March, Fourth week :: 2021

The new dog, Laika, is a little sensitive. She’s supposed to go to work with my daughter every day but a vet’s office is full of strange dogs and people and noises that make her anxious, so she has to stay home with the rest of us on workdays. I’m not really a dog person, or rather, I like dogs just fine when they belong to other people and not so much when they are my responsibility, but for most of the day Laika is quiet and sleepy and as unobtrusive as the cats, so we get along fine. A couple of times a day she stares at me with the saddest possible eyes until I take her out to the (unfenced) woods so she can explore without getting lost. On Laika-days I am forced out of my homebody-ness and out under the trees in all kinds of weather, something I’ve never been able to do consistently by my own willpower. Which means the dog that I did not really want has become a facilitator of something important for me.

Today while we were tramping around in a different part of the woods I found four plastic jugs full of water tied together with baling wire and buried in the leaf litter near a downed tree. There were rumors around town last year that a couple of homeless men had been sleeping in the old gravel mine that butts up against our property. This is the size of town that knows exactly who the two homeless men are and how they ended up sleeping in the old gravel mine, so I had an instant mental image of those jugs slung over the back of a particular bike on their way to and from town. No one had disturbed the buried jugs for some time, so while it’s mildly upsetting to think of strangers (neighbors?) sleeping in my backyard, I wasn’t really worried as I dug them out. I was wondering instead where the men are now as I haven’t seen them for months. The plague year has closed me in on all sides, put me on the defense, outstretched my compassion.

This week I was listening to Bayo Akomolafe talk about this feeling of overwhelm and how continually focusing on how to solve the world’s problems may be limiting us. Perhaps, he asserts, it is possible to use uncertainty instead. I have plenty of practice with uncertainty: I don’t know what to do about the water bottles in the woods or my homeless neighbors or gun violence or species die-off or the mess of late-stage capitalism. But when Laika draws me out under the sky and the rain hits our skin and the squirrels dash through the Fir branches and the Cedar shelters this tiny cache of human need I am suddenly aware of my connection to this great, groaning, speaking, moving Being that is Us, our world. “This world is promiscuous,” Akomolafe says, “it dances here and there, and new paths are always emerging.” It is in the listening, the connection, the waiting, he asserts, that we may be able to see the new ways of healing the world is devising for itself. Our culture abhors an unsolved problem, knows only the success of production and action, but for centuries there have been people who faced the world’s needs by retreating to lonely places to pray or chant or learn from the land. Maybe my daily visits to the trees are tapping into that quiet energy, maybe this nervous, sensitive dog that needs the woods is a deep calling to come away and learn. If so, I say yes.

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Gathered from this week:

~ Robins - by Peter Johnston. A lovely little film that will help you exhale.

~ Hedgespoken Picturehouse - Are you tired of streaming, polished, image-heavy stories yet? Tom Hirons and Rima Staines have brought their traveling, off-grid, story caravan online for live storytelling. I haven’t listened/watched this yet, but I have plans for tonight with a glass of wine and my pjs. UPDATE: I listened this evening and it is marvelous! <3

Don’t miss Rima Staines’ amazing artwork either.

~Adam Zagajewski’s Mysticism for Beginners

I hope you find some quiet places for your soul this week. And as it was Mr. Rogers’ birthday on Saturday, let me just say, “I like you just the way you are.”

Peace and love,

tonia

Brigid's Day

A photo from earlier in the week.

The rain has swollen our community creek, so we couldn’t go down to dip our hands in it as we’d planned on this Brigid’s Day, but we prayed a blessing over it anyway. It’s home for fish and frogs, crayfish, the giant salamander that surprised our son one day, countless insects and creatures and birds, stones and root and branches, silt of our common land, and most importantly, water, which grows more precious to me every year. (Do we ever dare complain about rain and snow in these days when so many in the world have no water at all?)

“Let us bless the humility of water

Always willing to take the shape

Of whatever otherness holds it…

Water: voice of grief,

Cry of love,

In the flowing tear.

Water: vehicle and idiom

Of all the inner voyaging

That keeps us alive.

Blessed be water,

Our first mother.”

~ John O’Donohue

***

This week, I also found a lovely series of house blessings in my Northumbria Community Prayer Book to be said on Brigid’s Day. You stop at each room of the house and give a blessing specific to that space. We’ll do that tonight.

Here are a couple of them:

At the Doorway:

May God give His blessing to the house that is here.

God bless this house from roof to floor,

from wall to wall,

from end to end,

from its foundation and in its covering.

We call upon the Sacred Three

to save, shield and surround

this house, this home,

this day, this night,

and every night.

In the kitchen:

Seeing a stranger approach,

I would put food in the eating place,

drink in the drinking place,

music in the listening place,

and look with joy for the blessing of God,

who often comes to my home

in the blessing of a stranger.

May your homes and your places be blessed as well, friends, with generosity, compassion, abundance, and life this weekend.

Peace keep you,

tonia

a helpful exercise

Even though I set myself a deadline, I find myself taking frequent breaks to watch the hearings on a live stream on my phone. There are so many of these hearings I’ve quit keeping track of what they are. At any rate, they all contain the same cast of characters leaning forward into mics, foreheads furrowed, cloak of righteousness and/or indignation. When they break for lunch or duties or press conferences, I write furiously, try to keep my characters from suddenly becoming indignant and/or righteous and/or spiraling into hopelessness at the demise of everythingtheyeverbelievedaboutdemocracy.

At regular intervals I have to stop and wrestle with the idea that two people, equally desirous of justice, can watch the same never-ending hearings and draw different conclusions. My brain does not want to accept this. Even now I do not want to write this down. I want both people to see the truth. Which is the way I see it. Which is the way all reasonable and justice-loving people see it. On my phone screen is a montage of interviews which defy my desire. A teenage girl in a Woodstock t-shirt flips off an alt-right reporter, a woman with hair the color of old foam scowls to a news network, it’s all a pack of lies and machinations. I make a mental note to use “machinations” in a sentence sometime soon.

I think about what I’ve learned from the Benedictines and the Buddhists and Mr. Rogers and the Pacifists, how everyone has goodness in them and it is our work to find and welcome it. I think about how peacemaking is listening and understanding the other side and I think how I’m tired of hearing the other side and I just want them to quit being wrong but I know that somewhere out there someone is thinking the same about me, and I stop for just a minute and sigh.

I take a break for lunch. The geese have been sleeping on the porch and I shoo them away. It is almost about to rain but I put on my boots and get the old broom and sweep away the mess they’ve made before a delivery driver or a neighbor decides to drop by unexpectedly as they did last week and had to tiptoe around piles of goose shit to reach the front door because I was down in my office writing my novel and didn’t know there was shit happening on the porch. I feel like this is a metaphor for my whole life but I don’t know exactly what it means. Also, I think, while I’m sweeping, that DISTRUST is the common denominator. None of us believes anyone anymore, so we go with the narrative we’ve already been constructing for a long time. This makes sense to me. My whole novel is about the fallout of broken fidelities. I decide that lunch is a bowl of peanut butter and chocolate chips and get back to work writing with renewed purpose.

On the checklist for “How to Be a Writer,” is point number 3: “Know who you are writing for.” There is a helpful exercise accompanying it: “Write a paragraph that states clearly who you are writing for.” This reminds me of the old Slylock Fox comics in the Sunday paper. “How to draw a Fox: Draw a circle. Now draw a square. Now draw a Fox.” At first I was discouraged, because how can I be a writer if I cannot even complete point number 3 on the checklist? Over time, I have realized that the exercise, like Slylock Fox’s drawing instructions, is pointless. You do not discover your readers by paragraphical declaration. You discover them by process of elimination. Is anyone still around after you have written your truth? That’s who you are writing for.

The hearings are done for the day and so now all there is left to do is reconstruct a future for myself which does not include despair. I write some more and I think about the readers who will read this novel and understand what I am saying about shit and cloaks of indignation and disbelief and truth and that little thread of hope that keeps us moving forward and I don’t feel quite so bad. Maybe I even feel like these are the machinations of hope: to be as real as we can be, to keep ourselves from easy categorizations, to make art, and conversation, and mistakes, and stands, and contradictions (I am large, I contain multitudes), and sense, and love, and dinner. I think about how much I want something to trust in again, and I look outside and see the geese are sitting on the porch and so I shoo them away and find the broom and I think, well, there’s that.

Martinmas

I love that Martinmas and Veterans Day coexist on the same day (at least in the U.S.) Even as we remember the sacrifices women and men have made for their country, we’re reminded by St. Martin, the Roman soldier who became a Christian and then refused to kill, that there is a third way we can choose. (And this reminds me as well that although religion has been used to justify enormous amounts of persecution, war, and violence through history -and is still doing so now, God help us - it can also be a catalyst for conversion and peace. Anyone else need that reminder?)

When my children were at home, we always made Martinmas lanterns and hung them from the chandelier for a candlelit supper. Many other children and families take their lanterns on a walk through the night. I think it’s a lovely image to represent Martin’s witness to peace shining through the darkness of war and oppression.

On this day, I also like to spend time with other pacifists. Since I don’t really know anyone in my everyday life, it means revisiting the writings of William Stafford, Walter Wink, Thic Nhat Hahn, Leo Tolstoy, Vera Brittain, Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others. I think most of us who come to pacifism and nonviolence arrive there after a struggle between what we know to be true internally and what the rest of the world is determined to make us believe. Having a day to remember those who have stood courageously against the tide of public belief is a lovely gift.

So Happy Martinmas, my friends! May we be reminded of what is possible and courageous enough to believe in peace.

***

This would be a great time to revisit Desmond Doss’ powerful story. And here’s a poem from William Stafford, who spent WW2 in a Conscientious Objector’s Camp:

Learning

A piccolo played, then a drum

Feet began to come - a part

of the music. Here came a horse,

clippety clop, away.

My mother said, “Don’t run -

the army is after someone

other than us. If you stay

you’ll learn our enemy.”

Then he came, the speaker. He stood

in the square. He told us who

to hate. I watched my mother’s face,

its quiet. “That’s him,” she said.

a franciscan year

I can't seem to shake off the monastics.  I'm continually drawn to their disciplined rhythms and focused intention in attempting to make an outer life that reflects their inner lives.  A couple of years ago I came across the Third Order Franciscans - an Episcopalian order that commits to live by Franciscan principles in their every day lives.  I love their aims of love and simplicity.  Looking over their Rule (guidelines for committed living) again this last month, I realized it could provide a container, of sorts, for the various threads I want to pursue in this coming year.

The last few years I've been looking for ways to integrate financial discipline with my concern for our (personal) middle-class disconnect - the distance between my pursuit of comfort and my neighbors' daily need, the condition of the planet, the growing class disparity in America, the mental and spiritual plague of consumerism, etc.  I've tried various ways of tackling this, but the Franciscans brought it all together for me:

"Saint Francis...[desired] that all barriers set up by privilege based on wealth should be overcome by love. [...] we avoid luxury and waste, and regard our possessions as being held in trust for God. Personal spending is limited to what is necessary for our health and well-being and that of our dependents. We aim to stay free from all attachment to wealth, keeping ourselves constantly aware of the poverty in the world and its claim on us. We are concerned more for the generosity that gives all, rather than the value of poverty in itself.""Acknowledging that everything belongs to God, we seek to use his gifts wisely and to be good stewards of this fragile earth, never destroying or wasting what God has made. We provide the things necessary for ourselves and our families without demanding luxuries. We seek never to forget the needs of others."

The Rule for the Third Order encompasses several areas other than just finances, but they all braid together to support and enable each other.  I think this is what I've been missing, a cohesive vision that addresses all the various aspects of how we make decisions and what motivates us.  This is a brief outline of the Rule (found here):

The Holy EucharistPenitencePersonal PrayerSelf-DenialRetreatStudySimplicity of LivingWorkObedience

I've written some guidelines for myself that fall into each of these categories (although not always exactly as they are meant for actual members of the Order).  They include praying the Divine Hours 3x daily (as able), periods of silence each day, reducing social media interaction to 1 hour/day (sounds like plenty, but it goes very fast between posting and answering comments, etc.), a no-shopping year, and regular hospitality.   I'm calling it my Franciscan year, and while I know it will be a challenge, I also feel a sense of calling and peace.

"Humility, love, and joy are the three notes which mark the lives of Tertiaries." (Third Order members)

In this context, it does not seem burdensome to keep a routine of prayer or create space for silence or refuse to buy.  It seems like opening a door and entering into the rhythm of the real world, where we work and yearn and make space for each other instead of mindlessly pursuing our own comfort and pleasure.  I'm entering the new year with a lot of peace and assurance.

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Since I know some people will have questions about what our no-shopping year will look like, I'll offer a brief outline of our plan here. Please remember, this is a journey toward integrity, not a competition about resources or stewardship.

2019 No-shopping Year.We will not shop/order/buy anything outside of the following:

1. Regular household expenses. (I have reduced our food budget slightly but this is a broad category overall and we have talked through what we need and what we can go without.)

2. Already scheduled home maintenance projects (this includes building a pole barn and some subsequent landscaping.)

3. Seeds/supplies for a small garden.

4. Replacing any necessary items that break or are lost.

5. Gifts for others (reduced budget).

6. Books necessary for work.

I'm sure there will be exceptions to these guidelines, because that's the way it goes in a large, busy family, but we do have a way to evaluate those needs as they arise.  Mostly it involves talking, waiting, and considering whether it complies with our commitment to simplicity.  I'm so looking forward to using what we have, making do, and learning new ways to meet needs.

As always, I love to hear your thoughts. 

I'll leave you with this version of St Francis' famous prayer for peace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agPnMxp5Occ