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This poem emerged from a night when I was sleeping peacefully and then awakened at 3:00 am to a prayer running through my mind. It didn’t stop. I felt peaceful, but the prayer was insistent enough I finally rolled out of bed and took up a pen and a pad of paper to allow my soul’s yearning to spill onto the page until it was spent. Don’t give me that old-time religion. I’m not longing for the past. I don’t want what used to be, or who used to be. I want you, God. New. Fresh. Now. Here. As a deer pants for the water My soul longs for you. I want your ineffable presence. I yearn for the embrace of spirit. I crave the resonance of being known. I want the bloom of a daffodil, Not the regularity of brickwork. I want the lift of heart that comes When human ego recedes And my spirit is wrapped in the love of God. I want the feeling of union that comes When community pulls together after disaster. I thirst for spirit’s intrusion Unexpectedly Arising in the midst of mundane. The shaft of light through clouds And not the territorial bickering of committee meetings. I want You. And I know You are present In the heartbeat of every person who bickers. You Pour out into the selfish and sublime An equal opportunity employer When the greediness for getting the credit Or being right Is overcome by Poetry Rush of water over stones The hush of a forest glade The clasp of hands bloodied by a battle. I long for the soar of my heart Thrumming with a gospel choir, Without finger pointing, Condemnation, cold shoulders, Committee cliques, Denominational wars. I want The pulse of community Justice rolling down like waters Love lifting me Righteous longing satisfied Grace flowering The burst of love in the midst of suffering. Not explanation. Not reasoning. Reasoning does not fill the holes in my heart Church members being appropriate Are no substitute for the Holy Spirit. I know The swell of inspiration throbs In the hearts of liberals and conservatives Even when they don’t hear each other. It waits In the lectionary And in the wild burst of heart When a stranger runs into a fire To pull a child to safety Without rehearsal or reasoning. God, I miss you. And You miss me too When I invest in Seeking approval from the committee In the church or in my head Instead of breathing You in. Oh, Israel, you said. I would have gathered you to me As a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But you were not willing. Break open our armored hearts To expose our willingness. Open the channels of justice That have been choked with arguments for What we’re accustomed to, What won’t cause a fuss, What stays within the budget. We need a fresh experience of You Out of bounds Rogue Like Your spirit. Revive us again. With a flash of lightning With a baby’s laughter With the purr of a kitten With a squeeze of a hand. Interrupt our order of worship With a shower of stars The embrace we’ve longed for Or the welling of tears. Override our structures And be with us in our midst. Abide with us. We long for you. Show up, God. Take the log out of our eyes While we strain at splinters. You know how we are, Clasping our lists of rules, And you love us anyway. Help us to feel You In disappointment In grief In despair In fear. Give us joy Give us hope Give us laughter Give us rest. Give us You.

Can’t we just get along?

To people on the other side of the aisle: We have a problem.

Strong opinions opposite to my own strongly held opinions, fired off bluntly and with a claim of certitude, make me defensive and anxious. Or call it uncomfortable, disrupting, or destabilizing.

I discover in myself a knee-jerk reaction, an impulsive drive to convince the other person of my truth, in order to restore my sense of harmony and understanding. Couldn’t we all just get along? But it isn’t working. The other side isn’t buying my logic, and I’m not buying theirs, so we’re stuck, polarized and frustrated. And problems remain unsolved. We aren’t hearing each other.

A Facebook friend recently challenged an article I posted because I thought it was grounded, responsible, and well-reasoned. She called it “a one-sided hit piece where facts are not put into perspective” and “politics disguised as facts.”

Her comments “triggered” me, and I made an initial conciliatory response: “we obviously are viewing the world through different lenses. I can respect your right to your opinion, but I disagree with your premise.”

I hoped for a quick “agree to disagree” closure. But she wasn’t done. She wanted to strengthen her argument. I wanted to back away. I have a lifetime habit of seeking to escape angry confrontation, because I learned that strategy as a small child, in the midst of a whole lot of angry confrontations. Some people learned the opposite tactic as little kids, and their experience taught them that they feel better if they come out swinging, that the best defense is a strong offense.

Me? Sometimes I just want to hide. That doesn’t mean I’m conceding the point the other person is proposing.

And it doesn’t mean I’m stupid. I just feel safer going in my cave for awhile, nursing my own strongly held views to myself, because their logic measured against the sources of information I’ve come to trust over a long time just doesn’t make sense to me. And because I don’t believe the other person is going to suddenly see things my way. The sources of information they trust come from a very different set of assumptions. They’re not stupid either. And I’m not powerful enough to make them “see the light” I see in a brief interaction. So I pull back.

Each of us is hard-wired to use our habitual tendencies as our primary mode to act in the world. We might be pugnacious or retiring, intellectual or emotional. We’re not obtuse, and we’re not dumb. In order to survive a lifetime of difficult problems, we use strategies we’ve been practicing for all that time. We come to believe our strategies are the “right” way, because they work for us—and/or maybe the ways they aren’t working aren’t readily apparent to us.

Our political views, and ways we present them, are powered by that hard wiring.

Our personalities are constructed kind of like a house is built, starting from the ground up, when we’re very, very young—before we have words to formulate what is happening to us. Before the concrete foundation of a house is poured, the “main” plumbing and electrical systems are laid down to connect the house to the sources of power and water. Then as the walls go up those wires and pipes are further connected to wall switches and plugs, and to the sinks and toilets and tubs. By the time the house is “livable,” all that stuff is hidden under the floors and behind drywall, so we don’t notice it, don’t think about it anymore. It doesn’t change without some serious demolition and re-installation, so if it’s “faulty” from the beginning, there might be some difficulties along the way.

My own hard-wiring was installed during an early childhood of being emotionally neglected, ignored, and abused, and my individual response from the time I was little was to protect myself by going inside my shell like a turtle.

Once I started school I discovered my teachers were reliable sources of the acknowledgement I’d been missing. So I came out of my turtle shell to develop my intellect—to get my needs met where there was a higher likelihood of support. I learned to use words, and to gauge whether my audience was receptive. My automatic tendency today, if my intellectual or conciliatory response isn’t heard, is to pull back from a fight. And automatic strategies aren’t easy to change, without serious demolition and re-installation. Even then, they persist.

Of course this post itself is an example of my effort at intellectual conciliation. Go figure.

Somebody else’s hard-wiring may have been installed during early years of encouragement for staking a claim for the “high ground.” Maybe their early role models’ examples demonstrated that a combative stance meant they’d come out of a conflict the victor. I can’t blame them for following a strategy they learned to get their earliest needs met.

And it’s not an either-or proposition. Those two examples are polar opposites, but we are complex individuals, our views and habits shaped by a million variables starting from babyhood and reinforced over all the years of our experience.

And then there’s confirmation bias. Here’s what Wikipedia says about that:

“Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or strengthens one’s prior personal beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs.”

Google and Facebook play on confirmation bias by feeding us search responses that correspond to our search history—so over time I get fewer and fewer pieces of information that might contradict what perspectives I already hold. When I do “research” on the internet I’m not getting all the information there is, and even “information” is what has been interpreted and expressed by a writer with a particular perspective.

Much as we’d like to believe it possible, “truth” does not emerge as a sudden shaft of light beaming through the dark clouds with an angel chorus announcement. It’s not that easy.

Having said all that, let me come back to the original impetus for this post.

My Facebook friend didn’t mean me any harm. She was disturbed by the political article I posted because it challenged what she believes, in the world-view that makes sense to her. She wanted to share her views on it. And her way of presenting her views was disturbing to me. I got triggered. I posted conciliation, she posted resistance—which I imagined came from her hard-wired mode of defense. Which triggered me further.

It happened at the end of a long day of coronavirus stories, and dealing with a difficult family dilemma that has no resolution in sight, and feeling isolated, economically vulnerable, fearful about the future of the world and our society, missing my reassuring routines. In that moment I was exhausted, and my coping was frayed to shreds. I wanted to go to bed, but I was unwisely still scrolling on Facebook.

My Facebook friend stirred up all the feelings I’d been ignoring and repressing and pretending weren’t a problem.

But I was having a problem.

I was having a microcosm of the world’s most gigantic problem, it seems to me. The problem of coming to an interaction with personal beliefs held ferociously like a shield, to ward off the challenges of the other. We don’t approach political discourse or negotiations with an intention to understand. Our primary stance is to protect what we already see as truth, anticipating the other will harm us. We don’t presume a positive intention.

I wasn’t hearing my Facebook friend, and I don’t think she was hearing me. Not the way each of us was intending, or needing, for real communication to happen.

I was hearing the urgent press of knee-jerk, habitual response to personal historical experience. An old, old voice inside, the voice of self-protection, was setting off an emergency alarm, a signal to go to ground. Duck and cover. Run! Hide!

I wasn’t hiding from my Facebook friend. I was hiding from the ancient, painful experience of not being heard. It was old hard-wiring.

Momentarily overwhelmed and pessimistic about the likelihood of resolution, I blocked my Facebook friend. Which must have made her mad, understandably so. Maybe I was too hasty. But did I want to reopen that conversation?

 

How quickly are we, as a culture, blocking opposition views from our conversation? There’s a whole lot of shouting going on, and precious little listening.

Each of us, even those on the other side of the political divide, is trying to make sense of life’s difficulties. We all want to feel safe.

We want freedom, and resources, and community, and we want an easing of what disturbs us. We all want to be heard.

Can’t we all just get along?

“I’m reminding you–Breathe.”

I’m still breathing, even though I haven’t been on the blog all year.

This morning I talked to that gadget in my kitchen again. I instructed Alexa to set a recurring daily reminder for me.

I told her to remind me to breathe at 9:00 every morning. And then I told her to set another recurring daily reminder to breathe at 11:00. And then at 1:00 pm. At 3:00. And also 5:00, 7:00, and at 9:00 pm. Every day.

My first try had been to tell her to set a recurring daily reminder for every hour on the hour between 8:00 am and 9:00 pm. But she replied, “Hmm. I don’t know about that.”

Sometimes she doesn’t get me.

So I had to do it in stages, one reminder at a time. I just wasn’t patient enough to set up thirteen reminders.

Of course, in between all those reminders, obviously my body will continue to automatically take in breaths on a regular basis.

The thing is, I don’t notice my breathing most of the time. There are a whole lot of good things in my life that I don’t notice. What I mostly tend to notice are things I don’t like much. Things that frustrate me, negative thoughts. Terrible blunders I commit, that’s a big category. Stuff like that.

So I set reminders to notice my breathing more frequently. If I’m not in the kitchen, I get a little reminder note on my phone.

I didn’t instruct Alexa on this, but I intend to remember to do more than breathe. I intend to stop what I’m doing, and be conscious of how I’m breathing, that I’m able to breathe—more easily than some people can physically do. I could pray for the well-being of those who can’t breathe so well.

While I’m breathing, I can notice that I’m safe—which could help my tendency to get anxious about things that aren’t really problems at all. I’ll try to notice what I have a good life I have. And that I don’t have to worry about the basics. I can be grateful there’ll be enough air to breathe the next time I need it. Odds are excellent I’ll continue to have food to eat, a roof over my head, and people who care about me.

I can notice that I have a 100% success rate, over the last 66 years, in getting through whatever challenge came at me.

Over the years, and right up to present day, I’ve employed some old coping strategies that were not-always-so-attractive, by the social standards I feel compelled to satisfy. I don’t like some of those patterns I recognize in myself. I’ve made some choices I’d rather not discuss, out of regret. There are still amends to make.

But I’m still breathing.

I still have blessings to notice.

Maybe I could settle in here and be at home in myself. And notice it’s a pretty good place spend a few minutes. Or more.

Wendell Berry said: “And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home.”

Just remember to breathe.

Mass of contradictions

When I was young, food was home and mother and friend to me. The pantry was a place of refuge from a world with so many sharp edges.

The kitchen was where I went to be fed, to be enfolded in a buttery, sweet, creamy hug in a bowl. Chocolate chip cookies were the most welcoming lap I knew.

Thick peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches filled up my empty crevices, my hollow hungry heart. Potato chips were always there for me, with no reproach. I never met a pizza that didn’t like me.

My brain hard-wired the synapses encoded “if you want love, have cake.”

All the considerable information published about healthy eating and lifestyle has not resulted in persistently healthy choices for so many of us. What we know to be correct has not matched our habitual action, our compulsions, our off-and-on craziness about food, our avoidance of exercise.

62.2% of Americans are overweight or obese, derailed from the track to health. We do it with food, and sloth. Eat too much of the wrong stuff, and repeat. And sit in recliners, with food. Maybe we’re better for awhile, and then off-track again. Better again, and then…. Well, you might know the pattern, and the diet statistics.

I was thinking about all this, and addiction to sugar and fat, in or out of remission.

And also thinking about the characters in this novel I’m writing. (I promise you, I didn’t just change the subject.) There’s a character named Dolores, about whom my first readers keep saying, “I just hate her so much!” and “when can I see another chapter?” She does move the story along!

Dolores is a skinny, tightly-wound woman. She thinks her three children demand too much of her. She’s resentful. There are reasons she’s so brittle, but she is who she is. She smokes a lot, and she likes her cocktails. A woman of contradictions, she is also seen cooking bountiful meals, catering to her husband. She makes: fried chicken, brownies, meat loaf, mashed potatoes, homemade pie. She is the designated source of nourishment in the family. Possibly triggering a few small food issues.

Here are pieces of an excerpt from my manuscript, in the voice of Dolores/Mother:

“I had to get past this big Christmas dinner Mickey expected. The turkey had gone into the oven first thing, before we opened packages…. I basted the turkey and worked on the side dishes…. I was up to my elbows in the stuffing, which was more than its share of trouble to make.  Holidays meals were such a production…” [Here’s the martyr, simultaneously laying out a sumptuous holiday meal and also blaming the family who want it from her.]

[Now she talks about her daughter Kathleen.] “….The new house was just a few blocks farther away from school and the benefit of a few more calories she could burn walking, easy peasy. ….it was never too early to put her in the habit of watching her figure, since it was clear she did not take after me in that department. It would do her good to swim some laps…” [Her stream-of-consciousness while preparing homemade piecrust.]

“….I noticed as she walked away that she had put on the stretch pants I gave her for Christmas. Dammit, they were tight on her already. Tomorrow I would stop at the hardware store for sure. Mickey could install a lock on the cabinet where I kept the snacks. Apparently, they were too much of a temptation without me supervising. That girl would be a porker just like Ma if I didn’t take her in hand.”

“…So just a tiny sliver of pie for Kathleen. Or better still, just none for her, since I was making it for Mickey anyway. She would get used to it, and she didn’t have to like it.” [The daughter is eight years old. Think she might end up with an eating disorder?]

Savory casseroles and stews, flaky biscuits, juicy sizzling steak, crispy-chewy cookies oozing warm chocolate—the fleeting bliss of crisp and buttery and sweet on the tongue. Could overindulgence in calories suppress a craving for something less accessible?

What happens when calories are abundantly available, but love is rationed? When emptiness can be eased by the sleepy calm of a full stomach, but the heart still isn’t fed? How hungry are we to be loved? That would be the very antithesis of hard edges, sharp criticisms, deprivations of care, withheld approval.

Are soft bellies deal-breakers for love? Do they disqualify us for the imagined prince whose rescuing arms bring a life without risk, without pain? Happily ever after? We’re just talking about fantasies here.

She has such a pretty face, if only she’d lose weight. But what a beautiful heart she has!

We’re looking for love in all the wrong places. It’s already here.

The thing is, I’m lovable just this way. <3

 

Something beautiful

A quote worth pondering:

“I was sitting in Fred Rogers’ office… talking … about children and violence, on a Tuesday, that was the moment that the shootings at Columbine were happening. When Eric and Dylan were shooting their classmates. It was exactly what we were talking about….

And what I had said was ‘there’s three simple words or ideas that you can apply to a rich life … you say that there’s something beautiful, something noble, something sacred.’

…Just a brief example of what I mean by that:

…The sunset—if we allow it to touch us—do you and I take time in our daily lives? And I’m talking about seconds—to consciously be moved or touched by something we consider beautiful?

If either of those two kids [Eric and Dylan,] thought there was a single thing in the world—a word, an idea, a song, a rock group, a movie, a bird, a person, a religion—if there was a single thing in the world that either of those kids thought was beautiful, noble, or sacred, they never could have done what they did.

And then I realized with a shudder that—is it possible that tens of millions of Americans don’t feel they have any time for beautiful, noble, or sacred in the vicious crushing pace in this life about: wanting stuff and getting stuff and having stuff and using stuff and buying stuff and then of course replacing stuff, repairing stuff, protecting stuff, defending stuff.

You know that it’s so vicious, it’s anti-life.”

–spoken by Bob Lozoff, transcribed from on-camera interview in the documentary Mr. Rogers and Me (available free on Amazon Prime video.)

This is me now. I, Judy Emerson, have strong personal feelings about the wisest course for America in the aftermath of mass gun violence.  We are all shaken, but the adrenaline speeds your reactions in a different direction than mine. I will set aside my temptation to spout statistics and pound my fist on the table.

But—it’s like he said, that getting stuff and protecting stuff and defending stuff is anti-life.  I agree with him.  What is it we insist on protecting?  We are yelling at each other to defend—what? A position? An object? Stuff? Or even the right to have stuff?

Wherever we believe blame can be pinned for mass violence, what if we changed the subject to our own life, our own conscience?  What about coming back to the one power each of us can actually wield?  The power of choice over our own thoughts, speech, actions. I have no power over yours.

If I focus on mine, and you focus on yours, what if we all considered this:

Are my thoughts, speech, actions promoting or defending life? Or stuff?

Hmmmm. 

 

Under construction

I’ve been re-reading The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.  The television series I watched on Hulu prompted me to download the original book on my Kindle.  I am reveling in the beauty of the author’s work.  Her simple, but weighted turn of phrase can evoke dread or irony.  Make me ponder the world.

The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu

This story is fiction. Made up.  Not true.

But it is, imperfectly, truth personified.

This book was published in 1985, when my daughters were only five and seven.  I read it so long ago that I had forgotten all but plot summary.  It was escapist reading for me then.  Its cautions and its hope sailed right over my head.  I was a little numb at the time.

But it’s still here, speaking to me now.  Look what I missed.  The warning that there are risks in complacency.  That religious structures may be antithetical to faith and virtue.  That human beings treated as possessions, pawns and tools signal encroaching rot in society.  That government can be subverted.  As it has been countless times in history.

I’m awed by this book.  How it makes me think.

Like I have been awed in the past by The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.  And by Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.  And To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.  And Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, and Beloved by Toni Morrison.  And more.  And more.

And what struck me next was that these books, and hundreds or thousands of other books, and the effects they have created over these decades or centuries, have this in common:  They are each a made thing.  A constructed entity, produced by struggling, imperfect human effort and ingenuity, grown out of the writer’s imagination, hard work, and skill.

The author started the same way we all started when we were five or six, with just a pencil and a piece of paper, writing their first name for the first time.  The author dreamed it up, each of them.  Invented this published allegory standing in for life itself, imparting some personal or universal wisdom about the nature of human experience.

The author built something new that never existed before.  Like a child’s father helps him to construct a birdhouse out of plywood, glue and nails.  He needs encouragement, and practice, and trial and error.  He’s learning to make more complex constructions later on in his life.  He has to be willing to try, and to endure mistakes and failures.  He has to build on what he learns.  He has to develop patience. He’s learning now, so that perhaps one day he will have learned how to construct a skyscraper.

Books are constructed things.  That encouraged me, somehow.  To think about these books that have inspired me, not as natural formations like a mountain range, pre-existing beyond my understanding or ability.  But as human projects undertaken, worked at, sweated and worried over, eventually completed.  Books are built of letters, words, paragraphs and patience (punctuated with impatience,) and stubbornness, and conviction, and maybe a little fanaticism and perfectionism.  A little obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Human constructions, like an invention patented, a system enacted and affecting outcome, a product developed and marketed, a business built and thriving, a union formed and bringing change.  An industry, an economy, a nation.  We humans make things, some constructed on a foundation of ideas held sacred.  Some for money, or to gain power over others.  I might have reverence or ambivalence or revulsion for a book or for a corporation or for an agency or a government.   I won’t like all their intentions or their effects.  We won’t all agree on the outcomes.

But each of us can build something.  A contribution to human endeavor, based on our interest and strength and skill.  We can use the failures to recalibrate, adjusting the course toward eventual completion.

I have an interest in building with words and ideas.  Not everyone will like what I construct.  My writing project, now unfinished, does not function today as I have in my mind that it should.  It’s still raw.  So I’ll guard what is still in-process from public view until it’s completed.  I’ll keep hammering away at what I’m building.

Margaret Atwood, and John Steinbeck, and Toni Morrison had this in common:  they developed their raw, unformed ideas with stubborn, repetitive hard work.  They kept trying.  They didn’t give up.  And eventually they gifted the world with a whole and complete articulation of ideas that became a part of our cultural canon.  An experience we can enter like a house constructed of art.  Like the palpable beauty that we step inside when we’re in the presence of the statue of David that Michelangelo “constructed” out of a piece of marble.  Or a different kind of beauty in the experience of a Gustave Klimt painting.

There will come a day when I’ll invite the world to step through the portal of my completed structure, into the world of made-up characters who have something real to say.  For now, it’s still under construction.  Back to work.  Donning my hard hat now.

Courage, cowardly lion!

Does fearless even exist?  Somehow we adapt to personal fears that flashed into being long ago when something disrupted our sense of safety.  We ignore, we avoid, we mask, we repress.  Life calls for courage, even while fear still huddles in the shadows of our heart.  Ah, there’s a challenge!  (Poem by Dawna Markova.)

 

setting out

 

I will not die an unlived life.

I will not live in fear

of falling and catching fire.

I choose to inhabit my days,

to allow my living to open me,

to make me less afraid,

more accessible,

to loosen my heart

until it becomes a wing,

a torch, a promise.

I choose to risk my significance,

to live so that which came to me as seed

goes to the next as blossom,

and that which came to me as blossom,

goes on as fruit.

–by Dawna Markova

higher

 

What we talk about when we don’t talk about politics

I confess.  I never watched “Grey’s Anatomy.”  All those years it was Thursday night programming, I had appointments on Thursday nights.  But now I’ve been binge-watching on Netflix.  Besides creating characters you love or hate, Shonda Rhimes was a master of finding amazing songs for the soundtracks.  The show is introducing me to a world of new music.  Those songs made me think, made me feel, gave storylines the perfect punch.

Season 5, Episode 21 (which first aired on April 30, 2009) featured “Turn and Turn Again” by All Thieves.  The vocal quality knocked me out, and the peaceful feeling of it.  I didn’t analyze.  It was just art flowing over me.  Wow.  Inarticulate wow.  I shared a link to the song with a friend, who responded, without saying if she liked it or not, “What particularly grabs you about this song?”

Well, damn.  So then I was on the spot.  Esplain yourself, Lucy!

I was surprised to discover in the lyrics a prompt to say something out loud about politics.  I don’t want to step on any toes, and I don’t want mine stepped on.  But just listen to this song.  Please.

Note that I hold no rights to the video or the lyrics, copied here.  Here’s the link:

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=turn+and+turn+again+lyrics&&view=detail&mid=360AF244B15EB2A13FDE360AF244B15EB2A13FDE&rvsmid=59C551D7AEECE6EF398F59C551D7AEECE6EF398F&FORM=VDRVRV

And the lyrics:

Worn from walking this far

So worn from talking this much

And what we found and what we’ve seen

As the road curves down

And the lights come up to meet us

Silent for the evening

We enter this town

Like new born creatures

Those I know I see anew

And the space between us is reduced

For I am human

And you are human too

So turn and turn again

We are calling in all the ships

Every traveler, please come home

And tell us all that you have seen

Break every lock to every door

Return every gun to every draw

So we can turn And turn again

Only priests and clowns can save us now

Only a sign from God or a hurricane

Can bring about

The change we all want

And we’ve done it again

This trick we have

Of turning love to pain

And peace to war

We’re just ash in a jar

So turn and turn again

We are calling in all the ships

Every traveler, please come home

And tell us all that you have seen

Break every lock to every door

Return every gun to every draw

So we can turn And turn again

Writer(s): Mark Bates, Rollo Armstrong, Tzuke Bailey

Wow.  So here’s what I think.

The road curves down… And the lights come up to meet us ” –We’re in a difficult, painful place.  But something awaits us.

We enter this town Like new born creatures”  –With “beginner’s mind”, we might discover something wondrously unexpected here.

Those I know I see anew”  –Life bursts forth out of a rigid absolute that I encased in concrete long ago.

I am human…and you are human too”  –There’s an unexpected glimpse of heart behind armor.  We have more in common with one another than differences.  We are all bearers of light, shadowed by the effects of the darkness.  Wisdom and ignorance in each of us.

Every traveler, please come home… And tell us all that you have seen”  –Could we try to hear one another?  –After not listening for so long, and only bashing each other, pushing our own agendas onto one another, trying to shout over each other’s voices to make our own message heard and suppress the other.

Angry politics

Might we find a way to believe that the other voices, even those who oppose our ideas, have their own reasons for their belief, based on perspectives emerging from experience, even if it’s different from ours?

Return every gun to every draw [drawer?] … so we can turn…and turn again”  –Laying down our weapons, hearing one another, could we subvert destruction, see the pain in each guarded heart, nurture seedlings instead of torching forests?

Only priests and clowns can save us now… Only a sign from God or a hurricane… Can bring about… The change we all want”  –Does it take a hurricane to make us kind to one another for a minute?  I’m not taking “priests” as literal religious figures, although maybe…  But grace–something radical, out-of-the-box, a supernatural or serendipitous unfolding that opens into an alteration we couldn’t generate by rational means.  Surprise!  Wouldn’t grace be good?  Standard operating procedures have gotten us to exactly where we are.

And we’ve done it again… This trick we have… Of turning love to pain… And peace to war”  –We’ve screwed it up again, negated what good had been accomplished, as humans do over and over.  Of course we do.  Another predictable social cycle of expansion, then contraction, then expansion, like all the cycles preceding.  A liberal movement, or conservative, and then the opposition response, then back again…. Because we are never satisfied to hold to a course that isn’t an immediate and perfect fix to our dilemmas.

ambiguity

Because humans get uneasy in the face of ambiguity.  We want bumper-sticker simplicity.  Longing for perfection, we destroy the good.  We clutch at something different, and then we don’t like how that works out….  We’ve become marbles in a pinball machine, only ricochets and flashing lights.

My own heart’s highest expression of what is right and good, moral and ethical—for me—only rankles with folks I cherish for entirely separate reasons.  I don’t expect we’ll be suddenly simpatico if I insist how wrong they are.  They’d surely tell me I’m the one who’s nuts.  And then where are we?

Listen.  Maybe we could hear each other.  And turn again.

 

Dry Bones

You noticed I’ve been AWOL?  Yeah, I missed you too.  I’ve been in the muck wrestling with myself.  I dislike the term blocked.  Okay, maybe you’re not a writer, so it’s possible this has no relevance to you.  Except.

Ever call yourself a failure?  Ever quit because you were stuck?  Maybe you figured other people were better able.  And who did you think you were anyway?  In a flash you were axle-deep in a swamp of self-defeating beliefs.  It might take more than four-wheel-drive and hip-boots to navigate the sinkhole of self-doubt in your path.

Stuck

Yeah, I know.  If you had your druthers, you’d be anyplace else.  Me too.  But I still want to get where I was going.  I’m not giving up.

So I looked for a source outside my own fevered brain to get out of the swamp.  And I found help. I’ll give credit to Bret Lott.  And to the author of the book of Ezekiel, in the Old Testament, for much of this entry.

Yesterday in the public library I found Before We Get Started, A Practical Memoir of the Writer’s Life by Bret Lott (Ballantine Books, 2005.)  He pointed out that writers are restricted to the same tired old letters and words and possibilities that have been recycled for thousands of years.  We just rearrange them.  There’s nothing new under the sun.  Our raw materials are like dry bones.  He went on:

“Faced with that endless valley of bones we have available to us, we must do what Ezekiel did: we must bring those bones to life.  Ezekiel’s vision can teach us a lot about writing:

“Ezekiel 37 New King James Version (NKJV)

37 The hand of the Lord came upon me and brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley; and it was full of bones. Then He caused me to pass by them all around, and behold, there were very many in the open valley; and indeed they were very dry. And He said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”

So I answered, “O Lord God, You know.”

Again He said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, ‘O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! Thus says the Lord God to these bones: “Surely I will cause breath to enter into you, and you shall live. I will put sinews on you and bring flesh upon you, cover you with skin and put breath in you; and you shall live. Then you shall know that I am the Lord.”’”

So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and suddenly a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to bone. Indeed, as I looked, the sinews and the flesh came upon them, and the skin covered them over; but there was no breath in them.

Also He said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, ‘Thus says the Lord God: “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.”’” 10 So I prophesied as He commanded me, and breath came into them, and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great army.”

Dry bones to life

Here’s Bret Lott again:

“…. I don’t think it would be too far from the truth to imagine that Ezekiel, knees trembling before the despair of so many bones and God breathing down his neck for an answer thought fleetingly, dangerously, There’s no way.  Bones to life?  Nope.

“O Lord God, You know.”  He doesn’t say, You bet.  He doesn’t say, Don’t think so.  He leaves it to God, and then proceeds—and here is the most important moment—to speak the prophecy he has been called to speak, whether he believes it or not, and not knowing as well what that prophecy means.  He speaks, because he has been called to, and not because he knows what will be the outcome.

And then these dry bones come to life.”

Me again.  This is another version of the resurrection story, the paradox woven throughout the natural world and Biblical wisdom.  That what is dead can come alive again.  As recurrent as winter’s dead grass emerging green again through melting snow in the spring.  The vibrancy of new forest growth fertilized by the mulch of wildfire’s devastation.

New growth

What is dark can be foundation for brilliant dawn.  It’s built in to the design of the universe.

Dawn

Ezekiel and Bret Lott are both talking about inspiration.  How something beyond rational is required for creation, which is the transformation of sweaty gruntwork into a beating heart quickening sinew and flesh.

It takes faith to follow, and keep following, what has called us.  Our balking is where we’re stuck on our own inadequacies.  Our resistance flies in the face of the calling itself.  My second-guessing is telling God he doesn’t know what he’s doing.  My fear of doing it wrong keeps me blocked.  Over-analyzing, self-critical.  Paralyzed.

Blocked

The act of creativity enfleshes and enlivens dry bones, beyond my known abilities.  I’m called to trust the process.  So here’s my part:  I need to let go of whether the stuff I’m writing is any good, at least for this phase.  I need to keep at a practice of producing material.  Do the next right thing I can find.  Sit my butt in the chair and type what I can, words that show up on the screen.  I need to set aside advance edits of the story trying to emerge, tantalizingly close to the surface.  Quit overthinking, and transcribe what is hovering there.  Pluck the images out of thin air, and take down the message dictated.  Inspiration is not my job.  That’s a separate thing.

Creation is still happening, every day.  For writers, for entrepreneurs, for problem-solvers, for teachers, for those making steps to solutions.  When the ashes of a dead career, or relationship, or project fall away, leaving open space for a new pathway.  We create when we don’t know how it will play out, but we’re willing to puzzle over possibilities.  We create when we get our judgments out of the way, and take the next small step to what we CAN see to do.

Prophesy!  Without knowing the ending.  Even when I don’t know if it’ll be any good.  The job, the call for me, is to quit the distractions and just do it.  Focus on the practice.

The breath to bring life to those words?  That’s from a source beyond me.

What are you inspired to do?