Abide the Winter

Dried leaves crunching under my shoes. Broken sticks blown down. A pink rose petal in a puddle.The only color in the woods, the tawny beech leaves. Spare, stark, clean and simple : winter.

The darkness comes and will reach its depth at the solstice. By then we will be looking for more brightness beyond colored Christmas lights. Windham Hill artists present a song, "Abide the Winter". Perhaps we can do more than abide it. Maybe we can poke around in the darkness of this bitter season and find bright shining objects.That is what I will do this Advent.

As I listen to the music of the above named group,  I think of a call I made today to a person that I have met just a few times.The last time was at the doctor's office where I was dreading the discomfort of a mammogram. I know Irma from church and, that day, she walked up and whispered: "I have breast cancer."This dear soul has been battling this disease off and on for years. She is now 80 and you will find no person on this earth who is more alive and joyful.And loving.It is an honor to breath the same air as she.Today, her news was good, she has stopped taking some medicine and is feeling well enough to go to church again.

As we closed the conversation, I told her about the new baby Graham that arrived last month."Oh" she said, "he must have a warm hat and a blanket", which she will make.Light.

Advent is the season of waiting for the coming. And in the rich dichotomy that my faith provides: He is coming and He is here.The Light.

on the grace train...

 



It always starts with a nudge.

"Go and talk to her."So I leave my pew, make my way up to the wooden statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe and touching her feet I whisper :"Help." Her gaze is off to the right, eyes half closed but I know she hears.

Our chats are brief .She advises patience, peace and always prayer. I nod.

What I have brought to her is a painful situation in my family.New and troubling.The holiday time of family has become sorrowful. When I walk away from our talk, it is with the confidence that I just need to keep my eyes open and watch. My mood lifts. I know I have been heard.

When I get home from Mass, I open my e-mails and find one from a high school friend who reads this blog. I have not heard from Alice in months. My mouth falls open when I read the link she has sent me. It is an interview with a Jewish, atheist Harvard professor named Roy Schoeman, whose heart was converted when Mary appeared to him and they had a chat. Alice was looking for a music video on you tube when she happened on the conversion video and sent it on. Mary at work.

That day, an e-mail and then in awhile, a call and the healing has begun.

Hail Mary, full of grace.

an American original

The wind whips fiercely as she stumbles along the desert floor. It is winter and the white sun gives light but little warmth. It suits her mood. She has always been drawn to the dry, empty waste that is the West. Here poets write, painters sit and saints pray. She is none of these. She has come to seek his bones.

He has been missing for over 80 years; but she hears his voice sometimes. Is it that face, full of youth and maleness? Or is it the picture of his burros, abandoned and grazing idly by the stream ?Or is it enough that he was a young painter and poet who cut all  ties to be as free as the eagle? She is haunted.

This young man took the road less traveled and left these words behind: "I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear."By foot and burro he would walk the empty spaces of Utah and the surrounding states for months, seeing no one.Setting up his easel occasionally and with great simplicity, he painted what he saw.

"Where is Everett," his parents in California were asked time and again."Oh, he's wandering ", they always said." We send him money to a post office in Utah and that keeps him going. He comes home once in a while."And then all contact ended in 1934.Silence.No word. The world empty of Everett Ruess. Men searched for years. Bones were found , not his; theories expounded. The poet never found , never seen again. Did he cry out at the end? Did he regret his wildness?

His last words answer:, "I'll never stop wandering and when the time comes, I'll find the wildest, most desolate spot there is."He was 20 years old.

Summertime in Venice

Have you ever watched a movie that broke your heart ?

When I was a teenager, that movie was "Summertime in Venice" with Kate Hepburn. Kate played the part of a lonely spinster who saved her money for a solo trip to Italy .I can see her now, after arriving, throwing open the doors of her room enchanted by the piazza below.
Venice.
And then later, eating with a married couple on that same piazza feeling like a fifth wheel. Trying desperately to fit in somewhere. .

It seemed to me that I rather looked like her but without the glorious high cheek bones. Slender, freckled, unremarkable hair., knobby knees .We were nothing like the busty stars of that day; Marilyn, Jayne, and Sophia.
Kate and I.

I have to confess that I always thought I would be a spinster, an unmarried lady, still on the shelf , alone. I hadn't thought of this specter, that had hung over me for many years, until the other night. It all came to mind as I looked around the restaurant where my family was celebrating my milestone birthday this month. Another woman was partying at another table with female friends, relatives (?) She had her sparkling crown on her head as they sang lustily to honor her day. I looked around our table, with just half my family.there, the other two grown children being away.My heart swelled. How could I tell them what having this circle means to me? A marriage of over 50 years through turmoil and calm , a place where I belong with arms that hold and protect. A son and a daughter who, no matter what, will be there for me. A daughter-in-law who is raising my two grandchildren with wisdom and love; the little grands who call me Grandma Graham. So proud to be that.

The last scene of that movie is so poignant. Kate is leaving on a train to begin her journey back to America and in the distance, her married Italian lover is racing to hand her a gift. A perfect white flower. He cannot reach her, but it's O.K.,she sees it and waves in joy. For a season, she had been loved. A season, a lifetime, I am grateful beyond telling.

This is all that matters

The dragonfly visits.Whenever I leave the house , he swirls nearby. A garden friend whose colors often make me smile. Who knew they come in blue, green , yellow and black?.They enchant me and I am grateful that I have time to notice.They flit, then light and wait, for a traveling food supply, I suppose.

How like those little insects are my thoughts, going here and there but yesterday I had a revelation. I should know this of course but something made it very real and I am holding tightly to this knowing. I offer it to all who drop by.

In the Catholic Church, the belief is that the bread consecrated at Mass becomes the body of Christ, Him and real. Not a symbol. This is something I have accepted without understanding how this can be so.What in the natural world is like this phenomenon ? It is like believing that God had no beginning and will have no end: always was , always will be. When I explained this to my 5 year old granddaughter, she did a head slap and walked away.I know, it's hard.

Perhaps by just putting this belief in my pocket for another day, I was rewarded. On retreat in Alabama a few years ago, I knelt before the host in the monstrance on the altar and with eyes closed, I heard this: "This is all that matters." If you were next to me and spoke, it wouldn't have been as clear as this. And the only reason the Host would matter is if it is Christ. I believe.

Now to the other day.I was fretting over some slight, some sharp tone headed my way, a  feeling of being overlooked and I brought that to prayer.This is what was given to me:.".if you have done your best, as you know it, the rest is out of your hands.Seek first the kingdom and leave the rest at My feet. It is of no consequence." What freedom! To know, really know that I have a choice about these matters.I can dwell on the hurts or release them and focus on what, in the end, IS all that matters.

where you are going....

Art by Everett Ruess, Desert Light.

"I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

 I found these lines while reading a book about writing for the Fall group that starts in September. I have had some solitude lately with my husband gone helping one of our sons.The time on the porch in the cool morning perched in a wicker chair is wonderful. I stop reading to feel the breeze on my cheeks and think there are no better moments than these.

The words at the beginning were written by the American icon, Henry David Thoreau. I visited his grave once on an autumn day in New England. The memory is a happy one.We, my husband and I, were tired from the drive and the dogs that kept us awake the night before.We slogged through the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, looking for Poets Hill and I was ready to give up. John, however, kept at it because he knew how much it meant to me. Finally, there was the Thoreau family plot. Holy ground.

I noticed something right away that touched me.The stones just had the first names of Henry and his siblings.These are old stones and grey. But unlike the others, Henry's stone was white on the top and I immediately knew why. Pilgrims like myself feel compelled to stroke the top of his stone, to connect, and thus it is rendered almost clean. In front of the stone someone had left a small bright orange pumpkin.A gift for a poet, a solitary, that has touched something deep in me.

Alone, in the quiet, is the only place that I can hear the Voice, the lover, comforter, guide, the one who encourages. In the stillness , face turned away from everything, pen in hand, yesterday I heard this. I offer it in love to all who may need to hear:

"Once you were lost, hanging by a thread.You remember those times of pain and shame.
See where you are now. All the things that hurt can be looked back on and forgotten.Where you are going, nothing like that exists, even in memory."

the legend of Jingwei

Across the room she stood looking so healthy, way beyond what I knew.I had heard about her deep faith and wanted to know this beautiful, blond young woman.We fell into an unexpected friendship.

The painting above depicts the Chinese tale of Namu, a young girl who is playing  in the Eastern Sea. She was unable to reach shore and drowned.She is then transformed into a bird called Jingwei. She lives on Departing Doves Mountain among the mulberry trees.Namu now resembles a crow with a patterned head, white beak and red feet She regularly carries twigs and stones to the sea in an effort to fill it up.The sea laughs at her and she answers that she will spend the next hundred million years filling up the sea, so no one else will share her fate. From this myth comes the Chinese chegyo idiom which means Jingwei tries to fill the sea or dogged determination and perseverance in the face of seemingly impossible odds.

My friend Michele was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005  when she returned from her honeymoon. The honey of that trip left her shortly thereafter. After treatments, she was doing well but in 2010 her cancer returned with a vengeance. At that time she was given 3-5 years .That was 8 years ago, She fights, she hopes, she endures.

In the midst of her journey, she has been led to produce beauty products specifically for cancer survivors whose skin has been affected by chemotherapy. She now goes to a retirement facility and gives facials weekly. But what she brings is her story. One that has touched me so deeply that I can't explain it. In the painting above, my sweet girl stands facing that dragon which is cancer. Through all of this, she has a heart filled with appreciation. Her most recent note says this: "I am so grateful to the Lord , especially for putting all these angels in my life.." Those are the white doves swirling about her speaking words of love as she faces her journey.