Happy Birthday to the Baby Boy
a gogyoshi
You have been in the world
for twenty-five years
exactly 9131 days
and I am grateful
for every single one
So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.
Psalm 90:12
For this child I prayed, and the Lord has granted me my petition that I made to him.
Therefore I have lent him to the Lord. As long as he lives, he is lent to the Lord.
1 Samuel 1:27-28
Peace
Last day at the beach
I wake far too early
but I make the coffee anyway
and take a cup to the top deck
I sit in the chair
facing east
drinking in
the deepness
of solitude
the blessedness
of silence
Earth stirs a little
and sighs
like a baby in its sleep
Just ahead, high over the sea
Venus glitters and winks
I am the bright and morning star
I know you are
My waiting soul
cannot think
of anything else it wants
or needs
as black silhouettes
of pelicans
fly soundlessly by
against the sky
pinkening with light
Sunrise
signifying the end
of night
My view this morning: Venus over the Atlantic just before sunrise
Pelicans, while not in this particular shot, are plentiful here. As the sky grew lighter they appeared in silhouette, gliding gracefully against it. The pelican is an ancient symbol for Christ, often depicted in Christian art.
Revelation 22, the last chapter of the Bible, references the River and Tree of Life, the healing of the nations, the end of night, and the return of Christ with the words “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last…I am the root and offspring of David, and the bright and morning star” (13; 16).
The best I can do is to describe this morning scene. The sense of peace, so often fleeting or not to be found when Earth is wide awake and churning, was honestly too deep for words. I shall hold these moments in my mind for returning to when my soul needs more nurturing, long past summer.
—with thanks to Carol Varsalona for the theme and for hosting the Spiritual Journey writers on this first Thursday in August.
Today’s spiritual journey theme is celebrating small things (thank you, Ramona, for hosting our group).
What’s been on my mind all week, however, is the brokenness of things.
I wrote a series of poem-posts on it.
In those posts on the brokenness of things I could have mentioned that the incalculable horror, loss, and grief in Uvalde still weigh heavy on my heart each day, that I mourn the state of humanity and the inability to spare children. I could have mentioned that this school year, another chapter in the continuing saga of COVID, has been the hardest yet on staff, students, and families. I could have mentioned my despair over diametrically opposed viewpoints about what’s best for students and how some educators cannot get beyond deficit thinking to see the wealth of creative and artistic gifts in the youngest among us…
I wrote instead about being a child. About breaking my arm on the school playground when I was nine. About fearing my father’s anger and being surprised by his gentleness. In an effort to comfort me he brought one of my dolls along to the orthopedic office. It embarrassed me. I felt too old for the doll. Maybe it was more a matter of not want anyone else to think I still played with dolls. Yet the gesture touched me, even then. To this day the memory of my father holding that doll, shouting at the orthopedist to stop when I screamed during the bone-setting, is one of the most indelible images of my life. There my father stood, unable to spare me more than a moment of the suffering I had to endure. I could see the intensity of his own suffering. It was written all over his pale, fierce-eyed face. His presence and the knowledge of his pain on my behalf somehow breathed a waft of courage into my terrified heart. This little stirring of courage would sustain me through a subsequent hospital stay when the bones in my arm slipped and had to be reset. It would prepare me to visit a five-year-old boy with a crushed foot across the hall as he screamed in pain and terror. It would beget empathy: me there in my wheelchair with a cast halfway to my shoulder and him in a hospital bed with crib rails, his poor damaged foot heavily bandaged and raised on a suspended sling. United in common suffering, we would find a glimmer of overcoming, in the very midst of our brokenness.
That is the thing about children. Before there are even words to express, there are keen understandings. Children are natural ambassadors of healing. They instinctively seek to comfort. Their native language is love.
I realize, now, what I was longing for when I went back to those childhood moments.
The spiritual journey is littered with broken things, broken people, broken self. I remember wondering how that little boy’s crushed foot would ever heal. At nine I imagined the bones in countless pieces and couldn’t conceive of how doctors could repair that much disconnectedness. I wondered if his foot would ever be okay…but I knew, somehow, he would be.
Which leads me, at last, to the Great Physician. Who, like my father, intervened on my behalf to alleviate my suffering, and who, unlike my father, is able to provide more than momentary relief.
I’m not sure yet if I’m done writing about the brokenness of things but here’s where I finally pick up the path of celebration. I celebrate the sustaining gift of faith. I celebrate the memory of my father, gone for twenty years now but so alive and active in my memory. I celebrate that the school year is now ending, that a desperately-awaited respite has arrived. I celebrate children.
It occurs to me that none of these are “small things.”
So, here is one: I celebrate the musicality of children.
For on the most hellish of days, when I hear them singing, I remember heaven.
For the kingdom of God belongs to such as these… Luke 18:16.
Salvador Dalí – Los niños cantores (Children singing) 1968. Cea. CC BY 2.0
It is the season
of newness
of flowering
of fresh color
of cloudless sky
so blue it hurts
it is the season
of grass
of earth
of birth
of birds
of Eastertide hatchlings
leaving nests
to wing their way
through the world
it is the season
of contemplation
of existence
of life
of purpose
of time
not standing still
and therefore being
infinitely
piercingly
precious
Micah contemplates pink sorrel and a piece of pine straw
There are
certain advantages
to having
a young son
in the mortuary business
such as when
he tells you
that you really
ought to set up
a “pre-need”
and pay for
your funeral
in advance
or
when he texts you
a picture
of a rose-gold casket
because he thinks
you will love it
(okay, it IS beautiful
—still…)
but most of all
when he brings you flowers
while you’re living
because he
remembers Mother’s Day
and he works
right next door
to a killer florist.
*******
with thanks to Two Writing Teachers community for Tuesday Slice of Life sharing
As I write, the National Anthem’s being sung at Churchill Downs for the start of the Kentucky Derby.
I’ll be pulling for a horse not favored to win.
His owner grew up in eastern North Carolina on a little stretch of road in the country. It’s paved now, but people have living memory of it being dirt… and I have an affinity for old dirt roads in these far reaches.
Once upon a time, I was a child who stayed in a little house on a dirt road in the summertime. I swung from a tire swing that Granddaddy hung from the pecan tree all studded with woodpecker holes. I swung to the deafening rise-and-fall rhythms of cicada-rattles, alongside the old dirt road across from the clearing where timeworn gravestones stood over people my grandmother knew when she was a child. I swung back and forth, round and round through the dappled afternoon, singing a favorite folk song from my father’s Peter, Paul, and Mary album…
Stewball was a racehorse
and I wish he were mine
he never drank water
he always drank wine…
The song goes on to say how the speaker bet on the gray mare and the bay, when:
ahead of them all,
came a-prancin’ and a-dancin’,
my noble Stewball.
The hoot owl, she hollered…
This past week, early one morning, I recorded a hoot owl (barred owl) hollering from the pines behind my home.
Memory runs so deep, so strong.
And so I pull for the horse named Barber Road, whose odds keep going down in these remaining moments before he gets to the gate.
Here’s to my own beloved road by another name in eastern North Carolina, and childhood, and belonging, and ol’ Stewball who wasn’t favored to win, either, but did, and to the hoot owl, the stories, the songs, and overcomings.
And here’s to you, Barber Road.
Run on.
Thoroughbred racehorse. MIKI Yoshihito. CC BY 2.0.
Update: Barber Road finished 6th. By now the world knows that Rich Strike, the least-favored horse (80-1,) took the Derby in the second-biggest upset in its 148-year history. Secretariat, the first racehorse I remember, and who still fills me with awe to the point of tears, holds the record.
May. Newness. Longer days, more sunlight. Blossom-laden trees perfume the air, geese with goslings glide across glassy ponds. Along the backroads and byways, the fields have been plowed; John Deere tractors roll over the naked earth, freshly dotted with neat rows of little green plants.
I think of sowing and the harvest to come.
My illustrious daily planner seems to be a cross between almanac and oracle these days. It offers this quote:
Small seeds of gratitude will produce a harvest of hope.
I love it for its own merit, emphasizing gratitude, which I know to be as transformative a force as love, forgiveness, and possibly awe. I envision tiny seeds of gratitude planted in the furrows of the heart, eventually producing a harvest of hope to be stacked and stored for when it is most needed in the future.
And I remember Joseph.
Unlike the chief cupbearer in Genesis 40, who “did not remember Joseph, but forgot him,” after Joseph interpreted his dream, correctly and prophetically. At the time they were in prison with the chief baker, who would be hanged by Pharaoh (yet another accurate dream interpretation by Joseph). To this point, Joseph had endured quite a bit. His mother died just after having his baby brother. His older brothers detested him for being their father’s favorite and for being “this dreamer” (37:19)… perhaps Joseph shouldn’t have told them of his dreams in which they, and their father, Jacob, all bowed to him. His brothers discussed killing him until Reuben, the oldest, intervened. They threw Joseph in a pit instead and sold him as a slave. Joseph is purchased by Potiphar, the captain of the guard of Pharaoh. Joseph serves Potiphar with great efficacy and integrity, so much so that Potiphar “left all he had in Joseph’s charge, and because of him he had no concern about anything but the food he ate” (38:6). Until Potiphar’s wife tried repeatedly to seduce him, that is, becoming so aggressive that Joseph wriggled out of his garment to get away from her… a garment she used to make the accusations which landed him in jail for thirteen years. (Note: This is the second garment that causes trouble for Joseph; the coat of many colors given to him long before by his father didn’t set so well with those brothers. Imagine their initial self-righteousness while tearing it, dipping it in goat’s blood, and presenting it to their father as evidence that Joseph was attacked and killed by wild animals…which, of course, they’d live to regret).
And Joseph is forgotten in prison until Pharaoh has a troubling dream and the restored cupbearer finally remembers him.
Here’s the thing: It was God’s plan all along for Joseph to stand before Pharaoh and interpret his dreams of coming famine, that Pharaoh should be so impressed he’d set Joseph up as prime minister of Egypt, that Joseph should execute his proposed plan for planting and harvesting:
During the seven plentiful years the earth produced abundantly, and he gathered up all the food of these seven years, which occurred in the land of Egypt, and put food in the cities. He put in every city the food from the fields around it. And Joseph stored up grain in great abundance, like the sand of the sea, until he ceased to measure it, for it could not be measured. -Genesis 41:47-49
It is this divine plan of action that eventually saves Joseph’s brothers when they come seeking food in Egypt.
Joseph weeps a lot through several chapters. When his brothers realize who he is, they bow before him (every dream having come true) in fear and trembling… and Joseph chooses reconciliation over retribution. His father is still alive; he brings the whole family to Egypt to survive the famine. The brothers again fear his wrath on the death of their father, but Joseph’s words ring with gratitude to God: “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, that many people should be kept alive…” (50:20). And so the Twelve Tribes of Israel were preserved.
Seeds of gratitude, shall we say, protect against spiritual famine, yielding hope to be relied upon in times when faith is tested, as Joseph’s was. He never wavered; this is why I love him. He’s one of my favorite Biblical figures, exhibiting integrity and faith in abundance.
In the midst of our trials, God is at work. In times of bleakness, verdant lushness awaits.
Begin with seeds of gratitude… and expect a harvest of unimaginable abundance.
Joseph Storing Grain During the Seven Years of Plenty. Patrizio Cajés (1540-1612).
*******
with thanks to my Spiritual Journey friends who write on the first Thursday of each month, and to Susan Koehler for hosting today on a theme of “abundance.”
On the last day of National Poetry Month, Sarah J. Donovan, creator of Ethical ELA, invites teacher-poets to celebrate thirty days of writing for VerseLove. In studying a collection of poems dealing with struggle and celebration about what we are told and believe about ourselves, Sarah says: “I thought a lot about how our bodies hold and shape so much of who we are.” Today we write to own that we are writers and poets, considering figurative body language, other voices that have influenced us, and our own song.
For me, writing calls from sacred places, inherently requiring, as an act of creation, sacred spaces.
As such, writing, poetry in particular, takes on a life of its own. It starts as one thing and becomes another. This may be more than one poem. I am just letting it be.
Polyhymnia at the Core
And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been.
—C.S. Lewis, “How the Adventure Ended,” The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The ghost
of my father
and grandfather
are here
in the shape
of my face
something of them
about my cheekbones
my mouth
a certain turning
My grandmother
is in my bones
those are her arms
in the mirror
fixing my hair
no denying
my mother’s eyes
the Spirit sighs
I imagine Polyhymnia
nearby
(if I can choose
my Muse)
in long cloak and veil
finger to her lips
bright eyes glimmering
silken rustlings
as she leans
whispering,
always whispering
it is with great love
that she raises
the lion’s claw
piercing every knobby layer
of my being
peeling away
until all that remains
at my tender core
is wordless song
singing there
all along
you are alive
alive alive alive
in the listening
in the remembering
in the faces
in the sacred spaces
where you have been brought
to learn
the unforced rhythms
of grace
now find your words
and be
Polyhymnia. Joseph Fagnani, 1869.
Polyhymnia’s name means “many praises.” She is the Muse of sacred poetry, hymns, and meditation.
The lion’s claw in my poem is an allusion to the referenced chapter in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where Aslan peels away the enchanted dragon skin from Eustace, restoring him to his true—and transformed—self.
“Learn the unforced rhythms of grace” is from the paraphrase of Matthew 11:28-30 in The Message.
Today on Ethical ELA Leilya Pitre invites teacher poets to “walk to your place of comfort.” The idea is to take a break, rest, relax, maybe noting things that capture your attention when you’re on a walk, or maybe walking back in time, through memories, or recalling a personal revelation that occurred on a walk. Just walk, poetically.
I love walks and have written of many… today, I meander back through memory to a place of comfort.
Walking with Granddaddy
Sunday afternoon
sidewalks aren’t crowded
no rush hour traffic
clogs the street
just a few cars
stopped at the intersection
can’t walk over to Rose’s
at the corner today
to buy a toy
like my Slinky
or click-clacks,
glass amber spheres
suspended on a string
to pull back and hear
that loud CLACK CLACK,
or a powder-blue
sachet ball made of satin
decorated like a lion’s head
with blue googly eyes
and an aqua feather-tuft mane
no, Rose’s is closed today
so is the drugstore
at the end of our row
no chocolate-covered cherries
or Peppermint Patties
or those caramel creams
that you love so
no, today we walk
hand-in-hand
across the street
while cars wait
at the lights
past the fire station
round back of the
Baptist church
to the playground
you let me climb
the big sliding board
not letting go
of my hand
until I am sitting at the top
you are there
at the bottom
when the sliding stops
you push me in the swing
until my feet touch the sky
I am a bird
flying so high
until the shadow
of the steeple-cross
grows long on the grass
hand-in-hand again
I watch our feet pass
back over the pavement
crossing the street
each step measured in time
of heart-to-heart beats
—oh, how yours to mine
still talks
so long after
our Sunday walks
Granddaddy and me on his 61st birthday.
I am two and a half.
Thirty years later:
Granddaddy with my boys and me, on his 91st birthday,
a year and a half before he died.
He is gone, but never far away.
I started this blog in March of 2016 because I knew I needed to write more. At the time I was leading writing workshop training for elementary teachers and teaching writing lessons across grade levels; I would go on to co-design workshops for teachers as writers. Although I’ve loved the craft all my life, I wasn’t always an active writer; if I was going to encourage others to write, that needed to change. One must walk the walk… I came across the Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life Story Challenge too late that year, but I’ve been participating every year thereafter. I didn’t stop writing with the daily March challenge. I kept going on SOLSC Tuesdays. I found other online groups and wrote with them, too… and I kept going when my district moved away from the writing workshop model and stopped providing opportunities for teacher-writers. I kept on going when life took sharp turns. I kept writing because memories started flowing and I didn’t want to turn them off. I kept writing as a means of choosing hope over despair and because I kept coming across interesting things to try. I began recording ideas and dreams in notebooks, all the time thinking about what I might write next…for there’s so much more to write. So many more stories to tell. I love every minute, even when the writing is hardest. I have learned that just beyond that concrete wall is a garden of plenty, if I can just find the hidden door…
I don’t think I would have kept going if I hadn’t been part of a writing community that uplifts, encourages, and inspires one another.
You are the key.
I owe a debt of gratitude to all at Two Writing Teachers.
Fellow Slicers… don’t quit now.
Write more.
When you need a challenge
write more
When challenges are too much
write more
When you need silence
write more
When silence is too much
write more
When you need to know yourself
write more
When knowing yourself is too much
write more
When you need to remember
write more
When remembering is too much
write more
When your heart is full
write more
When your heart is empty
write more
When you are grateful
write more
for you cannot be too grateful
When you are out of ideas
write more
and more ideas will come
When endings come
write more
and find beginnings
My pencil pouch
*******
Thus concludes the daily Slice of Life Story Writing Challenge with Two Writing Teachers. Thank you for thirty-one days of joy.
Tomorrow is the first day of National Poetry Month; I’ll write more in VerseLove at Ethical ELA.
lit bits and pieces 