Work

·      Marge Piercy's poem, “To Be Of Use” – Considering work

A  woodpecker works to find breakfast in a tree before me.  Beside the river, sandbars and a shallow remnant lie alongside each other.  Sparrows fall like leaves.  The air is silent.  “The thing worth doing well done” – preparing food, loving a child, choosing a word, painting what is felt more than seen, listening – is beautiful and true and necessary.  Her parting line – “the pitcher cries for water to carry and the person for work that is real” – speaks to me in a strong, clear voice of necessity, of exasperation at the premise of a wasted life, at the ways in which our culture advocates medication because disappointment is the assumed human norm.  When we have work to do, however, we can heal.  We find purpose.  The tiny head taps in rapid succession, cheeping staccato words to another close by.  The work is what it is – necessary for life, without lament or evasion.  He is wondrous fair – bright red head, black and white horizontally striped body, bright light through a blind.  He taps, chirps, taps, chirps.  Work.  Not workaholism, but work as legitimate and fulfilling.  Work as nourishing and necessary.  Work as cleansing and instructive.  My longing – our longing – for legitimate work is driven by a desire to create, to ease, to mend, to tend, to care for, to leave a mark.

Thresholds

My neglect of the work here is inexplicable; but as I, at last, consider why I took an unintentional sabbatical from writing, I see that this year was a challenge.  Someone special, who I didn't understand in the past, came forth again, patient and earnest, awaiting the right time.  As I heard my qualms and fears and truths tumble forth, I realized love for this man, someone who could actually return it and make my life better by being in it.  He asked me to marry him.  I accepted.  That commitment has given us the opportunity to explore an intimacy that makes real for the first time the promise of the Holy Spirit.  I am surprised each day that such a person exists, that as my confusion surfaces, it bursts like so many bubbles in a simmering pot.  The experience grows stronger and more elastic each day, that I might extend myself on his behalf to help and grow him, as I am grown through this loving.  Thank You.  I squeeze my eyes shut as I hold my heart open, a little bird caught in the wind.  He cups his hand around me, shielding me, caressing me, reminding me of his constancy.

I stand in awe of my sons, strong and tall and noble as trees.  They love and understand and reach for me even in my prickliness.  They strive and evolve despite the difficulty of the world and its ridiculous demands.  They are fine in a way I don't understand, and their origins are confusing...who switched my babies?  I do not deserve them, but am grateful beyond expression.  They love me so well.  Richard loves them, too.

My work is, as always, a beautiful gift.  I leave it in bus stations, in the backs of friends' cars, out in the rain, and still it gives back so much more than I give it.  Because there is so much of it, and because I now have a husband and son-to-be as well as my own progeny, the work and attention required precludes research or art-making.  I miss them both, realizing they need their time for my mental and spiritual health.

Richard goes to Afghanistan next week for five months.  I have always thought war was a part of the human path to peace through brutality, a poor substitute for real change.  He has helped me see that there's a little more to it than that, and that there are very real threats to our way of life - very real people who hate Americans enough to kill as many as they can, indiscriminately, and see it as a path to Heaven.  I have come full circle in my mourning it, seeing that he wants to go and needs to.  My challenge, in his absence, is to be a mother to his son who knows only that a mother figure would steal from her own children to satisfy her own greed.  I ask for grace to help my ignorance and fear.

My personal challenge is to do something about my own excuses - my own potentially detrimental habits, my own cynicism and sarcasm, my own rough edges, my own personal wars.  Until I do, my rhetoric is hypocritical and I pretend.

Shalom.

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.

In Memoriam

Today we celebrate the abbreviated life of David Gentiles.  I don't understand it, nor do I believe I won't see him again, arms folded across his chest, listening intently, bursting into animated gesticulation without warning. Surely during his memorial, fittingly on a baseball field, he will jump up from the stands and proclaim it all a farce, hugging everyone and laughing because we are all together.

What I do understand is that it is my turn to do those things myself that I depended on David for: the dirty jobs he shouldered without complaint, the attention he paid without tiring, the trials he endured alone.  It is now my challenge to step up and do as needs doing, to love as needs loving, behaviors I'm afraid of.


It is hard to say or see right now, but I somehow trust in shalom: all must be as it should be.

A lament

Someone beloved and critically important in my faith community was injured today, and lies in critical condition in an intensive care unit. It doesn't really matter the how or the why; the what sat in my darkened car with me as I returned home from a vigil for him, and I'm sure I'll find it waiting there in the morning when I go back.

To think of him is to think of sanctuary. He has protected me on more than one occasion. I had the privilege of teaching one of his daughters, the same clear blue light in her eyes that illumines his own (though I use "teaching" loosely here: Calla had everything she'd ever need when she came to me at 17). When he prays, knots loosen and problems resolve. When he speaks, tears spring from his eyes as life flows through him, unimpeded. We all see him as an angel, lover of baseball and flawed humanity.

My words are hollow. If prayer is presence, my heart is open and listening, Lord, and that hurts, but it is good. I lift him up to You. I lift up his family, his countless friends, his sacred, beautiful life.

Shalom.