I'm back

I guess I'm back on Blogger with tales to tell in a whole new place. A literal one this time.

We moved to Colorado over the summer and now live in the one of the country's richest, "safest," cleanest places.  In Boulder County, the beauty alone evokes pleasure, strength and venture with every daybreak! The receptiveness from everyone we meet is wonderful and it frees us to be ourselves. It’s nearly too much to comprehend how many facets of opportunity this culture provides to enrich our lives.  This is a season for restoration and enlargement.

Intriguing, then, are the frequent dreams at night that I have of home in NJ. With all the celebration I'm taking in, I'm not longing to go back. They’re not leftover nightmares about troubled days, either. But they do cause heartache.  Sometimes the prostitutes appear, the homeless, the drug dealers, the imprisoned.  They’re all there, with our other neighbors and friends, going about their usual business like any other day in Millville.  And I’m there with them.

As major changes go, it's natural to miss what's familiar, and our neighborhood was the thing most palpable, dynamic and affecting to me.  It wasn’t relatives nearby, our church friends, the other places I frequented or my regular escapes into nature. Life was a struggle on our troubled street, but it was home.  And it’s where I loved and found Love.

I’m paying attention to these dreams and the feelings welling up, to the grief over how much tragedy occurs and how many lives are ever-stuck in emptiness, darkness and despair.  I’m considering how it all translates into life here and the now-distant relationship to Millville.  Yet I recognize the need to let things play out as they will, in their own timing, so to enjoy the gift of the present.

Years ago, Kenn gave me Mother Teresa’s A Simple Path.  I do prefer weightier books but decided to read it another time.  It’s straightforward, like the life of Teresa and her fellow missionaries: all sincere yet most unsophisticated.  Except for their love.  To simply love, with no questions asked (or strings attached) and no judgments made, this is the most profound way of life.  It is The Way.

Almost daily, I celebrate how our NJ days rooted us deeper on that Way.  Those times enlighten these, like a preface to a book. How will this story of Love go on?  Let's let the Artist do the unveiling.

Unfold the Tapestry.

New again

Last year was a big marker year for our family, and entering the new in 2014 brought such joy.  It was in the major transitions of 2013 that I got to feeling dizzy with LOTS of frustration and at least some fear mixed in.  We weren't just entering a new chapter, it felt like starting all over again.  This, despite the evidence that the changes were actually leading to a wonderful culmination of the last ten years.

I confess I still have days, every week it seems, where I just cannot see that evidence!

But back to the story... I was spilling to my Hub this struggle with all the newness, when he acknowledged so simply,

"It's hard to be in a new place."  

That's all I needed: the permission to say it is hard.  It is normal/acceptable/human/forgivable to struggle to believe and stay in the moment.  I wrote down my circling thoughts as a poem, including the fantastical things that happen in my head when the Now becomes uncomfortable.  Months later, I reformed it into the villanelle below.  It reads very specific to me.  I hope some of you can relate enough to find permission, and then be freed to face the disbelief.

New again is still the place
where I smile for the hope
but then run a moment later

to where it’s long been cold.
For I’d rather be there, then.
Not new again, displaced.

What if today is just mistake 
I let our yesterdays take me
running only moments later

to where I'm dizzy, unrequited,
mistaken over you, wishing
new then was still my place.

Then back again, though not far
off, I still find hope is hard and
cannot run in moment’s laughter.

I do mistake what is today
to mean our dreams are now erased,
that being new in another place
bodes us run alone hereafter.

Until it is time

forty each

one of them says

greeting the passerby like

he's known her before

he

just

slows

goes

while i pull

weeds and wonder not

about dirt and indiscretion

but how it is i know

yet stay

sometimes

the ones behind

the lattice weaved i must leave 
till they've grown

so
go

slow

then 

each is known

before reaching to be pulled
out of dirt and in discretion

Gardening one day last year, I overheard an exchange maybe fifty yards away between a female pedestrian and a driver.  Quickly I was conscious of its nature: the young woman and her friend were marketing.  Selling themselves.  For as long as we've lived in this dubbed-destitute place, there are still moments that stun.  The real world of the desperate is right here.  (It's everywhere, mind you.) The cruelest acts are lauded for amusement and the most innocent or vulnerable are handled with contempt.  I am thankful in these moments that I'm still disturbed.

Interrupted.  Stirred up.  Dismayed.

On another day on our old property, I decided - once and for all - to get at a menacing vine.  I started digging to reach the roots, pulling it foot after foot and yard lengths, only to see that the further I dug the thicker and deeper it grew.  Still, I worked: heaving, chafing hands, bent in affront.  I never did rid the root.  Somewhere in the fight I had the picture of a powerful, unseen enemy.  It symbolized perfectly certain things that we'd discerned in our midst at that time, and it has since served me repeatedly.  Whether on individual or universal scales, it's the systems of earth and sky that we battle against here.  Not people. 

Jesus used metaphors for teaching the truths of how this all holds together.  One parable depicts the kinds of soil that determine whether seeds take root and thrive and finally bring a bounty.  In another, there's a story of an enemy who's sown bad seed and the workers have asked to pull the resulting weeds.  The landowner replies, "No; for while you are gathering up the tares, you may uproot the wheat with them.  Allow both to grow together until harvest."  Let them go.  Until it is time.

I think some weeds aren't weeds at all but life existing where it shouldn't be. 

Two weeks after the soliciting incident, I was tidying up the yard again and couldn't quite reach the saplings growing wildly under my porch.  Even though they're trees and I love trees, they're unsightly and destructive when they grow under there, behind the lattice.  I know now from experience that if I let them go, they'll grow long enough to be easily grasped and drawn out.  The metaphor returned to mind.  How often I wish I could just pluck others - neighbors, family, strangers - from the entangled messes they live in, in the dark.  I'd like to act quickly, forcefully, but my attempts to reach into those places in such a manner would and do prove futile.  (Not to mention the cuts and bruises that might ensue as when I try squeezing my arm through that lattice!)

I may feel disturbed.  I do get dismayed.  If I wait, though, wait on the Lord in supplication, I do get shaken up to hope.  I keep up with gardening, and I beckon with power in prayer for the day when seasons have proven to mature it all.  Many tomorrows may pass, but I pray that even these seeming weeds are found to be seeds that fell on good soil, longing in the end to be pulled from the dirt, from the dark.

-------------------------------------------------

And this is for
anyone feeling they're in the dark
wondering about the ground they're in.








 

Taking stock

Today the world ponders the life and passing of Nelson Mandela.  And this holiday season as a whole can bend one toward reflection.  As well as burden.  In my life, it's been November where I've taken special notice since it holds for me powerful firsts and lasts, deaths and births, redemptions and travails.  Yet there's no wonder, with winter on its way (at least in our hemisphere), that anyone would take this time to take stock, store up.

I was remembering our car wreck of 1995 when I started this poem last month, already thinking on the mysteries of dying and living, when I learned of another unexpected death.  A dear soul left this world at the age of 38.  Just as his impact and that of Mandela do not end here, today, this poem could conceivably keep on going, no matter the number of Novembers I have to come. . .



Not very often now it'll flash in my brain I could have died that night but I was carried through
the force through dusk through the trauma through to dawn and I have not tried to count
the dawns I have been carried into since since I don't think it's a debt I could carry

Why am I given what others are not or do I not have what's theirs and is it better than life life
is so strange I said when she told me of some betrayal - or payback - maybe order made of
something and I beg again if I might see into what seems disorder but then catch myself

Are they really caught up into immunity, purity, ceasing of insanity insanity that's knowing
they are in fact more sane than this whole damned existence of dawns and dusks and force
is it that will carry them through trauma to something better than any could calculate

November you've had such darkness I have very often thought was dispelling through what's
been given me since that night but today you are carrying a richness of neither dark nor light
alone but of both and all all things made vivid, palpable, if only in flash, invigorated dusk

in the meantime

i'm sure i'm not the first person to think of it. how befitting is the phrase, in the meantime. i laugh.
i also tremble.

in the meantime? it's what we do when we are waiting. hoping. looking forward to something else. something more. sometimes it is something longed for, for such a long time. or other times, it is an answer we may not want to come, an event that we fear. this stretch, this span, these moments for us become mean when we feel them as cruel, miserly, unmerited. mean time.

we are a stubborn, persistent, demanding humanity who forgets this world is not ours. not forever. we forget Whom it is Who made time and lives wholly (holy) outside of time. we are a people who forget the promise:

"I know what I'm doing. I have it all planned out—plans to take care of you, not abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for." (Jeremiah 29:11)

in actuality, it is only our capacity to wait that is mean - poor, limited, low - while Scripture teaches unapologetically that all of this life is a waiting. Read all of Romans 8!  Here's just a portion.

"All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it's not only around us; it's within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We're also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don't see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy. Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God's Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don't know how or what to pray, it doesn't matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. That's why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good." 

will we allow the waiting to make us mean?
and by that i mean humble enough to receive our future.

everything under the sun

took a lovely walk around the neighborhood with the littles today. R and i chatted. A relaxed in her stroller. we stopped at a park for a while.

taking in all the sights, you can't help but notice the spring paradox. fresh greenery and budding trees with newness in the air, all mingled with burned out, boarded up homes strewn with rubbish and left to decay. what was once pristine and grand lies in wait for exploitation. R and i talked about one house with its gorgeous brick porch. he suggested buying it. i said i wish someone would . . . make it all new.

though the mess is commonplace here, it doesn't feel natural. only disheartening to a heart where eternity has been placed, as Ecclesiates says. the building up and tearing down, the keeping and throwing away, it's a mystery to me. a mystery to be embraced as i look toward the One whose works will endure, like a tapestry not worn.

among other things new, i do get to take part in a little home rebuilding. recently, a contractor began the city's rehab project on the exterior of our house. and i have many hopes for the inside that are bit by bit being fulfilled. the house has surely had its own seasons. i am thrilled to be part of this mending, laughing, planting, healing and gathering time!