the sea is still deeper

In so many ways the world seems to be getting smaller and smaller and with technology and the media and the constant feed of information from around the world, it feels like everything is happening in my own backyard.  The weight of the world starts pressing in on me, suffocating me if I let it. 

Taking in the expanse of the sea lifts that weight.  Did you make the sea? God asks me. Do you keep the gulls in the air?  Do you send the storms and waves to carve out the caves and rocks that, to you, have been here for eons and eons?  All those problems you hear about have been going on for millenia and all the while these ancient bastions of rock and sea have been keeping vigil, unmoved by the problems of the world.  Does the world seem to be falling apart to you?  It has fallen apart before in the eyes of men and women whose only perspective is from their narrow fleeting view from their own lives.  

But I live on, God says.  I live on and it's not over until I say it's over.  Look up!  The sea is still deeper than any man has seen, the sky is still wider than any man can take in at one time, the trees are still older than any one man's lifetime, the rocks will still be here even if the entire world economy fails because I live on and nothing will bring me down.  It's not over until I say it's over.

in the middle of a war

When you're in the middle of a war, you cannot see the ultimate outcome, only the mud beneath your feet and the treacherous minefield that lay before you.  Sometimes when you look back at previous battles, at defining moments of your life when you were fighting for something, you can see that if you had given up at the moments when you were filled with hopelessness, you would have lost the war.  So in retrospect, those defining moments become your great acts of courage, the acts that won the war. But in the moment without the glow and warmth of having triumphed, there is only the mud beneath your feet and the crawling forward on your belly when you have little hope of ever making it through to the other side.

Only when the smoke and gunfire are over do we really know which of our acts turned the tide for victory or for failure.  Only the end will tell us which moments were the defining moments, the moments that changed our lives and the lives around us for good or for ill. 

While the mud sucks at our every step, we wonder...is this a war I will eventually lose?  will I battle but not live to see the victory?  should I give up now and move on?  will I ever see the victory and freedom I'm longing for?  what if the tide turns today and tomorrow I find myself standing with arms outstretched in the light of victory?

Seven years ago I was in a war.  I fought heaven and earth, but no one else really knows.  It was not a visible war.  No one saw me charging with my bayonet or crawling through the brush to ambush the enemy.  No one saw me wiping the blood off the wounded in the middle of the night. I still don't really know how much my fighting determined the outcome, but I know that I fought and that the war was eventually won.

I'm in a different battle these days and I don't know what the final outcome will be. But when faced with the choice now to give up the fight or to keep marching through the sucking mud, I sometimes hear a voice challenging me...what if the next moment wins the war?  what if tomorrow the bloodshed ends?  can you afford to give up now?

tidal wave

I am growing older and can't stop it.  I feel more and more helpless, more and more overwhelmed by life, by the 6:00 news, by noise and clutter and flashing lights and honking horns, by the Internet, by too many choices and decisions, by the clamoring of my own inner needs.  I am only in my fifties.  If I'm feeling this now, what on earth is it going to be like in my sixties? seventies? eighties?  Will I even still be here?  It all gives new meaning to what it means to be "out of control."  I'm realizing that its not just other family members who are beyond my control, or their choices, or co-workers or finances--it's every tiny parcel of every day.  I do not know what is coming today or the next hour or the next minute.  How do you stay open hearted and exposed to the good and the beautiful when you're startling and flinching whenever there is a sudden noise or that unexpected phone call or that physical sensation that you're trying to manage? 

Late in the morning I felt hungry and I was out running errands and decided to get one of my favorite meals.  I stood in line pretending that my whole life was in order, not letting on that I felt weak as a kitten and vulnerable as a naked baby bird.  I bought my meal...have a nice day, the girl behind the counter said.  I needed quiet, so I drove to the river and sat in the car and watched as people here and there fed the geese and pigeons. 

I took a bite of my food and watched a man and a woman and three young girls set their picnic out on the picnic table.  The girls threw bread crumbs to the birds.  I chewed my food but felt a tidal wave of grief welling up and out of my soul.  Stay with it, I told myself.  Look at it.  Feel it. I stopped chewing and stared at my food and let it come, swelling up and up like water filling a cavern, rising and suddenly spilling over the top until the tears were dripping down and I had to gasp to breathe. 

It was my daughter and all that's been lost, it was my oldest's suffering I had recently witnessed,  it was about my brother being gone--we are not five anymore, we are four--no more chances with him.  He's gone. It was about the stress and relentless strain of the last three years. It was about aging and about loneliness--these moments that are lived out of the deep wells of our lives are always lived out alone.  They can't be shared.  The depth and breadth and the waves and currents are too much to get out in words. 

I listened to the music playing on my car stereo.  I listened to one song over and over.  I pressed the replay button--three times, five times, ten times, and let the grief spill out.  I listened and watched the three girls feed the geese and then the gulls--the gulls riding and sailing the wind, spiraling up, riding silently down, now this way, now that, a mass of gray and white living leaves riding the wind.  I let what was sealed up inside come to the surface and gasp. 

Having time alone and having the quiet and giving myself space and privacy to let the waters well up and spill out was what I needed. When the waters rise, the leaves and debris float on the surface and finally are washed out when the waters spill over the top.  It leaves the basin cleaner.  A clean basin is easier to manage--less debris. 

It doesn't change any of the circumstances that cause me grief but it does allow me to accept them and make room for them without trying to control them.  It allows for the co-existence of pain and peace.  It takes that festering wound, sealed over with taut, red and swollen skin that's too tender to touch and brings it into the healing air, let's it begin to heal.

more sure than ever before

"Life is complex...But if I tell you that when I lost my way, I found it again by following the moss growing on the north side of trees, I will almost certainly have to warn you that in the redwood forests there are many trees covered with moss on all sides...I hope you will abandon the urge to simplify everything...[and] appreciate the fact that life is complex."

                                                             --M. Scott Peck, M.D., Further Along the Road Less Traveled

During the final years of my first marriage, which ultimately died and ended in divorce, one of the most difficult things I had to face in myself was the fact that I had for so long made excuses, rationalized, provided (weak) explanations, covered up, and in many other ways pretended...until I couldn't hold the facade together anymore.  It was a shock to me when, unable to hold the mask up any longer, I began to tell the truth, and then discovered how many people had seen the truth long before I did.

The fact that I could not or would not face the truth and, therefore, could not or would not see the truth, shook me to the core and still affects me today.  It shook my confidence in my ability to see things as they really are.  Life has become much more complex to me since my divorce and since I've gotten older.  I am less sure of more things...more sure of a few things.

There have been too many times in my life now when I have made judgements about others only to discover how terribly misguided my judgements were.  There have been too many times in my life now when I was positive I was seeing clearly, only to discover I wasn't seeing clearly at all.  There have been too many times now in my life when I've lost hope, only to see the impossible happen right before my eyes.  I've been dogmatic about beliefs that now 20...30...40 years later, I've given up altogether.

Now in my fifties, dealing with new challenges...aging, relationships that I thought would last forever, now gone...I am less sure about many, many things...and yet, more sure about a few things than ever before.

off ramp

Every workday morning, I take the same highway to downtown, and I exit the highway on the same off ramp on my way to work.  Every workday morning.

On Wednesday morning of this week, I sat on that off ramp and while waiting for the light to change and looking out my driver's side car window, I saw--really saw--for the first time, the grandest of oak trees.  How could I have missed it so many times before?  But there it was in its silent grandeur, it's reaching branches and its trunk miles around in circumference, standing silently as it had for maybe 80 years, certainly longer than the highway had been there.  And the world rushes by every morning in all its pressing busyness...so busy, such important business to take care of, so much pressing in on every side...and the oak stands and lets it all go rushing by...doing what it has been doing for years...growing, reaching, living, sending roots down deep, silently and slowly sucking up life into leaves and branches and leaflets, silently and slowly...very slowly...so not in a hurry...becoming what it was meant to be.  

Let the world rush by in its perceived self-importance and rush, let it all rush by in such pretentious self-absorption...the oak is not distracted or misguided or caught off guard...it just does, everyday, what it was meant to do--grow--slowly--steadily--silently--into its grandeur.

appearances

I have always known a few people who, at least on the surface, appear to have taken charge of their lives.  They seem to know what they can control and what they cannot.  They do not indulge in self-doubt.  They do not procrastinate.  They appear to have perfect marriages and problem-free children.  They are helpful people, always ready to give me advice about how to get my own life in order.  They would be wonderful company if they didn't make me feel like such a failure.  But the real trouble is, I don't believe them.  

The perfectly functioning people are always people I do not know very well. 

                                  

                                                                                                           --The Awakened Heart, Gerald May

observations of a child

We have clearly lost something when we are no longer free just to be, when we must always be active, doing some things and refraining from doing others.  Something is missing when we have to force our pauses, carve out our spaces, and then feel we have to justify them.  As a result, recreation often means engaging in more pleasurable work, not freedom from having to work at all.

                                                                                                    --Gerald May, The Awakened Heart

Of all the people I know, my grandchildren are the most free to just be.  And when they are with me, they give me opportunity to be the same.  In fact, they have a way of slowing life down--way down--and, unless I miss it by insisting that they hurry up and be efficient, they create space for me to just be as well.  

It has been said that for us to truly experience heaven on earth, we must become like little children. I've wondered what it is about children that we must become like, and since I became a grandparent, I've come to believe that one of the qualities is the ability to be really present in the present moment.  Something we find as adults that we have lost. 

It is the simple things that make me happiest now.  You have dreams as a young person, you long for this or that experience, and then as you get older you find that one of the greatest pleasures in life is sitting on the back patio with a child and letting the present moment with all its fullness unfold--in conversation, in the sights and sounds, and in listening to the thoughts and observations of a child.

I wish you well

With Christmas past and the intensity of the holiday season over, I went into recovery mode and, other than going to work each day, I gave myself time to coast for a little while and to retreat. In the evenings I worked on the puzzle that Danny gave me for Christmas and I took my time putting away the decorations and cleaning up the house. It felt like the necessary antidote and prescription for the toll that the preceding weeks had taken.

After spending one of those very quiet days in the house all day, I did venture out one evening after dark to make a specific purchase being careful to avoid the busiest stores filled with all those people eager to return their Christmas gifts for something better or at least something that fit. My plan was to enter the store, make my purchase, and escape back to the safety of home as quickly as possible, but as I stood in line for the cashier, someone I had been close to more than ten years before appeared and joined the cue. It was good to see him and we caught up briefly. How was your Christmas? Did you get to see your family? Yes, I'm trying to recover now too.

We had run into each other a number of times before over the last ten years but we hadn't really had much conversation beyond the courtesies and as we walked out of the store and prepared to say polite goodbyes, I wondered if I should continue the conversation. Maybe he was in a hurry to get home? I tried to read the cues and then a question was asked that opened the door to more than a polite goodbye, see you in another decade or two.

It turned out that we stood underneath the parking lot lights and talked for a long time and it seemed impossible that a decade had really gone by. It was one of those conversations that goes beyond words and catching up on the news of each others lives and ends up being something that comforts and reassures and brings the satisfaction that we're almost always longing for in our interactions with other human beings. Things have happened over these past years, do you understand? Do I dare tell you what I really think and feel?

Somehow, despite the years between, I knew again that we were friends. I'm not even sure what indications were actually given that safety and understanding were being offered, but my heart knew. When I arrived home and recounted the experience to Ruben, the safety and understanding spread to him as well and it led to more conversation that brought about even more comfort and reassurance and I told him how I want to be able to offer that to people, to be able to encounter them even after the years have gone by and things have changed and they have changed and just allow them to be who they have become, to say what they have experienced, to feel differently than they did before, and to communicate that It's ok, I accept you as you are and as you have become. It's ok that life has changed what you think and feel. It's good to talk to you and to hear how you are and I wish you well. May you truly have a happy new year.

envy

In the middle of a mostly very content life, I am occasionally assaulted by envy.  In one moment I'm fine...contented, happy.  And then I witness the prospering in some way of my neighbor and suddenly I feel an insidious resentment that I don't have what they have.  It feels unfair, as though I deserve every good gift that anyone else receives, as though I deserve what they have, whether or not they have the good gifts that I've been given.  It's a serious case of selfishness and greed and it's distressing how quickly I can go from a state of peace to a state of irritability and negativity.

A certain experience when I was in my late twenties that involved washing clothes with a rub board taught me a lesson, and I look back to that experience over and over when I feel those waves of envy that take a day full of color and life and turn it into a gray drudgery because I don't have what someone else has.  The essence of the lesson was to consciously take in the good I've been given and to deliberately let go of the drive to have more.  The essence of the lesson was that gratitude is the key to contentment.  Deliberate gratitude. 

Another person's bounty reminds me that wonderful things can happen at any time to anybody.  I will appreciate the many good gifts I've been given.

                                                                                                                                  --Courage to Change

music

Sometimes you have to watch someone love something before you can love it yourself.  It is as if they are showing you the way.

                                                                                       --Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz

My husband loves music.  He hears music everywhere and if no music is actually playing, he hears music in his head.  He hears the different instruments, he hears the difference between this arrangement and that arrangement, he hears the beat and the rhythm and the melody and the bass line and the background harmonies.  He has been hearing music in his head ever since he was very young and in those moments when you can tell that he has drifted away into his own thoughts, it is often into the depths of music that he has drifted.

 

Watching Ruben love music has taught me how to love music.  Since he plays the bass guitar and I've listened to him play with various bands, I've learned to hear more clearly the bass line in music.  Seeing what goes into a band setting up and listening to the difference each instrument makes, listening closely to the lyrics, learning the background and meaning to songs, learning to hear the different chords and the changes in rhythm and the melodies layered on top have all helped me to hear so much more.  Now sometimes I turn the music up very loud when I'm alone and I listen intentionally to hear each of the pieces that is making the whole and I can disappear into that dimension of sound, that place where Ruben goes in his head that I've only just begun to be able to really see. I'm learning to really savor some of what I've been oblivious to because he has helped show me the way.  And on top of all of that, is the mystery of music which even Ruben cannot explain of how certain sounds can move our emotions or flood us with memory or bring us to tears.

So now that Ruben has been showing me the way, I can love and appreciate music and sound far more than I could before and I can drift away into the beautiful depths as well.  And while he has been pointing out the sounds around us, I've been showing him that dark afternoon shadows are really purple and that the white light on the tops of the trees in the morning is actually pink.

burying my brother

On Saturday, December 15, 2012, ten days before Christmas, my family and I buried my brother.  I had been contemplating more and more as I got older what it was going to be like to have to lose my parents.  I was not thinking that I might lose my brother before that.

I received the call from my sister while I was standing outside of the bank with my husband...just standing there in the parking lot about to get in the car and the call came.  He was gone.  He had fallen after dinner, maybe his heart, I don't know, but he was gone, she said.  I wailed, "No! No! No!", but it didn't make any difference.  I clung to the phone that night crying and listening to my parents and my sister crying...we hung on the phone and cried together, several thousand miles apart.

We flew to Texas the next day and by that night I was wrapping my arms around my little mother saying, "I'm sorry...I'm sorry, Mom...I'm so sorry!"  What else is there to say?  The next four days were filled with decisions and planning, sometimes heartlessly demanding.  My mother never looked as small as she did the day I saw her standing in a room full of caskets, nodding her head at one, pain etched across her face in silence, tears running down her cheeks.

I stood at the podium in the chapel, unable to stop shaking, unable to steady my voice, barely able to read the words on my pieces of paper.  All so surreal.  I saw his body and knew it was him, but asked myself silently, "Is it really him?  Why do his hands look so old?"

We buried him on my parents' land, there near the road, there where Mom could watch over him and know that there would be no more suffering, just the absence that we will all have to live with and the loss of all that could have been.  The next morning while it was still dark, I walked outside wearing Mom's winter coat that she has hanging by the back door.  I stood there by the mound of dirt and told him I was sorry and late that afternoon Mom and I planted bluebonnet seeds across the soil and watered them hoping they will come to life in the spring.

You never know what's coming.  One of the hardest things about life is keeping an open, receptive heart when you know full well that tomorrow could bring the shock of loss or betrayal or death...with no second chances.  I've lost my brother.  I know where he is...he is on the other side of that river and I will see him again one day, but today...he is gone and there is a grief that fills that emptiness. 

so stop pretending and tell the truth

You know how when someone is talking to you and they're working from behind a facade and you can sense the pretending?  You know how you feel when they tell you things that you know for a fact are not true and they're trying to paint a different picture?  Maybe they're embarrassed and so they won't get real about stuff.  Maybe they're arrogant and won't face the truth about themselves or others or things in general.  Maybe they're inviting you to their house for an evening and you know they're involved in a pyramid scheme and just want to get you on board with their efforts to make themselves some money.  They come across like the salesperson that knocks on your door in the evening when you're tired from working all day and they force you to be rude because they just won't take no for an answer.  They're not really talking to you, they're trying to make you do something.

I think God probably feels the same feelings a lot.  Sometimes I think He's listening to us and thinking, "You know, just stop the talk and just tell me the truth."  God isn't offended by our honesty, no matter how virulent.  It's what He wants.  So stop the pretending and tell the truth.

in the canned vegetable aisle

I was on a cleaning binge recently.  I had started early in the morning and the more I cleaned the better I felt.  I can be really losing it emotionally and sometimes the fastest cure is cleaning the bathrooms and mopping the kitchen floor.  So I was cleaning and couldn't stop, even though Ruben and I had planned to run some errands.  Just a little more, I kept telling him. 

Finally, we left on our errands and at our first stop, I caught sight of an old friend across the store.  We had been friends over a decade before and had drifted apart, our lives going in very different directions.  We hadn't talked in years.  Besides that, she had been struggling in her marriage back then and I had tried to encourage her in it, but it had been me that ended up divorced, and I had never known what she thought of me after that.  I wasn't sure I wanted to find out now and so I hid in the canned vegetable aisle.

But a few minutes later, I came around a corner and nearly ran into her and when I said her name, she looked up and seemed genuinely glad to see me.  After exchanging brief generic greetings, I found out that she lived overseas now and that she was actually flying back the next day and only happened to be in the store looking for some last minute items before she finished packing for the flight.  I asked her how she was...how are you really, I asked.  She looked back at me as if to see if I really meant it and then the tears filled her eyes and she began to pour it out.  I stood there feeling like I was on holy ground...be quiet, I thought, this is grief and great hardship.   She described the barreness in her marriage, that she didn't think she could last more than a few more months, she spoke of the tremendous difficulties of her day-to-day life in another country and culture.  She told me she was a failure.

Whatever I have imagined that people have thought of me because of my divorce, one thing I discovered that I had not anticipated was that there was a great mercy...even for me.  I touched my friend's arm and told her that I had worried about what she thought of me because my marriage failed, that I felt like a failure too, but that I had discovered that there is a great, great mercy for those of us who fail.  There is mercy for you, too, I told her.  Lots and lots of mercy to make up for all the failures and sorrows and grief.  She asked me if I would pray for her whenever she came to mind.  She asked me to remember her email address and if I ever felt prompted to write her, it would be greatly appreciated she said.  I knew she had to go, she had a trip to pack for and a plane to catch.  So we hugged and said good bye and she was gone.

As we drove away, I told Ruben what had happened while I stood in the canned vegetable aisle.  I told him that it seemed to me to be a divine encounter.  There was a reason why I was driven to keep cleaning and cleaning this morning.  There was a ten-minute window in time when two lives living on two different continents would bump into each other in a store and an appointment was being orchestrated, an appointment where failures could be spoken out and mercy shared to cover them.  May God bless my friend, wherever she is right now.

shackled

My children are adults now.  They are no longer children.  They must live their own lives, and they need freedom from me—the one who wanted to meet all their needs and couldn’t.  My role has changed from the one who was to give all to the one who must let go of all.  Know where they are at every moment for over 25 years and then—stop.  Stop and let go and let them live their lives.  And reflect on all the things you thought were so right and so important and see now that they weren’t important or that you were flat-out wrong.  You were misinformed, you thought you saw things the way they were, but you saw incorrectly.  You thought you were loving, but you were only protecting yourself.  You thought you knew what would equip them best, but you ended up shackling their souls.  You thought they would remember and feel loved, but they remember and feel hurt. 

It's not the entire truth.  It's not the whole story.  But it is part of the truth, and it is part of the story. The part you hoped would never happen.