Truly. I am in paradise.
Beyond the azure of the water, the sway of palms and the warmth of the sun, there are pine trees in this place. You can see them in the photo above.
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” (Gerard Manley)
And. There are pine trees in this place.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m ever going to make it home again. It’s so far and out of sight. Carole King
Carole King’s Tapestry album was soundtrack for my adolescence.
One of the songs on the album finds the singer wondering if she will ever make it home again. Tired and dispirited, she knows the longing for a place that will take her in and hold her gently.
I am headed to just such a place. This Memorial Day weekend I will be home again. In a few short hours I will join my guy and my dog in the car for the journey to the cabin that has been in our family for fifty years. My girls and my new sons will join us in reading, coffee communion and lake watching.For nearly all of my life I have climbed into the lap of the logs and the water and the space of being home.
Going home is particularly poignant this year. My mother died two months ago and her being in that space echoes yet so I will miss her and celebrate her as the weekend unfolds. My father died in that space the day after Memorial Day twenty years ago. His presence lives in the logs.
And, I will be meeting with a realtor in order to learn what might be in store for me as I consider selling the cabin.
How can I let her go?
My sense of “home” has changed. For the years following my parent’s divorce and in the years following my own divorce I clung to the cabin with a sort of Scarlett O’Hara fierceness. I would not let it go. I could not let it go. The cabin was my childhood and my adulthood and it was my solace and it continues to be more things than my tender psyche will ever be able to articulate.
But home? I am learning that home is a movable gift. Home is where my loves are. Home is not frozen in place nor is it frozen in time. It is ongoing in its unfolding and for this I give thanks.
I don’t have to own the cabin to give thanks for my parents and my childhood and my children and the generations of friends who have shared cabin life with me and mine.
I don’t have to wonder if I’ll ever make it home again.
Turns out I’ve been home all along.
Gratitude takes up space.
Gratitude swells and transforms and it is alive alive.
The kindnesses of my life sprung from the heart of human grace are tender mercy. Love lives in my home and it visits in the form of children who share life and laughter as well as questions and ache. The tender goodness of thick coffee and attentive hearts are ground for the stretch into the unknown of each day.
The artistry of the Holy pounds in the power of the Great Lake outside my window and it spangles in the still of night and the need to stop and pay homage lives in every “thank you” breathed on every day. Two bald eagles dipped blessing over our heads yesterday. Two.
Where is the space for so much gratitude?
My daughter is getting married.
Oh. Oh. Oh.
She who was born bright of eye and wise of soul has found a companion who shares the light and the deep of it all and this, this is momentous.
She will cleave to another. While it has been years since she last shared home with me her home will now be established around the nucleus of the heart they share and tend.
What courage it takes to love, to say “yes”, to open to learning life in the company of another.
They have that courage, do Leah and Terin.
We who love them will bask in the power of what it is they become in each other’s keeping. They are good together. The shine and ground of their love is blessing to creation.
And this mother, this mother is feeling the cellular surrender that began at Leah’s birth. It has long been such wonder to behold the world through her being.
Now I add another to my heart and apprentice myself to learning life through him and my daughter is getting married.
Eleven years ago I moved to Minneapolis a newly divorced woman with three grieving children.
We were all nuts.
Somehow we lived, one day to the next. The eldest left for college. The two youngest endured finding their own new ways in a new place, as did their mother. Life was marked by train rides to see their dad and sometimes visits with the Chicago-dwelling eldest. We were careful around each other. We grieved. Oh, we grieved.
And we lived.
Friends were found and life made and gradually it became easier to breathe.
We lived:
Pick ups to and from college for three. A”bonus dad” and “bonus sibs” to acclimate to. More friends, explorations, band concerts, leaving and returning and growing awareness that the bond of love is a rare and precious thing.
Graduations from college and jobs won and left. Partners welcomed and woven into kin fabric. Hearts passionate about healing and justice and beauty and community and the splendor of the earth. Pastor’s kids adept with people and open to life.
And now the youngest graduates on Saturday. There for his walk will be his deepest and most tenacious fans: his mom and dad, his step-Coop, his sisters and their partners and on the next day a raucous cloud of witnesses present to mark the good of it all.
It will be the last big party at this house that has known many parties – some I knew about and many I did not. We will be together, we who have been so blessed to walk from a world saturated by grief into a world near too-full of gratitude.
I can’t speak it fully. e. e. cummings comes close:
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
wich is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
e.e. cummings
We are alive.
I thank you God for most this amazing.
The anxiety is ramping in our lives and surely in my belly.
We have a signed purchase agreement on our home. All will be well and good pending a thorough inspection. Someone just spent five hours inspecting our 100-plus year old home.
Now we wait.
In Rochester, our realtor is fielding a counter-offer to the offer we made to buy a home. It was the first one we saw lo those many weeks ago, and it has lived and breathed with us since. We believe it is so very right.
Now we wait.
Oh but I am a crabby woman; thin of skin and jumpy-antsy because this thing called home is a morphing thing.
And in the midst of my crabby, I am chastened by awareness of my staggering privilege.
I have a larger-than-I-need home and I want to purchase same and what, oh what of all those who feel anxiety every day because they are assured of nothing in the way of home.
What of those who are children and teens and adults and elders who have no home?
Our church is working with an organization called Beacon in the metro area. Beacon is an interfaith housing initiative seeking to eradicate the all-consuming misery of soul and body that is homelessness. Through one of their programs called “Families Moving Forward” we will house four families at our church for a week.
It is a monumental undertaking. We are organizing to make sure that we have a welcoming space and food to offer and hospitality to bless but really, one of the most monumental things we privileged folk are undertaking is the willingness to face the reality that the families we welcome live without what we take for granted: home.
We have become willing to encounter our neighbors. We are a ministry outpost in the way of Jesus.
I know myself to be needful of perspective in these days.
I surely want to let go of the soul-roil engaged in fretting about the more-than-I-need.
Time is better spent in pondering what to serve our guests for breakfast on Saturday. Time is better spent thanking God for the volunteers who are committed to showing up. Time is better spent being open to what the Holy has for me to learn.
In this household books are sacred.
Both Cooper and I are inhalers of print. Books are friends and teachers and they mark the cycles and seasons of our lives. To say that we have many of them is an understatement.
In readying our house for sale we have taken many trips to the second hand book store. We get a mere pittance for them, but at least we know they will have another life. Many of our books have gone to the library at Richfield UMC. We have thinned and it is not a task for the faint of heart but we did it.
So when I came home yesterday to stacks and stacks of books on the floor I was flummoxed. We had a stager come in to ready our home for photo taking tomorrow.
She had assassinated our bookshelves!
I asked her how it was she determined which one or two survived to grace each shelf.
Her answer? She chose the ones that were prettiest and looked the best.
I knew it was time for me to leave.
So I did.
Wow. All those words, all that beauty, all the hours of grace shared were summarily consigned to boxes until we unpack them in Rochester.
And so it is. We are being staged. I recognize my house, but it feels that I have moved into the time of transition when assumed relationship with space and surroundings is no more.
There is gift in this. I notice the lovely ways the leaded glass in the dining room creates prisms. I thank the trees in my back yard for their cardinal-bearing ways. I wonder at the foolishness of waiting so long to do so much good work in order to pretty up our home.
I can forgive the stager. She wants our house to speak welcome.
So I’ll box the books and imagine that they will find welcome and a place to be.
Stagers bring lessons.
Don’t they?
We are readying our house for sale.
This house energetically reached out and grabbed me from the moment I first entered her front door.
Home for the last nine years is a grand old foursquare Victorian. She has gleaming wood and stained and leaded glass windows and she has held us with such grace. Parties – those I know about and the many I do not – to celebrate graduations and weddings and college leave-takings and returns and room to settle when life threw curves and coffee pots drained and cards dealt and meals shared and flotsam and jetsam accumulated through nine years of merging and setting out; all these things live in this place.
We are readying her for her next work.
And we are having to do our own work of celebrating and marking and mourning that which was and that which will be no more as well as that which will always be.
It seems I tell my life through dogs and houses.
I mark my days and ways of being according to the dog love and the house that conspired to hold me.
This house has held me and mine with such grace.
It is the house of Zoe, Mick and Ball and an Olm Wiggen Macaulay clan made flesh under her roof.
Good work.
My mother is 84 years old.
She skated with the Ice Follies, raised four children, survived divorce and a second challenging marriage, rolled in a car three years ago and picked herself up to begin life again. My mother is petite tungsten. She raised us to work hard, be gracious, and appreciate the beauty of creation and music.
She came for a visit. To do so, she climbed on a shuttle from Duluth and when she arrived at the Minneapolis airport she was summarily dumped by a driver who was in a hurry. In the midst of his rush, she was dropped at the wrong place with the wrong suitcase. How to connect with her waiting (in the wrong place) daughter? How to forgive herself for her suitcase blunder?
We found each other due to a kind fellow traveler. As we were going down the escalator to get into the car and there discern how to retrieve her missing suitcase, a traveler ahead of her lost control of her suitcase. Said suitcase, with handle in the up position, wedged itself in such a way that as my mother went down the escalator that suitcase handle encountered and gouged her shin. She was trapped. She was injured. I was there and powerless to do anything but hold onto her.
She limped away and after a few steps tossed off in a sort of no-big-deal way that she was bleeding.
And so she was. Her leg had been barked and opened. When she allowed a look at it, my whole body hurt because she had such grievous wounds.
We got her suitcase after a trip to the Mall of America Transport Hub and to Shakopee. All the while she worried; not about her leg, but about how she was inconveniencing me.
I am so very much aware that the woman of steel and grit and heart is a woman made fragile by years and life.
She let me tend her. She whose voice, tenderness and steel I carry was willing to let me kneel at her feet and tend the places of wounding. It felt like a passing of the mantle. Much of me is moved and grateful to be able to mother my mother. The other much younger and surely primal part of me wants to shout and fuss because it will never be done with needing a mother, this child.
I will never be done with needing my mother.
For a number of evenings I have been tumbled into a strange and troubling land.
Cooper and I have been watching “Mad Men”, the television series that details the birth of the advertising machine in the 1960’s. Through all the cigarette smoking all-day-long drinking woman squashing I find myself drawn and heartsick, both.
I am watching on television the generation that raised me.
The assumptions that speak through the dialogue are those that have bedeviled me through much of my life: The assumptions about the role of women, the “boys will be boys” catering to male privilege, and the insistence upon not seeing what is going on. All of those assumptions were in the smoke-filled air that I breathed growing up.
I watch the trim-waisted women desperately seeking meaning and the loneliness of the men. It seems both genders are engaged in a desperate attempt to avoid the realities of life. Their children are cossetted and kept safe from the world but they know the great world of the unspoken and they are uneasy in their cloister.
I find myself amazed at how much has changed in fifty or so years.
And I find myself amazed at the wounds that remain, subterranean flinches that make themselves known throughout the day as I encounter what is in the year 2013.
We still make assumptions that harm both genders (including the assumption that there are only two genders with no gradation between).
We still don’t want to have to see what is going on.
We still exalt those who can manipulate us best.
I don’t know if I can continue to watch the series. It hurts too much.
Oh my mother, oh my father, oh those of us raised in those days.
Is there balm in Gilead?
Landscapes, Nature, Aerial, and Cityscapes
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. – Marcel Proust
A view of life through the heart of an elder
thoughts on showing up to all that is
Celebrating the Sacred
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