Others have survived it:  children coming home for the summer.  From college.  From total freedom.  From no governor but their own sweet sense of things.  From clothes carpets on bedroom floors and late night gatherings.  From volume on high.

To home they come.  Home, where parents are and rules are and sleep is celebrated (the kind where waking at 6:30 AM means eight hours of pillow time).  Home, where counter tops enjoy the freedom of being unlittered.  Home, where nooks of reading and silence are savored.  Home, where socks go into the dirty clothes basket.  Home, where dulcet tones waft from the stereo speakers.  Home, where parents have the crazy notion that they might have some input into the quality of life lived in their domicile.

I love my children.  Maybe most especially because my middle daughter who is newly graduated from college shared with me that she and her friends became aware that they don’t live in their “own” homes any more.  They live in our homes.  Theirs, surely, but the parental splash that makes for “ours” changes everything.  (Or at least I like to believe it does).

We’re figuring it out.  Do we like to have their friends over?  Yes.  Do we want to come home after a long day of work to ten of them crowding the kitchen and denuding the refrigerator?  No.  Will we survive this?  Yes.

To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven (thanks, Ecclesiastes).  This is the season of welcoming and boundary making and negotiating and asserting.  We’ll survive it and more.  I trust that. 

Perhaps more troubling is the notion that once the lights go off as the sun is coming up and my children have gone to bed, the crusty socks that call our house home are off reproducing in the dark corners and under-couch lairs they seem to prefer.  They are taking over the house…..

It’s messy, love is.  There is no pain or savor like that borne in its being and there is no greater teacher than the insistent call that is love.

I spent Friday night with people who are students with me in the thing that is loving:  Cousins and offspring of same, siblings, uncles and aunts, my mother, and a whole collage of people marking the life and legacy of my aunt.  She set the table at which we gathered.  Her table, as my cousin John spoke it during her funeral, was one where good manners mattered, graciousness was foundation, and hospitality given gift.

Every family has their DNA.  The Fawcett strands?  Strength, laughter, dogs, rascal, integrity, loyalty, poetry, clan, beauty, soul, curiosity, people, vulnerability, grit, pride, humility, grief, heart, generosity.  Seeing cousins after a decade or more of living was wonderment.  In them beat the shared longings and promptings that were dished out through our births and around our growing up tables and we are many and we are one and we are blessed.  From a tall physician and a petite musician came this clamor of life in the bodies of their offspring.  And we have played it out, this clamor.

We have loved and lost, grappled with pain and betrayal, run from and run to.  The strands of our being have hummed with sureity and jangled with doubts and somehow we have come round right and Friday was reminder that there is no knowing like that of family.  We share a story deeper than the changing scenery of our days.

We have lived the challenges of the gift of love and we seek its wisdom yet.  Some of that wisdom can only find fullsome voice around the table that is family. 

For the gift and stumble of learning love through kin, my wondering heart gives thanks.

My aunt Carolyn is near death.

Her body is riddled with cancer and it came upon her quickly.  Her children and grandchildren are gathering as are siblings and other beloveds.

This hurts.  She is my mom’s older sister.  Tall and strong and talented and gracious and fierce and like no other, she is.  Private, oh so private about her thoughts and being.  And within that being, the glimpses I got of the woman are part of the who I am.

We would spend weeks with her and her tribe of five children.  I almost wondered if she and my mom conspired around childbirthing, because with the  exception of one child in the middle not represented in my family, the two sisters had four other children  born in pairs.  It made for raucous gatherings.  A cousin our own age for each of us.  There were summers at the cabin and weeks in Duluth spent at Carolyn’s and Thanksgiving feasts and loud poker games and not a one of my mom’s sibling laughs delicately.  Most of their kids share the same propensity for full-bodied laughter.  So the air when the family gathered was laced with conversation and laughter choruses and intrigue and warm.

We’ll gather soon to thank God for Carolyn’s life.  I don’t much know how to say thank you.  What I am thinking these days is what a powerful blessing family is:  Memories and traditions and relationships and bumps and the ongoing threading together that is sacred learning ground.  We learn from each other lessons that we can’t even speak.

The lesson I can speak has to do with french toast.  Aunt Carolyn taught me that french toast is a great way to use stale bread and it goes a long way for small cost.  That teaching I can speak.  But the other things she has deposited in my heart?  I can’t speak them.  But I know them to be grace. 

So I pray on this night: God’s blessings, travelling mercies, thank you, thank you, thank you.

For forty some years now a part of my heart has been lodged in the log embrace of my cabin.  My parents bought it when I was in second grade.  The day after school let out, my mother and my sibs were in the car and on our way to the cabin, where we would spend days barefooted and swim suited and blissfully at one with water and space.  My father would pay his visits weekly after he had finished worship on Sunday.  The same was true for the other men who owned cabins up and down our beach.  They would come, the men, and they would leave.  And the beach?  It was a community of women and children with an occasional and welcome male splash.

After a time, my father moved there and made home full time.  The power of his spirit was taken into the pores of the place.  When he died all too suddenly in its shelter, his wife muddled on for a time in the solitude and the stress of winter in isolated places.  She came to know the need to bail.

So I bought it.  I could not imagine it leaving the family.  I could not imagine my life without the sanctuary of its presence.  I could not bear the thought of leaving the community of women and children now grown and the generations beginning to find roots there.  I bought it and in doing so I am keeper of the light of hearth for me and for my kin who know it as heart home.

This summer it is not available to me.  For a time, it is being rented to another.  And oh, the ache for the smell and the feel and the hold and the song of it is visceral.  The rhythms of my life are jarred.  The crawling in that has long been is no more for a time.

I am learning things.  I am learning that I am a creature who must spend time by water, in wind, and under trees.  I am paying attention to the ache and seeking ways for my rhythm to be restored in other venues.  I am digging more in the ground of  my city yard.  I am seeking re-creation through lakes and grass and water never far from the armor of concrete.  I am learning gratitude for God’s creative glory in the birds that feed on the newly hung bird feeder in my yard.  I am learning.

And I know that after a time, the cabin that is the nest of my heart will once again take me in.  So this ode to ache is also song of gratitude.  She is, that log hug.  She is, and she waits for me and mine.  That is blessing, it is blessing indeed.

I was handed a gift yesterday at church.  The woman who handed it to me shares my love of words and seems to have an uncanny sense of what will resonate with me.

The book is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.  I had heard someone else mention how good it was, but the title seemed too cute to make for an interesting read.  Plus, it was hardcover and I have pledged myself to only buying paperbacks if the wait at the library is too long.  Most times I stick to that pledge….

I read the book in one day.  It has a power hard to describe.  And for me on this day, it was just the sort of soul food I was hungry for.

The gift was given on Mother’s Day.  I received it after having led worship at two services where moms and children were sitting side by side on a Sunday morning worshipping God and giving thanks for the life of the other.  My mother on Mother’s Day was three hours north in Duluth.  My three children were off doing what they need to do on such a day:  studying for finals and working miles from their mother’s side.  I will admit to a bit of wistful loneliness.  I was missing my mom and I was missing being the mom of kids I could sit in a pew with.

And then I got a gift.  With an amazing card with a message I was graced to hear.  And suddenly, Mother’s Day became a celebration of the power of connection shared through the cords of love we weave in our lives.

The gift of life comes in ways sometimes visceral and sometimes ethereal and we who are reborn through the gifting are meant to give thanks.  And so I do.

Somehow we don’t hear much about how grief is a total body experience.

When we lose things:  dreams, beloveds, a sense of solid, the wham of grief is sudden guest in our life.  Uninvited, to be sure, but guest none the less.

In the rounds of pastoring, grief is a language that is spoken often.  Those of us who are able to be present at such times feel the honor of such sharing.  To be witness to tears and thrashings and wonderings about how such weight is to be borne is holy work. 

And it is work powerfully shared.  Sometimes people come out of worship flowing with tears.  They are apologetic and embarrassed.  Sometimes they aren’t sure what triggered the deluge.  Sometimes they know well the source:  a parent’s favorite hymn, the dangerous power of stillness and its ability to surface pain, the challenges and wrangles of life that just seem overwhelming and too much to bear.

When such tears are shed in the company of others, they are gift.  They bear witness to the power and safe of community.  They are proclaimers of mystery and sign of soul work.  They are language deeper than words.

My prayer is that for each of us, there is a pair of eyes, a presence, a place where tears and grief and confusion are safe to share.  Companions on our spirit journey are there for us, even when we feel less than lovely.  Even when we are so confused we cannot speak coherence.  Even then, especially then.

And my prayer is that the awareness grows in us each that in all of our griefs, we are companioned by the Holy:  Breathing, pulsing, and loving in all of the wet.

It was as if all the flavors of the earth were out to play in the May sunlight.

I’ve lived in Minneapolis for over five years now, but somehow didn’t get over to experience the May Day parade and revelries near Powderhorn Park.  This year my daughter Leah was pretty insistent.  I HAD to be a part of this.  She was right.

The parade begins before the parade begins.  Rounding the corner onto the street where the parade was going to pass, I was treated to the sight of blocks of people on their hands and knees drawing on the street with chalk.  The barricades were up, the cars were gone, and the play began.  Every manner of bike tooled past.  Costumes meant to celebrate spring were worn.  There were ribbons dancing and bodies freed from months of hiding from the cold.

The parade itself, when it passed us, was a story wrought by Heart of the Beast creativity.  Every year there is a theme.  This year it was how it is we are called to build a better world through a compassionate global economy (at least that’s what I got from it).  The story was told by an array of enthusiastic folk willing to give time and talent and energy to tell a story that needs telling.

I sat in the sun.  Leaning up against my guy, nestled next to my eldest, immersed in the celebration that is life,  glad to be alive and embodied and ready to play.

I drove halfway across the state of MN today to watch my daughter fly.

Rachel is a senior at the U of MN Morris.  She is a biology and environmental science double major.  As part of their graduation requirement, students are asked to prepare and present a lecture on a topic.  The lecture is to last forty-five minutes or so, with ten minutes for questions from students and faculty.

I’d be hard pressed to say exactly what her paper was on.  It had to do with how it is mercury is spewed into our environment and taken into the most basic lifeforms and transmitted up the food chain to humans.  It was informative (who knew that all those chemicals and the ways they bond would translate into tremors for the health of creation) and it was clear to me that she not only knew a lot, but was excited to share it with her peers and instructors.

How is it that this is so?  How is it that we gestate and give birth, raise and love, bless and send, and observe flight?  How is it that children morph into adults who have such passion for their worlds and such conviction that they can create better and saner ways of encountering it than the generations that preceded them?  How is it that a mom can bounce across the state and land in her daughter’s world and watch there a miracle unfold?

I’m in awe.  Somehow that girl ended up in my life.  Somehow I got to hold her and sing to her and breathe the air she breathed and now, in flight, she thinks to invite me to share the loft.

Blessed am I among women.

We have unpaid ministerial staff at our house.  Unpaid, unless you count bread gulps, mountains of Purina, and catnip baubles.

The heart ground of our clan is Zoe, our black lab (mostly) dog.  She has not always been appreciated.  While a puppy, she was BAD.  Furniture still bears witness to her penchant for tearing and ripping and chewing.  She was wild and excited most of the time.  We wondered what kind of crazy lunacy led us to take on a puppy with three small children.  There were thoughts of throwing in the towel.  But we prevailed, figuring that we didn’t want our kids to get the message that if they misbehaved, they would be shipped off to another home.

Thank goodness for that.  As she has aged, Zoe has blessed us beyond the price of any piece of furniture or vexation.  She is the first to greet anyone coming home; tail wagging and a slipper or shoe in her mouth as gift.  She is the warm heart always available to my children.  When tears and the huge challenge of living have swept them through the years and some of that challenge had to do with parents, Zoe was the go-to for steadfast and uncomplicated love.

She smells, yes.  She gets wild about garbage trucks and newspaper deliveries, yes.  And she is teacher of love.

The cat?  Well, that’s another story.  We got Ball as a chance for Jamie to have “his own” critter.  Foolish was that notion.  Because as we came to learn, cats are no one’s own.  They are their own.  And so it is with Ball.  He is insistent that he be treated with a flow of food.  He makes the dog cower because he is one bad hombre.  And yet, when the day has been long and the soul wrung, Ball finds his way to laps and shares his warmth and rumble.

I read in the morning’s paper about what goes on in designer puppy mills.  It sounds foul.  What I know is this:  the dog that was born under a trailer in rural Duluth and the cat that was taken in from a shelter in Minneapolis are grace in our lives.   In the choreography that is life in our home, hearts walk on four legs.

It’s Earth Day.  Today on the calendar, anyway.  But the reverence and mindfulness meant to surface on this day toward the gift of the cosmos must become so much a part of our being that we know each day to be Earth Day.

On this day we stop and give thanks –

For the places in our childhood that taught us awe and holding:  the lap of trees and the loft of sitting above the ground in the midst of the music of leaves.  The lakes that taught us to trust their hold as we relaxed and learned to float.  The mud crafted into pies and cakes and flung.  The stars singing a song of belonging to a child flat on back in the midst of the awesome “what is”.

For the places in our adult life where we are reminded that God’s artistry is life blood:  the cabins, the woods, the tree buds that promise that winter will leave for a time, the smell of growing and green and its partner the decay and crisp of fall.

For the awareness that all that is has been wrought from the imagination and heart of God and we are witnesses to the fragile and precious gift that is creation.

May we tend it with reverence.  May we tend it with gratitude.  May we breathe with our creator the breath of life upon this world.