More Calendars = More Time?

Wow. Here it is January 6 already, and I'm longing for a bit of that slack tide that I wrote about in my last post almost a month ago! Or looking for some way to stop time, or at least to slow it down.

Meanwhile, I've noticed that by quirk of fate, through a combination of gifts and purchases, I now have five calendars--two small decorative ones, two large art ones, and one good sized very plain one. Five calendars, not counting the two family calendars in our kitchen. Nor the two daily planners that I bought--one pocket-sized one that rides along in my pocketbook and one larger one for my desk.

I'm wondering what's going on here. Do I somehow think that more calendars equal more time? Or that having more calendars and planners increases my chances of being organized and using my time well?

That has a bit of the ring (or sting?) of truth about it. This starting a new year thing has reactivated my fantasies of being more organized, using my time better, getting more accomplished. And behind those fantasies lies a bigger, harder task--getting clearer about my life!

Maybe I always feel this way right after New Year's. Maybe I always get caught up in the new year/new me/new life kind of thing. There's something about passing this large marker in time of one year turning to the next that stirs up questions, most of them full of high expectations, about the territory that I've crossed in the year that is past and where I hope to be by the time New Year's rolls around again.

But somehow it feels more intense a longing this year. Maybe it's because I spent several days right before Christmas helping to move my mother from Maine to Connecticut and then spend time in the days after Christmas supporting Anna in finishing her college applications.

All I know is that I stood for almost an hour in the daily planner aisle of Staples the other day, searching and hoping for the "perfect planner," not knowing exactly what that would be but figuring I'd recognize it if and when I saw it. I chatted with other shoppers who came and went. We all agreed that there were way too many choices and that none was "just right." And yet they seemed able to make a decision and move on.

I stayed there and stayed there, walking a few feet to my left and trying those, then to my right and looking there. Back and forth, back and forth. I'm sure I probably looked many times at the same ones, not remembering one title or cover from the next.

In the end, after selecting the large plain calendar that I eventually bought, a planner that I had no doubt stared at before but not noticed caught my eye. Its pages are laid out quite differently from the others, and while I can't say it's perfect, it was different enough to seem worth trying. So I bought it along with the calendar.

But for right now it's that large, plain, black-ink-on-white-paper calendar that is beckoning to me. And I think that's because for right now it looks so clean and spacious, like a fresh snowfall before any footprints have crossed it. It seems to be suggesting to me something about simplicity, something about slowing down rather than speeding up, and something about taking stock before the turn of the year gains momentum and brings new deadlines.

I think I'd secretly like to choose one of the calendar's spare white squares and mark it off all to myself, set up some boundaries, and climb right in. And then simply luxuriate in one day--one twenty-four hour block--without any agenda. No expectations. No obligations. Just a day.

Pooh Sticks at Slack Tide

The tide was very high and slack the day after Thanksgiving when we arrived at the "jiggly bridge" where the Mill Pond meets the York River. About ten of us--sisters, spouses, cousins--were out for some fresh air and our annual day-after-Thanksgiving walk to the Jiggly Bridge following lunch together at my mother's. (We walkers were her daughters, sons-in-law, grandchildren, and something like a great niece.)

Over the years on walks to the Jiggly Bridge, my sister's family and mine have carried on a tradition of playing "Pooh Sticks" at the bridge, where we have almost always encountered a significant rush of tidal current in one direction or another--either from mill pond to river and out to sea, or the other way around.

Pooh Sticks, for the uninformed, is a game described in one of the Winnie The Pooh books. It is played by dropping sticks off of one side of a bridge into the moving water beneath, then rushing to the other side of the bridge to see whose stick "wins" by coming out from under the bridge first. When the tide is moving fast under this particular bridge, there are hazards of various kinds--eddies that toss lightweight sticks in not so straightforward directions or even hold them captive a while; rocks and rock weed that complicate matters at the edges of the passage, especially at lower tides; and sometimes also the wind playing tricks.

While I'd like to claim that veteran Pooh Stickers play with skill and finesse, making careful calculations to fit the circumstances, it's really not true, at least not for us. Winning is basically a matter of luck--luck both in finding a good solid stick or two and in dropping the sticks serendipitously. And winning isn't nearly as important as simply playing.

This year we walked to the bridge knowing it would be our last such day-after-Thanksgiving walk. My mother will be moving soon; at age 91 she is somewhat resigned to this next "adventure" (not her word for it!) that will relocate her to an assisted living facility near my sister in Connecticut. For my daughters and my niece, who were young children when we first launched our Pooh Stick tradition ten or twelve years ago, this was an important ritual to enact one last time. Anna and Hannah began scouting for sticks as soon as we turned onto the path to the bridge. It felt important to me, too, to play this last game of Pooh Sticks; my heart felt full anticipating this simple ritual.

The high tide was noticeable immediately. In all our years of post-Thanksgiving (and also some summer- time) Pooh Sticks, we have never encountered such a high tide. Nor such a slack one. Meaning, there was virtually no current moving the water either into the millpond or out to the river and the ocean.

In other words, there would be little force to move our sticks under the bridge. It was even hard to tell which direction the water was moving, so negligible and subtle was the movement. This was not going to be one of our more rollicking games of Pooh Sticks!

Indeed our sticks dawdled and drifted their way under the bridge, barely making forward progress. It was like suspended animation--the slowest, laziest Pooh Sticks game imaginable! That's just the way it was, and there wasn't much to do but . . . go with the flow, what there was of it.

After two rounds of lazy sticks, we started to turn for home. And I was seized with a desire to mark this occasion some how--this last of many years of Pooh Sticks together at the Jiggly Bridge. We'd forgotten to bring a camera, so there was no way to note this moment with a photo. The best I could think to do was to gather us into a group hug just where the bridge meets the footpath, which is what we did, honoring this tradition and this gathering and this marker in time. With hands in mittens and bodies in thick winter coats, we threw our arms around each others' shoulders and huddled together briefly.

More recently it has occurred to me just how fitting the slack tide was for this particular game of Pooh Sticks. The tide itself was marking time for us, inviting us to pause there between flood and ebb. A calm, quiet moment before we would all be swept up in the turbulent, troubling force of the current of all that has to be done to move a 91 year old woman. And perhaps even more than the tasks to be done, there are the strong undeniable yet undefinable currents of emotion and memory--some very old and some quite new--and the challenges of four adult siblings juggling interpretations, desires, opinions, and different ways of sorting things out and getting things done. Someone recently reminded me that each of us carries with us a slightly different memory of the very same woman who is our mother, and no one's memory is any "truer" than another's.

Some days now it seems as if all five of us, my mother and her four children, are being carried along into a strange birthing process, a "birth" that is a dying and being born anew in some as yet unknown way, that we are being carried on a current that allows for no turning back. I would be glad for a moment of slack tide calm here and there.

Manifesto

I've been haunted by a story a heard the other day, about someone (name and identifying details withheld to protect the innocent) who had been a professional musician before being ordained as an Episcopal priest, who gave up playing his instrument of choice when he took up ministry. Something about the story got a hold on me, or me on it, as if I knew there was something there to be learned and  perhaps spoken aloud. And when I tried to wrestle and write about it, what came out had the force of a manifesto, more or less as follows.

I want to say in the name of all that is holy, do not forsake these things you may do (like playing a musical instrument, gardening, painting, cooking, etc.) that are life-giving for you, that keep you connected to the wild, living, untamable life-force, to "Whatever it is that's out there and in here," as someone I know chooses to call this. That's what I want to say.

And again in the name of all that is holy, please do not confuse all that is "religious" for all that is holy. I see now how thoroughly and terribly I mistook what's religious (and even more narrowly, what's Christian) for what's holy and sacred, and in the process did grave injury to my own self and my creative energies and inclinations, not to mention those of others.

I suppose the story of the priest who gave up music-making reminded me a bit of myself. For most of my life I've been a poet of sorts, at least I've been an occasional writer of poems. I took poetry workshops in college, even won a poetry prize, and carried on writing poems in seminary, though really, it's possible I kept writing in seminary largely because of the inspiration and encouragement of someone who loved both me and my inclination to write poems.

By the time I got to seminary I had already shown a troubling (though I thought entirely "holy") inclination to ditch my allegiances to activities and even writers who weren't explicitly "Christian," as if truth couldn't come to me and the world through such channels. Never mind that I loved the works of these writers, poets, musicians, etc. For whatever sad combination of reasons--immaturity, a slightly stoic New England upbringing, and the overly heavy influence of some conservative, somewhat Calvinist Christian colleagues whose judgments I feared--it didn't occur to me to trust what I loved, to pay attention to what gave me delight. As if sacrifice and suffering and seriousness were the only reliable tools for discernment. (Yuck! Heaven help us!)

About ten years out of seminary, an encounter with the person who had inspired and encouraged my poetry shook me at my core. Acting from instinct, I did my best to write about this encounter, and without ever deciding to, I started to write a poem. And the act of writing a poem got my attention.

"Oh..." I found myself musing. "I used to do this; I used to write poems on a regular basis."

I didn't remember stopping writing poetry in any sort of intentional or official way, but I knew it had been a long time since I'd written any. Naturally I wondered what had happened and went looking back in my journals. Here's what I found:

Ordination had happened. Parish ministry had happened. Writing sermons and directing my creative energies toward church stuff happened. By the time I had been out of seminary for about a year and had been ordained and employed in parish ministry, I had stopped writing poems. I didn't mean to stop; I just kind of stopped.

I had allowed one of my most personal of creative outlets to dry up from neglect and non-use. In so doing I had also lost one of the best ways I had had (though I may not have put it this way at the time) for staying in touch with a voice that was truly mine, authentic to me and most certainly not shaped in any particular way or toward any particular topic or occasion that was required of me, like preaching a sermon, writing a newsletter, leading a discussion or teaching Sunday School.

And what I would say now, from the vantage point of another fifteen years, and from the place of freedom gained by renouncing my ordination and stepping well out of church life, is that in giving up that creative outlet I had also given up one of my best and most open channels between me and "all that is holy;" between me and the great creative force that infuses, animates, and sustains the universe and everything in it; between me and "whatever it is that's out there and in here," within me and within you and between us, too. (Though it leads to a huge new topic, one might even say this was for me a way of "prayer" though it didn't seem to bear much resemblance to all the ways I had thought I should pray and had tried--and basically failed--to pray.)

Somewhere in the days of my musing on the story of the priest-musician, I happened to have a conversation with Raye Tibbitts about this, which resulted in her asking me to be a guest blogger on Gatehouse.

"Sure!" I said.

"By December 1st?" she asked. "Sure!" I said (it seemed so far away at the time).

As the date drew nearer, my recollection of our conversation grew vaguer and vaguer, so that I honestly began to wonder what on earth I could have possibly said that Raye found so intriguing. All I could remember was the Episcopal priest who had given up his music-making.

That, and my new understanding of "the unforgivable sin." What? Have I lost it? Why would I care about "the unforgivable sin"?

As I talked to Raye ("ranted" may be a more accurate verb) about this whole matter of recognizing the "holiness" of all forms of creative activity (and really, all of life) and of reclaiming the word "holy" from the religious sphere, I spun off a sudden new insight into a not-so-favorite Bible verse, in which Jesus is reported to have said: '"Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin'--for [his critics] had said, 'He has an unclean spirit.'" (Mark 3:29-3-)

Of all the "blasphemies" against the "Holy Spirit" (a.k.a. great creative force, Life, and other wide inclusive names), the one I've come to see as "unforgivable" is that of so narrowly defining and trying to limit what is holy that one overlooks, undervalues, squelches, and and dams up the flow of the creative force through each of us. And what's unforgivable about this is that every time we undervalue, demean, and refuse to play along with this creative force, not only do we harm ourselves, but also something of great potential value is lost. Something that wants to be expressed through us is left unexpressed, perhaps forever--"an eternal sin."

I'm not talking only about "creative works of art" although it's easy to see how this operates in that sphere. I'm talking also about whole lives and the capacity each of us has to live more fully, more creatively and authentically, not as someone else but as ourselves. That, it seems to me, is the holiest obligation each of us has for the time that we're here. (Not to the exclusion of things like compassion, and justice, and kindness, mind you, but those "virtues" get expressed through you in your own way.)

I will end with a very short, favorite story and a favorite quote. The story is of Rabbi Zusya (a long ago rabbi), who nearing death, declared to his beloved students, "When I stand before God, God will not ask me, 'Why were you not Moses?' God will ask me, 'Why were you not Zusya?'"

And the quote, from Howard Thurman, a 20th century theologian: "Do not ask what the world needs; ask what makes you come alive and go do it. For what the world needs is people who are fully alive."

These Golden Bees

"And the golden bees 

were making white combs 

and sweet honey

  from my old failures."

Antonio Machado

I don't know Spanish, but ever since hearing the poet David Whyte read this Machado poem in translation, these lines have been among my favorites. I know the poem by its first line in English, "Last Night As I Was Sleeping." Or something like that.

I've been thinking about them a lot lately, and I want to write a series of posts about "the Golden Bees' School of Art"--or how these golden bees seem to operate in my own art-making (and life-living). 

But because I'm up against a serious deadline to be ready for an Artisan Fair on Friday afternoon, for today I am only going to leave you with these lines. Let them wash over you and into you, and see what happens. 

Here they are again, with a few more lines that go with them:

Last night as I was sleeping,

I dreamt--marvelous error!--

that I had a beehive

here in my heart.

And the golden bees

were making white combs

and sweet honey

from my old failures.

The Sneaky Guise of Selflessness: Part 2

At the risk of beating this particular tired, nearly worn-out horse past the point of usefulness, I have a couple more thoughts to add. One was a moment of self-understanding (that may border on self-justification) about my desire to blog what I feel like blogging without having to worry much about whether I'm being helpful to others.

"Ahhh, yes," I thought in a flash of recollection. "Writing sermons all those years (22, to be more precise), I was altogether focused on what would be helpful, elucidating, enlightening, encouraging, or challenging in a positive way. No wonder I not only find it hard to allow myself to do otherwise but also have a burning desire to follow a different (i.e., self-determined) path of inspiration!"

I suppose this bit of awareness should have been obvious to me--I'm sure it has been clear at various times. It's just one of those slippery fish that easily wriggles free of my grasp. I have put in my dues in an other-focused profession. Even if the stuff I wrote was drawn from within myself and the quirkiness of my own creative process, the writing and speaking of all those sermons took place within externally determined boundaries and a fairly set liturgical framework, for a clear purpose that had little to do with free personal expression.

Preaching is an an art form, for sure, but one in which the goal of the particular religious inclination can clash mightily with the hungers and longings of an individual creative person. My soul has borne the brunt of that clashing of agendas, goals, longings.

"But you can exercise your creativity in your sermons," people used to say.

"Yes, but..." I used to try to respond. Often as not, I would give up trying to articulate the struggle, the intensely felt clash of forces, because no matter how I tried to frame it, my desires for true creative freedom to express myself however I chose (meaning, in whatever medium or language I chose and on whatever topic I felt moved to speak) always sounded just...so...damn...selfish.

How can the fires of individual self-expression ever come off sounding as morally or religiously legitimate as the ideals of serving others? Especially from within an institution whose stated goals and norms are the service of others in the name of and in the spirit of Jesus?

I remember a poet leading a poetry workshop I attended while still in seminary, who took a rare (among the rather bohemian poetry world of that workshop) positive view of my religious affiliation. He suggested I read one or two poets who wrote what he thought of as "religious poetry," even if not overtly religious poetry.

I'm not sure I could have said so very clearly at the time, but I think I knew even then that I didn't want to write "religious poetry!" Over the years my poems, when I wrote them at all, were a means (or at least kept alive a hope for such a means) of keeping alive some other voice within me, a wilder, truer, sometimes even a deliberately irreverent or skeptical voice, a voice outside the boundaries of the church.

And my pursuit of other art forms over the years sprang from a similar motivation. My forays into drawing, painting, knitting, dyeing yarns, weaving...

"Oh, wonderful!" at least one parishioner said after I had learned weaving during one of our sabbatical breaks, "you can weave new altar hangings for the altar!"

I remember how suddenly and totally my heart sank when I heard those words (and the moment was at least seven years ago). And I remember how a fiery, feisty energy had risen up almost as suddenly, ready to defend my creative pursuits as my own, to mark off a place where my own quirky, peculiar, authentic to myself as possible self-expression would be guarded from that seemingly insatiable hunger of the church to own it all, to own all of me, and for parishioners to want to claim my creativity for themselves.

As you can imagine, there's still more to tell of this story. But right now I'm off to deliver some paintings to the church where that very same exchange happened seven years ago. For the second year in a row, I will step into that building (that I still love very much), not as a priest but as a painter. Somehow I think I would do well to repeat that last sentence to myself many times over, and to savor it.

And then to keep telling about the "sneaky guise of selflessness", and especially about the time when I finally saw it for what it was and dared to choose a different path.

The Sneaky Guise of Selflessness: Part 1

This post is really a sequel to yesterday's about "Waiting for Permission". It's where the permission issue hooks up with the selfish vs. selfless (or at least altruistic) issue. What do I mean by the selfish vs. selfless/altruistic issue? You know the one, I'm sure.

Usually the things we wait for permission to do are viewed by some super-ego part of ourselves as "selfish," self-centered, for ourselves and our pleasure alone.

"What good can this possibly do for others?" we might ask. Artistic, creative, and self-expressive endeavors seem particularly vulnerable to such accusations.

Of course there are numerous leaps of false assumptions and false thinking that take place in our minds along this path, and sadly, our particular culture's bias toward the pragmatic and away from the aesthetic and creative is of no help at all.

And since most of us, and especially most of us who are women and girls, are encoded--perhaps hormonally, and certainly culturally--toward serving others, being praised and feeling rewarded for doing for others rather than for ourselves, to choose to do something that appears to be primarily for one's own pleasure or simply because it's who you are is difficult. More than difficult. Terrifying even. I have been stopped in my tracks more times than I care to count.

Enter then what I call "the sneaky guise of selflessness." Under the cover of darkness (in this case, the darkness of your own lack of self-awareness, your disconnection from your self) your own personal dream or desire finds a guise of selflessness. You find a way, in other words, to offer up your personal "calling" toward particular creative endeavor as something for a whole bunch of people! You get to do it because you find a way to do it for others; thus, it's no longer selfish of you!

And believe me, life hands you countless opportunities for doing so. (Being in a helping profession ensures that you will have an endless supply of opportunities to bite the bait. My years as an Episcopal priest in parish ministry are riddled with examples. I could get very specific about some of them, and how I came to recognize what I was doing--another day, another post.)

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that there's something dishonest or distorted about all altruistic activities, nor about all creative endeavors offered to others. Not all of them are really your own private yearnings in distorted disguise. Sometimes you really do want to teach others how to paint or draw or write or sing. Sometimes it really is a part of your calling to lead groups or to share your own knowledge and love of a particular field or craft with other people. And thankfully some people really are called to the visibly altruistic professions--to be healers, nurses, doctors, teachers, librarians, you-name-its! It's what makes their hearts sing (at least some of the time). Thank God!

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about something much more insidious, precisely because it happens beneath your own radar. And after it happens enough, it becomes a rock solid habit that is both hard to notice and hard to break.

It has even been a part of my struggle around blogging! Is it really and truly OK for me to blog what I feel like blogging, to spend a little time at the keyboard putting my thoughts out there for others to read, simply because I enjoy the process of doing so? To choose whatever topic seems to want to be written on a given day, or whatever words or ideas I seem to want to play around with, without regard for whether it might do anyone out there in cyberspace any good at all? (Ah, there's the rub!)

Could it be enough simply to tell a story because it's a story that I feel called to tell, driven at times to tell, partly because when I scratch deep enough down I discover that part of who I am, part of my DNA, is a writer and teller of stories?

More times than I wish to relate or you probably wish to read, I've steered away from an expression of simple joy or a quirky observation in my blog in favor of something that might actually, if I'm lucky and say it honestly and well, help someone else. Who's to say that the expression of simple joy or the quirky observation wouldn't have been just as "helpful" as my attempt at wisdom?

I even had a small tussle with a reader of one of my blogs early on (one since abandoned), a reader who really didn't like even the slightest hint that I was going to write what I felt like writing and wasn't all that concerned about what she and other readers might want me to write about. I held my ground, but it really got under my skin. I fretted and worried for days that I was a hopelessly self-centered and self-serving blogger. (Maybe I am! And if so, well, so be it. Might as well stop pretending.)

Suddenly I'm aware of what a huge topic this is. And how much I could say about it, how many stories I could tell. Let's just say, there's more to come, and call it a day.

Waiting for Permission

Remember how in grade school (maybe even in high school?) if you needed to go to the bathroom you had to raise your hand and ask permission from the teacher? And of course you had to ask your parents for permission to do things you wanted to do if they required money or a ride or you just plain knew they were a little too big to do without asking.

Such as when I took a semester off from college after the fall of my sophomore year (that was the first really big permission thing--I remember what my dad said: that if I was as unhappy in school as I said I was, then perhaps I'd be wasting my time and his money to stay, so his answer was "yes").

And then I tried to find a job somewhere away from home for that semester, and I was interested either in doing some kind of service-oriented work (like a short-term Peace Corps kind of thing) or working on a boat in the Virgin Islands (like a short-term totally NOT Peace Corps kind of thing).

And when I received by mail--it was all done by mail in those days! How slow!--a rather vague job offer from the male captain/owner of a yacht who took paying passengers for week-long vacations, my dad said, "No way are you going to the docks on St. Thomas to meet some strange man who may or may not actually offer you an honorable job." I think I was secretly relieved to have that permission denied.

In any case, I've been aware these days of how often I still act as if I am waiting for someone other than me to give me permission--to try out an idea, to paint a certain way, to spend a whole day painting rather than doing something else, or to ignore all the rules and suggestions for successful blogging and just blog what I feel like blogging.

And do you know what happens when I wait for someone else, some mysteriously unidentified other, or else some poor innocent who happens to cross my path, to give me permission? (And not only do I wait but I don't even ask, because of course to ask for permission for such things at age 56 is nigh to ridiculous!)

What happens is that I notice other people who appear to have their acts together enough simply to do what they want or think best without waiting for permission from someone else, probably because they give themselves permission without even having to think about it!

And when one of those self-permitted people happens to do something I'm still waiting for the aforementioned vague permission to do, boy, does that trigger me! I might feel betrayed (how could you steal my idea?), or like a victim (you didn't tell me you were going to do that!). And on an even deeper level there's a part of me screaming, "NO! Wait! That's what I want to do!"

I get to see things more clearly--about myself and how I operate; and even more important, about what there really is within me that wants to be expressed, created, honored and acted. And of course to be given my fully self-authorized permission to do just that.

P.S. Thanks, Beth, for nudging me yesterday by saying you'd noticed I hadn't been blogging much of late.