Mixed Up Files, or "On Not Three Blogs"

When Bekah was in third or fourth grade and a voracious reader, there was a book around whose title I loved--From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. It's about a girl who drafts her little brother to run away with her to Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where they dupe the security guards and hide in the restroom until the museum is closed for the night, and, of course, they get embroiled in solving a mystery.

I don't remember if I ever actually read the book, but its title has always stayed with me. I suppose I often think of my journal or perhaps even more so my blogging as something akin to mixed-up files. Maybe the subtitle of my blog could be: From the seriously mixed-up files of the somewhat mixed-up mind of a relatively sane woman. 


Or something like that. Because that's really what this seems to be--it's sometimes a blog about painting, and sometimes a blog about leaving the priesthood and starting over to find a new path in life, and sometimes about what it was like to have been an Episcopal priest, and sometimes it's about my childhood, and sometimes it's about . . . well, being alive, being human, being myself. (I know, that last phrase sounds a bit egocentric, but I don't really know what it's like to be anyone else.)

This blog is, for better or worse, all of those things, and in no particular order. Believe me, I spend lots of time (usually in those gaps between blog posts) debating the merits of having a blog that's only about my art or only about leaving the priesthood or only about--you get the idea. For a while I even had two blogs  at the same time, but they blurred and overlapped, and I wasted a lot of energy trying decide when I was writing for which. So I gave up on that track and retreated back to one blog.

I've even thought about starting a money blog, because dealing with money and finances and how to make a living having left the one profession I was trained for does occupy my thoughts quite a bit. And I've learned a lot about myself and money (and about money in general) in the last couple of years, and I have a few funny and hair-raising stories to tell. (Talk about seriously mixed-up files!)

I have a feeling the time is near when I may actually start an art-only blog for posting images of paintings and maybe even of drawings. That one seems relatively straight-forward, and it doesn't mean I can't blog about painting in my mixed-up files blog.

But I'm not quite there yet.

I've even composed in my head a blog post titled "On Not Three Blogs," which is kind of an in-joke for students of Christian theology who might remember Gregory of Nyssa's essay "On Not Three Gods" about the doctrine of the Trinity. OK. I had to Google "On Not Three Gods" to remember who wrote it--which one of those so-called Church Fathers. But writing this has made me realize perhaps that's the title of this post.

So for the time being I will keep going in this blog, thinking of it as my "mixed-up files" blog. Or more precisely, From the seriously mixed-up files of the somewhat mixed-up mind of a relatively sane woman.

Bekah in Kenya 1

I said I'd link blog to blog with my daughter Bekah who is spending the semester in Kenya, and then I promptly forgot to do that when she posted her first entry from Nairobi! It's a great one--informative and entertaining. If only she had included a photo or two--like up close and personal with a giraffe? Maybe next time.

Here's a link to it. Her blog is called: Bekah in Kenya. Go figure! (Actually, go read it!)

Here's to Spring

It must feel like spring today in Egypt--the exhilarating, inspiring, take a deep breath and sing, shout, and dance kind of spring. At the edge of the unknown, the future opening to just what new reality no one knows.

I had already planned to blog today about spring--the hopes and longings for spring that lots of us northerners find welling up in us on these cold but sunny days, the driveway crusted over with ice, the mailbox, broken off by the plow's forceful heave of too much snow, now askew but tied onto its post with some old clothesline and my best knot know-how. The snow piles so high it's easy to imagine they will be here into May. How will the crocuses and daffodils find their way through to bloom?

But I didn't want to blog only about hopes and longings but also about the small but real, tangible signs that spring is working its way already. Last week we marked that odd day knows as Groundhog Day (and the famed mammal did NOT see his shadow), an adaptation of the day elsewhere and otherwise known as Candlemas (also the Purification of the Virgin Mary, and the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple), St. Bridget's Day, and Imbolc--the latter being most likely the first of them all in time, and the other names later adaptations and reinterpretations.

Imbolc was a traditional feast day in pagan, pre-Christian Ireland (and perhaps is still in pagan and now- Christian/post-Christian Ireland?)--the day that falls midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. In pre-Christian days it came to be associated with the goddess Brigid, goddess of poetry and healing, who in time became the Christian St. Bridget. (I know, it's complicated. And it doesn't really matter if you follow me or not! I actually just read that Brigid was said to have had two sisters, also named Brigid, so that she was a "triple goddess"--imagine that! A holy trinity of Brigid, Brigid, and Brigid!)

Imbolc, on Feb. 1-2, is considered the first day of spring in Ireland. Imbolc means something like "in the womb"--because at this time of year the lambs are growing fat in the wombs of ewes, nearing birth. I like that way of counting spring's beginnings even when the fuller expression of the season still lies weeks away, buried and hidden under snow.

And so it is, even in chilly Maine!

Just a few days ago a local Maine sheep and fiber farm posted a photo of a newborn lamb on Facebook! (Open this link to Romney Ridge Farm only if you want a dose of serious lamb cuteness to brighten your winter spirits!)

Over the past ten days, we've actually passed numerous significant milestones on the way toward spring. First, on January 31 the sunrise broke 7 a.m. and is now rising at 6:46 and getting earlier every day. Next  came the day when our total gain of daylight since the winter solstice passed the one hour mark. And soon after, the sunset has passed 5 p.m. and counting.

I assume it's this growth in daylight that has set the birds to singing! I've been hearing titmice and chickadees not just making noises but singing their trademark songs. Could it be they are warming up for wooing and courtship?

It cheers my soul. So here's to Egypt, to the spring of freedom (though the road ahead may be bumpy), and to the spring of spring.

Blog to blog

Seems I've been a bit focused on things other than this blog of late. Among other things, helping Bekah to get ready for her semester in Kenya (with SIT, studying Health and Community Development) and taking her to Boston for her flight to Paris and on to Nairobi. Then it was fielding her phone calls and skype connections when her first flight to Nairobi was cancelled due to two flat tires.

We went to bed Saturday night knowing that she had set at least four different alarms in her hotel room at Charles de Gaulle in order to be sure to make it back to the airport for her second try at getting to Nairobi. When our phone rang at 5:30 a.m. Sunday finding me largely still asleep, I was awake enough to know that this was not a good sign. She should have been in the air to Nairobi.

No such luck. Her flight had been postponed again--this time because the crew was late arriving at the airport and the aircraft had not yet been checked for flight readiness. How reassuring.

I spent the next few hours repeatedly checking the Air France flight status website, watching as the the flight's scheduled departure got moved later and later in 10 minute increments, feeling powerless and fretful. At one point, I found myself thinking, "What if I considered the possibility that somehow it's better that this flight leaves late? What if I didn't chafe at this reality?" I don't know if this marked a step forward in maturity and wisdom, but it did open up a bit of open space.

Bekah did eventually get take off from Paris on Sunday. After calling SIT's headquarters in Vermont to be sure that someone would meet her in Nairobi, I did my best to get on with my day.

For some odd reason, neither Air France's website nor www.flightsarriving.com was able to confirm that her plane ever landed in Nairobi! We simply chose to assume that no news really was good news--that had something unthinkable happened, we would have heard, and that Bekah was fine and had connected with her SIT group in Nairobi.

How wonderful for David to receive an unexpected phone call from Bekah today, using a borrowed cell phone as the one she had just purchased was not working! And later my phone rang out with the sound of an arriving text--"Hi. Are you getting this? This is a test."

She's still far away, and for four months. But she's fine. And with the wondrous connecting thread of technology an option at least some of the time. I am grateful.

So now it's time to link blog to blog. One of Bekah's study abroad scholarship grants requires her to keep a blog, posting at least once a week. Here's the link for Bekah in Kenya. Enjoy!

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."