Apr
29
The bumblebees waited, making lazy and noisy circuits of the front porch.I brought in Homestead verbena, already a sprawl of outrageous purple flowers. Miss Huff lantana, a smallish perennial with a deceptively Old South name that will put out hot orange and golden flowers, sometimes with a hint of blush, eventually filling up the landscape even in the hottest of summers, as deceptively demur Southern belles will sometimes do. For spice, fluorescent pink ice plant, which folds its gaudy flowers every night and flings them open again every morning.
And out of sheer recklessness, a nice-sized lilac bush whose fragrance will leap to compete with a nearby magnolia, which has more than a dozen fat buds lush with promise.
After they were all in the ground, I set right the leggy rose bushes that had bent double in a recent storm. To show their appreciation, a dozen buds opened this morning, watercolor red.
The verbena was barely in the ground when the bumblebees gathered ’round. By late morning, the butterflies had come – one very chic in black with iridescent blue trim, a shy one in white, others in orange and yellow to show solidarity with Miss Huff. Coming in with authority, a plump chickadee in formal-wear perched high in the five-gallon maple that has already leafed out in rich green.
Sometimes when I garden, I understand why God went on for days. Who would want to stop? Let there be this…let there be that…and watch the magic that follows.
Apr
23
My Facebook Fast ended about 14 hours early. I’ll let you decide whose idea you think it was.
I have 120 notifications on Facebook, piling up over the last 40-plus days. I didn’t know that until this morning because when I gave up socializing on FB for Lent, one of the last things I did was to turn off my notifications. Lead me not into temptation and all that.
This morning, I received a notification that I had a message from a FB friend asking me to call her at a phone number out of town. I might’ve waited until tomorrow to return her call, except for her last sentence: “I’m still in the hospital.”
I called. She has been in the hospital far from her home for three weeks. She was out of town on business when she almost died. Almost lost her leg to amputation. The procedures doctors used to save her leg and her life sound horrendous. They have no idea what is wrong and until they do, they cannot cure it. If this recurs — and there’s every reason to suppose it will — she may not survive. She is 38 years old, a beautiful woman who shines a light of love and wisdom into the world. I know this is so because I’ve only met this woman once face-to-face, but she inspired and encouraged me during the lunch we shared. We felt a bond, a spiritual bond, I believe.
My friend believes this ordeal is not about her. It’s about touching the people with whom she’s crossed paths. They are sharing their stories with her and, I’m sure, gaining courage or hope or inspiration in their conversations.
She knows her situation is critical. She knows a cure may not be coming. But we talked about the possibility for healing, even if there isn’t always a cure. Whose healing? Who knows? Maybe hers. Maybe her hospital caregivers’. Maybe healing will come in strained family relationships. Maybe it will be for the friends who pray for her.
Last night, as I contemplated the end of my FB fast, I found myself questioning whether I was as excited as I’d expected to be about re-entry. I realize now that the fast has come to a close in a way that reinforces my belief that relationships forged on Facebook need not be shallow or trivial. You are my community and with you I share crazy fun music videos and news that outrages me and insights that remind me what’s important. And we share the stories that reveal the meaning and the depth of our lives.
If you pray, please pray for my friend Torri by thanking God for the cure that may come and the healing we know is already happening.
Apr
21
Cindy on her last vacation at Folly Beach, 1999
When my sister died in 2000, there was an obituary. There was a column written by Gerry Hostetler, who wrote in The Charlotte Observer about the life and death of ordinary people who were nevertheless special in the ways they touched others or made their mark on the world. Then there was a column written by The Observer’s Doug Robarchek, who was known best for his multiple award-winning Outfront column, which defied description so I won’t even try.
My favorite was Doug’s column, which began, ”This is a story about love and timing, sweet anticipation, death and mystical symmetry.”
Doug wanted to help me somehow after Cindy died and I asked if he would help me give away the tickets Cindy and I had just purchased for a trip to Disney World. We were to leave on Saturday; Cindy died in her sleep sometime Friday night. I wanted someone to have those tickets. Someone who wouldn’t be able to go otherwise.
So Doug wrote about it and he heard from his readers about people who should have the tickets. I chose a little boy named Joseph with a rare bone marrow disease. He needed platelet transfusions on a regular basis. There were a lot of medical bills. Joseph’s mother came by on Thanksgiving morning to pick up the tickets. After the trip, she brought me an album of photos so I could see what a how much fun her little boy had in Orlando. Joseph was an adorable five-year-old with a beautiful smile.
A few years later, I was going through the morning paper when a little boy’s face caught my eye. It was Joseph. The photo was part of his obituary. He was 10 years old.
Today, Cindy would have turned 55. And Joseph would be 15 now, full of the sweet anticipation of the day in about six months when he would be old enough for a driver’s license.
Apr
20
Cindy, about age 20, with her dog, Moses
I want to tell you all about my little sister, Cindy, because April 21, 2011, would have been her 55th birthday, if she had lived 11 more years. But she didn’t. She died in her sleep in October, 2000, and nothing since has been quite as good or mattered quite as much because she isn’t here to let me know it matters to her, too.
Cindy, about 5 years old
Apr
17
I want to have a great big party on my Facebook wall when this social media fast ends at 12:01 a.m. Easter Sunday. But before I get to the celebration, I want to note: My Facebook Fast has been more than worthwhile.
In the early weeks, I wondered if I’d made this big, hairy deal about what a spiritual experience it would be to give up socializing on FB for Lent. Would it turn out to be nothing more than self-imposed isolation? Would I give up my FB friends only to wallow in Netflix Instant Watch?
My understanding is that we give up something that matters to us during Lent. Sometimes it’s something bad that we want to be rid of. Sometimes it’s something good, making way for us to contemplate things spiritual, possibly the nature of sacrifce. In a Salt Lake City newspaper story about people who were considering giving up FB for Lent, a Lutheran pastor said, “”The whole point of Lent is a time of getting closer to God. The point is to leave selfish behavior behind you, to put off the ’self.’ Facebook is almost a shrine to yourself, with pictures, status updates, seeing if people ‘like’ you. It’s all about you.”
I’ll argue that point some other time. But with one week to go in my Lenten Facebook Fast, I want to share the common thread I see running through my experience. Not surprisingly, it is hunger.
First came hunger for my community. Friends, family, people I respect and love who challenge me to think more broadly and to share more of myself. Over a few weeks, that hunger for simple interaction ultimately gave way to a focus on the deeper hunger for intimacy, a core hunger that goes back to childhood for me. When I reached that level of hunger, I had what may be a commonplace response: I started throwing food at the hunger. Result: two weeks ago my weight hit an all-time high.
As we all know, there’ll never be enough ice cream and cookies and pie — no, not even pie — to fill emotional hunger. So after the scale spiked and I ran through every episode of Monk and Mad Men, the hunger to connect intensified. I began to journal more. I wrote new poetry. I blogged. The pace of the blogging picked up. One night I wrote three new blog posts, one right after another.
Now, in the final days, I find myself going deeper into stillness, where there is no hunger and sometimes, in especially soft moments, there is no self. There is only the stillness, which is so full. Too full for words.
Apr
10
Disclaimer: I do not advocate killing off alpha males. And I’m not necessarily saying that aggressive, hostile men are baboons.
Once upon a time a tribe of 62 baboons were living a very typical baboon life in 
Kenya. Like most baboon communities, the Forest Troop was dominated by a small number of large, nasty-spirited and bullying male baboons. These dominant males made the women and the smaller, less aggressive males miserable by abusing and mistreating them. And as sometimes happens, the baboons who were being abused by the biggest and meanest were taking out their frustration on the younger and smaller members of the community, who were then bullying those even younger and smaller than they were.
We know all this because the Forest Troop was visited and studied every summer by Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford.
Then, about 20 years ago, nature proved that the survival of the fittest may not always look the way we think it looks.
Because they were big and strong and aggressive, the dominant males in the Forest Troop fought off the competition for what seemed to be a major coup: a nice, big juicy pile of meat. Which happened to be tainted with bovine tuberculosis. Oops. All the alpha males in the Forest Troop died.
One might think that the others in the community who had been oppressed for so long would now step up and take over all the chest-thumping behavior. Not so. For 20 years now, the community has maintained a peaceful and nurturing atmosphere, even to the extent of communicating to incoming adolescent males from other, more typical baboon communities that mean, nasty behavior will not be tolerated in the Forest Troop.
I first heard this story on a National Geographic documentary about stress. This small part of the bigger story fascinated me and I Googled around until I found a New York Times story that referenced the same research. Although the study in question was about stress, I also see a wonderful object lesson about the potential for all the mean-and-nasty among us to make themselves extinct with the very attitudes and behaviors that they believe make them kings of the hill.
I’m not holding my breath, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if the human race could prove itself to be wiser than a tribe of baboons by learning the lesson the primates had to learn the hard way?
Apr
8
One of the important tasks of 1978
Friends ask me sometimes if I’m “caught up.”
The question leaves me groping for the right words. People who ask that question must speak a language — live a life — so foreign to me that I can’t come up with an answer. The last time I was “caught up” was probably 1978. That’s not a random date chosen for the purpose of hyperbole, either. I spent 1978 on the road in a 1970 Ford Econoline van, heading nowhere in particular, achieving nothing in particular. Maybe I’ve been over-compensating ever since.
Recently a friend passed on a book by Robert Holden, Happiness Now, which included a list of key points to help readers identify a belief that happiness is earned by how hard we work. Here are a few that apply to me:
- Life is a never-ending “to do” list.
- Exhaustion feels like a weakness and a failure.
- Every moment is full and there’s always more I could be doing.
- “Hurry sickness” is chronic — there’s never enough time to do everything.
- At the end of a work day, it isn’t about living the rest of life; it’s about recovering from work.
- Sleep in on weekends? Forget about it.
- Even on sick days, a little work might be necessary.
- Really great friends, rarely get together.
Okay, so I’m aware. Maybe I’ve even made progress in changing (gosh, I hope so; I think it’s been on one of my to-do lists, or maybe it was one of my annual goals). I know my chronic case of ”hurry sickness” is in remission most of the time, although that is frustrating in itself because it increases my sense that I’ll never have enough time to get it all done. But I also realize that this mindset has been with me so long that being rid of it once and for all may never happen.
So I haven’t deleted my to-do list. What I have experienced, during my Facebook Fast, is an increasing stillness around me. Less noise. Less activity. Less indecision, which I take as a sign of less mind-clutter.
I still can’t say that I’m caught up. But maybe I’m catching my breath.
Apr
5
I almost missed one of my Top 20 Moments to the impulse to capture it so I’d never forget it.
Four and a half years ago, I went to the Outer Banks. I arrived late in the afternoon and decided to hit the beach for a long walk. I headed south, saw a wash of purple in the west that signaled incoming rain. Still, I walked for a half hour or so before heading back. About halfway back, I saw the beginnings of a rainbow. A good harbinger for my trip, I thought.
This rainbow seemed particularly vivid to me, and it continued to grow…or reveal itself…until it spread from one horizon to the next.
Absorbed in the miracle stretched above me, I began to see what was surely a trick of my imagination: a second faint shadow of color arcing just above the first rainbow. As I walked, the second rainbow grew more vivid and more visible in the late-afternoon sky. I sat down in the sand to watch it as it also stretched from horizon to horizon.
Soon, everyone on the beach became aware of what was happening overhead. The sky had begun to spit rain, but nobody left the beach. Everyone was too busy pulling out cameras and cell phones to capture what felt like a once-in-a-lifetime photo op. For a moment or two, I questioned the wisdom of just sitting and watching when I could be running back to my condo for a camera.
But it came to me that in their frenzy to snap photos, some of the people on the beach that day were missing the moment itself. And no photo could ever recapture that scene, visually or emotionally or spiritually.
During this month away from Facebook, I’m realizing how often my first thought when I have a memorable experience is how cool I can make it sound for my FB friends. I am, in effect, taking myself out of a moment that can never be captured and projecting myself into a moment when I’ll try to do just that in words that will no doubt be entirely inadequate.
I wonder: If the skies opened and Christ stepped into view, how many of us would lose ourselves in Tweeting it or updating our status or grabbing an image on our I-Phones, never realizing what we had just given away by not being present for that precious moment?
Apr
2
Random notions at milemarker 25 on the 46-day Lenten Facebook Fast:
Aftermath in Japan: Cannot help but wonder if the earth is trying to destroy us before we can destroy her.
Poetic license: Without Facebook as an outlet for the ideas that pop into my head, I’m writing more poetry and have recognized a recurring theme around what grows in Southern soil. Having been molded from this red clay and taken root here for more than 58 years, I am intrigued to discover how often the theme appears as a reflection both on what is best and what is worst about the South. A few lines from a recent poem:
The red clay of this green land/hardens into brick, a mean thing/to come up against. Yet red clay unfired/remains so brittle it crumbles/in a heavy hand.
And yet: I did not win the Amy Lowell Travelling Poet Scholarship, so my year of living in Paris and writing poetry will not begin this September. And yet…having decided that doing so is an entirely reasonable dream, I am now prepared to make some version of it happen another way. Especially as I realize this is not the first time I’ve entertained such a dream. When I was 13, I decided I would leave for Paris when I graduated from high school. I made the mistake of telling my family. Their reaction convinced me I had hatched a ridiculous and impossible plan. I was wrong.
Losing Bobby: Watching a fictionalized account of the night Bobby Kennedy died, I was struck all over again by what we — the nation and my generation — lost that night. Our innocence was long gone, assassinated with his brother in 1963. But when Bobby died fast on the heels of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., a few months earlier, my belief that we could be redeemed seemed to go with him. Many in my generation, at least, abandoned ourselves to drugs and sex and world-weariness.
Season of Green Cars: Started on Day 15. Also known as the Month of Red Eyes.
Mom Jeans: I heard about mom jeans for the first time on Day 21. I was not horrified to discover that’s what I wear. I wore hip huggers in the 1970s. They hugged my hips. Today, the same jeans lead to muffin top. I’ll stick with mom jeans, thank you very much.
Winds of Grace: Reminded of a quote from the Hindu saint Ramakrishna, who said that the winds of grace are blowing all the time — we just have to raise our sails.
Today is April 2. The wind is blowing mightily outside my windows. I think I’ll go raise my sails.
