Tag: love

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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Arguing: Fun for the Whole Family!

When our friends Markus and Almut had their third child, we asked Markus how it was to go from being a family of four to a family a five.  He’s a Classics Scholar—insightful, deliberate, a little quirky with a pleasing neurotic edge.  “Well, it’s less…monolithic,” he said, making the shape of a column with his hands.  “Four is just so tight.  With five, there’s more movement.  It’s more dynamic.”  Then a bewildered look crossed his face.  “Sometimes,” he said slowly, “I try to keep them all in my head at the same time and I can’t.”

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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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We Are Not Alone

My father-in-law, who is wise and insightful, recently posted a comment on my post, “Sit. Feast on your life,” which included a poem by Derek Walcott.  He (my father-in-law, that is) wrote:  “The personal pronoun ‘we’ says: You are not alone, we belong together.  And that’s what I wanted to add to your consideration: Don’t only look into the mirror to see yourself but look around you to recognize all the people who love you or hate you. You are connected to them in good and in bad hours. That’s what gives life to your life.”

He posted this for me to consider so I have been considering it.  And it put me in mind of a David Whyte poem called “Everything is Waiting for You,” which I would like to share with you today.

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Nice Things Men Do

This Christmas my dad came up with the greatest present idea ever: Small Acts of Kindness.  Now, no, my dad did not INVENT the idea of Small Acts of Kindness, but because he is a lawyer with a strong attachment to structure, he created a system for executing the AOKs that is worthy of note: he and my mom alternate months throughout the year, and each month, one does two AOKs for the other.

Stipulations: the AOKs are not to be blended in with birthdays, Valentine’s Day, or anniversaries, and during their anniversary month, they are both exempt from the individual AOKs, since they will be doing something to celebrate together. 

And no garden variety AOKs for him, either.  There may be some flowers involved, a surprise lunch now and then, a gift or two, but for the most part the AOK is exactly what it says: an ACT of kindness, doing something the other person would truly appreciate.  Examples thus far have included:

  • making sure the other person’s shoes are polished and in good repair (no small task when the person has 12,537 pairs of shoes). I think this involved a tarp, rubber gloves, and a step ladder, in addition to the full spectrum of shoe polish colors; 
  • organizing the other person’s sock drawer (again, not a quick job when the person actually has 4 sock drawers–black, blue, golf, and golf overflow–and this is my DAD);
  • repairing assorted items of clothing.

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Radical Lent—A Poetic Approach to 40 Days in the Wilderness

So it’s Lent.  If you’re Christian, that is. Lent spans 40 weekdays, beginning on Ash Wednesday (today) and ending the Saturday before Easter.  I grew up Catholic, which I consider a privilege, mostly because grounding in any faith tradition gives you something to work with.  Whether you practice it or not as an adult, a childhood spent in a strong religious tradition means you are never homeless.  I may be wrong, but leaving home, while difficult, may be easier than never having had the feeling that you belonged somewhere.

Lent has some beautiful theological significance, which you can read about if you are so inclined.  But one of Catholicism’s (Catholic school, specifically) greatest weaknesses is the inability to translate deeper spiritual practices into meaningful experiences for children, so what I remember about Lent is that you either give up something you like or do something that you don’t like.  Forgive me, but the spiritual gap between Jesus’ self-sacrifice and giving up chocolate (or, as my son Jacob decided when he was 8, beer) for 40 days is so enormous as to be absurd almost beyond words.

This year I have decided on a radical approach to Lent—I am going to do more of something I love and less of things I do not love. Specifically, I have committed to the discipline of reading one poem each day for 40 days, and writing about what it reveals.  This is not really radical, because my belief is that unlike the giving up beer approach to Lent, which treats us as if we are spiritual babies, this approach will bring me more into an adult-adult dialogue with myself and the world, which I believe is what God would prefer anyway.

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For Valentine’s Day (a short love story)

“I’ll always think of you when I see dirt,” he told her. He said this because every time they walked in the woods, she smeared dirt between her hands. Dry summer dirt, cold, crunchy winter dirt, and all the promising, practically edible dirts of the spring and fall. Being with him was like that. Earthy. Messy. Like compost–generating a slow and steady heat. She was completely awake with him; she saw everything. The tiniest ferns unraveling, moist green mosses, as complete as the world; and once, the blossoms of a cherry tree fluttering to the ground. “Snow,” he said that time, and they both laughed.

“I just want to love you,” she told him as they walked through tall prairie grass in the spring. “Yes,” he said. They walked in all seasons.  Once, in the rain, he gave her his jacket and she had to roll the sleeves up four times. “How do you feel?” he asked another time, standing in the middle of a summer forest. “Like myself,” she said. “I always feel like myself with you.” He didn’t say anything. There were mosquitoes that day, and clouds of little gnats hanging in the humid morning air.

Another time, they walked across a quiet frozen lake. They had been sledding on a flimsy plastic sled that he had tied to the roof of his car. They ate chocolate and drank the juice of a grapefruit from each other’s mouths. He walked to the edge of the lake to look at the snow, and she laid down in the middle, looking up into the white sky. 

A black bird winged–she remembered thinking that word–winged–from the top of one bare brown tree, across the lake to the top of another, and it was as if love itself had flown down and blessed them.

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a heart-felt holiday

A repost from December 2009. It’s worth it.

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Having neither spectacular accomplishments nor grave misfortunes to report, and, to be honest, having exhausted the vein of humorous family anecdotes over the years, I will tell you instead that we are all well and fine, and hope that you are too.

Instead of Srajek family details, which are really much the same as any other family’s day-to-day lives, I offer this story about something that happened to us this time last year, at the start of a long Midwest winter.

In our local paper there used to be a kid’s feature called “Letters to the Editor,” where school kids responded to a question from the editor, and then some responses from each school got published.  One week last December, Jacob’s answer to the question “What is the top item on your Christmas list this year?” turned up in the paper.  He wrote that since he wanted to be a carpenter when he grew up, he had “always wanted” a carpenter’s plane.

If he didn’t get that, the number two thing on the list was “lots of nice building wood,” a response that makes him sound quainter and less electronically minded than he really is, but, well, he was probably writing what he knew had the best chance of getting published (they’re never too young to play to the crowd).

About a week after his response appeared in the paper, we received a letter in the mail from a woman we did not know. She apologized if we were not the parents of Jacob Srajek, said that she had looked us up in the phone book, and she hoped her writing was not an imposition to us.  A clipping of Jacob’s letter was neatly taped to the corner of her own letter, which was printed on paper with a decorative floral border.
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