Shall We Dance?

I read the story in Reader’s Digest, and I haven’t read the Digest in decades. But the story has stuck with me through the years. The multistory office building was burning, and its occupants streamed down the stairwells, parting to get around the woman standing frozen at the top of a flight of stairs. Finally a man stopped beside her and said quietly, "You have to go down." She replied, "I can't." He said again, "We have to go. Now." "No!" she repeated, "I can't do it." "I'll do it with you," the man said, taking her arm. "But I'm scared," she cried. To which he said, "Then do it scared."

The title of this post was going to be, "Doing It Scared," but yesterday, sitting in the Cafe Carolina garden as the sparrows hop around me, reading Saturday’s chapter in Walking in This World, I ponder on Julia Cameron's thoughts about restlessness. Restlessness can be frightening; often we don't know its source, or what it is calling us to. It is our tendency, I think, to ignore it; wait it out so we can go back to our routines. If our life is humdrum, lacking innovation, at least it is familiar and understood. But Julia says, "Restlessness means you are on the march creatively. The problem is, you may not know where…" and that is disconcerting and scary. She says, "When we listen to our fears with tenderness and care, when we accept them as messengers rather than as terrorists, we can begin to understand and respond to the unmet need that sends them forward. The next time you are restless, remind yourself it is the universe asking 'Shall we dance?'"

It occurs to me that restlessness and fear are dance partners. We feel restless and we know something is suggesting a change. And we are afraid. We dance around the inner malcontent, alternately trying to hear and wanting not to hear what it is that is calling us. Whether we admit it or not, it is fear that insists that we stick to our routines, insists on linearity. I wonder if we often dress that fear up in fancy dress and call it "responsibility." It is irresponsible to even consider changing what is working well-enough. After all, we have a family; co-workers; a mortgage; the lawn needs to be mowed... Besides, thinking about options and change is overwhelming. And what if we fail and lose it all? How irresponsible and stupid is that? Julia: "But [the One Who is More] is not overwhelmed. And if we fail at Plan A, God has an endless supply of Plan Bs. There is always a fallback plan, and a net. Faith to try again is the net. Ignoring the urging, we will, most likely, still get to our destiny; but when we are willing to [listen to the distant ill-defined music and irrational promptings], we will get there sooner."

The photo I took of my cone flowers, before I left my house for the last time, reminds me that our new ways of being don't begin in full bloom. A lot of rain has to fall and sun has to warm our face before we are fully transformed from seed to fullness. The garden is not in hurry. Why are we?

When he learned that I was leaving my employment and North Carolina, a church member who is a pilot offered to take me somewhere in a VSP (very small plane). It sounded terrifying to me. And thrilling. And isn't that what adventure is? Both of those－fear and excitement－dancing together? It is my year to venture; I say yes. I figure I will do it scared. As it turns out, though there are some bumps and buffeting as we fly through an unavoidable cloud bank, the fear is powerfully overshadowed by the thrill. Saying "yes" is really the scariest part. We fly west to Asheville and meet my family for dinner; and as the sun sets in the pink sky garden, we fly back home to the moonrise.

My mother is a worrier; always has been. I think she worries that I don't worry. We are going to live together for a while. I am worried that her tendency to worry will rub off on me. I consider the difference between fear and worry.

Fear is being afraid that my car, with its 205,000 miles, won’t carry me and Smudge across the country. I take it to my favorite mechanic (Village Auto Werks) and Pam and Greg check it out from stem to stern. And I upgrade my AAA membership so I can be towed more than three miles without taking out a loan. Worry is obsessing about a car hydroplaning across the center line and hitting me head-on; and then, if I survive, landing in a hospital in God-Knows-Where, Texas; and my insurance won’t cover it because I am out-of-network; and no one knows I’m there and I have forgotten how to contact them－or forgotten who "them" is; and what happened to Smudge? You get the picture. Fear tells us what we need to think about so we can take resolving steps. Worry spirals us out of control into ridiculousness, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it anyway. Except not go, and miss the adventure of a lifetime.

A story on NPR this week fascinates me. "How do mosquitoes avoid being killed by raindrops?" (And who knew anyone cared?) Raindrops, afterall, weigh 50 times more than the mosquito, and are like plummeting comets falling all around their teeny bodies. A team of mechanical engineers checked it out. What they discovered is that the mosquitoes don't try to avoid the drops, they hitch a ride. For a fraction of a nano-second, they dance with the drop before letting it go and moving on. Huh, they don't try to avoid the very scary dangers that lurk in their universe, they embrace them. The danger is, however, if they are too close to the ground they risk getting crushed between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Perhaps that is what results when we put off our dreams, our inner restlessness－when we stay too close to the safety of the ground for too long. We get stuck.

When we came down out of the sky in the VSP and got in the truck to head home on the dark road where deer and other scariness lurk, Jonathan said, "Now for the dangerous part." Safe or not, I am leaving the well-known ground. I am choosing to dance－and to fly. I am following my dream, my inner restlessness, to return to my heart home. I don't know what it is going to look like; I am just taking the first step. I will learn the dance as I go. I am doing it scared. I leave two weeks from today. First stop Asheville, to meet my grandson Ethan; who danced－not fully formed, but in his perfect beginning－into this scary, beautiful world yesterday.

Shellfish

It might be more appropriate to title a blog post on Easter Sunday something having to do with new life, or resurrection, or something equally Eastery. And crustaceans do not apply. But shrimp are not really what's on my mind.

I have frequently referred to, and thought of, myself as selfish. I crave solitude. I love silence. I like solo activities like writing, walking, reading, gardening. I don’t volunteer. I don’t join clubs or book groups. I don’t hesitate to say “no” to invitations, even from friends, when it intrudes on my plans with myself. (I am trying to get better on that last--I need and love my friends.) I feel bad about my selfishness. Both of my sisters and my mother are generous women; what, I wonder, happened to that gene in me? My mother has always put others ahead of herself and her needs. I daresay she has never even honestly asked herself if that is what she needs.

Then, yesterday, I read Julia Cameron’s thoughts on the topic (Walking in this World). "We get our lives wrong because we get our questions wrong. We get our questions wrong because we have been raised in a culture that is punishing to the forms of freedom necessary for artists to flourish. These freedoms are the ones that allow us to be a little less nice so that we can be a little more genuine... It is my considered opinion that most creative people are actually too selfless... 'Selfish enough' gives us the self for self-expression... For an artist, being too virtuous is no virtue at all. It is destructive and counterproductive."

Wow. I have a hard time thinking of myself as an artist or a writer. I do consider myself creative, however. And I know when I don't have time to create, I am out-of-sorts. I can't squeeze it in between life and life's activities. It is life to me. (And maybe someday I can call myself an artist or writer. For now I am grateful to others who name it for me.)

I am so glad there are people in this world whose passions revolve around improving quality of life for other people. They are the heroes of the earth. Can I let it be okay that I am not that selfless? And could I start by not referring to myself with a word I consider a "bad person" word? Not selfish, in touch with my inner self. Sharing myself in a way tuned in to that inner me.

On Maundy Thursday,  at Pullen's evening service, I read the Matthew text about Jesus in the garden at Gethsemane, as I have for several years now. I know that people who have a need to categorize people have figured out what Jesus' Myers Briggs Inventory letters are. It doesn't really matter to me. If he was an introvert, he had highly evolved extrovert skills. If he was an extrovert, he was in tune with his need for solitude. I love this text, Jesus is so human in it. He is angry. He is afraid. He wants his life to go in another way, and he asks that it be so. And he accepts who he is. He asks his friends for "me time." In that moment, he is not there for them, he is taking care of his own needs. Did that make him selfish?

The MT service at Pullen includes foot-washing. Maundy meaning mandate, and Jesus mandating the importance of the symbolic act of foot-washing. I was honored to wash the feet of someone who had until this week, held back from this ritual. He told me later that he was prepared for the gift of washing my feet--the humble servant part--but he was surprised by the pleasure of receiving. I think many of us think it's selfish to enjoy receiving gifts. Begone with that idea, I say. I have suggested to my mother that if she can't bring herself to ask for what she needs, think of the people she is depriving of the opportunity to give. Better, though, to just sit back and allow oneself to be ministered to. And that includes ministering to oneself.

Lent is my season. I recognized that several years ago. I relish the quiet and introspection that the spiritual season asks of us. And I love being in the garden in the cold, when everything in the natural world is happening out of sight. And then slowly and quietly life sneaks back in. If we are dancing about the garden, we miss it. It is when we are quietly watching and waiting that we begin to notice a sprout here, a bud there. A bird song piercing the quiet, and the answering call from a distant roost.

New life happens for me at the end of Lent, again and again. It is, at first glance, coincidental and uncanny. But really it is not. It is my season. It is synchronicity. It is my self in touch with my world.

And now it is Easter. New life. Time to go back out. I wept through a singing of "In the Garden" this morning. Then went out and bought the garden a gift. A calla lily. As it turns out, a calla lily is neither a calla nor a lily. And I am not a shellfish. I am off to the garden. Alleluia!

I come to the garden alone
While the dew is still on the roses
And the voice I hear falling on my ear
The Son of God discloses.

And he walks with me and he talks with me

And he tells me I am his own

And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.

Kaleidoscope Eyes

I love kaleidoscopes, from the cardboard cylinders with bits of plastic in the end that were birthday party favors and Christmas stocking leavings when I was small, to the multi-hundred dollar polished wood ones on stands with pieces of colored crystal that mix when the end is turned and fall into place when the twisting stops. My favorites, though, are those with clear prisms in the end that make patterns of whatever it is turned toward.  

This is a week of meandering, twisting experiences. Nothing seems to fit together. So much so that yesterday I don't think this post will have a theme. But that is what kaleidoscopes are: every movement changes the picture. Perhaps that is what Lent is about, waiting and watching for whatever comes. Life doesn’t always come together in a nicely wrapped tidy package; the days don't always fall into a theme.

Change is in the air and I feel unsettled, uncertain, unprepared. Fearful. Panicked. I read this on Saturday from Walking in This World, by Julia Cameron, and it helps: "If you are panicked, tell yourself, ‘Ah! Good sign: I am getting unstuck.'" You have to do some twisting before the glass settles into place; the panic transforming to excitement at the venture.

Here in the south this week, it is full blown spring (and much too warm for me). I observe the twists of the kaleidoscope. Each night it turns, and the next morning the scene is different.

The dogwood blossoms move from barely opening and invisible from the deck at the beginning of the week, to nearly fully busted out with the beginnings of leaves on the branches at the end. The lawn is full of buttercups  (well, yellow flowers) and violets and the tiny blue flower of the otherwise despicable carpet weed. Or maybe the carpet weed is the white flower and the blue another creeper. At any rate, the blue and the white are co-conspirators in the plot to take over the garden. (They have already won in the yard. I don't care.) I pull them by the handful, without gloves as usual and with the resulting splinters and dirt under my nails. I love the wild phlox, which pops up everywhere bringing bright spots to areas not yet in bloom.

The Japanese painted fern, the purple heart, and the Jacob's Ladder increase in girth daily. The bleeding heart has teeny half-inch hearts on the new plant; I don't remember seeing them on the immature plant in years past. These plants are clearly loving the warmth more than I am. The Japanese weeping maple and the more ordinary Japanese maples have transformed from bud to wispy emerging leaves to nearly fully open. The feathery loropetalum gets more and more thick with pink.

The banana leaves are climbing all in and over each other to unfurl. I am fascinated by these triplets born together, and struggling now to individuate.

The Rose of Sharon, the one here that I transplanted as a tiny seedling from the other side of the yard, contains the old side-by-side with the new. I ponder that, how even as we change and grow, we keep some parts of who we have been with us always, the new coming out of the old like this year's banana plant; and some pieces of ourselves, like the Rose of Sharon, we shed only as the new crowds it out. Other plants become completely empty, waiting barren through the winter for the new growth to emerge. We are all of these.

There will be many tall red papery poppies this year. Invasive, but so much fun and full of good cheer. This week, though, their beauty is in the holding of raindrops that sparkle like the glass at the end of the kaleidoscope.

I am in the cemetery on Saturday for both the sunrise after the early fog, and the sunset. I am honored to share this special place with my northern-transplant friend who has not been before. There are several rainy nights this week (and a fabulous thunderstorm and pouring rain last night), and I cherish the early morning damp air and the raindrops clinging to the plants.

I sit on the deck with wine and camera and wait for birds at the feeder. I do love cardinals. I Google them for facts and learn that they do not live in the Pacific Northwest (sad), and that they mate for life. Another website puts that last bit in perspective: "Cardinals mate for life; which sound like they spend decades of bliss together until they retire to some Cardinal condo in the [mountains]. Truth is a cardinal’s life expectancy isn't much longer than a year." However, you have to love this: Most female birds are silent, while the males expose themselves and announce their territory to the world. A truly unique thing about cardinals is that both sexes sing and both sound pretty much the same, and claim their joint territory.

Friday I take Smudge, my five-year-diabetic cat, and her three-pounds-lighter svelte body to the vet for a glucose curve, and she is declared in remission. No more insulin for now. I feel like such a good mom. I enjoy her pleasure in the sun and the new bug life in the garden.

There is a new employee at work, and I spend some time with her this week going over the financial details of her job (payroll specifically). She asks a question about sabbatical time that ministerial staff can take after three years. Administrative staff gets no such thing, and it gets me thinking about what I would do with an all expenses paid period of time to look at the world through different eyes. What would I point my kaleidoscope toward; what would I like my twist to settle into? What if I had a whole year?

Julia Cameron: "We cast our dreams and desires ahead of us, and as we move toward them, their content takes on solidity... A symphony moves both through and ahead of a composer. As he [she] moves toward it, it moves toward him [her]... As we commit to our dreams, something benevolent commits back." I am daring to dream.

The thing about kaleidoscopes is they don't work in the dark. If you hold yours up to the light and twist the end, where does the glass settle for you? Or maybe you have the kind without the colored glass; perhaps you need to look at what's already there and see how the pattern can change if you point in a new direction and look with different eyes. I am turning mine this Lent; pointing, dreaming, looking, watching, waiting.