because we all need more love
The artists Christo and his late wife Jeanne-Claude created some of the most extraordinary pieces of art in the world. Running Fence, Surrounded Islands, Wrapped Trees, and The Gates are some of the best known. They are enormous environmental projects that take up to 25 years to plan and create. None of their exhibits are permanent.
Continue reading “The Beauty of Transience: Our Collective Wisdom”
“No hidden meanings” is #2 of the “43 Eternal Truths” in Sheldon Kopp’s Eschatological Laundry List. I have no idea what it means. None at all. I do have a vague sense that to say there are “no hidden meanings” oversimplifies the reality of life, diminishes the complexities of our experiences and of the divine, and way, way overestimates our poor abilities to truly grasp how spirit works, and why things happen the way that they do. But I could be wrong.
And anyway, this is my blog and I get to write whatever I want. So I’m going to tell you a story which may or may not have something to do with hidden meanings. I’ll let you decide what you think it means. Maybe you’ll even write in and let me know.
A few years ago in our community, a woman who was drunk got into a car and got onto the highway. She drove, in the wrong direction, into a van of people and killed them. She survived and was sent to prison. She was vilified.
Sometime later, I was talking with a friend of mine named Lynn who has struggled for many years with alcohol and drug use, and is tentatively feeling her way through a stretch of sobriety. She had gotten drunk, drove, was arrested, and because of her record, put in jail. “The addiction counselor asked me why I went back out after so long,” she told me in her raspy smoker’s voice (“went back out” is AA speak for relapsing). “I said, ‘I have no idea.’ He looked at me and said, ‘That’s actually the best answer you can give. Most of the time there is no reason.'”
Lynn’s cell mate was the woman who had killed the people in the van. Lynn told me that after talking to this woman, hearing her story, she knew, then and there, that she was finished with alcohol and drugs. That she could have been this woman, that they were no different. She promised herself that she would never use again. And she hasn’t.
“She saved your life,” I said, when she told me this story. “She saved my life,” she agreed quietly. “She saved my life.”
Oscar Wilde wrote, “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.” It’s one of the most reassuring quotations I know. Our God is the God of the second chance.
Hidden meanings? I have no idea. Maybe you can write in and let me know. I would love to hear what you think.
In Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, Anne Lamott quotes Lenny Bruce: “If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”
My respect for Anne Lamott was enormous before I started this Lenten blog, and now it’s pretty much expanded to such a measure that no word feels big enough, like numbers and the federal debt. It’s HARD to write about spiritual issues, especially once you get past the easy-to-say stuff that is really more like “spirituality lite:” having compassion, being nice to others, and generally making an effort to be a good person.
There are three strands of one story trying to weave themselves together in my head today, and if I were a better or less tired writer, I would not have to tell you that upfront—it would be clear from the writing itself. And since I’ve started off with that unsubtle disclaimer, I’ll follow it by just telling you what the three strands are, even though that feels like handing you the rope and telling you to go braid it yourself, instead of weaving a fine and smooth story, which is what responsible writers are supposed to do.
Continue reading “And Now For Something Completely the Same”
In 2002, Maya Angelou was the speaker at the University of Illinois’ commencement. It was a cloudy day, and all the dusty old Important University Administrators droned on and on with their dusty old words. And then Maya Angelou was introduced. She stepped to the podium, opened her mouth, and her honey-rich voice rolled out singing, “When it looked like the sun wasn’t gonna shine anymore, God put a rainbow in the clouds!” Then she called out into the mass of people, “Good afternoon, rainbows!” It was 8 years ago, but it could have been 5 minutes for how full and powerful her voice still is in my head.
The most romantic moment of my winter this year was on New Year’s Eve, standing in the bathroom watching my husband try out his new nose hair clippers. And this not to imply that there is no romance in my life, or that the moment itself wasn’t romantic. It really, really was.
We celebrated New Year’s Eve with my sister-in-law and her husband by getting dressed up and doing karaoke downstairs in the family room, which was more fun than I can say. And one of the things I love about being with my sister-in-law is that she has the ability to made life feel like an occasion. She makes the effort. She wears red lipstick every day. She uses her best dishes on a regular basis. She pays attention. The big difference between the two of us is that I am a “Why bother?” person, and she is a “Why would you not bother?” person. It’s very refreshing.
Yesterday marked the halfway point of my “Radical Lent: a Poetic Approach to 40 Days in the Wilderness” Project. As it is a project, and as I often remind my students of the importance of “early deliverables” that give you a chance to step back and ask yourself how things are going, I’ve decided to do that today.
Actually, I began this blog, From the Heart, in earnest on February 15th. It was already lurking in my private cyberspace closet for a little while before then, but on February 15th, I took what felt like an audacious and presumptuous step, and asked people to consider subscribing to my blog. Then I texted my sister to say that I felt sick.
My friend Tom once shared a story of a woman he knew who kept a journal about gardening. One entry that always stuck with him was a short observation on a day when the slow transition from winter to spring seemed to sharpen into visibility. She wrote: “Things mostly green.”
While we can definitely feel the return of life to the ground here in east central Illinois, things are mostly not green. The air has been more forgiving, the sunlight gloriously welcome, and yes, there are a few tiny shoots poking through in the yard, but this is the time right before the green, the time between.
Whenever I see a flyer for a workshop or talk on “Work/Life Balance,” I get a very bad feeling in my chest and my head starts to hurt. Unless there will be someone at the workshop with a clipboard and a sign-up sheet for volunteers to come over and dust my floorboards, cook dinner for my family, buy the batteries at Walgreens that I keep forgetting, or clean out the box of stuff from when I moved my office last December, I can’t think of a single good reason to attend.
My bottom line belief on work/life balance is this–it’s a hoax, and a dangerous one at that. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s David Whyte in his most recent book, The Three Marriages: Reexamining Work, Self and Relationship: “People find it hard to balance work with family, family with self, because it might not be a question of balance. Some other dynamic is in play, something to do with a very human attempt at happiness that does not quantify different parts of life and then set them against one another. We are collectively exhausted because of our inability to hold competing parts of ourselves together in a more integrated way.”
There was a lady in our old neighborhood who used to walk up and down the sidewalks backwards. Sometimes she carried what appeared to be two gallon jugs of drinking water, one in each hand. She was very thin, made all her own clothes, and had a very complex relationship with her health. She was extremely concerned about air quality, for example, and yet was married to a man who smoked so much that not only his teeth but both of his hands were yellow from nicotine. I hated seeing her, not because she was so odd, but because I recognized her as a fellow neurotic. Even on days when I was feeling completely normal, catching a glimpse of her lurching down the sidewalk was like a magnet for all of my wacko health fears. They would just come shrieking to the surface like little monstery kids who jump up and down and yell “BLAAHHH!” right in your face.
from the heart 