Tag Archives: Soul Care

Rosie Posies Ashes Down

18 Thursday Feb 2010

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

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Ring around the rosie,
A pocket full of posies.
Ashes, ashes
We all fall down.
– Old Nursery Rhyme

It was no mystery, yesterday, as to why I couldn’t write.

I had allowed a situation to eat away at me and had nothing left to give.  What began in a blinding moment led in the end to self-betrayal, when I forgot who I was and what I stood for.

I can offer excuses.  I was tired.  With three hours sleep and two hours of tossing and turning, I gave up hope and got out of bed at four o’clock.   And then, tired as I was, I allowed emotion and my being on the right side of the law to cloud my thinking when I made an important telephone call five hours later. None of these rationalizations console me.

So rather than think or stew about the dreadful situation, as tired as I was, I began to clean my house.  The house was due for a spa day and it got what it deserved, —  sweeping, dusting, mopping — that down-on-my-knees deep cleaning that even took me to the scary basement before I circled the house over and over, like an old-fashioned ring around the rosie…. until all I could do was fall down.

Too tired to clean anymore, I collapsed in my favorite chair and cleaned up the backlog of recorded gardening programs on my DVR.  And after that, rather than going to Ash Wednesday services to receive a cross of ashes on my forehead, I watched more television with ashes in my mouth, for words I wished I had not spoken in that early morning telephone call.  With no words to write, I went to bed; and amazing as it now seems, I slept like a young school girl free of trouble and cares.

This morning, I woke up refreshed, ready to face what I could not bear yesterday.  And alone with my thoughts, a cup of coffee and an empty page in my journal, I began to unravel tension into the most marvelous insight:  It was not too late to set the situation right.

It was not too late to stop hiding behind a law that was there to protect me.   This wrong —  that I lost sleep over yesterday, that had so clouded my thinking, which could not be shed in so many acts of housecleaning, this wrong that the legal statutes say is not mine to set right — could still be made right as long as I allowed love to have its way.  And so it happened that I bowed to love.

Something happened shortly after I made the call.  I’ll call that something love — a warmth of love that flooded my insides from head to toe.  I wish I could describe more clearly what exactly I mean by this, but I can’t.  I can only say that I felt washed by grace, that the burden I had wrestled with yesterday was lifted and that these words are pouring out faster than I can now write.

Afterwards, I sat still.  I sat with the phone receiver still beside me, and my favorite biblical passage on love — the one that resides in those first twenty-five verses of the seventeenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel — open on my lap.

I am left with this sense that there are some things we do in life for no good reason but love.  These actions make no common sense.  Nor do they make good business sense.  Love alone can trump all our senses.

And giving in to love, I feel more like my old self.   Or maybe it would be truer to say I feel better than my old self.  For surely something Holy was leading me toward that better way of love, just as surely as something was teaching me that the better way to mark Ash Wednesday was with ashes on my forehead rather than ashes on my tongue.

I prefer those Ash Wednesday words I wrote in the sand a year ago.

Wholly Listening

04 Thursday Feb 2010

Posted by in Life at Home, Soul Care, Writing

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Regret closes in.

What door did I just close?  What would have happened had I not been so quick on the tongue-trigger?  What might have been said had I waited in silence?

Of course, conversations happen fast.  The words of another don’t quite sink in before the moment is gone.  It’s only later that the loss is felt, only later that regret fills in the hole of what might have been.  And as much as we’d like to retrace our words back to the time of impending revelation, the opening we glimpsed too late  is gone.

It’s funny — in an ironic, sad sort of way —  that it was just last night when I was talking to my husband about when, in my writing, I most sense the presence of the Holy.  Inevitably, it comes through telling stories of  times when life catches us by surprise, when we forget ourselves enough that we simply react, without fully processing what it is we should do.  Or what it is we should say.

For a moment, we are immersed by whole truth.   Unbridled hurt or anger flares up and life shakes lose a tear.  We feel naked and exposed.  Or sometimes we’re just so darn giddy that if we don’t embarrass ourselves by our victory jigs (after we’ve come to our good senses), then we have surely embarrassed friends or family or complete strangers with our demonstrations of foolish and unabridged joy.

Sacred moments catch us by surprise, and often, I realize only later that I may have closed a door on something important.  It happens more often than I would like and perhaps, more often than I know.  Last night it happened with my brother’s unexpected call.

Jon never calls on Wednesday and never so close to bedtime.  Looking back on it, I guess he was in the midst of  a whole-truth moment, where he simply had to tell me something, in spite of the fact that he was calling at the wrong hour or on the wrong evening.

I can’t recall Jon’s exact words but he called to thank me for bringing a holy listener into his life.  Jon wanted to tell me about  their first meeting and how much he had enjoyed being with Jim.  On some level, I sensed the weight of  unprocessed longing in the words expressed and the words that may have come next.  But I’ll never know since I jumped into the silence with words that should have waited on the weightier words of my brother.

Silence is indeed golden.  It helps us be better listeners.  It gives us time to absorb.  It gives the one speaking time to clarify and expand.  If truth is resting on the tip of a tongue, silences invites the truth to slip out in the open.

With silence, our listening can become whole.  And in the  listening, when the speaker loses all track of  time and forgets about the listener and for a moment, even forget about himself, the listening become something else.  Holy.

Ice Storm Strata

31 Sunday Jan 2010

Posted by in Life at Home, Soul Care, The Great Outdoors

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Ice pelts my window.

It calls me to relive memories of that earlier ice storm, which paralyzed our city and sent the National Guard with chain saws to our front yard.  I am haunted by the remains of those once beautiful trees.  But no matter; the trees were blocking traffic and what was dead had to be removed to allow life to return to the neighborhood.

But even now I see those decapitated trees.  We were lucky a tree did not hit our house; two weeks earlier, I had hired an arborist to remove a weak Siberian Elm from the back yard, whose wide network of limbs covered the back west of our home and the east half of our neighbor’s.  The healthier Siberian Elm in the front did not survive.

Last year’s ice storm, mild by comparison, woke me from a deep sleep.  Hearing the ice made me edgy.  And now this most recent ice storm, the one of two days ago, has converged to rest on top of two years of ice-storm memories.  Is there no disaster relief?  How many stratum will eventually build up before I can shake the memories surrounding that first devastating ice storm – the one of December 9, 2007?

I recall the date with ease.  It is not ancient history, after all.  But even if it were, I fear time will not lessen its grip over me.  Last year’s tossing and turning, as ice slammed against our rooftop, forced me from a warm bed to release sleep-robbing thoughts on paper. “Stop your whining,” I told them then.  And for a while, they grew still.

But the thoughts follow in the wake of every ice storm.  They are relentless.  There is nothing to fear, I tell myself.  Compared to many in the neighborhood, our losses were minor two years ago — no heat and power for three days and one old Elm tree gone forever — if we survived once, we can survive again.

But I wonder now, as I wondered then, whether the brevity of our suffering was a rare sort of grace given to those in mourning.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

Two days before the 2007 storm hit, we laid my mother’s body to rest.  And because the ice storm followed mom’s death so closely, I fear I may forever associate one with the other.   Will I always wake up at night when I hear ice hitting the rooftop?  Will I always recall that moment of dark fancy – while living in our unlit cold home during the 2007 storm – when I wondered whether slinging around ice was mom’s way of venting anger from the grave, in the same way she infrequently resorted to slinging around a pot or pan, or slamming a door or drawer to vent her anger at life?

Mom was not angry about dying.  She had told my sister – a few months before her stroke, with no forecast of death close in hand – that she was ready to die.  If others of us weren’t as ready, then surely the inevitably of death’s appearance could make us so.

But making ready is not always easy.  When storms are coming, people prepare to live life amidst destruction, buying batteries and water and ready-to-eat food.  When the storm is death, we each prepare in our own ways.  My way involved tears.  Lots of tears.  I cried for an entire week, praying for a miracle, blubbering by my mother’s deathbed, until I finally told her the day before she died, that it was okay it she needed ‘to go.’

Swifter than any could have imagined, Mom died.  My maternal side of the family tree was gone.  The strong oak that I could never imagine being without, the tree I liked to lean upon to gather strength, was felled by death.  When the hospital called, we couldn’t get there fast enough.  We went anyway.  She died on a Wednesday night and an hour later we gathered by her bedside to whisper our final goodbyes.  We buried her two days later.  It was a cold Friday afternoon.

After six weeks of hope and one week of grief, all within the confines of an ICU room, I was ready to get on with the business of living.  But nature had other ideas.  That life-stopping ice storm came, and I was robbed of all mind-numbing distractions.  No television.  No books to read in an unlit house.  I was left alone to grieve in the dark and cold.

And so the memories come with every ice storm; the grief spigot opens to invite me to chip away at the remains of grief.  Yet, with tender mercy, it also invites me to remember Mom’s life and the way she absolutely loved to look out her window on falling snow.  And so last Thursday, in honor of Mom, I stopped life to look out my window.  And it was beautiful.  Then standing still, I listened.  The ice no longer sounded like pots and pans banging.  Instead, I heard hundreds of little bugs crashing into my windshield.

Someday, I think, the ice will become itself again.