April morning snowstorm haiku

"thirty-six degrees,"
the silver column shivers
like my pinking neck

wafting from the sky,
birds and flakes nearing feeders
jostle for position

fragrant breakfast tea
cozy in my idling car
steams up the windshield

gray-faced commuters
dodge and weave through slushy lanes
with colorless protest

Ack.

Ack. Ack.
Ptooie.

Poetic women and muscular birds

I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We're here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don't have time to carry grudges; you don't have time to cling to the need to be right.
--Anne Lamott

It snowed last night. It was the wet stuff, the kind that perches on anything that will stand still, making doilies out of the trees: the perfect backdrop for the cardinals at Beloved's feeder. What a gift to discover that scene as I peered over my yogurt this morning, especially since I'm a little bit anxious at present. I'm in a situation that has abraded some emotional scar tissue...hearing an echo of my heart at its most broken, reminded of a time in the not-so-distant past when I was most decidedly Not At My Best.

The difference, this time, is that I am older, wiser and less invested in my own need to be right. I'm better at taking care of myself, this time around; though this is a stressful situation, I'm finding that I'm not unhinged by it as I was last time. I truly am hearing an echo, instead of experiencing the pain afresh. That's helpful. That little cardinal this morning was able to give some of my baggage a good shove, too; he was surprisingly strong. :-)

I think Anne Lamott is right, and most of the time it's reasonably easy for me to keep track of the beauty in my life; it is abundant, and I'm richly blessed. And yet...sometimes it just isn't possible or appropriate to dance. One of my dear ones is in that place right now. She's been in a chronically painful situation for some months, and though she's moved out of harm's way, there is substantial grief, anger and loss with which she must grapple on her way back to the dance. And the best the rest of us can do is to say, "Talk, and we'll listen. Cry, and we'll hold your hand. Wait for this to pass, and just keep breathing in and out, because the music is still playing. You'll be able to enjoy it again, once that roaring in your ears stops."

My friend is not religious, but we seem to just get one another anyway. The part of me that lives in theological language lives poetically in her, and she has a lovely, honest, artistic spirit that inspires and enriches me. Further, she is a deeply kind and generous soul, whom I know to be resilient. She has faced down larger beasts than this one and survived...flourished.

She reminds me of another wise woman/poet to whom I got to listen last week: Maya Angelou appeared at Orchestra Hall, and Beloved and I went to hear her. She told a number of her own stories, read from her work, and best of all, she sang to us. It went straight to my church musician's heart that the thematic thread tying the evening together was her repeated refrain of "This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine." She told us about the little bits of other people's light that have illumined her own darknesses. She called out the light in each of us and reminded us of our imperative as human beings to blow on those sparks, for all our sakes.

It was a little bit of the bright Epiphany season, interpolated into somber Lent. Luminous. Powerful. Brimming with hope. And this piece of Maya's light is with me still:

Don't carry with you unforgiveness.
Refuse to pay its passage.
As soon as is possible, let it go.

And so I can say to my friend with some assurance that she will find her way through this particular wilderness, because I've been there, too--and my light did not die out. I can keep reminding her that the anger and sadness and screaming injustice she's experiencing at this moment will not define the rest of her days. I can point her toward the day, not too long from now, when she'll be able to offload that heavy cargo...when something as small and bright and fleet as a bird will help with the heavy lifting, bringing her back to the dance.

Emily Dickinson was right: hope is the thing with feathers.

Friday five: signs of hope

I'm a fan of the RevGalBlogPals, particularly LutheranChik (we lesbian Lutherans have to stick together!). Every Friday, they do a "Friday Five"--questions to think about a bit. I really like this week's theme, so I'm going to hop on their bandwagon and answer them, too.

If you're reading this, consider yourself tagged.

Because anything that points us toward hope is good.

1. Sign of hope?
After years (decades?) of apathy, the American electorate has awakened, stretched, looked around, and decided that they do care, after all, about how the country's being run--and are NOT happy with its current direction. Better still, they're finding ways to make themselves heard. Alleluia.

2. A word of light in a dark place?
Can't help but hear the sopranos of my church choir, as we're working up Faure's Requiem for Holy Week, singing "Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine" (let your eternal light shine upon them, O Lord). Lovely, lovely moment in the Agnus Dei--go & listen to it, if you have a recording! It's a moment where the music turns on a dime, and their entrance is a musical shaft of light breaking through clouds of grief, like in the above photo. (After all, a requiem is a Mass for the dead). Mmmmm.

Also, the examples of several dear ones gracefully working through/waiting out various stages of grief with various causes is inspirational to me without fail. (See posting What You Get.)

3. A sign of spring?
The lilac bushes at the side of my driveway have BUDS on them, despite the fact that it's been below zero for a weirdly long time. Talk about perseverance in the face of adversity! :-) Oh, and it's 21 degrees right now, according to the thermometer on my garage. Just maybe, spring will come after all.

4. Challenging/surprising?
Dealing simultaneously with Beloved's family's issues with our Horrifying Gay Marriage and the recurrence of her mother's cancer is challenging. Prayers would be gratefully accepted here.

5. Share a hope for the coming week/month/year...
There are so many:

• health for many ailing loved ones
• healing for loved ones in grief
• progress in relationships with Beloved's family
  
• a completely new administration in the White House, headed by either our first woman or our first person of color...and progress on marriage rights for GLBT folk, at long last
• progress/healing around GLBT issues in The Church, in my own congregation and wherever they appear
  
• my weight loss goal (20 down, 40 to go!)

Bonus play: a piece of music/poem guaranteed to cheer you?
Too many to list, really, BUT anything by Earth, Wind and Fire or Aretha Franklin, or Stevie Wonder's "Sir Duke" will always get me bopping, as will African choral singing (or any other kind). Really, anything that's got beautiful poetry, well-crafted music and inspired singing will usually do the trick. See, I can't stop. New music is great, too--discovery is a joyful thing.

The yellow line

It's snowing. The air temperature is in the high 20s, and it's rush hour here in Minneapolis...in other words, excellent conditions for wretched driving. I've never been happier to get home and hug my wife. I could easily have died about 30 minutes ago, or at least had my life changed in a Very Big Way.

I didn't. It wasn't. And I'm feeling very much like the guy in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" who, at the approach of the undertaker's wooden cart, hollers "I'm not dead yet!"

Of course, he then gets it in the back of the head with a frying pan...

I was on a busy street. I wasn't going very fast, but I hit a patch of ice. I'm a cautious, experienced driver with a healthy respect for the weather, but I'm not sure any of that mattered at all, in the moment. It was pretty much out of my hands. I have to say, it's unnerving to look directly into the grilles of oncoming cars. I turned the wheel, ever so slightly, intuiting that even being broadsided by the folks on my side of the dotted line would be preferable to running into opposing traffic face-first. There were cars behind me, but they were in the other lane, which apparently was not as icy. After swirling around a bit, I ended up perpendicular to traffic, with both of my front tires kissing the curb. There was a queue of rather surprised drivers on either side of me, waiting for me to right myself, and my mortality was giving me a gleeful raspberry from the passenger seat.

And now, I'm awed.

At how much could have changed for me and mine in the space of 10 heartbeats.
At the richness of being in this world.
At how deeply grateful I am to still be here.

We spend a lot of time defining what side of the "line" we're on...politically, theologically, in any number of ways. I could easily have been wiped out today by someone on either side of the yellow line. And everyone involved seemed to cooperate in the moment of crisis, conspiring to keep all of us as safe (!) and whole as we'd been before our almost-incident. Maybe, just maybe, at the bottom of it all, we're better at being a human family, more instinctively inclined to look out for each other, than Conventional Wisdom would have us believe.

Was self-preservation involved here, on the part of all the drivers? Undoubtedly. But tonight was also an illustration of the premise that we all do better when we all do better. And that, without more than a fraction of a second to react, we do try to look out for one another when it really matters.

Boundaries are necessary. They help us to locate ourselves and one another, keep us from most collisions, and help to point us in the right direction when we need it. But I'm sure not seeing boundaries right now; instead of what separates us, I see what we hold in common. Instead of the terror I'd have expected, considering how close that really was (and my propensity for hyperbole), I'm weirdly calm and even a bit joyful. Actually, I was sort of amazed not to have that "omigodomigodomigod" adrenaline rush that often accompanies situations like that, despite the fact that The Big Unknown got (literally) all up in my grille tonight.

I'm just grateful for the other drivers on the road (which I'll earnestly try to remember at tomorrow's rush hour when I want to swear at them again). I'm grateful to be looking out my kitchen window at the snow, smelling dinner cooking, looking forward to a mundane "snuggle on the couch and watch TV" evening with my lovely wife. I'm grateful for all the love in my life.

I'm grateful that, even though I really crossed the line in the most basic way today, I'll get to see what tomorrow has in store.

Got to go now. I'm home, and I'm so glad to be here tonight.

Peace, friends. Take care of each other.

P.S. Got to give a shout-out to my friend Milton for a particularly wonderful post today. Go & see. :-)