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A Way to Mark Time

Time is one of the things over which we have no control. It cannot be stopped or manipulated and it flows in only one direction — at least as far as we know. It can, however, be sanctified.”

Alan Jones

It is December 5th, the second Sunday of Advent, and the first December I have not been a teacher. I woke up early to shower and go somewhere the other day, and as the water rushed over me, I thought I do not miss this. There is nothing to be mourned from 5:30AM wake-ups, hustling lunches, diapers, and book bags out the door for a 7:30AM start to my work day. Those are not the things I miss about teaching.

I feed Anneliese with one hand as I type this with the other. Her entrance into our lives back in April was more and less disruptive than Evangeline’s, more and less life-changing for me, more and less miraculous. As with most things, I try to assess as I go so that I can experience the moment in real time, rather than in some sort of nostalgic reflection: having a second baby doesn’t seem to be as emotionally or mentally difficult as having a first baby; I am still the “new me” of motherhood, so there is no big identity shift; logistics are a nightmare as they never were with only one child; there is no more playing around (there were times with one baby that I felt like we just had a little buddy we brought along to everything we did — now we have two little buddies, but that’s one buddy each, and not everyone loves an incessantly-talking-toddler-and-incessantly-grunting/screaming-baby combo).

[Anneliese is done eating. I give her a huge slinky to toss around on the top of her high chair. I think I hear Evangeline stirring upstairs. Type, frantically.]

When September rolled around, I felt the itches of a new school year. I am 32 years old, and this was the first September (minus one outlying year after college) that I have not begun a new academic year since I was three years old. Many teachers have similar stats to their life resumes, but when I realized that was 28 years of fresh starts and new notebooks and new syllabi, I was shocked.

[I asked a former teacher how many years it would take before I stopped measuring time in school years. She smiled sweetly and said, “Probably never.”]

I wondered how I would feel after I left teaching, who I would feel like. “Once a teacher, always a teacher,” is both terrifying and lovely — more than once, I have found myself on the cusp of correcting a child I had no business correcting, laying out expectations in too-obvious a format for regular adult communication. And of course I could wax poetic about the daily instruction and guidance I give my daughters etc. etc., but that feels like trying to shape my days into something they aren’t. I’m “teaching,” sure, but it is so much more personally rewarding longterm than classroom teaching, and so much less rewarding on the daily level. They are similar, but not the same.

On this second Sunday of Advent, I can’t help but think how the Church calendar has influenced my spiritual walk and my writing. Both Advent and Lent create this mysterious space that opens me up to inspiration. This year, my inspiration is taking the form of moments of candle-lighting, hat-knitting, and a slow movement toward rest. Again, a year spent with the Sacred Ordinary journal, and the short daily reflections coupled with more extensive searching in the weekly Examine are allowing me to tap into that part of me that used to commune with God in the quiet, but now communes with Him in the bustle and loud of a home taken up with others.

Time is always on my mind. As a mystery and as a bringer of death. As an agent for healing and as a vehicle for change. How to mark it? Should I mark it? What would happen if I didn’t?

September used to mark the beginning of a new academic year. September of 2021 flowed from August and into October in a seamless wave of walks, diapers, coffee dates, middle-of-the-night wakings, and endless dishes and laundry.

December used to mark the beginning of Advent. December of 2021 still marks the beginning of Advent. When I cracked open my blue Sacred Ordinary and looked at the wheel of the Church calendar, I wondered at the consistency, at the shared experience across time. We will light the second candle of Advent today in our living room and across the globe. I’ll read the Scripture reading, and Evangeline will want to light all the candles at once because who wouldn’t?

I may not be teaching, but it is still Advent. Christ is still coming. Christ has still come.

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How to Pray in the ER

Sitting alone in a dim emergency room, cordoned off by a sliding glass door and curtain for privacy. I have been here before, but never alone. The last time, I was 22, and surrounded by not only my parents, but all three of my younger siblings. I didn’t know then that I’d long for so much chaos.

I’ve sent Gabe home. He wanted to wait in the parking lot because you never know how long the ER will take — you hope it will be quick and I’ll be running out there with a relieved skip in my step. Go home, I say over the phone, feed the baby and put her to bed. It’ll be awhile.

I sit and I wait. What will they detect? What dark, amorphous shadow will they discover in my lungs? Will it be large, so big they hook me up to an IV? Is surgery looming? Or will it be small? Small enough to terrify, but small nonetheless? Or, hope against hope, will it be nothing? Just two lungs working hard but not broken, filling to not-quite-capacity, but all systems go?

No one told me Covid could cause blood clots. For all the reading and listening I’ve done over the past 11 months, I have never encountered this fact. I knew to watch for a fever, for difficulty breathing. It was this — the hitch in my breath when I breathed too deeply, the thick choking cough — that made me call my midwife, and then my primary care, and then the respiratory specialist. Not till I sat with the specialist did I hear the word “clot” or “given your history,” and not till then did I realize there could be far more wrong than Covid.

The tv hanging above the door is dark, and I have no desire to turn it on. I have no book, no distraction other than my phone. Social media holds no enticement, and I look at the clock. How to be patient? Is the doctor looking at the images now? The CT results clear to him but unknown to me? I worry I was forgotten, as though they could forget the pregnant woman, positive with Covid-19, possible blood clot. As though there were any sort of hubbub in the small hospital at all.

The hands on the clock tick, so time is passing. No one checks on me. I was told half an hour to read the results forty-five minutes ago. I practice a deep breath. There it is: the catch, the cough.

The anxiety of waiting.

Picturing my daughter eating dinner with Gabe and my mother, babbling away, asking where I am. Or not asking, because fear doesn’t yet exist.

The first time, as I learned I had a blood clot in my thoracic outlet, I floated. I was young enough to have never thought of clots and healthy enough to think I could will myself back to health. Death was possible (as it is always), and in the days and weeks afterwards as I took my daily blood thinner, I wrestled with my fear of Death in a real and profound way.

I would miss my family, my parents and brothers and sister.

I would miss my friends.

I would miss the future I had imagined and was just now beginning to realize.

This time, ten years later, I am 32 years old.

I would miss all those things, but this time, my little girl is being tucked into her crib by her grandmother.

This time, my husband waited in a freezing cold car because he didn’t want to leave me alone at the hospital.

This time, a new life spins and swirls within me, refusing to let me forget that my lungs breathe for two.

Something my mother did very well was teach me how to comfort myself: You need to make a list of things that make you feel better. And when you’re upset, look at that list and choose one thing.

So I start singing.

It is soft, almost a whisper, and I am surprised that with such tired lungs I am able to sing whole lines. Words flow from me, from my memory. I can’t pray because I have no energy left to create. Instead, I receive the words passed down to me, and I both use them to soothe and offer them as prayer.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

that saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost but now am found,

was blind but now I see.

Hymn after hymn filling my little room just loud enough for me alone to hear. And as I sing, I realize what a gift I have been given: to have words within me when I have none of my own. Our minds are so malleable, so open. It’s easy to forget that what we read and see is imprinted in our brains. The headlines that are keeping me awake at night — I fill my mind with things that torment me. Yet, here I am in a hospital bed, and years ago I had been given words of comfort and rejoicing for a time such as this.

Suddenly, I remember my great grandmother. At 105, she had little memory left. On good days, we had sweet conversations that replayed enough for me to anticipate the next line. On bad days, she didn’t remember which great-granddaughter I was. What she always seemed to remember were the words to the hymns I played on the piano, her tired but lively voice singing words that were not her creation, but were hers nonetheless. Her mind was often not with us, but the words emblazoned there 100 years ago reminded us of her soul.

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When the doctor comes back, saying “No blood clots, but your lungs are covered in Covid pneumonia,” I rejoice. I want to reach out and hug him. How odd to rejoice over that! But blood clots are far, far worse, and my prayers, humbly and perhaps awkwardly lifted up, had been received and lovingly answered. When the nurse leaves, I remove the EKG pads myself, toss them in the trash, gather up my clothes. I bend down (with difficulty) to tie my boots, and walk out of the ER with a huge smile on my face.

Evangeline is asleep when I get home, and I don’t wake her. How I want to hold her in my arms! To snuggle her soft head against my face. Instead, I eat reheated macaroni and cheese on the couch. I tell my mom and husband about singing in the ER and what a strange experience it was. Eventually, I go to bed, trusting that I will get to hold my daughter in the morning.

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Repetition

I take a deep breath. I close my eyes, but only briefly, because my daughter is standing by my knees, her arms stretched up up up. She has just dropped a hard book in my lap for the fifth time, and no, it is not a different book. It is the same book, the one I would never choose, the one the doctor’s office gave us to teach her about musical instruments. She couldn’t care less about the musical instruments, no matter how much I try to connect the real live piano with the representation of a little red piano in her book. She flips past these pages with a determined goal: to get to the pages with babies. Once there, she points her perfectly straight, amazingly tiny pointer finger smack-dab in the middle of their faces and shouts “bahbah” as loudly and joyfully as I’ve said anything in my life.

And here she is, begging me to read this book again. To say the instrument names over, even as she hurriedly turns the page before I can get the words out. I think for a moment of the good old days — last week — when her book of choice was From Head to Toe by Eric Carle, or even further back, The Very Hungry Caterpillar? How could I have been so foolish as to bemoan reading those colorful, sing-songy, semi-narrative books? Oh to go back to last week!

Do not worry. Of course I picked her up. Of course I set aside my desire to read my own book (On Beauty by Zadie Smith, and my, I am now reeling at the end of it) and instead managed to read-in-full three of the ten pages before she lost interest, snapped the book shut, and shimmied down my calves to the rug, off on another living room adventure. Every time this happens, I stare at her, my head a bit tilted in awe that this darling creature thinks nothing of abrupt demands and even more abrupt declarations of utter boredom.

As with most things right now, even this has two sides — one annoying, one endearing. I’ve been reading How to Raise a Reader (“The New York Times” has an online guide), and the authors state that even this flipping through, this gazing at pictures, this baby-babbling is, indeed, reading. The other day, just as I sat down in my white chair with a bowl of cereal, she toddled over with a book grasped in both hands (this one, I think, was Chicka Chicka Boom Boom), and I said, “Evangeline, Mama’s eating breakfast. I’ll read to you after, okay?” I said this with no thought that she would listen, understand, and back away peacefully. But she did. She looked at me a moment, then turned around, plopped down on the floor, and opened the book on her splayed legs. She read to herself, and I chewed my outrageously loud granola and watched with wonder. Maybe the monotony of reading the same book all day for a week was instilling some sort of independence. Maybe I wouldn’t regret the majority of the time I stop doing what I’m doing to gather her in my lap and read. Maybe I’d never have to read that silly musical instrument book again.

This is Day 36 of our social distancing, Day 36 of us waking up together in our cozy home (when the furnace doesn’t stop working in the middle of the night), Day 36 of oatmeal with apricots for breakfast and Zoom calls and FaceTime and hollers across the street with neighbors.

There is so much the same. Over and over again, I do laundry (well, really, over and over again I should do laundry), and the number of dishes this tiny family accumulates by the end of the day is monumental. I simultaneously wish Evangeline would please, please, choose another book, and look back with nostalgia at the various little things she’s already outgrown. I have an up-close look at her movements through time, and as I watch her try again to stack a book on top of her sippy cup, I think about how she has no idea what is going on in the world. To her, this is some lucky turn-of-events: both parents home, all the time, and in no rush to go anywhere. She doesn’t understand when we listen to the news in the morning, when I get melancholy in the afternoons, or when she reaches out to touch her grandparents’ faces, why all she feels is a screen.

I remember a poem I wrote after college. The main event is washing brown eggs in the kitchen sink with the pads of my fingers, but the underlying feeling is repetition. I tried to write about the mundane, repetition, and joy. I thought I knew what those things were, how they overlapped. I didn’t know yet about Brother Lawrence or his book The Practice of the Presence of God, and so it was like discovering something for the first time with my own heart and hands (I am growing more careful to value these discoveries as different from those made second-hand; it is too easy to dismiss personal revelations [non-divine] because others have already had them).

Now, nearly ten years later, and I am re-learning the soul of my poem. I am re-learning the wisdom of Brother Lawrence. Evangeline knows nothing of this, or, maybe, she knows it all — the joy on her face when we do the simplest things.

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Fire in Her Belly

It was a simple print hung on the wall of a house I hardly knew. I was fourteen, I think, maybe fifteen, and I saw it as I was leaving. The black ink outline of a woman’s full, pregnant body, the orange flame of fire inside. I must have looked confused, or maybe I asked outright: “What is this?” because the woman who lived there tried to explain.

Mary, human body filled with fire, Jesus, Holy Spirit, pregnant with fire, flesh.

I wasn’t much older than fifteen because I was unable to understand. Art — like life — was still two-dimensional, and the idea that an image that wasn’t real could represent the true was too hard for me to comprehend.

I still see that image every Advent, burned into my memory like the fire in her belly.

Last Advent, I, too, was expecting my first child. I basked in the joy of sharing that time with the Church calendar, and I loved that we had much to wonder about. Many of our questions have been answered (she has Gabe’s eyes, my smile, and her own sense of rhythm), but there are still so many. Every morning, she wakes up new, and just when I think I have mastered this parenting thing, she changes the rules. I am grateful that we have been able to make her life beautiful and comfortable, even while so many parents struggle to fill their children’s tummies.

Last Advent, I sang in a stretched-thin gold dress for three nights. I ran out of breath on nearly every musical line, but my voice felt strong. The baby liked the music. I was happy to squeeze a six-month belly into my old concert dress.

This Advent, I had a dream of her sitting in the concert, her eyes wide with delight. I thought she would love it. Gabe, even, thought it was doable. So he dressed her in a plaid Christmas dress and tights and sweater.

She made it through the first song. She didn’t want to listen to us, she wanted to sing with us.

That’s the problem with a baby who’s used to singing: she doesn’t know when to stop.

I use the term “singing” lightly. She scream-sings, shout-sings, utters every single emotion she experiences with her voice. She doesn’t know how not to interact with people — how to just let them be — and so she is apparently a difficult concert baby (which is to be expected at nine months, I suppose).

I was sad to see them get up and leave the room, but also relieved.

Did you hear that baby in the back? Ruined every single cadence.

After Gabe took her out (they paced the entryway for a bit, went downstairs, listened through the floors), we sang a set about flowers, the idea of Mary as a Rose, Christ as a Rose. The lines flooded over me.

There is no rose of such virtue
As is the rose that bare Jesu,
Alleluia.

For in this rose contained was
Heaven and earth in little space,
Res miranda.

Here it was again: “For in this rose contained was Heaven and earth in little space.”

Fire in her belly.

Res miranda — marvelous thing!

As Madeleine L’Engle says, “I do not understand the incarnation. I rejoice in it.”

This is beyond my understanding. It is beyond my reason. I remember feeling the baby move inside me and wondering who this baby would become. How much harder would it have been to allow Jesus to become who he was? Just as I wrote last spring, she is her own, and Mary must have wrestled with the same feelings I have: This is my baby, and yet he is not. He was the fire in my belly, and yet…

I often think what a terrifying honor to hold the Son of God in your womb. Then I think what a terrifying honor to hold any human in your womb. I think of the women who desire a child but aren’t able to carry one. I think of the babies who aren’t wanted. I think of my own mother, the exhaustion, the stress, the deep ache of love. I yearn for a world where hearts are not broken.

Maybe we all have fire in our bellies.

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Life from Ashes

 At 3:06AM on March 6th, a scream ripped through a small sterile room. The woman lying on the operating table never thought she would be there: legs double-strapped down, a blue tarp suspended over her head, her body convulsing as the hormones raced and swirled and left her. Like so many things, this was not what she had pictured. And like so many things, ultimately, it didn’t matter. The scream was good — proof of working lungs and a long labor brought to an end.

Ash Wednesday

What is the meaning of life on such a day? Brought into a world that is broken on the day that serves as a reminder of the death of all things. Better to be born on Resurrection Sunday! New life on the day of New Life! I continue to wonder what the significance of an Ash Wednesday birth will have on this life that is currently curled up on my chest while I type around her.

Lent has had a unique place in my life since I first started observing it. I didn’t grow up in a church tradition that practiced Lent, and my ignorance of its value was clear when I thought giving up things like chocolate was supposed to mimic Christ’s sacrifice. Only later, after college, did I realize it wasn’t supposed to be the same as Christ’s sacrifice, but to be a constant reminder of that most sacred gift, and the season of lament began to hold new meaning for me.

There have been Lents that broke me. Or, perhaps, it is that I was already in mourning and the church calendar lined up to allow me to grieve. I have appreciated the coinciding of cold, dark days with lament, and I have read daily devotionals, prayed daily prayers, given up daily distractions. I have mourned the loss of relationships, prayed for the strengthening of others, and sought Christ’s transformation in myself.

There are so many things to be worked out in the active intentionality that Lent provides.

There are so many things to be waited on in the rest and contemplation that Lent demands.

This Lent, however, is starkly different.

Her eyes are almond shaped. She has her grandmother’s lips. Her favorite thing is to stretch her little limbs as far as she can and move as much as possible. She does not like to be swaddled, and she loves to look out windows.

Life doesn’t always line up with the meaning of days. Sometimes you miscarry on Easter. Sometimes you bury your grandfather on the most beautiful sunshine-filled day in August.

This year, my Lent looks like wonder. Wonder at this tiny human who was once inside me and is now outside me. She was born on Ash Wednesday — for dust you are and to dust you will return — and her birth meant no ashes, no church for me. Her birth on the day of ashes didn’t even factor into her name, and yet Evangeline seems the only name for a baby born on this day: Bringer of Good News.

It seems to me there is no better vocation, no better blessing.

[Photo credit: Gabe Knell]

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Three-Year-Old Freedom

She sits in front of me on the bus, her dark head barely visible over the blue seat. Pink bows keep two small braids from unraveling by her face, and her head turns swiftly as she tries to take it all in through the window.

I am on my way to church — not necessarily against my will, but most definitely against the yearning I feel to roam all day in the sunshine and write with my friends by the Charles River. But I made plans with another friend (in part to make sure I did indeed get up and go), so here I am on the bus that will take me to the T station. I have been audacious enough to ask to be blessed, to ask that God would somehow bless this thing that I find so difficult to do in this season of my life.

With an old man at the next stop enters the hot stench of an unbathed body, and I bristle, both at the smell and at the rudeness of the girl next to me, covering her nose, pouting. The old man looks at me, and I smile — a peace offering — because it won’t be long before I, too, offend people with aging.

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It is the Sunday after a trip to the midwest and the Sunday before I jump right back into all that I left behind. I performed a makeshift grocery-run on Saturday, I diligently did my laundry, I celebrated a friend’s engagement with champagne, and I realized I hadn’t read half as many pages of my stack of books as I had planned. At choir, I leaned in and whispered: I feel like I’m in college choir again. Like those days when I was at the beach but had to come back to campus for practice, and I can’t focus and all I can think about is the ocean and the sun.

I was giddy with something (holiday-high, maybe?), and I sang but I also laughed through rehearsal. Sally and I topped it off with our classic buffalo chicken calzone, and here I am, the next morning, praying that choosing this church to call home, at least for now, is right.

The little girl reaches out and touches the back of her father’s thigh. Her hand is small and her fingernails are perfectly-shaped crescents that I imagine her mother carefully clipping after a warm bath. The girl gazes up at her father’s face. He does not look down, and I realize she is merely checking in. She doesn’t need acknowledgment, only presence.

I am captivated.

We funnel off the bus and onto the T. I do not mean to, but I am sitting directly across from her. Now she stands, her little body full of the confidence so many of us grown-ups lack. She knows to grasp the T pole with both hands — she knows the world loves her.

I snap a picture.

I feel guilty, a thief. But I am spellbound and I can’t explain it.

When we reach my T stop, I get off, knowing I will never see her again. I had wanted so badly to reach out, to cup the top of her head with the curve of my palm, but her ease and wonder would not be possessed. She unselfconsciously took in the world and demanded that it love her.

And I did.

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Lost Letter

photo-11-e1435232845365.jpgI found it a few days ago, tucked into a book as an impromptu marker. I’d used one of my favorite notecards and I remember writing the letter in February, sitting in the little white chair in my bedroom.

I’d meant to send it, like any letter, but somehow it’s been hidden for the past five months.

I toyed with sending it now, but my curiosity got the better of me. I tore it open, read the words I’d meant for a friend. A time capsule, this letter that was never meant for my June-self, contained not only comfort, but truth.

I had no idea the difficult conversations I’d be having over the next few weeks, nor the “change” (really, changes) I felt coming. All I knew was what I read, what I felt, and how beautifully scripture pairs with Mary Oliver in a handwritten letter.

“For I am the Lord your God,
who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar —
The Lord of hosts is his name.
I have put my words in your mouth,
and hidden you in the shadow of my hand.”
-Isaiah 51:16

Dear K,

This was part of my Lenten devotional — good ol’ Henri Nouwen! — and it struck me for a few reasons. The biggest one, though, is that God’s words fill our mouths. God fills our mouths with his words. There is so much power in that but the number of times I do not feel God’s words coming out of my mouth would seem to disprove this fact. So in those moments when we are most afraid, most vulnerable, most ready to throw our hands up and despair, that is when the power of God’s Word (God’s words) can lift us out of ourselves.

But hand-in-hand with this power is God’s protection. I think it was this combination of truths that brought this verse so deeply into my heart. Because as little as I feel God’s strength and power within me, I would say I feel his protection even less. Sometimes I feel I march through the gates of whatever “righteous” battle I’m waging at the time, but despite God’s power, I am left unprotected, easily hurt, and most often very confused.

I think perhaps there is a little bit of your New York in that: full of strength in the beginning, a sense of extreme vulnerability, and a feeling of no protection afterwards.

I feel on the cusp of some “great change,” and I don’t necessarily mean factual, physical, geographical. I think this Lenten season holds a mystery for my discovery, and when I woke up and read my devotional, writing to you became the first step in that pursuit of quiet, of rest, of opening up to hear God speak.

Morning Poem
by Mary Oliver

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches —
and the ponds appear

like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead —
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging  —

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted – 

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
wether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

Love,
Catherine

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Who Am I?

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We play this game in class with the last few minutes on Fridays. I call it “Who Am I?” but really it’s just “20 Questions,” and only sometimes do I make them choose Greek and Roman mythological characters. One student leaves the room while the rest of us decide which person he or she is.

They love making boys goddesses and girls gods.

And so we’ll choose a character and call the exile in. He or she will commence asking yes-or-no questions until eventually it becomes clear who he or she is supposed to embody.

The thing I keep noticing is this response from the rest of the students.

Let’s say it’s a girl, and she only knows that she’s from mythology, she’s male, and she’s not a god. Her next question might be:

“Did I defeat a lion?”

Every time, the rest of the class guffaws in disbelief.

How could you ask that question?

OBVIOUSLY NOT.

Oh my gosh…!

I didn’t quite understand what was happening until this week.

While one student stands ignorant in front of her classmates, the rest of them can only function with their knowledge. They’ve forgotten (in the span of about .65 minutes) that not everyone has the same information they have. This student asks “Did I defeat a lion?” with less knowledge than they have, but with enough to wonder, hmmmm…maybe I’m Hercules…

Student: “Did I get punished by the gods?”

Chorus: “HAHAHAHA!”

Student: “Did I become an animal?”

Chorus: “WHAT?!”

After a few rounds of this teeheeing and finger-pointing, finally I stood up.

“Listen, guys,” I said, “you have to remember that she doesn’t know what you know. Her questions make complete sense because she doesn’t know already that she’s Theseus. The question only sounds crazy to you because you already know.”

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I have this vision of something big and grand that would open high schooler’s eyes to the great wonderful world. I have this idea that our faith is too small, too cultural, and that to get these kids out where Christianity looks different but transforms just the same is part of my job.

I look at my students, and I want to dump every ounce of experience and wisdom I’ve gained through trial and error into their beings so that they don’t have to do it themselves.

I wonder how parents do it. How do you watch these little half-yous-but-not-at-all-yous walk the earth and not suffocate them? How do you let them function in their ignorance? And it isn’t ignorance in the negative way, so much as it is a stage.

You can’t force experience.

RIght, you can’t, but what is experience if not created?

How do you not expect your children, your students, to be in the same place you are?

I am constantly reminding myself that I function at a different level than these young minds and souls I teach.

They don’t know who they are.

They walk into the room, and they don’t know who they are, so their questions, the way they interact, might seem strange to me, the one who has just a bit more knowledge.

The one who progressed smoothly (and not so smoothly) through the stages of growth to arrive at a non-arrival where things are still being worked-out.

Even people all the same age are not in the same place. Whether it be actually (some are married, some are single, some have children, some travel the world) or just internally (some feel confident, some love their jobs, some long for more, some have faith that pumps life), we are all spinning on different trajectories.

And that’s okay.

I will never have the calmness of my high school friend, who, when I asked her, “What do we have to look forward to?”, said:

“Well, I’m a pretty content person. So I don’t know what to say.”

That will never be me.

We’re spinning different stories, but we’re both playing our own games of “Who Am I?”.

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Shutting Up

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I’ve thought of many books and inspirations that I’d like to pump into your veins to inoculate you from the traumas of living on this planet in a human body, but in the grand scheme of things I really, truly know that you will find all the wisdom you need at the moment you need it.

This is what I opened last week, slipped out of a little brown envelope and held in my hands. The card was perfect for me, complete with the stamp of a chicken and Rumi quote about birds flying and falling and flying again.

At first, I thought:

What?! Please, please, inoculate me! Send me every quote, every book, every shard of wisdom you have because right now I’m feeling so incredibly overwhelmed by being who I am and not who I am supposed to be.

But then, after a few moments of feigned irritation, I realized she was right.

I wasn’t ready.

And just as I have been suffocated by genocide in Iraq, Ebola in Sudan, the anger of supermarket workers and strikes, the racism and fear and riots, the brokenness of my students, the brokenness of everyone I love, the brokenness of me, I wonder if I would be equally as suffocated by bits of wisdom that I’m not yet ready to digest.

~     ~     ~

This was where the rest of my post was, the part where I write about learning to shut up and stop giving advice, stop giving wisdom. Where I stop myself from talking.

Then the irony caught up with me.

“You will find all the wisdom you need at the moment you need it.”

That was enough wisdom for that moment. And this one.

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Good Things #45: A Face that Shines

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“Exodus says that the people could tell Moses had been with God based only upon the look of his face.  It is real when it is real hard. Don’t go to a place to preach, go to help and in helping earn the opportunity to share the reason your face looks different.”

I asked my uncle about missions and what he thought about them and I tried to explain why I wrestle with a lot of what I see around me. And this is what he sent me.

It has been my prayer since opening his email.

Does my face look different? Does it shine?

Am I breathing in that I may breathe out?

 

Bleeding Out

Even if I was lonely, even if I was broke
Even if all the dogs in the pound let me know
Saying it’s never over, it never ends
Grab the guns and the ammo, let us descend
To the darkest of prisons, and break their defense
We will rattle the cages, rules will be bent
Oh, remind us our days are all numbered not spent
And peace it comes easy, like mist on a ridge

[Chorus]
Breathing in, breathing out, it’s all in my mouth
Gives me hope that I’ll be, something worth bleeding out
Breathing in, breathing out, it’s all in my mouth
Gives me hope that I’ll be, something worth bleeding out
All the worries folks tell us to break all of our ties
To our families and loved ones, we leave when we fly
To these cities we think we need in our lives
Oh you Manhattan jungle, you tangle our pride

[Chorus]
Breathing in, breathing out, it’s all in my mouth
Gives me hope that I’ll be, something worth bleeding out
Breathing in, breathing out, it’s all in my mouth
Gives me hope that I’ll be, something worth bleeding out

All the buildings, they lean and they smile down on us
And they shout from their roof tops, words we can’t trust
Like you’re dead, you are tired
You’re ruined, you’re dust
Oh you will amount to nothing, like tanks full of rust
But we scream back at them

From below on the street

All in unison we sing, at times, been redeemed
We are all of the beauty, that has not been seen
We are full of the color, that’s never been dreamed
Well, nothing we need ever dies, yeah
Nothing we need ever dies, yeah
Nothing we need ever dies
[Chorus]
Breathing in, breathing out, it’s all in my mouth
Gives me hope that I’ll be, something worth bleeding out
Breathing in, breathing out, it’s all in my mouth
Gives me hope that I’ll be, something worth bleeding out.