Friday five: where the heart is

Songbird of the RevGals writes:

Tell us about the five favorite places you have lived in your lifetime. What did you like? What kind of place was it? Anything special happen there?

1. My family home as a child--for all the usual reasons: fireflies in the back yard by the lilac bushes, Christmas trees in the living room, the mysteries of my parents' bedroom dresser closet (what the heck is a cuff link for?), my bedroom covered with Tiger Beat posters of Charlie's Angels, Shaun Cassidy, John Travolta, the Captain & Tennille...not an inch of wall space available, really. :-)

2. My sophomore dorm room--my sanctuary. I absolutely loved having my own space!

3. My first apartment--above an electronics store, with a leaky roof and wallpaper that wouldn't stay up. Absolute crap, in retrospect, but it felt FANTASTIC at the time.

4. My seminary dorm room--again, a sanctuary, as well as a tangible sign of the new direction in my life. Simple, in sort of a monastic way. However, living in a dorm with all those other people at thirty...ummm, no. :-)

5. Our home now--the best of all. We dreamed of it for years, and it's better than I could have imagined. Often full of friends...best of all now that it's full of puppies. We had a house blessing when we moved in, led by dear friend B. Showers of blessing, really. Every year, it's more our little place in the world.

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.

Refrigerator wisdom

Our kitchen is, in general, a joyful profusion of color, with nods to Beloved's penguin collection and our shared propensity to pile up clutter. I'm talking CLUTTER, until we're moving a week's worth of mail around on the counter like Scrabble tiles, in order to chop vegetables for dinner. But I digress. :-)

Near the entrance to the kitchen is our riotous refrigerator, covered in my magnet collection: besides numbers for pizza and the nurse line, features include Snoopy and Charlie Brown and a Norwegian flag, souvenirs of trips to Chicago and the North Shore, and the assorted wisdom of many, many sages ranging from Dilbert and Opus to Gertrude Stein to Walt Whitman to Eleanor Roosevelt. Some favorites:

• Do one thing every day that scares you. (Eleanor Roosevelt)
• No use being pessimistic; it wouldn't work anyway. (Phillip Mueller)
• There ain't no answer. There ain't never gonna BE an answer. THAT's the answer. (Gertrude Stein)
• Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. (Rainer Maria Rilke)

I'm generally suspicious of any theology or philosophy that can be summed up in an aphorism, but I can't seem to resist these various bits of humor and wisdom, either. And, word junkie that I am, I'm instantly seduced by poets and writers with a gift for metaphor or an elegant turn of phrase.

I've been a lover of Rilke, in particular, because he gave me the courage to live into a truly scary time in my life. I quote him regularly, and try diligently to live out my own questions. Incidentally, I think that Letters to a Young Poet should be required reading for every human on the planet, along with Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. I love to believe that we'd be elevated by reading them--that we'd be a little braver and a little kinder to one another in this broken, blessed world.

Anyway, last night, I found the perfect magnet. It trumpets the pinnacle of refrigerator wisdom:

• When I'm feeling blue, I start breathing again.

Seriously.