Jun

18

By Peg

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Categories: Love, Spiritual heroes

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Father’s Week #5: Falling in Love

My favorite father and daughter

Who can say why we fall in love?

A shrink who once helped me become a little less crazy said the attraction that we think of as love starts in a place he called our “lizard brain,” the seat of our most primitive and deeply rooted instincts and responses to life.

The last time I fell in love, here’s what my lizard brain saw and responded to: a devoted father.

Strong, admirable father figures had been in short supply in my life. I didn’t even know it mattered, didn’t know I cared. I see now that the lack stunted my life, starved me emotionally and drove behaviors that ultimately left me even more empty and even more emotionally hungry. There have been times in my life when I even railed against the idea of a Creator who seemed like little more than an absentee father to a hurting and broken world.

Then a father and his daughter came into my life. They shared their life with me and, in doing so, gave me the kind of family that had been my lifelong craving. In doing so, they made me a better person than I ever expected to be.

We are now living out our own quirky version of happily-ever-after that has even transcended our divorce eight years ago. But no matter what else has happened in our lives, he has always, always, been the kind of father I would have ordered for myself if we could build our lives from an a la carte menu. He always loved his daughter unconditionally, even when he could have been excused for wringing her neck. When she was little, he knew how to gently but firmly use the Daddy Voice to let her know beyond a doubt when she was approaching the limits of acceptable behavior. He treated her with respect in all ways, at all times. He understood that she was his to protect and to teach, but not his to control or live through. Time and time again, he tossed out everything he believed about himself in order to become a better man, a man worthy of her respect and love.

When Elisabeth was two years old, the two of them were in the car one day and he fired up one of the cigarettes he then smoked at the rate of three packs a day. She looked at him and, with all the authority a two-year-old can wield, said, “Daddy, throw that out.” He did. He quit cold turkey.

That was about the time they came into my life.

Who can say why we fall in love, except perhaps in retrospect.

Jun

17

By Peg

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Categories: Love, Re-Vision Your Life, Spiritual heroes

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Father’s Week #4: The Last Man I Worshipped

Jim and Peg, about 1970

Jimmy is my brother. My half-brother, really. Eight years older than I am, my father’s son from his first marriage. I adored him. He is the first male I trusted and the last one I worshipped.

He taught me to make a monkey face for family photos. He told me slightly twisted fairy tales at bedtime. And I can say with confidence that Jimmy would have done anything for me – I once had the photograph to prove it: a black-and-white snapshot of 14-year-old Jimmy sitting on a coin-operated rocking horse outside a tourist stop in the Smoky Mountains. The humiliation is clear on his face. He endured it only because six-year-old Peggy begged him to do it. In the photo I’m standing on tip-toe beside him, a goofy grin on my face.

My brother didn’t live with us. When we took him back to his mother’s house on Sunday evenings, I would stare through the back window of our ‘58 Ford Fairlane until the house where he lived disappeared, stifling sobs.

Jimmy became Jim. He joined the Alabama National Guard. He became a husband and father. Somewhere along the line he became a man of faith, a man who refused to be the kind of father our father had been.  Today, Jim is also a stepfather and a grandfather and, not the least, an honorable, kind and loving husband. 

My brother is still my hero, the finest man I know. He turns 67 in September and one day, I suppose, he will be gone for good. When that happens, even though I’ll know he is safely home at his Father’s house, I will be as inconsolable as that little girl watching him disappear through the rear window of the car.

Jun

16

By Peg

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Father’s Week #3: Learning to Love Uncle John

My Aunt Arlene buried two husbands. In her mid-40s, she found number three.

Let me be honest: From the beginning, none of us liked John.

John and Arlene

John might have been one of the most irritating men on God’s green earth — family members who were far more gracious than I am would tell you the same thing. John was ingratiating in a way that grates. He was self-righteous. He used heavy doses of false humility to get the continuous ego strokes he needed. He was unemployed and closing in on 60 and some of us had a strong suspicion that the idea of a financially comfortable widow appealed to him.

But there was Arlene, determined to marry him anyway and God knows she’d seen her share of sorrow and if John made her happy, well, we cared more about her happiness than John’s irritating ways.

So they married and we all set about learning how to love Uncle John.

Although Arlene was more than a decade younger than Uncle John, she was the one who lived in seriously failing health for more than a decade. A diabetic, she lost one leg, then another. She had a heart attack. She had breast cancer. She became an invalid and she needed taking care of and John was the most patient and faithful caregiver I’ve ever been privileged to witness. His most consistent prayer was that God would let him live long enough and have the strength to take care of Arlene until she died.

That’s exactly what happened.

John was closing in on 90, and had his own heart condition, when a stroke finally took Arlene 30-plus years after they married. In all that time, Uncle John had never wavered in his loyalty and devotion to Arlene. He never failed her and he stretched himself to his physical and emotional limits to make her life comfortable long past the point at which a lesser man might have given up and said, “I’m too old for this.”

Arlene was my second mother, so I guess that made John my second father. And in spite of all the traits I judged him for in the beginning, Uncle John proved that a man doesn’t have to be perfect to have the emotional backbone to be a strong, reliable protector.

Jun

14

By Peg

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Categories: Love, Spiritual heroes

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Father’s Week #2: Clyde’s Gentle Nudge

Clyde

I was over 40 when I met Clyde; he was pushing 80. He tried hard to father me in later years when I was still pushing father figures away.

Over the years, Clyde taught me the secrets of growing roses, including how to mix the perfect soil for growing them and how to prune them and when the fragrance is strongest. When my sister died, he helped plant a rose garden in her honor at the bank where she had worked. He also taught me the most important secret of all: The more you give them away, the more abundantly they grow.

Clyde also gave me bushels of homegrown tomatoes every summer and a cutting rooted from a sweet shrub bush that had been in his family for more than a hundred years. He told me his World War II stories. He modeled consistency and love in action and the humility of contentment with being a work in progress.

And when I was still a hostile spiritual novice,  declaring in defeat one Sunday morning that I didn’t know a thing about God, Clyde is the one who looked across the room at me and said, ”Now you’re getting somewhere.”

That was a life-changing moment for me, a moment when God used a kind old man to nudge me gently in the direction of grace and truth.

Clyde has been gone a couple of years now. But, like all good fathers, his legacy lives on in generations of people who continue to walk his walk of patience and compassion and geniality and unconditional love. I hope sometimes I’m one of them.

Jun

12

By Peg

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Categories: Love, Re-Vision Your Life

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Father’s Week #1: Paying My Respects

I see them clearly, sitting on porches in rockers or straight-back chairs, straw hats pushed back from their foreheads in the summer, making small talk, sometimes ambling out to somebody’s car to fill half-empty co-cola bottles with whiskey hidden under the front seat. They were largely silent and ineffectual and they were the father figures in my young life.

While they sat and rocked and sipped, mothers, aunts, grandmothers and great-grandmother bustled around in hot kitchens, getting food on the table and talking non-stop about family problems and family news and family decisions. The women were lively. They laughed, they knew what was right and they knew what mattered — each other, us kids, people long dead, good food, home. The women in my life I loved and respected.

The father figures I loved, for the most part. But I didn’t respect them. They were irrelevant to the emotional fabric of our lives. Beside the women who ran the world as I knew it, they seemed colorless and weak. So it is little wonder that I’ve been unable to sustain a healthy relationship with men. I learned early to discount men as relationship equals.

In this week leading up to Father’s Day, I’ll try to re-vision the role of men in my life by looking at the ones who broke through my resistance and became the father figures I’ve needed. Whatever my childhood perspective on the men who influenced me early in life, I was too young to understand the whole story of my family. So this week, I’m going to celebrate Father’s Week by paying my respects to the men in my life.

Jun

6

By Peg

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Still on the team, sitting out the game

I don’t date. I don’t want to date. Apparently that’s odd. A few weeks ago a friend speculated on the reason. ”I thought maybe you switched teams.”

I think I laughed. It’s not easy to articulate my choice not to pursue — or at least hope for – a relationship. Not easy mostly because there are layers of reasons. We could peel back one only to find another, then another, then another.

Let’s start with a couple of facts. I find men attractive (but I’m not naming names). I like men and find conversation with them stimulating.

So what’s the deal with the ban on relationships?

Do the math. I’m 58 years old. I’ve been single for seven years. Before that, I spent 37 continuous years in one relationship or another. Think about it. I was in relationships from the age of 14 through 51. Enough, already. 

Investing in me. I relish time to myself, time to grow into just me. I treasure my freedom, after all those years of being part of a couple. Investing in being a happy, healthy couple requires energy and time and dedication. I don’t regret the effort and I consider some of those relationships successful. I’m just ready to spend that effort differently, at long last. I want a relationship with myself before I die.

God is calling. I want a stronger relationship with God before I die. In some faith traditions, people are called to solitude, to contemplation, even to celibacy. I want as much of all three as is reasonable at this life stage. I may not always want those things to this degree, but today I do. 

If nothing changes, nothing changes. Dysfunctional patterns are repeated in every key relationship I’ve ever been in. I’ve received help from people wiser and smarter and better trained than I am. I’ve come to understand relationship dynamics well enough to know that I’ll keep attracting the same dysfunctions in different packages. When I ventured out, briefly, into the world of over-50 dating, I realized that I was doing no better than I’d ever done — except that I was getting smart enough to walk away without spending years trying to heal something that wasn’t headed for healing. Today, I choose to work out my issues in relationships that aren’t sexual. It’s just as challenging but a lot less painful — not only for me, but for everyone. 

Collateral damage. The available, age-appropriate men I run into tend to want commitment. I’ve learned that most don’t believe me when I tell them up front that I do not. In my wayward youth I toyed with men’s affections. Not today. 

I get to keep my clothes on. Trust me. It’s better this way.

Or maybe the answer is simpler than I’m willing to admit. Maybe I’m saving myself for John Cusack.

(For more about age-appropriate men, see my poem “I’m saving myself for John Cusack” on the page Sex, Lies and Simple Truths on this blog.)

(Illustration courtesy of AkaraKingdoms)

May

29

By Peg

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The Uncounted

Oliver Perrin Waldrop, Jr., was a principal and teacher in a tiny rural Alabama school — I seem to remember that it was a one-room schoolhouse, but my memory may be faulty on that detail. Then he went to serve his country in World War II.

After he came home to his wife and family, Uncle Junior sometimes wore a hook on his left arm; sometimes he didn’t wear the hook and I could see the stump just below his elbow. His arm was the least of what he lost fighting in World War II.

Junior never went back to teaching. I’m not sure he ever went back to work. After the war, he drank too much. In a family of men who were bad to drink, he was the worst. Then he started going away. Sometimes he went to the state mental hospital. Sometimes nobody knew exactly where he went. Eventually, he stopped coming home at all. He lived on the street in cities all over the Southeast.

Then one day, more than 20 years after World War II ended, the news — the news that every soldier’s family fears — came. Junior was dead. He drank himself to death, or died from exposure. It was never clear because, really, what was the difference, the police said.

Today, I understand more than I understood when I was a little girl. I understand that Uncle Junior was not just a no-account drunk. I understand that he made a sacrifice for this country that changed the direction of his life. Today I understand that Uncle Junior was a casualty of war, one of the uncounted who come home and die by inches.

Today, I want to thank Oliver P. Waldrop, Jr., and all the others who give their lives for us, sometimes long after we think they’re home with us, and safe.

May

27

By Peg

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On the Day She Would Have Turned 80

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

By Peg

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Categories: The Spiritual Life

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What remains behind the veil

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

By Peg

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Categories: The Spiritual Life

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Heaven Knows, Mr. Hawking

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

By Peg

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Diggin’ It with Mike Myers

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

By Peg

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Categories: Re-Vision Your Life, The Spiritual Life

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Being wholly holy

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

By Peg

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poemcrazy, Lake Havasu & the Tower of Babel

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

By Peg

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Restoring Mother

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

By Peg

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Cheering in the Streets

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

By Peg

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Categories: Uncategorized

Creating Misery

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.

Apr

29

By Peg

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And on the fifth day of vacation…

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

By Peg

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Categories: Love, Social Media Fast, The Spiritual Life, Uncategorized

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Fasting, Healing and Praying

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

By Peg

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Categories: Love

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Love, timing and sweet anticipation

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

By Peg

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Categories: Love, Spiritual heroes, Uncategorized

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Happy Birthday, Cindy

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

By Peg

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Categories: Social Media Fast, The Spiritual Life

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40 Days Down, 6 to Go

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

By Peg

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Categories: Social Media Fast, Uncategorized

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Alpha behavior and extinction

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

By Peg

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Categories: Re-Vision Your Life, Social Media Fast

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Catching My Breath

Peg has her face painted

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

By Peg

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Categories: Social Media Fast

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Life as a Social Media Op

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

By Peg

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Categories: Social Media Fast

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Mom Jeans and Other Random Notions

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.