Author: admin

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. And try to live the questions themselves.  Do not seek the answers that cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will, then gradually without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.  (Rilke)

As I joked with a fellow shopper in our local grocery store this morning, I was reminded about my shopping adventures during the first year that I spent in Switzerland.  In my first encounters in grocery stores there, I found that the other shoppers, mostly women, were not to be trifled with. At least I couldn’t understand what they shouted at me as I stood in the aisle doing my mother’s extensive-time-reading-labels number, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have been pleasant. I would be whatcha would probably call frustratingly slow, trying to understand what the heck I was buying, and how many Swiss francs it was gonna cost me, while other shoppers would rush by me at breakneck speed, somehow managing  at the same time to neatly arrange their purchases in their carts in what was likely alphabetical order.  I would give them what I hoped was a wide-eyed and innocent American stare, and they would look back at me suspiciously with narrowed eyes and go off muttering to themselves, likely repeating to themselves what I came to learn was the national phrase, das hand mir nid garn, or “we don’t care for that sort of thing.”

In a global community which is all about political correctness, I hesitate to attribute any characteristics to those from a particular country lest I be perceived as casting ethnic slurs, but the reader of previous blogs may remember that I am Scotch-Irish, and while we may appreciate order, it is not the guiding light by which we live our lives.  Those whose ancestors starved in a potato famine or ran naked down the mountains to meet their foes in head-on battle don’t give much credit to alphabetical order.

While I never got the knack of what color garbage bag I should use for whichever day I was putting out my garbage, or understood the nuances of where to sit (or not) in train cars, nor fully comprehended which public bathrooms were off-limits,  I loved Switzerland.  Its amazing beauty, and the kindness of its people (reserved though it was — but we cynical Scotch-Irish types understand “reserve”), and even its predictability were warming and reassuring and uplifting. I mean, there’s a lot to be said for a country where the dogs are allowed to carry their own leashes in their mouths and never snarl at each other in restaurants.

And order?  I can be as obsessive-compulsive as they come, particularly when I get anxious, and want my world to be secure and predictable. Being a very small country like Switzerland in the midst of what historically has been a chaotic Europe would create a certain national flavor that tended toward being careful and watchful. Like Piglet in Winnie the Pooh, life can be frightening when you’re a “very small animal” (not that I’m sure Switzerland would appreciate the comparison — after all, think about all their money!)

Uh, oh, I think I may have lost my way in this blog . . . What am I saying?  What is my point?  Do I have one?  Do I need to have one?  Where is my pithy conclusion, my wrap-up, my zinger of an ending?  My answer???

I don’t even know the question!

Ahhhh . . . It’s okay  . . .  Sometimes blogs . . .  and life . . . just aren’t orderly.  Or predictable.  Or safe.

And it’s still okay . . .

Make your own recovery the first priority in your life.  (Robin Norwood)

We’ve probably all heard or read the following anonymous Autobiography in Five Short Chapters numerous times.  I know I have, but as I engaged in the same darned argument with my spouse today, somehow magically thinking, I guess, that this time it would turn out better, you would never have known it.  And so, humbled, one more time I pulled myself out of the hole into which I’d fallen, and trudged onward — at least this time I didn’t have to go through all five stanzas of this little ditty, and that’s something, I suppose. Read on . . .

I.

I walk down the street.  There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.  I fall in.  I am lost.  I am helpless.  It isn’t my fault.  It takes forever to find a way out.

II.

I walk down the same street.  There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.  I pretend I don’t see it.  I fall in again.  I can’t believe I am in this same place. But it isn’t my fault.  It still takes a long time to get out.

III.

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it there.  I still fall in . . . it is a habit . . . but, my eyes are open . . . I know where I am.  It is my fault.  It still takes a long time to get out.

IV.

I walk down the same street.  There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.  

V.

I walk down another street.

The time for seeking is over; the time for finding has begun . . .

. . .I look out at everything growing so wild and faithfully beneath the sky and wonder why we are the one terrible part of creation privileged to refuse our flowering . . . (David Whyte)

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?  (Mary Oliver)

The following story was told to me by the wisest woman I ever knew, an old Swiss woman who lived high in the mountains near Zurich.  I share it with you just as she told it to me.

News from the Borderland

     In ancient China the emperor’s troops had conquered a province that was so remote that nobody knew anything about it.  But the emperor wanted to know what he owned.  So he called for the most famous painter of all and sent him to that province with the task of painting whatever there was to see.  For a long while nobody heard from the painter and the emperor sent word that he was expecting his return.  Finally the painter arrived — without any baggage at all!  The emperor was terribly disappointed.  “Where are your paintings?”  he asked.

 “Where do you have a white wall?”  was the answer.  A huge white wall was soon found and the emperor, surrounded by the whole court, sat expectantly in front of it.  Then the painter started his work and under the strokes of his brush arose a landscape with mountains and lakes, meadows and deserts, cities, highly walled, and windswept tents.  There were trees and shrubs and flowers and animals of all sorts, and strangely dressed humans, working, loving, warring, dying and begetting,  old people, and children playing.  Many paths lead through this province.  They were full of carts and people wandering from one place to another.  The emperor and the whole court marveled.  What a fabulous province.  Secretly all wished to be there.  The main road led right through the middle of this province, and now the painter turned his back to the spectators and slowly started to walk it.  As he walked deeper into the picture, the foreground rolled up and vanished.  The painter continued walking, taking with him mountains and lakes, trees, animals, and people.  Then he too was gone.  And the emperor and court were again looking at a blank white wall.

There always comes a time for each of us to realize that the time for seeking is over, and the time for finding has begun.  When this happens, we have to give up our hope, our belief that someone else is going to show us the way, or do the growing work for us.  Just as the painter in the story invited the king and his court to do as he walked into his painting and took it with him, each of us have to take the responsibility for our lives.

As we make choices, no matter how small, each of our personal lives is being created; certain futures are being invited and others are being erased by those choices. Choices can sometimes be difficult to make, but if we pay attention, “teachers” are everywhere, pointing us to the unlived portion of our lives.

We each have one precious life to live.  Live it fully, whatever that might mean for you!

. . . story mends and heals what has been harmed in the psyche, what has been left for dead at the roadside, or worn down simply by the living of life.  (Clarissa Pinkola Estes)

May stillness be upon your thoughts and silence upon your tongue!  For I tell you a tale that was told at the Beginning — the one story worth the telling . . . (Celtic storyteller prologue)

It’s gettin’ toward storytelling time in Jonesborough, Tennessee.  I can hardly wait.  Sitting under ginormous tents, and listening hour after hour to funny, poignant, rich stories that bring smiles and tears and sometimes outright guffaws — what could be better than that??  Not much for me.

When I was a little girl, one of my very favorite things was when my mother or father told us stories about their own childhoods.  Their actual experience was growing up dirt poor in Appalachia in the midst of the economic depression, but for me their tales were a rich cornucopia of feed sack dresses and homemade woolen stockings, a favorite cat named Tricks, huge milk cans full of lemon crackers made by Great Granma, Christmas decorations of sycamore balls and pine cones and an orange (if they were lucky) for a present, another granma who smoked a corncob pipe and talked about witches, tar and featherings, revinuers, spooks — so much wonder!  Seeing a first car, eating a hot dog for the first time, all day church meetings, getting whipped with a hickory switch for telling a fib, walking miles to go to school in a one room schoolhouse . . . oh, the glory of those stories for me.

And when my Granma would come to visit for awhile, my sister and I got to take turns sleeping with her, and were put to sleep with even older stories than my parents’ glorious ones.  To imagine my grandma following a bear over the mountain on her way home one evening, to hear about the mysterious spooks that hung out around her house all the time, to even entertain the notion of having to watch out for mountain lions in the branches of overhead trees — wow!  My life as a little girl in the ’40s and ’50s was tame stuff  in comparison.

I sometimes wonder, tho,’ if my own experiences as a child would sound equally exotic to children today.  Things that I’ve written about in these pages, like playing booger in the cellar, and catching lightnin’ bugs in a mason jar, and no TV, and outhouses, and watermelon seed spittin’ contests (and if you swallow one of those seeds, you’ll grow a watermelon in your stomach), and Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogues and Christmas “wishbooks,” and my mom making all my clothes until I was ( finally) out of school at age 26 — lotsa stories running amuck in my head without too many folks to tell ’em to . . .

This kind of storytelling tradition has perhaps suffered in the midst of our technological advancements and in our current cultural climate, but it’s still alive and well in some places, like Jonesborough, with the National Storytelling Center and Festival — and it’s no coincidence that Jonesborough is in the heart of the Appalachians.   Mountain cultures like ours breed stories like flies; liars’ contests and swappin’ grounds and tall tales competitions abound.

And perhaps we’re finding new ways to tell our stories — and to listen.  I’d like to think that was true about social media.  I do know that telling and listening to stories about each others’ lives, both roles being equally important, are vitally important to claiming and valuing who we are, who we have been, who we will be.

So celebrate your story! — tell it as much as you can, especially to children.  Listen to others, too — nothing can be a greater gift.  And to those of you reading this, thank you for allowing me to tell you some of mine.

The white man must treat the beasts as his brothers. . . If all the beasts were gone, man would die from great loneliness of spirit.  For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man.  All things are connected. (Chief Seattle)

He shall cover you with his feathers, and under His wings shall you find refuge . . .(Psalms 91:4)

. . . that they may be to you as relatives.  (Lakota tribe)

As long as I can remember, I’ve had chickens (except for a stint of about 10 years in the swamps of Louisiana, where chickens’ dinosaur origins were fully acknowledged and chickens-as-pets given a dim view). But as  a child my first animal friends were chickens.  One of my earliest memories is that of sitting flat on the muddy ground of a chicken yard, still in diapers (at least I hope I had one on — older sister, sometimes given the joy of attending to such trifles, sometimes “forgot”), trying to carefully rescue chicks caught in a torrential downpour — I can still remember how I cupped each chick carefully in my hands and handed them up to my sister, and how cold and wet they felt, and how important it was to save them . . And how squishy the ground felt on my bottom.

We got our chicks in two different ways:  Sometimes my mom would order the chicks through the mail, and it would be so exciting to go to our small town post office and hear a chorus of peeping coming from the back and wonder if they were ours.  But most of the chicks we got were special needs ones, “culls” that my dad got from the hatchery, where otherwise they would have been killed.   They lived at first in a cardboard box by the kitchen stove that grew in size as they did, with a heat lamp hung above the box.  Their names reflected their appearance, Crooked Toe, Brainy, No Tail,  Beaky, Two Toes . . . They were richly loved, and as a result bonded with us and we believed they loved us back extravagantly.

Chickens were my refuge and sanctuary, too.  When things were tense or snarky in our house, I would go sit on the doorstep of the chicken house.  The hens would vie for places on my lap, where they would gently swipe their beak back and forth on my knee.  The comfort of that was amazing.  And healing.

The deep connection that most children share with animals and nature is remarkable, as if indeed they know something that we as adults have forgotten:  that the landscape of relationship includes infinitely more possibilities than only human-to-human.  In her wonderful book, Animals as Teachers and Helpers,  author Susan Chernack McElroy speaks of a Lakota phrase, mitaku oyasin, meaning “all my relations,” a prayer that honors all of creation by recognizing and affirming our inter-connectedness.  If humankind lived as though all of creation were honored relations, can we even begin to imagine what a different world it would be . . . A place where animals and all the earth would be seen as loved and honored relatives. . .

And we human types stand to learn and gain so much from such a point of view!  Currently our flock of chickens includes Popeye the rooster, and his little harem of eight hens.  Popeye is an Araucana rooster who rules our chicken yard with a tender touch.  Very solicitous of his flock of eight, some of whom are gentle subtle ladies and some who are drama queens, he spends his day doing his spouse-ly duties, patrolling for predators, and searching for food his girls might enjoy.  When he finds a choice morsel, he gives a sweet kissing-like call, “took-took-took,” that brings them running to his side.  Then he stands aside while they enjoy the treat, and only after they’ve had their fill will he sample the snack.  The Talmud praises the rooster, and its writers advise us to learn from him courtesy towards our mates.

Although he stands tall and prances proudly, Popeye is a gentle gentleman, eying us benignly as we care for the flock, never flinging his spurs about as so many roosters seem inclined to do when they strut their stuff.  His crow is a part of the soundtrack of the farm,  and he starts welcoming the coming of the light around 3 a.m.  And while it always feels to me as if he is crowing for the sheer joy of it, the prophet Muhammad tells us that roosters crow because they have seen an angel.

And seeing Popeye lift his head in a hymn of praise, it’s easy to believe that.

This is what you shall do:  Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people . . .  (Walt Whitman)

Wholeness is the goal, but wholeness does not mean perfection.  It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.  (Parker Palmer)

My Bookbub tells me there is a new bestseller out there that I might wanna read, entitled The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k.  The title reminded me of one of my own more shadowy parts that I named Yummygas, an acronym for the descriptive phrase, “You Have Obviously Mistaken Me for Someone Who Gives a S**t.”  Humph. And here if I had gone public with all that shadowy wisdom, I could’ve maybe had a bestseller on my hands.   There ain’t no justice; not only do I have to put up with that part of myself, but I don’t get to make a profit from her.

I know where that part of myself originated. It grew because somehow I had to defend and protect myself from caring too much, from having crummy boundaries as a result of a bleeding heart, from being so easily hurt that I could never effectively be of help. She (Yummygas)  doesn’t have the need to crop up so often these days, unless I get really incensed over some injustice or another and feel helpless about being able to change it.  Then my inner hero wants to charge forth on her white horse to save the day, and Yummygas immediately rears her head, saying something like,   “Are you crazy?  That never works!”

I’ve learned over the years that I am both — both the hero on the white horse, and Yummygas.  I am my shadow as well as my light.  The reality is that light casts a shadow, and I have to be wary of living too fully into either of those parts of myself because one doesn’t come without the other. And that’s okay.  I’ve learned that I can’t really fix, help, or heal anyone — in even using those words, I’m seeing the other person as the broken one, and me bigger and better, and able to somehow magically see what that person needs.  In trying to make things better, sometimes I’ve just made them worse.

What I can do is show up, be present, and attempt, at least, to practice loving-kindness as a way of life, not just to others, but to myself.  And I’ve learned that what shows up at my door is mine to attend to, whether it’s a feral cat who’s gonna need some care, or a request from a friend to borrow a car, or a meal to prepare.

The day we stop caring or showing we are human is not gonna be a good day for any of us.   As a credo for living, there’s a little poem by Kent Keith that kinda says it all:

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.  Be kind anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight.  Build anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow.  Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough.  Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God.  It was never between you and them anyway.

. . . the quiet teachers are everywhere, pointing us to the unlived portion of our lives.  (Mark Nepo)

It was a muggy, sodden morning on the beach this morning as a result of heavy storms in the night. I was wet when I finished my triking and walking routine.  The water was almost totally still, the tiniest of waves lapping lazily at the shore, almost like Pickles cleaning her whiskers after a saucer of milk.   And upon my return, it is very still and humid, with even birdsong and squirrel scolding hushed.  No one is stirring; RVers sleep late at the beach.  It’s always interesting to see the remains of the parties the night before, since I am sound asleep when they are going on.

This is my last day here; tomorrow Pickles and I will go home, leaving husband and Hank to do some RV maintenance and spend some guy-time for a few days.  Pickles and Hank have gotten to be almost-friends while they’ve been here, and it’s sweet to see them cuddled up together, at least for the ten seconds until Pickles wants to play, and Hank takes exception to her overtures — guess he’s gotta maintain his dogly-standards.

Since I’m big on being present where I am, I’ve been surprised this morning to keep finding my mind wandering to another place and time.  A few years ago, while staying at a bed and breakfast on the northern coast of Maine, I took an early morning walk through the empty streets of the small town in which we were staying. As I walked, the cool dampness was intensely apparent; fog wreathed itself in changing patterns in the streets and wrapped around the buildings in fantastical patterns.  Muffled waves lapped at the nearby shore, and the briny smell of the sea was all-encompassing.

It was a very different landscape from this place, and from the small mountain town where I grew up, and where my mountain-bred mother had spent her entire life.  She had died a few years earlier, and was on my mind that morning as I walked.  Always, it seems as if in death there are so many stories still untold, so many bits of wisdom and advice that you wished you had gleaned, so many unexpressed emotions and gratitude you wish you could have given, so much of value that was yet to have been learned.

As I passed an old, weather-worn building announcing itself as the village library, I noticed a glass enclosed case on the small front lawn, filled with a few damp papers.  I opened it and took one, and found a single sheet with a poem entitled An Observation, by May Sarton.  This is what I read:

True gardeners cannot bear a glove between the sure touch and the tender root; must let their hands grow knotted as they move with a rough sensitivity about under the earth, between the rock and shoot, never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit.  

And so I watched my mother’s hands grow scarred,  she who could heal the wounded plant or friend with the same vulnerable yet rigorous love; I minded once to see her beauty gnarled, but now her truth is given me to live, as I learn for myself we must be hard to move among the tender with an open hand, and to stay sensitive up to the end, pay with some toughness for a gentle world.

I thought at the time, and still do, how astonishing so-called coincidences are; it’s as if time and place collapse and dissolve, so that there is no difference between that place and this, and the conversation I wish I could still have with my mother, I am still having.  It all becomes part of the Whole.

And I know beyond any shadow of a doubt that all the pieces of this moment that I’ve just described are in the same way teaching me something.  And just maybe it’s something about the prices we must pay for a “gentle world.”

Here I raise mine Ebenezer, hither by Thy help I’m come.  And I hope by Thy good pleasure, Safely to arrive at home.  (from the old hymn, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing)

Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Jeshanah, and named it Ebenezer . . . (The Bible)

This morning on the beach, I was playing with building cairns with the few rocks and shells I could find.  Cairns have always intrigued me, not just because of their beauty and sometimes strangeness and whimsey, but because they seem to be such rich symbols of something unnamable.

My sister and I frequently drive up into the mountains and collect stones and river rocks from the crumbled foundations of my grandmother’s home.  The cairns we build with them dot the farm, small stone towers, balanced precariously, and yet somehow standing firm through wind and weather and machine and animal incursions.  As I pass by them, they never fail to touch me deeply, and I’m never quite sure why.  But I think it has to do with that lovely line quoted above:  Here I raise mine Ebenezer, hither by Thy help I’ve come.

Symbols have always been used to transcend language and culture and to communicate volumes with one simple icon.  The stone marker known as a cairn seems to be a symbol written on our hearts and deep within the collective consciousness.  These stone way-markers are present on every continent and in societies around the globe from the native peoples of northern Canada, the high Himalayas, to Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.  They are referred to in ancient texts, and we continue today to marvel at the Stonehenge mysteries, as well as other such “standing stones.”

Cairns are often used to mark summits and guide hikers, to pass along to others what we have learned about the way, the path, the trail.  They represent accomplishments, knowledge, experience gained, difficulties overcome, and sanctuary and guidance for pathways yet to be traveled.  They are both a tribute to honor one’s journey, and to point the way for others.

The beauty of the cairn lies in the balancing of the rocks.  And perhaps in taking the time and effort to gather the stones, and balance the rocks, we are affirming the sacredness of each individual life, of our life, no matter how ordinary it may seem — “This is who I am, this is my story.”   Raising our “Ebenezer” is an act of love and reverence not only for the story of our own journey, but a symbol as well of our commitment to further the journey of others.

We each have a precious life to live, a story to write, a journey to take; no one can write it or take it for us.  And each of our personal stories moves through us, creating history, and inviting futures.  Your story is the one story worth the telling.  Whatever it may mean to you, build your cairn, raise your Ebenezer!

Your story matters.

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.  (Jack Kerouac)

We’re still at the Shore, altho Mr. Peeps made the choice to return to the farm, where he could continue his misadventures in trying to become part of the farm cat gang.  Twelve week old Pickles misses him badly, and is having to devise her own mischief rather than following in his worthy footsteps.  Her very favorite of late is running nighttime laps around the rather cramped bed, which usually earns her time-out in her crate. Hank, of course, is above it all, with the far greater concern of having to carefully mark and re-mark the bazillion spots he has carved out as his own here.  Today on our early morning walk on the beach, we found that the gusty winds of the last few days had driven the water far out beyond the usual tidal flow area and oh! — the new places that Ole Hank found seemed to be truly savored and appreciated — land where no dog had gone before, a pioneer journey.

Husband and Hank are heading home to check on things, so Pickles and I will have some girl time.  I am considering laying in a supply of peanut butter pretzels and ice cream, and chicken and gravy baby food (Pickles got hooked on it during her post-hollow-tree-diarrhea bout).  Still got plenty of beach reading, so I should be all set.

Right now I’m reading John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie, his account of his 1960 solitary cross-country journey with his old dog Charlie, a French poodle. The richness of his writing makes me fall in love with words all over again.  About the truthfulness of his perceptions of America, he writes:   “On the long journey doubts were often my companions . . . There are so many realities, and what I write here is true only until someone else passes that way and rearranges the world in his own style.”  A man after my own heart . . . I think I’ve written that myself  — if not, I should have!

When I was growing up, my father had two pithy remarks designed to halt the ongoing flow of chatter, giggles, and questions with which his two daughters could inundate him — “don’t talk if you don’t have anything to say” and “don’t talk just to hear the rocks in your head rattle.”  Now, lest you think my father was a mean, abusive man, let me hasten to assure you he wasn’t; he was just a product of his time (children-to-be-seen-and-not-heard ilk) and probably overcome at times by the “girlie-ness” of his home.  But the unintended consequence of this was for me a remarkable lack of facility with the spoken word.  I can be so inarticulate that my mind has been known to go completely blank when asked my name.  While those of you patient enough to read these babblings may find this hard to believe, it is sad but true.  I am not a terribly gifted verbal person.

But write?!!  Journals spill out of every drawer and closet in my home.  I am in love with the written word, and I read and write voraciously.  Notice that I don’t say “well,” just voraciously!

So to all of those of you who are reading this (and I think there are only a small handful of you, a select group to be sure, but very small), I want to say thank you.  Thank you to cyberspace and thanks to all those of you who have so generously sent comments at times.  What a gift!

My hope continues to be that the words you read here may also gift you at times, perhaps with a smile, or a chuckle, or a recognition of a commonality of experience, or even a new thought or reflection that you might want to commit to paper yourself.  When I ask myself why I’m doing this writing, the answer still comes that I hope that it might be a place where you can stop for a moment to refresh yourself.  I probably flatter myself greatly in saying that, but as long as it keeps giving me joy to do it, I’ll keep cranking it out.  Thank you for reading it!