Silver and Gold

I attended only one Brownie meeting, but the song I learned that day has stayed with me since, and it has never, ever made sense:  Make new friends, but keep the old.  One is silver and the other gold.  It obviously stuck with me, having only heard it once, and it irritated the stuffing out of me.  Which one is silver?  Is silver as prized as gold?  Well, obviously not monetarily.  Why should I listen to this song?  What right does the song-writer have to tell me how to make and keep friends?  Yes, my brain went there at age eight.

I didn't like the Brownie meeting.  My sisters weren't there, and my mother's absence was always more profound when I didn't have two older siblings looking out for me.  There were strange women guiding us, and there were girls my age that knew so much more than me.  I ran home that day and begged my mom not to make me return.

So, this could be titled:  How the Brownies Taught Me About Myself, But Not Until I Turned 37.  I recently returned to Maryland to visit my sister and some close friends.  Well, the land pulled out all the stops for my visit.  Vibrant green fields.  Blue mountains undulating on the horizon.  Red barns scattered about, promising freshly stacked hay inside.  I was awestruck.  I was wooed by my former homeland.  I was confused by the movings of my heart, wanting to return to this familiar place.

My time with family and friends refreshed me.  I could talk with my goddaughter and her mom for six hours straight without my introverted side taking over, yelling in my brain, "I need to be ALONE!"  My sister's home was full of energy--at times we had NINE boys running through the yard, but I was taken care of so sweetly by teens and tweens cooking, cleaning up, and playing with my boys.

Returning to New England was painful for me.  I was longing to be reunited with my husband, but I was dreading the land that made me think of cold, hard winters and Puritan ancestors who could not break out in a dance while making lunch.  There are times my Scandinavian heritage confuses me.  What Dutch Reformed genes created me!?  I began looking on Zillow for houses near my sister.  I was exhausted from the long journey home.  I felt terribly alone.  And I was doubting my progress of finding friends in the seven years I had been back in Connecticut.

Within two days, I had impromptu hang-outs with two friends that I've made in the past two years.  I was encouraged and regained some hope.  I also caught up on my sleep, and all of a sudden my home and my yard weren't the worst things at which to look.  All in all, New England has been very good to me.  My life has made sense and continues to affirm me in my decision-making abilities.  But it doesn't negate the grief of losing so much time with old friends.  My heart hurts.  I struggle with discontent.  I long to merge the gold and silver of my old and new friends.  I have always been happiest with my sisters around me, and if Brownies could have been with them...well, I would have had all the badges in the world.  But merging old and new is hardly ever possible.  I need to embrace both, however separate they may be.  I will love both and make both my priority.

My Maryland Best Friend (smile) gave me a cosmos plant this past May.  It has grown in my New England garden, and today it bloomed.  I have many treasures in this life.  The key is to cherish the one before me.

Clam Digger

I could clam for hours

off the dock of Grandma’s cottage.

Her island home, my launch pad

to the secret life and danger

of the sea.

Ben and Julia tread water beside me,

linking arms with the rowboat that leaves

flecks of green paint in our elbow creases.

We welcome the rising tide

while Amy stays inside, waiting to eat

the cherry stones raw. I am a hunter,

racing against the dark, so clever with my toes.

Seeing with limbs more swift than my cousin

or sister, I feel through dense sand and deep

water, cold tide lapping the back of my neck.

My mother hollers from the kitchen,

calling me to dinner, but I wrestle

between sunset and the bucket near full.

I am hungry to uncover the colony.

The ocean floor is thick and devouring,

but these toes can burrow

and find clams until my bones

cramp with cold.

The last of the sun is spreading

its umber light across the sound.

I steady myself on the rocking boat,

give my feet time to think,

and dive, maneuvering my fingers

past razor clams, securing the little necks

for our family’s blue ribbon chowder.

Yearning for More

We are all designed to yearn.  It is evidence of our spiritual being.  All animals hunger for physical nourishment, show curiosity, and make great efforts to procreate, but none of these features include a yearning for More Than Now.  That is the human experience.  We are wired for heaven, for another realm.

When I first read The Lord of the Rings, I was fixated on the trees in Lothlorien.  Legolas describes them with reverence:

[Lothlorien] is the fairest of all the dwellings of my people. There are no trees like the trees of that land. For in the autumn their leaves fall not, but turn to gold. Not till the spring and the new green opens do they fall, and then the boughs are laden with yellow flowers; and the floor of the wood is golden, and golden is the roof, and its pillars are of silver, for the bark of the trees is smooth and grey.  

The trees show seasons of beauty but never death.  This is heaven for me.  Heaven is not stagnant.  It is not one moment perpetuated for eternity.  Heaven is the life and beauty of earth but without decay.  

And this is what we yearn for--the beauty without the pain, the abundance without the loss, the new without the end of an old new.  It is always birth and life.  So we do not fear change, we fear the end of what delights our soul.

And today I am a mother that fears the end of babies in my home.  I am yearning for new life.  But choosing to bring another soul into our family is the heaviest of decisions for we working poor.  I can go on Zillow and find another home in another state where we can get better work and better pay, but then we would miss our family, our incredible neighbors, and our backyard with infinite adventures.  I would not miss our ceilings, or the damn road an arms-length from the kitchen.  But I would miss my new friends--the ones I looked for and worked for over these past six years.  Yes, you.  I would miss YOU.

So here were are at the idea of heaven.  I will never stop yearning.  It is who I am, and I believe who we all are.  We are here to look for there, grasp it with a light hand of hope, and pull it toward us and the ones we love and meet and pass on the highway.

Now to take this mother-heart and create new delights with Lion and Bear.

Beauty, Pain, and Laughter

June, the month of Not-Quite-Yet.  Spring can linger or be long gone by June, but the busy lives of school, ceremonies, and gardening haven't yet given way to lazy summer nights.  It's a month of almost, maybe, not yet, and goodbye.  When Mike and I were planning our wedding, I was determined to pick any month other than June.  The June Bride mocked me.  She was pristine and predictable.  She was that woman who had chosen and planned everything the right way, was now married for over forty years, and was frigid.  Well, that's a whole other story.

This June was a visit to Maryland.  I walked the property of my former community.  There were other details to the weekend, very important ones, but that was my mission.  I didn't know it was my mission until I was home and realized I'd neglected my friends and family in the Mason-Dixon heartland.  It was painful to know they had taken second, third, and even no place.

But I stood on the land.  I felt the breeze that used to whip my veil around and cause my heart to expand.  The birds were in the sycamore trees, singing a call that once surrounded my thoughts on countless evening walks.  Mulberry trees were thick with berries not quite ripe for picking.  I knew each tilt in the gravel road that leads to the burial ground.  The grass had never been cut.  It was the same throng of sweet green blades I knew so well.  They were the exact ones, I am sure.

Each moment, each inhale of honeysuckle led to the next place where my soul had already been.  It takes years to know land.  The visit reminded me of how I have owned only two pieces of land in my life: the community property and my grandmother's cottage on Mason's Island.  I am rich.  I am blessed to have entered so fully into the corners of these two places. 

The following weekend was set aside to visit the cottage (now owned by my aunt) with my whole family.  Bear was not himself.  Only recently have I seen his happy self return.  My being away with Mike for our anniversary and then my visit to Maryland took its toll on him.  We needed weeks to heal, time to show him that I was not leaving again.

By the time we entered the only home of my childhood, I was thoroughly done with reflection.  We had friends sharing the time with us---good food, wine, and weather.  It was a perfect release to the intensity of hanging out with memories the weekend before.

And what only made June better was a week long visit with Lala.  We have known each other for over 25 years, and this was the best time we've ever shared.  I went from reflection and pain, to reflection and joy, to joy, to laughter and attempts at fearlessness.  Above all, laughter is what makes you whole.  It is the only way to live June and any part of life cramped with memories.  

Honey From the Old Country

It was a ghost in the form of a mason jar.
She sent me a text with the image of our honey,
the liquid gold we collected from benedictine bees.
Several jars were discovered in her mom's basement,
and like Mary watching Lazarus wake from the dead,
I gasped at the image glowing on my phone.

Just a spoonful of that crystallized nectar of the gods
could send me into deep recollection--
sweet threads swirled into pots of herbal tea,
a generous serving spread over warm wheat bread,
sheets of phyllo dough united with layers upon
layers of butter and bee spit to make
Baklava in celebration of my vows.

She promises to bring me a jar when she
visits this summer, and I fear the power
of its beauty will draw my children's hearts
away from mine into the hills of Maryland.
They will wear long robes and tend the
bee hives with great skill and sadness.

The Good Friday

We would never learn to be brave and patient if we only had joy in our lives.  ~friend of a friend

Our hearts are like stone, and only suffering carves them into bowls big enough to catch the joy.  ~Strangers and Sojourners, Michael D. O'Brien.

There is something about Good Friday that pulls me into the quiet.  It is a day unlike any other in the year.  Even while caring for David while he throws a tantrum in his room, or wiping Evan's nose, or running to the bank and picking up cheese at the store, I am caught up in the quiet of death.

He hung on the cross for three hours.  His body was put through brutal torture.  His soul carried the grief of millions.  The psychological and emotional pain were deserts upon deserts of suffering.  There has never been a human born who has known that kind of pain.

Yet every drop of blood was a gift of mercy for me and you.  We are sitting at the foot of the cross being baptized in his never-ending stream of love.  With each labored breath, Jesus filled his lungs with our sorrow and exhaled forgiveness, dispelling the stench of our sin.

Good Friday is about his death--his Holy Death.  There is no crucifix that can adequately depict the death of Jesus.  But I need to sit before the image and respond to the reality of what he did and still does for me.

From the Other Side

I lived in community.  I was part of the sanctuary.  We prayed.  We prayed a lot.  There were families who entered into the sanctuary as their lives could permit.  They home schooled their children.  They attended Mass.  They shared their lives together over meals and gardening.  It was a challenge for them to enter into the Divine Office---to attend Lauds or Vespers, to experience the sacred hours of prayer.  There were times I shared in the exhortation of these mothers and fathers.  Pray more!  Become centered!  Bring your children with you and worship together!  I felt holy.  I knew of my own pride.  I was not ignorant of the sneaky spiritual arrogance that overtakes those in full-time ministry.  I knew my life of prayer was only as effective as the times I chose to be centered apart from the ritual.  Or where I took the ritual and formed it into a vehicle of imagination fueled by hope.  Ascending the Mountain.  That was my goal.

Oh, God.  Forgive me.  I am a mother.  I am on the other side and desperate to accept the valley.  It is Nazareth, not Jerusalem.  It is the clay pitcher of water, not the river Jordan.  It's is Mary's role.  She is my model.  She accepted.  I yell at my children.  I get frustrated when they don't act like little monks.  There are moments where I am IN the moment.  But why can't my children be in the moment with me?  They are in control of which moment I am to enter.  And that is a level of yieldedness I have yet to accept.

I had a single friend spend time with me recently.  She meditated every day.  She moved with calm. She was centered, virtually free of anxiety.  I was jealous.  I felt inferior.  I felt as though she was the nun, and I was the mother watching from the outside, desperate to attend Vespers with her.  I want to chant again.  I am now on the other side and have yet to figure out my rhythm.

It is such a gift to be able to see from the other side.  It doesn't feel good, but it is so good.  I am being given the opportunity to finish a work that was started in community.  I am being given the chance to see things anew.  The mother.  Her work is never done.  And when does she pray?  When does she lift her voice and enter the sanctuary?  Maybe thirty years after she's started the race.  Maybe someday I will look back.  Will I worry about when I prayed?  NO.  I will hope that I spent enough time with Lion and Bear.

It is enough.  God forgive me for judging the mother when I had no eyes to see.  Forgive me now for judging myself while I have eyes that see, although dimly.  You know Nazareth so well.  You know the beauty and the mess.  Help me to embrace it all.