Feb
19
By Peg
Categories: Occupy Love, Re-Vision Your Life, Uncategorized
Tags: Apology, Child of the 60s, Civil disobedience, Family, Southern Life
Feb
19
Her name was Rosie. She came several days a week to clean house and take care of my sister and me. She told me if I ate sugar right out of the sugar bowl that worms would grow in my tummy, which I did not believe but still fretted over most of my childhood. She liked my sister better than she liked me, but then, who wouldn’t?
She was, in the language of the day, “the colored help.”
My family was not wealthy. We were barely middle class, living in one of those plain boxes with a chain-link fence on a block of identical plain boxes that went up all over the country in the post-World War II boom. If we were barely middle class, I can only imagine where Rosie fit in the socio-economic hierarchy of the middle 1950s.
A half-dozen years later, Rosie no longer came. Instead, once a week we got in the station wagon about 6 p.m. and took my father’s clean work shirts, rolled into damp, tight balls, to a woman who did the ironing for my mother. She lived in a dingy house at the top of a flight of rickety stairs in a neighborhood we called, using the language of the day, “colored town.” That was polite language, a step up from the language my father used.
Around that time across the South, all hell broke loose. Police used fire hoses to beat back people on the streets of my hometown, people who wanted something called “civil rights.” Little girls died in a church bombing. My friends and I couldn’t ride the bus into downtown for a movie and a fountain soda at the five-and-dime on a summer afternoon any more because of something called “sit-ins.” My father sneered over other language, like “freedom riders” and “outside agitators.”
I was a witness, if a young and confused witness. I know what happened and I was part of it, if reading the news and moving from confusion to outrage can count as some small part of the change that was at long last happening. I tell it now because the blood of racists runs in my veins and because I know what turmoil had to take place to get us to this still imperfect place where we are today.
This afternoon, I read a column by civil rights activist Myrlie Evers-Williams in which she said, “When we speak, if only in a whisper, momentous things can happen.” I would add that when we don’t speak, as loudly and as clearly as we dare, momentous things can be lost.
Maybe it isn’t enough for people to tell the stories of courage and righteousness. Maybe those of us who remember the small minds of injustice and cowardice and hate need to speak, too.
This is part of the legacy I bear: The blood of racists runs in my veins.
Illustration by DigitalArt via www.freedigitalphotos.net
Jan
16
Who is our prophet today?
Who is leading us out of this wilderness in which we find ourselves today? Who is pointing the way to a promised land that seems at least as far away today as it was 40 years ago?
When I was growing into young adulthood in the 1960s, the world was a frightening and dangerous place. A place of war and violence in the streets and hatred based on fear of the unknown and the different. In other words, it was a lot like today. The biggest difference may have been that we had prophets who were pointing the way out of the wilderness.
We had Bob Dylan, who sang to us about a different way to live in that dangerous world. We had Bobby Kennedy, who vowed to help us build a different kind of world.
And, of course, we had Martin Luther King, Jr., who reminded us that God had a different plan from the plan we were living out.
On this day of celebrating the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., I scroll down my Facebook news feed, read the messages King left us and I teeter between hope and despair. Hope because he spoke with the authority and the authenticity of one who had inded been to the mountaintop, had seen the promised land. And if it was true then, if there was a promised land then, surely there must still be one today.
And despair, because in these 40-plus years since his death, so much of the progress we had made seems to be eroding. It is eroding at least in part, I believe, because the voices that dominate today’s conversation are the voices of self-interest and antagonism and sarcasm.
Where are the voices of hope and reconciliation? Where are the voices that lift us out of our small lives and onto the mountaintop? Who is urging us to act with courage, to live from that place inside us where we are kinder and braver and more compassionate than our fear or complacency or pettiness? In 50 years, who will we remember as the voice we followed out of this wilderness?
Are we without prophets today? Or do we choose not to listen when they speak?
Dec
23
Musicians use a lovely Italian word for a gradual decrease in loudness: diminuendo. The very sound of the word makes me smile.
Tomorrow afternoon, about 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve, the diminuendo begins. One by one, cars head for home. A parking space empties. Then another and another. A storefront goes dark, a mall, a grocery store. Red kettles are spirited away. A dwindling stream of headlights melt into the dark.
No matter how many gifts I wrap, no matter how many cookies I bake, no matter how burnt out I get listening to Jingle Bell Rock, that moment comes when nothing is left but the hush of the silent night.
That is the moment I wait for, my favorite moment of the season, when I can believe that for this one night, all is truly calm and bright.
Merry Christmas.
Dec
18
"Cheers" regulars Cliff and Norm
Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name,
and they’re always glad you came.
The theme song for the 1980s TV series Cheers pops into my head a lot. It was a show about a neighborhood bar, the kind of place where regulars walk in and their usual drink shows up at their favorite barstool before they can even get seated.
Bars like that are still out there, I’m sure. It’s the kind of place my parents hung out when I was a kid. I spent a lot of Saturday nights playing dominoes while they drank beer and I really don’t much care to be a regular there any more.
In fact, I’ve spent a good bit of my adult life resisting being a regular anywhere.
But there I was, this morning, sitting in my regular spot in a most unlikely place, surrounded by a lot of most unlikely people, many of whom do, in fact, know my name.
You wanna be where you can see,
our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows
Your name.
A year ago today, I had never set foot in the place. But a week before Christmas, I slipped in at the last possible minute, grabbed an end seat in the back, easy for a quick getaway. After the small gospel choir with the big sound got everyone’s heart pumping — even mine — someone up front asked first and second time visitors to stand and give their names so they could be properly greeted. I did not stand up.
The details that got me from that moment in time to this don’t matter much. What does matter is that this morning, one year later, there I sat in my regular spot. Even before the small gospel choir marched its big sound down the aisle, I had talked with at least a dozen people about our lives and all the ways and places our humanity intersects.
What does matter is that something in the spirit of the people who gather in that place made it impossible for me to stay away. It’s a spirit that welcomes all of us, with our baggage and our doubts and our differences and our ways that haven’t always been a natural fit with stained glass and hymnals.
You wanna go where people know,
people are all the same,
You wanna go where everybody knows
your name.
Here in the South, some folks call churches the poor man’s country club. Still, comparing mine to a neighborhood bar may seem a little extreme. But I believe a lot of folks at Caldwell Presbyterian would like the idea that somebody thinks their church is the kind of place where people might just shout “Cheers!” when you come in the door.
Right after they call you by name, of course.
Dec
7
Here we are, nearly the middle of December, and a million miles from Christmas.
The ways we relate to this holiday are anything but holy. It is a retail orgy. It is precious videos and music over-exposed into meaninglessness and a distinct lack of comfort or joy.
As for the birth that launched us into this Celebration Gone Wild, we are separated from it not only by centuries, but by beliefs so tattered and divisive that those of us who claim to remember the reason for the season face off. We are the battleground and the birth itself has become the victim of the stiff-necked certainty that divides us.
So what is there left to say about this holy day that we have stripped of meaning and left at the entrance to the mall, battered and unrecognizable?
Last year, I attended The Birth, a play based on the writings of theologian Frederick Buechner, one of the deepest and most profound writers on Christianity from the last half-century. Buechner likes to challenge us to shift perspective, to step into the story of our tired old beliefs and imagine being touched by the workings of a God too mysterious and magnificent for us to fully comprehend. A God who sends his message of hope and love in the form of a baby – a helpless baby born poor and homeless, already rejected by people just like us.
Sitting in the darkened theater that was as Spartan as any manger, I fell into the mystery and the mysticism of that birth, that simple birth whose echo should have long since faded. And somehow, has not.
Nov
24
Being grateful for what I have is easy. Pecan pie and Miss Bailey and sunshine out the windows and my favorite shoes that are not only comfortable but look good, too.
What can be hard is being grateful for what I don’t have. Not the stuff I don’t have like sickness and hunger and homelessness – it’s pretty to be grateful that I’m missing those things.
What’s hard is being grateful for what I don’t have when I think it’s something I should have, something I think I need to make life perfect, something I expected would come my way.
I spoke with a friend yesterday who had surgery about a month ago. She worried, before surgery, about how she would cope. She wouldn’t be able to go up and down the stairs to her bedroom. She wouldn’t be able to get her own breakfast or dress herself. And this was all going to happen over Thanksgiving, which would mean she wouldn’t be with her daughters in other states or her granddaughter or her brother.
What she has had, in the midst of this ocean of need, is the humility to accept the help of dozens of friends, the kind of friends who are willing to help you when you’re helpless. What she has had is an awareness of how much she is loved and what really matters and that each person who has helped her has been the hands of God, providing everything she needs in life. What she has been given is a hard circumstance that became not something to endure, but a time of spiritual growth.
So on this day of giving thanks, and every single day if I am paying attention to the way God works, I will be grateful for what I don’t have and think I want. Because I can be sure that there are more gifts in my lack than I will ever find in my abundance.
Nov
1
As seen on Facebook
Wow.
I saw this posted on Facebook. Its original source was a fan page that posts a lot of stick-it-to-the-liberals funny stuff. So I presume from its source — and from the 1000-plus responses — that this is intended to be a humorous put-down of Democrats.
I’m not going to get into the politics of this because at this moment in time I have very little respect for politicians of any stripe and next to no confidence in the folks we’ve elected to run our country, whether they’re red or blue.
What I want to talk about is a world in which we ridicule the idea of saying, “Share your candy.”
I know, I know. I understand the political ideology behind this. But, hey, there are so many ways to make liberals look foolish that I am astounded conservatives would pounce on this particular idea. They might just as well ridicule the notion, “Feed the hungry. Clothe the poor.”
My inclination was to add, “Love your neighbor. Bhahahah!” But I think the point is made.
Sep
28
Just try it. That’s all I ask.
The next time someone irritates the very devil out of you, pause for a moment and look for the ways that person is like you instead of focusing on all those differences that make you want to scream.
The next time someone looks like the root of all your problems — or society’s problems, because goodness knows society has a lot of problems and we sure do want to pin the blame somewhere — imagine for a moment that this person feels the same fear or anger or uncertainty you feel, just packaged differently.
The next time you want to look down on someone who clearly oughta know better or do better or be better, just for a moment remember your own worst moment, a moment you wish you could take back, a time when you should’ve known better or done better or been better. Maybe there’ll be an instant when it’s like looking in the mirror.
Just try it. Once today. Then once more tomorrow. Try it because it sounds sappy and simplistic but it is surprisingly hard and we all need to stretch ourselves at least once a day. Then try it once more. Who knows? Maybe it gets easier.
Changing how I think about other people may not sound like much, but it is the beginning of change. A change in my perceptions. A change in my own level of frustration with daily life. A change in how I interact with that one irritating-as-hell person. Sometimes, one thing changes everything.
Humor me. Just try it. Promise?
Photo courtesy of Mantos Ruzveltas
Aug
31
It's hard not to be joyful with ice cream on your nose
A few years ago I was going through one of those troubled times when I couldn’t decide who to blame for my misery but knew damn well somebody was to blame and somebody should pay. I was chock full of self-pity and self-loathing and lots of other self-defeating beliefs and behaviors.
One afternoon, mid-summer, I had one of those brief, shining moments that I like to call a God Shot — for no discernable reason, I was filled with joy. In that instant, I understood that I was free to choose joy. I also understood that I would forget joy was always there for the choosing but that, in odd moments here and there, joy would choose me and I would remember.
I decided to make the most of that moment. It will not surprise you to know that “making the most of it” for me involved ice cream. But not just scoop-it-into-a-bowl, eat-it-with-a-spoon ice cream. I would go in search of those little cones we used to have when I was a child. I would cram one of those cones full of ice cream and let it run down my fingers and stick to my nose. It’s hard not to be joyful with ice cream on your nose.
I went to the grocery store and picked out mint chocolate chip ice cream because nothing says summer like mint chocolate chip. I’d never bought cones before, but I thought I’d seen them there before, at the end of the freezer case beside Hershey’s syrup and caramel sauce. I turned the corner and sure enough, there they were, boxes of old-fashioned cones. The brand name, it big, kid-attracting letters: JOY.
Tonight is the final night of August, surely the perfect night to celebrate the end of summer. In the kitchen, I have an old-fashioned cone and a single-serving container of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Some of which will stick to my nose.
Aug
3
Compromise: a settlement of differences by mutual adjustment or modification of opposing claims, principles, demands, etc.
That’s what Webster’s says about compromise. Here’s what I say: Once the compromise has been reached, the goal should be to support the compromise and to work together to create success from that compromise. To do anything less is childish and petty and self-serving to the extreme.
Nobody is happy about the economy. Nobody likes everything about the debt ceiling deal that was reached in recent days. The only way one person or group or party gets all of what it wants is in a dictatorship. We the people have not granted 100 percent control to any one person or party. So we compromise. Sometimes the people who do the compromising even do so in the spirit of finding the best solution from among a smorgasbord of conflicting ideas.
Here’s what needs to come after the compromise: unity in the service of success.
Not continued bickering or bellyaching. Not fingerpointing or namecalling, which belong on the playground. And not, even in this era when news coverage has been replaced by yammerers, ceaseless rehash.
Unity and hard work to make it work.
I can’t make that happen in Washington or at Fox or at CNN or in the vitriolic comments added to blogs all over the internet. All I can do is support the spirit of compromise by refusing to be part of the attack mentality that has replaced rational discussion. I’d like the work of our political leaders to be successful in restoring our economy and our good name around the globe, even if I don’t agree 100% with how they get there? Wouldn’t you?
A compromise has been reached. It’s time to set aside differences and pull the plow together.
Jul
1
(Caution: This is a rant.)
I love music. All kinds of music. I love bluegrass and classical and the blues. I love Dylan and Willie and Frank and Hank. I love Billie Holiday and Patsy Cline and Eva Cassidy. I don’t love all musi
c, but my tastes run across a broad spectrum.
But I’m tired of other people deciding what I listen to and how loud it’s going to be, then forcing it on me everywhere I go.
Once upon a time, piped-in music was only in elevators. So mostly I could avoid it and I was only exposed to it in small doses. It’s hard to overdose on a ride from the lower level parking deck to the fourth floor.
Now, music is everywhere and most of it is too loud. It’s at the mall when I walk, sometimes with competing music coming from inside the stores as I pass their open doors. It’s at grocery stores and at restaurants when I’m trying to eat and enjoy conversation. I’ve even heard it blasted into parking lots before I walk into the stores. It’s at home improvement stores, discount stores, the auto repair waiting room, doctor’s offices…everywhere.
Am I really the only person left who likes to talk to the person I’m walking with, shopping with, dining with? I especially like doing so without having to raise my voice. And when I’m alone, I enjoy the silence. I don’t even mind being alone with my own thoughts.
And that, I think, is the problem. Too many of us are terrified of being alone with our own thoughts.
The irony is that I’m possibly the only person left in the universe without earbuds and an electronic device loaded with a personal soundtrack. Maybe I’m the only one still listening to all this unavoidable racket. So, please, could we just turn off the music?
Rant over.
(Illustration by Danilo Rizzuti.)
Jun
26
A new friend visited my condo for the first time last week and I, of course, gave her an extensive tour of the entire 960 square feet. In the bedroom, she saw a Cathedral Window quilt and said, “That looks like an heirloom.”
Actually, I have four generations of family-made quilts stashed around the place. The one she commented on is the only one I made, and the last one I would have considered an heirloom.
I started making the quilt in 1976, right before Doug and I got married, jumped into a Ford Econoline van and hit the road for a year. In all 48 continental states plus Mexico and Canada, I worked on that quilt. Scraps of fabric from shirts, pajamas, skirts, robes, even a purse – all sewn by my mother, my sister and me — made their way into the quilt.
The quilt was supposed to become a bedspread. But around 1980, the project stalled and the quilt officially became a wall hanging. Quite a comedown from the noble purpose of bedspread.
Shortly after Doug took a position at The Charlotte Observer, the paper announced its annual arts and crafts show for employees and family. On a whim, I entered the quilt. Afterward, I started second-guessing myself. I kept imagining how pathetic that unfinished quilt would look beside all the really cool stuff made by other, talented people. The day they were hanging the show in the lobby, I drove downtown to the Observer to pull it from the show so I wouldn’t embarrass myself.
When I arrived in the Observer lobby, I was too late. The quilt had already been hung. Hanging beside it was the Best of Show ribbon.
I’m not often speechless. In those days I was rarely teary-eyed. That day, I was both.
Decades later, I moved into a townhome. My incredibly talented artist friend Elizabeth Bradford saw the quilt and suggested that I hang it over the 70-year-old four-poster bed that had been my grandmother’s. When I moved again, two years ago, the quilt went into a plastic storage tub and under a new bed with a cheap brushed metal headboard that I liked for its sleek, modern look.
This spring I was away for a week and left my condo in the capable hands of an artist of another type, Christina Lewis with The Redesign Company. When I returned home and made my way through the condo, I was stunned to find that Christina and her crew had draped the well-traveled Cathedral Window quilt over the metal headboard. Once again, the quilt had been give a place of honor.
In the 20 years since the quilt won its award, I’ve become a sentimental sap. Once again, I had tears in my eyes.
No great message here. Just scraps of moments pieced together into a sweet little story about a quilt that I keep trying to dismiss and others keep telling me is more than I imagine.
Jun
23
Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois, who "always depended on the kindness of strangers" and might have done better to depend on the kindness of Southerners
I was born without the kindness gene. Ask anyone who knew me before I turned 40.
Kindness has been on my mind since reading Nancy Kraft’s recent blog on the congenital kindness of Southerners as reflected in what I will call Southern speak. Nancy deals with the full range of Southern speak. It’s a great read and you should check it out now to provide context for this blog, but promise me you’ll come back for my random thoughts on the kindness of Southerners.
Nancy — being Not Southern, bless her heart — says straight out that those of us who grew up in these parts have learned to value kindness over honesty. I think that’s insightful, no matter how much we might bristle over having our honesty called into question.
Let’s assume for the moment that she’s right. Being taught congenital kindness from the cradle, with all the graciousness and gentility that may come with it, also might have introduced us to the art of the little white lie. Maybe for some of us gbeing dishonest — and please understand, I’m using that term in a purely hypothetical way — has become preferable to being bluntly honest because we find it easier to deal with a guilty conscience than to deal with conflict.
Maybe dishonesty got entangled with Southern speak when we heard our momma’s say, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything.” Rather than learning to keep quiet, we learned to say something nice even if it was a stretch.
From a more positive perspective, maybe learning the ”if you can’t say something nice…” thing taught us to zero in on the things that are nice. We don’t necessarily want to tell someone that we loathe her green bean casserole and wish we could ban her for life from ever again bringing it to a single family/church/neighborhood gathering. Instead, we nibble at it and tell her how much her green bean casserole reminds us of the one Aunt Alma used to make and takes us right back to our childhood. If there’s a degree of truth in it, does it really hurt to tell her that instead of answering straight out when she asks if she should bring her casserole again this year?
So maybe Southern speak has led us down the path of little white lies. Or maybe in looking for ways to say it in complimentary terms instead of speaking the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, we’re trying to find a small measure of truth and grace. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, although I can certainly see how it disrupts intimacy and, perhaps worst of all, leaves us eating a lot of green bean casserole.
Jun
16
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.
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.
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
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.
