Seen through a window mist dimly

My heart is full from these rainy roofs,

from a yellow-gabled window interrupting purple slope,

sage green next to white next to rusty red,

cedar shingles seen through a window mist dimly;

from wooden animals carved in a far-off land

     now lined up along a window ledge,

     always travelling by standing still.

Though this is just a small town on a damp day

and my coffee is bad and my toes cold,

there is some mystery here beyond the misted pane,

just out of reach of my grasping mind.

I have travelled to this place in search of a presence beyond

but the mystery meets me in a wet sidewalk like any other

and in the simplicity of metal roofs carrying rain down from the sky

– another journey upward turned down.

Bursting into the fug,

a little girl spins around the pillar singing

“Sun, sun, mister golden sun!”

and while he isn’t shining down on us today

her yellow hair and rippling laughter are my sun,

and the mystery

is in me.

This is not my town

nor the cafe I wanted to sit in,

but resting my feet on a window ledge

something inside me comes home.

Another journey outward leading in,

always travelling by standing still.

(Tuesday 9th April 2013,

St. Andrews-by-the-Sea)

The Year in a Word

A few days before 2012 reached its timely end, my friend Joanna asked me a question I wouldn’t have asked myself and that I didn’t instantly have an answer for. She was the perfect person to ask me this question, since she has become good at exploring it herself on her blog: What word would I pick to sum up my 2012?

I thought hard about this as I pottered around the kitchen making us poached eggs on hot-buttered crumpets, letting my mind wander back over the last twelve months.

I recalled our recently gained permanent residency in Canada, my corrective eye surgery in June, and my choice to pull back from some work commitments in order to give more of my time and energy, while it matters, to Amélie. And I remembered the unexpected pregnancy and early miscarriage that only some friends and family know about but that, now almost a year in the past, perhaps I will begin to write about. So, with all these memories, the word that came to me on one of my trajectories from stove to toaster was this: HERE.

“Is that allowed?” I asked her, lifting an egg out of the swirl of simmering water. A noun or an adjective seem worthier of summarizing a whole 365 days. But HERE was the word that came to me, so I told her what it meant to me as we sat down to the orange goodness of free-range eggs seeping into buttery crumpet holes.

Firstly, I mean being HERE in the sense of physically here in Canada. There has been something unexpectedly settling and comforting about gaining permanent residency after more than four years of temporary visas and some uneasy moments of transition and uncertainty. But our new immigration status has come at the right time. It takes longer to really settle somewhere than you might think and the four year mark finds us with roots having grown deep down into this New Brunswick earth, well and truly committed to this place and these people as far into the future as we can foresee or predict. Because, of course, settling means more than just being here in body, but also being here in heart and spirit and will. And we are – for better or worse, for richer or for poorer, four years having already given us a good test run on those highs and lows. No-one can throw us out now - unless we commit a heinous crime of course! – and that feels good.  (Being able to stay, that is, NOT committing a terrible crime.)

In 2012 I also made some deliberate choices to be more HERE, not always trying to be everywhere and ending up nowhere, not always waiting for life to be how I want it to be before I ‘show up’ and give myself to what IS. The biggest choice I made was to work less in order to be around more for Amélie. And, again, I don’t just mean being physically there for her, but with some energy and creative brain space to spare because I’m not trying to juggle 101 things outside of the house and ending up with only the rat ends of myself to offer at home. Pulling back, pulling IN, was both a hard decision to make and also felt like an absolute privilege and gift to me for this season. Hard because though some of my deepest desires have to do with being a mother, this is also the area in which I feel I fail most consistently and dismally. And, apart from that, parenting and Stay-At-Home-Mum work is often thankless, endless and somewhat monotonous, whereas work outside of the home is more measurable and challenging – often more varied – and usually brings more recognition and instant ‘reward’. But though in some ways I struggled to make the decision to put more of my eggs into this precarious but precious basket, I was ready for it: ready to try and fail and try again, ready to actually attempt to give myself more fully to what and whom I profess to value most. I have also been keenly aware of the luxury of this choice – one that not many have – and the fleetingness of this season in our family life, one in which it still matters to her whether I’m there or not. So although trying harder inevitably brings more failure and heartache, there have still been enough moments when I have KNOWN that I was more present, available and invested than I would otherwise have been, to make this a choice I could never regret.

Getting my eyesight corrected with laser surgery might seem too trivial to feature in a summary of the ways in which I have been HERE during the past year, but it was a significant step for me, and not just because I have been blind as a bat all of my adult life and can now see perfectly! I have always felt rather hidden behind glasses, as if it were these paltry frames and lenses rather than my eyes that really got seen, and I have been torn between resenting and feeling comfortable with this. So taking the risk of having my precious eyes pushed and prodded (and burned!) felt a little like a courageous coming out of hiding, as well as representing a choice to spend a decent amount of money on myself for something I would have in the past considered superficial, vain and wastefully extravagant. Since being given the gift of new eyes, enjoying wearing eye make-up more often has felt similarly significant as a choice to shine rather than hide – and as a push against the inner voices that still whisper their reproach. In the wake of my surgery it was very telling for me to realise that part of me still wanted to be able to have regular ‘glasses days,’ meaning days when I could somehow hide, or at least try to! But I can’t hide behind my glasses anymore. I am Here and I can SEE!

Finally, perhaps it’s hard to imagine how a miscarriage could have anything to do with the word HERE. Although it was my fourth miscarriage after (it now seems, miraculously) having Amélie almost nine years ago, this one came out of the blue after we had mostly come to terms with only having one child. So this pregnancy and its loss at 8 weeks, near the beginning of last year, brought with it so much suppressed longing, tentative hope, fear, sadness and loss – past and present – that you would think I’d wish to be anywhere but ‘Here’. But the surprising gift of this situation was that I felt, really for the first time, able to simply be present to the rollercoaster of desire, hope, fear, longing, pain, sadness and loss that life took me on, and not try to wish it away, deny it away, even pray it away, as I have in the past. For the first time I truly, deeply knew that nothing I could do, say, think, imagine, feel or, yes, pray could control or predict the outcome, for good or ill. But I could be Here, Now, in the gift of the moment, and present to the truth of what I was experiencing. And, incredibly, I discovered that there was true Life in that ability to be present Here and Now – even if it’s painful – rather than always thinking Life is elsewhere or waiting for it to be otherwise. So I just let myself cry a lot, and that was good. And then I mostly stopped crying, and that was good too. And I was truly ALIVE.

So that’s what I realised over breakfast with a friend. Although when I think back over 2012 there are a myriad of moments, days and weeks that I zoned out, stressed out, numbed out and was far less present than I would have liked to have been, still I am encouraged that I have been able to be just a little more HERE, and in some significant ways and situations. And I want this to grow. I don’t want to miss the one life I have been given.

What about you? Grab an egg as we leave a year behind and look to the next, have a think, and tell us what 2012 meant to you.

On the most excellent way: Rocks and remaining

Two small sections of my dreams remained with me when I woke up this morning, and I was somehow reminded of them by the slow and rhythmic swing of the hammock this afternoon. The one I will reflect on today was of a large rock that I was unable to move despite my best efforts. On waking, the familiar words “If I have faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing” joined this dream picture; so later, on my sunny hammock, I turned to 1 Corinthians 13, that passage beloved of weddings and quote books, to be reminded...

Love: The most excellent way. Also the most challenging way: often so difficult to truly find, then fraught with pain and failure and disappointment, and oh-so-hard to remain on and walk well.

But, I reflected today, could this most excellent way be so hard largely because it is so simple and so unrewarding in the ways I desire to be rewarded? I have no great longing to move real mountains with my faith or my prayers, but there are plenty of metaphorical mountains I would like to see completely out of the picture. It is so easy to believe – somewhere deep inside, though often not consciously – that it is the removal of certain situations, challenges, imperfections, sadnesses or deficiencies that would finally complete my life, making me utterly happy and fulfilled. Another angle on this metaphor is that moving a mountain or a rock has a certain thrill and triumph about it; its removal (or moval?!)  is a concrete, measurable, noticeable achievement. And who doesn’t love those?  Thus it is also easy to believe that experiences of achievement and accomplishment are what I am lacking and need to pursue.

Yet, in my dream, the rock I was trying and failing to move remained, and the challenge was issued – is constantly and wordlessly issued – despite and in place of this failure: to make love my goal and my priority. In other words, this dream task I was focussed on and failing at was not really the needful, important task at all. The task I’ve been called to, and that all of us have surely been called to in different ways and contexts, is simply (and challengingly) to love. Though maybe the way of love has the potential to be less challenging if I really make it the focus of my desires, energies and priorities; if I turn my back for a moment on the rock that calls me so urgently and ask instead what it would mean to love, just to love – here and now.

And so, today, I faced a whole day with nothing in my diary; no appointments, no great tasks, no worthy achievements awaited me. But what I did have was a family I love and who I am lucky enough to be loved by in return (as if this love began with me!); and a home to tend and create for them, a task that often seems so small and yet so never-ending and thankless. Such an apparently thankless and endless task begs the pointed question: what, in fact, makes me ‘something’? And what makes me ‘nothing’? 

To (try to) move mountains without love, I continue to learn, is what makes me nothing. But to turn my focus away from the mountains – either the great challenges and imperfections, or achievements and glories – and bend down to love, even after I have failed at this task twenty times already today? This is the most excellent way.

 

This is how I learn to remain in his love, and I have discovered too long and slow that apart from this love I can do nothing.

So, today, the rock I turned my eyes from was my ‘To Do’ list, and the tyranny of the computer, and the ego demands of ‘productivity’ with associated recriminations of ‘uselessness’; and the bending down and reaching up to love took the form of tidying my kitchen, preparing a simple summer lunch to share over conversation with my husband in the garden, hanging laundry in the sun, walking to pick up my daughter from school, and giving her space of time and heart to talk out her eight-year-old worries. And here’s the unsurprising surprise: it was precious, and priceless, and simple, and satisfying. No doubt there will be days to turn love towards the moving of mountains (can the two not come together?), but not today.

You can't contain a child

You can't contain a child

Let one loose in a field

And she will run, fly

Too much life in the limbs to walk

Always the full charge

All this waiting life calls for dash and tear

Tearing to open this moment’s present

To be present to it all

Please, sadness, don't leave me.

Please, sadness, don’t leave me.

You have softened my hard heart and opened my eyes to see secret sorrow bravely borne in familiar faces all around me.

You have unearthed my dormant soul, giving tender shoots of desire room to breathe again and slowly climb towards the light. You have revealed with sorrow what has been my delight, and with grief what remains my unfathomable love. You have given me hope that delight and love can grow to guide and sustain me, that holy desire can give birth in me – through me – to life in the world.

Your gentle tears make me feel alive and present, tender and open, woman and human.

So, sadness, why do you stand up now to take your leave? Why so soon?

Is my loss, my need, too small for you to stay any longer? Am I so shallow, my life so easy, that you cannot feel at home here with me?

Why does your gentle hand pry away my clinging fingers? And why – do you know – DO they cling?

Tell me, sadness, is it GOOD that you leave me?

Is your work complete here, your time done? What is it that you came to do, and what do you see in me now that turns you towards my door?

Sweet sadness, I cannot hide from you what I have tried to hide from myself:

That your tears have not only opened my eyes but, lately, have also threatened to close them to the gifts that crowd so thickly around me; that they have opened my heart towards others, but have sometimes also turned it away, and in, and down.

Perhaps you feel that I toy with you now, USE you – to feel alive and exceptional and entitled – and you know that the hard work of sorrow must give way to the hard work of practised gratitude in the everyday, and of life and love re-gifted to the least of these.

So, sadness, if you must go away, then take with you ingratitude and self-importance, but please leave behind soft-heartedness and thankfulness and compassionate presence.

I will leave the door unlocked for you; your tentative knock will no longer be ignored. If it is your time to come and eat with me again then you will be welcomed here, as will your sister joy whose light step I hear approaching as you bid me farewell with a final glance and a fond smile.

Clarion call

Voices ring around me, pealing like a carillon of clear bells in my fog. To hear a human voice speaking its truth is a clarion call to authenticity. It is disturbing, unnerving, disorienting. The evident clarity of another soul pierces unclarity, shows up the aimless wandering of my own soul. It is a wake-up call, a dawn bugle, a violent knock on the door in the night hours.

But to answer the call, open the door, rouse myself from sleep... What does this mean? What will it take?

For that voice, bell, clarion, bugle belongs to another and emanates from the true and courageous places of another’s deep self. To try to pick it up and sound it myself would be to enter even more deeply into the shapeless fog. Somehow, somewhere, I must awaken my own slumbering voice, speak kindly and urgently to my own timid soul.

Expectations about expectations

One of the treats of living in New Brunswick, Canada, is that we are no longer forced to go and sort through spindly, overpriced trees at the local garden centre but, instead, can tramp out into the snowy woods and choose a real live, bushy one, chop it down, drag it back to the car, and carry it home triumphant like the proverbial caveman with his quarry (or woman!). This year the snow was absent, but the presence of our good friends – and some ice to stamp on and crack – more than made up for this unusual lack, and the kids all ran around among the trees, usually invisible and so only traceable by their shouts and laughter. Thus it came to pass that the fated tree was chosen without the participation of dearest daughter number one, who has grown to love the way we wander and deliberate and choose together. Bad idea. Both Amélie and I always think we need a taller tree than we can actually fit into our sitting room, but this year she decided it was ‘tiny’ (and so it WAS compared to the giant specimen that can fit into our friends’ house!). Tears were shed. Angry words were spoken over the accursed tree.

Cue my allergic reaction to ingratitude, which sadly isn’t the most accurate radar and can read lack of thankfulness into the simple (but, admittedly, dramatic!) disappointment of a little girl’s deeply-felt desires and wishes. How long will it take me to learn that an attempted clampdown on the emotional reaction of a seven year old is more often a fruitless stab at control than it is a loving or helpful response?! Yes, sometimes a line has to be drawn in the sand, but often a simple ‘being-with’ is enough to allow the tide to reach its lowest ebb and then begin naturally to rise again.

A blessed pause in the proceedings followed. The tree had to wait a handful of days until we could bring it in from the cold to finally stand upright and be dressed in its finery. This was enough days for my dread to grow over what sort of scene would ensue during the tree-decorating afternoon that is ‘meant’ to be a time of family frolicking and fantastic fun! Enough days for me to angrily contemplate another clampdown on unacceptable behaviour so as to ENFORCE gratitude and fun-having! How infuriating that this little person was so unable to manage her high and inflexible expectations of what a tree should be like that she would end up ruining her own enjoyment of what IS – and ours along with it! Truth be told... she would end up ruining MY own (high and inflexible?) expectations...

Oh.

The day rolled around. The tree rolled in. Even with a ton of trunk sawn off, its peak still touched the ceiling. The perfect size. We laughed. Jeremy is ALWAYS right about this, despite our habitual lack of a tape measure and the subsequent female insistence that our ceiling is higher than he thinks. We put on Christmas music and laid out gingerbread eggnog, crisps and chocolate biscuits. We complained about the sap on our hands. We contentedly arranged each treasured ornament on the fragrant branches. Amélie claimed that this tree wasn’t quite right; it wasn’t like trees we’d had in previous years. Jeremy said he thought she was just getting older, taller, and her perspective was changing. We turned out the overhead lights and Little Girl sat on her Daddy’s lap in the dark silence and stared at this year’s twinkling tree. Expectations had mercifully lost their urgency – along with expectations about expectations! – and we could just be, as we were, with the tree that just was.

It was a typical beginning, at times a tough beginning, but in the end a good beginning to this special, challenging, sometimes magical, sometimes trying season. If we can just BE, just enjoy what actually IS, in all its imperfections – if we can ALL do this! – ours will be a happier, more restful, more loving Christmas.

So be it.

Just Breathe

“Just breathe” The invitation floats to me across the mist above the river.

Driving the same old route home from the school run and captured by the glimpse of hazy water as I passed, I find myself standing on the pier facing the broadening estuary, the mistline just below treeline forming ethereal shapes, one sleeping fishing boat and one bobbing bird the only black against expansive grey.

My internal space feels nothing like the serene, open space before me – tight, tense, packed full and spinning. Though no great tragedy has crossed my threshold, still the full gamut of human emotions dances in my veins this morning: anxiety, sadness, fear, shame, longing, guilt, loneliness... And my heart and mind reach out greedily, desperately, towards and beyond the calm generosity of the riverscape. I need something more, want something more.

“Just breathe.”

Could it be that simple? Just to stand. Just to be. Just to breathe. Not grasp, grab, grapple. Not clutch for answers or meaning... or even rescue. No need to understand, process or resolve all the swirl and churn.

But I’m not sure that’s enough for me, or if I am even able to stop, and let go...

And then I notice. This river, this mist, this sky, these trees and clouds and birds, they make no demands on me. They ask for nothing. So why should I demand anything of them, why stand greedy on this wharf? They are effortlessly what they are, and that is their gift to me, if I can receive it. The unselfconsciously graceful arc of the bird’s neck a second before it dives underwater, black blot absorbed ripplelessly into the vast silver. And, on the far bank, those faithful friends the silver birches remain rooted to their spot, content to exist. They know themselves as part of the whole, as freely sustained, just as the air offers itself to me without reserve or cost or need to be noticed.

I breathe. I am. My inner swirl is like the mist. It just is.

No other stage on which my life plays out offers me so fully this gift, picture, mirror, example. In every arena I bring desires, demands, expectations, and am met by the same in return. I do not object to this, you understand; these are the stuff, the fuel, of human interaction and endeavour. But, oh, to hold these lightly and play them blithely! Oh to complete my next needful task with the same unselfconscious grace as that one bobbing bird!

And so I rediscover what I have finally and recently been learning after almost forty years on the planet: that it is worth taking even five minutes out of my work day to go for a walk in the woods, or ten minutes out of a long journey to look at the sea. Stepping off the stage for mere minutes immerses me in the healing power of nature’s unforced presence, and in its gentle invitation simply to exist, and know my existence to be supported. Just to be.

“Just. Breathe.”

Rachael's Breastplate! (I arise today...)

I arise today through quietness of morning, peace of forest, riches of sunrise.

I arise today through softness of mist, gentleness of dew, beauty of silver birches.

I arise today through stability of earth, sustenance of air, fluidity of water.

I arise today through presence of strangers, welcome of friends, absence of others.

I arise today through a mighty strength.

I arise today.

(Yes, credit due, of course, to St Patrick's Breastplate or The Deer's Cry, and to my early morning walk that inspired my last post. May you also be aware of the mighty strength by which you arise today, in whom you live and move and have your being.)