Light in the Darkness

It has been raining some lately in the southwest corner of this verdant state, and gray a good bit of the time. But St. Helens is visible on Friday, for the first time in over two weeks; the dawn splits open a ribbon of sky at the horizon to reveal the snow-cold mountain in silhouette. On the way to yoga in Olympia, the sun shines through a hole in the clouds and illuminates the tops of the tall firs and casts cloud shadows on the road.

I don't mind the gray and rain (and contrary to what one might assume from weather reports across the country, it does not rain all the time). It does not make me feel dreary at all, at least not in the winter. But days like Friday, when the sun just shouts, "The hell with it, you clouds, I'm comin' through!" make my soul sing in a way that daily sun in the south never did. And God knows, Friday we needed something, anything, that felt like hope.

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,

In the bleak midwinter, long ago. (Christina Rossetti)


Even as I watch for cloud holes revealing blue sky as I drive, I am listening to the news out of Connecticut. There is trouble in our garden. In our world, in our country, in our cities, in our small towns. And there always has been, since time began. But our easy connections with one another today, through the internet and television and our mobility that makes it possible to know people all over the nation and the world, bring the trouble close to our hearts and to our own lives and make a hole there. And that is a good thing; it lets the blue of goodness shine through hearts that have let the monochromatic gray settle in.

We hurt when violence happens, whether natural or unnatural. And there has been plenty of both lately. Our president sheds our communal tears on the international stage. His words and his tears reveal a little blue sky. Social media is full of people in pain. The debate about gun laws is breaking back into a gallop. It is always good when people are talking, even when it is heated and filled with 

disagreement about how to solve a problem that all of us desperately want to fix. Ideas about ways to help Newtown, today, right now, are bouncing about. We mustn’t stop. We honor the fallen when we stay in dialogue, searching for solutions. People are hugging their children. I read on FaceBook one person's cynical belief that hugging children won't help. I beg to differ. Every shred of caring and love is a part of the solution. The day we become hopeless about the future of this world, is the day we fail.

"Ring the bells that still can ring; forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." (Leonard Cohen)

I arrive at the yoga studio early. My mat and I get my favorite spot, facing the three tall windows overlooking Capitol Lake. I finish my warm-up stretching and sit in sukhasana (easy sitting pose) and look to the lake. The clouds have filled in the holes and the gray sky is once again unbroken. Suddenly, from the direction of the Puget Sound boat docks, a large flock of birds whooshes into view. I don't know what they are. Bigger than small; smaller than gulls, and black. They arrive together, then break into two groups and begin diving and rising again in unison, reversing direction and then swooping back and reversing again; dancing above the lake, staying within the frame of the three windows. Tears fill my eyes and leak down my cheeks. I don't count the birds. I know there are 28. Later I hear the children were in two classrooms.

At the end of the practice, our teacher arouses us from the stillness of savasana saying, "Imagine, as you come to your seated position, that the sun is shining." And so it is. Shining brightly. Glittering on the lake. The clouds on the drive home at dusk are both darkly ominous and pink with hope. Ground fog floats among the hills, drifts over the plain, fills in the nooks and crannies, softens the harsh street lamps, covers the fabric of the land in stillness.

In this season of Advent, we are heartbroken and hopeful. A baby came to bring hope to a broken world. This is a familiar place. Every major world religion has a central historical figure that represents hope. Every major world religion has a messianic prophecy that a Promised One will rise up again and unite all of humanity into one loving family.

Is it us? Are we the Promise?

"For someone on earth will see the star, someone will hear the angel voices, someone will run to Bethlehem, someone will know peace and goodwill: the Christ will be born!" (Ann Weems)

Liking Christmas

I walk out of The Fresh Market on a lunch break this week, with my wee cup of coffee and my two weekend blueberry scones that they now save for me on Thursdays because they don't put enough for me and anyone else in the Very Small Scone Basket. Sleigh Bells is playing on the  shopping center outside musak, and I am actually wearing a light jacket and a scarf. And it hits me: "I'm going to like Christmas this year!" It's not that I generally choose not to like the holidays, just that for a long time--more years than not, in the last couple decades--I haven't. For one reason or another, which I don't need to go into detail about, it's been a dreaded time of year--the rejoicing coming when it's over. 

You become what you think about. (Earl Nightingale)

I was set to continue that saggy default tradition this year. I will not see a single family member this December for what might be the first time in my life. That seems like a sad thing. In truth, I suppose, it is seeing them and it not matching my Very Big Fantasy About How Things Should Be that has been hard. So this year I will be grateful for my chosen family and look for opportunities to spend time with them. But if that doesn’t happen (they do, after all, have families of the other flavor), it will be okay. I will enjoy a few days off and find peaceful things to do. 

You become what you think about.

I know what I'm gifting half of my family--and they are purchased or created. As for the other half, I am in convenient denial that it needs to get done and shipped across the country and I have no ideas. Elizabeth posted on FaceBook this week, after Cyber Monday and Black Friday (apparently those days are supposed to catapult one into the Christmas Spirit), that she is getting extremely annoyed by television ads and talk show guests suggesting "last minute" gift ideas. "Has the 'first minute' even happened?" she rants. It is convenient, I suppose, to have the first and last minute wrapped up in one weekend. Maybe if I did that I could concentrate on other meaningful Christmas activities: making my home festive, baking, giving attention to my life and those who inhabit it with me, attending to Advent and the coming of the Bearer of Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love.

After another difficult week, the weekend finds me looking for color in the garden. The leaves are gone from the trees and the predominant shades of the earth are brown and dull green. There are a few red leaves clinging to a low branch of the dogwood and one lonely bunch of red berries on the pyracantha that I recently reshaped. The Mexican heather and the roses that keep blooming. The cheerful winter jasmine at the end of the driveway is covered with buds of hope and the first bright yellow blossoms are open. There is a single yellow leaf on the gardenia bush, along with the red splash of a single old bloom. A new Christmas display is birthing down the street with a choir of angels, wise people that apparently arrived at the stable in a train, and shepherds with their sheep keeping watch. The titmouses and chickadees have nibbled the suet in the holder stuck on the window into a perfect heart shape.  

Love.

Gift giving is great fun, if you are a child or have a child that you get to watch beam with delight on Christmas morning. But I find it hard to gift adults. I can't bestow upon them anything they really need, like a Large Infusion of Cash. Yet, if we don’t give and receive something at Christmas we feel cheated at both ends. I don't need any stuff. It's Clementines that make me happy. Like Honey Crisp apples in the fall, I am glad that Clementines are seasonal. I mourn them when they stop being available at the market, but when the Honey Crisp apple season ends, there are the Clementines. When I unwrap the the first little treasure and the bite-sized section explodes its sweet tang in my mouth, I remember that I have missed it. Same thing with the Honey Crisp that I watch and wait for during the long months after the price of Clementines goes up and the quality goes down. Like an out-of-area lover, their return is all the more poignant for their unavailability most of the time. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and all that.

Joy.

The return of both the Honey Crisps and the Clementines in their own season, like the predictability of the garden, gives me something to look forward to. And the unexpectedness of finding out-of-season buds already on the hydrangeas, and jonquils that are a foot tall already, are both promise and surprise. Both bring me optimism for what is around the corner: that which is known, and that which is not.

Hope.

I am leaning heavily today on the sentence I ran across yesterday, "You become what you think about." Think negative thoughts, like not liking Christmas, and you become Scrooge. I do not find it easy, though, to give heartache and disappointment and anger and fear the boot when they really, really want to control my head. But I am going to try to make room in there for hope, peace, joy, and love. And just maybe they will win the battle.

Peace.

Hope Springs a Turtle*

When my family lived on Plum Road in Starkville, Mississippi, a box turtle inhabited the petunia beds that bordered the raised patio. I loved that. I haven't seen any turtles in my gardens here, but there is plenty else sproinging up on this first day of spring. Spring is such a hopeful time. And spring in North Carolina is incomparable. For all my provincialism about the Pacific Northwest and all my whining about summer heat in the south; for all my longing to live higher above sea level, spring in North Carolina almost makes up for all that is geographically and atmospherically--and for almost every other way--lacking in my living (at least when it is spring). This morning I put my spring birdhouse on the front porch in celebration.

Warmth returns mid- week, continuing the typical schizophrenic pattern, and along with it the extra hour of daylight after work to explore hope among the dead leaves; to sit on the deck with a glass of wine and watch the leaves grow and the dogwood blossoms open. Five of the six rose bushes I planted have leaf sprouts; the bleeding heart has its first string of little heart bells with their translucent clappers; the understated euphorbia bloom tops the tall velvety soft stalks; the weeping Japanese maple leaves are unfurling from last week's red buds like winged creatures; the wild violets are purpling the lawn and rock crevices and everywhere else I let them grow--which is anywhere they want.

The banana tree has ten three-inch shoots and yesterday I find one of the Purple Hearts up beside the front step. I don't know how I missed one of the hostas that must have sprung fully formed overnight, while its sisters are just poking through the soil. The Japanese Painted fern fronds are several inches tall (and I hadn't even seen them come up) and the fiddlehead shape of other ferns are emerging everyday, looking rather like those things children blow through at parties, to make the paper cylinder shoot into people's faces. The azaleas are budding and my feet don flip flops for the first time in the 70-something degree warmth.

My patio project under the canopy of the dogwood is coming along. The hole is dug--and redug after I decide to move it twelve inches toward the Pacific Northwest in order to avoid dealing with one of the tree roots. Yesterday I pick up 130 more bricks--thank you to Susan and Boyd for the donation and for helping me load and unload them; and to Vickie for working side-by-side with me to exchange the donated bricks with holes for the solid ones in my yard border. I only need 250 more. I decide to go with the costlier, but more manageable, bags of pea gravel and sand from Lowes as opposed to the hassle and subsequent shoveling of delivery en masse, and get ten fifty pound bags of gravel onto the construction site. Only thirty more to go. Advil is my new best friend. I put down the weed barrier landscaping cloth before I call it a day. My hopefulness is growing that I will be able to accomplish this herculean project; and leave a more or less permanent mark on this little space in the vast universe.

At five o'clock I sit on the deck with a cold one and raise a glass to my dad's best friend who is at that moment being memorialized in my home town on the left coast. It is also my Daddy's 94th birthday--or would have been had he not left us way too soon sixteen years ago. I have always been aware, of course, that my own birthday is on the eve of summer; but only this week do I realize that my father's is on the eve of spring. Connection. I recall the year he "let" me build a brick walkway from the edge of the yard to the compost pile. I'm pretty sure my work was not up to his standard, but if he said so I don't remember. I weep in hopefulness that he might be proud of me for tackling this patio; in spite of the fact that he was monumentally disappointed in who I was at the time of his death. And, in spite of his displeasure in me--and consequently mine in him--being my last memory of him, I miss him so much. That's kind of how I am, I have discovered as my years march on: however disillusioned people are with me or me with them, I remain hopeful that someday, some year, they will come back around and re-engage in relationship. Hope springs a turtle.

There is a perigee moon this weekend--a once every twenty years Supermoon. A perigee moon, I learn, is when it comes closest to the earth. It is big, it is bright, it is spectacular. Because of the trees that block my view of the moon as it rises from the horizon, I drag my tired muscles into the car and go in search of a better view--because the moon is worth it. A thin cloud veil floats across the celestial orb; it looks like a pentimento--the original art hiding behind an overwash, as if the artist is thinking she could do better and intending to try. But when I go out on the lawn for one last look before bed, the veil is gone. Hard to improve upon perfection.

It is the same moon that my almost longest ever friend sees as she returns to her winter home in Indiana after an impulse visit to North Carolina this week. (We have known each other since our daughters were in pre-school; they are still friends, too. Cheers, Charly.) It is the same moon an across-the-ocean reader of my blog sees. She (?) left a comment last week, saying, "I don't know how I arrive to your blog, but I like it just by reading the first phrase!!!" That pleases me so much. I click on her link and read her blog. I think she might be from India. Hope springs a turtle that connections of ordinary life to ordinary life will someday bring peace to this messed up world. It is the same moon my family on the other coast sees (but I expect it was hidden by clouds last night). It is the same moon Emma's friends from her Peace Corps days in Tanzania see. It is the same moon my church friends in Cuba this week see, with our brothers and sisters in Matanzas. It is the same moon that floats over northern Japan and Afghanistan and all the other troubled parts of the world. Look up! Look up! In the sky, in the garden, in relationship--hope springs a turtle.

* In gratitude for the title of this post to Brennan, a young student in my friend's classroom. Through the eyes of babes, in whom our hope lies.