Tag Archives: Writing

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.

Old Words of Love

15 Monday Feb 2010

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My husband wrote me twenty-four letters twenty-four years ago, shortly before we married.   I’ve re-read his letters twice before, but up until yesterday, I can’t recall ever re-reading the letters I sent to him.

I didn’t realize the time this would entail, for it’s never a simple of act of reading —  to read something so personal is to re-open a personal time capsule, one that evidences a familiar yet almost forgotten life I once led.  The letters held sweet remembrances of everyday life with my young daughters.  And the letters reminded me of all that caused me to fall in love with my husband a second time, for he wrote such timeless words of love.  They were words I needed to hear then and words I still need to hear.

But yesterday, it was running into a much younger version of myself — for in that old writing, I see only glimmers of the person I am today — that proved to be the greatest surprise.  Was this really me?  Could I have penned these words?  Yet, one passage, in particular, written on February 19, 1986, is something I could have written just yesterday:

“Sometimes I just want to make things slow down.  It seems like I’m always in a  constant rush — rush the girls to school, myself to work, etc.  It’s so easy to overlook the really important things in life, to even forget why you’re caught up in the treadmill in the first place.”

I wrote these words during a tumultuous time in my life.  I had emotionally and physically put aside one life, but had yet to begin a new one — I was living in that uncomfortable, indecisive middle ground — one letter full of hope, the next weighed down by depression.  I had been unhappy for so long, use to living with my emotions on ice, that my development seems arrested — the words appear to be written by someone far younger than the age that I was when I wrote them.

Our letters teach me that love is both messy and a miracle.  Love demands vulnerability, it requires that we stay open and it deserves more than I can possibly give.  I have come to accept that I cannot love my husband (or others in my life) as he (or they) deserve(s) to be loved — nor can my husband love me as I deserve to be loved.   But as I re-read my husband’s letters all over again, I sense the constancy of his love, even when it fails to show up in everyday words and actions.

In the midst of my reading, as I was recalling life before marriage, my husband recalled a conversation with my father thirteen years ago.  In truth, it was less a conversation than prayer of thanksgiving, as I think about it.

We were on vacation in Colorado — my husband and I had been married eleven years by then — and my husband was standing beside a stream behind our cabin when my father walked down to join him.   With no prelude in small talk, my father blurted out, “I just want to thank you, Don.  You came along at a point in Janell’s life when she wasn’t happy.  I’m not sure what would have happened had you not come into her life.” After Dad said his piece, Dad turned around and walked back up the hill  — as if there was nothing else that needed to be said.

Thirteen years ago I would not have viewed my past situation as dire as Daddy had.   But after yesterday’s reading, I can see that Daddy had cause to be concerned.  And like Dad, I am thankful that my husband came back into my life to help me pick up the pieces and put love right.

And so it is that my husband is still putting things right; for how perfect that these old words of my father’s would be shared now —   at a point when Daddy is no longer able to talk for himself —  to make me feel so loved.   Old words of love never grow old.

Whether Questions

08 Monday Feb 2010

Posted by in Life at Home, Writing

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Cars are driving into work while my husband is making his way toward Houston.

Snow too, is on its way.  Perhaps it will be a light covering this time, unlike our last two, which left 10 inches and six inches before it left town.

Meanwhile, inside my home, and inside my skin, I’m feeling restless.  I’ve this sense that I’m to do something, but I don’t know what.   Am I forgetting something?

Some questions about the future of my writing are nagging me.  I’m losing interest in the blog format, though I don’t have anything in mind to take its place, and I fear if I don’t keep at it, I won’t continue to practice.  There’s just no clear path in front of me now  — no sense of direction, like whether I should go this way or that —  I’m just floating in air like that snow floating by my window.

And where did this snow come from?  It wasn’t suppose to show up until this afternoon.  But here I sit, trance-like before its beauty, while the urgency of earlier ‘whether’ questions melt away to be replaced by new ones.

I wonder whether this snow is our morning rain forecast in disguise — and if so, whether this means that our afternoon snow is still on its way?

Oh, what does it matter.  Either way, I’m staying put. Questions will melt into answers in their own good time.  And with chores done and no meals to prepare for ‘Honey’, I’m going to have a good time too.  I’m going to watch a beautiful snow fall today.  And as I get comfy in my favorite chair, perhaps I’ll think a little about life.