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An Offering

IMG_1467I am walking along roads I know well — well enough to anticipate dips and turns without thinking. I am walking in the slanted light of morning, and the air smells like spring.

I pass an older woman in purple slacks. She carries a purse, so I know she isn’t out on a leisurely stroll like I am. She has a purpose, a place. I have a purpose, too, but it’s not quite so tangible.

There aren’t many places I feel closer to God than when I am walking. Walks are my response to uncertainty, to fear, to wrestling. I walked around and around on 9/11, and again the day of the Boston Marathon bombing. I walked as graduation approached and I mourned the loss of my little life at college, and I walked the day I realized I would not be able to take that job with AmeriCorps back in 2012.

As I go, I talk to God. I slip in and out of actual conversation with him and conversations with others in my life. I shape thoughts and how I feel and how best to convey these things to other people. But God listens the whole time, and I feel his shaping of my words, too.

I stop by the stream and sit on the crooked cement slab, watching the water flow from under the road. It foams and swirls and swirls together, one floating foam into another, until they converge and slip over the rocks and down the stream.

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I think about how we are all “others” and how this is scary.

That seeing and accepting another’s otherness is what community is about.

No one drives by to see me in my striped hoody by the stream, and I know what waits for me on my return home: Bonhoeffer and YA literature, a couch made soft with blankets and the sound of the neighbor children racing their bikes in the street.

I sit for a moment longer, and I want to sing to the Lord. I want to sing a song of trust and faith, a faith that covers and holds up all the brokenness and sadness I sometimes feel.

I want to sing, but no song comes. I wait. I am open.

I want to sing.

But there, by the stream on that quiet road, with birds chirping in the weeping willow, no song comes.

At first, I am concerned. Where is my song? I want to have an offering, but my hand — my throat — are empty.

And then I think that maybe my offering is too much me and not enough listening.

Too much sound and not enough quiet.

Too much struggling for answers and not enough allowance of questions.

And so I sit a moment longer, get up, walk home.

An offering of listening.

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Henri Nouwen and a Broken Lent

I begin the Lenten season with gusto. Perhaps gusto is not the right word, because it’s more like a settling in — a settling into the rhythms of 5:30AM and Henri Nouwen and prayer. I am not so good at this getting-up-and-reading. My eyes cross. The words bleed together and I struggle to read through again, hoping this time to catch the nuance, the challenge, the peace.

I attempt to bring some of this contemplation, this observation, to my 8th grade homeroom. They get better at listening and at least looking at me as I try to spin words that reach them. Prayer requests usually revolve around upcoming tests, but once in awhile, I am struck by their depth of care for this hurting world.

We drive home from Maine and the sun is bright pink and as I catch it between the metal arms of the bridge, I feel sadness. Sunday is over, the next week spreads before me, and I focus more on the setting of the sun than the the brilliance of it against the gray sky.

I take a picture.

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It doesn’t even begin to capture the beauty, and I wish for once I could bask in glory instead of mourn an ending.

I hear stories of birth – -moments that should be joy and laughter — but instead end in deep pain. But Miss Hawkins, I didn’t think that happened anymore. I didn’t think mothers died. But they do and they leave behind babies and husbands and mourners on multiple continents.

I try to navigate being a Christ-follower and being a student-leader and sometimes waking in the middle of the night with the secret voice that says Just run. Nobody needs you anyway. Italy still looks good, and think of the writing you could do. You’ll never save all of them, so run away and stop trying.

Then I wake up at 5:30. I grind the coffee beans, put the tea kettle on, settle in under my nine-patch quilt.

I read Henri Nouwen, a passage from the Bible, a prayer. I tell God in full honesty that I do not know how anyone gets through this life without Him.

I drive to work in the sunlight across the marsh. I pour another cup of coffee from a co-worker’s ever-full coffeepot. I ask for prayer. I smile at everyone.

This, I guess, is the place I should be. This place of “What would I do without you, Lord?” I know that it is in this place that good work is done.

 

So many terrible things happen every day that we start wondering whether the few things we do ourselves make any sense…Here the word “call” becomes important. We are not called to save the world, solve all problems, and help all people. But we each have our own unique call, in our families, in our work, in our world. We have to keep asking God to help us see clearly what our call is and to give us the strength to live out that call with trust. Then we will discover that our faithfulness to a small task is the most healing response to the illnesses of our time.

– Henri Nouwen

 

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Nashville, Here I…

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I am wearing a wool hat in my bedroom. This is not a complaint, just an observation.

I have dreaded going out to the chickens for about 3.6 weeks, and today was no exception. I keep shoveling a path and the snow STILL manages to get in my boots. The girls squawk and run around in circles because they’ve been cooped up in the henhouse for nearly a month. The snow is higher than the mini door to the run, and at this point, it’ll be another two months before they see the outdoors. I give them apples and scraps to compensate. They glare at me.

I got a text (a text!) from the airline that my flight to Nashville has been cancelled. They’ve graciously (graciously!) put me on a flight to Nashville on Wednesday, but that only gives us 1.5 days for way more than 1.5 hassle…we shall see. K and I are waiting a little longer to decide how to make the most of this very unwelcome change of events.

I have brewed more tea and coffee this month than the rest of the winter combined.

I’m wearing out my new Christmas slippers.

If I don’t go to Nashville for break, does that mean I have to do grad school homework instead?

[N.B. I love snow. Even yesterday, waking up to the fourth storm in a row, I was glad. Then I drove home slowly and steadily and slipperily and was still glad.]

He asked what I did last Valentine’s Day as we watched the icy snow slant sideways through the light of the street lamps. I had no idea. It’s not really a day I’ve marked in, oh, ever.

[Just looked it up: was on my way to Italy with our school trip. Not a bad way to celebrate.]

This just in: not going to Nashville.

Not renting a car for the first time. Not dancing along Music Row.

Where does that leave me in this ice-snow winter?

Wondering how best to paint NYC red.

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[I’m sure we can dance just as well in New York, and it turns out Nashville is barely any warmer than home.]

[I may or may not be wearing my newly knit hat — it kinda fits in with the hipster vibe of Williamsburg, right?]

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Old Wheels Bite the Dust

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What do you do when you’ve had something since  you were sixteen and it’s breaking?

What do you do when you realize a little too much of yourself is tied to a thing?

What do you do when you realize that maybe there is more weight to a thing and its memories than there is freedom?

I drove for months with a window that wouldn’t go up in my car. It wasn’t bad in the summer – often the top was down anyway, so who cares?

But then it started to rain.

We had a week of straight rain. Of me running out of grad class with a towel and garbage bag to frantically cover the gaping hole (it only sort of worked). The rain came in, no matter how hard I tried to cover it. I was pretty resourceful, though, I think.

Then it got chilly, and the morning commutes got less and less comfortable.

For weeks my students laughed at me.

“Magistra, why do you have a towel on your car?”

Ummmm…

My neighbor jokingly yelled at me to “get that fixed already!” I told him it was too expensive, that I couldn’t sink another thousand dollars in a ten-year-old car that was falling apart.

“I’m just looking out for you,” he said, smiling.

“If you were really looking out for me, you’d buy me a new window!” (To which he shook his head because we’ve had many years of back-and-forth.)

I was determined to get one more summer out of that cream colored bug. I was determined, actually, never to buy a new car. I was determined to hold on to my sixteen-year-old self that cried when she got home and saw this thing that she never dreamed of having. This material thing that had brought so much joy to her life and her friends’ lives, too.

But the truth is, I am a very different person than I was at sixteen.

I got a letter from a college friend yesterday — a kindred spirit — and she told me how there are so many versions of herself she’s not sure which one to be. And I thought, Yes, that’s exactly right.

When I was sixteen, I was angry. I was afraid. I was sure that I’d never get into college and I was sure that I didn’t deserve whatever love I received.

But I also loved to laugh. I loved going to the diner for pie after performing in our high school shows. I loved walking to the library with my best friend and reading books, teeheeing in the stacks when we came across Portnoy’s Complaint. I was a better baker and cook than I am now, with the time and desire to perfect.

I wrote more in high school than I do now.

I got in a bad car accident and, after being spared, realized that God must, indeed, have work for me to do.

What a frightening thought.

I took trips to Maine in the summer — two teenage girls (I can’t believe we were allowed to do this!) cruised up the highway with the wind in our hair, spent the weekend on the ocean eating seafood and kayaking, shopping in Freeport, feeling the freedom of adulthood that lay just over the way.

…

All this to say: adulthood is here.

I handed over the keys of this bizarrely dear friend.

I walked away with a new car that has already begun to stand for everything that is new and hopeful.

And I said goodbye to the parts of me that need to go — in the shape of a cream colored convertible bug.

Goodbye, Buglette. It’s been real.

photo 2[And Auntie, don’t worry. I kept the orange flower you gave me.]

[P.S. My 8th graders, on seeing my new car: “It’s not quite as Magistra as your other car…”]

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Egrets

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“Where the path closed
down and over,
through the scumbled leaves,
fallen branches,
through the knotted catbrier,
I kept going.”

I don’t really like nature poetry. I’ve tried for years, taking recommendations, trying to more than just acknowledge its worth and actually revel in it. But there are few nature poems (or poets) that get me.

Or should I say: there are few nature poems (or poets) that I get.

And it isn’t for lack of love for nature, either. I’d take a day in the woods over shopping and call it blessed. Still, there’s something.

A friend once told me, “Egrets are auspicious birds.” We were standing by the ocean watching two egrets meander along the marsh. This friend is a reader of signs — a believer in “reasons for things” — and as I watched the egret bend its elegant neck to the marsh grasses, I almost believed her.

Battling through thorns, swatting at mosquitos, the narrator searches for something she doesn’t even know is there. At first, it’s just a clump of reeds shimmering across the shore. Then, suddenly, it bursts into life and white fire: egrets emerging from the reeds.

“Even half-asleep they had
such faith in the world
that made them –
tilting through the water,
unruffled, sure,
by the laws
of their faith not logic,
they opened their wings
softly and stepped
over every dark thing.”

“By the laws of their faith” — as though even birds have a sense of belonging. I imagined their long un-clumsy legs shifting with grace.

They opened their wings softly and stepped over every dark thing.

I sit on my bed, that last line resonating through the room as though I’d read it aloud.

I read it again, quickly, afraid almost that the words are not true. That I didn’t just read a poem about egrets and water and darkness and light.

But I did, and there it is on page 148. A real-live nature poem that stopped me in my mindless reading and gave words to transcendence.

She’s done it again, Mary Oliver, with her observations and daily life and the shaping of thought into poetry.

Maybe I don’t think I care for nature poetry.

If this is me not caring, then why has the image of egrets rising up out of the reeds, the image of “stepping over every dark thing”, settled so permanently in my mind?

[Photo: Texas Eagle]

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The Story of Hands

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I’ve always been fascinated by hands.

Sitting on Grampa’s lap in the big recliner, I remember the feel of the bump along the edge of his thumb. He’d been in a boating accident years before, and the bones never smoothed after the surgery to reattach his thumb.

Watching Great-Grammie Shaw knit in the sunny den, her veined hands flashing the metal needles. You’d never have guessed she didn’t have full-use of her right hand — that a car accident in 1927 left her to relearn how to write, how to knit, and how to sew. The only thing she couldn’t re-learn was how to type. It scared me a little, the shape of that hand, but when I grew older, I marveled at how she held her coffee mug every morning, the tilt of it towards her mouth right up to a month ago.

My Dad’s hands in church as he held the Bible, the fine blond hairs of his fingers, the shortness of his nails. How those square hands held me and gardened and played card games. How the freckles came out in the summertime.

And Mama’s hands, small and brown from the sun. Her wedding ring stopped fitting me when I was a teenager, and I thought my hands must be huge. But it wasn’t that, really, it was the smallness of Mama’s, like her thin wrists.

That time I was driving along 1-A and realized my hands would die. That I looked at them and finally saw how deeply fear ran in me.

[“You know what I remember, Catherine? Having a sleepover when we were like fourteen, and we were all talking about boys. And you said he had to have good hands, that you always looked at his hands. I’ll never forget it.”]

Sitting across from a man and thinking No, no, because his hands looked like a woman’s and he was eating salad. Because his nails were too long and his laugh was too high and all I could think was no.

Hands tell stories without words. Like a timeline, they trace the beginnings of life all the way to the grind of your day. The scar on my right hand from that broken mug my senior year of college, how it bled and bled and seemed to stand for more than just my clumsiness. The freckle on my thumb that’s only recently appeared — proof of sun and age. The writer’s bump I got in second grade writing an essay on keeping chickens (in cursive). The way the veins in my left wrist protrude just a little bit more than my right — a reminder of blockage and breaking free.

Even now, as I think of different people in my life, I see their hands. The half-moons of my aunt’s nails, the wedding ring my Gramma has never taken off, the slope of his trimmed nails and the way my hand feels small inside his.

Who knows why hands are what I see? I wonder what it is other people see: ears? noses? eyes? There’s so much character in a hand, though, the kind of character that makes you feel like you know a person long before you do. I try not to read bodies, but it’s hard, ignoring the reality of truth right in front of you.

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Too Personal

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“Why haven’t you been writing as much?”

“Oh, you know, don’t have much to say these days.”

Which is true. Lots of thoughts, not a lot of formation.

But the real truth?

“I read your blog — not all the time. Sometimes I feel like it’s too personal.”

So, there you go.

That’s what’s been keeping me away: this quick sentence from a friend that has made me reevaluate and second-guess almost every post I’ve thought of.

I don’t think of this blog as too personal.

“Really? You do?” I asked. “Because I was thinking how I leave so much out, how there are always these glaring holes of what’s really going on.”

~     ~     ~

This weekend, I posted pictures on Facebook of my trip to Brooklyn to visit my recently-relocated friend. We were smiling in the sun and looked absolutely ridiculous with ring pops.

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What I left out was that we both tired of those ring pops before they were gone. That
I got lost on the subway a grand total of three times. That I had blisters like you read about. That I wandered the Metropolitan Museum of Art alone with a backpack weighing thirty pounds slung across my belly “to protect the art.”

That I couldn’t sleep on the train ride there or home because my mind was racing to the blur of the landscape.

Even today, I posted a picture of the girl I babysit. The caption?

A woman after my own heart — how do you not love kids who beg you to take them fishing?

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The sun was beautiful on the water. It was still and quiet. The lily pads were in bloom and blue and red dragonflies swooped together among the flowers.

What I didn’t write?

That five minutes later, I had two whiney kids who couldn’t cast for the life of them (and apparently aren’t able to put a worm on a hook). There was pushing and accusations when a brother knotted the line, whining because it was so hot and the water bottles I’d painstakingly packed were “warm.”

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It was only about half an hour later that I decided:

You know what? Let’s just sit with our feet in the water, ’cause this is exhausting and I can’t take it.

~     ~     ~

So what am I trying to say? Something about social media? How it’s a manicured version of ourselves? How we present only the good and beautiful and leave the ugly at home?

A little.

Don’t get me wrong, I know there are some things that need to be ugly. It’s the unique parts that make someone worth reading. It’s the specific that makes writing resonate with you.

Sometimes armpits are hilarious. Sometimes they’re just gross.

More than that, though, it’s an echo of what I’ve written about earlier.

There’s always more going on under the surface. Perhaps I do get too personal here, but it’s usually because it feels comfortable. It feels like the space to write things I care about. It feels like the space to figure out what it means to be me — both as a writer and as a human.

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Makeup and Growing Up

They came down with their faces covered in makeup.

Pink blush smeared across their cheeks, gray eyeshadow swiped along their eyelids, and even through their pride, I could see that the gooey pink lipgloss was already annoying them.

They’d never admit it.

The thing about babysitting is that you learn a lot about parenting. You learn a lot about loving the right way — and the wrong way. You learn the art of blocking your ears to whining because if you didn’t, you’d probably flip your lid.

You also learn when and how to live out the theories you worked so painstakingly to create for the past however-many-years-you’ve-lived.

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[Now that’s some little-girl makeup I can get behind. Photo: Jean-Paul Gaillard]

I knew a boy in college whose earnestness was unsurpassed. He chose his words carefully, he chose his theories with the heart of someone who cared almost too deeply to survive this world. He had all these ideas.

But he didn’t know how to live with them, really.

His desire for equality was constantly bumping up against reality, against young women on campus who didn’t understand. Why doesn’t he hold the door for me? I’d hold it for him!

Once we talked about high heels. He told me I should never wear them, that they were used to make women vulnerable, that it was all about “The Man.” I laughed and said, “Well, I like the way I look in heels. I don’t care what men think!”

“But you should!” he said, sounding concerned. “That’s the problem: everything is defined by what men think.”

And while his theories were right and his heart was right, I did look pretty good in a pair of heels and I continue to throw on a pair when I so feel like it.

Theory vs. Reality.

~     ~     ~

And here these girls stood before me with faces shining (although perhaps less-so due to the powder they’d covered them with). My mind raced to all the implications:

UGH MAKEUP

I hate it. Even though I use it. I hate it.

She’s only seven.

What is WITH this culture that makes young girls so obsessed with how they look?

And this will lead to more makeup and tight clothes and endless dieting and weird walks and hilarious but awkward flirting and…and…and…

I took a deep breath.

I looked at their smiling rouged-up faces, and I said,

“Looks like someone’s been playing with Mom’s makeup.”

And they giggled and ran up the stairs.

Maybe someday I’ll talk to her about looks and culture and men and living fully.

Maybe someday I’ll teach her how to put on blush so she doesn’t look like a clown.

Maybe someday I’ll be able to show her that she is as beautiful when she is telling me a story as she is when she’s wearing that fluffy floral dress.

But today she is seven and she has a friend over. Today she is playing at adulthood and laughing.

Today is not the day.

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Prayer and Desire

photo 2 [“I don’t understand – what’s the point of praying? It’s not like we can change God’s mind.”]

When I pray — when I ask God for what I want — I am opening myself up for blessing.

I am trusting that God is capable of meeting my needs, my desires. Beyond capable, even. I am trusting that He wants to.

But, just as possibly, I am opening myself up for disappointment. For “no.” For dissatisfaction.

I am reminding myself that I am vulnerable. That I can be hurt and confused by circumstances. That I am at the mercy of my God.

[“So you’re telling me that prayer is all about our attitudes? It has nothing to do with God’s actions?”]

If I do not pray — if I choose instead not to commune with the Creator, not to bare my wants before the Lord — then I cannot say I am hurt. I cannot say that God withheld from me what I am convinced would be good for me. I cannot say that he told me “no” or directed my life down a path I never would have chosen.

If I do not pray, I can convince myself of my own strength.

I didn’t want it anyway.

Like the fox and the grapes, I will slink away in sadness cloaked in falsehoods.

I didn’t want to sing.

I didn’t want a home, a farm.

I didn’t want him.

I didn’t want little blonde babies.

I didn’t want to be a writer.

If I never want, I will never be disappointed. It has very similar outcomes to not loving, really: If I never love, I will never be hurt.

[“Don’t we choose? Don’t we get to decide what our lives look like?”]

I’ve gotten good at prayers of gratitude; ever since my blood clot, I look to the sky, see the peachy-pink shades of a sunset, and words of thankfulness tumble from my lips. It isn’t hard for me to remember the Lord’s goodness in what He has already done.

I haven’t yet mastered the trust that God remains good regardless of what happens. photo 2 And so, I come to the place I often find myself. The place where I must choose to live fuller – and probably be disappointed – or live safer, and walk the earth with shells of avoided disappointments.

Their very emptiness is enough to make me cry.

~     ~     ~

I prayed for the first time in weeks.

Yes, I’ve had random thoughts to the Lord, thanking Him, asking Him, talking to Him.

But I have been avoiding my desires. I’ve been avoiding admitting there are things I want. And I’ve been avoiding telling Him that I know He is in control.

Because if I don’t think He’s in control, He can’t allow (or not allow) things that will disappoint.

[“I just feel like He’s been removing all my reasons for going. All the reasons I thought I was doing this don’t exist anymore. I don’t understand.”]

I prayed for the first time today.

The first time in weeks.

And I asked Him for what I want. I do not know yet what the outcome will be. This could go the way of the beach house. This could go the way of so many of my life’s sister ships.

I do not know.

But I have prayed, and opened myself up to both the possibility of blessing and the possibility of disappointment.

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Beach Week [in images]

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Back at the beach for our yearly tradition (year nine, for those of us counting).

Last summer, I wrote about Mary Oliver and living while I sat in the sun.

This time, I’ve written a letter and a terrible poem that might not always be terrible.

I’ve also consumed a lot of ice cream.

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I’ve talked about missions (still on the brain), and I’ve helped grill twelve cheeseburgers, two bratwursts, and roughly six hotdogs.

I’ve made a rockin’ potato salad.

I’ve been grateful that Dunks is a mile away and I’m shocked they don’t know my order by now.

I’ve wandered down to the water in the dark, making Gramma nervous but coming back in due time.

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I’ve people-watched like a champ, playing “inner monologue” and creating bizarre plot lines to strangers’ lives (I hope they don’t mind…they’re quite entertaining).

I’ve walked the beach three times a day, and seen how the light changes against the sand.

photo 1 photo 2And now, I sit.

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