Pieced Together: The Strength of the Imperfect: An Invitation to Advent 2013

Welcome to Advent 2013 at From the Heart. This season I’m contemplating imperfection, and you are invited to join me. A very lucky fortunate thing happened to me a few weeks ago: I had an important dream, a guidepost dream, one of those dreams that feels like a visit with the force that knows what your life is meant to be about. I dreamt of broken things–boxes filled with cracked porcelain and shards of blue-green glass, rooms of strange pieces of furniture that didn’t belong together but were somehow beautiful, and people I know who are messy and flawed but authentic and deeply human.

The phrase that kept repeating itself throughout the dream was “pieced together,” and I dragged it with me through that time between sleeping and waking like a fish flailing and heavy on the line. Fully awake, I felt like someone collapsing on the shore with a kind of hard-earned sustenance in my arms.

“Pieced together” is what my life looks like right now–broken, scary, confusing, and somehow powerfully real. Perhaps the most powerful part is seeing more clearly how many of us live just this way–with jagged pieces of our lives that don’t fit together, that don’t make sense, that hurt, and yet must be held and carried right alongside the pieces that are smooth and whole.

okayMaybe it’s illness, or loss, pain, grief, fear–whatever we didn’t ask for but arrived anyway and can’t be shaken off. What I hope for this Advent is to believe that there is treasure in a pieced together, imperfect life, and to figure out how to find and share it. I hope you’ll be here with me.

Below, a lovely poem that recently appeared on the Writer’s Almanac, a hymn to Mary by, surprisingly, Edgar Allan Poe. Note the hopefulness in the request that Mary be present in both bright and dark times, and let it remind us that there is tremendous power in the humble act of asking for what we need.

Hymn

At morn—at noon—at twilight dim—
Maria! thou hast heard my hymn!
In joy and wo—in good and ill—
Mother of God, be with me still!
When the Hours flew brightly by,
And not a cloud obscured the sky,
My soul, lest it should truant be,
Thy grace did guide to thine and thee;
Now, when storms of Fate o’ercast
Darkly my Present and my Past,
Let my Future radiant shine
“With sweet hopes of thee and thine!

Edgar Allan Poe

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Nobody Was Meant to Do This Alone

So many hard things have been happening around me lately, some in my own life, some in others’, and then awful traumas like the Boston Marathon explosions. Several of my friends were there, luckily all are safe.

At work, one of my colleagues recently lost her young daughter to diabetes. Another friend just told me this story last week–one of her friends was in the McDonald’s drive through and she happened to look back and notice that the young woman behind her had her head down on the steering wheel and was crying. My friend’s friend paid for the young woman’s meals, just as small act of kindness. Well, the young woman followed her and asked why she had helped in such a way. As the two women were talking, the young mother started crying and confessed that she was in such distress, and suffering so much emotionally, that she had planned to bring the Happy Meals home to her young kids, go up to her bedroom and kill herself.

After talking more, the friend convinced to please get some help, and to even allow her to come over and help her get herself together and at least provide some respite for her and the kids.

Yes, this is a really bleak story. But one with a thankfully positive ending. And yes, things like this are happening around us, as we drive to work, as we sit in the next office to someone, as we say “thank you” to the check-out person at the grocery store.

When I saw my colleague who lost her daughter, it happened to be in the grocery store, and we just held each other for a few minutes. “You were such a good mother to her,” I said. “I still can believe she’s gone,” she said. And we both agreed that it is only the support of other people that gets us through times that hurt more than we could have ever imagined.

Please consider doing something kind for someone today, if you don’t do that type of thing already. It helps them but it helps you too, because it reminds you that you have that capacity to step outside of yourself, even if just for a moment. Be kind. Thank God.

My new Writing Coach blog is now at this address: http://leslieannecrowley.wordpress.com. I posted a new poem yesterday!

From John Wesley (June 17, 1703March 2, 1791), an 18th-century Anglican clergyman and
Christian theologian:

“Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all
the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all
the people you can. As long as ever you can.”
hands

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Just in Case You’re in Vienna, Maine…

My dear friend Colleen Crowley has been lending me her wonderful cabin here in Vienna, Maine while I get ready for what my new life is going to look like and it’s fabulous! No electricity or running water, but HUGE windows, the comfiest bed with flannel sheets and a down comforter, and a Coleman stove. Okay, and I have to tell you about the composting toilet. It is the coolest thing ever, doesn’t smell a bit, and uses NO water. Everyone should have one. Really.

I’ve fallen in love with candles and all of the (Virgin) Mary artwork that Colleen has all over the cabin. I want this print  called “The Annunciation” by Henry Ossawa Tanner SO MUCH. I look at it every morning and at the other lovely Mary images and artifacts that imbue this exquisite little place.The Annunciation by Henry Ossawa Tanner 1896

I’ll have more pictures to share when I return, but just wanted to say that in return for Colleen’s kindness in letting me stay in her cabin, I will be doing a free writing workshop at the Dr. Shaw Library in Vienna, Maine this Sunday, March 24 from 3:30-5:30 so if you’re in the area, come on by. The librarians are super nice and the theme is going to be Self-Compassion. Mostly though, we’re just going to talk about writing, journaling, poetry, and how amazing it all is.

Love to all of you, and thank you from the bottom of my heart for all of the kind wishes. They mean the world and more. I love you all too.

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The Endless Surprise of Kindnesses

For my exquisitely kind family and friends

Perhaps this is true of all poems–perhaps when you read a truly brilliant poem you realize that you didn’t really get it before. Or, more likely, good poems are like life–they reveal more the more that you experience. After all, it was Freud who said, “Wherever I have been, a poet has been there before me.”

I’ve used this poem–“Kindness”– by Naomi Shihab Nye before, but I understand it so differently now. Perhaps it’s a gift of compassion to myself that, instead of feeling stupid and thinking, “How could I not really get it before?” I let myself experience it more fully. For I believe with all my heart that poetry gives you all that the human heart and psyche can truly give, and the more open you are, the more you can take in. Sometimes, when that openness comes from being broken apart, love and light have more room to enter.

The truth is, I didn’t know until recently what the first lines of this poem really meant: “Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.”  I had no idea what she was talking about. People who’ve lost loved ones surely did; not me. I do now.

But I also didn’t know what the poet meant by her closing lines:

“Then it is only kindness
that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.”

But I do now. I do now. Thank you to everyone who has been so kind to me in the past few weeks.

Below is the full poem. With a heart full of gratitude.


Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the
Indian in a white poncho lies dead
by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night
with plans and the simple breath
that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness
as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow
as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness
that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day
to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye

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The Best Intentions: Your Thoughts?

Below is a beautiful and poignant poem from Jane Hirschfield about the very human tendency, even longing one might say, to ensure that what we love will never leave us. When you read the poem you’ll see that the natural world–flowers, rivers–even one’s own body, quietly refuses to agree to the human need for permanency. It is only other people who say, “Yes,” to the plea to “stay always,” and the rest of the poem has already made it clear that such a promise is just a wish, a hope, and ultimately impossible.

Like all truly good poems, this one tells the truth. Though I also find myself asking about that very human tendency to say, “Yes, I will be here always,” even when we know it isn’t really true. Because my sense is that sometimes, even though I don’t know how, it is true, or at least, it’s worth saying for the very real comfort that it offers. Yes, in the end we are always alone. No, we can’t make life stand still. But, we can very gratefully accept the imperfect, life-giving, and completely necessary gifts that other limited human beings offer us.  And we can believe in their infinite goodness. Perhaps we actually have no other alternatives.

What do you think?


The Promise

Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower.
Stay, I said to the spider,
who fled.
Stay, leaf.
It reddened,
embarrassed for me and itself.
Stay, I said to my body.
It sat as a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.
Stay, to the earth
of riverine valley meadows,
of fossiled escarpments,
of limestone and sandstone.
It looked back
with a changing expression, in silence.
Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always.
by Jane Hirschfield,  Come, Thief, Alfred A. Knopf, 2011
Daffodil shoots
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Could it Really Be This Simple?

I found this Post-It in my son Jacob’s room and had to capture it on film. I asked him what you should do if the moment sucks, and he said, “Then live in some other moment.”

moment
my new motto

A clarion call of a poem today from Mary Oliver about living in other moments, other lives, going down new paths, reaching beyond what you can see. Yes, it really could be this simple.

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives —
tried
to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging
from the branches
of the young locust trees, in early morning, feel like?

Do you think this
world was only an entertainment for you?

Never to enter the sea and
notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never
to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the
air as you open your wings over the dark acorn of your heart!

No wonder
we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from
your life!

Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who
can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all
attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner
chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer
stone?

Well, there is time left —
fields everywhere invite you into
them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from
wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on
your coat, leave your desk!

To put one’s foot into the door of the grass,
which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be
afraid!

To set one’s foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with
amazement!

To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
god the
ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,
nodding this way and that
way, to the flowers of the
present hour,
to the song falling out of the
mockingbird’s pink mouth,
to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have
opened

in the night

To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and
rustle in the wind!

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling
it a life?

While the soul, after all, is only a window,

and the
opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little
sleep.

Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild
roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I
sat among them. Maybe

I even heard a curl or tow of music, damp and rouge
red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery
bodies.

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark
shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!

A woman standing
in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what’s coming
next
is coming with its own heave and grace.

Meanwhile, once in a
while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
upon the immutable.
What
more could one ask?

And I would touch the faces of the daises,
and I
would bow down
to think about it.

That was then, which hasn’t ended
yet.

Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross
the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean’s edge.

I climb, I
backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.

–from West Wind

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Invitation: Come for Comfort

On Saturday afternoon I was at the nail place getting my no-chip manicure, looking at and listening to the people around me, which feels a bit like watching TV–calming and weird at the same time. There were two young women talking about their plans to go out drinking, discussing the names of drinks they planned to try: the “Dirty Girl Scout,” the “Naked Girl Scout,” and something with the words “blow job” in the title. There was a lady talking about her plans for the family Christmas dinner she was making, and how some of the kids could eat off of Christmas plates but not all could because she didn’t have enough for everyone, but maybe she should go to Kohl’s and buy more? And then there was the gigantic football player and his girlfriend: he was getting a mani-pedi, she was texting her friends.

Then the Christmas music started, specifically, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” and tears started running down my cheeks because all I have on my mind are the people of Newton, Connecticut and their families. I was crying, but couldn’t wipe my face because my hands were soaking in polish remover, and this seemed both ridiculous and completely appropriate at the same time. We go about our regular, sweet, silly little lives, because what else would we do, and at the same time we are all, as one of the characters in Jan Karon’s lovely “Mitford” novels says, “trying to swallow something that won’t go down.”broken-hearts-on-hands

I’ve been wondering for days whether to write this post because what in God’s name can anyone say or do?  That is the question I was asking myself on Saturday, sitting there in the nail place, especially when the owner’s two little boys came in and crammed themselves into one pedicure chair together and played Angry Birds on an i-Pad. What can I do? What can I say? What can I do?

So this post has just been a draft, and would have remained as such until today’s news of the funerals started coming out, and I realized that I was actually afraid to take my 7-year old son out shopping on our way home tonight. What they say when school shootings happen is always the same: “Things like this don’t happen here.” But that has never been true. Things like this happen here, wherever you are reading this; here is Virginia, Oregon, New York, Illinois, Ohio, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Norway…the bottom line is that Newton, Connecticut is anywhere, everywhere, and those children and those families are us. All of us.

My intention in writing this post is to invite you to come and be here. Something like a virtual prayer service. Just be here, with whatever you have, whatever you can offer, whatever you feel. Come and sit here, in front of your computer screen, and pray as hard as you can, pray with everything in your heart. Cry or breathe, let your heart break open, then pray some more, because it matters and you won’t be alone. I truly believe that when we have no idea what to bring but bring ourselves anyway, it matters. If all you have to offer is grief, then sit here in front of your computer with your grief. You aren’t alone, and it matters. Your grief matters. Your love matters. There is love here. There is heart here. Because you are here and you aren’t alone.
brokenheartThe poet Denise Levertov wrote, “In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.” That is what made me write this post. And because, as the Rilke poem below tells us, when grief is all you have, then grief is what you bring. It is right and good to demand that God hear our grief and help us bear it.

Read the poem. And if you want to let me know that you were here, if it helps you to do that, I promise you that your prayers will be in my heart as I keep offering up whatever I have to offer. Your prayers will echo in the hearts of everyone who is here reading, and that matters. Together we can share what feels unbearable, together all our prayers will mean something, not just to us individually but to everyone else in pain. I promise that too.

I read this quote from one of the Newton school neighbors who took some children into his home to wait for their parents: “This little boy turns around, and composes himself, and he looks at me like he had just removed himself from the carnage and he says, ‘Just saying, your house is very small,'” Rosen said. “I wanted to tell him, ‘I love you. I love you.'”

When our hearts are broken, sometimes love comes out. It will never be enough, but it matters more than we ever know. I love you. I love you.

Pushing Through

It’s possible I am pushing through solid rock
 in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.

I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.

Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by Robert Bly)

18

School Supply Insanity: Just Do It Or Just Say No?

In 2005, many first-days-of school ago, I watched my 7-year old son walk into his kindergarten class with tears stinging my eyes. I felt stuck in place, unable to leave, and was surprised to see another kindergarten mother walking quite snappily back to her car. It struck me as somewhat unseemly, her sprightly air. The kindergarten teacher, a wise and, I would come to learn, hilarious woman, looked at my weepy-mommy face and winked. “This isn’t her first rodeo,” she said, smiling.

Now, eight years later, with two sons in high school and one starting 1st grade, this impending school year is no longer my first rodeo. Which is why there are no traces of sentimentality left around one of the critical steps in gearing up for 1st grade: the School Supply List.

Long gone are the days when school supplies held the air of freshly sharpened pencils and sheaves of blank, potential-filled paper. Long vanished is the fantasy of cheerfully picking out pencil cases, notebooks, and new crayons with my sons. And good riddance.

Continue reading “School Supply Insanity: Just Do It Or Just Say No?” →

8

Mother’s Day 2012: A Declaration of Independence

Motherhood is (and has been for more than 150 years) one of the hardest topics to write about in any meaningful way. And yet the overwhelming amount of material written about motherhood just in popular press alone–articles, books, advice columns, magazines, blogs, tweets–should make you question why I would even think such a thing, let alone publicly declare it to be true.  If motherhood is so hard to write about in a meaningful way, why is it written about ALL the TIME?

It’s written about all the time and in so many places precisely because it is so hard to understand.  Motherhood is a subject that, at every moment, is both constantly changing and exactly the same.

Continue reading “Mother’s Day 2012: A Declaration of Independence” →

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In Which I Write About Jacob’s Accident & Become Famous

As some folks know, Jacob was hit by a car last month while riding his bike to school. The driver didn’t stop (yes, you read that right. Someone hit a child on a bike, knocked him over and kept driving.)  Jacob wasn’t hurt.

It was a very powerful learning experience for all of us.  I wrote a short piece about it for the website ChambanaMoms.com, and it is my Very First Guest Post Ever.  Go here to read it (Mom, that means you have to click on the underlined words).

Happy May Day all!

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