose her faith.
"I have big problems right now, personally, and lately I've been saying that God doesn't exist," she said, pulling the dog-eared prayer card out of her pocket. "This has given me renewed faith."

I'm seeing under the water line on this iceberg again, I guess.

Spirituality and the Art of Preschool Soccer

When the baseball diamonds at the sports complex have grown their strong and thriving ant civilizations, you know it is time. Time to take to the grass and start kicking a soccer ball around. This hallmark season is our third one (as a family) for preschool soccer. I learn more each time I have a son go through the experience.
I learn things like:

When you go to practice, one of the first things you are taught is equipment care. You don't sit on the ball, even though at any given moment it might seem the most comfortable and therefore most logical thing to do. You know nothing about consequences like deflation yet, however you don't have to be smacked by a flat ball to learn, because you're still young and you trust your coach enough to do what he says. At least for as long as you can remember what he says...

And even though on some level you understand that the bright orange practice cone is for drills and skill building, you also know it makes a great mega-phone and--when put together with the ball--makes a nice imitation of a giant ice cream cone. Of course, you must display these discoveries for your teammates until the coach patiently comes and takes the cone away and puts it back on the ground. As soon as the coach turns to work with another player, you pick the cone up again.

You know that the ball is supposed to be kicked into the goal, but you also know that it is a lot more fun to go behind the goal and kick the ball so it rolls up the back of the net, arcing back at you...and many of your friends join you because they, too, believe this to be more fun than simply making goals.

While your team has a pow-wow with the coach, one player simply wanders off to socialize with another team practicing nearby. This teammate has not been launched as a spy; he just discovered that someone on that team has the same shin guards he has...and besides that team is not saying or doing anything worth a scout's attention anyway.

You discover to your amazement that it is possible to get kicked hard enough to bring tears; and even stranger, the kick is random and blameless and part of the game. No one was mad at you or out to hurt you, it just happened. So you learn to "shake it off."

And even with all that tortoise-paced advancement in readiness, you still somehow arrive at that first game day with your colors on. You manage to get through a real game; and even though you may not really know who won and who lost, you nevertheless know that you always shake hands with the guys in the other color at the end. Then, you get a pat on the head from the coach, and some mom gives you a really good snack.

And that's the end of that story...no moral. Because morals are for later...after a few more seasons...maybe when you're in the 9-10 year old leagues.

Another way to be bread...

Well, you're home now. The first flurry and thrill of being home again for you all has passed, but we have not quite arrived at the time where normalcy returns to its grooves of friction. Not quite yet....it never hits that friction for you and me...it is a thing for the kids...

No, with you and me, it is often just like it is now: I read a funny and tender book and chuckle beside you, you drift off into a Sunday afternoon snooze after a long week dragging stuffed animals and car seats along with you. You're the man! You're my hero! Really! And as you drift off to sleep, you mumble something. I lean over you, "What, honey?" You say it one more time: "I'm so happy to be married to you."

I forget sometimes to breath deep for the smell of bread baking is delicious! I forget that there are other kinds of bread, and other ways to engage in not-so-rich communion between lovers. Even laying here beside you, I read this young man's musings about his experience with the ideas of bread and a woman he loved:

"A beautiful girl. My first girlfriend and I miss her. But she and I were never meant to be. She was in between boyfriends and was too pretty to go without. I was there like a number in a bakery. She pulled the ticket, glanced at it, and waited to exchange me for some loaf of bread or cake or pie or feeling that she was beautiful. I'm just the sap who adored her and wanted to hold her hand or sit close or look into her eyes. But I gave her the slip. Came right out of her hands before she could claim her prize and I bet you, I bet you a million dollars she doesn't even remember that number. She'll just pull another ticket, glance at it, and wait for them to call her out. She won't remember the things I said and won't realize I had never said them to another girl. She'd heard them before and it all ran together like bad poetry. You could see it in her eyes when I talked to her. You could hear it in the way she said thank you when I complimented her dress or the color of her eyes. And I suppose if I'm honest with myself, truly honest, I'd have to say I loved her."

I forget sometimes to be grateful. I forget that there are other men in the world whose hearts are like yours and now and then it occurs to me to pray them well-wishes. As women, we are encouraged to think about all sorts of types of men and the things a world of men might expect from us; it is easy to find such a thought fraught with despair: I could never be all of those things! I heard Rimsky Korsakov's Scheherazade last night. It is like that sometimes...a woman like me thinks that each night--even up to 1001 nights--the story must be so eloquent, so engaging that it holds death at bay for one more day. But now it is not the particular sheikh that drives the feelings of pressure, it is sadly in some ways a Christian culture thing. And outside this small circle where women learn submission, I forget that there are women like the one above, and the men who love them to their own loss. I forget to be grateful that we have found a quiet cove where none of these waters seep in.

I guess some of my thoughts also come from my watching Shadowlands yesterday with its poignant theme: the elixir of love promises that for every ounce of happiness that flows into the cup there is also an ounce of pain, the awareness and then actual life of inevitable separation at the moment of death, and yet the love is so rich as to be worth it.

And some of my thoughts spring from the fact that you have all been gone for the week, but I have you back now...

And as I trace my way along every spoke in this stream-of-consciousness wheel, each one I see leads to the same center: gratitude. I'm so happy to be married to you, too.

And when I cast my list off, I see...

...I discover these things that have each visited me at least three, and sometimes more, times in random fashion over the last few days. Sometimes you defy me to make sense of the things that appear in your world. I extend to you, my love, the same challenge. Make sense of these things that keep floating up from the submerged parts of the iceberg:

• broken down cars with their hoods up: first evidence was seeing what I would have sworn was our son's car in this state, only to see the man walking down the road dejectedly was not after all our son...then happening by on my way home at the exact moment that he and his "savior" arrived to deal with his break-down. The probability that I should witness both his breakdown and his rescue are phenomenal to my mind, but it happened. And not just that, but stories of similar broken-down, hood left up moments... in books, cartoons, etc.
• the word "stain" and its counterpart "stainless" showing up an inordinate amount in multiple sources other than laundry soap commercials.

and finally...

• trolls...which were even in Dilbert this past week.

You say you're not good with the vague stuff that seems to be Divinely given to you from time to time, my dear. Now you see why I can sometime interpret for you those things that seem to have no rhyme nor reason, and why? Because these are the types of synchronicities that lurk in my world. At last, the premiere reason for the List: to serve as an anchor keeping me in the world of the sane. (I'd giggle here, but that might come across as crazy.)

Alone with My List of Things to Do

I talk too much. Actually, the way it expresses itself here is that I type too much. Today is my last Greta Garbo day...my family returns tomorrow. I counted back...it has been at least a decade since I spent all night alone in a residence. I've been in a hotel by myself a couple of times when my husband sent me on a "get-away" but this has been different, no one yelling just outside my bedroom door destroying the illusion of privacy. So now, alone--without anyone to interrupt me or start crying because they "forgot their word" while I was talking--alone like this I ramble on like a blathering idiot, making up for that decade of intermittent breaks in sequential thought.

Three days and nights with no one around. So who am I when no one is in my periphery?

I am a student who gushes essays into cyber space.
I am a minimalist athlete...biking and swimming.
I am a friend on both phone and computer forum.
I am a person who remembers how to entertain myself to the point of sloth.
I don't sleep.
I thought I'd be a cleaner and an organizer, but that ain't happening.
I eat very little, but pretty healthy.
I've basked in the glory of self-appointed activity, but...
...I continue to feel guilty about the things I've not accomplished these few days...

I guess I should now stop whining about this ethereal List of Things I'd get done if I only had the time. I've had three days and nothing on the List is done. Maybe part of me wants an unfinished list...but why? To have cause to wrap up in that scratchy blanket of familiarity called "you're a failure"? Bah. Maybe it is to have something to live for, to keep me waking up the next day. But that reason for the List is even more depressing. So bah to that, too. Maybe, just maybe...shoot, I lost it. I had a really profound reason for the List, too...oh yeah...power. If it is there and I can refuse to do it, then I am the one making the decisions and the work and the obligation are not driving me. (Whew, glad I was able to retrieve that one.) So I guess the purpose of the List is not so much what is on it as the fact that it exists at all, probably for all of the reasons above but mostly the last one. In the words of my oldest son, spoken when he was but five and not feeling so powerful: "At least I'm the boss of my coat." I'm with you, son, at least I'm the boss of my List.

I'll relinquish my list to God tomorrow. Well, I'll relinquish it today, but I'll talk about it tomorrow. For today, I've already talked enough.