Category Archives: Soul Care

No Better Place

31 Wednesday Mar 2010

Posted by in In the Garden, Life at Home, Soul Care

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I can think of no better place to spend Holy Week than down on my knees, out in the garden.

I’ve devoted the better part of the last three days to my garden; I’ve trimmed, cleaned up leaf debris and planted a few bulbs.  Except for planting annuals, which will need to wait for a few more days, my garden is reading for its Spring growing fling.

Caring for my small Mesta Park garden is no full-time job.  After caring for lawn and gardens at our Texas home — which covered almost half an acre, I’m almost embarrassed to call what I do here in Mesta Park ‘gardening.’

Today, with all my ‘gardening’ chores done, but with leftover desire to keep gardening, I rang up the owner of the duplex next door today to see if I could come over and play in his dirt.  He’s so pleased with what we did together last fall — with his money and my time — that I learned I’m to come over any time I want.

So now, in addition to my own property, I have two duplexes whose front yards I care for on the block, counting the ‘Cinderella’ duplex across the street.  These three are still only half of what I cared for in Texas.  It’s my own little ministry, where I share my know-how and love of gardening with some good neighbors.  It’s just me and God creating a little beauty together.

It feels good to work with my hands, to think creatively off of the written page.  The down-side, for my husband anyways, is that I’ve been so tired, we’ve gone out to eat the last three evenings.

Tonight, after dinner, my husband suggested an evening walk with the dogs.  It was so pretty, I had to run back in to grab my camera.  It was quiet — we walked in silence — covered by the light from old streetlamps.  The sky was rosy pink when we began and soft cornflower blue by the time we got home.

On days like these, I can think of no better place to live than in this old neighborhood.

Life of Pi

21 Sunday Mar 2010

Posted by in Good Reads, Life at Home, Prayer, Soul Care, Writing

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My friend Connie couldn’t stop talking about this book.

That was seven years ago.  Yet, even now, I remember how Connie’s eyes shined and how my normally articulate book-loving friend stumbled for words when attempting to describe how this story made her feel.  Maybe it was this unfamiliar stumbling that caused Connie to pick up the book a second time.

But it was Connie’s third reading that finally garnered my attention.  Connie’s action, rather than her words, became  an enthusiastic endorsement that led me to plunk down fourteen dollars to possess my own personal copy of Yann Martel’s prize-winning novel, Life of Pi.

Like most of my book purchases, I promptly gave it a home on my bookshelves, to age and gather dust like fine wine.  The intent was to read it someday —  once I had aged and the words had aged, and once I came into an age of more time and less busyness.   My hope was that when someday arrived, once this book and I came to know one another, that my eyes too would shine and my tongue would stumble for lack of words.

Of course, my someday shriveled up and died.   There are always other words to read and enough tasks to fill any day.  Had it not been for the words of another “Connie,” my someday ship would still be off at sea.  It was three weeks ago that, words written by the author of Ripple Effects, stirred me to action:  I left my writing desk, walked down the stairs, across my living room to enter my book cellar of a library.  I scanned, I found, I pulled, I dusted and carried the book upstairs to place on my nightstand, to live beside other books of more serious intentions.

I had several books in front of it — I was finishing up one novel and had required reading for my Monday night class.  So I didn’t begin the story of Pi until a week ago.  Until yesterday, I read at the slow rate of a few pages a night.  But yesterday’s surprise snowfall offered me the perfect someday to finish the story, which I did in the company of three dogs, a soft reading lamp and a few hours of the clock.

“I have a story that will make you believe in God.” So Martel begins his story — or should I say stories — because two stories grow out of book — and we the readers, get to pick which version we wish to carry with us.  Is this a story about God and a young boy, a story about impossible miracles and providence?  Or is the story a simple human tragedy with a good ending?

My husband had to come up the stairs to remind me when it was time for us to eat.  The dogs had to remind me when it was time for them to eat.  I read right through the dog’s dinner bell, which thankfully, my husband answered.  And when I finished this story, I didn’t even bother to describe its impact on me.

Like all good stories, I don’t think we really know what seeds are sown from words freshly read.  It’s only with time and reflection and space and more time that thoughts of the reader and the writer integrate — likes seeds in soil — and either something grows from the planting or it doesn’t.  Perhaps like live seed, it depends upon how much nurture the seeds receive.

Yet there are twinges of thoughts that come as one takes in the words of a great story.  Mine was that the Life of Pi could be shorthand for a life of piety, for surely, the young boy Pi is pious in the best sense of the word — as one who has a heart devoted singularly to God, as one who punctuates his daily life with prayer, who has a heart for God that even allows him to love that murderer Richard Parker.  And is it not appropriate, that Pi’s nickname represents an infinite number, since piety and matters of the heart should be a never-ending story?

I can’t say whether this is a story that will make one believe in God.  But I know it’s a great story, and that it reminds me of other great stories in another great book — stories like the one about Adam, the first zookeeper, and Noah, another zookeeper and his Ark full of animals and Job, who was not a zookeeper, but suffered enough tragedy that led him to question the reasons for life and his feelings about God.

My friend Connie was right seven years ago.  The book begs a second reading.  Someday.

The House That Jack Built

14 Sunday Mar 2010

Posted by in Home Restoration, Life at Home, Soul Care, Writing

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What would I do if I won the lottery tomorrow?

It was a question I was asked several weeks ago by my spiritual director.  I had been talking about feeling stuck.  Maybe I was whining, because God knows, I have been struggling a little of late.  All the activities that once brought me great joy no longer do.  Whether its writing, spiritual direction training, even gardening – all has lost its luster.

That question has proved life-giving.  So maybe it’s not so bad to be stalled, since I’ve taken the last two weeks to take stock of where I am and where I want to be, five years down the road.  I’ve asked myself questions like, would I travel around the world?  Would my husband and I retire to some little lake house a little further south?  Would I continue to garden and to write?  Can I see myself sitting as spiritual director for fellow seekers?  Oddly enough, I can respond ‘yes’ to all of these questions.

But strangely, the thing I would most like to do in the world, if money were no object, is to buy old unloved houses and restore them.  And would you believe I said this to Curt, with no thought whatsoever, on the very night he first posed his ‘litmus’ test question.  And the answer is really no different now, after two weeks of pondering.

So imagine my surprise, when a week ago, my sister told me that she wanted to try to keep rather than sell my parent’s former home.  The house that my father Jack built twenty-five years ago is going to get rebuilt from top to bottom; my sister plans to  replace the roof, windows, kitchen appliances and redecorate surfaces, like walls, flooring, ceilings.

This property that my sister inherited has been in my mother’s family since the late forties — my sister and I ran across the warranty deed when we were clearing out the house last week.  I believe my grandparents bought the house from one of my great uncles — though, originally, I understand the house belonged to the parents of two great-aunts.

The original home purchased by my grandparents was demolished over ten years ago, though the front porch of that original home still stands.  My mother began a garden around that old porch and a new grape arbor I had built nearby.  And my sister, being the gardener that she is, will likely refurbish and add to the small garden our mother left behind.

My sister will be a wonderful caretaker of the property.  Christi knows exactly what color she wants to paint the exterior — and she has so many ideas for the inside.  And yesterday, while Christi and I were painting the front sitting room a lovely shade that can only be described as the color of homemade vanilla ice cream, Christi asked me to help her.

All I can say it that even though the house is my sister’s and not mine, I feel as if I’ve just won the lottery.