Take One Step. . .

I have typed and hit delete several times, trying to formulate pretty sentences about what is going on in my life, how my inner life is merging into my outer one in some exciting and challenging ways. But the truth of it is that I feel I am in a season of feasting this autumn, sitting down to a rich stew of inspiration, opportunity, encouragement and grace. I’m learning the discipline of setting my place and picking up my spoon and tasting, perhaps, for the ingredients I might add.

So may I just share what is shaping up to be my recipe for this season?

• a writing workshop and concert with this amazing woman, who has been breathing life into my ears for almost two decades  (Clicking on the link will take you to her site, and a chance to hear a new song called “The Speed of Soul.” You might give yourself the gift of four minutes listening.)
• Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker J Palmer. The book I’m cracking, the one I’m almost afraid to read.
• a dear friend, who is asking good questions and giving gentle but intentional nudges. My reconnection with her is all gift.
• A little yoga to start the day, which is making me feel stronger and more flexible, but kinder and more patient with my body as well.
• Traveling through the parables with my dear friend above, and a few other members of our Triune family, trying to find what Jesus’ stories might reveal about our own.
• poemcrazy. I mentioned it on Monday, but it bears repeating!
• the cool mornings and evening quickening my spirit as they do every year. “Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.” –George Eliot
• The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Nightly rescuing my sense of humor from the election season.
• facing the blinking cursor, the blank page, the truly awful first draft Anne Lamott warns us about. And lots of coffee.

And finally, a few lyrics from one of the first Carrie Newcomer songs I fell in love with:

“I’ve been known to think too much
Get caught up in planning and choosing
I’ve sat down with my head in my hands trying to
Lose the fear of losing
But you can’t go back and you’re never the same when
Love’s left its mark on you
Whether stronger, bitter or better, or wiser it’s all up to you

Take one step a little bit closer
Take one step a little bit closer

I woke up yesterday morning I was smillin’ I was smillin’ wide
I heard wild geese calling
I called back and looked into your steady eyes saying

Take one step a little bit closer
Take one step a little bit closer. . . “

What’s filling your cupboard, your plate?

Better at Being

When I was a child, it was always about the next thing. My childhood was often unhappy, and the next thing was always the hope that it would be better. A cold silence would melt into words, open hostility would simmer back down to a lower boil. I’d get to the bottom of my pile of paperbacks, and play my Billy Joel records. And finally, I’d be grown up and not always leaning toward next.

But I ‘ve found the practice of presence in the current moment is not easy. I was wired early on to peer over the next fence, and our culture gives me a boost. It’s all about better and faster, more and more, and your body may be one place but your mind and heart, soul and spirit, aren’t necessarily where you plant your shoes.

But last night, I was where I was. Seated at a table with friends, sharing an impromptu crab cake dinner. We passed the dishes and ate, laughed and passed them again. There was good food, there were the faces around the table, and I was all there. With all my senses, with my thoughts, I wasn’t even leaping ahead to writing this post, I simply was. And it was good. When we got home, I gathered up our huge cat and cuddled her on my lap, petting her to hear her loud purr. And I was all there too.

The patient is getting better.

There is a place for my forward-looking, for planning and hopes for the future, for best-case scenarios and just-in-case arrangements. But I’m learning to long for more here and now, the grace of twilight coming into a kitchen  over dear faces, plates scraped clean and the last of the dark chocolate, melting on my tongue.

Back

I have that whispery, raw feeling you get when you have not talked for a long while, and the first word out doesn’t sound right, so you swallow hard, and try again.

That’s this post.

Something happened in the spring. Right after my fortieth birthday, I wrote a couple of posts, about the wholeheartedness with which I want to live out this next decade. In fact I had a whole series of posts planned about the practices I wanted to adopt to nurture this life, this brave pouring of myself into the days and people and places of my particular world.

And then they just didn’t get written.

Some of that was because I was out practicing those very things, instead of writing about them. I shot more photos, read more books, spent more time outside. I looked deeply into my loved ones’ eyes when they spoke and I answered. I spent some good mornings with a trusted friend, long talks over cooling coffee. I spent a great weekend of laughter and confession and pizza and grace with another friend.  We planted a garden and ate our own beans and peas and basil.

But lest you think I’ve been off on some odyssey of self discovery and enrichment, the truth of the matter is that practice is just that, and perfection is not on my radar. As we navigated the end of the school year, my mothering life was its own usual blend of joy and angst. (You may remember my standardized test rant from my one drive-by post from that season.)  Now that summer is here, our communal happiness at another school year well-finished has to share space with my struggles with body image and self-care, the questions always of what enough looks like, on the calendar, in the home, in front of screens, on the plate, in the living.

And always, the online questions, the ongoing blogging debate I have in my head.

What I think I have to admit now is that writing is one of the main ways I figure stuff out, one of the ways God reveals what God reveals of the design of my life, the calls on my time and energy. I write to make, and to discover what I’m making next. And here, the words can come together with my images, and together they are something new. Reading back over them, I discover what was not there before. Specifically, the way I often write, the short personal essay, gives new gifts, in the writing and the reading.

None of this should be surprising. I’m a Christian. The Judeo-Christian God speaks to create. I’ve plowed this ground before.

But maybe it is just time to admit, I am back here because I can’t, ultimately, not come back to words. And landed where I am, in 2012, this is a pretty great place to play with them, to weave and tear out, knead and shape, and then to bear them in my hands, or in the basket of an image, and offer them to you.

I don’t have a grand plan, a series, pages of notes on a legal pad. I’ve discovered those sometimes go the way of my all-or-nothing exercise schemes. But I’ll be back here, with some words about the pages and scenes and places and people that have been helping me calibrate better with my whole heart.

Wishing you every good thing of summer.

 

Next, Please

Yesterday was my fortieth birthday. This perhaps explains my restlessness and vague melancholy over the last few weeks. A quiet alarm at four decades gone, mingled with frustration that at forty years into life, almost a dozen into mothering, I’m still skinning my knees and asking elementary questions and chasing my tail around some of the same trees.

I’m finding that a milestone birthday is acting on me a lot like New Year’s Day or the beginning of the school year. There is the urge to make a list and DO, DO, DO. An exercise schedule, a writing schedule. Whipping into shape everything within range of busy hands. Inside my chest there’s an inner coach who looks a lot like me, whistle around her neck, barking, “Let’s make something HAPPEN people.”

But there’s another voice, softer but more insistent, saying that this is not the way, this is not what to make of these emotional and reflective days. Last week I dove again into the humor and wisdom and relentless faith of Anne Lamott, who assured me that help is always on the way.

I’ve found it to be true.

Yesterday my friend Jill took me out for coffee for my birthday. Time with her is always gift, with good conversation and laughter and lots to think about afterward. Yesterday was no exception. It helps that she shares my ambivalence about this particular number of candles on the birthday cake, and it helps that she asks good questions of her life and is making peace with waiting for the answers to emerge.

When I unwrapped my birthday package from her, she gave me more than she planned to. She knew I loved the lockets Liz Lamoreux makes, with messages, reminders, precious words pounded into them. Her thoughtfulness in remembering something I’d mentioned in passing and tracking it down in the wonders of etsy touched this often-bruised heart.

But as I wore the locket yesterday, I knew she’d given me more than a token of our friendship. She had given me an answer to what to do with this moment in life that feels precipitous, that feels like a weighted new beginning. Or rather, the right question to ask.

Inside the old brass are the words “whole heart.” We’d watched Brene Brown’s TED talk        together, and I’d felt stirring a desire for that kind of bravery, that really could give up the nursing of old hurts and insecurities and shame for the open-handedness of living vulnerable and free.

Jill’s gift has me taking a deep breath. In asking “What’s next, please?” I’m really asking, “What would it look like to live my forties with my whole heart?”

Love with my whole heart?

Mother with my whole heart?

Be daughter, sister, friend, with my whole heart?

Serve with my whole heart?

Create and write with my whole heart?

This is only a different way of asking the questions I’m always asking, about living the one-piece life. About how to be all real all here, looking and writing through the lens of a redemptive story without slapping a trite homily over pain and loss and grief. Remembering that faith requires, well, faith. Resisting the urge to jump to the “right” answers when what I need to do is to sit in the questions.

So I’m asking?

What does it look like to dwell in and live from, my whole heart?

Growing Dark, Growing Light

Somehow it always catches me by surprise, the way the days shorten so quickly. This afternoon I found myself, peering around like a mole in my dim kitchen at four thirty.  But we’ve lit one more candle on the wreath this week, predicting morelight and life coming.

It has been quiet here at the blog, while my hands have been busy making things I can’t share here, that are steadily being wrapped and tucked beneath the tree.  There’s been Christmas music and the creak of a needle, slipping in and out of tightly stretched fabric. And when the work is laid aside, there have been big, full moons and the muted kaleidoscope of the colored lights I’m glad we said yes to, soft on the ceiling.

For the first time ever, I shared my heart from the pulpit of our church home, encouraged us to sing of a true Christmas, of a God with us Whose story is told over and over in acts of love. I watched my older boy play an angel in that place a week later, and marveled at the gift of a place where we know and are known. The mornings and evenings we’ve spent there have reawakened my wonder in Advent.

As the boys’ school break draws closer, I am hopefully moving from a place of preparation to presence. This means letting go of many things, including my own vision of a perfect me, who has made it all and decorated it all and baked it all and, yes, prayed and contemplated and proclaimed it all. Even adding together the two women I am in these December days, you can’t come up with one like that!  There’s just me, a little more in touch with her limitations that usual.

But creeping in, even in the low light of these short days, is something better than perfection, something new this year. It is a sense of enough-ness, and, as the fingers loosen and let go, a breath of freedom instead of failure. Soup and bread, candles and greenery, peace and hope. The light is coming, and the darkness will not overcome it.

 

Two Women in December

It is December. We’ve hung the magnetic Advent calendar I made four years ago on the nail in the kitchen. We’re opening the first door in The Advent Book tonight, and beginning that journey through the miracle story. On Sunday evening we lit our first candle, our first flare sent up, Light come back into the world. These are the things we return to, over and over.

And as this month begins, I find once more that I am two women in December. One woman makes lots of lists. Everything we need, from everywhere we go in the most traffic-congested part of town, so we only have to make one harrowing Saturday trip in that direction. She orders most purchased gifts online to avoid more of the afore-mentioned harrowing trips, and to keep within the budget. She organizes materials for handmade gifts and stitches and glues and assembles and wraps. She eyes the calendar carefully as invitations and community event fliers and announcements of school programs roll steadily in, trying to say yes to the important and leave lots of margin. Sometimes she scrambles, to keep the menus halfway healthy, to keep the house calm in the flood of decorations and young excitement, to keep things steady.

And there’s another woman. She pauses three times daily with old words woven, She stops with a pile of folded laundry to consider the one candle burned lower than the others, wax pillar shorter but a sign of hope growing brighter. She lets these tall boys do more of the decorating and doesn’t move things around while they’re at school. She lets it be, remembering footed pajamas and over a decade now of oats and glitter on frosty grass. She remembers to pause on a lovely afternoon, and lift her head, and notice the bare tree-lace etched against the deep blue sky, and breathe all the way down to fill her belly. She remembers that good enough is often good enough. She remembers she is a waiting woman, one who walking in darkness has begun to see a great light.

It is the old Mary-Martha thinking, the desire to make one woman good and the other bad. To want to take the stubby pencil away from the list maker and make her paint the frozen sunrise.

But the fact is, these two December women in me need each other. For mammas everywhere, even the ones who have asked the questions and said yes, even the ones who have said careful no’s, there is just More in December. More crafts and activities and family commitments and spending and scheduling and juggling. And in the meantime, the daily round of meal preparation and laundry and school paperwork and bill paying go on.

The first woman, with her lists and coupons and order confirmations and embroidery floss and hot glue frees me up to be the second woman. The organization and preparation make space for full presence in prayer, with loved ones, and doing the meaningful things this Advent season holds. The question between these two women is not which one is good and which one is bad, but who is most needed in the moment. The planning and discernment, instead of being barriers to presence and peace, become doorways to rest and contemplation, when I take the invitation to lay my pencil down.

 

The Spaces in December

 

I remember the commercial from my childhood. It’s Christmas Eve, and snowing hard outside. A little brother watches at the window, waiting for his big brother to come home. Later, the adults have given up that the big brother will make it in time for Christmas, and the crestfallen little boy begins to sing a carol at the piano. But then the music swells as his older brother’s voice joins in and he appears. It may have been a Hallmark commercial, or Coca Cola. I cannot tell you, because I was always dissolved in tears by the end.

I have a sentimental streak a mile wide, it’s true, but looking back, I think the reason that little drama pierced my heart so was that it represented everything my home of origin was not. In his worried wait, the little boy was comforted and encouraged. The family gathered lovingly around tree and piano. And it all ended with a joyous reunion. There were no grim silences, no guilt or blame. No child feeling solitary in the midst of a season of togetherness.

I’ve been considering why we overfill our holiday seasons, whether with consumption or activity or food. For those of us who follow Jesus, celebrating the birth of the One who was present at Creation but born in a stable with purchasing and overindulgence is absurd at best.

But I know for myself, as a child in a family, to borrow a Red Molly lyric, “not broke but badly bent,” I believed in the image. If only there was the crackling fire, the gifts beneath the tree, the perfectly laid table and the faint, far-off sleigh bells, the kindness and warmth and safety and love would surely be there too. And I vowed that when I had my own family, I would craft that picture I carried around, meticulous as a snow-globe scene, but unshaken.

I grew up. By God’s grace, we are building a functional family. And we have had some lovely Christmases together.  But I’ve long ago realized that all the candy canes in the world, all the twinkly lights, and even excited little boys in footed pajamas, scattering oats and glitter on the lawn for Santa’s reindeer and rising in the early dark, will never heal that little girl at the window in my heart. Only the One Who comes at Christmas, mysteriously, slowly, wonderfully, can do that.

There are spaces in December we cannot fill. Even in healthy families, even as believers in the Promise fulfilled, we live between the now and the not yet.

This year will be our first Christmas without my father in law. I’m already missing his smile, his bright eyes, his red vest. And I know that all the stuffing made up of busyness and buying can’t fill his place in our family circle. In this land between how it is and how it ought to be, there are these gaps, places no Madison Avenue-generated images can paper over.

I’m choking as I write this, wishing with part of myself that some fabulous box beneath the tree could ease my boys’ missing their Pop-pop, that some magical moment I concoct could dispel the shadow of sadness for us all, waiting in the corners of the weeks to come. Some short cut brought to you by MasterCard, or Martha Stewart.

But we know that redemption, restoration, and the drying of every tear of a bruised and broken Creation is a long winter road. For of course our healing is carried on the shoulders of a Maker and Savior Who was bruised and broken. In the midst of these weeks of preparation, I am tempted to whip up a frenzy of distraction, swell the music, cue the lights. Drown those empty spaces in glitter and dough and sentiment.

And surely there will be music and gifts here, and there will be laughter, and likely some tears as well.

But I want to spend at least some of my moments at the frosty window, acknowledging the spaces that wait for filling, looking down the winter road for the One Who will surely come.

 

 

Asking and Listening, or, The Places We’ll Say Yes

Sam loves setting up the Christmas village my mother-in-law gave me. . .

Joshua loves trimming the tree as a family. . .

John loves the Advent Book we’ve read together each December evening since the boys were tiny. . .

I’ll begin this post with an apology. If anyone who reads this feels I’m skipping right over Thanksgiving, and furthermore that kind reader will be roasting a turkey for twenty-five in just shy of three weeks and is up to her ears in stuffing recipes or a guest bathroom remodel, I’m sorry. This week I’m continuing to consider what I’m feeding, with a focus on the Christmas to come.

The reason is three-fold. First, I love Thanksgiving, partly because I think that even in our culture, we haven’t managed to mess it up too much yet. Family and feast can have their pitfalls, but we have largely left commerce out of the equation. Second, I’m not hosting Thanksgiving this year, so I’m not asking the to-brine-or-not question or mapping out a make ahead battle plan.

Finally, I know for me, for this planner-mom, the ironic key to living grateful in the now is to spend some focused time thinking about the weeks of December and Christmas itself. If our family tucks in moments here and there of aligning our holiday expectations with heart, time and financial reality, we can be more present in these weeks of gratitude and grace.

This post began with my own family’s answers when I asked them what the most important activity or tradition of the Christmas season was to each of them. What was most interesting was there was no hemming and hawing. Instant answers. It was delightful that all three activities happened to be home-centered and free. To add my own answer, I love the trimming of the Advent wreath each year. The first autumn John and I were married, we were living in Richmond, Virginia. We went to a huge arts and crafts fair, and came home with a pottery Advent wreath– four candle holders connected to a narrow circular basin, with a separate candle holder in the center for the Christ candle. On the first Sunday of Advent, I fill the basin with cool water and add holly and cypress and boxwood from our yard, and the candles. Together we add prayer and flame. My favorite thing. . .

So asking that question and really listening to the answers gives us a place to begin. These are the first things we’ll say yes to, the things we’ll celebrate around. Sam will get to shake out the white tablecloth that makes Carolina “snow” for the Christmas village and choose where we place the church. We’ll make a whole afternoon or evening of trimming the tree, with finger food and Christmas music and let Joshua plan the menu. We’ll watch the clock on December evenings to leave plenty of time to let the Story of Stories unfold as we open each door in The Advent Book.

And the Sunday after Thanksgiving I’ll be out with clippers and a basket, looking for trimmings for the symbol of our waiting, of our eager hearts.

So in these weeks, we ask, and listen, and allow space to be surprised by the answers. And in beginning with these yeses, we have the joy and humility of beginning to plan a celebration that is a family creation instead of a one-woman show.

So early in November I’m thankful to have a map of yeses to navigate the weeks to come.

 

Friday I’m in Love

Ah, the 90′s, turning this song up on the radio, plaid flannel, all the campus trees aflame and Timberland hiking boots. Nostalgia. . .

But actually, this morning as our little family parted to start our days, I was thinking of all the things I’m in love with right now. All the little blessings drifting around me like leaves, and how gratitude presses them between waxed paper, how thankfulness warms and preserves their color and texture. A woman who chased the moon has been teaching me that, for a long time. My hands are filling with russet and gold:

• Sam’s prickly boy hair beneath my lips for a goodbye kiss.
• Joshua’s quiet companionship near the end of the day, sitting on the sofa, just being.
• Making my husband laugh.
• Reading, reading slowly, Grace for the Good Girl, and finding old hurts buried, but unearthing places where healing can flow in.
• Soup and bread, simple meals, spoons scraping bowls.
• My cat’s satisfied purr when she claims my lap in the evening.
• Turning up the music loud, singing along.
• Time with an old friend, her face across the table.
• A second cup of coffee, just because.
• Needle slipping in and out of fabric stretched in a hoop, the breath-like rhythm of stitching.
• A husband who knows how to rescue a day gone sad. . .

All these things so ordinary, but you know, I know, that these blessings will never come again in just the same way. They are as fleeting as they are familiar. I want to drain my cup of them, slurp the last drop. This Friday, I want the heady senses-all-awake, wide-eyed falling in love receiving of this mundane, marvelous day.

November’s fourth Thursday is a feast, the twenty-fifth of December a festival. Next week I’ll write more about heart and hands preparation for those gracious and glorious days. But today I’m sitting down to this daily portion.

What’s on your plate this Friday?

 

 

What Am I Feeding?

This is the month I always think of as being spent at table. Easter is a sunrise empty tomb, a blanket of lilies. Christmas finds altars everywhere, trembling on frosty starlit hillsides, woven in the notes of soaring anthems, whispered in prayers by the fire. But this Thanksgiving month’s first images for me always center around preparing and sharing food, a ring of faces around plenty.

But if I am satisfied with belovedness, filled with the enough-ness of that daily portion, and if I’m going to live thankful as the last leaves skitter away and the earth settles, I have to consider what else I’m feeding this month, besides this family. What am I feeding? How can all I consume nourish gratitude? Perhaps even more important, what empty calories am I taking in that leave me empty of what would give life?

This is a season of gathering for me, gathering the recipes and craft ideas and handmade gift plans to carry my family through the celebrations to come over the next couple of months. I pride myself on resisting the messages blaring from every advertisement that my worth, my contentment, and the happiness of my children swings from the string of a price tag. I know in my bones that new and shiny are not the answer when I feel that gnawing emptiness.

And yet. . . I can shatter peace and quiet celebration with a whirlwind of too much flour and floss and paper and glue as surely as with shopping bags and spending money we don’t have. Both approaches resist the idea of enough. Both paths tell me the lie that more is better, that it is my job to fill and fill and over fill.

Because perhaps then I’ll measure up. To the friends, to the parents of my kids’ friends, to all the faceless, anonymous Others we’re so often performing for. And I’ll top this false confection with a dollop of self-righteousness, that all this excess is homemade and not purchased at the mall.

If I’m going to choose another way, if I’m going to carefully consider what I’ll feed and fatten during these weeks of preparation, I have to take a deep breath. I have to come back to that simple question: what is enough? It is not about good or bad, for special, celebratory menus and presents made with love in the fingers are not bad. But how much of them are enough? What number of moments of joy will let them be illuminated, each like crystal beads on a string, singular and precious, rather than the cheap glint of crammed and crumpled tinsel? What line, carefully drawn, will prepare nourishment and prevent gluttony? Will I feed my insecurities and misgivings, or will I feed my soul?

As with many spiritual issues, the questions to ask are refreshingly practical.

• How much consumption of new ideas in enough? How much pinning? How many tear sheets? Can we keep a finger on our creative pulse to check when we are crossing from inspiration to overwhelm?
• How many new recipes are enough? Or can dishes from past years, familiar and homey, bless with their very same-ness?
• How many gifts are enough? Would some time of service or a donation to charity extend blessing more than another thing, handmade or purchased?
• How many parties and events are enough? Are enough quiet evenings and simple food in place to give a pause that refreshes?
• Can we curb the celebrations we plan to make room for spontaneous moments of worship and grace? Can we leave space to receive these gifts?

I’ll be baking and making here, certainly. But I’m asking these questions, knowing my weakness, but knowing too the deeper longing I have for what will satisfy, for me, and for the loved ones for whom I make this home.

Two dear women I admire are using this month’s focus on gratitude to consider in very practical ways what their families eat, to challenge themselves to carefully regulate their spending to have more to give away to those less fortunate at the end of the month. This is another compelling way to consider “enough.” I’d also like to thank my blogger friend Aimee, whose “less is more” post on Facebook yesterday got my wheels turning.