Tag — Year’s Best
Top 9 for 2009
Do you ever feel a little brittle? Are there times when your wisdom seems weak and your intuition is on the fritz?
We all have moments when we feel a bit too buffeted about by the storms of life, when our souls get a little bruised. In those moments it is good to have a pool of guidance and inspiration to dip into.
A few years ago one of my favorite good-souls, Bob Carlton, invited people to gather their best posts-of-the-year together and post them all up over at his blog, The Corner. Every year since, I have committed to this practice, finding the things that have fed me the most from deep within my internal sense of authority and wisdom. Gathering them up in a single place gives me one-stop shopping on those days when my soul is running on empty. It is a fixed reference point when I feel lost in the world.
So here are the posts from 2008 that will carry me through 2009. What your your top nine? Put a linke to your round up in the comments below. I’m sure we’d all love to visit.
heart,
rachelle
A Story About A Love (by Cate, age 8)
The Care and Keeping of Sacred Stories
Solstice, Stonehenge, Solitude
Choosing the Beast
9.20.08 Update: This is now up in essay form as well…just scrolll down.
This is something that came to me today. It will be up in a day or two as a text post. But for now, I think it wants to be just sound. I’m sorry it doesn’t look prettier. If anyone can tell me in simple terms how to change the code so this is an embedded file that doesn’t have to open in a new window I’d appreciate it. Until then, thank you for listening as-is. Oh, and please say nice things, or at least that you listened. Podcasting still feels tender-new to me. Tak.
Listen to the podcast here:
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Choosing the Beast
I sat in silence for the first time in a long time today. No television on as background noise, no music, not even the warm tumble-thump of the dryer. Just the candles and a tub full of warm water, and the sounds of my noisy mind slowly settling into stillness.
There is a way of holding still without becoming stiff that only happens for me in the womb like waters of a bathtub. As I have no bathtub here in my Danish expat home, this watery stillness is a much longed for and uncommon occurrence. Today, in my borrowed claw foot basin something came to my side. A revelation:
The choice to love, to really love, is incredibly, ridiculously brave.
It is not a surrendering of self but rather, a time when you scramble a bit to find your footing, and then you stand in your own power and look the Vast Beast in the eye and say, “I choose this.” I choose this thing that can both protect me and tear me apart; that can and will bring me my most enthralling joys and my most excruciating and unanticipated pain. I choose the risk. I choose the possibility of endings. I chose to be as simpatico as old souls and to be equally, heartrendingly misunderstood. I choose to be at intervals rashly taken advantage of and unexpectedly worshipped. I choose this terror and this beauty. I choose love.
There are many times when we step into this place of love in naiveté—in the blithe flush of new crush and happy mutual adoration, blissfully unaware of the awe-full power we are inviting into our lives. We do this when we marry; when we choose our children; when we accidentally fall in love with a jubilant soul, with the idea of beauty, with wanting to be a writer or a painter or a poet; with a country we did not even know was part of our bones. When this happens, we live in that place for awhile with ease and contentment, unable or unwilling to see the depth of the pact we have made, not acknowledging that some part of our soul was the currency used in the bargain. Sometimes this joyride continues through the long luxurious length of our journey. But more often the fearful awesomeness of what it really takes to sustain the choice to love looms in front of us and we find that we must be very brave. Brave enough to say, “I choose this still.” Brave enough to stay the course, to maintain the bond even when it becomes painful to do so. Brave enough to say I will bear the ache of watching you grow up, of watching you be sick, of watching you grow old. I will bear the confusion over what to do, over how to love you best. I will love you through this whirlwind, through this firestorm. I chose this beast called love.
I am in a place right now where I must very intentionally choose to love: to love people who are far away; to love my challenging tween and teen; and most challengingly to love my own ill and tired self. And I am watching others commit brave acts of love: surrendering to a first love; watching someone die; tending to a baby soul born at midlife; loving someone through the sickness part of “in sickness and in health.” These acts, these making of stands on the high ground of love are so real, so raw, so terrifyingly powerful they make me want to shield my soul from the solar-flare burst of it all.
But I won’t. I don’t. Instead I stand in the choosing. I stand in the heart of the flame and I try to remember, “if you are never afraid you can never be brave.” And then, I chose love.
Fairy, Mallard, Lily, Tree-A Christening
Eden in the role of fairy at the arboretum in 2006. Picture by MadGiddy.
There is a demonstration garden at the college of agriculture and veterinarian arts, which lies between our flat and the children’s school. I walk through it sometimes, on my way back, to escape the roar of the traffic on the morning-busy streets around our new home. The garden is moving towards its finest season, unfurling leaves and blooms.
There might be fairies here, I think, and thin spaces such as the Celt’s revere. A friend of mine, a full-blown adult, believes in fairies. She is not the type to wear caftans either, or to name her children ‘Willow.’ She’s actually an incredibly intelligent and well reasoned academic. She works with the poor all over the world, and struggles to find paths of escape for those caught in the throes of human trafficking. She is wise, my friend, and knows you cannot love reason too much and still nurture hope. And so, fairies. Why not? Why can’t the earth and her energy—the creative force of fern and flower, earth and air—why can’t these things sometimes appear to those with sighted eyes? Stranger things have happened.
At the very least, there is creative power in this place, so eagerly tended by students, their futures unfurling before their very eyes—all the possibilities of their own growth spilling out with earth and seed from their mulch-rubbed fingertips. All this cultivating. All this growth. It is the first thing we know of our parental divines: God Created. God creates. In this bright urban garden, with people barely out of their teens, that holy work continues.
I walk through the curving paths, trying out a new graveled walk or step-stone passage each time I visit. Today the garden leads me to Mallard couples, sleeping in loose pairs on the grass with their heads tucked under their wings. They look for all the world like croquet balls abandoned when the players were called away to tea. There is a pond here too, with a marsh tucked into one curve, and a lily pad farm in the other. As I walk along the curve of the pond, past low borders of bent-willow fencing and calla lilies as yellow as lemon tarts, I am greeted by a cherry tree which stretches wide where the pond path meets the trail to the gate. I pause there under her branches, the beautiful cherry, always our first hope of Spring. The air seems to hum with energy. Thin Spots. Fairydom. In a heartbeat she christens me, the cherry tree and her humming court. And then, with a slight reluctance, I move on, towards the traffic and city bustle, the chores and the normal—life beyond the narrow gate.
Just before I reach the street, there is a transitional space of sorts—the brick-paved expanse of the college drive which stretches wide between the garden and the roadway. There, I am greeted by the school’s fountain: five charcoal granite slabs slick in the sunlight. I hesitate a moment, feeling obvious and strange. Then I walk up the slick lower steps to the spring bubbling forth at the top, dip in my hand, touch my forehead, breastbone, the boney crest of each shoulder.
A baptism then, into the life of fairy and mallard, lily and tree.
For most posts about my sacred life click here, or become present to your own sacred life with Sacred Life Sunday. Thank you for being here!
eighteen
“Here there be monsters.”
There is fierceness to your love as a parent, a primordial viciousness that cannot quite be captured by pen or by page. The heat of it feeds you, moves you to the force of living that must be done to rear a child, to create a life.
But it tears at you too, this animal of passion, and the thing that tears deepest is that the one you love so fiercely–this child of womb or of heart–cannot understand this beast, cannot capture it in their reality, or even in their imagination. And you know, in spite of this longing to make sure they know, that they aren’t meant to, aren’t intended to. This kind of knowing is not expected of them.
So this tears then too, this absolute inability to communicate the sheer volume of heartache held for them, the rawness of the love which bears them into existence.
And when the child is not your own and you must live into a place that is not-parent, but rather mentor, or friend, or some indefinable something else–where then does this animal go to dwell? And where does the fierce protectionism burn when the child grows older, finds wings on which to lift away? Where does that energy live, when the cage you’ve built in your heart is no longer large enough to contain its nervous pacing, when there is not enough flesh to keep it fed?
Should there not be a guide book for this wild adventure? A star chart or a river guide? Should there not be an ancient map, a gilt compass, moss on the north of the tree? How do you find your footing when you dwell on the edge of love’s fierce map?
Top 7 for ‘07 from Magpie Girl
Another Bride, Another Groom, Another Sunny Honeymoon
Beaches and Bodies: An audioblog
Dia Des Los Muertos: Regarding Simeon
Ps. Here’s an old collection of Top 5’s from my previous blog as well: ‘05
Dia de los Muertos
A tiny tin-shrine memorial with a dried rose from my hospital flowers. Made for Dia de los Muertos celebrations at Monkfish Abbey, November ‘05.
“Lord, let now your servant, depart in peace according to thy word. For my eyes have seen thy salvation…”
He was very tiny, about the length of my arm from my elbow to my wrist. The nurse, nervous and new at this kind of sorrow, had eventually managed to wrap him in blankets, one small arm extending outside of the heap, his hand so frail I was afraid to touch it lest I tear his fragile skin.
We had wept so many tears for him, our doomed son. Tears in the dark sonogram room; tears when my knees collapsed in the hospital stairway; tears when we told our parents; tears as we waited all the long week to see him delivered; tears in the cold procedures room as the new nurse fled and we were left to deliver our baby alone.
There were more tears now, as we played him special songs, anointed his head in our own private baptism, sang him chants from my Lutheran childhood. Tear as we set him in the infant warmer — now disconnected and cold — to say goodbye.
Later, a union would go on strike and his ashes would wait for weeks at the crematorium before we could claim them. A small plastic bag in a square cardboard box, sealed tight with a twist tie and silver dog tag bearing not his name, but his case number, long and unfamiliar. We would cry again then, finally retrieving his remains, and dusting the water with him on the edge of the sound.
My mother cried these same tears for her first child, drugged and foggy as she came to from the delivery room. Empty arms wondering where her son had gone. My aggrieved father explaining the still birth, full term but not fulfilled. She never got to see her son, to hold his hand, to say goodbye. It just wasn’t done in those days. The hospital ferried him away without even a gravestone. The nursery packed up and painted before she was released to come home. Even now, he doesn’t have a name.
As a young teen, I read a story where a girl hides from school bullies in the shed of a cemetery. There she finds a statue of a child who had died long ago. The base of the statue read, “Our beloved Benjamin.” That’s how I think of my long lost brother — as Benjamin, uncle to Simeon, who also left too soon.
It is not within my rights to name my mother’s son as Benjamin, but I can name–did name–my own. And today, on this day to remember the dead, I remember Simeon David Chapman, who made me a mother, who is this mother’s only son.
