Tag: courage

And Now For Something Completely the Same

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.

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God Put a Rainbow in the Clouds

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.

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Goodbye to Winter: A Love Letter

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.

New Year's Eve 2009

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Halfway There & Filled With Gratitude

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.

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Things Mostly (Not) Green

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.

not quite winter, not quite spring

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Why Balance is an Unhelpful Ideal (Unless You Are a Gymnast or a Tightrope Walker)

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.” 

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A Case for Running Backwards

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.

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The Antidote to Exhaustion

“‘Tell me about exhaustion,’ I said.

 He looked at me with an acute, searching, compassionate ferocity for the briefest of moments, as if trying to sum up the entirety of the situation and without missing a beat, as if he had been waiting all along, to say a life-changing thing to me. 

‘You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?’

 ‘What is it, then?’

‘The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness‘”
(David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, 132).

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New Week, New Month, Same Two Choices

Last night on the phone my dad reminded me of a priest who used to serve at the church I grew up in.  His name was Fr. Reginald.  He often gave these short, succinct homilies, with one main point that stayed with you because it wasn’t weighed down with a lot of extraneous rhetoric.

Today’s poem is like that.  Today is the start of a new week and a new month (and only three more months of winter here in the midwest!).  Yet this poem reminds us that in every moment, we have the same two choices–love or fear.  Despite the poem’s repetition of the words “there are” in each line, despite the insistence that love and fear are the only two states of being, you always have a choice about which to claim, to see, to believe.  This is not to imply that’s it’s an easy choice, because God knows, it isn’t.  Nor is fear a “bad” thing.  Without fear, there is no need for courage.  And luckily for us, no matter what, it’s a choice we get the chance to make, over and over again.

Love and Fear

There are only two feelings, Love and fear:
There are only two languages, Love and fear:
There are only two activities, Love and fear:
There are only two motives, two procedures,
two frameworks, two results, Love and fear,
Love and fear.

Michael Leunig (contemporary Australian cartoonist, philosopher, poet and artist)

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“God Says Yes To Me”* (& other brazen beliefs)

God Says Yes To Me

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

*Kaylin Haught, The Palm of your Hand, Tilbury House Publishers, 1995

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