May
29
May
27
Mother and Jim, my stepfather
Two photos of my mother have not turned up since my last move. I wish I could show them to you.
In one, she is 13 years old. Her legs are bare, she wears run-down loafers, a simple print house dress that was clearly handed down from someone who was not 5′6″ tall or weighed 100 pounds, as she does. But her dark hair is shiny and pincurl fluffy and her smile is radiant. Her name is Mary Katheryn but people call her Kit, sometimes Kitten. She looks 19. If I had to cast her part in a movie made at that moment in time, a very young Elizabeth Taylor would be perfect.
In the other photo, she is 20 years old. She stands on an old-fashioned ferry, the river behind her. She wears a beautiful print dress with a wide sailor collar and a belt at her slim waist — a perfect fit for someone who is 5′6″ and 105 pounds. Her dark hair is shiny and pincurl fluffy and her smile is radiant. Liz Taylor still has the part. It is her wedding day and her new husband calls her Kathy. They are taking the Warrior River Ferry from rural Walker County to Birmingham, the big city.
I don’t know if mother was ever that radiant again. The man who took the photo of his young bride on the Warrior River Ferry would not make life easy for any of us. A little over a year later, I was born and four years after that, my sister was born. My sister would have a physical disability, for which my mother blamed herself until the day she died. Still, the people who remember her remember all the ways she made their lives better, with her kindness and her smile and her big heart and her cornbread. She would remarry a man who adored her. She would be a good stepmother and a loyal friend. Little pieces of her life sit on shelves and countertops throughout my house, and rest inside people throughout the South who knew her and loved her.
(You’ll find a poem about the wedding day photo on the page Squeezing Life Out of Dust.)
May
24
One of my spiritual sisters who was not yet a spiritual sister at the time asked me, early in our relationship, how I would explain the Trinity — the whole Father, Son and Holy Spirit thing.
She is an ordained minister, so I knew I was in way over my head. Determined not to choke on my inability to express the incomprehensible, I spent about seven minutes talking myself into a tangled mess before throwing up my hands and saying, “I have no idea what I just said but I’m pretty sure it didn’t make any sense.”
We still laugh about it.
Yesterday, I told another new spiritual friend that I’d always found it easier to wrap my head around the Holy Spirit than the Creator God and his incarnate Son. Frankly, a lot of the stuff surrounding the Father and the Son leaves me with questions that have never been answered in a way that works for my limited human understanding. It seems to me, at times, that people — me included — are too determined to make human sense out of spiritual truth.
But the Holy Spirit, now that makes sense to me in a way that requires no reasoning or logic.
The Holy Spirit is the part that whispers into my heart to let me know when I’m in the presence of something holy that I might not otherwise recognize. The Holy Spirit is the part that settles over me like a soft blanket when I finally let go of my ideas about how things ought to be. The Holy Spirit is an unfolding wisdom so deep that the best we can do is drag it down a notch or two and call it synchronicity or serendipity. The Holy Spirit is the spark of something divine that I sometimes recognize in others, more rarely recognize in myself and am sometimes blessed to recognize in myself and others all at the same time, which lifts me into something I call joy — and joy is as impossible to describe to those who have never felt it as the Holy Spirit is to those who have never given themselves over to experience it.
Maybe the best thing about the Holy Spirit, for me, is that I can’t explain it, I can only attempt to explain how it feels. We’ve allowed it to remain a mystery, instead of draping it in theology or language or stories that will always fall short. Maybe that’s why it makes sense to me: it’s the part of God that we’ve left alone, that we are powerless to tame or label or contain. All we can do is welcome it.
May
17
Stephen Hawking is a heckuva lot smarter than I am. He’s certainly more educated than I am. And it’s entirely likely that he’s a lot wiser than I am, too.
He can be all that and he still knows no more about heaven than I do.
Hawking is the brilliant physicist who has written about his belief that the creation of life is no more than an accident. Recently, he made a few headlines by saying, unequivocally, that there is no heaven. He said, “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
I have two thoughts about what Hawking says.
First, how sad that he thinks of himself as nothing more than a brain. Having been gifted with so much intelligence, I can see how he could find it very appealing to believe that the brain is the surpassing part of our being, the part that defines us. No matter how smart he is, I believe he’s wrong about that.
My second thought is that the wiser one grows, the less one is certain of. My beliefs have been proven wrong too often, my insights challenged too often, my perspective shifted too often, to hold any of my ideas too dear. Facts fall out of fashion just as beliefs do. So I strive to hold my mind open to what may be revealed to me next.
I’m surprised a man as brilliant as Stephen Hawking does not do the same.
(Illustration courtesy of Salvatore Vuono)
May
15
Mike Myers
Caroline Love Myers
Maybe I was born with dirt under my fingernails. Maybe it’s embedded in my DNA. I’m southern, so neither is outside the realm of possibility.
For whatever reason, dirt is my medium. I write poetry about dirt. I consider pulling weeds after a rainy spell to be a zen experience. I see a patch of bare ground and know what wants to grow there. When I come home from a walk, I empty my pockets of ground things — leaves and acorns and cones and stones so lovely they evoke a spiritual response in me.
So a few weeks ago, when I heard about the opportunity to work in a community garden that will be shared with Friendship Trays, the Salvation Army and a bi-lingual pre-school, the earth-mother hippy-chick in me couldn’t wait to start.
I haven’t had my first opportunity to dig yet. But today I learned that the dirt for the garden — 14 tons of it? could that be right? that’s enough to bury the BofA tower, isn’t it? — came from a plot of ground that’s been excavated to build a parking lot. That plot of ground, before it was destined to be paved over, had been the location of the family home of Caroline Love Myers, the woman who was instrumental in the early success of Charlotte’s Crisis Assistance Ministry. The house was moved years ago, then renovated into a sparkling jewel by Caroline’s son, Charles.
Mike in front of the Love family home on Providence Road
Before it was moved, the house was one of the great loves of Mike Myers. Mike’s first love, of course, was Caroline, his remarkable wife. But the house…oh, how he loved that house.
I know this because Mike was my boss at Central Piedmont Community College for five years. Mike took child-like delight in a great many things; one of them was showing people around the house where Caroline had grown up, the house where he and Caroline raised their four children. He loved talking about the rugs, the paintings, the kitchen, the side porch, the history of the house. He loved introducing visitors to Extra Dog and telling the story of how the mutt came into his life. He loved going upstairs and telling tales of the days when Charles and Mike Jr. and Richard and Susie were small. He loved entertaining in that house. Mike Myers loved life more than any person I ever knew and, for him, life was centered around his years in that stately old house.
Mike is gone now. People still miss him acutely, as I do, because there was never anybody else quite like Mike.
So to dig in the soil that was the ground of Mike’s life with his family will raise in my ears the echo of Mike laughing, calling me Pegarino, hatching a harebrained scheme that only he could turn into reality. He would love to know, as I do, that I’m kneeling in his dirt this summer, getting his earth under my fingernails. Mostly, he would love knowing that his dirt is being used for something more than the ground floor for a slab of concrete — that it will be used to feed people.
May
10
On a scale of one to ten, how holy are you?
Maybe the answer to that question is pretty much the same as my stepdaughter’s answer to the question, “How cool are you?” If you think you are, she’ll tell you, then you’re not.
Pastor John Cleghorn at Caldwell Memorial Presbyterian Church spoke recently on what it is to be holy. While that’s pretty much unattainable for me, I found it a refreshing switch from all the talk about being sinners. It’s one thing to admit I’ve sinned, another thing entirely to lug around the label ”sinner” and use it to define myself. What I feed will grow; regularly reminding myself that I’m a sinner is, I believe, asking myself for more of the same.
But what exactly does it mean to think about being holy?
It is “the everyday business of character transformation.” It is aiming to live a functional life in this dysfunctional world. Being holy is to live the human virtues of Christ as nearly as possible; it means to look into our hearts, because that is the wellspring from which our actions and our relationships flow. You may want to read Pastor John’s message yourself because I probably have this all wrong; I often hear what I need or want to hear instead of what was actually said. But here’s what stuck in my heart: To live a holy life is to strive to be wholly what God made us to be.
Which, in the end, may be harder than giving up sin.
No matter how one defines holiness, I believe I’ll be a lot better off if I try living up to being holy instead of living down to being a sinner.
May
9
Yesterday, I heard a discussion about the Genesis 11 story of the Tower of Babel. In that story, God realizes that the people of the world are building a tower to reach the heavens. God, probably liking the peace and quiet, grew concerned. In The Message translation, God said, “One people, one language; why, this is only a first step. No telling what they’ll come up with next–they’ll stop at nothing!”
Then, Genesis tells us, God gave the people of the earth many different languages and scattered them all over the planet.
That has always seemed to me an example of a bad decision on God’s part. Imagine if, instead of creating division between us and reinforcing the idea that we are not alike and shouldn’t even occupy the same corner of the planet, we all spoke a common language and felt we were, indeed, “one people.” Someone yesterday said maybe this story from Genesis 11 is an indication that God likes diversity, which is an idea that appeals to me. I just wish, sometimes, that God would say things straight out.
Then comes the synchronicity. I’m reading a really fun book, poemcrazy, by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge. Chapter 45, which I reached during lunch today, talks about the poetic power of language. She sites words such as balbriggan, willliwaw, palimpsest. Then she writes that the word havasu (as in Lake Havasu, I presume) means “sky-water” in both Navajo and Turkish.
Wow. What are the chances of that? We all know how similar certain words are in certain languages, especially when the people who speak those languages are close geographically. But Navajo and Turkish! That’s quite a geographic range.
I don’t know what this means or how it came about. I make note of it only because I find it fascinating.
And maybe because it says to me that perhaps we don’t really speak different languages after all. We only think we do. And if we listen or look closely enough, we’ll find the places where God made us one people…and left us that way.
May
7
Katheryn Watson, 1991
Cancer stole my mother at the age of 61. Cancer also stole our relationship.
Mother was sick four years. For the four or five years before that, she had nursed her husband, who died from his cancer, as well. Mother never recovered her spirit. Cancer left our family broken. By the time my mother died, here is what I believed about her: She never said she loved me. She never hugged me. She expected too much of me. She didn’t protect me when I was most vulnerable.
I carried that version of my mother with me for the next 12 years.
Those were 12 hard years. God was knocking loud and hard on my door. My sister died. I turned my stepdaughter against me. My marriage ended.
When I was preparing to move, I pitched out everything that chronicled my life to that point. Years worth of journals. Letters from my sister, my grandmother, my father. Newspaper and magazine stories written by me and about me. Bitter and hopeless, I threw everything away to punish myself. In the process, I read it all, one last time. As I read my mother’s letters, even in that place of deep despair, my mother was restored to me.
There in her handwriting was everything I had ever needed from her, everything she had given with such abundance, everything that four years of her cancer had gnawed out of my heart. She never wrote a single letter to me without telling me how much she loved me, without telling me what a wonderful daughter I was, without telling me how proud of me she was. And I had forgotten all of it.
At that point even my mother’s love was not enough to heal me; the healing would come later. But her letters were enough to wipe out the lies I had told myself. She spoke love to me from the place where she waits for me and forgives me and continues to feed me with her belief in me.
On the eve of Mother’s Day, here is what I am remembering:
- the way, when I was a little girl, she and I could pick up in the middle of a conversation that we had abandoned weeks before, knowing, just knowing;
- the way she insisted on going to the hospital on the day of my 40th birthday, knowing it was the last birthday of mine she would ever see, because she didn’t want her cancer clouding the party my friends had planned;
- the way she told me she was tired of being the strong one, and asked me to be the strong one the rest of the way;
- the way I failed her, and she never said a word.
May
2
Osama bin Laden scripted his own violent death. That seems clear to me.
Our soldiers courageously did what they were charged with doing. That much is also clear to me.
But the spiritual leader I try to follow would not take to the streets, cheering for the death of any human being, even an enemy.
And yet, there we were, waving our flags and rejoicing in a way that I cannot reconcile with the teachings or the actions of my spiritual leader.
I remember 9-11. I remember where I was and what I was doing and the horror of realizing that we were watching intentional acts of hatred. I also remember being just contrarian enough to think: What if we refused to hate the terrorists? What if, instead of offering hatred and revenge, we offered prayers? What if we pray as mightily as we are prepared to fight? What if we believed in the power of prayer more than we believe in the power of force and vengeance?
Of course, I acknowledge that many of us might’ve ended up dying for that belief. It’s happened before.
Today, with Osama bin Laden dead, I can live with the fact that Iam not sorry he is dead. I accept the fact that, as a nation, we feel strongly about the need to seek justice. But justice does not equal hate. And patriotic pride is not the same as gloating.
I know without a doubt that I don’t have the courage to live the way I’m called to live in the face of all the world’s hatred and brutality. I feel uncomfortable saying what I’m saying here because I know that people I love and admire may disagree strongly. But this one thing I believe with all confidence: The spiritual leader I try to follow would not take to the streets, cheering for the death of any human being. That much I can do, also.
May
2
Over the last year, I’ve been reading biographies of writers, people like D.H. Lawrence and e.e. cummings and others. I am struck by their misery, and how well they spread that misery around.
Writers, it appears, are an unhappy breed. We are depressed, we are alcoholic, we are in spiritual torment, we are angry, we are sexually conflicted, we are self-absorbed. We are forever aliens in a world we experience intensely. Even our writing rarely makes us content and often keeps us poor.
Not long ago, I read a review of a new memoir by the daughter of novelist William Styron (Sophie’s Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner). In Reading My Father, Alexandra Styron apparently examines life growing up with her angry, alcoholic and depressed father. The question at the heart of her reflections, according to reviewer Keith Staskiewicz: Is his art enough of an excuse?
Maybe this is the right question. But, having lived in the skin of a writer for more than 50 years, the true point, I believe, is this: The writer’s art is not the excuse for bad behavior. The writer’s art is the result of the bad behavior, or, more to the point, the misery that is behind the bad behavior.
A writer writes to make sense of acutely felt pain — not just the writer’s, but the world’s. Writers and other artists — musicians, painters, photographers — give expression to the emotions and experiences that make up our humanity. But first they must feel it, and feel it acutely.
Talent is not the writer’s excuse for creating misery. Misery — felt and inflicted — is their excuse for writing. Writers turn misery into a gift. Without them, too many of us might think we were alone in our misery.
