May
29
What’s the deal with prayer?
Is God the Great Santa Claus in the Sky, receiving our wish lists all year long? Or is prayer about asking what God wants — the old thy-will-be-done thing?
Even Jesus seems to have been ambivalent about the whole prayer thing. He’s been quoted as saying that whatever we ask for in his name is pretty much a sure thing. Yet, one night when he was sweating blood over what the future held for him, he asked for a reprieve that he didn’t get. Of course, right before he said “amen,” he gave God an out.
So are we supposed to ask? Or are we supposed to submit? If even Jesus waffled, who the heck are we to think we have the answer?
May
28
Looked out the window recently during one of the sudden, summer-like downpours we’ve had. I love my third-story perch and the perspective it gives me — a wide-angle view of the world sprawling before me instead of that narrow, coming-at-me sensation I can get from life when I’m out there in it.
Walking toward the corner grocery store were two people, a man and a woman, single-file, each with an umbrella, both drenched despite the umbrellas. I’ve been in their soggy shoes before. But it’s getting harder to be surprised by life.
The storm that rolled in late this afternoon did not surprise me. Before bed last night, I checked the hour-by-hour weather for my zip code for the next 18 hours. Sometimes I check my zip code and somebody else’s, too. Then I can plan my life accordingly. I can wear shoes that have seen better days, cancel a lunch date if I don’t want to be on the freeway in a gully-washer, move the plants on my balcony closer to the rail so they can drink in as much rain as possible.
I suppose that’s better than getting caught. But it gives me the false illusion that I can control how life comes at me. I start to believe that even if I can’t control whether it rains, I can be prepared. I can minimize the inconvenience and plan my way into predictability. And that’s a comforting notion that can coax the spontaneity out of me.
To fully, joyfully live this life, can I at least try to welcome whatever it brings without feeling the need for an hour-by-hour prediction? How would it change my experience of life if I could sometimes walk home in soggy shoes?
May
23
Roaming Facebook recently, I ran across a name that called up ghosts, ghosts that had walked the dark corners of my mind off and on for more than 35 years.
My ties with this woman had been severed when I slammed the door on a relationship with her brother. She was a girl then, still in high school. I had thought of her almost as often as I’d thought of him. I felt I’d been a bad role model. What if the events that had left such a mark on my life had damaged hers? But I never felt free to try and find out; she was behind a door that needed to remain shut.
So I was apprehensive; but when I contacted her, she was gracious. She is a wise woman with a good life and I felt a burden of guilt slip away.
Her brother died ten years ago.
Her loss and grief at losing him rang through her written words. I saw photos of her sons, one of whom looks much like her brother at 20. As I studied her son’s face, still sweet with the innocence of unscarred life, another burden slipped away. I was able to re-vision her brother the way he might have been if things had been different. And in doing so, was able to re-vision that part of my own life.
The change became possible, I think, from looking back through the lens of her love instead of through the lens of my fear.
May
16
Stepped out on my balcony last night, plate in one hand, glass of iced mint tea in the other. Not yet late, but overcast, so it was neither too hot nor too sunny for comfortable dining out.
As I pulled out a chair, the bistro table lit up at the very instant I sensed a flash over my shoulder. Before I had time to name it lightning, thunder exploded like rifle shot, so loud and so close I expected to whirl around and see a limb cracking and falling from one of the giant trees beyond my third-floor balcony.
Nothing to see. But I knew a declaration of war when I heard one. I covered my willow rocker, took down my red umbrella, brought in the folding chair, retreated to my dining table. The sky remained calm, the wind never picked up. In the end, I could have stayed outside, dined to the music of birds and the hum of traffic from the nearby expressway, let the day fade out. But when nature roars, I’m not bold enough to call the bluff of a natural world that continues to prove it is cruel and capricious.
Tonight, without the all-talk-and-no-action fireworks, it has begun to rain here at the intersection of afternoon and evening. A gentle rain, no wind, even. I’m going to sit out on the balcony and wait to find out if nature — unfeeling as ever — waters my tiny garden or if I’ll be up doing it myself tomorrow morning.
May
9
Do I know the greatest women in the world, or what?
I know at least one woman whose sparkling laughter could save the world, if we could get enough people to listen. I know another woman who can make me laugh until I’m reduced to tears and in danger of wetting my pants. Yet another possesses a wild, wooley spirit that makes everyone around her smile.
I know poets who take my breath away — and bring out all the petty jealousy I wish I could deny.
I know artists who have adorned my home with sacred roots and magical birds and brazen magenta magnolia pods.
I know women who make God sit up and take notice when they pray and women with the gift of powerful silence. Women whose music makes me ache and weep and throw wide my arms to let it all in. Women who are wise and women who are like children in the joy they feel and the joy they create. Women who write and teach and garden and give and polish up the world’s beauty on a daily basis.
All of them are God’s unique way of loving me by providing everything I need for joy, wisdom and unconditional love.
I spent the first 40 years of my life holding myself back from the friendship of women. I didn’t know how to be part of their tribe. I didn’t even know I wanted to be part of the family of women. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the women I was working so hard to keep out knew every secret I had ever thought was hidden from me, and were willing to share it.
May
7
On my spiritual journey, Kiawah Island has been sacred ground.
I have come to Kiawah Island, S.C., at the worst times in my life—during the four years my mother struggled with cancer; after long bouts of overwork that had depleted my mental and physical reserves; after the unexpected death of my younger sister. And whenever I brought my battered spirit to Kiawah, it found a measure of healing in the silence and the solitude of its beaches and salt marshes.
I’m not the only one who has felt this way about Kiawah. Surely members of the Kiawah tribe of Native Americans, who hunted and fished here as long ago as 5,000 years, felt it. Centuries after that, American troops trudged onto Kiawah during the Revolutionary War to rejuvenate their minds, bodies and spirits.
The shedding of everyday life always begins before I reach the island, on the drive down Bohicket Road on Johns Island. Kiawah is an island beyond an island, which gives it an added buffer from life in the frantic lane. Bohicket Road’s narrow lanes thread beneath a canopy of ancient live oaks so broad that you and I could not join hands around one of them.
On Kiawah, I am loosely held in the arms of a universe that knows abundance is found in a thin slice of moon glinting off the water or the call of one heron to another across the marsh. Kiawah is one of the few remaining places in this part of the world where I’ve experienced long spaces of silence so deep it is possible to hear the whisper of a breeze through the marsh grass or the plop of raindrops into a lagoon.
Kiawah is so still I can pause to watch a great egret, who glances in my direction, makes a hop onto the bank I occupy, and takes a few graceful steps toward me. I whisper, “Good morning,” a greeting she acknowledges with a toss of her snowy head. Then she lifts her wings like a goddess who never doubts that the wind will do her bidding and she is gone.
What Kiawah gives me is the simplicity of a perfect day, the perfection of a simple day.
May
2
In high school, I performed a reading of Robert Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man” for a drama class project. I fell in love with the gentle spirit of the poem and a particular line about the meaning of home.
No, not the line that everyone quotes: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.”
That’s Warren speaking, the husband who isn’t thrilled with the return of an old man — Silas — who has been more nuisance and burden than help around the farm in recent years. My gut always told me that was the belief of frustration, a belief with a resentful edge to it. It might be the truth, but the grace was missing.
In the poem, the next line comes from Warren’s wife, Mary, a woman whose soft heart who always softened my voice when I performed her lines. The line is awkward — I used to think Frost could’ve done better – and that makes it true to the awkward way we often speak, especially when we’re trying to articulate the ineffable. In response to her husband, Mary says: “I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”
Home is something we somehow don’t have to deserve. It is simply there for us, ready for us to claim. A place where we will hopefully be met, not with judgment or long-suffering resignation, but with the soft spirit of unconditional love. The forgotten quote from Frost, for me, resonates with truth and grace; it’s the one I wish people quoted.
