On this Thanksgiving morning, I am feeling both grateful and troubled. Grateful for the many gifts and graces that fill my personal life; troubled for the state of the world we share. I’ve often been at a loss for words these last few weeks. Watching the news has alternately filled me with anger, despair, and righteousness – emotions so strong that I’ve been afraid to speak for fear of my own intemperance.

As is so often the case, this morning I sought insight and solace from another person’s words, and am so thankful to have come upon the following from David Whyte, who manages to tease out extraordinary meaning from ordinary words. In this national moment of daily accusations and revelations, in thinking especially of what it means that so many people have been trying to stand in the painful truth about their experiences with those whose power has so often granted immunity, these words have offered me insight. And so I share them with you, and hope you find something in them as well.

 

“HONESTY

is reached through the doorway of grief and loss. Where we cannot go in our mind, our memory, or our body is where we cannot be straight with another, with the world, or with our self. The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties: all of us are afraid of loss, in all its forms, all of us, at times, are haunted or overwhelmed by the possibility of a disappearance, and all of us therefore, are one short step away from dishonesty. Every human being dwells intimately close to a door of revelation they are afraid to pass through. Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.

The ability to speak the truth is as much the ability to describe what it is like to stand in trepidation at this door, as it is to actually go through it and become that beautifully honest spiritual warrior, equal to all circumstances, we would like to become. Honesty is not the revealing of some foundational truth that gives us power over life or another or even the self, but a robust incarnation into the unknown unfolding vulnerability of existence, where we acknowledge how powerless we feel, how little we actually know, how afraid we are of not knowing and how astonished we are by the generous measure of grief that is conferred upon even the most average life.

Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless. Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness. Honesty allows us to live with not knowing. We do not know the full story, we do not know where we are in the story; we do not know who is at fault or who will carry the blame in the end. Honesty is not a weapon to keep loss and heartbreak at bay, honesty is the outer diagnostic of our ability to come to ground in reality, the hardest attainable ground of all, the place where we actually dwell, the living, breathing frontier where there is no realistic choice between gain or loss.”
–David Whyte, ‘HONESTY’ Excerpted From CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words© 2015 David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

Everyone who visits Rome tells some version of the same story. Here’s mine:

We spent the morning touring St. Peter’s Basilica. It was grand and vast, almost more to take in than one could grasp. We celebrated mass at a side altar where Pope John XXIII is interred, his uncorrupted body encased in glass. The morning was overwhelming, to say the least.

After four hours in the Basilica, Mom and I were free to find our way in Rome. Footsore, jet-lagged, and dehydrated, we grabbed a table at the first sidewalk cafe we saw, still inside the security perimeter of the Vatican. Lunch was perfect! Afterwards, we literally grabbed a taxi back to Casa Tra Noi, the driver swearing a steady (but quiet) stream under his breath as he made his way up the narrow hill, every few yards maneuvering around obstacles not envisioned when this street was first cobbled: buses, delivery trucks, SUVs.

We rested for a while on the patio, and I swallowed another miniscule cappuccino, before meeting our tour bus for the drive to the Cathedral of St. John Lateran. At first, I was unexcited to tour another cathedral, but then I realized that this bus trip would show us much of the city we might not otherwise see in our brief time in Rome. And it did: the Colosseum, the Forum, the Circus; we crossed the Tiber River; we saw the balcony where Mussolini harangued the crowds. Our group piled off the bus at a statue of St. Francis that stands across the piazza from St. John Lateran. We posed for a group photo,then made our weary way toward the church. Like most sites in Rome, there was security to go through – though there was no guard in sight here, just a conveyor belt that we all dutifully placed our bags on, walking through metal detectors before retrieving them.

Our guide, Father Andre, in his brown Franciscan robe and sandals, introduced us to the cathedral. I remember bits and pieces of the history he recited, though I wouldn’t be able to reconstruct it without assistance. We looked at the beautiful papal door, opened only in jubilee years (bricked shut at other times). Then we wandered over to the giant front doors. By this time in the day, our group lacked its earlier spry energy, so we waited for the stragglers to gather close enough to Father Andre to hear his next words.

“These doors,” he said, “Were originally on the Roman Senate. Think about that for a minute! That means that Cicero walked through these doors. Augustus Caesar walked through them…everyone you remember from early Roman history likely touched these doors.”

And that was it: my goosebump moment.

Like I said, everyone who has been to Rome has this story. They tell about the exact moment it hit them that they were in a spot where ancient history still lives. I couldn’t have anticipated that my moment would occur at a cathedral I’d never heard of before – but it was an electrifying moment. For me, it was my heart’s true first step on the pilgrimage I had come to Italy to make.

Last night I went for a walk. There were storm clouds massing overhead, but the sunset was still pushing through every opening in the cloud cover it could find. Consequently, the urban farm down the street was enveloped in shadowed twilight, while the factory across the street was lit dramatically, looking like a shining city of legend.

It has been a dry September, despite the clouds that have regularly gathered. There have been spectacular sunsets due to both the clouds and smoke haze in the atmosphere from the fires out west. One Sunday a few weeks ago, our skies took on a greenish tinge and a strange opacity  despite weather instruments reading “mostly sunny”. I couldn’t help but think how frightening it must be in places closer to the flames.

Last September was the opposite – so wet that this week in 2016 we were on flood watch, followed by the evacuation of parts of town at the end of the month (including my neighborhood). A Herculean effort by residents and city workers prevented a massive disaster, though my apartment has never quite returned to its pre-evacuation state. (Due to my lack of initiative, not to any flooding – the place remained dry throughout!)

I’ve been thinking about the ways this September mirrors so many other Septembers in my life. Always, after the rush of August, I look toward September with a hopefulness that is rarely born out – I think September will usher in a slower pace, an expanse of time to enjoy a brief pause between late summer and the start of fall. But it never works that way. September is always a frantic blur. This year has been no exception.

The one consistency I’ve enjoyed from year to year is the changeable skies September brings. The blue-est blues, the most colorful clouds, the most dramatic sky-scapes. Often, September skies are the only natural phenomenon I get to experience fully in this month of effort and hurry.

Sometimes, that is enough.

Of Being

I know this happiness

is provisional:

the looming presences —

great suffering, great fear

withdraw only

into peripheral vision:

but ineluctible this shimmering

of wind in the blue leaves:

this flood of stillness

widening the lake of sky:

this need to dance,

this need to kneel:

this mystery:

—Denise Levertov

“An awake heart is like a sky that pours light.”  –Hafiz

 

I have this memory from when I was around six years old. It is early summer, and I have awoken very early in the morning. My siblings and my parents are sleeping but the sun, just up, is shining and its warmth is beginning to lift the dew from the grass, forming a hazy ground fog over the yard. I am still in my bed, but the top half of my body is actually wedged onto the window sill, my face pressed against the screen. The yard, the bluff across from the one we live on, the trees I can see on hills across the Mississippi – all of it – is kissed by the sun and beautiful.

I can smell the fresh morning air, with its commingling of flowers in bloom, the river, grass and a darker scent I always associate with air emanating from the old lead mine tunnels bored through the limestone bedrock of my hometown. I hear a door close, keys in a lock, and whistling. My grandfather comes into view, leaving his basement apartment and walking along the narrow sidewalk through our yard, up the cement stairs and to the car park, on his way to work at the meat packing plant. He disappears from my view as suddenly as he appeared. It feels strange that he has no knowledge of my gaze or the love I feel for him.

I stay like this, laying in the window for several minutes. I am aware of my sleeping family in their own beds in the dark interior of the house not knowing that I am awake and watching the world. I am self-contained yet connected to everyone and everything. This feels illicit, somehow – this awareness of a world that is not aware of me.

This luminous memory has remained fresh for fifty years. I’ve thought about why often over the years. Nothing in particular happened. There have certainly been other mornings when I was awake while others slept; many mornings that I enjoyed quiet before the rest of the world got busy and choked the place up with noise. And while it may have been the only time I was awake early enough to watch my grandpa go to his very early shift at the plant, I doubt that is why the experience struck me so deeply.

Perhaps it was the first time I felt connected to everything I was looking at without being the center of it.

I looked up children’s stages of self-awareness and found the following stage-theory, in which a child’s response to a mirror is used to describe each stage:

“That, right there, is self-awareness in a nutshell: that’s a mirror (Level 1), there’s a person in it (Level 2), that person is me (Level 3), that person is going to be me forever (Level 4), and everyone else can see it (Level 5).

Queue your five-year-old’s first existential crisis.”   

https://www.fatherly.com/health-science/children-five-stages-self-awareness-mirror-tests/

I was definitely a kid who had a difficult time with that level 5 self-awareness. Being “seen” was excruciating for me. In photos I am often contorting my face in an effort to avoid looking directly at the camera, as if this would somehow make me less visible to the lens.

At the same time, I had a child’s lack of awareness that everything wasn’t about me. If my parents fought, if my sister was cranky, if it rained on the day I wanted a picnic – these all seemed to be about me. And, if I’m honest, there have been many times throughout my adult life I’ve had to shake myself out of this kind of self-referencing. (Just yesterday, a colleague’s demeanor changed dramatically during a meeting and several of us sought her out, afterwards, thinking we must have said something to upset her – she was suffering from a sudden-onset migraine. I guess this is a human tendency, not just mine.)

Back to that long-ago morning, that sense of connection without direct attention (or even awareness) was definitely part of it. There was my grandfather, clearly in a good mood as he whistled off to work. He had no idea I was watching him. He had no idea that, at that very moment, I was feeling love for him. And there was the rest of my sleeping family, to whom I felt connected, also – all with only my awareness. Was this one of the first times I was aware of feeling non-transactional love? Love for my family that was just love – not a response to some behavior or input from them? I don’t doubt I felt it before that moment, but how often was I consciously aware of that love emanating from me?

Then there was the land – the trees, our yard, the hills, the river, the limestone – I was filled with wonder and love for it, too. The sun, the light, all of the beauty in that early morning: had I ever felt such an outpouring of love?

I remember feeling a tingly, buzzy, sensation in my fingers and toes – I was full of some energy I couldn’t name. In fact, there were no words to articulate the experience. This was one of the few times in my childhood that I didn’t follow my mother around the house blabbing every detail of something to her. Later, when everyone was up, I held my tongue. I knew those few minutes of experience had been mine in a way that was deeply personal.

Many years later, I had a discussion/philosophical argument with my brother about chaos theory and the butterfly effect (can a butterfly flapping its wings in New Mexico cause a hurricane in China?) He wasn’t buying it. But I argued that everything was connected. I remember saying, “I believe it. I believe it is all connected – we are all connected.” He suggested that was magical thinking for which there was no “real” evidence  – and I told him I “just knew it”. (Of course, science has proven spooky action from a distance now, so I feel vindicated on the evidence front.) But I was convinced long ago on the level of personal experience – I had felt that connection.

Is that why this one childhood memory has remained so cherished and luminous? Was this the moment I first had the felt, lived, experience that all is connected? I don’t know. All I can say for sure is that even after years of taking this memory out and turning it over and over in my hands, it has never lost its shine – and that’s how I know it is important.

This morning, I woke just as the sun was casting a pink glow over everything. The green trees outside my window were lovely against that pink sky. I felt both gratitude and a sense of well-being, waking up to so much beauty. But it wasn’t an “awakening”.

 You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it. –Mary Oliver

My mother says that, as a child, I could – and did – fall asleep anywhere. Once while shopping downtown, she stopped to chat with an acquaintance for a few minutes. When she was ready to move on with our errands, she looked around for me – and discovered me, sound asleep, on the sidewalk.

I wish sleep came as easily now.

Oh, I can still fall asleep (sometimes) with the rapidity and grace of a fainting goat. But the depth and duration of my sleep is often not impressive. I am becoming more well acquainted with the hours between 2 and 5 a.m. than I ever wished.

On my good nights, I sleep for a couple of hours before waking up. On the bad nights, I am keenly aware of each tick of the clock.

My thoughts have been casting a shadow on the moon of my heart.

Some nights the shadow looks suspiciously like Donald Trump, or the clashing of angry crowds, or a family waiting to be rescued from their roof. Sometimes it is just a blobby shadow with no distinctive shape. I think and I worry about politics, about what is happening to the earth, about all of us.

I must remember how to let go of thinking.

This week is the beginning of the school year for children in our community. Even though I don’t have children myself, there is no way to not know this fact – my Facebook feed is wall-to-wall first day of school pictures (and that includes teacher friends, who post their own first day photos). Also, for a surprising number of my friends’ kids, this year marks a transition – from kindergarten to first grade, or from grade school to junior high, or junior to senior high. The kids seem to be taking these transitions in stride, but a number of their parents are emotional wrecks.

As a kid, I experienced more than the normal number of transitions in school. Kindergarten wasn’t offered at parochial schools, so first grade saw me transitioning to a new school, with all new kids. In fifth grade, we moved across town in October. In my new school district, I went “shared time”, meaning I spent half a day at the public school and half at St. Anthony’s, my new Catholic school. Then in January, we moved to Minnesota. School number four that year was the Catholic school. That summer we moved from our temporary rental home into a house my parents had bought, and I started 6th grade at another new school. 7th grade saw my entry into the consolidated junior high in town, where overcrowding had us students attending in split shifts (I didn’t start school until noon). In 8th grade we moved to Ohio, where I finished junior high and, the following fall, began high school. After my junior year, we moved back to Iowa, where I finished by senior year and graduated from high school. My K-12 years were followed by college at a small Catholic university, then graduate school at a major public research institution. If I’ve counted correctly, that is 12 new starts – new schools, new rules, new peers.

Looking back, there are several observations I can make: it wasn’t always easy to find my way, either physically or metaphorically; as an introvert, I struggled at times to make friends; occasionally, the differences in protocols, methods, or subject matter pacing caused confusion and required extra time to catch up (or boredom if I was far ahead on a subject).

More important, though, is this universal truth: in every educational setting I met incredible people who cared about me. And eventually, I made friends with other students. But the first people to care about me were always and invariably employed by the school: teachers, librarians, lunch ladies. They noticed me, even when I was trying to shrink and blend into the drab institutional walls. Sr. Joseph Mary in the St. Raphael’s library was always setting aside books for me to read. Mr. Nelson invited me and others to have “rap sessions” at the end of the day (it was the 1970s after all). Sr. Pat Nolan took me in as a bewildered high school senior and helped me believe in my own way of seeing the world.

Here’s a true story, one of many which have left me feeling that school librarians are the unsung heroes of the world. When I was in high school, there was a gas explosion and I happened to be at the epicenter of it. The school evacuated, while I, dazed and bewildered by the concussive force of the explosion, wandered slowly in the empty halls, my chemistry goggles still on. Mrs. Slusher, the librarian, was outside the open doors, and happened to glimpse me at the far end of a hallway. Against orders, this tiny little woman ran into the building, put her arms around me, and guided me out into the sunlight.

Yesterday, as I was enjoying the first-day postings on Facebook, I suddenly received several instant messages simultaneously. They were from college friends who wanted to let me know that Sr. Mary Ellen Caldwell passed away. Sr. Mary Ellen was an amazing religious studies professor. I can remember people asking me, as I was registering for every single course she taught, what possible use these classes were for my future. The only answer I could give was that Sr. Mary Ellen was an incredible teacher, and my mind came alive in her classes. Interestingly, thirty years later, I’m using what Sr. Mary Ellen taught me every single day, both personally and professionally.

To all the parents out there who are worrying about your kids: I can’t say you don’t need to worry. I can’t promise that the school year will turn out the way you or your child hopes it will. I’m aware that this world is a different place than it was when I was young. But I still believe that most teachers, counselors, social workers and other staff in our schools care about the children entrusted to them. I encourage you to keep breathing, and allow some time to pass before you judge how well it is going. Kids and teachers are a resilient bunch; together they can accomplish things no one would anticipate.

“One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.” (Carl Jung)

“Woman Killed in Road Rage Incident was a Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old Slut.”

You may wonder what possessed me to read the Daily Stormer article with this title. After all, I knew that the website was a neo-nazi “news” and commentary site. Part of me didn’t want to believe that, hours after Heather Heyer had been killed in Charlottesville, anyone would be vile enough to write such a headline referring to her. Part of me felt compelled to know for myself what they said, rather than just rely on commentary from others. It is hard for me, after the fact, to reconstruct my thought process prior to clicking on the article because reading it changed something in me.

The gist of the piece was that women are always a drain on men’s resources and, as such, have only one redeeming purpose on this earth: procreation. Women who are not mothers should be exterminated to reduce the drag on men. This, the article assured me, was doubly true for fat women who are not mothers. What possible purpose could such individuals have? Following this line of reasoning, the commentator went on to say that, therefore, Heather Heyer – and by extension any woman without children or past their child-bearing “usefulness” – deserved to be murdered.

The article was vile. Truly, unequivocably, vile.

But, truth be told, it felt a little familiar. It was definitely more direct, more intentionally hurtful, and less sanitized than a lot of messages our culture sends to women. But it was, underneath the nazi rhetoric, not that different from what women are told repeatedly in this culture: We are worth less than men; We don’t deserve (nor do we receive) the same care/benefits from society as men; We should be grateful for the attention of men, even when it is expressed as harrassment and/or violence. I don’t want to spend this post arguing that these assertions are true: if you want convincing that women are treated as less-than and systematically discriminated against, you can do the Google search as easily as I can. Try “women and healthcare” or “women and wages” or “women and violence”.

Reading the Daily Stormer piece flipped a switch inside my brain. I could feel, at the deepest level of my being, the ways that I’ve both received and internalized cultural messages about my own worth and power (and also about the worth and power of a variety of other folks, whether people of color, LGTB+, those living in poverty, etc.) At the core of who I am, a word formed:

ENOUGH.

As in, “I/we have had enough.”

As in, “I AM/We ARE enough.”

As in, “There is enough.”

While there are definitely people who know where I stand, I have mostly tried to play by rules that I now see more clearly than ever were intended to keep me quiet: don’t ruffle feathers; don’t lose relationships over differences of opinion; be likeable; don’t be forceful; don’t assume you know anything (or that what you know means something). Sometimes, I have lived my life as if the greatest good that could come of my choices would be my own invisibility. I have allowed myself to make occasional small ripples, but I have avoided ever making waves.

I’ve believed the myth of my own powerlessness for far too long; I’ve finally had enough of that bullshit lie. I am powerful enough to change this world. Despite the scarcity narrative so prominent in white supremacist and nazi chants, there is enough to sustain each of us in this world if we will only use our power to shift dominant paradigms. We are – each and every one of us – so much more than just a drain on resources.

Today, I find myself wondering about Heather Heyer. Her friends say she was afraid there would be violence, but that she felt she needed to protest on Saturday anyway. What was she thinking when she left home that morning? Was she hoping to send a ripple of love or justice into the waters of racism, misogyny and hate? I feel certain she wasn’t seeking death. Whatever her hopes and dreams, Heather understood that she had the power to effect change and she chose to use that power.  Heather definitely made more than ripples: when she chose to stand in her power on Saturday, she unleashed a wave containing all the force of a tsunami. May each us discover our power and courage to do the same.

“The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.” — Virginia Woolf