Who can tell what miracles Love has in store for us if only we have the courage to become one with it?
Everything we think we know is only the beginning of another knowing that itself has no end
–Iqbal, Sufi Mystic
Happy Love Thursday. May miracles be yours.
I haven’t been writing much.It seems that there is a shift going on in my life and I am not quite sure what to make of it.
It feels rather big and quite small at the same time.
After all, nothing has changed and yet everything seems to be changing.
My life feels so very much the same, but I feel new. And yet I feel as though I am really who I always was. And recognizing myself from long ago and realizing I had been there all along.
I don’t know how to write about it. And yet I don’t know how to write about anything else.
So I do my laundry. And I make dinner. And I play Uno with Max and read books. And I go through stacks of paper and finally take care of a thousand things that just last month seemed not worth doing.
Many of the events that are precipitating all these shifts are not the stuff of publication. Some are quite small, like streams that gently shape a mountain side over time. They are so mundane. Others have been earthquakes, shaking my very sense of security. They leave me feeling vulnerable and exposed.
Sometimes I feel like I am on the edge of some big deep breakthrough, but really, truth be told, most minutes I feel like I am wandering around in the spiritual desert, arriving at the same lesson over and over again. I feel like the last month or so has been a kind of spiritual boot camp.
Over and over, in big and small ways, I keep being called on to trust. To shed fear. To open up to love at whatever the cost. To operate not from a place of hurt but from compassion. To hold it all lightly, even when it feels so heavy. To claim my power and then to be unimpressed with it and let it go. To establish boundaries but let love flow freely across them.
To stop asking “what next?” To stop asking “why?” To stop seeking and spinning and hoping and wondering.
And just be.
Empty.
Speechless.
As a storyteller I don’t know what to do with the silence. The long stretches of quiet. Except to honor the stillness and to know that some stories are meant only to be whispered to God. And that soon, other stories will come to me. To let the fields go fallow for awhile and trust that I will write when I am ready.
This past Sunday, Odette threw a dinner party at our house. She called together some of the dearest members of our tribe to thank them for planning a fundraiser to support her girls. We pulled out dresses and dusted off the china, put a white damask cloth on the table and filled the house with flowers. As everyone started to arrive it started to pour…a heavy summer rain, the kind that washes funks and bad moods away. We drank beer and wine and gathered in the kitchen, all of us crowded in that tiny space leaving the rest of the house empty. As the lights flickered and the power threatened to go off, I pulled out candles and placed them next to the good dishes and half- hoped for the intimacy that an outage would bring.
And then Odette called us around the table. We stood there all of us, adults and children. We held hands as Odette bowed her head and began to say a blessing in her mysterious and beautiful language, a blessing over the food we would eat, a blessing over strangers who had become family. I opened my eyes and looked around the circle. And I took a mental picture and burned it into my heart. A circle of community. A table loaded with food. An endless cycle of giving and receiving.
And I knew that for all the shifts and changes and silences and spiritual deserts and breakthroughs, I have all that I will ever need. And no matter where I explore, I will arrive back here. Home.
Back when I was in my teens or very early 20s I had a vision of my future and it looked like this: I would finally make it, be wildly famous if only in a small circle, have lots of friends, and life would be largely effortless.
The things that would be difficult, I imagined would be amazing challenges–like hiking up high Asian mountains, or writing THE speech, or winning some national prize. I imagined that things like getting the laundry done, remembering birthdays, matching my clothes and looking passably fashionable would be so old hat. Certainly things like caring for children and getting a healthy dinner on the table and the grocery shopping done–that stuff would be done breezily in no time flat, leaving me lots of time to struggle nobly with poetry, and science and other meaningful critical important stuff.
I read this post today by Jena–Her blog is often a mirror for me–I go there and see so much of my own internal world reflected. In her post I recognized so clearly the way I sometimes hold the ordinary regular old stuff in my life. I wonder why it is 20 years later and I am still struggling to figure out how to get the cat fed and the recycling to the curb and the kitchen floor mopped, why small things can leave me feeling a bit flustered and why I do not have a perfectly ordered and neatly wrapped up life like “everyone else”. Or I stomp around grumpily through the mundane wondering when I can get through it, when there is going to be time to be brilliant and glamorous the way I imagined it would always be. Fortunately, I recognized too my own eventual settling into the notion that really at the end of the day I am enough. Happily enough.
I am so thrilled to be regular and unglamorous. To not always have it together. To screw up and make mistakes and learn.
Yesterday Jen Lemen talked about many of the things that leave her feeling foolish. Oh I have my list too. Many of them are mentioned above. Jen and I spend hours giggling over all the ways we play the fool and yet in this laughter I see beauty reflected back at me. I look in this mirror and know that I am exactly perfectly who I need to be right now. That its quite OK to be able to the kind of person who doesn’t always hold it all together so neatly but instead who runs around with life spilling over her arms, dropping pieces of lovingly constructed color along the way. Flawed but authentic. Jumping in with both feet. Getting messy. Living now.
And just now, I stood at this mirror. How crisply I saw my reflection in Bella’s story even though the contours are so very different. I am on the otherside of my divorce and am truly healed and yet the echoes of who I once was are still there. And I wonder what that means. Like Bella, after a long struggle to overcome difficult things I am used to being in healing mode. I laugh with glee when I realize that I am actually on the other side –not in the thick of it anymore and have to giggle when I say, “What is my excuse now? What is holding me back”
And speaking of now, I also today found this little gem at another of my favorite places to go for comfort–Cheerio Road. I thought Karen Maezen Miller just hit it perfectly–this notion of what it means to live in the moment. To be present NOW. Its so cliche, so chic these days to talk about THE NOW as though you need some special sort of wisdom, you need to have obtained some special enlightenment to live in the present. I am printing this post out and taping it to my mirror to remind myself that there is no future when I will be glamorous–there is no time when it will all fall together. There is no time when I won’t play the fool. There is no time when I will forget what happened in the past. No–there is only now. With me in it, enough–more than enough.
I am tonight standing at my mirrors, gazingly lovingly at soulsisters who hold themselves up so that I may see myself clearly. And am thankful.
The lovely and talented Rachelle over at Magpie Girl put out a call to all us “Small is Beautiful” Bloggers to gather our favorite seven posts from 2007–a greatest hits so to speak.
Here are mine. Enjoy.
My dear friend Jenni, my tireless champion and advocate, recently submitted a couple of my blog posts to sk*rt. I am so touched and excited about the prospect of new folks finding their way over here. Swing on over this way and over here to check it out! (and you can vote for it if you are so inclined to help it get seen more!!) I am just tickled pink…
Lovely letters that make me smile
Last night I got a letter from Anne.
I heart real letters. Not all letters-just the ones that I get in my mailbox from someone who doesn’t want money from me. From someone who actually has news or something wise to say. From someone who is thinking of me.
There is something about actually holding a piece of paper, the heft of it adding weight to the importance of the communication. The permanence of it.
I relish the fact that the letter was once actually held in the hands of the person writing to me. The author’s joy, sadness, boredom, yearning all imprinted into the paper like little energy fingerprints. I love that a dear one put it in an envelope and selected a stamp, walked to a mailbox and remembered to send it off and that ultimately some kind mailcarrier placed it in a pile just for me. A long chain of tiny acts of deliberate intention.
I appreciate all the clues on a letter that set the prose into context. The coffee stain on the back that tells me it was morning (or maybe late at night) when the thoughts tumbled out…the handwriting so small and intense or loopy and hopeful, the bored doodles in the margins. A series of crossed out thoughts that reveal a distracted mind. Are those tears that smudged the ink? Sometimes the paper is smooth and perfect–the letter carefully written with no mistakes. A finished product with a rough draft crumbled up in the trash. Perhaps if I am lucky I can catch a whiff of familiar perfume.
You can take email, with its showy instantaneousness. I’ll take a letter any day.
Last December I was cleaning out a closet in the room that is now my office. It’s what a real estate agent might call a bonus closet–the deep dark extra closet that becomes a catch all for life’s baggage. Ten years ago when we moved into this house I used it as a place to park the countless boxes of memoirs I have dragged around with me all my life. After so many years, so little attention, and a new-found disdain for clutter, I tackled the closet expecting to be able to throw away whole piles quite quickly. Instead I found myself seated in the midde of the room surrounded by pages of others’ lives captured in pen–secret confessions, mundane news whispered to me on paper. There was the card, scribbled quickly with a bright colored pen to ease the loneliness of life after college, the long letter from a friend in the Navy–out to sea and pensive. The newsy letters from girlfriends, recounting dates gone bad, weekend plans and new jobs, new homes, new love.
And among all these gems, some written over 20 years ago, was a long letter full of poetry. It was from the guy I had dated the summer between my freshman and sophmore years of college, a summer that was purely magical - a bridge between innocence and maturity. That summer was a time before I knew about real heartache and crushed dreams, when life seemed like one long infinite stretch of nothing but possibility. I was head over heels not only with him but with life and all that the future could hold. We kept in touch for a few months once back in school, before life took us in different directions. His letters were some of the best I ever received.
Holding that paper in my hands again, rereading those bold, sweet, vulnerable words only a 19 year old could pen, my heart sang just as it had half a lifetime away. For a brief moment I was back sitting on the floor of the hallway of my dorm, reading those words for the first time, all giddy and sparkly.
I have to admit that this January I carried that particular letter around with me for a couple of days tucked safely into my notebook. The hopefulness and warmth that it represented to me seemed like a perfect talisman for the coming new year. When I was at last ready to put it down I pulled out a pen and some notebook paper and wrote him a long letter with blessings and warm wishes for his older, less innocent, self and the family that I was sure he must have. I googled him and found an address for his oncology practice, put a stamp on it and sent it on its way. I giggled when I thought of the many different ways it could be received. Would he be shocked? Thrilled? Terrified? Call for a restraining order?
Last March, on a miserable dark night I went to my mailbox and pulled out the bills and circulars. I sifted through and found a heavy envelope, the handwriting eerily familiar but a return address I could not quite place. I went inside, made some tea and opened it curiously. It was a most lovely four page letter, handwritten on a legal pad, slightly torn at the top, a chronicle of 4 precious children, an amazing wife, a busy medical practice and happiness found in the midwest. The best kind of news…A shot of sunshine loaded with humor. His voice the same, just wiser. I couldn’t have asked for a more glorious response. It too made me feel sparkly but in a grown-up, more settled and less naive kind of way.
Letters can do that in a way no other form of communication can.
Sure I enjoy the spontaneity of email–how it makes you feel so close to someone so far away. I appreciate the convenience of text messages too. And I have been known to spend a late night here or there whispering on the phone for hours, hearing the voice of someone who makes me smile.
But letters, letters are works of art.
I love letters.
