Tag: Loss

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Not Talking about the Trinity

Photo of three small lit tea candles, but we are not talking about the Trinity.

[This week, I’m posting a sermon I delivered at St. Michael and All Angels. Back to regular posts next week!]

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

How many times have I said those words and made that gesture without thinking about it?

When Father Joe asked me to preach today, his email included this note, “Fair warning,” he said. “It’s Trinity Sunday.” To be honest, at first I didn’t really know why he was warning me. I guess I’ve never paid much attention to the feast of the Trinity.

So, I did what I often do when I’m confronted with mystery. I fired up my laptop and typed “preaching on Trinity Sunday” into google. I found things like “Dear Priests: The Top Five Heresies to Avoid This Trinity Sunday”; or this one: “It’s Heresy Sunday: Don’t Fall for the Trap”; and my favorite: “Tweeting Trinity: Because Heresy is Meh,” which unfolded as a series of 66 tweets. We’ll come back to #61 later.

I was starting to understand Father Joe’s warning,

so I made a snap decision. We’re not going to talk about the Trinity today. I’m going to leave deepening our understanding of the triune nature of God to the professionals.

Instead, I want to talk about Nicodemus and his conversation with Jesus in today’s gospel. Nicodemus is a Pharisee, a leader of the Jews. The Jewish Virtual Library describes the Pharisees as “blue collar Jews” who are the “spiritual fathers of modern Judaism.”

Nicodemus “came to Jesus by night,” presumably to avoid being seen. He starts the conversation with what seems to me to be an unequivocal declaration of faith.  “We know that you are a teacher who has come from God,” he says. That’s his going in position: knowledge–not suspicion, not curiosity, not hope. “We know,” Nicodemus says. “No one could do what you do without the presence of God.” Of course, he doesn’t say that Jesus is “the son of God,” but if I get sidetracked by that technicality, we might end up talking about the Trinity, and we’re not going to do that today. Suffice it to say that Nicodemus knows that Jesus has come from God.

The last thing Nicodemus says is “How can these things be?” I have been thinking that living in the space between those two comments— “we know that you are of God,” and “how can these things be?” — might define our lives as Christians. F. Scott Fitzgerald writes, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

It occurs to me that to call ourselves Christians

is to do exactly that: to declare our willingness to sit with mystery.

In between those two statements by Nicodemus, Jesus says a lot of important and famous things.  “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above” and “no one can enter the kingdom without being born of water and the spirit.”

We know that Nicodemus is “astonished” by these words, because Jesus says to him, “Do not be astonished.”

But let’s leave Nicodemus with his jaw hanging open in astonishment for just a moment. I want to tell you about the butterflies. Not just any butterflies, but a few dozen specific butterflies hanging from the eaves at Bosque School about two weeks ago. On Wednesday morning, they began to emerge from their chrysalides. We watched in awe as each chrysalis first opened, as a new creature stepped gingerly into the world. They hung there for hours. While we watched, each butterfly unfurled one wing at a time, then the two wings would start to spread apart and stretch open. Finally, early that afternoon, the first butterfly stepped off the overhang and flew.

I couldn’t stop thinking about them. These beautiful creatures, (Cathy Bailey came by and told us they were mourning cloaks) have been here before. What I was witnessing wasn’t their first birth. They knew the earth first as something to crawl upon and now they know it as something to soar over. Maybe that’s what it’s like to be born from above, to be born of the holy spirit.

But we are not talking about the Trinity this morning.

Let’s get back to Nicodemus. In this country, we love to evaluate teachers. In that spirit, when Jesus turns to Nicodemus and says, “Aren’t you a teacher of Israel? I can’t believe you don’t understand this,” one might conclude that this wasn’t Jesus’ finest teaching moment.

Wouldn’t it have been nice if Jesus had said something like, “Oh, I see these metaphors aren’t working for you. Let me lay it out more simply”?

But far be it be from me, a person who is afraid to talk about the Trinity on Trinity Sunday, to rewrite Jesus’s lines for him. Instead, Jesus doubles down on the figurative language. He says,

“The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

In other words, be willing to sit with the mystery.

The wonder I felt that Wednesday morning

watching the butterflies emerge and soar lasted exactly forty-eight hours. Friday morning, at work at Bosque again, the chrysalides were hanging empty from the eaves, and I started getting texts from my husband.  Sadly, you probably know where I am going with this. The names of the cities are starting to blur. That morning, it was Santa Fe, Texas where an angry young white man showed up at his school and started shooting. Two days ago, just before I left my house to attend a joyous graduation ceremony at Bosque, a seventh grade boy in Noblesville, Indiana, started shooting his classmates.

I find myself standing here before Jesus, among all of you, friends and fellow believers, and all I have are the words of Nicodemus. “I know you are from God” I repeat, almost like a mantra in the face of suffering, almost as though I am trying to convince myself. I know you are from God, I say. Yet “how can these things be?”

Nicodemus shows up two more times in John’s gospel. In chapter seven he reminds the chief priests that the law requires them to give Jesus a hearing before convicting him. Then, after the crucifixion, Nicodemus brings the burial spices and, with Joseph of Arimathea, wraps the body of Jesus in the burial cloths, and lays him in the tomb.

I have one more short story

to share with you this morning; my third, if anyone is counting. (Not that the number three has any special meaning to me today.) In between those two school shootings, while I was trying to write a sermon that either would or wouldn’t be about the Trinity, I met up with an old student to have a drink and catch up. He’s in his thirties and highly successful by any measure. As a person who served in the military doing dangerous work in Afghanistan, he has experienced more suffering and death than I likely ever will. Talking with him I was reminded of a time when I experienced a great loss. In 2011, a student I loved killed himself a few days before the beginning of his senior year.

In the wake of that loss, I was trying very hard to pretend I was fine. When people kept pointing out to me that I wasn’t, I finally went to talk to Brian Taylor. When even your priest tells you to talk to a therapist, you figure it’s time. My problem was that I had become terrified to love in such a fragile world. To heal, I had to remember to love anyway. I had to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and retain my ability to function. I like to think that that’s what Nicodemus was doing as he laid Jesus’s body in the tomb.

So. If this had been a sermon about the Trinity,

you might be tempted to think that the story about the butterflies was a story about God the creator, and that the story about the school shootings was a metaphor for Jesus’s earthly suffering on the cross. You might even think that my own slow decision to let love call me back to the things of the world reveals the movement of the spirit.

But you would be wrong. The only thing I understand about how God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one is that love wins. Tweet 61 from “Tweeting the Trinity because Heresy is Meh” says “So can we speak of God? Yes! (because of revelation). Do we know what we mean? No! (because what’s revealed is a mystery).”

What I have to say on this Trinity Sunday, on this Memorial Day weekend, is that all that I know about what I mean is that as Christians, we are called to sit with the awesome mystery of Christ’s redemptive love.

In the name of the creator, and of earthly beauty and pain, and of the mighty, mysterious power of redemptive love. Amen.

Happy Memorial Day weekend! This post is the text of the sermon I preached at St. Michael and All Angels this morning. (At some point, that link should take you to the audio version.) If you enjoyed reading my work, please feel free to share and to invite your friends to follow LiveLoveLeave.

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Hard Days

Photo of hikers emerging from a cave into sunlight.

Many years ago (call it 2007) I was in the middle of one of those long stretches of hard days. My father had just died in West Virginia and my mother-in-law was dying in my family room.

I was teaching high school and Fred was teaching at the community college. He had a great schedule: all of his classes were on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so he had plenty of time to care for his mother. Part of this care involved managing the troupe of hospice workers who saved our lives every day.

They brought things Ann refused to use,

like oxygen and a hospital bed. They convinced her to do things she refused to do, like take a shower, or speak to the doctor, or sleep in her bedroom at night.

They took her blood pressure, listened to her lungs, and helped us find a good sleeping chair. Hospice workers taught me how  to help with adult diapers and  to apply the cream she needed for the rash under her breasts.

On good days, I’d listen forever to her stories–often fabulous tales with a recurring theme: life would have been better if only [fill in the blank] hadn’t wronged her.

On hard days I seethed while she complained about Fred or about the meal I had just made her. “I can’t eat this garbage,” she might say, on a day that wasn’t good for either of us.

That was a rough spell. Coming as it did on the heels of both my father-in-law’s and my father’s deaths, and in the midst of my mother’s worsening dementia, those were hard days. Even our dogs had started dying.

I look back on those hard days now

and can see how my focus telescoped in. Breathing and moving. Those were the things I knew. Inhale, exhale, and keep walking through the obstacle course as it unravels before you. One day you climb over a rotting fence, one day you belly crawl through thorny underbrush, and one day you leap over or (screw it) stomp through mud puddles.

Maybe you even have one day when you lie on the couch and pretend the world can take care of itself, because even the air has become too heavy for you to carry.

On one day like that, I stayed home from work. Ann must have been sleeping, because I can’t find her in this memory. The lone member of the hospice troupe scheduled for that morning was a woman named Mary.

I’d never met her before, but Fred knew her well. I don’t remember her title, but she seemed to be the “caring for the caregivers” member of the team. I put a pot of coffee on and she and Fred launched into conversation.

I hung on the fringes,

gave them some space, and poured the coffee when it was ready. Determined to be a spectator in this conversation, I wasn’t ready when Mary turned to me and said, “And how are you doing?”

What I mean by “I wasn’t ready” is that I didn’t smile and say something like, “I’m fine, Fred is really bearing the brunt of this.” Mary blew that simple trumpet, and all my walls came tumbling down.

When my mother-in-law was dying I didn’t dig; I didn’t open my heart to wonder why she was preparing to leave this world with so little affection for it. Her stories were set-pieces, polished works that I let pour over me like tiny stones.

I was afraid to pick them up and learn what they weighed. I smiled and nodded through Ann’s last six months, occasionally generous, often resentful.

When Mary asked me how I was doing, I talked and cried for a long time. I’m not exaggerating when I say she changed me forever. Her simple question gave me permission to feel what I was feeling. She taught me that I didn’t have to be strong, that I could set my little piece of sky down once in while so I could rest.

Oscar Wilde said

“The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.” He was right about that, but in those hard days I felt like I was being precocious in racking up so many losses. My friends were still visiting their parents for holidays and dinner parties, not going to doctors’ appointments or writing eulogies.

Lately, though, and sadly, that has started to change. My friends’ parents are receiving hard diagnoses, entering hospice, passing judgment on their own long lives. My friends are walking beside their parents, holding up the sky as best they can.

I’m watching from the other side, wondering how to be helpful.

All that comes is a line from a poem by John Matthias.   “When my father finished playing dying/I began…”

The line is from a poem titled “Poem for Cynouai” that I first heard the poet himself read when I was in college. He was my teacher, and the poem moved me deeply. Whenever I forget what it means to write poetry, I read that poem and remember.

Right now, the book that holds that poem is sealed in a box in what used to be my mother-in-law’s closet. I packed most of my books a few years ago when we first thought we might sell this too-big house. We filled neatly labelled boxes and stacked them on top of one another like drawers in a mausoleum.

I can’t find “Poem for Cynouai” online (except in pieces in that review I linked to above). The words remain alive in me, but I can’t touch them. I can’t read the lines above or below the one line I remember. I can’t ask the poem questions or turn the page to see what follows.

It’s something like that, all of these losses.

I am not sure

why John Matthias showed up in my kitchen while I was writing this morning, or why Mary the hospice worker came to mind as the coffee brewed. What I do know is that a number of my friends are in the middle of things I’ve made it to the other side of.

I feel like I should have something to offer them: useful notes from the journey, maybe, or dispatches from the far shore. Instead, I feel like the friend I spoke with the other morning.

He’s in the middle of the obstacle course right now; he’s climbing, leaping, wading, striding, trudging–dealing with each hurdle as it appears. From where he stands, I imagine, there is no such thing as looking around or beyond or ahead.

“I wake up every morning,” he said, “and I don’t know.”

I remember that feeling.

In those long stretches of hard days it’s as though you signed up to run a race and no one will show you a map of the course or tell you how long you’ll be running. All you can do is put the next foot down, and then put the next foot down again.

Right now, though, I’m in the middle of a stretch of good days. Or maybe I am not in the middle at all; maybe I’m at the beginning, and these good days are going to unroll into the future as far as I can see. Or not–maybe I’ve lived through most of them already and my next obstacle course is waiting just around the corner.

In his poem “Evening” my old friend Rilke says, “It is alternately stone in you and star.”  I don’t know. But if I were going to send any news from the star days, maybe it’s just that they came back. Life came to its senses eventually and got back to the business of living.

In the meantime, it’s good to have friends who help you hold up the sky.

Thanks for reading! If you like LiveLoveLeave, please tell your friends! (And don’t forget to add your email address to receive every essay as soon as it’s posted. )

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Pop!

It’s one-thirty Wednesday afternoon, and I’m standing in a sunny classroom blowing up an imaginary bubble. I make my fingers into a tube, hold them to my mouth, and blow.

I’m with nine teenagers and about fifteen pre-schoolers, participating in Project Serve, an afternoon of service learning at my school. The teenagers have been studying early childhood music education, and today they are putting that training to work for the first time. I don’t have a job here; the “big buddies” are in charge.

Once my bubble is all blown up, I make exaggerated spritzing motions with my finger and squeaky noises with my imaginary squeegee, cleaning my bubble so I can look around and see all my friends in their bubbles. When we’re all enclosed in our own protective spaces, we’re ready to sing and move around the room without crashing in to one another. A big buddy I’ll call Vee leads us in a song in Spanish about a statue garden (at least that’s what I think it’s about; I’m only one week in to Spanish class). When she says, “Asi!” we all stop and make crazy statue poses inside our bubbles.

I have an unusual job. My morning began at the Lucky 66 bowIing alley with seventy ninth-graders. The freshmen are bowling because the tenth and eleventh graders are taking the PSAT, and the seniors are sprawled across the building we call the schoolhouse, working on college applications. The original plan was to take the ninth graders to the corn maze, but we’re in a drought, so the corn never grew high enough to cut a maze into the stalks. I hope the short corn doesn’t mean the cranes won’t winter in this field, but that’s a thought for another essay.

The class of 2017 fills the first twenty-two lanes. Twenty-three and twenty-four next to us are empty (this bowling alley owner knows what he’s doing), and the rest of the lanes are occupied by a women’s senior citizen league. It’s nice, I think throughout the morning, this spectrum we make from one end of the building to the other: exuberant youth yields to blank space, which matures into rich old age. The students notice the women, too, but not the symbolism.  “Those old ladies know how to bowl!” one of them tells me on the way back to the bus.

Bowling always takes me back to Pittsburgh.  My friends and I spent lots of weekends and summer days bowling at the alley across the street from the Howard Johnson’s on the way down the hill toward Kaufman’s. There’s a Galleria there now, but if you live in Pittsburgh, you know that I’d never say I bowled at the lanes near the Galleria; they will always be the lanes up the street from where Kaufman’s used to be.

As far as I know, this firm adherence to yesterday’s landscape is strictly a Pittsburgh phenomenon. If I were to tell you how to get to my high school (which doesn’t exist anymore), I would tell you to turn left where the Heigh-Ho used to be. The Heigh-Ho burned down long before I ever went to high school, but if you want to know where to turn, you need to know that the Italian restaurant whose name no one knows is the Italian restaurant that’s where the Heigh-Ho used to be.

If we weren’t bowling across the street from the HoJo, chances are we were bowling at Caste Village, down the hill from where Aunt Ann and Uncle Don used to live, where you could still roll duckpins in the late seventies.

There’s one another anomaly about getting from one place to another in Pittsburgh that has shaped me in ways I haven’t fully explored yet. The first time my husband came home with me, we decided to make a quick trip to the mall. At the end of my parents’ driveway, Fred said, “Which way should I go?”

I told him the truth, which was, “It doesn’t matter.” He looked at me a little funny, but turned left. At the bottom of the hill, he asked again, “Which way should I go?” And I told him again, “It doesn’t matter.” It’s hard to understand these sort of directions if you grew up in a city on a grid, but most of the time if you want to get anywhere in Pittsburgh, you have to go over a hill or through a hill or around a hill, and it doesn’t much matter how you do it. Somehow you get where you are going.

After bowling two games, the freshman class, the other chaperones, and I head back to school. I stop in the schoolhouse to visit the seniors, and a student I’ve taught for the past two years asks me to read her college application essay.

Do you know how, after someone you love dies, you walk around for a little while without any skin? You feel everything; there’s a tender rawness in the air that tugs your heart outside your body and pins it, flapping, to your sweater.

My student doesn’t quite say those words in her essay, but she tells how she lost a woman who was a second mother to her when she was ten years old. She writes about how frightening it was to let people get close to her, how hard it was to learn to be vulnerable again, and how she finally grew into the strong and independent young woman I know.

She wants feedback on her writing. She wants to talk about how to make her essay more powerful and whether she needs all those commas in the second paragraph. She doesn’t want to talk about the old gash in her heart, or about the crack just now opening in response in mine, so I find myself saying the things I should say, like “Can you write about a specific time when you let someone in?” and “Do you remember a specific moment when you learned you could solve problems on your own?”

Her eyes grow soft while we talk, and I am having trouble keeping mine from doing the same, and this is what it means to teach high school. Students with their invisible stories ask teachers, who keep their own stories tucked in, about sentence structure, specific details, and semicolons, while what we’re all trying to say to each other is “I get scared, too,” and “yes, love will tear you apart.” We keep going up and over and around hills, and somehow we get where we’re going.

I say a few last words about her essay and it’s time to head to U8 to meet my service learning group. Over the course of one afternoon, I watch nine students transform into teachers. They start with their “Hello” song according to plan, and the first group of preschoolers is easy; they wave, they sing “Hi,” they pat their heads and stomp their feet. Everything the “big buddies” do works.

The second group is hard; some “little buddies” just aren’t going to sing or clap or pose like statues today. I watch the teenagers realize they need to improvise; they change their plan, they grab the interest they do see and run with it, reacting to the smiles and needs on the tiny faces before them.

The final group of little buddies is tiny and enthusiastic, and none of the big buddies wants to let them go home. We all wave and say goodbye and watch them walk across campus toward their bus. I imagine the bowling alley arcing back beyond the freshmen; I see these little bodies pushing round balls down smooth, bumpered alleys.

When the tiny ones are gone and the big buddies are putting the room back together, the energy is palpable. They talk about the kid in the yellow shirt who loved the bass, the goofy kid in the puffy jacket who made them laugh, the little girl who wouldn’t do anything but put her head on the floor. I recognize their euphoria, the adrenaline rush, the exhausted high a good teaching day leaves after the last student takes her story home.

All afternoon while I’ve been clapping and stomping and singing songs about shoes, I’ve been fighting back tears. Actually, not just tears. Do other people have these perfectly happy moments, when you become so overcome that you know that if you don’t keep everything in, what is going to come out of you is not a tear or two but a full-fledged, inconveniently timed sob?  I think this might be what James Wright is talking about in “A Blessing” when he says

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

After the little buddies clean their bubbles, a big buddy asks, “What should we do with our bubbles now?” One little boy raises his hand so hard he levitates. “Pop the bubble,” he yells. Another little boy’s whole body smiles as he takes up the refrain, “Pop the bubble! Pop the bubble!”

The blossoming teacher before me promises them they can pop their bubbles at the end of class, so it’s really important to keep their bubbles safe and whole until then. It’s an inspired improvisation, and sure enough, at the end of class, she remembers her promise.

“Ok,” she tells them, “it’s time! Let’s all pop our bubbles.” Tiny fingers make poking motions and popping noises and then it’s done.

We all step out of our protective coatings and take our stories out into the world.

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Gentle

On the floor of the room where I write, a little round rug, a souvenir from the trip to Las Vegas where we saw the Cirque du Soleil “Love” show, proclaims “ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE” in friendly capital letters. The rug was expensive as souvenirs go, but Fred and I both knew when we saw it that it belonged in our home.

Lately I’ve been caught up in the gentle things of the world. I proctor a study hall every other day at work. Ninth graders who are finding their way in the world of high school come for about forty-five minutes, take out their books, and, for the most part, study. We meet in a beautiful classroom; sunlight pours in from a wall of windows overlooking a grassy quad. It’s peaceful in study hall.

Sometimes when I’m working at home in my office, my dog comes in and stretches out on the love rug. When he does this while I’m practicing the violin, I know that what the rug says is true.

Last week in study hall, the students were playful. Ninth grade homework must have been light. They were playing on their phones, I was pretending not to notice, and Google was celebrating its 15th birthday with a piñata doodle. (If you know what I’m talking about, let me just say that I stopped at 48 candies. I was proud of my restraint.) One of the boys announced, in my favorite part of study hall that happens after the kids are free to go and four or five of them stay around and argue about math formulae, that he had just realized that “If Google played soccer, he’d be on my team.” This is what it means to be fifteen.

Sometimes after I play my violin for too long, when I’ve gotten obsessed by the challenge of shifting to play an A harmonic in tune, or when I’m trying to memorize Beethoven’s Minuet in G without sounding like the band in The Music Man, I lie on the rug and stretch. After freeing my neck and shoulders, I press up into downward dog. Sometimes, if Rusty has stuck around for the whole practice, he walks under my downward dog, stretches effortlessly into his own, folds his paws, and settles like a sausage in the space between my body and the love rug.

This past weekend, the Animal Injustice Prevention Society at my school held a dog-a-thon to raise money for Watermelon Ranch, a no-kill animal shelter. Kids in purple t-shirts filled a grassy field with plastic kiddy-pools full of soapy water. Happy dogs meandered among the pools after their baths, sniffing, licking, frolicking, loving strangers indiscriminately. It was Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grand Jatte come to life, tempered with Chicago’s Saturday in the Park, a song I danced to with an umbrella in Susan Pierson’s basement, when I was even younger than those kids in my study hall. I want to say to them now, “Listen, children, all is not lost, all is not lost, oh no, no…”

Sometimes in the room with the “All you need is love” rug I read the news on my iPad. This is where I am when I read the Pope’s interview in America and feel myself beginning to forgive the Catholic Church for not being a place I could stay. This is also where I read about the recent death of a dear friend’s wife, and where some mornings I read from “My Daily Spiritual Companion,” a little red journal my uncle Larry gave me last year after my Uncle Don died. Sometimes in this room I notice the night lifting, or the white plum casting shadow shapes, or something Rilke said, like “I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It’s still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time.”

Last Sunday I could feel my body vibrate as I sang. I have been feeling my breath deepen as time expands out to the horizon and ebbs, leaving me, sometimes gentled, sometimes sad. I have been reading the letters my mother sent to her mother from Germany in the late fifties. In April, 1953, she writes that she lives near the site of the Battle of the Bulge and sees the soldiers clearing landmines. “Don’t worry,” she tells her mother, “they don’t let you go where they aren’t sure it’s safe.”

Do you know that if you Google “gentle poems,” thinking that this time you’ll reach beyond your bookshelves to ground your meandering thoughts, the first fifteen entries will be Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” even though you were determined, this one time, to write about something other than the fact that after we live, we die? Do you know that the next entry takes you to a link to The Guardian, and a story about Taliban poetry, where you will read, “Evening the twilight arrives slowly with its lap full of red flowers”?

It is still true that the world is hard. Tonight as I write, the government remains shut down. No one seems to know how to get from here to the day after tomorrow. Recently, though, when it seemed as though we were about to bomb Syria, it became possible to believe that all that needed to happen to prevent war was for the pope to lead a day of prayer and the American people to lose their taste for killing.

Some early mornings I sit on a zafu on my little blue “all you need is love” rug with the dog breathing beside me and I believe.

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Clicking In

A few weeks ago I bought clipless pedals for my bike. I had already bought shoes with a space on the bottom where a cleat can screw in, and that hollow spot kept calling me. So, back I went to the sports store to buy the pedals. Then off I went to borrow the right sized wrench from a friend who knows her way around a bike. Then off I went to the bike shop to get help loosening my old pedals, and finally, I cranked on the new pedals on Sunday afternoon. Then it started raining.

It rained Monday. Then it rained Tuesday. Then it rained Wednesday…Then it rained Friday. I live in a desert in drought, so this sort of week doesn’t happen here. I just kept looking at my bike shoes sitting patiently on the piano bench. They looked happy, eager. They looked ready for a ride.

The point of clipless pedals is to lock your feet to the bike, without using any straps or toe cages. When you want to free your foot, a quick twist of your ankle releases the cleat. My pedals are flat on one side, so I figured I could click one foot in while keeping the other free, thus easing in to this learning curve and reducing my chances of falling, which my friend had guaranteed would happen.

Saturday afternoon, while all the usual clouds convene to decide if they will rain on us today, I head out. I want to see what changes all this water has made in the world. I ride east where the bike trail skirts the Piedras Marcadas Dam, not quite a mile from my house.  My first near miss happens just before I get to the dam, before I’ve even gotten my courage up to click one foot in. A jogger stops me for information about where the trail goes, and as I stop to answer her, I push down on the pedal and hear my left foot click in. I panic and yank hard, skinning my knee on my handlebar, while talking casually to the runner. (If you are having trouble picturing the geometry of this moment, it’s not you. I’m certain I couldn’t recreate this move intentionally.) Her question answered, I ride on.

The dam flanks a flood control zone tucked between neighborhoods just west of Eagle Ranch, so if you don’t walk or ride your bike around here, you’ve probably never seen it. Most days, it’s a large dry bowl, a strangely lovely open space where clumps of trees grow bucolically and an abandoned shopping cart announces that someone calls this landscape home.

I’ve always laughed at the hopeful, stucco-colored pillar at the far end painted with the numbers one through twelve, every one of which has been visible every other time I’ve been here. Saturday afternoon when I ride by, though, water has covered one through five and is lapping at the six. Six feet of water has shortened the trees and turned this hollow basin into a lake. As if to emphasize this fact, a group of adventurers in a green rowboat is dipping their oars in last night’s rain.

An hour and a half into my ride, when I’ve looped most of the way back and I’m approaching our new lake from the south, I’m feeling cocky. I’ve had a few other near misses, like when I stopped at a light on Coors and clicked out with just my left foot, leaving my right connected to my bike. This worked fine until I leaned to the right to hit the crosswalk button, but another hard yank of an ankle kept me upright. I’ve got this, I’m telling myself as I slow down at the bottom of the hill to walk my bike through a turnstile.

Seeing all this water pooling in drought land has me thinking about abundance, about how things go empty and are refilled. Recently at a faculty meeting, I watched a Ted Talk. (Note to future anthropologists: This is what private school teachers do at faculty meetings in the early twenty-first century.) Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, was teaching the audience that everyone loves classical music.  Before playing a Chopin prelude, Zander asked us to think of someone we loved and had lost.

I didn’t do that. I was at work, in a room in which I’ve already spent too much time thinking about loss. I didn’t want to begin the new school year weeping with my colleagues. Been there, done that, would rather not this time.

I opted not to engage.

The school year has started out beautifully, though. I’ve felt confident, competent, and joyful. I’ve been getting enough sleep, finding time to write, playing my violin. That’s why I was so surprised last week at another faculty meeting when I found myself paralyzed in the face of a simple decision. Two meetings were happening simultaneously, and I couldn’t decide which one to attend. I asked clarifying questions about information I already knew; I expressed concern about the plan, and then I changed my mind after the meeting I had chosen started, left it abruptly, and spent fifteen minutes roaming around campus trying to find the other meeting, which, it turned out, was happening just across the hall from where I’d begun.

It took me another half of a meeting and a few more moments of panicky indecision to realize that something other than having to choose between two meetings was bothering me. It all came flooding back: the sadness, the fear, the knowledge that to love children is to skip along the edge of a beautiful chasm. Somehow I’d managed to get a good month into the school year without tripping into that old fear.

Saturday afternoon, though, I’m standing astride my bike at the bottom of a hill looking at a lake where a field used to be and thinking about the fact that cool water rains on us from a generous sky. I’m wondering if the drought is over. I’m thinking about everything I know about loss and abundance. My left foot is safely planted on the ground when I turn my head to the right to gaze at the mountains.

This is the moment, as I’m falling into the bushes by the side of the trail, when I remember that my right foot is still clicked in to my pedal. There’s nothing I can do. I ride gravity down to the ground.

On one of his first visits to Albuquerque, my father remarked that everything in the desert looks like it wants to hurt you. (At the time, he might have been picking a goathead from his golf shoe, but I can’t be certain.) Today, an innocuous looking bushy plant with leaves like razor blades slices into my calf to prove him right. As I free my foot and climb out of the weeds, long streaks of blood stream down my leg.  I don’t see the other thing in the desert that wants to hurt me, but I can tell you that it was hard and pointy, and it left a two-inch mark just southeast of my tailbone that looks like one of those pictures of deep space nebulae on NASA’s website.

Weeks before I bought my new pedals, I came home from work and dug through my sheet music.  I found my old book of Chopin preludes and sat down at the piano. Before I started playing, I thought about someone I had loved deeply and lost. I played that prelude over and over and over. I let it hurt me and soothe me; I let it empty me out. I let it refill me.

Saturday afternoon after I laughed and lumbered out of the bushes with my bike, I did what there was to do. I clicked in and pedaled home.

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Glee

Lately I haven’t been able to focus. I get up in the morning, and instead of sitting down to write, or going for a bike ride, or working on lesson plans, I’m picking up a book and putting it down, pulling Nick Hornby off my shelves only to set him aside for Jane Smiley, sitting down at the piano for ten minutes, picking up my mandolin, sorting laundry. I’m like the birds in the backyard before rain, flitting from branch to branch, not staying anywhere long enough to sing.

School is starting soon. I can feel it gathering around me, that sense that I’ll be sitting at a lit desk in the evening as the dark comes early and the crickets start to hum. The end of summer, the doors opening to new things, the gentling of shorter days—that whole soup of nostalgia and anticipation and nervous energy that I remember feeling almost every September since 1968—it’s starting to simmer again.

Yesterday I bought a nine-pack of fine-tipped Sharpies in black, blue, green, red, purple, and orange, and a fourteen-pack of Pilot G2 blue click gel pens. There are many reasons why I’m a teacher. Not the least important of them is that it gives me an excuse to shop for loose-leaf paper and new pens when summer starts to grow shabby around the edges.

School is starting soon. A few nights ago I was watching a Glee re-run (go ahead, judge me and get it over with!) when the cast spontaneously broke into a fully orchestrated rendition of Shout in the hallway by their lockers. Suddenly I am standing under orange and black crepe paper streamers in the cafeteria at Bethel Park Senior High circa 1980 at an all-night dance-a-thon. My friends and I are getting a little bit softer now, and a little bit louder now, and I’m learning how very much I enjoy being the one holding the microphone.

From the very first episode, I tried not to watch Glee. Something about it reminded me of eating deep-fried twinkies or bacon sandwiches on glazed doughnuts: it seemed like something that people who take themselves seriously as adults just shouldn’t do. But even as the scripts deteriorated last season and most of the teenagers I know stopped watching, I kept on.

I couldn’t help it. I like seeing those fake kids figure out their lives in Show Choir. I like watching their angsty teacher and quirky counselor wince and love them through a series of ridiculous mistakes. I even usually like the big, corny song and dance numbers when pianists, drummers, dancers, and bass players magically appear in the middle of chemistry class. And I might as well admit this, too: on more than one occasion my husband has looked at me in amazement in the middle of the show and asked, “Are you really crying?”

School is starting soon. I have a new backpack, and new intentions to ride my bike at least twice a week, and a new software program for writing lesson plans, and class lists full of names of eager students, some of whom have probably spent the past few weeks as I have, losing their purchase on summer, scrabbling to catch hold of a new year’s routine.

I once raised my hand to answer a question and told my teacher confidently that fall symbolizes new beginnings. She corrected me, explaining that fall is the symbol of ripening and harvest, the time when summer’s growth comes to fruition, the period before the open-armed earth rests after gifting its bounty. Spring, not fall, she explained, is the season of new beginnings.

But of course, it wasn’t. Spring was when fifth grade ended and you knew you would never sit in that same classroom in the middle of the upstairs hall again. Spring was when you erased all the pencil marks in your books and said goodbye and signed your friends’ autograph books. Fall, on the other hand, was when you got new shoes and new folders and cut brown paper book covers out of grocery bags to cover your new books. Fall was when you were one grade older and moved to a new teacher one classroom closer to the end of the hall.

Maybe I like Glee because I can watch students grapple with mistakes without having to try to think of anything wise to say. Or maybe it’s like the space shuttle simulator I rode at Kennedy Space Center this summer: I could pretend to be brave enough to be exploded into outer space without putting myself in any danger at all.

That last thought probably explains the surprising depth of my sadness when Cory Monteith, the 31-year-old who played Finn on Glee, died in real life on July 13. Last spring I met a teacher who said, “I’ve lost twenty-six kids in twenty-five years” and went on with the conversation. I wanted to get to know him. I wanted to learn what faith or fury feeds him and lets him keep loving these fragile miracles.

What I’m saying is that you have to be a little bit brave to be a teacher. You have to love your students as though you can protect them from themselves and the world, even after they teach you that you can’t.

School is starting soon and I’m growing restless. The real life death of a man who played a student on Glee reminds me that even in make-believe school, there’s no simulator. Loving kids is dangerous work. It’s also hilarious and joyous and infuriating and enriching and draining. It makes you feel wise and mature and solid and grown up. It makes you feel unworthy and immature and too flimsy to support the weight of so much earnest becoming. It’s beautiful and terrifying and real.

It’s almost fall. Everything is beginning again. I can’t wait to get started.

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Wobble Board

Have you ever stood on a wobble board? Mine is a sixteen-inch wooden disk, mounted on top of a hard plastic dome (imagine a circle of wood glued to half a baseball, with the round part of the baseball touching the ground). After I tore ligaments in my ankle for the second time a number of years ago, my doctor suggested I use a wobble board to try to prevent future injuries.

The point is to rock back and forth on the board in every possible direction without letting its edges touch the ground.  Theoretically, I’m not just strengthening lots of little muscles in my ankles and calves by wobbling around, but I’m also improving my proprioception, my body’s ability to sense where it is in space.

It’s comforting to think that my muscles know where my elbows are in relation to my earlobes and how to keep me upright if my left foot lands halfway on the curb and halfway on the road. I like that my body is working to keep me balanced without any conscious intervention on my part.

Not that long ago, I went through a period when I felt every day as though I were standing on that board. Accosted by a loss that knocked me off balance, I couldn’t figure out how to make the earth stand still beneath my feet. It was as though aftershocks from an earthquake were rattling the ground every day, reminding me that destruction was immanent.

Friends, well-meaning strangers, and grief counselors all recommended I “talk to someone.” For weeks I carried scraps of paper with names and phone numbers in my pocket. I was terrified that I’d call the wrong person; how do you choose among strangers which one to invite into your vulnerability? It wasn’t until I finally decided to talk to a trusted priest and even he handed me a scrap of paper with a phone number on it that I finally decided I wasn’t going to be able to find solid ground on my own.

A few months after I started “talking to someone,” I had a dream. In the dream, my husband and I were lying on our stomachs on a raft. We were somewhere beautiful, maybe off Hawaii or Monterey, in the middle of the ocean. The raft was also somehow a spacious field of grass, rocking gently on the waves. For some reason Wyeth’s painting “Christina’s World” always comes to mind when I think of this dream, although looking at the painting now, seeing the way the woman in the grass looks (purposefully?) toward the house in the distance, I can’t really explain why.

There was no purpose in my feeling in the dream. Years ago after breaking my wrist I woke from surgery to a stranger wrapping me in hot blankets. That was how I felt in the dream: enveloped, tended to, almost surreally peaceful. I found myself craving that feeling long after I was awake. I can close my eyes even now and almost feel it.

At some point in the dream, though, the waves picked up. The raft started rocking aggressively. As the waves grew menacing, I became terrified, certain that the next one would capsize us and pull us under. I dug my hands into the grass as the dream that had begun as a beautiful respite became, literally, a nightmare.

Just as I was trying to scream myself awake, a voice in the dream said, “It’s not a raft; it’s an island.”  I don’t know whose voice this was, but it spoke matter-of-factly into my fear. It repeated those words, “It’s not a raft; it’s an island.”

Somehow, saying it made it true. I looked around, and I could feel the column of earth under my feet, reaching all the way down to the ocean floor. We continued to dip and lunge in the waves, but we weren’t going anywhere. We were on solid ground. I could relax back into the movement.

When I told the woman I had finally chosen to “talk to,” about this dream, she smiled. She said something like, “That’s such a powerful message from your psyche, telling you that you are going to be ok.”

The thing is that I believed her. The ground didn’t firm up instantly, but “It’s not a raft, it’s an island” became available to me as a mantra, as a little stone I can worry in my pocket whenever the earth starts pitching beneath my feet.

I remember one time flying over the Southwest and being terrified for a moment at how tiny all the cities are, how desolate the spaces that sprawl between. “We’re so alone!” I remember thinking, feeling a wave of compassion for all of us, tiny people scattered like old seed on dry land.

If you zoom out even further, beyond the airplane, who is to say what’s raft and what’s island? What is there, really, that’s tethered all the way down?

In his poem, “The Abduction,” Stanley Kunitz writes,

Our lives are spinning out
from world to world;
the shapes of things
are shifting in the wind.
What do we know
beyond the rapture and the dread?

There was a time when lines like those could paralyze me, when all I wanted was to make the world stand still. I thought I needed the “shapes of things” to stop “shifting in the wind.” I wanted to be able to say with certainty, “The world is this way; therefore, it isn’t this other way.”

For some reason walking the dog with Fred in the rain tonight, I’m thinking about this dread and rapture. It’s a gentle rain by the time we head into it, but just half an hour ago, it was wild; lightening arced into the ground and wind twisted the sycamore in the back yard sideways.

The streets are wet and I walk balancing on the curb, still working on my proprioception, still trying to figure out how my body is positioned in space, still learning to keep my balance in a whirling world that holds both love that rocks you gently on the waves and loss that tries to drown you.

The trick I’ve learned on the wobble board is this: If you don’t want to fall off, you have to go with it as it flings you face-forward; you can’t panic as your body falls backward or dips to the left or right. You can’t fight the motion.

You have to let go. You have to trust that somehow, in some way you don’t have to understand, the center will hold.

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View Christina’s World

Read The Abduction

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Eden

Yesterday at a school in Oklahoma, teachers lay on top of their students to protect them as a tornado smashed through town. This is what teachers and parents do every day; they throw themselves between children and danger, hoping that such a frail shield will be enough. We keep getting reminded that all we have are these flimsy, breakable bodies, that sometimes all we can do is throw ourselves to the ground and hold on.

I was already thinking about loss. All week I’ve been trying to figure out the connection between loss and abundance. I’ve never agreed with people who say that loss exists to make us appreciate joy. Joy is its own tangible thing. You know this if you wake early; every single morning, one bird sings first. Being awake to hear that wild call into darkness, that summoning of light, isn’t the absence of anything.

The day Fred and I walked north and south as far as you could go on the beach at Laguna, clambering over rocks, skinning our knees, and peering into tide pools, wasn’t the absence of anything either. Joy didn’t come that day because no one we knew was dying. Joy came because an abundant world had cracked open, and we had shown up to see sculpin, sea anemones, and starfish washing in and out of the tide pools.

If loss isn’t a joy-deepener, what is it? The callous “suffering is God’s will” has always struck me as an oxymoron, and a particularly unkind one at that. I prefer to imagine a distraught God trying to talk a stubborn son out of crucifixion. I can picture a strong-willed young man-god explaining to his horrified father, “I know you didn’t mean for it to go this way, but, trust me, I know what I’m doing.”

I guess deep down, I don’t know what to make of Eden.

For almost a decade, I spent one week every year at a Zen Buddhist center in the Jemez with a bunch of teenagers. Buddhism taught me that my thoughts weren’t my self and that I could acknowledge anxiety and then let it go. It taught me to breathe, and to chant, and to be still and wait for understanding.

One of the four Noble Truths says that the origin of suffering is attachment. My understanding of Buddhism is whatever you call understanding before you can call it rudimentary, but this one always bothered me. How do you love and remain unattached? How can learning how not to hold on be a good thing?

For the record, I excel at holding on. My step kids laugh at the way I grip the strap above the passenger door when Fred is driving. I don’t lift my hands in the air on roller coasters (or at least I didn’t back when I used to ride them). I never let go of the handlebars, or even the steering wheel for that matter. In the picture from the Tower of Terror, one of those elevator-dropping rides that I got on accidently, you can barely see me; I’m tucked in behind Fred and holding on. Even when I’m riding the tram to the top of the Sandias, where my biggest fear is that the cable will snap and we’ll plummet to the canyon floor, I hold on to the pole in the middle of the cabin, as though somehow that grip could save me. I’ve got holding on down.

Non-attachment always sounded to me like not caring, like protecting yourself to avoid inevitable suffering. I know how to do that, and for me, learning to be alive in the world has meant un-learning that skill. I had to learn how to love enough to be destroyed by loss, and then, when loss almost destroyed me, I had to learn how to tread water beside it without letting it pull me under. I had to come to grips with the fact that the children I teach can die, and still throw myself on top of them as though every nascent promise will have a chance to blossom.  I have to throw seeds into clayey ground and trust that something beyond my meager gardening skill will help them grow.

It took an Episcopal priest to help me understand this idea of loving without attachment. When the Rector of my church announced his upcoming retirement, I, along with an entire congregation, had several months to come to grips with the impending loss of a wise, compassionate, beloved teacher. Over those months, in sermons each week, he and the other clergy talked about love and grace and leaving.

At first I wanted them to stop. I didn’t want to live in the loss any sooner than I had to. But as they all kept talking, every week, in beautifully crafted sermon after sermon, I felt something in my grip unclenching.

Last Sunday after the final service, I went to a ballet recital. I watched as one of my students led a group of three year olds on stage. A minute or so into the dance, one little tutu’d girl stopped. She didn’t get confused or distracted or scared; today just wasn’t her dancing day. She folded her arms across her white leotard, dug in her white-tighted heels, stuck out her tiny lip, and pouted. Tiny tutu collisions followed as the other girls, their routine disrupted, lost their way on the big stage. My student danced on beautifully, her face relaxed and smiling, her dancing free and joyful.

When I first heard about our Rector’s retirement, I was that little girl in the tutu with my arms crossed. When the time came for our last service together, I was my student, able to keep dancing through a world that wasn’t organized around me.

One summer before I realized I like the idea of gardening more than I like gardening, I planted tomatoes, peppers, basil, thyme, and parsley in some clayey soil that gets too much sun next to a brick wall that radiates heat and cooks the plants all day. (My sister once added sage and rosemary to this mix and called it her Simon and Garfunkel garden.)

The parsley loved it. I put in two plants that year, and they grew bushy and tall, and I ate fresh parsley all summer. I remember those plants vividly because a parsley caterpillar spent July living on one of them. If you haven’t seen a parsley caterpillar, it looks more like something that came out of Pixar than out of creation. My grandson wore a Bee Transformer costume on his fourth birthday, and the parsley caterpillar looked a little bit like that. 1284088532SZTrNi-1

I spend just enough time paying attention to the world that it’s still easy to surprise me. The parsley caterpillar, striped in neon green and black, dotted with bright yellowy-orange spots, would lift his head and wiggle his two bright green horns when I came into the garden to water.  (Ok, I suspect I’m personifying, or at least canine-ifying here, but all I can do is tell you how the world feels to me.) I learned to water gently, so as not to wash him off his stem. Each day I’d peer at the parsley until I spotted him, say good morning, and update him on the dismal state of the other plants in the garden.

The first morning, certain I was experiencing something new on the planet, I did some research and learned that my little (ordinary) worm would grow up to be a black swallowtail. I wondered what he knew about who he was becoming. He didn’t seem concerned. He lazed on the parsley all summer. Back when we shared our house with three aging beagles, my sister described them as “decorations that follow you around.” That’s sort of how I felt about the caterpillar; he was a really cool animated plant decoration.

If you’re a real gardener, you already know how this story ends. One morning I showed up with the hose at my scrawny garden, and the parsley and the parsley caterpillar were gone. Every single leaf had been chewed to the stalk. It hadn’t occurred to me that one day he would leave and take the parsley with him, but it made sense. He’d had to find a new spot to spin himself into his shroud while he transformed. I looked around the garden, but I never found the chrysalis.

Mostly I don’t understand loss. I don’t understand how each loss holds every other loss. I don’t understand how we keep managing to live our way out of it. I don’t understand why sometimes these frail bodies are enough to hold back pain, and sometimes they buckle. For a while I wondered if abundance were about the present, the potential each moment has for bursting into beauty, and loss were about the past and future, and our fear of losing every impermanent thing. That doesn’t really explain it, though. Loss is every bit as present and tangible as joy.

Because my parsley caterpillar went away to cocoon, I missed the moment when the black swallowtail emerged into a new world. I didn’t see him light on the trumpet vine and wait quietly for his wings to dry. I don’t know if he burst out blinking into the sun, or unfolded himself easily into early evening.

1351460677oDGetxMostly I don’t understand loss. All I know is that that summer, the back yard was full of black swallowtails. I loved to watch how gently they brushed the planet. I can see them now as I watch my student dancing; they skip and flutter, they light for a moment on a branch that doesn’t bend, they swoop and hover. All they are is wing and wonder; nothing about them is built for holding on.

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Into the River

Way back in high school, I was the friend who would carry your secrets. Tell me your problems–I could pick them up and carry them around those high school halls without my shoulders bending a bit. Nothing marked me. People thought that was a good thing. I thought that was a good thing. Friends came out to me, told me about their abortions, explained their problems with their parents. I skipped on, their secrets and my own floating above me in a helium balloon sealed tight and tied securely to my backpack. Life was easy. I was happy.

Not that long ago, I realized that I’ve spent much of my life carrying that balloon, walking along the shore of the river, keeping my feet dry. Next to me rushed a river full of life: muskrats, beavers, river trout, crayfish, snakes–all of them were swimming by me. I kept my distance. I happily portaged other people’s problems down the river, slinging them over my head like a fiberglass canoe, but I never got my feet wet.

Suicide has a way of throwing you into the river. For a long time after the second of the two worst phone calls of my life, I drowned, I tumbled, I washed by places I wished I could stay. I fought the current, looking for the break when I could make my way back to shore.

But then a funny thing happened. Somehow my wet feet found the bottom. They  eased into the muck where tadpoles were burrowing and reeds were beginning their long, faith-filled journey toward the sun. I found myself walking in the river. It wasn’t easy. I kept losing my balance on slippery ground, and my feet grew heavy with mud. Sometimes I’d fall down; sometimes the weight of the water would keep me from walking at all. But once in a rare while, the water would buoy me up, and I’d swim.

One day I forgot to angle for the shore.

Here in the river cranes call from the marshes, eagles cast shadows, geese v overhead. Here in the river life is harder, my own problems snag on branches, my friends’ problems weigh me down. Here in the river cynicism and joy battle it out in me each day. Here in the river when the cranes call, I lift my eyes into the blooming morning sun.

This blog is called “live love leave,” and it’s about trying to learn how to do all of those things with grace. It’s about learning to play the violin, training for triathlons, loving things that are fragile, and loosening my frantic grip on the world. It’s about letting the world hurt you and love you. It’s about the shape of your shoulders as you try to stop carrying the world.

This afternoon I walked out into the hallway of my school and some kids were playing the Game of Life. It was an English project. Heathcliff and Cathy and all the gang from Wuthering Heights were there, riding their horses over the moors and ruining each other’s lives. (OK, Heathcliff was doing most of the ruining, but that’s not really where I’m going with this). I remembered how my old best friend Jacqui and I spent many hours of our childhood spinning that wheel, losing a job and going back two spaces, having a baby and pushing another little pink peg into our convertibles, getting married to Henry or Eddie or some other boy we loved from afar in fourth grade. (I suppose I should reverse those last two items. It was the seventies; we were in Catholic school.)

Not that long ago I realized that I’ve spent a lot of time learning to play life. This blog is about what I’ve learned, what I’m still learning, what I don’t even know I don’t know yet. If you plan to keep reading I have a spoiler alert: I make a lot less money than I used to. The shape of my shoulders has changed.

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