Stuff I Like

Okay, here is the latest installment in "S. attempts to be grateful--Beautiful Things Edition:"

--The changing leaves. Barrage of gorgeousness, and today I get to drive for an hour and a half, by myself, marinating in beauty.

--Getting to see crew teams on a little snatch of the Niagara river on the way from being able to get a flat tire replaced for free! Thank you warranty!

--My omelette this morning--I used spinach, so it is sunny yellow, orange from the carrots, green from the spinach, and red from the hot sauce. Beautiful and tasty!

--Flamenco dancing. Live. In person. Good seats. Amazing music. Unbelievable dancing. OMG, I think the entire course of my life has just shifted. When you next hear from me, I will have exchanged a quiet, Buffalonian office existence for a gypsy camp, a billowing skirt, and a pair of clicky shoes.

And this. Discovered via another website of which I am fond, godspy.com, such a witty, funny, accurate read. Like reading my life story, in embarrassing vividness. I just had to share with all of my pea-coat wearing, facebook member, Onion reading, unpaid internship working white friends! Enjoy!

Okay, now I am off to a wedding, to freeze my booty off in a dress that is completely seasonally inappropriate, but unfortunately one of the only wedding appropriate pieces of attire in my entire wardrobe. No, believe me, it is, I've thought long and hard about this.

But I promise that, soon and very soon, you will get some long, thoughtful, meaty post. Actually, it will be about dancing, I can almost guarantee, considering that's just about all I think about. Yes, still the only thing I think about. Okay then.

Toodles!
S.

Antidote

Greetings, faithful folk who read this blog...

I don't have much of interest to say today, unfortunately. Generally these days I feel like a bathtub that's had the stopper pulled out and am watching all of my energy swirl away down the drain. But I am trying to start something new and I hope if I make mention of it in such a public forum it will be that much closer to becoming a reality. I want to become more aware of what is around me, particularly of all the good that is in the world that I see everyday and want to move even deeper into not just noticing, but fully embracing and appreciating what is around me. So I want to start asking myself the question, "What is the most beautiful thing you saw all day?" Maybe it was a bright red leaf on the sidewalk, or a feather or a smiling face. But whatever it was, I just want to have noticed it that day. So, for starters, yesterday was a tie because I saw, over a fence, the mossy roof of a little gazebo that had a beautiful wrought iron ridgepole on top. And I also got to see the sun setting over the lake yesterday and the sky was a deep color of pink and the water was blue and the behind me was my favorite color of deep blue...take my word for it, describing sunsets is not my strong suit, but this one was stellar.

Today it was the fake cobwebs that I put all around the railing of our balcony to decorate for Halloween! I love decorating and I love holidays and these cobwebs took me back to happy memories of our Halloween party in Australia. Maybe this year I'll even whip up another batch of those poop brownies that we enjoyed!!

Who knows, in the future I might even try to incorporate a little photography into the exercise. If only I weren't so averse to my current camera...oh well. What about you? What is the most beautiful thing you've seen today?

S.

Love Poems, of a sort

Now, after neglecting you after a full month, I will post twice in one day. The reason is this: after feeling crappy and tired all day yesterday, today I felt even MORE crappy and tired, and so decided to stay home from work. Who knows when spare time like this will come upon me again? I figure I better make the most of it.

So what I have to say now is this: two of my dearest friends in all the world just got married the weekend before last, to each other, which I guess is good, in the grand scheme of things. This meant that I got to see a whole bunch of the people I love dearly, but they are gone now, so I am sad. But it also meant that I poured blood, sweat, and many tears into a poem that they asked me to write for their ceremony (the folks getting married, that is) and I wish to share the fruit of my labors with all of you, since now that it is safely written down and read and printed in the bulletin, I feel sufficiently detached to be sort of proud of it. So here you go:

The Ocean and The Dream: A Poem in Two Parts

1. Jeremy

How long does it take
to know that I will always love you?
How can I explain what I am sure of?
It is like knowing
that I will always want to come sit
under the same ribbon-hung tree every day.
To be quiet with her
and write wise thoughts in my book.
It is no philosopher’s certainty, of course.
No, it is much finer than that.

It is seeing the sky
from the bottom of the ocean,
being humbled by my fragility
beneath the weight of all that water
knowing down here that forever
means so little, when I am the one
who says it.

But constancy, my dear,
is not about moving oceans
or whispering sweet nothings
that float to the surface like bubbles
and break your heart when they burst
and are empty.
I have a better promise for you.

I promise that when our two trees grow,
they will bend towards each other
as surely as leaves seek light
branches will entwine with branches
and the deep roots of our lives
will clasp each other
and go still deeper.


2. Alicia

I could almost believe
that we heard the voice
of the road through our sleep,
like the bird song of a siren.
And each of us was lifted
and carried and placed
by the fluid, compelling arms of the night,
so that our thousand mile journey
was made without even breaking
the smooth undulations of sleep-breathing.
And even in that dream,
the landscape had changed,
but I was not amazed.
Wasn’t I set here by chance?
Didn’t stars and planets align
and simply make it so?

But we are not Dante’s children,
waking and lost in the woods.
Remember the day we chose the path?
More than that, remember ourselves as two travelers
who found that at every divergence,
we didn’t want to say goodbye.

And by and by I realized,
the road beneath my feet
was asking me a question:
Who is the one who can paint every flaw
in bright, violent colors
and frame that picture, and still say, “beautiful.”
I answer this question with one of my own:
“How could I have chosen anyone else?”


And, since I can never seem to offer a piece of my own work without also offering some of someone else's which I esteem to be better, here is a gorgeous, blush-worthy poem from the fantastic Pablo Neruda. If I were you, I would make sure to read it sitting down on some soft surface, surrounded by a heaping pile of cushions, as this piece has been known to produce swooning, particularly if you read the original Spanish version, out loud. Ay, Pablo!

Things forgotten, things remembered

Merciful heavens! Sometimes things just slip away from me to the extent that a whole month can pass (gasp! The first of October! It's actually been more than a month!) in which I post nothing on the ol' blog. For shame. Shame, shame, shame! I have no way to atone for this, so therefore, I will simply press on.

The first update I bring to the table today is that I missed Rosh Hashannah. Completely and utterly missed it. Did I not mark it's appearance on my office calendar with joy, considering that's the only way I knew when it was coming? Did I not practically count down the days until it was going to be here? I even thought of it on Monday morning and said to myself, starting this evening, it will be Rosh Hashannah. And then from sundown on Monday to sundown on Tuesday, thought of it not at all. Lamentable day!

Here is the backstory. I have been interested for the past six months or so in starting some casual observance of Jewish holidays. It makes sense to me because I clearly need some better way of connecting with the bible besides reading it, which basically never happens. And it makes sense to me that in the same way that the church calendar guides us into the life of Christ through marking time, so the Jewish calendar guides us into the story of God and God's people Israel by intentionally drawing our minds to the contemplation of certain parts of the story.

So, as far as I understand it, Rosh Hashannah is the new year of the Jewish calendar, the birthday of the world. On Rosh Hashannah you are supposed to hear the blowing of the shofar, which, I am told, symbolizes the breaking open and building up that is supposed to happen to a repentant person. Because, I think it's ten days after Rosh Hashannah, one is supposed to observe Yom Kippur, which is the day in which one's fate is set for the next year. So the time in between is supposed to be about repentance and making amends to those wronged in the past year. Repentance is hardly something I excel at, or could even claim to understand, so this would probably be a good discipline to undertake.

Unfortunately, what actually happened for me on Rosh Hashannah this year is that I spent most of the day feeling sick, and sleepy, and sorry for myself that I had such a crappy, boring job, irritated at the gray, rainy weather, and irritated at others for contributing to the fact that my job is crappy. What a way to start a new year!

But here is one of the things I love about these church calendars--these things operate so independently of me and what I'm feeling. I am glad that even in the midst of the thousand tiny deaths that constitute fall, we could be reminded of the birth of the whole world and the renewal of creation. And even when I'm feeling sick and crappy and stuck in the old ways of my tired old life, God could still be doing something new.

This is why I want to incorporate the Jewish calendar into my life--because it's another thing that has the potential of taking me out of myself, of guiding my reflections somewhere they wouldn't go of their own accord, and because, quite simply, I think they are beautiful, and I am always attracted to beauty.

So, L'Shana Tova, friends, here is to a sweet new year and here is to remembering to celebrate what we value!

S.

Crutches

I was raised to hate the saints.

Okay, okay, maybe hate is too strong a word. In fact, it is almost certainly too strong a word. But it does make a catchy opener, right? Really it is more accurate to say that I was never taught to love the saints, I was taught to think of them as a distraction, something that weak people used because they weren't really committed to God. Saints were idolatrous, I mean, just look at all that art connected with them. So many pictures. Man's futile attempt (gendered language being part and parcel of the diatribe) to bring the infinite down to a knowable level. Which is wrong! And wicked! And really, really naughty!

The same thing, in essence, was said about all non-spontaneous prayer. If it wasn't "from the heart," the immediate, extempore outflow of that moment's emotions and response to God, it was phony, insincere. Rote. The product of Dead Faith. This would include, in practice at least, if not in theology, even the Lord's Prayer and the Creeds. The most important thing, in both of these cases, is my personal, direct connection with the divine, my individual response, my emotional engagement.

But what happens when the connection is severed? When emotions are deadened? When I can't bring myself to have any response at all? I think a part of the culture which produced devotion to saints and reliance on liturgical prayer was perhaps one of greater humility than our own. It was a culture of largely unlettered people, more farmers than poets. Perhaps they felt incapable of barging in on the Most High, unannounced and without decorum. Perhaps it wasn't (isn't?) wrong to feel that way. While we recognize God-drawn-near in the incarnation of Christ, we must also keep in mind God-mysterious, God-beyond-speaking, Holy-Holy-Holy God. When we view God in this way, doesn't it seem right that spontaneous words should seem to rough? That we ourselves should feel somewhat inadequate to approach, knowing ourselves as we do and knowing only the thousandth part of what the incandescence of God requires.

But this is not really my point. I was often taught to think of saints and liturgy as something for weak people, for those not brave enough to face God, not faithful enough to speak their own thoughts to Her.

But now, I know, I am weak.

Not only not brave enough to face God, but often caught running in the opposite direction. I imagine burly brothers and sisters, both living and passed, catching hold of me as I try to scoot out the back-door of faith and turning me, pressing me back in the proper direction, and then pushing me even further with their prayers when my stubborn, terrified feet refuse to go even one step farther. When my own faith is weak or dormant, the prayers of the saints keep drawing me toward the dread throne. They lower me like a dying invalid through a roof, knowing intimately the nature of my disease and its cure.

They are mentors, wise voices still speaking to the Bride, urging her to remember old lessons. Francis chatters amiably to birds and wolves and speaks a very current message about the urgent need for creation care. Thomas unwillingly goes to India and challenges us with the intrepid faithfulness of a doubter. Mary quietly sings her song about a God who fills the hungry with good things and calls us to have compassion on the poor who have always looked to her for aid.

These days, I find myself having a similar reliance on liturgical prayers. Too often, I have nothing to say to God or I am too unbalanced, only complaining or thinking exclusively of my own little problems to the neglect of my local and global community. When the spontaneous outflow is stopped through hardness of heart, the words are a gift. The kyrie reminds me of my constant need for mercy. The Lord's prayer humbles me with every pounding phrase, to be brought to ask for another kingdom besides mine, to ask for pardon, to be put on the same level as my enemies. The prayers from the Book are beautiful, from liturgies are beautiful, and I am attracted to beauty when nothing else moves me. To say, I am angry, I am in pain, I am confused, but here are these words, and I can say them because of their sound, their feel in my mouth, their look on the page. They comfort me. To say, there is so much I cannot do, so much to this life of faith of which I feel incapable, but, these words. I can say them. Even without feeling, even without belief, I can bring myself to say these words and to believe, in this moment, that saying is enough.

I am profoundly grateful for saints and I am profoundly grateful for prayers and I am profoundly grateful for the renewal of mind that allows me to embrace them both.

At Last

Okay, so a little later than I anticipated, and a little rougher than I would have liked to put before my public, but here is another poem. Not terribly representative of where I am right now, as I wrote it back in early June, but as I look over my notebook, by far the best piece of recent work. So, that's that.

Where You Find Me

What if you were the old apple tree
the high grass
the moon in summer
the rocking chair
rain on the roof?

What would I be then?
Surely not the same old seagull
that child lost in the mall
a broken egg on the kitchen floor
the battered woman with broken teeth.

If we could get there,
to that place where
you were the stained glass picture
and I was the stub of a summertime candle
lighting you up from behind--
O, I know it!
There, everything would change.

Beauty Goes Underground

Today, I come bearing gifts. And because this is not the sort of area where one can give actual gifts, I come bearing virtual gifts. First of all, in my continued waste of my existence trolling around the web, I have discovered what I think could be my new gem. It's godspy.com, a very promising looking Catholic site that I have enjoyed poking around on for the last couple lunch hours. And in so doing, I stumbled across this article.