Twelve Years Later

Twelve years later, I can still remember my horror on the morning that I heard. Horror both at what had happened and at what would happen next, which already loomed like an oncoming storm in the sky of the day's pain. I held my baby in my arms and listened as Amy Goodman, from Ground Zero, played the terrified voices of people on the street. I held Devin closer and kissed his hair and wondered what the world would be like now.

Glennon of Momastery had this to say this morning. It says everything I might hope to say and more, so I will save my words and recommend it to you.

I also want to tell you about a book. It is called Acts of Faith and it is written by a man named Eboo Patel, an American Muslim from India and a leader in the youth interfaith movement. This book has transformed my understanding of what is going on in the Muslim world, especially for the kinds of men that end up committing terrible acts. It has expanded my empathy and my commitment that we all need to learn to know one another and live together and that the best place to start is with our youth. I cannot say enough about it. It is one of the most important books I've read in my life. I sincerely hope you'll consider checking it out. It's not an apology for anything. It's a rallying cry for us to create a world of cooperation and pluralism.

On this anniversary, my hope is for all of us to be at peace, all over the world, safe from violence and misunderstanding. I pray that we all find freedom and that we can learn to live together in this fragile world. And I hope and pray especially for the Syrian refugees who are right now, in the millions, living in uncertainty as the world decides their fate.

The Smell of Rot and Orange Rinds

Hello there. It's been a while.

I only intended to be off of my blog and Facebook for 40 days, and that 40 days ended over a week ago. When the time came for me to come back and tell you all something about my time off, I found I didn't really have anything to say. I wrote blog posts and discarded them because they were trying to hard to prove something. So I waited some more, becoming increasingly concerned that inspiration had not struck.

Inspiration still has not found me, so I guess I'll go ahead and just give it a go.

I don't have any deep thoughts for you. Time out of the internet social network was the same as time in it, except quieter. I honestly expected that I would have some kind of spiritual epiphany, as if I had gone up into a cave for a month and waited for God to speak. That didn't happen. Sure, I had several useful thought-processes and made what I think of as some discoveries, but I remain very much as I was.

More so, in fact. I find that fact a little embarrassing.

Right now—as I am writing—something in this house has gone terribly bad. I can smell it every time I inhale through my nose. It is, judging by the odor, either some very rotten milk or a dead cat. I have searched for the source of the smell in vain for several days and I can't find it, so instead of looking, I am boiling orange peels and cinnamon on my stove.

And this sort of sums up everything.

The things about myself that I don't like just keep on stinking up the place. I am insecure, self-involved, and prone to fits of anger and depression. Still. I wonder, all the time, if I am hiding this well enough, underneath the smell of cinnamon, and if it smells as bad to you as it does to me. I have frequent moments of peace and I think I have found The Answer, but, once the water boils away, the smell still lingers on the air.

I am stuck with it. And I think it might be fear.

Writing a memoir is very unsettling. Or, at least it was for me. I don't regret having done it, but it hasn't been easy to do. Taking the intimate truth of my humanity and putting it down for others to read takes something like courage, and I am not sure yet if it's a courage that I want. I'm not sure yet if I am ready to be criticized—not just for how I write but for who I am. I am not sure I am ready to read internet reviews that make me feel like all the cinnamon and citrus in the world cannot hide the odor of my truth.

This fear is not unreasonable. The internet can be a bit cruel, don't you think?

In my book, I wrote a chapter about middle school. (Remember middle school?) It is called "Forsaken," and it is about feeling that no place in the world was safe, that everything about me—even my trying to be different and better—was fuel for others to torment me. It is about losing my faith in a world that loved and wanted me. Perhaps it's about losing God. When I was twelve and thirteen, there really was nowhere safe for me to turn to. There was no real respite from the pain. It lingered on me, festering, until I learned how to treat myself with alcohol and drugs and then later with the 12 steps.

This is relevant, because I find that the social media world often feels a great deal like middle school to me.

In dealing with this, I have focused entirely on the notion of courage, on boldness, on shameless truth-telling. I believe in all those things. I truly believe that there is nothing in that memoir I need be ashamed of and that it contains a great many things  to which others will relate. So, I have plunged forward, over what felt like a quietly mounting hysteria, and prepared to give it to the world. I have thought about selling it, about revising it, about making it the best version of me that it can be. I have buckled down and striven to do my best.

It occurs for me only now that this may not be very healthy.

I find that the person who wrote that memoir needs a safe place she can turn. Before she opens herself up to the universe, inviting anyone—no matter their intention—to take a look, she deserves for her feelings to be known. There needs to be a spirituality that can hold her, a circle of friendship that can sustain her, and a real choice to go forward.

She needs permission to turn back.

I find it's easier to empathize with my own needs when I think of myself as a daughter, someone whom I love unconditionally and whose feelings, no matter how large, remain important to me. And if I had a daughter and she was scared and vulnerable and hoping for courage she wasn't sure she had, I'd give her permission. I'd give her space.

So, I am doing that.

I am waiting and I am learning whether I can be with myself, whether I can see all of I have written, and all I think, as the story that is and not as the one true case about life. I am not going to send it out into the world until I can sit with myself in silence and be comfortable with what I find. I think I owe that to myself.

So, thanks for being patient with me. Right now, my work as a writer requires more mediation and less courage, more quiet, and less of my own commentary.

I need to divest myself of my fear-based desire for acceptance and popularity.

I wonder if any of you can relate. I wonder if anyone else is learning to have self-compassion and sit still. If you are, and you are willing to share about it, I'd love to hear from you.

I have other things I want to share with you, but, for now, I will just say: I missed you. Drop by and say hello.

Into the Tidal Zone Part Two: Making Justice

Photo Credit: Morguefile

Welcome to part two of Into the Tidal Zone. Part One can be read here. This is intended for audience participation, so please comment, and comment on comments, and follow comments, and otherwise keep things interesting in a respectful way. This series is intended to explore in a variety of ways those areas of our lives that we might call spiritual, religious, ethical, or whatever name you have for the magma core of who-you-are. I call mine my spirituality. Today I am delving into the issue of obligation to make justice, or change, in the world.

*

At the church of my childhood, there is one religious teaching I remember most: Make justice. This is the thing that got stuck on me.

It was the 1980s and the government of El Salvador was killing its own people (10,000 by 1980). My church was part of the Sanctuary Movement at the time. After long deliberation, the adult members of the church had decided to harbor a family from El Salvador in open defiance of federal law. The family had two children: Marta and Jesus. When they first came to us, we played a game with them and, all the other kids, where our names were drawn out of a hat.

"JEE-SUS?" my friend Karuna whispered, holding a slip of paper in disbelief, before someone corrected her.

Marta was around my age. She was taller than I was and had long dark, wavy hair and a broad-lipped smile. She seemed shy without more English, shy out of her world, but likable and kind. This hiding of people was an important secret that had to be kept, or Marta might be dragged away to blood-covered jungles, I imagined, where, taken by the military, she would be turned into black smoke. Disappeared. One day we went with her and her brother to the county fair, and I was scared the whole time that she would be recognized and dragged away with the cotton candy still sticky and pink in her hands and teeth.

This was how I learned that justice was something that real people needed and real people provided, that it was imperative, and that it included risk.

I wondered why we didn't do more.

"Would you give up your TV if it would save a starving child in Africa?" I asked an adult friend one day, when I was twelve. (All the starving children were in Africa in the 1980s.) She thought about it and answered honestly.

"No."

This drove me crazy about the world. I gave up eating meat when I was seven, but everyone else ate it. If I asked questions about why, they tended to say that they thought it was wrong but that they did it anyhow, which bothered more than the people who said they thought it was all right.

When I was fourteen, my friend and I walked into Macy's and, examining all the make-up, left it with stickers that said "This product tested on animals." When we were caught, the store clerk was kind and gentle and didn't yell at us, but simply asked us to stop. We did. Having walked in as nonviolent protesters, we left as reprimanded kids. We walked on to the food court to order a calzone.

When, at twenty-two,  I was getting ready to have my first baby, I was hearing about the conditions of workers in China in factories. No baby things from China please, I asked everybody.

"Here," said my grandmother, proudly, handing me a stuffed animal for my coming child. "This seal was made in Sri Lanka."

"You're not realistic enough," people told me. "You can't make them stop."

"I know," I told him. "I think I'm still supposed to try."

There were no diaper bags that weren't from China. At least not in our price range. So we bought a Chinese one anyway. Would you give up your TV? Maybe I wouldn't... Maybe not...

Having been presented with no more refugees to be friends with since middle school, my heart ached for something meaningful to do. How do you make justice? I wondered. Does it always mean making someone mad? The kind of justice I was trying to practice seemed to involve $5 cookies from Whole Foods, made locally with all-natural dyes. It seemed to make shopping harder, make life harder and bring no obvious reward. Thinking in terms of justice, without getting next to injustice, was like walking around barefoot on hot and rocky ground.

*

Today, I look at the world and ask myself the very same thing.

Today, I buy ethically-questionable meat along with ethically-questionable rice and sometimes the only thing I can be sure of are the bunches of lettuce from my yard. I sob inwardly at the mountains of fire and the young firefighters killed and think, Surely, we could do better than this. Surely I could do more to prevent the climate change of the world! I become exhausted by the need for action and justice-making and do nothing, too often, when something would be the thing to do.

But still I am moved by the need for justice. I let my heart be engaged. I watch the films posted of children who, having grown up in America, then face deportation because they cannot get the right paperwork*. I wonder if Marta ever became a citizen. Did she go back to El Salvador? Or was she deported, after learning to love cotton candy, and learning to speak easy English, and calling this nation her home? I wonder.

I carve out small spaces and do what I can: I give up paper towels, plant a garden and learn to grow food in a way that does not make war with the earth. I eat eggs from chickens that I keep and tend myself. I strive to teach and love and honor each child that I am given to teach and love—mine or someone's else's—in a way that makes both of us larger than we were. We make small donations. and read and try to stay awake.

It does not seem enough.

When my teenage son came back from Mexico this April, where with his own hands, he built houses for those living in dirt-covered shacks, I saw the face of justice-making: he was exhausted, nauseated, dirty and, getting in the van, he told me:

"I want to go home and take a shower and eat real food and go back to Mexico again."

*

How were you raised to understand justice and action to the change the world? Was this part of your religious upbringing?

Has this understanding changed?

What have you lost? What have you gained?



*You should really try and find time to watch this moving film. Gather tissues first.

New Series: Into the Tidal Zone

Photo Credit: Morguefile  

What I call the tidal zone is the transforming edge of human experience, that place that is neither sea nor is it shore. It is a place apart from the ordinary concerns of daily life but close enough to them that are not fully lost to the ineffable greatness of the sea. In the tidal zone, sometimes things are clear and beautiful; sometimes they are murky and scary and dark. The world there teems with beauty and it all lives on the knife's edge between birth and death.

The tidal zone is the spiritual world: the world of longing, prayer and wonderment; the world of finding, grace, and bliss. 

It doesn't matter, really, if you think you are religious. Life will take you down to the shore. The questions and answers you find there will shape you and make you who you are. We all come out different from one another —some of us more different than we'd like.

I wrote a whole book about my life in the tidal zone. And I'd like to start exploring some of these ideas here. I want to start with a spiritual experience—mine or someone else's—and open up a conversation about it to see if we can find the common places and the places where we find different answers, take different paths from one another, and why.

*

Witness

It is Sunday and I am in a black church somewhere in my county because my daddy has been singing with his gospel choir. The pews are long and wooden and old, and I am shifting in them; feeling white and blonde and not Christian, feeling curious, feeling pale. I am small and I am an audience. I am a visitor. I am blue and cream and pale. All around me is coffee-colored skin and deep emotion and conviction: souls uplifted, assenting "Mmmmmm-hmmmmm. Yesssss." I am quiet. I know the words to the songs by heart and I know they are not real. Daddy sings "Just like Jeremiah..." I don't know who Jeremiah is, but I know how to sing. The Lighthouse Singers clap and stamp and move their feet; I want to get up and burst into thankful song with them. 

In a bit, there is more church service. This is quite unlike my church. In my church we stand and sing "We Are a Gentle, Angry People" and, afterwards,  there is a fish shredded into salad, at the buffet, and molded back again into the shape of a fish. It has olives for its eyes. Before the fish, before leaving, before Sunday school, we light a chalice and we quietly reflect. My feet have to be still. I have to think. I like my church. But the singing is better here.

Up in the front of the room is an old black woman with a trim church jacket: pink, and a hat on which perches a coiled fabric rose. Music swells and testimony rises to the low rafters and back down to where I sit. She is asking the congregation, "Will you look for Jesus?" People stand up and say loudly, surely, that they will. As a man stands up right near me, I feel whiter and stranger and less Christian than I ever have before. I feel hungry. And, as each person stands and says that they will accept Jesus, that they will listen for Jesus, will look for Jesus, I find that I am doing that, too. I am scanning the room right now for Jesus, hoping he will come in the side door. I am waiting for something blazing to happen, for some miracle to occur. I want Jesus to happen to me. I want to be invited and I want in. I want it to be real. The gospel song goes:

Jesus is real, I know the Lord is real to me. 

Jesus is real, I know the Lord is real to me. 

(Sometimes when I'm feeling low,) (no where to go,) 

(Jesus comes along) (and He makes me strong.) 

For I know, oh, Jesus is real.*

So I stand up. And this black woman is looking at me, this woman as smooth as dark molasses with a voice like the rumbling of a deep-bellied purr. She looks at me, with seriousness and affection, and she asks me,"Will you look for Jesus, child?" 

"I will," I tell her. And I sit back down, feeling so much better than I did before. 

Later, in the car, my dad, who is not Christian either but loves to sing, doesn't seem perturbed. His choir full of white people—Jewish, Buddhist, hippie, Christian, Nothing—sing gospel music. They sing about Jesus, who is real, and now—so do I.

*

Here's your question: What was a time when you can remember being exposed to the faith practices of other people in a way that actually got inside you, and in some way, and changed your feelings about life? 

What made this experience different from all the times you saw people believing differently and were not changed?

Are you still informed by this experience?

Your soundtrack: Jesus is Real by John P. Kee

Author's Notes: The memory I've included here is a bit of a collage of experiences I had. I found that I had a very clear memory of the woman speaking but not of her exact words or the circumstances of the day, so I filled in with what I could remember, in general, of sitting and watching gospel and how that felt to me.

If you want to read more about my experience of religion, or religious history read this.

*Song by John P. Kee.

All the God We Cannot See

Photo Credit: Morguefile by imelenchon

On the subject of religion, words mostly fail to join us in understanding; these words we speak that begin with "I believe."

I don't feel you. I don't get it. I can't make head nor tail of what you say.

And soon everyone gets angry or gets their feelings hurt—most especially the ones who think they really know.

I'm tired of this surety.

Aggressive atheism is like gathering up all the poetry books and burning them because you can't understand the metaphors.

Hard-nosed religiosity is like insisting on the singular, provable existence of only vanilla ice cream; it's like spitting on every other flavor in the freezer bin, threatening them all with a fiery, melty, imaginary doom.

This is how we fail to know each other.

Watch carefully. It's happening all over again. We fail to understand.

It's not that this overly made-up woman with the cross around her neck has never sat in the dark of a tornado cellar and asked herself whether God was in the wind. It's not, as we've thought, that she is feckless, stupid; unable to plumb the depths. It's that she's thought about this already and she knows that God is not in the wind but in the firemen who came for her, in the embrace of her neighbor, in the moment when her dog was found alive underneath the rubble of her whole world, and she felt gratitude.

She knows graces when she sees it. Do we?

It's not that this stuffy man is a fundamentalist, a naysayer, a bigot when he says no thank you to the idea of God. He is a seeker of wisdom, a kind of monk of the secular world. He is the one who will not enter the door of the temple while the beggars still have to stand outside. We think he's an ass, but he values reason, because he knows how easily we are swayed by the idolatry of passing thoughts. Even in great turmoil, he sets aside easy comfort and holds the line; he waits for evidence.

He knows courage when he's called to it. Do we?

It's not that this woman is trying to be difficult, even if she's furry, bra-less, and wears a pentacle around her neck. She is the sister of all things living; she is the spirit of the wild. It's not like we thought: that she believes in a Goddess sitting astride the Heavens; a superhuman hippie queen who rules the world. It's that she has learned, with practice, to see the divinity in every single rock, lichen, and ant that she observes. She calls this "Goddess." She closes her eyes to chant and everything alive is joined with her.

She knows beauty when she sees it. Do we?

We don't.

We cannot have the sacredness of Nature, the compassion of a loving God. We cannot have the peace of the dharma. We cannot have the courage to live without succumbing to short-cuts, to easy explanations of the unknowable world.

We cannot have these things. Not at the same time.

All the time, day after day, prayers are being prayed that will never leave our lips. Moments of transcendence are visited on the weary, on the sick. Faith is being shattered, threatened, changed, and born in the hearts of people we will never know.

Every day this happens. Spiritual lives are lit up like great torches or snuffed out; souls are trembling in the storm.

And still we think, in some small way, that we know God, or know what God is not.

We think we know this, without the inconvenience of praying five times a day or of keeping the Sabbath, or of daily meditation, and without cultivating the discipline of groundlessness. We know, we think, without the disciplined intention of spellcraft, or the utter trust required to sit, breathing stifled, and pray through a sweat lodge.

We don't really want to know. I don't. Because if we sat in the sweat lodge and let the smoke fill up our lungs, if we gave ourselves up to the practice of the yogas, if we fell to our knees and prayed to Jesus Christ to save us, and meant this with the truth of our entire hearts—we would be changed from what we are.

We would no longer know ourselves. Because we would have gone to a place where we were quite sure there was no God and found that God was there. Even in the abnegation of God's existence, we would recognize the beating heart of awe, of faith, of devotion to humanity and the world.

We would find that God is the same in all moments of rapture,

—and that we never ever knew what anyone else meant when they uttered the word: God.

We do not do this. And we cannot do this. We simply cannot live inside the skin of another person's soul.

But I wonder if we might just ask ourselves how much truth we are missing, all the God we cannot see; I wonder if we can ponder how much wealth is always concealed from us by our own  inevitably narrow human minds.

And so it is that I think that some of us might instead place faith where we have prior substituted small truths.

Faith is better; it lasts longer. Feet sunk deep in the unknowable, arms reaching for the trust we need to live our lives; faith is indeed precious, wise.

Aggressive truth, by contrast, is destructive, and, what's more—it's never true.

The truth is unknowable, unfathomable. The ineffable, refracted light of the sacred filters through us and shines its indescribable colors, gorgeous to our eyes.

Perhaps to have faith is to look each time at that light, as it passes through another, as it passes through our egos, landing splendid on the world;

and each time find something in it that is holy, that is new.


“Faith is believing that the outcome will be what it should be, no matter what it is.”
~Colette Baron-Reid

Strong Dreams

Photo by Todd Nickols

You are the youngest, and the one to whom childhood still belongs. You are the one with the LEGOs strewn all over the floor like tiny dangerous pebbles, the one with a thousand costumes you still wear, the one who looks for leprechauns. You are the only one of these magical creatures—a child still being a child—that I still have. You wake daily, with tousled hair and bleary eyes, ready to climb into laps and cling like a monkey to whichever parent, or whichever brother, is holding you. You come downstairs, suddenly awake and planning to play, and are interrupted by ordinary life again and again, turning suddenly to glare at me, your delicate face framed by wild hair still unbrushed, so that you look like a cross Albert Einstein with his finger in a light socket.

"I need you to eat because it's time for school," I tell you.

Harumph to all my plans.

Other times you are very congenial about the paces I put you through. You indulge me, like I'm a senile auntie whose time on this earth may be limited, doing your grammar pages beautifully with periodic declarations of "You're the best Mommy in the world." There, there, now, old woman. Don't fret. I've put marks on your pages. Now let us get dressed up and travel to Ancient Greece.

You've taken to quoting the Buddha. This is disconcerting in someone so small. Your mind is a place of spiritual largeness, a sky in which you walk from star to star and explore the wisdom of the Lakota, the Ancient East, and talk to Aslan, asking him if he is Jesus and what it means to have faith. You think about everything; you already have all the right questions to hand.

Outside, you build a trading post, a rabbit trap, a long house. You snare rabbits, you tell me, and use all their parts. You remembered, you say, to say a prayer of thank you for their lives. And can you have some candy now? And some juice?

"I have strong dreams," you tell me.

Yes, you do. You are made of strong dreams. Dreams that sometimes scare you, that rip your insides out.

"I can see it, Mom. I can see just what it would look like. I can see everything just how it would be." Fear touches each feature as you speak to me. Waking dreams of sadness. Sleeping dreams of monsters in the night. Around your room, we cast strong spells to keep both out, the two of us.

I think you are made to walk what wiser cultures called the spirit path. I think your time here is to be spent, in part, bearing the discomfort of living in the loud and angry world of war and televisions and Walmarts and finding your way back to the unity of the stars—that sense that you already have and talk about that we are all one, we are all sacred, we are all a part of God.

I know a little bit about this, because I was a child like you.

I lift you in my arms and carry you, because I still can and I won't always be able to. I hold you close so that I can feel your heartbeat against mine. And, for now, all the bad dreams are kept at bay by this simple act of love.

Today, you are eight. You will wake shortly and see that balloons rise above your bed. You will come down, excited, and get a special smoothie and some cereal you really wanted at the store. You will come down, trailing God in your blankets, rubbing stardust from your eyes, and join me as we celebrate the occasion of your birth in this mortal world.

Happy birthday, child of wonder. May this year bring strong dreams of wisdom and peace to you.

Mother's Day: Just the Way it Is

Techno music is blasting at Chili's. The clatter of stacked plates on trays erupt from the nearby kitchen. A cacophony of voices; plates glancing against each other with the force of swords in battle; glasses set on tables like mallets against sheet metal. Lights vibrating like strobes. Silently, I rest my head on the table. It is Mother's Day. 8 PM. Three hours of driving from Durango and we are in Española where the streets are lined with fast food Walmart chain link desperation poverty, and nature has been tucked away behind the concrete asphalt—just far enough away that it is lost. Forty-five minutes from home. They have to eat. My body is screaming, dying, assaulting me. My legs are going numb. A pain from my lower back rises up, wrenches my neck, twists my jaw and binds my head. I cannot cry in Chili's and so I keep my face still, impassive, expressionless, vacant.

"Happy Mother's Day," Devin says and smiles at me, checking.

And so I am struck again with the brutal reminder of what I'm doing wrong. Carpe Diem. I am supposed to be having a good time. I smile and the stretched, thin smile just makes it worse. I hate myself in this moment—for being the wrong mother. The mother of whom it is said constantly by one child to another, "She has a headache," the mother who needs it to be quiet, the mother who isn't having a nice Mother's Day, the mother who wishes she wasn't in Chili's, who can't eat anything normal at restaurants, who needs to support her neck—and can someone get her a place to rest her back, the mother—the only mother—who is too tired from watching soccer games to walk steadily to the car, the only mother in the world who gets frustrated at the sound of her children's laughter because it's like a bomb going off in her head. (There was a time, wasn't there, when laughter was not like a bomb going off in my head...I wish I'd known then how lucky I was.)

And I've just had it. I'm through with myself. I give up. I am supposed to be able to accept this pain. I am suffering because I resist it. If I could accept it, then it wouldn't hurt so much. If I could accept my children and their loud, bomb-blasting laughter and repeated getting up from the table into the walkways and the path of servers, then there would be no suffering. If I could accept that I can't accept it, then there would be no suffering. But there is suffering. There is tremendous suffering. And it is contagious. It infects everyone at the table as they hang by their fingernails on the expectation of my delight in Mother's Day, making small talk and glancing at me nervously. I am so—disappointing.

There is one job given to me worth doing—to be a mother—and I am screwing it up. And I cannot seem to figure out how to do it better than I am.

I think there is some lesson here, just out of reach; just behind a corner, that I can't see yet. I tell myself I am not supposed to see it yet. I am supposed to hang out here, increasingly desperate, until I am ready to learn something. Meanwhile, my ego is having a temper tantrum: throwing blocks and spitting, pulling hair, refusing to accept reality—just wanting anything other than the body and the familiar set of thoughts and emotions I've come to know as "me"—wanting to cut to the chase, come out on top; be crowned as a winner, able to laugh at my former idiocy, and have laurels set upon my brow. I want very badly to be an inspiration to everybody, unearned, and I don't want to spend time with the ugliness of pain and fear and disappointment and wanting things I cannot have. I want to to have survived.

This is what I'm like: I am not good with pain. But I like the after. I like the accomplishment of having lived through things. I feel elevated by the times I've spent with darkness, the prayers I've prayed in desperation, the emptiness I've stood in and stayed with and learned from. But I don't write much to you from there. I write from the after: the bliss where a child is suddenly handed to me, wrapped in warm receiving blankets—not the moment when I'm screaming that I cannot do this, that I want you to shoot me, that I don't have what it takes. I want you to see the victory and not the sobbing, bloody slog that took me there. I don't want you to see me scream.

But here I am anyway. When I am in pain, I shut down. I focus my eyes on a nearby tree through a window and I wait for the pain to go away. I pretend that I don't have a body, that I am astral projecting somewhere else. Every time someone speaks to me, asking if they can do anything, it disrupts my small sense of relief. When I am in fear, I press it deep down like a seed, far into the soil, so deep that the light can't get there, and I stand on top of where it's planted and bite my cuticles. When I am angry, I breathe deeply and focus on a stillness that I think is inner peace. I am shocked when fire blazes out of nowhere—anger out of nothing. Because I really wasn't angry. I was sure I was doing fine.

I think—have thought all my life—that I can get 'round myself; that I can cheat, that there's some way to get quickly to the moment of glory without paying the price of pain. Maybe this is why I get to have fibromyalgia and migraines and TMJ. I don't really believe in divine plans per se, but I do believe that the Universe just keeps presenting us naturally with opportunities to master things we haven't yet been able to learn. (The more I think about it, the more I think these two ideas are basically the same thing anyway.) If I have failed to learn how to live with myself while recovering from alcoholism and bulimia or getting divorced or having three kids or falling in love, then I get to keep developing chronic painful conditions, so that I can practice noticing that I can't really escape suffering. The Universe is boundless, generous, infinite. I get every chance I need to learn again.

At least, true or not, cast in that light—I'm doing this exactly the right way. I'm just a child being raised and making mistakes as I grow up. I'm up in the walkway of the restaurant again and I'm causing a disturbance, but I still get a chance to sit in a restaurant once more. No one ever takes the chance away. I still have my menu and my drink and my fork; I am taken here again and again, no matter what kind of scene I make.

"Suffer, Child," the Universe seems to say kindly. "Suffer your physical frailty. Suffer the pain of not being who you think I want. All these ideas are yours: 'Should be happy,' 'should be well,' 'should be calm.' Suffer as long as you need to. I will wait for you. There's all the time in the world."

And so my instruction is to suffer and really do it well; really notice it; to not give it short-shrift—to suffer so well and so authentically that I'm right there with myself—to finally just give up and let the suffering be there.

I can't do it yet. But I'm trying.

So—all this is to say: Happy Mother's Day. It's fine just the way it is.

Mindfulness with the Meth-Addicted Spider Monkeys

Photo Credit: Morguefile by mariocom20

Mindfulness. Doesn't that just sound like a good idea? I've had mindfulness on my mind. It's on my to-do list: become mindful—perhaps later, after I finish getting the house the way I like. Just before spring break, I went so far as to go to Tara Brach's website and poke around a bit. I liked what I saw, but I didn't have any time at the moment to watch any of her too-long videos because I was very busy checking my email and watching my children do all the things that they shouldn't do. So, I bookmarked it and added it to my list of things to accomplish over the vacation: clean out chicken coop thoroughly, de-clutter, become mindful watching Tara Brach.

Guess which thing I didn't do?

I had already spoken to my mindful friend Kristine about sitting with the Buddhist group at my church the week before. She was very encouraging and excited that I was interested, but also let me know that all of them mediated for half an hour at the beginning of each gathering. Half an hour. I still have very unpleasant memories of attempting sitting meditation in the past. You are, in fact, supposed to meditate if you are sober. I believe the step says: "We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out." The prayer part I've had down for years. The meditation part, I'll admit, has been a bit bumpier.

In my attempts to mediate properly over the years I have discovered these three things: breathing deeply is not necessarily relaxing when you are prone to panic attacks; spider monkeys on meth-laced Frappuccino regimens have less energy than my own ongoing narratives about myself, which run constantly and at full volume in my head; and sitting in meditative poses is as comfortable for me as being folded into a box. And now, I had fibromyalgia on top of all this.

Kristine encouraged me to tell the Buddhist group leader about my concerns. For some reason, this made me feel a great deal better. I would do this—after.

So, then it was the week after spring break. And Kristine had just gotten back from Mexico, so certainly she wouldn't be going and my kid and husband needed me to be home with them because they had just gotten back as well, so I didn't go then. I needed to go with someone, and there was no reason to be selfish about it either.

And then this last Sunday arrived. This time, I had emailed the leader and told him that I had very little experience with meditation and that I had fibromyalgia and wasn't sure if I could stay in one position for thirty minutes. He'd encouraged me to come and do what I could and said they'd help me to be comfortable. So, early, I texted Kristine to see what time it started and she said she wasn't going this Sunday but it started at 8 AM.

"Oh, OK then", I texted back."I'll wait until next week. I have a terrible headache anyway."

But she wasn't going to be able to go next week either and, it occurred to me, neither was I.

"Maybe I'll just go," I said.

I had a half an hour to decide. I'd been in some of the worst pain of my recent experience this last week. That was a very good reason not to go. And I'd have to walk in by myself. And what if my body freaked out immediately, or I had an attack of PTSD or something awful? I know me, and so I know I would just stay there, miserable, afraid to draw attention to myself.

Then I had this thought: This is you. This is your life. It's not about to be some other way. If you want to do this, bring the you and life that exists with you and just go and try.

So I went.

I did myself proud. I walked in, smiled, said yes I was Tara, and that I was going to need to lean against something so my jaw didn't go into spasm. The leader spent a good ten minutes thoughtfully setting me up on pillows and explaining exactly what would happen. Someone had a chime on their cell phone and, with all of us set up, it chimed.

My eyes were closed and I was in more or less the correct posture as I tried to focus on my breathing. The first thing I noticed was that there was a sharp pain in the center of my solar plexus when I exhaled which pulled through my chest to the center of my shoulder blades. It was probably costochondritis , which I already know that I have, but immediately I remembered an article I'd recently come across while sitting in a waiting room—the story of a marriage that survived MS.  In the article,  the foreshadowing of the husband's illness came when he experienced a symptom known as the "MS hug". I decided that this was what I was experiencing and began wondering how many of my symptoms were consistent with MS. All the while knowing that none of them were. This continued for some time before it became hard to think because the pain involved in maintaining my position became so large that thought was more or less impossible. Whatever thoughts I did have became largely focused on wondering how much longer this would last.

Meanwhile, over the top of this meth-Frappuccino chattering, there lay a very thin layer of stillness, like the membrane inside the shell of an egg. The thin-membrane of stillness hovered, unconcerned with the MS or the pain and compassionately resolved itself into remaining seated until the chime rung out again. The meth-Frappuccino spider monkeys began to notice this.

"Wow, I'm so deeply spiritual," one said.

"I'm actually not. Here I am thinking when I am supposed to be breathing," said another meth-addicted spider monkey.

They began an argument and made cases to prove their opposing points.

The membrane of stillness just paid attention to the pain increasing in my legs and chest and back and tried to locate a consciousness large enough to contain both the pain and the stillness all at once. My body started beating drums to let me know that we were done here and something terrible was happening and this needed to stop right now. The monkeys rambled on about my spirituality and Multiple Sclerosis and I continued to sit.

And then the chime rang. I opened my eyes and shifted my position. "Hallelujah!" my legs said. And I noticed that the pain, while still there, suddenly seemed smaller, and the consciousness around it seemed larger, despite the monkeys and all the arguments about MS.

And at that point I realized I was hooked. Just like the spider monkeys on their meth.

A Faith that is Born of Ambiguity

Photo Credit: Morguefile by cooee

I am going to tell you something that will sound very strange coming from a confessed atheist: I have never lost my faith.

Since the days that I first darkened the doors of a twelve-step fellowship hall twenty years ago, my life has been a daily negotiation between myself and that entity that some people call God. I am writing a book about this journey and where it has taken me, so I won't tell you the whole story here, but suffice it to say that, at eighteen years old, I was ready to give the care of my life over to an entity much larger than myself.

I grew up Unitarian Universalist. God had nothing to do with it, really. The subject of God at church was like the subject of politics at Thanksgiving. (Don't go there, or be sorry that you did.) I went looking and found God myself, later; I called Her the Goddess. I was still a teenager, and I said I was a witch; the taste of rebellion was like chocolate on my tongue. There was something real, though. At seventeen, I felt, I knew that all life was sacred, that nature was the lived Eden—the brutal Heaven of my heart. I fell on my knees in awe, the spirals of my DNA an echoing answer to the petraglyphs of old.

And I became a bulimic while waxing poetic about the Neolithic fertility goddess with her curves and breasts like hills of warm and earthy clay.

It didn't matter what I believed in. I had no relationship with God.

Unable to stop purging, I was afraid I would return to the life I had known months before the Goddess—a life of drugs and heartache, a life of reckless danger and hurdling pain. I went to the meetings where strangers talked about God and said the Lord's Prayer. Those meetings where I did not belong.

And in those meetings, I was saved.

Finally, I realized that I did not have to try. I did not have to force a will as thin as paper against the juggernaut of my addiction and my pain. I let go. I stopped trying. I walked to the edge of a cliff and fell, arms forward, into the arms of my salvation.

My head rung with the notes of "Amazing Grace."

And for seventeen years, the grace carried me. It carried me through an unplanned pregnancy. It held me through a terrible divorce. I knew God had me. It didn't matter who I said God was. God was what I knew when I woke up in the morning and promised my life to the care of the peace and stillness that would come. God was the answer I found in my self-reflection. God was the urgent need I felt to right the wrongs I did. God and I were fine.

And then something happened.

Finally, unexpectedly, something occurred that was beyond my capacity to hold inside the reason of God's Plan for My Life. I didn't know that I believed God had a plan for my life until I realized that this wasn't it. This wasn't the plan, and this wasn't the right life. I seemed, by mistake, to have ended up with the wrong God.

I was bereft.

In the end, though, I was saved again, just as I had been saved before. I stood before the Universe holding the God I'd had and, just like before, I found that everything in my hands was made of Self. It was small and imperfect, a reflection of me—limited by my imagination, crushed and warmed by the tight grip of my insistence on my will.

I let this small God go.

What came next was Nothing. And Everything. The multitude of laws and forces all greater than myself. The stillness, the emptiness, the complexity, the solitude, the fullness and togetherness of Life Itself. Forced again to my knees by wonder and joy, my heart was full again; full of the Everything-Nothing that is Life.

I called that Not-God and I called myself an atheist.

And every day since that day, just like every day before it, since the day I walked through the doors of that twelve-step room, I have worked out my relationship with that Everything-Nothing, with that power that is greater than myself. I believe not that there is a plan for me and not that life will leave me un-mauled, but that life is beautiful and worth living and full of the beauty and fire and meaning that we add to the experience of breathing in and out. I believe these things because I have to, and because my living makes them true.

I remember not that I am destined for happiness, not that I will meet my reward in this world or the next one, but that I have been saved from the monstrous power of addictive self. I am saved today, and I was saved yesterday, and perhaps—if I remember—I will be saved tomorrow. To ask more of life is perhaps to ask too much.


I have been an agnostic and a believer. I have been an atheist, a pagan, and a prayer of daily prayers. In all these ways I have set my feet on the path before me: the path of spiritual growth. I am unafraid to change my God if I have to do so to continue on my trek. There is no other way I want to live but this, with my whole heart seeking, my commitment deepened by my doubt.

And that is how an atheist can say that she has never lost her faith.

Note: I want to make it clear that this post is a personal statement and in no way reflects the experience of other self-proclaimed atheists, others in recovery, or the way anyone but me might choose to use the words "God," "atheism," and "faith." I share it because it is meaningful for me to reflect on. It is also meaningful for me when I read other people's heartfelt accounts of their spiritual journeys. I hope that something of what I shared may be meaningful for you, whether you are a believer, an atheist, or someone to whom the question has not mattered at all.

The Transformation of Curry and Ghee

Yesterday, I spent a stupid, astonishing number of hours standing in my kitchen. I stood there, apron-less, so completely present that I didn't leave a stain. I learned to bruise lemongrass, to make a bhun, then added flavors in layers like the organdy folds of a dress, shadow and light. I minced garlic and ginger, cracked open cans of coconut milk and squeezed a lime. I discovered that brown rice could be made to taste like a dessert without the use of sugar. Ah! To live where there are coconuts.

Also, I made ghee and put it up.

The butter melted and began to boil. I stirred and blew the surface to see if it was clear. It wasn't clear. Not forever. Somehow, this was not matter of patience but of presence, so I waited and I stirred. I watched and blew.

I was forced to stay in the kitchen and watch until, finally, it changed. I strained off the liquid and Mike helped me drain it into jars. For a total investment of five dollars and an hour or so of my afternoon, I had produced what looked like temple oil. I am manifestly hoping that this clarified butter will free me from my lactose-intolerant dependence on margarine. We will see.

There's something about that clarification that stayed with me. I have been spinning it in small cycles in my head. I acquire knowledge like Thai red curry, layer after layer, creating new flavors from the small facts that went in. It takes time and patience and must be done at the right heat. The flavors must be balanced or the bitter spice of ginger wins the day. I read the same book four times, at each pass learning something new. I add in layers, I fold in comfort, relevance and truth. In the end, I have forgotten the recipe, but the taste is something of the world.

The work I do on my soul, though, is like making ghee. I add everything to the pot and increase the heat. If there is too much heat, I'll burn. If the temperature is gentle enough, if it is safe, I bubble with the discomfort of altering slowly into who I want to be. I continue, past all patience, to be unclear. Blowing the froth, I remain clouded this time and the next, unending. Until suddenly, I'm not.  Then, for a time, I am holy. I am liquid gold. My inspiration can be burned in celebration, the memory of clarity holds true. Inspiration is made to be used and I do. I use it until it the jar is empty and it is time to make more ghee. This is predictable and painful. It is how it has always been. It is also what brings me joy.

I too often approach others who are making ghee as if they are making curry, and I offer them galangal, kaffir lime leaves and advice on how to work the spoon. What they need, I think, is someone to stand by them and watch as they gently transform into something they never were, someone to make sure the heat is not too high, to blow the bubbles and to offer encouraging thoughts.

The work of transformation is hard and sacred. It helps to have a friend.

A Christmas that is not Religious

The December holiday season is and always has been my favorite time of the year. This is true despite the fact that I often treat whole endeavor as if I were appearing before Emily Post in the Egyptian Underworld, where she will weigh my homemade rolls to see if my soul must be devoured. Even despite the lists and budgets with numbers climbing up and down, even despite the rushing about as if from one end of the Titanic to the next, I love the holidays. One reason: having grown up in a religiously eclectic family, I get more of them than you.

This year we will begin our celebrations with Hanukkah on December 8th. To do this right, I have been known to make latkes from scratch, pressing all of my children into service with cheese graters and the little knobs of russet potatoes that remain stubbornly un-shredded in my hands. I cook a whole chicken in the oven and the house is redolent with the smell of roasting fat. We buy doughnuts cooked in oil because the oil in the temple lasted eight days instead of one. We light the menorah, reciting the prayer in Hebrew that I was taught when I was too young to understand. Memorized in phonetics and unattached to our religious beliefs, we say it anyway. My kids argue about whose turn it is to pray and light. I read to them about the miracle and forget about the horror of war and oppression, pressing my mind instead against the truth that plenty often comes from very little, from what seems to be nothing at all. We pray because this is true. We pray also because our ancestors were taken away from their families and murdered like rats for being Jewish. We pray because all prayers change who we are. For eight days, we remember that we are Jewish, as well as many other things. We pray so that we might never forget.

Next comes Solstice. When my older children were very small, before the schools owned their mornings from before the break of dawn, I woke them in the dark and stuffed them wrapped in blankets into car seats, settling hot cocoas in their little hands. We lived in Northern California, and we drove a few miles out and up to where a green hill rose up above everything and an apple orchard stretched across the bottom of the sky. We waited in anticipation and glanced excitedly at the hills.

"I think I see it!"

"No, it's just a cloud."

"No, there! It's here! It's coming!"

Silly with cocoa and morning glee, we watched the sun rise. The baby sun, I explained to my youngest, is being born. The light is returning to the world. My children danced and sang and then chased one another through the wet grass until we took them home. We still celebrate Solstice most years at our church. To me, Solstice is the essence of the true religion of December. We meet the dark, it seems to encompass everything and then, in that nadir of blackness, new promise is reborn. This physical fact seems to me to hold the key to understanding our lives. It may be black as ink now. Yes, it is darkest, but just wait a minute and see...Wait one more minute and you will see.

Christmas itself will always and forever be the tradition of my Grandmother. She died the night before the solstice three years ago, at the age of 103. I found myself surprised that she didn't wait a few more days to partake in the roast beef. Grandma, being British, was good with the roast beef and served it with Yorkshire pudding. My grandmother was a Unitarian, the wife of a minister very important in his day, and she herself was a director of religious education involved lifelong in her church. On the occasion of her hundredth birthday, she was, in fact, named minister emeritus of River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation. Deeply religious, she was not certain she believed in God and didn't seem to find the question important. Therefore, our Christmas growing up had very little of the story Christ and a great deal to do with the outpouring of love for one's family, the aesthetic beauty of a lovely meal and the importance of doing right by our fellow human beings. We continue to celebrate it this way.

My children don't make lists of things they want. Instead, I ask them to make lists of things they want to give. Whatever gift they receive, the idea is that they will be happy with it because it was given freely and with love. This year, none of them has asked me for anything. That is the way it usually goes. We plan our giving carefully, shepherding what resources we have and we often give things that are needed to our kids, rather than things that would simply be fun. This is not so much a matter of Puritan ethics as simple mathematics, but my children seem glad to have whatever gifts they get. The grandparents do better by them than we. The older boys save their allowance to buy one another gifts. I find myself very proud that our holiday is not about wanting things, but about thinking about others, finding some way to honor them with a token of your love.

The weeks leading up to Christmas are filled with little events that punctuate the lavish beauty of the idea contained in that word: "holiday." We will spend a day in the making of fudge and other goodies to give to teachers and coaches, co-workers and friends. We make gingerbread cookies from scratch, with royal icing and spend an afternoon decorating the finished cookies with Red Hots, raisins, coconut and chocolate chips. The ginger, the molasses and sugar, all of it makes the house smell like love. We sometimes cut a tree from the national forest, a straggly, thin-branched thing, something of which you can say, if you squint, "It has potential." We decorate it with ornaments that we have had for ages, silly oddments of child-crafted things and legacy handmade clothespin dolls. It is beautiful in the way second grade hallways are beautiful. The cat sleeps under it and drinks water from the stand, happy we have brought the forest to him again this year.

On Christmas morning, we open our gifts in turns from oldest to youngest and watch one another with pleasure as each enjoys what they have gotten. We bust open holiday crackers, eat lavish meals and tell one another stupid jokes. Holiday music plays.

Christmas itself for me is not religious, except in the sense that life is religious. I believe fervently in the birth of hope, in the potential for help that comes from nowhere when you need it most. I believe not only that these things are miracles, but that they are predictable enough to be celebrated on the cycle of a year. They are part of the very nature of life. More than anything, I believe in the need to create rituals, in the need to say that this day is special, to cook special foods, to gather together, to decorate our homes. All across the world, we do these things, whether we have little or plenty, whether we believe or not. It is part of what it means to be human, this setting aside of days.

"For so the children come

And so they have been coming.

Always in the same way the come—

Born of the seed of man and woman.

No angels herald their beginnings

No prophets predict their future courses

No wise men see a star to show where the babe is that will save humankind

Yet each night a child is born is a holy night.

Fathers and mothers—sitting beside their children’s cribs—feel glory in the sight of a new life beginning.

They ask where and how will the new life end—will it never end

Each night a child is born is a holy night—a time for singing

A time for wondering, a time for worshiping."

~Sophia Lyon Fahs

Note: This post is in response to the curiosity of some of my online friends as to how Christmas is celebrated in the house of people who call themselves atheists, meaning us. It's funny because I suppose it never occurred to me that I celebrate it any differently from most people I talk to, but perhaps I do.  It seemed like a very interesting topic to write on, anyway. Thanks for the suggestion, Margi and Jewels.

A Prayer with Arugula

The arugula was the only thing I had sown this year from my own seed: a child of last year's arugula. I had allowed the plant, past its prime, to bolt and grow tall, to go to seed—ugly and rangy in my garden bed–—and pulled each dried-up pod, carefully harvesting little plant embryos from the chaff. Putting these in an envelope sealed with faith in biology and hope, I stored them overwinter and brought them out again last spring, sprinkling them chaotically in my salad bed to start again.

Up they came, and produced their delicious shoots of rocket to be cut into salads, added to sandwiches and tossed to passing ducks, who eschewed them for their bite. In July, they bolted in the heat again and I let them do their business, making more baby arugula for years to come. It was hot and heavy in the vegetable bed; bees abuzz and flowers of other lettuces coming into bloom as I lazily let anything past its prime pass into seed. Again, I harvested the seed and put it up in envelopes for a spring to come.

Yesterday, as I went about my business in the garden, peeking under winter covers to observe the infant growth of beets, onions, greens, broccoli and carrots, I saw something in the path. Arugula had scattered its seed on the garden path and sent up shoots, now a third generation grown on my land. Like so many careless sexual creatures, this angiosperm had spent its seed outside the confines of its home. There is such a delightful imperfection to this business of sexual reproduction—the mixing of genes, the crazy tangle of DNA. It would be less messy were we all but cuttings of one larger plant—the image of God, perhaps—but how much less interesting the world!

Over time, my arugula, having grown generations on the discrete micro-climate of my yard—will select for a variety perfectly adapted to the wind, the shade and sun here; perhaps even the watering habits of its grower. Each year, I will set seed, and the best arugula will grow. The arugula that survives will live to put forth flowers and turn flowers into seeds. I will harvest those seeds and start again; each year a new generation of peppery oval leaves—great-granddaughters of those I grew before. It is hard not to feel I am presiding over something rather great.

All the religion I need, for the most part, is spoken of in that arugula. Praise Glory, Praise Glory. Hallelujah to the world. I am fully in love with and devoted to Creation. Listen, listen. The decomposers work the soil at its little green feet. The beans spin sugar out of air and make a gift of it to the soil. The calendula keep nematodes at bay. Pollinators buzz and light. Predator robins swipe a caterpillar off a branch. Nature keeps putting forth. She is spilling her gifts upon my family—larger as I learn how to work with Her ways. I sit in the sunlight laughing.

Praise Glory. Praise Glory. Praise Glory.

Peace and Pain

Note: Since I recently had my wisdom teeth out and seem to have developed complications from my surgery, I have been thinking a lot about pain and my experience of the spiritual (or, if you prefer, meditative) nature of dealing with it. I have wondered why some kinds of pain are easy to deal with in this way and some are not. I had all my children by natural childbirth and my middle one at home. I suffer from chronic pain conditions. I find that I could meditate my way through childbirth and, to a large extent, through this dental pain, but not through a migraine or through a fibro flare. I still don't know why. Anyway, the story that follows is fiction, but is based, to a large extent, on my experience of my second child's birth.

The post is also a response to GBE2 prompt #67 Peace.

Coiled inward, her own breath sharp through her nose, Kate felt the sensation of uterine contraction wash over her. The last uptick in intensity had near defeated her. She could master her resources to  deal with the pain, and then the pain would increase. She was lying on her bed now, in a fetal position, with no memory of how she had gotten there. Her huge belly was an earth between her scrunched up face and arms and her muscled legs. She bit down on her own teeth and imagined trying not to fall into a pit. The contraction passed.

In the soft light of her home, she could see the distant movement of her husband Albert in the kitchen, where water was being boiled for instruments. Her midwives sat in living room chairs and smiled like sweet grannies at dressed-up princess toddlers; they were unconcerned and happy with her progress. Beside her in the dark was Maggie.

"It will hurt less if you get on your hands and knees, babe," said her friend, patting smooth her hair.

"How dilated am I?" This seemed critical, this measurement. Are we there yet?

"Probably six or seven. But you don't want them to keep poking you every few minutes to find out, do you?"

Was Maggie chewing gum? She sounded so casual. Her lips smacked happily. Kate found herself resenting anyone who could chew gum.

"No," Kate agreed, hurriedly.

"You're doing great, Kate," Maggie said, her face appearing at bed level, brown eyes soft with compassion. "Just great. Such an good birth. You're a trooper."

Then the sensation began again, as if Kate's whole center had clenched in upon itself, a giant blood pressure cuff that wouldn't stop squeezing. Harder, tighter, harder, and with it that twisting, nausea-producing cervical pain–that being opened up. It was definitely worse this time.

Kate closed her eyes. In the darkness, she could see a torrent of liquid light pouring forth; a tidal wave beating against levees that could not but fail, one by one. One levee stood, like a hand held out in protest. One levee remained to resist the overwhelming pain. Sudenly, she completely understood.

---

"Now, she won't even talk to me," Albert complained with some alarm in the living room.

"She can't, " Maggie laughed. "She's having a baby, honey. She's way past The Veil, getting that baby out. Talk to her too much and you're just gonna prick her little bubble of magical protection."

Albert stared. Why, he wondered again, was his wife friends with this woman? And how was it that she had so insinuated herself into their lives that she, not he, had taken charge of the birth of their second child. What on earth had made him agree to a home birth in the first place? In frustration, he got up, kicking back his chair leg hurriedly and going to fuss with the crib again. As if Kate would ever put that baby in a crib, he grumbled to himself. Nevertheless, he tightened all the screws. At least this would be safe, if he could help it. Job done, he stood up. 

"The baby is about to come," yelled the senior midwife from the other room. "If you all want to see, go ahead and come in here NOW!"

--

Motion stirred around the edges. People, it seemed, were gathering. Kate lay on the bed and the world trembled around her, layers of reality stacked as if in a torte. What a strange thought to have–a torte. Top-most there were people with which she knew she should converse. Bottom-most, blackness and the sound of a slow droning cant. In the middle, she hovered. Levees had fallen and waters lay still, with nothing to beat up against. Pain was present, but Kate didn't resist. Sensation passed over her and she received it; she reacted as she must. She shifted position, she motioned for wet cloths. Mostly she was bent on maintaining that internal stillness, which would allow her to appreciate the fierce sensation of bringing her child into the world. In what she knew was a rage of pain,she had never felt more totally at peace.

She was aware now that her body was expelling. "Baby" was not part of the thought. Her body merely did what the female body was designed to do–it gave birth. Now, that was the only business that concerned her, purely animal. 

With a third hard push, exclamations rose around her and the top-most world came suddenly into stark relief: 

"A little girl! A little girl!"

"Oh, good, job, Kate!"

"How beautiful."

And, just there, she was set back on the top of the strata of existence–awareness of her body fading backwards from her mind.

"Her name is Fiona," she whispered. "I want to see her."

Breathless: Spending Everything and Wasting Nothing

Today's post is a response to the GBE2 prompt Breathless.

I have lived my life in a wind tunnel, barely able to keep my toes buried in the sod. Punched in the stomach, my whole self poured out onto my life, my chest is heaving; I am slick with sweat. I gasp open-mouthed at purple lupines, raspberries, loosestrife and write love poems to gulls.

All my days I am falling, arms open, into the tent of southwest sky, unafraid of the bite of mountains as I land. I never land.

Aglitter in the flowers and birdbaths of a sunken garden, the iridescence of a beetle, there is a chimerical evidence of otherworldly splendor.

I am tidepooling for the treasure of creation. My hands overflow with aliens shaped like stars, with life in the form of a mat of cells that suck at the bottom of rocks, gelatinous and orange.

Photo Credit: Bronwyn Gordon

I am nestled in the curve of a grassy hill studded with oak, dissecting owl pellets and gathering buckeyes. I am watching quails and laughing at the antics of Douglas Squirrels.

Photo Credit: Bronwyn Gordon

I am engrossed with the world, driven to distraction. Breathless, the wind has been knocked right out of me by the sight of it all. So much unnecessary beauty. Lavish, costly, extravagant beauty. The world spends everything and wastes nothing.

Photo Credit: Gary Offenbacher

Would that I could live a life so bold. Always out of breath, spending the entirety of my soul upon the purpose of my life without misuse, dropping blossoms as I age, leaves as I die, building the soil of my community. Entirely used up, I would lie aged on the soil, white as Indian pipe; a saprophyte, a ghost.

My body would, within in a day, be forest loam–a place where springy mosses grow and people catch their breath, and hush, and pray.

Ask Team Ambiguity: Is Christianity Really Pushing Young People Away?

I have this recurring dream. In it, I am in a cozy cafe. I am wearing a shirt that says "Spiritual Atheist." Over in the corner are some smart looking people. They are wearing shirts that say "Humanist" and they look at me with raised eyebrows. Why the choice of verbage, they are wondering. To my left is a woman in flowing skirts. Her shirt is emblazoned "Pagan." Her companion's shirt says simply, "Witch." My closest friends–the ones at my table–are a motley crew. Their shirts say "Catholic," "Christian," "Mormon," "Jew," "Agnostic." Many of them, in a cozy cluster, are labeled as "Unitarian Universalist." Here and there I see "Buddhist." There are more labels here than it is worth devoting key strokes to describe. Everyone has a t-shirt and we are all just drinking coffee–except the Mormons–and talking about our children, our gardens and the weather. Everyone is polite and congenial. Everyone is labeled, and no one says a thing about the labels. We just drink coffee and chat.

This cafe is my life. I love it here. I love the people, but I am driven by the kind of existential angst that would demand that I stand up and start asking questions about Jesus. Everyone else just wants espresso and polite ignorance. I want to have an interfaith group therapy session. I sit on my hands and sip my latte.

I found this article in the Huffington Post Religion section, written by Rui Dai, a student at Duke University. I don't know if it is a good Team Ambiguity article, but I do think it is a good starting place for conversation. I like several things about the article. I like that Dai acknowledges that Christianity can and will survive its evolution toward scientific understanding which it has done time and time again. I like that she questions the existence of an organized anti-religious agenda. I have always felt that if there were such a thing, someone would probably have told me by now, given my associations. I am reminded of Jerry Falwell's denunciation–in the wake of the 9-11 attacks–of pagans, who, among other groups, he blamed for making America vulnerable to attack.

"We aren't even organized enough to get thirteen women together for a circle.," my pagan friend informed me afterward.

Dai's article is smart, articulate and challenging. It even, I suppose, takes my side, if we are taking sides. I am, after all, a Unitarian Universalist atheist liberal. The best articles make me think and this one did. I have some questions to ask about it, some places I want to go. Let's examine the body.

The Left Leg: Is the Christian faith really  any less tolerant than it ever has been? This is an argument not with anything Dai has said specifically, but with where I think some may go with her assertion. People are given to negative superlatives. Every election cycle is the dirtiest we've seen. Racial politics get worse and worse. Sexism doesn't get better, it only hides. Really? As recently as the 18th Century, the church was burning witches at the stake. Go back further and people were stoning adulteress women. How recently were cautions against the miscegenation as serious in tone as the ones against gay marriage now? The continued existence of intolerance doesn't make it as bad as it ever was. In fact, the fact that young people are turned off by the bigotry of certain religious groups that grab the mic is an indication that tolerance is increasing. Our younger generation doesn't want to hear that message anymore. I find that hopeful.

The Right Leg: There is intolerance and there is intolerance. I am going to say the thing that makes me so weird and unpopular with everyone. Secular assholes are just as much assholes as religious assholes. Intolerance doesn't require a religious stamp to be intolerance. Yes, some of the most institutionalized intolerance that currently exists is religious in nature, but you can be a racist, sexist, closed-minded, violent wrong-doer without coming in the door holding a cross or a Koran. (Hitler and Stalin always leap immediately to mind.) In terms of people you may meet in the cafe, the secular jerkwads are the ones who won't listen to anything you have to say, who malign everything done by any person of faith no matter the context and who hope that someday everyone will evolve to be more like them. So, in order to avoid the whole mess Dai describes, you can't become an anti-religionist. You need to just quietly and politely not attend church and avoid religious conversations. By all means, don't go the way of Christopher Hitchens, may he rest in peace.

The Left Arm: Is leaving the answer? I beg your indulgence because I am playing devil's advocate here. I am not a Christian, and I am not currently attending any church whose stated beliefs make me uncomfortable. I cannot say that leaving a church or faith isn't exactly the right thing to do for many people. It likely is in more cases than not. I just want to ask this question: How much change can take place from within a faith as opposed to from without? This is how my husband and I have chosen to approach our own faith. To do this requires that you love your faith and have an investment in it. It also requires that you have a sense of ownership of its beliefs so that when people argue with you, be they other lay people or clergy, you have a sense not of righteousness but of authority. Our own conviction is that our faith needs to be more active and relevant, less provincial, cozy and sure of itself. We often express disagreement in church, but we do it with love. I wonder what might be possible if more young people leaving Christian faiths would stay and bring their commitment to bear on them. I do not claim to know, only wonder.

The Right Arm: The young don't need church as much as espresso and Prozac. When I was in my twenties, I didn't go to church either. Why bother? I participated in various spiritual groups, but my life was more focused on my own exploration of the outer world and my own ideas about it. I tended to push up against any organizational doctrines as a means of testing my wings. We started going back to a UU church, in which Mike and I were both raised, when we had our third child and the older children were...older, old enough to need what I might call moral instruction. They needed community. We needed community. In our thirties, we suddenly liked dressing up and showing up on Sundays to bring our kids to Sunday school and sit in the sermon. I wonder if the seeming mass exodus of twenty-somethings is as significant as Dai thinks it is. I'd be curious to see the statistics on those kids when they're in their thirties.

The Body: Religion almost never seems religious to me. I think we cloak a lot of things in the guise of religion that are nothing more than the nature of being human. Bigotry may have a religious justification, but it doesn't require one and it will persist with or without that rationale. That is why I always argue that fighting over the semantics of fear and hatred is a waste of time and energy. The answer, we always find is love. I don't mean that in a "stick a sign up at a protest" sort of a way. I mean it in an actual, scientifically verifiable kind of a way. We got to know people of other races and care about them, which made the worst forms of bigotry start to disappear from the mainstream. The Cosby Show or Will and Grace gave us fictional African-Americans and fictional gay people that we could get to know. Gay friends, relatives and co-workers refusing to hide and be ashamed have woken us up to the smell of our own hatred, like a cupped hand close to our mouths. Our society is not done with this process, but it is happening.

Freeing ourselves from religion won't save us from being human and subject to other humans. It is part of our nature to form groups. It is also part of that nature to act without thinking, to choose sides, to attack that which seems "other," and to give attention to just the person that is doing the loudest, stupidest-sounding yelling. If we don't line up and form groups around religious lines, we can still do it around politics, child raising, and soft drink preference. And we will.

Everyone's gonna do what they're gonna do. I don't honestly expect that my three sons will attend church while in their twenties. I don't know that I'm invested that they do at all. Here's what I'm invested in: Come into the cafe. Sit down with me and let's talk about what we believe. I'm not out to convert you, and I hope you're not out to convert me. If it ends up getting heated, we can always get another latte and change the subject. I don't want to spend my life at one table with a bunch of people wearing the same t-shirt I'm wearing and I don't want to leave the cafe. So, come on in and pull up a chair.

Now tell me what you think. This is where it gets interesting. Here are the rules for all Team Ambiguity discussions:

1. Please do not rely solely on the pacifying statement that people just disagree. This is true but obvious. What is interesting is: why? And do these people feel listened to? I don't necessarily mean us; I mean whatever parties are at issue in our discussion.


2. You have to be respectful of one another and of the opinions or thoughts being discussed, even if you think they are are turkey twaddle. Team Ambiguity is characterized by its ability to step back and consider that we may be wrong. That means the turkey twaddle may be right. 


3. Please don't hide because you think everyone else is smarter or more articulate than you, or because no one has said yet what you were going to say and you are waiting for them to, so you can say "Yeah, what SHE said!". You are the smartest damn person on the whole blog. We want your comment because yours is the essential comment.


4. Please realize it's not a fight. Discourse is illuminating. It is what makes people smarter. If we are all following Rule #2, there isn't any fighting. We are just responding with our honest experiences and thoughts and stories. One person adds celery, another adds carrot and soon we have a rich soup of differing flavors.

Bring on the ambiguity!