Dirt

My younger son and I bought vegetable and flower seeds yesterday.  We are planning a garden.  He has decided this is something he wants to do, along with his decision to participate more often in a homeless ministry through our church.  The metaphor still applies: the seeds he plants with each cup of coffee or hot cocoa he hands out with a smile and well wishes might some day begin to grow in that person.  I am in awe of this eleven-year-old, who helps me be cognizant of the state of my dirt.

Last night I had a long, somewhat painful, very beautiful conversation with my fifteen year old, who frequently flirts with suicidal thoughts.  We talked about control, and about the fact that even when you know someone can benefit from something you have to offer, that person doesn't always want what you've got.  And how determination, perseverance, will very often be the only thing we have to offer and the very thing that is most needed.  How often do we fail when we refuse to quit?  We broke through a layer of striated rock that was cemented when I left my marriage.  It has been difficult over the years to get around to breaking up all the rocks, which are really just compacted soil, so something worthwhile would grow.  Last night, when he hugged me and told me he loves me, I felt a lot of things loosen.

This has been the message in my life of late: is my dirt loamy and granular, or hard and cracked in random places?  In my work with students, another metaphor has emerged: when we can be at peace, without desire to control, our lives work in harmony with nature and we affirm life and its right to assert itself.  When we seek to impose our will on nature, and therefore on others, we are cruel and difficult and loathsome.  I want something I can't have right now, and though it hurts, I'm letting it go.  I feel better about that than if I forced my way into the situation, which I could easily do, and took what I want.  I feel the dirt loosening that had begun to grow hardened.  I feel my brow relaxing, my mind unknot, the tears washing my dirty face.  Rick's message today was to do nothing - to not seek to accomplish or control, but to just be.  To mind the gardens with which we've been entrusted.  The prayer that followed was about becoming close again to the earth - to feel its faint murmuring through my bare feet, to allow my mind to be taken up and away from me so that something worthwhile might fill the cobwebbed void it occupies.

I have no answers.  My heart hurts, so I guess that means I'm alive.  I have my tools and I'm working.  Sometimes I don't know why, but I'm working.

Shalom.

Elegy for DG

Heavy on your brow the crown sits

Wove of brittle shale tears shed by

Wretched sheep you shepherded.

Waist-deep in shards,

We wade.

Great, scarred paws sift deceits for the carbonless diamond,

Save trembling sailors whose ships have sunk,

Stand with the smokers in solidarity,

Singe and soil wings, broken and healed,

broken and healed,

to lift the dead weight of separation.

In a misty hayfield stands a grand, live oak,

a hive of curving, gnarled parentheses.

The swaying arms cradle whispered vespers like Spanish moss,

Billowing tiny words into the air.

They are singing.

As they fall, the words twine wreaths

Round our heavy heads.

The songs, old truths, gather in braids

From heartwood, deep beneath the rings.

Longing to root in a strange, noble trust,

The branches embrace us paternally.

As we gaze up, rain falls from a clear blue sky

And we are sent to walk the long road.

From a distance, it was not a pillar of salt the gift

But the drops, like prisms, lit by a ray

And the words, “All is well”

In our ears.

“Love is such a priceless treasure that you may redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only your own sins, but the sins of others.  Go, and be not afraid.” 

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The best thing is often the hardest to do.

My face is wet with tears because someone posted a loving note - someone who has had my class before, someone I managed not to ruin.  How does that happen?  To the writer, I'm humbled by your words seemingly unfit for me, and grateful you were kind enough to tell me I helped rather than hindered you.  I wish you peace in your long journey, wherever it takes you, warning you that being true to yourself is an often lonely but always worthwhile pursuit.  Please keep in touch and let me know how it goes.  And thank you for the grace you gave me.  It meant a great deal to me.

And the best thing?  That isn't what we want to do; it is the thing we avoid, that we are destined for, perhaps, that we're drawn to inexplicably.  The thing we put relationships and medications in the way of, and yet it seeks us, to our dying day it seeks us and is relentless in its murmurings of what's undone.  That nagging thing we fear because it is for us to do alone, and that's the last place we want to be for long.  And yet there it is, glorious and terrifying and waiting - always waiting, without sound, without tiring.  I am lonely right now, trying to look away from it.  But I know why I'm out here by myself.  It hurts, and I'm tired, but I'm not exhausted.  I've known this would happen for years, and now I finally believe that I won't ever get away from it.  No position, no amount of time, no person can remove it.  My job is to surrender to it, to allow it to take me into the words and the paint and trust in what happens.  It isn't up to me, anyway.  "If you're playing too small a game, you'll sabotage the game you're in just to have something to do."  Peter McWilliams.

Shalom.