From Sunshine Hill

When Promises are Broken

2012-01-29T06:52:00.000-08:00

My friend, Bill, reflects that some promises must be broken; it would be blasphemy to keep them. And I'm reminded of a book written by Anthony Padavano back in the late 1960's. It came as such a revelation to me at the time, and yet its message is quite obvious. Our essential promise is to life itself--to live fully. Or as a very early Christian wrote: The glory of God is a human being fully alive. (was that Clement?) So, if in our ignorance or even in our arrogance we promise to set out on a course that turns out to be self-destructive, or destructive to another, or to the community or the earth, that promise must be broken.

As life progresses we have the opportunity to see more and to see more clearly and simply. Watch how our wise elders clear out the spaces of their lives. Even good things are given away, even things that hold the memory of beloved people or events. The more cluttered my house, my mind, my heart, my soul, the less I can see God. Blessed are the pure/simple of heart. Some promises are part of that clutter.

I've spent most of my life believing that promises are the glue that holds everything together. And for a long time this is probably true. But there is, perhaps, a moment at which some promise has us stuck in place, gluing our eyes, gluing our hearts, gluing our senses our souls our spirits, closing us down. It's time for cleansing.

It's frightening, terrifying even, to break a promise. There have been times I wanted to do anything but. Some people would rather go crazy or even die. Terrible mourning can set in after breaking/cleansing a promise that is no long creative, especially if we've set our lives and identity upon keeping it. We don't know everything; in fact we only know the slightest bit; sometimes I think I know nothing at all. We make mistakes. We've promised, sometimes, to continue in our mistakes. That promise is deadly.

Do you think it is possible that the only promise God asks of us is to BE? and that all the other promises are offshoots of that one?

Promises

2012-01-28T16:44:00.000-08:00

Broken House

The song says, "I've never made promises lightly; there are some that I have broken." I'm taken by that line. I'm taken by the entire song, so you'd think I'd be more careful about the promises I make. But no. Where it gets problematic is with the promises I cannot possibly keep. "How can I possibly do this?" I wonder even as I'm saying the words of commitment. I will never leave you. I will hold your hand when you die. Simpler promises, too, such as I will exercise at least a half hour a day. Maybe you are saying, "Now, Christin, there is certainly another way to look at this..." And you might be right. But, no matter the way I look at this, there are some promises I have broken. You've GOT to stop this promising all over the place, I said to myself some years ago. But I'm incorrigible.

Then, the other day as I was working on my new book project--a sort of memoir/spiritual apologia vita sua--it came to me that some of my biggest broken promises, namely the vows I made in the convent, are being fulfilled despite the way I dropped them and they shattered all over the cloister floor. Here I am, married to a former Trappist, living a profoundly monastic sort of life, praying each day during the Divine Office for my Sisters of St. Joseph, fulfilling those vows in a surprising way I could never have imagined.

So how does one understand this sort of thing? Augustine says that for those who love God all things work together for the good. Maybe that also applies to promises we make in the sincerity of our hearts, even if they don't get fulfilled in the manner we anticipate. A sincere promise gets fulfilled in ways beyond imagining.
I think it is Chesterton I'm paraphrasing when I say "Life is a promise that cannot be kept." But today I offer the thought that our lives are a promise that will be kept in surprising, even miraculous ways. And watching that miracle unfold has me smiling with wonder and gratitude.

Broken House with Spring Blossoms

THE LOWER WISDOM

2012-01-20T16:27:00.000-08:00

Rain and clouds outside my window to the southwest

Rain has been falling for three days. North, west and east of Sunshine Hill rivers and creeks crest. I just looked at the Trip-Check camera for Siskiyou Summit. Can't see much, though it seems to be rain, not snow, even 2,000 feet higher than John and I live. I'm glad not to be in my car up there; glad to be in my writing room looking out at these lower mountains just west of me. Out the other window I see fog rolling in along Sterling Creek Road between us and Sam and Ken. Soon the world will seem to end just past the yard.

It's been a contemplative time since I last blogged, and the weather suits my mood. It's been a time of significant nightly dreams, long ponderings over what they might mean, intense periods of writing poetry and reflections that begin to resemble the beginnings of a new manuscript--a kind of memoir. John showed me an apt poem by Brenda Hillman -- "Little Furnace." Let me share it --

--Once more the poem woke me up,

the dark poem. I was ready for it;

he was sleeping,

and across the cabin, the small furnace

lit and re-lit itself--the flame a yellow

"tongue" again, the metal benignly

hard again;

and a thousand insects outside called

and made me nothing;

moonlight streamed inside me as if it had been . . .

I looked around, I thought of the lower wisdom,

spirit held by matter:

Mary, white as a sand dollar,

and Christ, his sticky halo tilted--

oh, to get behind it!

The world had been created to comprehend itself

as matter: table, the torn

veils of spiders. . . Even consciousness--

missing my love--

was matter, the metal box of a furnace.

As the obligated flame, so burned my life . . .

What is the meaning of this suffering I asked

and the voice -- not Christ but between us -- said

you are the meaning.

No, no, I replied, That

is the shape, what is the meaning.

You are the meaning, it said--

(From BRIGHT EXISTENCE, by Brenda Hillman.

Thank you, Brenda.

ADVENT MEDITATION ON DYLAN THOMAS'S POEM

2011-12-11T16:25:00.000-08:00

I turn the corner of prayer and burn

In a blessing of the sudden

Sun. In the name of the damned

I would turn back and run

To the hidden land

But the loud sun

Christens down

The sky.

Am found.

O let him

Scald me and drown

Me in his world's wound.

His lightning answers my

Cry. My voice burns in his hand.

Now I am lost in the blinding

One. The sun roars at the prayer's end.

-Dylan Thomas

"Vision and Prayer" 1949

We grow older. The children leave home. Christmas begins almost imperceptibly to change into something new. Maybe in the beginning it is only the ornaments on the tree that change--the childhood ones have moved to the houses where the grandkids live--our children's houses. We hang a crystal angel, a silver-plated pine cone, One year we have no tree; instead we light candles on the mantle. We offer prayer as gifts. We sit in the silence and watch the bluejay that visits the feeder, the fox making his way across the forest's edge. We wonder what the Coming might be like now that its meaning sinks deeper and deeper into our souls, finally unencumbered by externals like bright ribbon and glitter. What kind of love might this have been that came to us from God? When we pray, "Come Emmanuel", for what exactly is it that we pray? We wonder that as we watch the sun setting early over the western hill. In the morning Orion strides across the still dark sky. "I wait for God as the watchman for the dawn." Breath, sighed onto the cold glass, makes a page on which to write one's deepest desire.

O Christmas, Christmas! You fill my soul utterly. You are the burning of love in the heart of night's chill. You are the tenderness of God; you are the fire. You are the searing of soul, you are the cooling wind. The Divine Gift you bring melts all I used to recognize of myself. My voice burns in Your hand, as your loud sun Christens down the sky.

May Love dawn for you in times of darkness.

Christin

IN THE PRESENCE OF THE SUN AND THE SEA

2011-11-23T15:23:00.000-08:00

The still empty canopy awaits the bride and groom. Bree and Patrick's family and friends mill, barefooted in the fine sand. I take a few pictures with my camera, and then just as the wedding party starts down the path to the beach, I am handed a small camcorder.

YIKES! I thought I'd have a chance to learn how to use this thing. The night before I had agreed to take a video of the procession and wedding. Bree's mom and dad would be in the procession. I was an obvious choice, even though I didn't know how to operate the camcorder. At that time I figured there would be time to find out. "I'll need about ten minutes," I'd warned, but they were already descending the steps. First bride's maid -- missed her. Second -- missed her too. John and Bryana stood at the top of the stairs. I grabbed Rachel, the wedding planner. "You have to take it off standby!" She reached over and clicked something. I hoped I was getting a picture. Linda had said there was a zoom lens. Where was it? How did I get myself into this? At least there was a professional photographer there for the still pictures. I sat for a while with the camcorder trained on the wedding couple and their minister. My liturgical critic told me he was doing a great job. John suggested I run around behind the canopy to get Bree's face during the vows. Oh Lordy! It would be like running across the back of the stage during the theatrical climax of SOUTH PACIFIC. I did it anyhow. The great irony would be if, when I ask Bree how the video turned out, she would say, "What video? It was blank."

So today when John asked if I planned to write the blog about the wedding, I demurred a bit. I know he wanted a beautiful, descriptive little essay. And I had glimpses of that loveliness during my virtual Carol Burnett act. But I have no pictures of the ceremony in my camera, and also no memory of the ceremony except what appeared on that little screen. Oh, and did I say that I was sitting on the bride's side? This meant that the sun was in my eyes and also in the camera lens. The whole thing, from my perspective, a comedy of errors.

This I do know: Bryana could have been the cover for the next BRIDES magazine. She was that beautiful. She was radiant. Patrick's eyes were proud and loving and grateful all at the same time.

The guests had a great time --

And from the rehearsal dinner to the setting off of a fire-lit balloon into the night sky, Bryana's whole being seemed full of light.

Lighting the fire balloon

There was one bit of the wedding ceremony that I actually heard, saw, and that stays with me. It is a snapshot I wish I could give you, but there's too much to it. It couldn't have been captured on the camcorder even if I'd been able to make it work professionally. It was a moment composed of the wind, the sunshine, the look on the faces of the bride and groom. It was a moment of blessing by the minister they had chosen who seemed to know with his heart all the words to say to them and to the rest of us. He called us into the presence of being itself. The presence of the sun and the sea, of family and friends, of the Holy One who made all of this beauty along with the love that binds us one to the other. And with this presence he blessed Bryana and Patrick -- children of all that we are--that all of us were that afternoon on the sand, by the sea of Cabo San Lucas. At that moment they represented the best of humanity, the best of what we are capable. They represented the love that we can see when we look deeply into anyone's heart, including our own. That is why, afterwards, the women were weeping with joy and the men were looking so proud. Because we SAW ourselves again as if for the first time. We saw what we can be and can become. We wanted to touch them, to stand before them, look into their radiant eyes, hear the words they speak, remind them of their times with us. At the reception people DID that. "I've known Bryana since the beginning, since 4th grade!" proclaimed her friend from Bandon.

So this is what a wedding is, and this is why we celebrate. This is why we attend. This is why friends and family flew all that way. Because this is what we are in the universe, isn't it? We are the creatures who agree to the union of hearts and souls, to the marriage of opposites--man and woman, fire and water, wind and sand, human and divine. And for a moment, there we are, in the center of that realization, in the perfect flame of that love which, as Dante sang, "moves the sun and the other stars."

POVERTY IN PARADISE

2011-11-18T14:34:00.001-08:00

Roosters crow in the morning and the little dogs bark. Across the street from the Mexican Inn the chickens peck in the vacant lot where the VW is parked, or maybe stranded. It's a good thing that I didn't write about the poverty I saw on the first day I walked through it, on the first day that I saw our little Inn situated right in the middle of it. I would have gotten it wrong. Probably I still won't get it right, but I might be closer.

Today when we walked past the dogs who have free rein of the streets, the graffiti on the walls, the broken windows, the piles of trash, the abandoned stores and cafes, and worse, I didn't see them quite the same way as I did that first evening when the bus let us off by the park and told us we'd find the Inn because it couldn't be far. Dragging our luggage we walked along the broken sidewalks along streets with no names. Finally a young man who was working on his pickup told us to turn left and then turn right and then turn left two more times. OK.

Poor man's patio

Since that evening we have walked these streets scores of times, back and forth from the Marina, only about five or six blocks away. The area around the Marina is rich with luxury hotels and shops. "It is a different world from any other," explains a suave English speaking Mexican in a gallery. "It doesn't really belong to Cabo, and it doesn't belong to any other culture. It is simply a place to fish and play golf and buy beautiful things." But immediately on the edge of the marina are blocks of little store-fronts with people who swarm around the tourists with fake silver necklaces for sale -- "one dollar; almost nothing!" I've become careful not to stop to look at anything, because the moment I do: "what size you want? what color? come back here...I have size. Twenty-five dollar, but for you, twenty. You maybe take it at twelve. I give it to you for eight." Today I got caught buying a sixty-five dollar blanket/shawl/table cloth for forty dollars and I didn't even want it! I just wanted to get away.

Little children learn to be vendors: At dinner last night two beautiful children stopped at our table.

And I became owner of three hand painted whistles.

In the neighborhood, though, no one tries to sell us anything. They live here. This is the home world. It isn't the tourist world. Here the cafes are owned by the neighbors and serve the neighbors. Estella directed us to the cafe operated by her friend from church. The menu was expansive, but few offerings were actually on hand. After not very long at all, my focus turned to the people rather than the things around them. Slowly as the hours passed my notions of beautiful and desirable went through a transformation. Even my notions about danger changed. I started seeing that chair under the tree that we pass twice or more times a day as a place where someone actually sits to relax in the shade, rather than a misplaced piece of furniture. It's a little thing, to be sure, but a significant cultural shift.

You stop seeing the strangeness of clothes lines right downtown, and begin to be aware of the care with which the clothes are hung.

Do you ever get the feeling that life is all topsy turvy? I see how difficult it can be to live down here. I see also how people help one another through their relationships. Estella is careful to take us where her friends work.It is an economy based on friendship. I suspect that few people in the neighborhood have missed out on the information that John and I are staying at the Mexican Inn--or that Estella and Miguel know who we are. And thus their home becomes our home. And you can feel it.

LIZARD BEHIND THE MIRROR

2011-11-16T12:22:00.001-08:00

We interrupt this blog about Italy to bring you words from Cabo San Lucas in Mexico. This little fellow to the left is merely a metal representation of his living counterpart behind the bathroom mirror who is too shy to allow photographs. John has made friends with the bathroom lizard who, he tells me, eats spiders. I did have a chance to see him yesterday waiting for dinner on the wall above the shower.

We are here on the tip of the Baja Peninsula where the Sea of Cortez meets the Pacific Ocean. John's daughter (and mine as well, now, along with Linda who is her birth-mother) is getting married on Sunday on the beach. So we are here ahead of time, enjoying the warmth and the sunshine. Rather than staying at one of the many beach-front resorts, we chose to stay in a small hacienda for the "authentic Mexican flavor"...and so it is. We come to know Miguel, the manager, even though he speaks no English, and I speak no Spanish. Nada. But John studied a bit, and can even tell jokes and play on words with puns. Last evening we had dinner with him and Estella who does just about everything around here.She spent the morning guiding us around the new and old parts of town. Then in the evening she took us with her to a charismatic prayer meeting at her Catholic church. The people we met there and the experience we had went way beyond anything one can expect from a vacation. An older woman with a classic Mayan face was so beautiful that John commented to me: If God turns out to be a woman, that's the face she would choose for Herself. I wish I had a picture of her, but it would have been too much an invasion of her privacy even to ask.


outside our room


fountain where birds bathe inside the Inn

John and Estella at the Marina


Beach front resorts


Cabo's famous rocks...not a good shot, sorry.

It's time for a siesta.

HERMITAGE AND SOLITUDE

2011-11-10T14:17:00.001-08:00

On a blustery Friday we took taxis high up on Mt. Subasio to the hermitage of the Carceri. Here St. Francis and his close friends spent months at a time in solitude, praying and communing both with God and our "brothers and sisters" found in nature. He wrote the beautiful prayer of gratitude for creation.

Praised be my Lord God with all creatures,
and especially our brother the sun,
which brings us the day and the light;
fair is he, and shining with a very great splendor:
O Lord, he signifies you to us!

Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon,
and for the stars,
which God has set clear and lovely in heaven.

Praised be my Lord for our brother the wind,
and for air and cloud, calms and all weather,
by which you uphold in life all creatures.

Praised be my Lord for our sister water,
which is very serviceable to us,
and humble, and precious, and clean.

Praised be my Lord for brother fire,
through which you give us light in the darkness;
and he is bright, and pleasant, and very mighty,
and strong.

Praised be my Lord for our mother the Earth,
which sustains us and keeps us,
and yields diverse fruits,
and flowers of many colors, and grass.

Along the pathways here are several caves in which the friars sought solitude with God. Bronze statues of Francis and two other friars capture their absorption in the earth and sky as though through nature to find a path to the Transcendent.

During the years that I lived alone on Sunshine Hill friends warned me against "becoming a hermit," as though there might be something dangerous about such a life style. And I recognize that there are dangers of being too much alone--self-absorption being one of the chief among those dangers. The person who becomes a hermit to "just get away from it all," is in danger. But in a world such as our modern one, with its fast pace and constant noise, a positive balance becomes a necessity. Some, like Thomas Merton, still are called to give this balance to the rest of us. There are others, much less visible in their solitude than he was because of the writing he was also called to do, who lead positive lives in solitude. What makes this hermetic life positive, I think, is the inner direction it takes of being focused on something so much larger than the self. Knowing oneself as part of the whole world, its destructive aspects as well as its creative, the hermit can lift up the self in surrender for that world, can enhance the consciousness of that world.

In an individualistic era like ours, it can be difficult to see how some guy living in a cave and talking only to God can affect me in even a small way. But what if every thought we have actually does vibrate throughout the entire fabric of being, and we aren't such individuals as we thought? Then in solitude we would not be so alone. Instead we would have the contemplative experience of realizing our connection with everything. Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Fire, Sister Water, Brother Wind, Mother Earth. Brother You, Sister I. And the same Breath in and through us all.

Brother Francis gazing at the sky.

The Poor Clare Sisters

2011-11-08T13:02:00.000-08:00

From Rivortorto we drove eastward through the Apennine Mountains into the Marches of Ancona to stop at the little town of Camerino and the Poor Clare Monastery where St. Camilla Baptista da Varano lived during the 15th century. She was canonized only in 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI.

I'd never heard of her before, and don't quite know what to make of her now. It's significant that the nuns worked all these centuries to have her recognized. She'd been a Renaissance illegitimate daughter of royalty. Her royal father had a great fondness for her, however, and when she decided to leave the courtly life to enter a monastery, he had this particular one in Camerino built for her. Later he and his family had become ensnared in political doings with the Pope--a Borgia--and ended up victims of a violent murder. When the pope attempted to annex Camerino, she was forced to flee into the Kingdom of Naples until a new pope was elected. Her writings contain nothing of these events, and she was known for her loyalty to the papal office and a heart able to forgive even the most heinous of crimes. The focus of her spirituality was on the sufferings of Christ, the cross, and the Divine Heart burning with love for the poor. I'm hoping that all of her writings will soon be translated (I found only one in English on the Internet). Apparently she had intense mental struggles, and I'd like to know more about that.

One of the four sisters still living at the Camerino monastery talked with us about St. Camilla, then served us a lunch of pizza and Italian cola. (It's neither Coke nor Pepsi nor like them in any way I could discern. It leaves a medicinal taste along the side of the tongue)

From Camerino we continued on to San Severino to visit the Poor Clare's there. This community has a Francis-story connected with it. He saved a lamb from among the goats and carried it to the sisters living there. They cared for the animal and made a cloak for him from the wool. Later the group of women became Poor Clare's. It isn't often that people on pilgrimage are able to relate so closely to the women in these monasteries, but our organizer, Bret, has known them for years and seems to relate to them as family.

We were led into a visiting room. Four nuns sat behind a grill and one of them spoke for about an hour about life in their community, and also about her own experience of vocation to this life-style. She was animated, articulate in English, and very young.

Afterwards we joined them for Vespers chanted in the chapel. They were in the choir section of the chapel, and we prayed in the public area, but we could see one another. These twenty-five women had been singing together for a long time, and their voices blended so beautifully that I started to cry AGAIN! It's true. I do continue to carry nostalgia for the beautiful parts of my early years in the convent. Probably it is nostalgia for the dream of convent life that I had when I entered, and of which I experienced some fulfillment. John leaned over to me and whispered, "Do I have to leave you here?" And I shook my head, no, even though my heart felt on fire with the same youthful longing I experienced when I was seventeen. "We have our own monastery on Sunshine Hill," I whispered back. (of course, the two of us can't sing like that!)

We waited in the courtyard until dinner time when the sisters served us a feast. Turkey, tomatoes from their garden, soup, pasta, salad, fruit, home-made wine, home-made brandy, tiramisu.

One rather scary thing happened there: Before going down the hill to catch the bus back to St. Mary of the Angels, several of us lined up at the restroom off the convent parlor. The men went in and out--no problem. The first woman who went in came dashing out, waving her arms, "There's a SCORPION in there." I was next in line. "Where?" I questioned. "Above the door." She shivered. Aha! The men had their backs to it. I thought of a little scorpion I'd seen in Florida--a skinny pink thing--and went in. Yes. There it was. Above the door. Black and fat. How fast do they run? Can they drop from a thread like spiders? It's little right claw moved slightly to the right. I simply had to use this facility!! It's black tail curled up around its fat body. Oh dear. Finished, I opened the door slowly, then edged out. Safe.

Afterwards I thought how a building hundreds of years old must be hard to keep up. I wondered if there are lots of those around San Severino. I suppose there are; it's high desert. I wondered if people ever get used to them? Probably they do. I have cousins in Arizona, for goodness sake!

Oregon's really a great place to live :)

FRANCIS AND THE LEPERS

2011-11-03T12:02:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time Francis of Assisi despised lepers. And who didn't? Probably the emotion was more one of fear, even terror. I don't need to explain this. But something happened to him. A dream. A vision. Who knows anymore? Something powerful happened, and for him, as a result, Christ was there. Christ showed himself present in (as?) the leper, and Francis kissed him.

In the deep valley below Assisi, below St. Mary of the Angels, below most everything stands a little stone chapel. It is at a place called Rivotorto, and is the site where Francis and his friars served the lepers. Look up the hill. It's a straight path down to this place. All the refuse would flow down here. Malaria would be rampant here. Disease of all kinds would have flourished here. Francis and his friars built huts and lived in them while they served.

The chapel now is in a little neighborhood and is cared for by a woman who lives next door. She holds the key, and was not home when we arrived. Possibly we would be unable to go inside, but just as we were about to leave she drove up. Some divine intention wanted us inside.

"Who or what is the leper in your life?" All of us pilgrims were asked to consider this question. What is it that I fear to embrace? What is it I despise? The people in the time of Francis thought leprosy was a punishment for some profound and hidden sin. What do I think is so evil I don't want to be in its presence in case it is contagious?

These days we are asked to embrace our shadow, the darkness within, that aspect of our personalities we've worked a lifetime to keep in check. We're told it holds the power of our creativity. The fear is that the shadow self will release chaos into our lives. It's the leper. That's what we think. Could it be it contains the face of Christ? Or is that too simple? What is it then? The suffering Christ? The one who took on everything we fear and hate? The one who surrendered to be broken open like an egg. Is that what the shadow is? The leper? What in me needs breaking, needs to be poured out, to be freed, released?

I wonder that now as I wondered it that day in Rivortorto. What have I consigned to the valley of darkness? What do I need to find down there, in the soul's depth? What in me do I need to kiss?

those little lights are a reflection on this scene of Francis and the leper

Santa Chiara

2011-11-02T11:25:00.000-07:00


Icon of Francis and Clare from WordPress

I may need to return. It troubled me that I'd forgotten Clare's crypt and her waxened body. Then I began to remember snippets: ---that St. Camilla's body looked plastic, while St. Clare seemed to have but the lightest coat of wax so that I thought, in walking past the crypt, that I hadn't remembered her body was preserved incorruptible. I think I knelt there. Maybe I didn't. Maybe people were in line behind me; I suppose they were. ---that when we left the crypt I said to John, "Maybe we ought to change the name of our home from Sunshine Hill to The Chiara House." Her name rings bells inside my heart (Kee AH rah). ---that I stood for a long time in front of an alb she had made for Francis. It was twice as long as a man is tall, and the now fragile material had been needleworked with an intricate design that must have taken her years to complete. And I wondered what she might have been thinking, praying, dreaming, imagining, surrendering as she worked on that sacred garment. What flesh actually remains of her now, fragile as this alb? Bone fragments? Ash? Wisps enclosed in wax.

The icon above from WordPress touches me to the quick. They had one vision, the two of them. One faith. One hope. Probably one Love. It's not like being in-love with one another. It is more like being inside Love itself, together. Divine Love itself. Or, maybe like "between us, One I."

Why didn't I remember that I saw her waxened body? Maybe because she transcended that body a long time ago, even while she still lived on this earth. What IS this earthly body of ours? Why have religions thought it significant when the flesh does not dissolve? It's barely there anyway. Sometimes this flesh seems to dissolve while living itself into the living flesh of others. Can I always tell where you stop and I begin? Doesn't physics tell us we are mostly space? So when we live in that space and not so much in our solidity, what then? Chiara! Chiara! We are you, now, walking past whatever remains of your fragile flesh hidden in that wax. We must carry now your light. Was that where I was that day? Somewhere out in the fields with her spirit? Somehow dancing in the radiance of her shining? My fleshly eyes peered through the heavy grill that protected her waxened remains, and quickly forgot. But something else in me saw Light, Chiara, and remembered.


Again, not allowed to take pictures, I found this one on the Internet

Back at St. Mary of the Angels Basillica, John and I browsed in the bookstore where they sell Franciscan books in almost any language. There's a small English section. One book caught my eye: Francis and Clare in Poetry. I waited though until I returned home to buy it, and when I did I opened to a poem by John F. Deane whose experience, somewhat different from mine, touched my heart and brought Clare very much into the present moment.

THE POOR LADIES OF SAN DAMIANO

Step down, out of the sun, into this crypt:

still life, with candlelight, and bride;

she has waited seven hundred years

for the bridegroom to claim her body;

she lies, in a glass casket, beyond glass walls;

watch, and your own face is watching back. Name her--

clara, bright, translucent--Clare;

and something less, not-life, not-death: dusk.

The face has a talcum pallor,

the fingers have the sheen of candlewax.

Precious, preserved, a dried flower.

Purple toadflax clings

to chinks in a high brick wall

in a market town in Ireland;

on glass-spiked wall-tops

lilac and laburnum droop,

their purple grapes,

their tresses of golden hair.

Poor ladies. Behind their walls

they struggle to emulate

the image of the Bridegroom, crucified;

outside, dealers thump with sticks

on the flanks of cattle;

trucks go by, their stench of dung,

the gasps of jostled animals.

Clare, like Penelope, sat by her mirror

embroidering an alb for Francis;

when their eyes met he was watching

far beyond, and only distorted shadows

passed on the mirror's surfaces.

Outside, olive trees drooped with a weight of fruit;

the density of flesh, if she could only

shuck it off, allow the blossoming

of love, of ecstasy, untrammelled, pure;

Clare, in quiet, offered up her life to God

bringing a coarse, dark fabric as a dowry.

In Ireland, poor ladies behind their grille

have given up their lives for peace;

as wedding blessings they send out prayers,

and rosaries of olive-coloured beads.

Today, above Assisi, mirage fighter jets

burst from the sun to shatter

the convex mirror of the sky.

We come, tourists, wedding guests,

step down out of the sun into the crypt;

whispering, and jostling, we are ushered past;

we know she died, Juniper and Angelo are witnesses;

she stepped through the mirror

into God's image, leaving her flesh

for the curious eyes of centuries.

Artist: Susan Clark

TOMB OF ST. FRANCIS

2011-10-31T14:12:00.000-07:00

The Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi is a magnificent structure fronted by an enormous square (on which we first saw the Beggar of Assisi). Inside are frescoes of the life of Francis painted by artists of the high Middle Ages such as Giotto. Here also is an ancient portrait of Francis, the only remaining fresco by Cimabue, supposedly the closest likeness of him that we have.

The pilgrims and art enthusiasts moved around the cathedral with heads tipped back, straining necks. Our small group was blessed to have Alex's vast knowledge and appreciation at our disposal. An amazing detail is that the construction of the lower church had advanced far enough in two years that Francis' body could be moved here from its temporary resting place. Again, taking pictures inside the church was forbidden, but if you are curious, you can find images on the Internet.

Beneath the main church is the chapel of St. Francis' Tomb. Somehow Bret, our pilgrimage leader and organizer, was able to arrange for us to celebrate Mass there. "In all my life," commented one of the pilgrims, "I never imagined I'd have a chance to receive communion right here, at the very tomb of St. Francis!"

It's an intimate space, almost as if carved out of the stone of the mountain. Here's a photo from the BBC, taken just after the first restoration in 800 years was completed this April.

Here words fail. What IS it about St. Francis? From where comes this falling away of all but God? It feels as though we are taken into his spirit, somehow, becoming more than we are. This sense has been felt through the ages. You can see it in the frescoes: a consistent comparison, almost an identification of Francis' life with the life of Jesus. But it becomes personal--an "I am That" of the eastern traditions. Father Jose stood at the altar, his back to us as it would have been in the pre-Vatican II church. That felt right, somehow, even though I've spent much of my life studying and promoting renewal in the liturgy. The priest, in this instance, felt to me like the point on a wedge of wind, of spirit, bursting out of the community of pilgrims with Francis, as Christ, into the Divine Mystery of God. Once again I wept. What a strange phenomenon, these tears that just fall and fall without the accompanying sense of crying.

After Mass we walked with other pilgrims around the tomb. The tombs of his closest companions also are here, circling Francis. The tomb is not of glass, unlike that of St. Clare, showing a facsimile of the living person. Francis' remains are enclosed in stone. One pilgrim lightened my mood by quipping: "you know why Francis was buried in stone rather than glass?" No. "They didn't want people to see him turning in his grave." Oh. OK. The little poor man of Assisi, stuck til the end of time in one of the greatest basilicas in Christendom.

Life is irony. It's a symbol, of course. This beauty all around his memory comes about as we try to articulate heaven, just as the book of Revelations with its golden and jeweled streets is also trying to articulate heaven. But we can't. We really have no words for that. We get a taste of it from time to time. Francis felt it in a cold cave in the mountains, in the kiss of a leper. What kind of irony is that?

Later we walked along the streets of Assisi, up to the main town square and the temple of Minerva, then spread out to enjoy the Saturday market and to find lunch.

The temple of Minerva


Looking down a side street


The dome of St. Clare's

Little shrines are built into the walls

RETURN TO GOD

2011-10-29T12:32:00.000-07:00

This man wanders the streets of Assisi, smiling, crying out the Word of God, and carrying a knapsack for alms, though he blesses both those who give and those who do not. We saw him during both our visits to the town. Was he a charlatan, a fanatic, or a true and radical follower of Francis? "Ritorno a Dio!" he kept repeating. "Return to God." Wasn't that what Francis used to cry out?

I noticed that most people pretended he wasn't there and went on with their tourist activities. Of course one can't give to every beggar. (There were many, both in Assisi and in Rome--some of them with bodies twisted beyond comprehension.) This one, though: Who made that sackcloth robe for him? Shouldn't he have a bowl instead of a bag? But then, Francis asked for money, didn't he? To rebuild the church. If we gave freely to anyone begging on the streets, would everyone leave their jobs and homes and take to the streets? I don't think so. I think it's hard work to beg, especially if you have to do it every single day. It must become like a form of work, not all that unlike being a census taker, a bill collector, a lobbyist on the Capital steps in Washington. And if your work clothes itch -- well. . .

What if he was the best thing in Assisi? Wouldn't we have struck up a conversation with him?

How does one tell a crazy person from a saint? I watched the Assisi Beggar climb the steps behind the Cathedral of St. Francis. "Return to God; Return to God!" He wasn't "normal." What saint has ever been normal? They are trans-normal. Francis went down the mountain to care for the lepers while everyone else was striving to go UP. "He's crazy," said the townspeople of him. He slept on rocks in caves. Afflicted with sores and blindness, he called his situation one of Eternal Joy. His heart burned with Divine Fire.

The other day I was reading a book that had nothing to do with Christianity. The author mentioned St. Francis of Assisi, calling him a turning point in the development of western culture, the first of the truly individuated persons. Up to then the collective had been primary. Francis bridged the times for us. In the stories we have images of him walking on the edge of the precipice in Laverna (like the archetypal Fool who sings and dances blindly on the edge of a cliff--the image of beginnings, of transformation)--images of him crossing the mountain gorge on the trunk of a tree blown down for his passage. He is the transitional man. (In his day many transitional men and women were executed for heresy.) Francis dodged that by his simplicity, candor, humility, willingness to be transformed.

Or -- so it seems to a novice of his Way which is (he would insist) the Way of the Christ.

This morning I'm just thinking this out, not even writing it in Word beforehand and pasting it into the blog. Just letting my fingers do the talking. First I pasted that picture in, and off went the fingers on the keys. If I sound crazy, maybe I am...

unlike Francis who looked crazy to so many, but was not. Yesterday I was reading an analysis of Beatrice of Nazareth, another mystic of the time of Francis, but spending her life in a Cistercian Monastery in Belgium. Scores of men and women across Europe in that era reported mystical experiences. Visions, sensory manifestations, the audible voice of Christ, etc. So the author asks the question I asked: how do you know they are sane? His rule of thumb is "how do these people act when they are not in the throes of a mystical experience, not at prayer, not in contemplation?" All of these people were not only functional, they were brilliant in their abilities to accomplish their work, to relate to others with compassion and good judgment, to take their place in the pattern of their social network, do be patient in their own trials, and the various other characteristics of a healthy, mature personality.

And what's not sane about the cry of the Assisi Beggar? "Return to God." I, for one, when I look at the world these days, think that's pretty good advice.

WOLF IN WINTER

2011-10-26T15:05:00.000-07:00

On October 4^th, before reaching Laverna, we took a side trip to Gubbio. John and I were both eager to see this little town because of his book, WOLF IN WINTER, published in the mid-eighties by Paulist Press. We watched for the scene he'd described in the book's opening:

"Gubbio grips the slope of Mount Ingino with all the tenacity and seriousness of a medieval fortress, stern as the cliffs rising behind it. It was the same in March of 1207. The city towers and the battlements on its outer walls had purpose then, protecting it from the raiders who poured out of Perugia, ruinous as the snow-swollen rivers raging down the sides of Ingino.

Atop the mountain, the monastery of San Ubaldo guarded the city and the Apennine passes. Even the cypresses ranged in columns on the hills had the appearance of sentinels. With the stiff movement of chilled watchdogs, their shadows stretched through the lavender dawn, patrolling patches of mud and dirty snow, leaping the low stone walls and grape stalks of the smallholdings outside the city."

(--John R. Sack, WOLF IN WINTER)

This story of St. Francis as a youth is the one that started it all for John, and so was greatly responsible for this pilgrimage in our lives. It is presently being reprinted by Tau Press and should be available in early November of this year. He’s since written two historical novels (The Franciscan Conspiracy, and Angel’s Passage) both of which are available for purchase. (Is this beginning to sound like an advertisement??? Hey, I love the guy AND his talent for writing. These are great books! And he is working himself up to yet another – resulting in a true trilogy of the longer, more sophisticated works. WOLF IN WINTER is more a young adult novel—but well worth the time of an old adult--such as I.)

On our own way to Gubbio the traditional story of the wolf was retold by Alex, our guide to the spirituality of each place. As the tale goes, a wolf was foraging in the town of Gubbio. The townspeople worried for their supplies, their animals, their children and their own lives. St. Francis, passing through, offered to talk with the wolf to see if some arrangement might be made. And sure enough -- recognizing Francis's compassion and simplicity and truthfulness, the wolf and the man reached an agreement. The wolf would respect the town and harm nothing, and the people would feed the wolf.

As he told the story, he kept referring to John, and pretty soon several pilgrims wanted to buy John's book which tells a rather more complex story, some of it from the point of view of Francis, and other sections from that of the wolf. Naturally, I'm not about to tell you John's plot or attempt to rebuild his fine characters here. Tau Press is about to send a whole box of newly printed books to Sunshine Hill. And they will be available both in trade paperback and for electronic books really soon. I hope you watch for them.

As we walked through the village on our way to the famous statue of Francis and the Wolf, we encountered another town market in the square.

I believe that every pilgrim in our group had a picture taken with Francis and the Wolf.

There's a famous saying: "God made humans because he loves stories." Stories of wolves survive in the mythologies of most European nations, and some very primitive ones feature the "Corn Wolf" which was literally the last sheaf of grain harvested, and was not to be eaten all winter, even if it meant that the people would go hungry. This wheat "belonged to the Wolf." In fact, this was the grain that would be planted in Spring, assuring the the survival of the people.

The Francis and the Wolf story seems, though, to add an important dimension to that more primitive one. Compassion. The open heart of Understanding takes the place of the closed heart of fear. Giving takes the place of hoarding as a way to survive.

RETREAT AT LAVERNA IN TUSCANY

2011-10-25T15:55:00.000-07:00

Before we left on pilgrimage, I told my friends I'd be at the tomb of St. Francis for his feast on October 4th, and I quipped that there would be a million others with me. Though I feel a bit claustrophobic in crowds, I thought such a crowd as this, all focused on the same awareness, could give off a spiritual energy in which I could participate. But it didn't happen that way, and I couldn't be more grateful. Instead, we all piled into the bus for Laverna in Tuscany to make a retreat in the mountain grotto where Francis was marked with the wounds of Christ--the phenomenon we call the stigmata.

We drove on steep mountain roads, around switchbacks, and gazed out at a landscape like that of a medieval painting. Sometimes villas graced the hilltops.

Up here, on Mt. Laverna Francis had a hermitage on land given him by Orlando, a wealthy nobleman. We'd been told to bring warm clothes to ward off a freezing wind that usually blows in October. But as we walked up the last bit of mountain towards the sanctuary the sun shone warm and bright.

Back in 1224, Francis had just finished a forty-day retreat, praying and resting in a stone cave. He'd asked Christ to be able to share in his passion, and was pierced in his hands, feet and side by a seraphic fire. Reading of this from the classic THE LITTLE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI was something I hadn't done before the retreat, but have done now, and honestly, it took my breath away. The place is still "hot" from that fire. Was it the altitude that made it hard to catch my breath?

We descended into the cave of Francis, the place he made his petition.

This is the actual hermitage. The grate protects the stone bed on which Francis slept.

A painting of Francis contemplating/praying in the cave

Light catching the edges of a gouge in the rock

John leaning against the rock at the precipice

We stood on a precipice where it is written that he was tempted, as Jesus was also tempted on a mountain, and then was saved from falling when he called upon God.

I can't do this. I don't know enough to do this. I know what I felt in that place. I felt fire in my heart. What is that? I absolutely do not know. What are spiritual experiences themselves? I don't know that either. They aren't emotional. They aren't cognitive. They can't be personally caused regardless of the perfection of techniques such as special breathing or postures. One author I read posits that such experiences are psychosomatic reactions to the touch of God -- the Divine Touch itself cannot be felt, but the body cannot help but respond, even in quite dramatic ways.

What did Francis feel that resulted in those bodily wounds? Was it the same thing that St. Paul felt which caused him to say, "I bear the marks of Christ in my body"? Other than Paul did any stigmatic exist before Francis? I don't remember being told of any. But during just my lifetime there have been--how many?--I think hundreds. Does the body respond to that suggestion once the mind is aware of it?

Does it matter?

"Deus meus et omnia" Francis cried as the Divine Fire pierced him. The words are in gold above the chapel of the stigmata. "My God and My All". I stood in the long hallway afterwards, after the procession had wound towards that chapel singing the litany of Mary. Why Mary? Because she said "yes." She said, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to Your will." Francis also said "Yes." The obvious question: will I? Every moment, will I?

The invocations of Mary's Litany rang out in Latin: Rosa Mystica --Mystical Rose, Vas Spiritualis--Spiritual Vessel, Vas Honorabili--Vessel of Honor, Domus Aurea--House of Gold…

A voice in my mind murmured, "Weren't you once going to write a meditation book on these invocations?'

"I was."

The voice again: "It's time."

Yes. Yes, it is.

TRANSITUS

2011-10-24T12:38:00.000-07:00

TRANSITUS, Latin for: PASSING OVER, CHANGING, TRANSIT, CROSSING, FINISH, SETTLE, END, TERMINATION.

At the spot in the basilica where (before the basilica was built) St. Francis died is a gate behind which are a blanket, candle, and flowers. We kneel there. I take a picture. This is the physical place of his crossing from one life to the next. Is there an intensity in the air here? Is there an opening in the fabric of space and time? I'm new in this relationship with the "little man from Assisi," the "troubadour of God." The people with whom we traveled, most of the other pilgrims, were professed to follow his Way as Third Order Franciscans. Among them I was very much a novice. But despite this I think that I could feel his spirit, his burning love, his desire that God be his All.

Outside the basilica, preparations were taking place for a parade in the square at St. Mary of the Angels. For hundreds of years this feast and the next day's feast of St. Francis were a national holiday in Italy. Each district brought its produce to the square, bands played, people danced, politicians pranced, flags were waved, costumes were worn. It's still happening. John and I, along with some of the other pilgrims, sat or stood for a while where the marching band had gathered. Then we wandered around the square. What a swirl of emotions! Deeply spiritual intensities with carnival atmosphere, with medieval traditions.

The local band gathers. A real community representation of musicians including quite young children, not shown on this picture

A more cultural/traditional musical group

"We shall come rejoicing, carrying the sheaves."

The wheat-growers were featured at this celebration--each one carrying two more sheaves than the last, up to ten.

Royalty??

Each city sent its own police representatives with their own unique uniforms

Lots of flags

I just LIKE this one :)

"Mary of the Angels" for the day. These children were carried on the shoulders of young men--on large wooden planks--bounced up and down so the angels' wings would flutter.

"Hummm...tell me again--what does all this have to do with the transitus of St. Francis??"

BELLS AT MARY OF THE ANGELS

2011-10-22T09:45:00.000-07:00

Bells rang each morning at seven. I pulled open the long drape and stepped out onto the little balcony where I could see the bell tower of St. Mary of the Angels and watch those bells swing. Sound summons inner experience. Bells of Sacred Heart church in the little town of my childhood. Bells of St. John's University in Collegeville, MN--pretty much unparallelled in my experience. The smaller bells of adoration. I've missed the bells that I now hear so much less often.

On Saturdays John and I give ourselves time and silence for retreat--for prayer, contemplation, spiritual reading, walks in nature. We'll be remembering all of you who visit us here. And I'll tell you all about the Transitus Celebration no later than Monday.

SAN DAMIANO

2011-10-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

The morning of October 3rd we went by taxi to San Damiano, the ancient stone sanctuary where Francis once heard the image of Jesus on the cross speak directly to his heart. "Rebuild my church," was the life-mission the young twelfth/thirteenth century man was given. He took the command literally, and began reconstructing the sanctuary stone by stone. This action grew into a metaphor for a renewal of Christian life which has spread across the world, continuing to have influence for both religion and culture in our contemporary world. Later a noblewoman from Assisi named Clare, influenced by his life and teaching, joined him and his growing community of friars. San Damiano became her monastic home, the place she lived and died among a growing number of holy women including two of her sisters and her mother. These were the first Poor Clares.

The taxis parked downhill from San Damiano and our pilgrim group began the trek up the cobble-stoned road. I snapped a photo of the welcome sign with a yellow notice of this day being that of the "Transitus" or the anniversary of transition for Francis from an earthly to a heavenly body, or his passage from earthly life. "We praise our sister, bodily death," he once prayed. Behind the sign was a bronze statue of Francis contemplating the valley, down into the area where the lepers once were confined and where he went often with his brothers to nurse and care for their wounds and other needs.

Just outside the monastery door is a statue of St. Clare raising a monstrance that held the blessed sacrament. The story is that during a war with the Saracens, as the soldiers marched up the mountain to raze the town of Assisi, she stepped out of the monastery and raised this holy object before them, miraculously stopping them, and the town was saved. I think of the wealth of our stories and the way that over the centuries they are refined and molded by the generations to speak truths otherwise impossible to articulate. What really happened? I wondered as I gazed at the statue. I've no doubt she confronted the soldiers with this holy object. But what really happened then? Were they stunned? Did they laugh? Did they see just a small woman standing in front of a tiny stone church and decide the whole campaign wasn't worth it? Or did they sense the present of the Sacred and, filled with fear, turn from their original intent?

We entered the doors of the monastery. Inside there could be no photographs.

In the vestibule

Here is a humble refectory where the Sisters ate their simple meals; here is the table where Clare sat. Here is the room in which she died; here is the very corner of the room; here is the window from which she could see the landscape winding down the hills; here is the little door through which the dying Francis was passed for her to say goodbye.

I stood where she died. Tears again. And my sister, Liz, came to mind. That morning I'd asked the pilgrims to pray for her. She's in her ninth year of battling stage four breast cancer. "I'm walking this pilgrimage for her," I'd said. And there in front of the place of Clare, Liz seemed to stand within me, the two of us one person, sharing this sacred space and the courage of another woman, Clare. Prayer has become not so much an asking for this or that, but a surrender, a being with, an opening of the heart, a trust in the goodness of the Holy God.

The stone stairs to the room where the sisters slept had been worn and polished to a shining curve that angled down. Almost a thousand years of feet had climbed them. At each one I whispered a prayer for my grand-niece, Varrah Claire. May she shine. May her heart be generous. May her feet walk the way of love.

We celebrated Mass in the San Damiano chapel. Our pilgrim priest had the grace to truly pray publically. His was not a liturgical performance. His words (ritual words) seemed to originate in the core of his soul; he used no book; he spoke as though each of those words welled up from his depths, joined the air, and infused each of us and then continued on as air continues. How can the heart not burn to be part of something like that?

The Cloister Walk as seen from the dormitory window.

Tomorrow: The Transitus Celebration

PILGRIMS ON THE ROAD TO ASSISI

2011-10-20T11:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was my volunteer day at the parish, and besides taking Holy Communion and a San Damiano cross to my dear Millie who has a lifetime devotion to St. Francis, I also took my laptop with all 668 pictures of the pilgrimage. Telling her the story, I often found myself pondering over one or another picture -- let's see; where did I take this one? Already my memory of places and images are beginning to fade, but the imprint on my heart is not.

Early in the morning of October 2nd, we left Hotel la Villetta by taxi for the Leonardo da Vinci International Airport to meet the other pilgrims and ride by bus to Assisi. The plane from Georgia had landed and Bret, with the pilgrims from the East Coast, already stood or sat by the red Meeting Post. John began immediately to match names from our pilgrims' list to real people. He's quick at that and soon knew who was who and where each one lived. Bret wandered with a clip board and checked people off. Some were on different flights as we had been. A woman from England arrived. Another from San Francisco. A group of Philippino women from Tokyo, a Japanese man and his wife, a priest, and another couple from the States who had arrived early were staying at a hotel in Ostia, and the bus would pass by there to pick them up.

These sorts of details are about all we knew of one another at the beginning--this, and that the priest was in no hurry to get on the bus--a characteristic that eventually became endearing, even peaceful in its ability to slow the pace of the world we just had left to correspond to the one we were about to enter. Bret reminded us that a pilgrimage takes us into the unknown, into strangeness, away from the familiar. It is sometimes uncomfortable as the boundaries of our lives stretch to accommodate new experiences and living situations. The travel can be difficult and tiring. We would very likely become tired. But each of us could expect some kind of transformation, if not right during the pilgrimage, then at a time closely following.

The bus rolled out of the space in front of the hotel, all on board, and we set out through the countryside for Assisi. Bret pointed out an archeological site, and I tried to take pictures from the moving bus.

In two or three hours we had our first glimpse of Assisi, a medieval town on a hill in prehistoric Umbria where both St. Francis and St. Clare were born, lived, and died.

The bus passed beautiful St. Mary of the Angel's Basilica, the site of the "Porziuncula," constructed by Francis and his friars as their first place of life and worship.

Right alongside this amazing church the bus let us off at Domus Pacis, the religious hotel where we would be staying for the next six days. We checked in, rested for a brief time in our rooms, and then all of us walked to St. Mary of the Angels for a visit to the Porziuncula. I had no particular expectations.

A small stone chapel sits right in the center of a Romanesque church that is like a cocoon around it. I was not prepared. I had not read enough. I didn't count on the spirit that would inhabit this place, the impact of prayer uttered over the centuries, the tangible devotion of my companion pilgrims, the power of seeing a woman in a shawl who was huddled on the step and leaning on the cast iron grille between the pilgrims and the altar with its icon of the Annunciation. Something both intimate and magnificent, ripping and like a kiss, piercing and fire-like broke my heart, and I began to weep.

In the past almost seventy-one years, whenever I've wept, I've known the object of my weeping. Joy or sorrow. A loved ones death. A kindness shown. Birth of a child. Impotence in the face of another's pain. Always 'something.' These tears at the porziuncula felt purely without object. They simply fell.

One of the pilgrims touched a stone. "Francis touched this very stone," she whispered. I touched it also. Yesterday I was attempting to describe this touch-devotion, which seemed to continue in various places throughout the pilgrimage. There seems an almost irresistible magnetism drawing human beings to touch what is loved or considered sacred. I think of the times I've touched the petals of a rose, let sand sift through my fingers, kissed the soft head of a newborn, held the hand of a beloved, run my fingers over the beautiful face of a child, my mother, my husband, my sister. I've kissed my fingers and laid them on the heart of the icon of Christ. Now I've touched these stones. I remember this moment the first time I touched the tomb of a saint. It was in Montreal. It was the tomb of Brother Andre (canonized in October, 2010). He'd been a special friend of Sister Ann, a member of the religious congregation to which I'd once belonged, so I made a special point of visiting his tomb. Tiers and tiers of candles, surrounded his marble sarcophagus. I stood before it, praying for Sister Ann -- and then it came to me to lay hands on that place above his body. Something like electricity came out from there, up into my arms and into my heart.

Two things: there is a prayer of touch. Every mother, everyone who's ever loved, every nurse and care giver knows this. The woman with the issue of blood in the Gospel knew this. Jesus knew. "Who touched me? I felt power go out from me," he said.

The second thing: The ego cannot interpret such experiences. It's best just to hold them lightly, let them happen, let them go.

In Assisi all I know is that I was unable to stop weeping.

A DAY IN FIUMICINO

2011-10-18T11:29:00.000-07:00

Vatican gold won't leave my mind. Last night I took out a book given me by a dear friend a few years ago. It contains gorgeous photographs of the Vatican, breathtaking shots of much we had seen and much more that we had not. "All that gold," the mother's song from Amahl and the Night Visitors streams through my mind, the aching soprano tones, "oh, what I could do for my child with that gold." Even the book in my hands is trimmed with what resembles gold. Bret, our pilgrimage leader, reminded me that Pope John Paul II requested that Mother Theresa's sisters establish a house for the poor close to Vatican City. "It is on the south side where you were staying--the poor section." And last night, when I turned a page, I saw a picture of one of the Sisters of Charity beside a door I was pretty sure I had walked past on the way from the Vatican to little St. Pietro's House. Three pages of this book of gold had been devoted to their work in Rome, feeding, giving shelter and medical care to the poor.

This morning we prayed the Divine Office honoring St. Luke, the writer of the Gospel bearing his name. Much of the imagery was that of the heavenly city with its golden streets and jewels, and the saints of that city of whom it was written:

"You are like sparkling gems on high

Reflections of the Lamb's own light,

The stones on which Christ built his Church

That we might reach God's vision bright."

Of course! I thought. All this gold is our feeble attempt to express that heavenly city in the core of our souls. And it is the poor who walk there. All of us, really, who are poor in some way or another. And we are the sparkling gems that line the streets of gold. The kings in the opera about Amahl sing: "Oh woman, you can keep the gold. The child we seek doesn't need our gold. On love alone he will build his kingdom, and the keys to his city belong to the poor."

We do our best to express what we hold most sacred.

But I was going to write about Fiumicino. It was October 1st. After breakfast Vincenzo dashed out into the street to hail a taxi for us, and we were off for Fiumicino. Our original plan was simply to stay near the airport for greater ease finding our pilgrim companions the next morning. In half an hour we were at Hotel La Villetta with a whole day to spend in a little fishing village where the Tiber River empties into the Tyrrhenian Sea.

After settling in at our lovely little hotel with its personal patio shaded by lime and olive trees, we did some wandering. In town the streets were transformed into a marketplace, and we wove in and out among the tents and tables of food, clothing, and wares.

On the other side was a main street with a café serving delicate pastries, various Italian coffees and gelato. We had some of each, and were visited at our table by a drum playing Somalian man with a kind face and a pocketful of little African elephants and turtles that he gave away as gifts. His dream was to come to the United States and get a job.

We moseyed back to the hotel, got lost, and ended up by the river.

Fishing boat arriving in evening

Nets

Mary, Star of the Sea, at the entrance to the river.

Fishing from the Wharf

My life had its beginnings by water--the Rainy River and Lake of the Woods in Minnesota. The natural world is my environment. Cities wear me out. Fiumicino made a restful transition from Rome to Assisi and I'm remembering it with delight at the same time as I feel Assisi pulling at my heart again, as it did the nearer we came towards it. And then, once we were there, it increased its magnetism. What will I feel when I begin giving words not just to the outer journey, but the inner one as well?

Next: Pilgrims on the Road to Assisi

THE VATICAN MUSEUM AND SISTINE CHAPEL

2011-10-17T11:25:00.000-07:00

I've been sitting here at the computer at least ten minutes without writing one word. We had an afternoon at the Vatican Museum. This is like saying that we had four hours to gaze directly upon the history of the world's art. The question arose: does one stand before one piece and gaze until it fills you up? Or does one hurry through each age of human beings hoping to catch a glimpse in some superficial fashion of something at least of what they saw and were able to reproduce?

Before we left home a friend recommended that we resist the temptation to linger over the beauty along the way (I think it's something like four square miles) and push ourselves through the tour groups as directly as possible towards the Sistine Chapel. There we could stand, craning our necks, for however many hours it took to see into the heart of those images. There were ceilings spun of gold. How does one resist the gaze? There were marble statues from Pre-Christian times, Roman, Greek. There were books and scrolls, tapestries that fingers yearned to touch. Chalices and jewelry. Icons, crosses, boxes carved of exotic wood. All with meaning. All done with the greatest human skill. All given, somehow, from the artist's heart to rest here in the house of God on earth. I wanted to see the sword of Constantine: I missed it if in fact it was there. So much I haven't told you. So much I've forgotten or distorted already. Now I remember that in the morning I kissed what I think may have been the cross of Jesus--the real one. I'm not sure.

It started here, I think, that I started to be whisked into a different world, although I wasn't yet aware. So we hurried as we'd been counseled to do. OH! Let me stop in the Raphaelite rooms! Already we've taken two hours and haven't reached the Sistine Chapel yet. Let me sit on the floor here. Let me hear the voices of these people covering the walls. Let me look into their eyes. Let me set up a tent here.

The group moves and I am swept on. Arrows point the way to the small chapel into which Michelangelo inscribed his soul. The colors of the restored ceiling and walls dazzle the eye. I'm circling and circling like Maria on top of her Austrian hill. We aren't allowed to sing, however. "SILENCE -- SSSHHHHHHHHHHHH" the guard hisses over his loudspeaker. A man close to me murmurs, "If he'd just shut up we might have a little peace in here!" My eyes go to the center of the ceiling for a view of the creation of Adam from the finger of God. It's quite small!!! Somehow I expected it to fill the entire field of vision. I want to smell the paint, the oil, the turpentine--maybe that would make all this seem more real, because it doesn't seem real. Something of me wants to be in the room alone, just to breathe. Maybe I could be there for a week, to look at each scene for a long, long time. The Last Judgment makes me want to lie prostrate and weep. I am overwhelmed. I no longer know where in the world to look.

The way out is different from the way in.

We see more modern art including a collection of work by Salvatore Dali. Now I want to return to that room also. I want a print of one work, the name of which I can't remember -- but I'm haunted by the intense red of it. John is struck by another of Dali's works titled "Angel's Passage," which just happens to be the title of his newest novel. An enormous statue seems to be emerging from the rock of earth, and I wonder if it is Michael. I couldn't get close enough to see.

For years I've heard from time to time that if the Catholic Church really were interested in the poor, she would sell these priceless treasures and turn the money into food and shelter and other assistance. Maybe for a short while in my very young years I agreed with that. Now the notion seems to emanate from a materialistic kind of logic. The true wealth of these treasures lies in their ability to inspire love and generosity, which is the spirit in which they were originally made and given. We are the ones, inspired by this art and beauty, who must be the gift and help to the poor. Outside of this context, placed in someone's home, or in a secular museum, the Vatican treasures would surely keep their artistic integrity, but they would lose their spiritual power to transform minds and hearts for generations yet to come. This, as I said, is the true Gold.

The Vatican, and the whole Catholic Church, may be wealthy in secular standards, but only in its holdings -- these antiquities. It's operating budget, especially now after all the litigation, must be very tight. Its true wealth, as always, resides in the souls of its people, like the beautiful and holy people we soon would meet when John and I joined the rest of the Pilgrims to Assisi.

At the end of the day John and I stopped at a restaurant, went inside and sat down. (This would mean the food would cost more. You pay to sit down.) The wine was smooth. The pasta elegant. The bill high. But look how pleased he is (and tired from the day.)

Next: a day in Fiumicino

HOUSE OF GOLD

2011-10-15T12:05:00.000-07:00

In Italy it is said that Rome is the administrative center of the church, and Assisi is the spiritual center--its soul. A hope that John and I had in making this pilgrimage was to reconcile those two in our own hearts and minds. Throughout the ages tension has existed between the church as institution and the church as mystical body. Law and Spirit. Doctrine and Mysticism/Contemplation. Christian mystics often were brought to trial -- (Martin Luther), silenced--(Teilhard de Chardin, Matthew Fox, Leonard Boff, and recently the theologian Sister Elizabeth Johnson), executed--(Joan of Arc, Marguerite Porete), or kept under close scrutiny--(Teresa of Avila, Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi). Hundreds, maybe thousands of others could be added to the list--not just mystics, but scientists, poets, healers as well. Knowing this, what would the Vatican have to tell me on the morning of September 30, 2011?

The tour I would have liked went down into the excavations beneath St. Peter's Basilica to the ancient city where St. Peter most probably was buried in the very ground upon which he'd been executed. Father Theo had recommended this Scavi tour as the most spiritual. Deep calls unto deep… But we would have needed to sign up for it at least two months before. So we went up into the dome instead. Several other friends had recommended this "even if you don't get a chance to do anything else in Rome." We stood in line outside in the square to purchase tickets to climb the stairs, while tour hucksters tried to sell us 40 Euro tickets for a tour of the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel instead. It was loud and reminded me of the money changers in the temple during the time of Jesus.

Our seventy-plus years recommended the elevator to the roof of St. Peter's before the 350 stair climb to the top of the cupola. About half way up we emerged on a balcony inside the church from which we could see the long center aisle, the cruciform design with its side altars, the altar above St. Peter's tomb, the golden high altar, and people an inch high. Behind us were mosaics of gold and precious stone which from the distance to the other side of the cupola appeared as paintings, clear and distinct. We circled the cupola and returned to the stairs. The walls began to curve inwards until we were climbing at almost a 45 degree angle on narrow triangular steps. When the passage became almost too small for a large person, we emerged through a doorway outside above Rome. (Rather like the Space Needle in Seattle). From there everything can be seen: all of Vatican City, the Roman Walls, the Coliseum, the Parthanon, the new parts of the city, and church domes and steeples everywhere. I took a lot of pictures. It was a wonderful artistic, historical, architectural, cultural experience.

Back on the ground we made our way into St. Peter's to walk the space we'd just seen from above. Looking up I could see people looking down from where we'd recently stood. I took pictures of the amazing works of art. I became a tourist. A good picture of Michelangelo's "Pieta" is impossible to get with a camera like mine. At home I have a small reproduction of this Pieta given to me by my mother. It's very well done. When I look at it on its shelf I am struck with prayer. But in front of the breathtaking original I could only try to take a picture.

It's a museum, not a church, I concluded; and how sad that is to discover in what is intended to be the heart and home of Christianity. At the same time, I felt certain that not all of the people visiting there were feeling as I was feeling. And as we walked a bit farther we came upon a section which was roped off to all but those who wanted to confess their sins and receive the Sacrament of Penance. A woman stood waiting, and she stood in the center of a circular design in the marble floor. She had her hands folded and her eyes closed, and she seemed to stand there as though she weighed nothing, as though she might just lift off the floor. She was more beautiful than all the statues put together because she'd been filled with prayer.

Somewhere along the many chapels lining the sides of the basilica is one covered by heavy curtains. Guards control entrance to that place. A sign indicates that it is an adoration chapel and that the Blessed Sacrament is exposed within. Catholics believe that Jesus the Christ is really present in the consecrated bread, though what that belief might mean to an individual depends upon the grace of understanding only God can bestow. To me that day the chapel looked to be a refuge from tourism. "This chapel is set aside for prayer," proclaimed the sign. I dropped my tourist mask and John and I entered to kneel and pray.

The room is all gold. It is the beating heart of the Vatican. It's small. But it's there.

I didn't know yet that all along our pilgrim way we would find a beating golden heart somewhere within the shell of these medieval churches. It would be of Gold that had nothing to do with wealth achieved by money. It might be the cloak of St. Francis lying on the floor in the space where he died. Around it would be built a cocoon, a shell of marble, of precious jewels, of gold, of artistry in painting, weaving, sculpture -- all of it, the shell of gold, a protection of something more than precious. The living Heart. Waiting. And ourselves--pilgrims on the way to find this Heart in the unlikely -- a bit of bread, a cloak, a stone ledge where a holy man or woman slept, the holy bones of one who gave everything for love. All waiting in the golden cocoon -- for the breakthrough into what we cannot yet know but only yearn for.

There was nothing else to do in St. Peter's. We exited into the square and out beyond the square to where the street vendors sold their wares which included a rather inferior gelato. We bought two cones and sat on a little wall under a tree to eat it before setting off to spend the afternoon at the Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel.

Next installment on Monday

PILGRIMAGE TO ITALY: FIRST MORNING

2011-10-14T06:45:00.000-07:00

I woke up alone in bed. It took a moment to remember where I was. The thick drapes closed out all light. "John?" The bathroom door opened. He'd been awake since 3:30 A.M., had showered, washed some of his clothes, dressed, and was antsy to get going though it was only 6:30 in the morning and still dark outside. I'd worn earplugs, he had not. Jet lag and street noise have their consequences.

I showered, thankful for the water that spilled from the shower head onto my sticky hair. I dressed, and opened the drapes to witness the shining Roman morning and watch the stream of people leaving the commuter train and grabbing the bus or their motorcycle to go, one supposes, to work. Men in suits strapped on their helmets, engines roared. I was in Rome--the common people's side of Rome. The sight of St. Peter's was only about five hundred yards away, but I could not see it. I could see large blue cranes towering above a construction area, the buses, the trains, and houses climbing the hills--each balcony with its plants and flowers, moments of green beauty. In the background stood a tower and an old wall which might have been boundary of Vatican City.

Balcony across the way

We would see sidewalk venders along that wall during the day to come. They get angry if one tries to take a picture of the wall, supposedly because they might be included as part of the scene. One gave me 'the finger' and ran into the bustle of people. Did he think I was trying to steal his soul? Was he in the country illegally? They spread out their Gucci purses on the cobblestones. No one stops. Where are these men from? They appear to be from Somalia. Are they like indentured servants to some illegal company? But the police are everywhere; what they are doing is no secret. It was a curious phenomenon.

Wall with its street vendors

Right inside the wall is the Vatican. It's amazing that the church with its wealth of the ages would be nested in the squirm of poverty. I want to make meaning of this, but perhaps there is no meaning to it except for being human. Imagination can bestow meaning, but what would be the reality of it? All these thoughts crowded my mind. Poverty and noise and insult outside the walls--inside: gold. I know this is nothing new, no original insight. But standing there I found the paradox overwhelming not just to my mind, but within my heart.

Vincenzo

On that first morning when we were about to leave the tiny room to find breakfast, Vincenzo arrived to open the door and shutters leading to an actual balcony on which was a glass-topped table. He let us know that we shared this space with the man staying in the adjacent room--Omar, a friend of his from the Marches section of Italy who works in Rome three days every week. Vincenzo brought two roses for the table, cappuccino, croissants, toast and jam, and we sat down in the sunshine above the noise of the streets which seemed by then to have woven itself into a kind of urban harmony. We talked with Omar who worked as an I.T. person with a computer company there in Rome. His command of English was good, and John had spent hours of many days studying Italian, so between the two of them we heard stories of the Marches where we would visit later in the pilgrimage.

Omar

Don't pretend, I told myself as I lifted my eyes up to the hilltops where I could see a unique church with an aqua colored steeple. I was scanning the horizon for beauty. But below the balcony beauty not only stood, but walked, emerged from trains, roared off on scooters and cycles, sat on benches waiting for the right bus, drank coffee, and called to friends in the bustle of the city.

Aqua domed church on the hill

Next installment: Visit to the Vatican

Pilgrimage to Italy: Arrival

2011-10-13T16:09:00.000-07:00

John and I just returned from our pilgrimage to Rome and Assisi, and my mind and heart are crowded with images and experiences. In the next few weeks I hope to sort out the high-points and write short reflections. Each day of the pilgrimage included so much that I stopped recording them in my journal and now must depend upon the photographs I took to trigger my thoughts.

Let me begin with what I wrote on September 30th--the day after we arrived in Rome and the first time I took my journal out of my backpack:

The orange sun set behind St. Pietro's House where we are staying for two nights. Both of us are just awakening from deep sleep, a nap following a full day in Rome. Outside, eight floors down from this tiny room, we hear the constant noise of traffic, the voice calling arrival of the trains, the train itself whistling and clicking over the tracks, and children calling to one another. Beneath our window-ledge-sized stone balcony are rows and rows of scooters and motorcycles that workers left parked while they take trains or buses back home from the city.

(below the balcony)

We have four locked doors down from here to street-level. The keys range from an ordinary small red one to an exotically long one that looks as though it came from a medieval stone prison. They were placed in John's hand last night. Weary after 24 hours of travel, we arrived here in front of a locked gate on a street that seemed unlikely to house people. It looked rather like a warehouse district, with an abundance of graffiti. But the cab driver pointed out the street name and number--the same as that on our itinerary. This is the place, he assured us as he drove off. We looked to see if St. Pietro's House was among the names of residents on the other side of the cast iron gate. Aha! The last of the list. I pressed the button. No answer. Pressed it again, and again. Nothing.

Dwellers at this address showed up, shook their heads when we asked about St. Pietro's House, opened the gate, went in, and locked it again behind them. One kind woman said she thought maybe there was a St. Pietro's House in the complex, and she let us in to explore. Now we were in a stone courtyard with paths leading off to several sections. A young Brit showed up. He was on his honeymoon and thought maybe we were looking for the Bed and Breakfast he and his wife were renting. It had a completely different name, but hey! anything is possible. At the same time two Italian men came home from work and let John know that we were in a condo complex, but they thought that a few people had bought units and turned them into Bed and Breakfast's -- probably St. Pietro's House was one of those. One of the men used his cell phone to call the number of the (as advertised) "hotel." At last--an answer. A man named Caesar finally came to let us in. He wanted payment--in cash--up front. OK, but there went half our Euros. We'd been thinking credit card for lodging and cash for incidentals. As often happens, my romantic imagination had insisted upon believing the misleading ads on the Web about this place with its view of St. Peter's Basilica, its balcony, its five minute walk to the Vatican. Well, there IS a view, but it is from down the street a block. There IS a balcony just wide enough for my size 9 feet.

(seen from one block past St. Pietro's House)

We closed the door and I went into the bathroom. One look at myself made me want to stick my head into the sink, so I did. Cold water ran over my hair and I applied shampoo. The water stopped. Nothing I could do would make it run again. Neither did the shower water run. The toilet did. I tried the sink again. The sink faucet came off in my hand. I remembered the time back in the 1960's when the Second Vatican Council was in full swing and Bishop Glenn came to the convent to tell us about this momentous event, but all he could talk about was Roman plumbing--how old and useless it was. The young nuns--and I was one of them--shook our heads over what seemed his upside-down priorities. Now I was standing with a head-full of sticky shampoo, in a waterless bathroom five minutes from the Vatican, and my only thought was the lousy Roman plumbing. Mi dispiace tanto, Bishop Glenn.

I dried my hair, shampoo and all, and pulled it back in a clip. We then went out walking towards St. Peter's Square. The evening would have been perfect for taking pictures, but I'd left the camera in the room. I opened my imagination to the spirit of the people in the Square, the people over the centuries who had sought so many human and divine experiences there. It felt smaller to me than I expected--enormous though it truly is. Why is that? Maybe the great spectacles we witness on television tend to distort space because the medium allows only for a small scene, a frame of space, not the panorama--so the small is made to seem larger as it fills the screen. Once in context, though, the perspective changes.

Evening in the square was meditative. I looked for a stone for my dear Sammie, something worn smooth by millions of feet over the centuries, but found nothing like that. She would have loved a piece of St. Peter's Square, but it was not to be.

(the obelisk in St. Peter's Square)

Back at the room John figured out the mystery of the water faucets. We did have water after all, we'd only been too mentally exhausted to figure out how the equipment worked. All was well. I collapsed into bed, laid my sticky head on the pillow and fell asleep.

(next installment tomorrow)

Troubled Waters, Many Worlds

2011-08-17T14:05:00.000-07:00

Seven-forty five. Mo licks my face; he's found a sunspot sliding in through the half opened doorway from the office. Late already, I think, with sunlight that clear. My purple, green and aqua blue caftan hangs on the mirror. Now over my head, falling, covering--easy way to dress. I fling the lavender shawl across my shoulders, gather my hair into a clip, and descend the stairs with Mo who is already dancing on his four tiny feet. Sandals. Leash. Mo's into percussion, his front paws playing a cadence on the sliding door. Morning air. Ah…

He runs first to the right, looking for his West Highland Terrier friends, Buster and Shannon, at the house next door to the cottage. Not home? Sleeping? He stands with head cocked for a moment, then turns to take me for my morning walk. Sandals crunch on the gravel. Ducks call to each other, splashing in Beaver Pond. Mo catches the scent of all who've passed by since he last was out. Blackberries have ripened in the thicket along the field, and I pick a few for breakfast. A breeze ruffles the Pacific Cedar.

A nightmare had awakened me during the night. A terrible thing of which I dare not speak in public, it was so violent. But the day to which I later awoke is like a different world. This leads me to think again of all the worlds each of us inhabits, and how they whisper to one another, sometimes in our dreams, sometimes simply as we reach out for a ripe blackberry in a thicket, hoping not to get snagged by a thorn. Did you realize THIS? the whisper says. Do you dare to look at everything you are? There's a quotation from Milarepa, a Tibetan ascetic, which John quoted to me this morning after he told me he already knew about the nightmare because I'd cried out in the night:

"See demons as demons: that is the danger.

Know that they are powerless: that is the way.

Understand them for what they are: that is deliverance.

Recognize them as your father and mother: that is their end.

Realize that they are creations of the mind: they become its glory.

When you know these truths, all is liberation."

Pilgrim Teacher

2011-08-15T14:41:00.000-07:00

If you're on the road and stop at a rest area just about anywhere you might see a wandering woman. She won't be sitting by the water fountain holding a sign announcing that her car broke down, or that she needs money for gas or food. She doesn't have a car. If it isn't raining, or only sprinkling, she'll be sitting at one of the tables. On it she will have placed her backpack and an open book. She'll be waiting for you. Well, not specifically "you," but for the one who stops. Her name is Jean Davis.

I saw her just outside Bellingham as I came out of the women's restroom and began to walk back to the car. John was sitting across from her engaged in conversation. This is not uncommon. He's a regular Studs Turkel. I walked up to the table and saw the open book, hard cover, older, the kind often found in antique stores and collected by people like my cousin Shirley because of the atmosphere such artifacts provide when stacked on a coffee table. I bent to read the open pages, curious about what this woman had been reading.

"What are you doing?" She queried, turning from John to me.

Her eyes a bright blue. Her face leathery from the sun. Her gray hair pulled back neatly in a knot. Her clothes layered, selected to last. She knew how to Thrift Store shop. Great walking shoes. Good sturdy jeans--no holes. Eddie Bauer jacket. She smiled--almost no teeth. I'd say she's probably my age, this or that side of seventy.

"I was curious about the book you're reading," I told her.

"Lots of people pretend I'm not here. Most who see me don't stop. Those who stop ignore the book and just want to know how I fell on bad luck. Once they realize that it's not bad luck but is my choice, that scares them. The police are scared, too. I don't fit the profile.

She calls herself a traveling educator. Once a teacher in the school system, she developed a sense of injustice over what she was required to teach. History seems to have been her forte, and so much was left out. What had been included in the curriculum gave young students a twisted sort of truth. So she dropped out. She traveled the country to discover its real history. She walks the country. Once in a town she finds the library and reads the original documents of the region that survive. She's incensed when told that such documents have been destroyed in the interests of providing room for newer books.

She is sometimes invited by people at rest areas to spend time at their homes, to teach their children, to enlighten their friends. "Read Dan Cushman," she suggests. "Read Elaine Dewar, George Grinnell, Jim Schultz, Dickleson Doubleford, Theadora Kreeber." She scribbled their names on a too small scrap of paper. (I've no idea who those writers are! but I saved the paper scrap and have copied their names here as well as possible considering the flourishes in her penmanship.)

Jean Davis is on a pilgrimage to find the open mind and the listening ear. She's a woman of the roads. Somehow she manages to stay healthy and to increase her knowledge day by day. Somehow she is passing it on. She spends most nights on public land beside the road. She seems to prefer the country and small towns.

When we left her, after an hour of good conversation, Jean Davis waved us goodbye, and sat down to continue reading her book.

Breaking Through

2011-08-04T17:17:00.000-07:00

Today was a writing day. John worked the entire day on his new novel, and I began the day by uploading my often revised novel, GYPSY BONES, onto Kindle. "YAY!" I shouted into the next room. "It's DONE!" Had I learned nothing from my reflections, just yesterday, on planning? No sooner had I shouted "YAY" than I checked my email to find one from my dear friend and poet, Kath. Some weeks ago I'd sent my manuscript to her for review, and she had done just that. She sent an attachment of her marked-up copy and we spent way over an hour on the phone discussing her keen observations.

I remember the first time an editor made a suggestion about my writing. As I recall it was one of those key rules: to show not tell. "Don't say that Elise loved God, show us Elise loving." Well, "Elise loved God and it was shameful." was the first sentence of the book. I was quite attached to it. (Authors do get attached to little phrases they hear in the middle of the night--phrases that seem to hold the secret of the entire book. I've been known to grab a pen and jot them down in an idea-journal by the side of the bed. They look really scribbled and odd in the morning.) Anyway, I turned cold on that editor. I argued with her. I lost her. She said I had to learn a thing or two, and she was right. There have been lots of editors since that shameful exhibition of mine, but I still miss her and am sorry.

Public confession finished. Today I felt eager to hear what Kath had to say, and afterwards I could barely wait to unpublish GYPSY BONES. I might not even put it on Kindle. It might not even be titled GYPSY BONES. I'm excited. I'm almost ecstatic (which isn't good because my writing is overly dramatic anyway.)

I guess one needs to take that step that completes a plan. The breakthrough follows the act I've believed finishes the task. Is it ever finished? Or is the end of something an opening to something beyond what could have been envisioned by the former plan?

Yesterday evening John and took a long walk by the bay, hoping to see Mt. Baker floating in the sky. She had flanked herself with clouds. I took a photo anyway. The walk relaxed me. The work I'd done during the day had made the book ready for Kindle publication. I knew I'd do it in the morning. THIS morning. Then we saw the two eagles, just waiting. What a picture they would be. Now I look at it and smile. There is a part of life that moves and another part that is still. Creativity is like that. A circle of waiting, of beginning, of crafting,of finishing, of breaking through, of envisioning the new, of waiting, of beginning, of crafting, of finishing, of breaking through ...

REFLECTIONS

2011-08-03T18:03:00.000-07:00

Turning right from Casa Cuervo, Mo and I walk up the road to Beaver Pond. It's quiet. Not one neighbor is outside. The throaty cry of a crow--alright--but it is distant. A red dragonfly tipping the rushes. Cool breeze from the Bay. I'm thinking how plans change. Sometimes all the planning seems to have been a waste of time.

John and I planned to put the cottage on the market, sell furniture of mine and of his, rent a U-Haul, and combine all that remained of our "stuff" at Sunshine Hill. In fact, I'd already begun clearing space. I liked it. The house was less cluttered. But even with the space, we wondered how long it would take us to sort our things out once we unloaded the moving van. We'd keep them in the garage and do it bit by bit. "I'm excited about this," I grinned.

The first day here I put a bunch of John's things on Craig's list. Late that afternoon I remembered the feel of being here last winter, the stark little upstairs room where I could write, the simplicity of upkeep in a smaller house. We went for a walk along the bay where Mt. Baker seemed to float in the sky over the blue water. "We could keep it," I ventured. "We could use it as a writing retreat…say, two weeks every two or three months we could make the trip."

Back at the cottage I checked my email. Already we had four inquiries about our ads. We deleted our postings.

Beaver Pond shimmers in the late afternoon light. Calm waters reflect the trees and grasses along the bank. Mo and I sit on a stone bench while I attempt to connect my own reflections with the realities they represent. All of this has something to do with plans we create and the amazing transformations that come about when we act to make those plans real.

CARRIED THROUGH

2011-04-29T16:31:00.000-07:00

Two husbands died. I think it was Anne Sexton who said the husband is "the one who carries you through." Maybe she meant the threshold, but when I read it I thought she intended something closer to that place where mind meets heart, or soul intersects with reason, or body juts up against the flowing spirit. A liminality of some sort. The husband carries you across the precipice to the other side. Then it turned out my husbands were the ones who went through. Not me. Did I carry them?

Anne Sexton took it on herself and went through alone. Maybe she did. One cannot know such things despite appearances.

I said I would not act the part of a husband again. Live alone, I said to me, and liked the arrangement. The dying of a beloved, holding his hand when he goes—it's just hard. Know what I mean? Becoming a Beloved again after widowhood is more than my old friend, Doris, said of her choice to have an 80 year old man love her on weekends but never marry her. "I'm tired of washing men's socks," she told me. Granted, "socks" was no doubt a metaphor. But admitting the option of another marriage is more than that.

It's stirring the ashes of a fire that once burned. It's breathing those ashes. It's the dryness. It's the gagging and the tears. It's looking long into the empty furnace of the heart. It's the weight of the husbands forever after, the weight of their love. It's the presence. It's the wondering how the two of them are getting along in whatever realm follows this earthly one. Are they bound to one another, different as they are? Are they entwined like some spiritual rope? And if I add a third husband and he dies, what then?

Some things must not be said, but then again they must. They must be said, no matter the consequences.

The first husband told me, "death is not the worst of our fate." What is? Is it being left behind? That just sounds like self-pity, and I actually did like the freedom of aloneness. I liked riding the tractor mower and discovering I could fix the three-stage osmosis water filter underneath the kitchen sink. Widowhood's a complicated thing.

Then John Sack arrived in my life. I thought at first I would take Doris's approach. But too much about his presence felt like grace. He's an author; so am I. He's a former monastic; so am I. His is a contemplative spirit; so is mine. He lives simply; so do I. He wants to pray together; so do I. He wants us to read to each other; so do I. Both of us are septuagenarians. We feel that we've come home.

"And the days dwindle down to a precious few…"

Who will carry whom through? I wonder that, but it isn't enough of a wonder to turn me away from this risk of loving yet another time. So I rehearse. "I marry you, John…" (What might it mean that two of them are named John?) I marry you among these multitudes of souls, in this the beloved earth, for this moment and all the moments however many those might be. I marry you in surrender of control and acceptance of gift—mine to you and yours to me. I marry you in whatever brilliance and breath our God might be, in whatever magnificence and total love that is Divinity's self gift. I marry you in the commonness of our every day, the gentleness of touch, the stimulation of mind, the raising of spirit, the creativity of soul. I marry you with clouds for shelter, sunlight for witness, the moon to mark our transformations, God for the binding of our lives. I marry you for the culmination of this pilgrimage through the human realm and for the crossing of that threshold into what is More.

Let there be love. Let there be no end to it. Forever with all the beloveds for all eternity.

Amen.

LOVE THAT MOVES THE SUN

2011-04-28T11:27:00.000-07:00

A dear friend expressed the fear that I might change. He's not the only one who has felt this concern. Over the months since John Sack and I have felt the calling to a shared life and have begun taking steps to respond to this call, a few other close and loving friends have voiced similar feelings. My heart holds their concern lovingly. I think I can understand. These are the beautiful people who have cared for me during these years since my dear John Weber became ill and died, placing me on the path of grief. It is now three years since I began to walk that path.

I don't want to walk the path of grief forever. Another dear friend who is grieving, having lost his wife only a few months ago, speculated about his own new and quite raw experience, and as I read his words I thought something like this: that the path of grief and the path of love cross and intersect, sometimes running as streams within each other. It is love, though, that finally becomes the larger stream, growing into a mighty river that holds the current of grief—now so imbued with love that it is transformed. It is a river of Gratitude. A river of Blessing. Grief adds depth and wisdom to love, and love sweetens grief. All of it turns into an ongoing presence of Life.

Before my first husband, Pat, died of cancer he told me that I must love again. The love must survive. Love was not so much the gift we gave to one another, but the Divine Gift that had been given to us and must continue to be given. "You are young," he said. "You must marry again."

Does that still hold true now that I am old?

Yesterday I visited Bennet who is almost 97. He sits all day long in his chair by the window at the home of his daughter, Sue. His face is smooth as a mirror. His nose hooks down toward his chin. His hand reaches out to take mine and his skin is dry and thin as parchment.

"How are you, today?" I asked him. "How do you feel?"

"I feel nothing." He told me. "Every day is the same."

"What does it feel like to be old?" I wondered aloud. "You are very old."

"I didn't know that." He looked at me. "They tell me I am, but I'm no different than I ever was."

Remember that old idiom: The more we change, the more we stay the same? I'm not sure of it. Though there's a way in which it is truer than it appears on the surface. Maybe it means that the more we change the closer we get to what is most constant in us, the still point around which the dance of existence whirls. The still point – this is what I think today – is love.

So, yes. I'm changing. Hopefully I will continue to change. Hopefully I will change wisely while love keeps its constancy. May all of us, as we age through the changes in our lives, grow ever closer to that stillness at the center where we each exist in wholeness and simplicity.

Dante put good words to it:

"But already my desire and my will

were being turned like a wheel, all at one speed,

by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars."

NEW VENTURE IN THE ONGOING ADVENTURE

2011-04-14T12:19:00.000-07:00

As a writer I sometimes take a liking to some of my books more than to others. If those books don't get a fair shake in the publishing world I ache for them in a motherly sort of way. One of those "abandoned" books was a little meditation book titled FINDING STONE: A QUIET PARABLE AND SOUL-WORK MEDITATION.

Oh, it was published--initially by Lura Jane Geiger, who founded Lura Media Press. It was to have been her final publication before retirement. She really loved the manuscript, particularly the mediation about living life to the full. She called me and read my words to me over the phone:

I do not want merely to live; I want to engage life. I want to squeeze life like a tree-ripened orange, to carry life like a child. I want life to be my love. I want to breathe deeply and fill my lungs with life; let its blood rush to my head and out to my fingertips. I want to spread life around, plant it like seed, give it away as if it had no end, no limit, as if I were rich with it. I want to take life on like a warrior, to shake it, to wrestle, to tear it open to expose its heart. I want to weep with life, to tend its wounds, to run pure oil down deep into life's pain and sing while life heals. I want to be swept up in life's adventure, to go where life calls me, to climb mountains, explore caves. I want to refuse life nothing.

It felt to me as though she'd become a midwife for my work. But before we could bring the book to birth through the publishing process, Lura Jane found it necessary to retire. What a loss. But her top editor bought the company which became Innisfree Press. Her name was Marcia Broucek. Her design for the book thrilled me, and she published it to good reviews. It can be difficult, though, when a company changes hands right during publication of a work. The book can become a sort of stepchild after a short time. Besides that possibility is also the possibility that a small new company won't make it through the first few years. And, sadly, this happened to Innisfree Press.

A few copies of FINDING STONE remained in my closet, and I brought one out from time to time, sent it here and there to various publishers. But it had been published already, and had sold only a few thousand copies -- no matter that a few thousand were all that ever existed of the book, numbers count in this business.

After John and I found one another and joined our writing and publishing efforts in his long established but little used CYBERSCRIBE PUBLICATIONS, we began to explore the potential of E-publications on platforms such as Kindle, Nook, Sony, iPad, and others. As a result, both of us are launching several of our books for sale in that format. The first book I've launched is FINDING STONE. He's far ahead of me, with four of his already launched and a fifth in process. In defense of my slow pace: I need to enter/type most of my out-of-print books onto the computer before I can convert them to the appropriate format. I was still using WordPerfect and floppy disks when I wrote them. No longer do I have readable electronic copies. But the new manuscripts--those I have. Five novels and at least three memoirs. What if I decide to just skip the regular publisher and publish directly to the electronic platforms? Already Amazon.com is selling more Kindle books than traditional ones. Even while writing this thought, I know that I intend to send my memoir, DARK FLIGHT, to Ave Maria Press in hopes that they will want to publish it in the more traditional way. And even while writing THAT thought, I know that I'll attempt to keep the E-publishing rights in order to launch it in that format simultaneously with a trade-paperback edition.

Look us up! You'll find all my available books at Amazon.com. CIRCLE OF MYSTERIES (book and CD) and ALTAR MUSIC can still be purchased in trade paperback. Some of them are on the second-hand market. FINDING STONE and ALTAR MUSIC are both available on Kindle. Just search my name: Christin Lore Weber.

John's there also. John R. Sack (There's another John Sack and their books get mixed together sometimes. The other one was a Journalist.) Several of 'our' John's books remain available in paperback or hard cover. All soon will be available electronically as well. FRANCISCAN CONSPIRACY; ANGEL'S PASSAGE; WOLF IN WINTER; YEARNING FOR THE FATHER; and a short story: "Blood-Brother Bear."

A FUKUOKA GARDEN

2011-03-31T13:43:00.000-07:00

There's sunshine on Sunshine Hill, and look what's growing in our -- "garden?" During the winter I made some vegetable soup into which, among other goodies, I put red cabbage. About a third of the head hid out for months in the bottom of the fridge. In the meantime John read Masanobu Fukuoka's THE ONE-STRAW REVOLUTION about a style of gardening that reminded me of jungles. All sorts of plants tangled together and grew in untilled ground. I liked the chaos of the idea. We weren't sure it would work here on this mountain-rock-hill, but weeds grow, so why not?

We started hanging out at seed stores, looking at packets of herbs and veggies. This we realized was pure play. We bought four fruit trees and started a little orchard of pears, apples, plums, and apricots. Fukuoka says spread compost over the area, so John raided my many years worth of mowed grass piles. There's a circle of poorly kept lawn in the center of the circle drive in front of the house. Down went the compost.

"Let's cut up those potatoes that sprouted and plant them," he suggested in late February. A few days later we opened a packet of pea seeds, sowed them along the south edge of the compost, and dropped several radish seeds here and there in exposed soil. Before we left for California I cleaned the fridge and was about to throw out the rather dry cabbage when I noticed that it was raised up a little in the center, so I took it out to John who was -- where else? -- in the Fukuoka garden.

"Do you think this would grow?" I held it out to him. No harm in trying.

I don't know if we'll actually get a red cabbage, but we have some pretty leaves. AND we finally also have some potato plants!

The peas are coming up also -- and John got the creative idea of providing old manzanita branches for their climbing.

A friend who has a "real" garden suggested he bring his rototiller to break up the soil for us, but would Fukuoka have done that? Never! Besides, we want to see what we hope will be a marvel of many colored leaves and vegetables growing alongside thistles, and maybe some marigolds. I just got that idea this minute. Maybe the deer will eat the whole thing, but that's OK too. Though I'd really like to gather some peas to eat straight out of the shell.

It comes to me that Fukuoka's garden is a lot like a writer's brain; its activity reflects the creative process. I almost always begin in chaos, a mess of thoughts and images mingled, with little focus. Some stillness must settle in, a spiritual, emotional winter. I wander the house, the yard, the woods--picking up this and that, staring at the bits of life poking out through brittle leaves, breathing in the air on any particular day and catching the scent of the season. Sometimes rain falls on my face. Sometimes dawn floods the sky with color impossible to describe. I plant these things. Or maybe I don't plant them at all, but they get planted by the very nature of Being Itself. I have a hard time saying it is God, but the secret I harbor is that this is exactly what is going on. And then one day a word springs up from the brain's tangle and the heart's loam. It's a word I can't stop hearing. I can't stop listening for it to repeat itself, to expand into many words, to contain some nourishment, some beauty and a whole lot of wonder.

I had a singing teacher in California whose yard was a Fukuoka garden of flowers. It sang. Really, it did! Driving by you'd think it was an empty lot because of the overgrowth, but then you saw that all of it was flowers. Every color and variety of flower that will grow in California--and that is multitudinous! Her whole yard was a mess of color in the grass. She couldn't cut the grass, of course, without disturbing the flowers, and so the grass thrived green among the yellow and rose and purple and blue and white and red. Oh MY! I'd catch my breath walking on her drive under the tree that grew white roses. How could such a tree exist? Real roses such as one might find at a florist's shop, but on a tree whose branches spread as wide as an ancient apple tree. I'd hear the singing from the house, her student who preceded me each week. How could I not believe that flower and song flourished together? Oh how I wanted a lawn like hers.

What all of this means, I'm not sure I know. This I do know: Something beautiful is growing again that will nourish the body and the soul. Buds have appeared on the pear tree.

And in the back yard the Shooting Star wildflowers have started to appear.

Come then, my beloved,

my lovely one, come.

For see, winter is past,

the rains are over and gone.

Flowers are appearing on the earth.

The season of glad songs has come.

Song of Songs

THE REAL ROAD HOME

2011-03-27T17:35:00.000-07:00

The road started to get a little iffy just south of Dunsmuir on the way towards Mt. Shasta. We had the plastic bag of chains, never yet opened, from the Les Schwab dealer who (I remember this distinctly) said they were a no-brainer to put on. But the Ford 500 is an all-wheel drive, so we were still OK. Probably we'd make it all the way to the mountain and the other side would be clear. It's the way fiction writers think.

OK, so the flakes ARE as big as silver dollars. For a born and bred woman from Minnesota and man from Ohio, this should not be a problem. We should have kept going. Just look, we are nearly at the head of the line. But then, after this picture, the snow got worse. The traffic really did narrow to one lane. Was it ten thousand semi-trucks that lined the Interstate? All of them parked, all of the drivers out in the snow fixing chains to their tires? Where were those guys who come out on days like this and collect fifteen dollars a tire for putting chains on the cars of septuagenarians? (not to mention, again, arty types who've spent their lives in their imaginations.)

The blinking yellow sign announced CHAINS REQUIRED FROM THIS POINT. We ought NOT to have stopped! There are those moments in life when such directions need to be ignored. We stopped. Out came the Les Schwab chains. Good man! He put a laminated sheet of directions inside next to the chains. John laid it on top of the car and began to read--good academics that we are! Unhook the chains. But where's the hook? It wasn't an actual hook. This can fool a person. Why didn't Les think of that? Pass the yellow of the yellow and blue plastic covered ring behind the wheel and hook it. Now the laminated directions are full of the dollar sized flakes. John brushes it off. A giant flake lands on my glasses. I can't see. This snow is wet--not nice freezing dry Minnesota snow. My gloves are wet all the way through. My jeans are sopping. My jacket is already wet clear through. It's a Land's End Squall Jacket! Wouldn't you think one of those would keep out the water? I'm pulling at the chain. It's supposed to fit around the tire, isn't it? There's no chain on the bottom of the wheel, but then you aren't supposed to have to move the car to complete the process. Pass the black hook through both of the red rings and hook to the chain. But the black hook doesn't reach through both red rings. The chain slips. John's on the driver's side having similar problems with the other wheel. A semi throws up slush and stones under his jacket. He's wearing sweat pants. They are now ready to be wrung out.

I announce that this is insane and that we should unhook the chains and take our chances. If the CHP is out in the storm and stops us, let them put the chains on. We tried. I pull the chains off my wheel. John's are stuck. He backs up the car a tad. I pull at the chains. Oh NO! They've wrapped around the axle or something back there. I tug. I'm splashed by another semi. They come loose. I throw them into the trunk.

Just as I'm getting into the car so we can pull out and get into the line of other cars and trucks, two semi's pin us in--one beside us, the other angled across the front of us. I visualize spending the night there. I wring the water out of my gloves onto the floor of the car. I squish the extra water from the denim covering the tops of my legs and my knees. Oh well. There's trail mix in the back seat and a blanket in the trunk. John now comments, "My unders are full of slush." He's good at assonance.

Then we sit for two hours before we start moving again. About four miles ahead we see the cause of the gridlock. The Department of Transportation had reduced the roadway from three lanes to one, just to accommodate three men in lime green vests jawing idly beside their sign offering to remove chains.

The next day I told capable Ken the story of the chains. He laughed: "You're supposed to practice in your driveway before you leave."

By the time we reached Black Butte the road was clear.

ROAD HOME

2011-03-23T16:50:00.000-07:00

One day, years ago, I confessed to a friend that California freeway driving made my hands sweat. Cars weaving in and out. Speeds that boggled the mind. And since this was before you could buy a Garmin GPS, I experienced the almost constant fear that I wouldn’t be able to find my way home. “But you ARE home,” she said. Maybe I looked askance because she continued with “When you’re on the freeway and the traffic slows you down, focus on your heart and say to yourself—I Am my Home.

Probably people exist for whom the notions of being lost or being a stranger have never been problematic, and who feel at home wherever they happen to be. There are others of us who needed to learn this coveted form of comfort. A different friend with something of a wandering spirit was off on her own to Portugal one summer, but flying across the ocean she consulted a book of oracles—the I Ching, I think, and concluded from the readings that she would meet a guru in Paris. So she skipped her connection from Paris to Portugal and stood in the middle of the airport terminal bemused over “what might happen next.” It took a few days of waiting, but a guru did finally come along, and she staying six weeks in his ashram. Now there’s a woman with no anxiety over where her home might be. She carries it with her.

I’m happy to report that I’m much better than I was in the past. My hands no longer sweat, and I’m not concerned about getting lost. Even being a stranger has turned into a satisfying experience. But three days in the Paris Airport with no clarity on what would happen next…I don’t think so.

These thoughts visit my mind now because John and I have been traveling. We visited our sons in California (one in the south, one by San Francisco). Each of them took us to the top of the world. In the south with John's son, Bjorn, we hiked almost to the top of Tehachapi mountain in the snow.

We went two/thirds of the way before the snowfall became too heavy to continue. We might have made it up the increasingly steep terrain, but probably not down again without becoming tumbling snowballs.

In the East Bay we climbed with Jeff to the summit of Brione's wildlife preserve. I climbed there often when I lived in Martinez, but never all the way to the summit. This time I stood on the very top and took a video of the horizon all around the 360 degrees. In contrast to the snow, we saw green wherever we looked.

And a blue heron, really one of our spirit birds, welcomed us both on the way to and from the summit.

Home all along the way. Home in the snow that crunched under my shoes and brought back memories of childhood Minnesota winters. Home in the scent of the pine. Home in the offer of John's hand to pull me up a steep incline. Home in the smiles of strangers. Home in the wind that chilled my face. Home in the good ache my chest gave off as my heartbeat increased and my feet continued to climb. Home in stopping for a few minutes, eating a piece of dark chocolate. Home in the sunlight and clouds above the Bay. Home looking down, following the trajectory to where I once lived. Home in the cry of the hawk. Home with the old eucalyptus tree that still grows by the side of Brione's road. Home where the miner's lettuce grows on the hills. Home in a vision so wide. Home in the hugs and smiles and affection of our two sons. Home in my heart. A forever home where nothing is lost and nothing is strange.

Finally, at Jeff's and Karen's home, a double rainbow!

SWITCHBACKS

2011-02-18T14:18:00.000-08:00

Skies are blue at Casa Cuervo. A blue heron followed by his mate lift off the beaver pond across from the cottage and glide towards the bay where the tide is out. We are walking—John, Mo and me—back from an early afternoon trek to the water. Mt. Baker rises shining white in the sunlight, flanked by its craggy sisters on one side and the Canadian Cascades on the other. Oh my, I wish I had my camera! I want to show you this. A neighbor’s puppy is off the leash at the bayside park inviting Mo to a game of “you chase me; I’ll chase you,” so we let the teeny guy off his leash to run in switch-back circles with Chipper. It would be nice, John comments, to come down here in the summer with our little computers to sit on the park benches and write. It would be – more than nice.

I’m stunned by life, its suddenness, its switchbacks as it plays with us. Will I ever get over how different all this is from what I expected? It’s making me spin, making me laugh, making me dizzy, making me fall and rise and spin again. Am I seventy or seventeen? Maybe only the body ages while the soul travels just so far before the switchback, and we get older and younger at the same time. Youth is at the core of us. Innocence is there. “Let the children come to Me; of such is the Kingdom of God.” Can I believe that I am loved beyond tears, beyond loss, beyond weakness, beyond knowing, beyond every resistance? Can I allow myself to live that love from this moment on?

And does it even matter if I can or if I can’t? The love is. Each of us, each mote of dust, each collection of atoms, each galaxy of each and every universe is immersed in the endless space of tender and immeasurable Love.

Mo and Chipper run in figure eights, the icon for eternity--switchbacks, weaving, winding in and out, here and there, barking, barely missing one another as they cross. We people, watching, find delight in them. “There is nothing I like better than to watch dogs play,” says Chipper’s owner, a white haired woman in a hand-knit claret cap.

Maybe we can’t help it—delighting in the way love crosses and comes back again in dizzying switchbacks that surprise us no matter how often they occur.

Daring this dizzy existence is--maybe this is true--the only way to fully be alive.

IMPROMPTU

2011-02-16T15:58:00.000-08:00

Winds off the strait toss the tresses of weeping willow beside the drive while the crows gather again in the yard for their morning conversation here at Casa Cuervo. Wind arrives in waves not unlike the ocean, but with wind we live inside the waves, we breathe them. Waves of wind lift my hair tangling it like seaweed.

I want to write “I’m hoary with its chill,” feeling myself a flake of white, my hair tipped with frost. But I’m afraid the word is ruined by urban slang, and Wikipedia says it surely is. But the image will not leave my mind. A wintry woman, no longer willowy, traces a bony finger across the window glass.

If I hadn’t lost my camera I would capture that weeping willow’s dance. You’ll need to imagine it. Even in the oldest willow something new is dancing, bending, flowing in wind’s waves. Impromptu living. Beginner’s mind. This is how it is at Seventy. What do we know anymore? The wind makes it clear that we have not lived our lives to reach a fullness of knowing, but rather to reach the end of knowing’s possibilities. Then there is nothing but beginning. All life is impromptu.

Goals, when they exist, become short term and easy to revise. When at 92 Aunt Gertie ordered three mops so they would last at least ten years, we all smiled behind our hands. She almost got to her one-hundredth birthday, though, so her laughter probably rang all the way into eternity. What I’m trying to say, not all that well, is that life is very short. It moves along like wind. It’s beautiful and frightening and eerie and basically a mystery. The choices I’ve made to form it into something I could know, something contained enough to fit my brain, expanded into realities I could never have predicted. Every moment is the beginning of an unknown.

Here I am at the Cottage, Casa Cuervo, on the northwestern edge of the continent, with a man whom last May I did not know. Not for a moment did I plan this beginning at seventy. My goal was to live alone, continue writing, find ever closer connections with God, enjoy my friends when they felt happy and weep with them when they felt sorrow. A good goal. So why is it changing? Was it not challenging enough? Was it too challenging so that I would have found myself unable to live it alone? (Already I have signs I might have failed). Was “alone” simply a preparation for this next moment? Is this new moment that holds within itself this new person the beginning of a new and deeper unknowing?

The winds of age are blowing. The jeweler who was making our rings commented that they would last forever, and John laughed, saying that for us forever isn’t all that far away. We go for a walk down to the water. It’s already afternoon and even with the bursts of sunlight through clouds we feel the chill. Four Canada geese fly over. Last night we saw a Bald Eagle surveying the water from the top of a huge rock framed by a rainbow. My hair escapes both my cap and my jacket hood and whips against my eyes. I think of youth when I took it for granted that all my plans would work out, not knowing that we walk blind, at each moment beginning our journey into whatever future.

I turn and look at John. I take his hand.

THE COTTAGE

2011-02-15T13:51:00.000-08:00

Outside Casa Cuervo the crows have gathered. Their sleek black feathers and raucous voices remind me of those images of Inquisition judges in thirteenth century paintings. I suspect, though, that this rather odious reputation didn’t enter John’s head when he named the cottage. He tends to have more the mind and heart of a St. Francis when it comes to ‘all creatures great and small.’ So I take another look. The crows waddle along the roadside cleaning things up. One of them sits on the bird bath under the cedars and gets himself a drink of rainwater from the storm we had yesterday and last night. About six gather and croak at each other like the fellows down at the coffee shop in town. Maybe they are nature’s editors.

I sit upstairs in the writing room on the left. John’s on the right in the room with all his research books lined up on shelves. The Writer’s Guide to Medieval Life, and historical references to St. Francis, to towns and cities in the Middle Ages, to ancient maps of Italy which I imagine have felt his fingers tracing the old roads from Assisi to Perugia. I pause for a moment to call out, “How do you spell Perugia,” and he asks if I’m writing about a pilgrimage we plan to make in October. Not right now, I call back, and then draft the sentence you just read.

A few blocks from the cottage is Birch Bay off the Strait of Georgia on the Washington coast. It’s a good walk down to the water. John is helps me that way—intent on exercise—and I’d go today except for the rain and my lingering winter cold. It must be gorgeous in the summer with the Canadian Cascades and Mt. Baker cutting jags into the sky.

The cottage itself is probably a good place for a writing retreat. It’s small, very little work to keep up. For a while we’d thought of selling it, but now that we are here again it feels complementary with Sunshine Hill—a place to go where life is even simpler. A place where the call of the crow inspires us to strip away all that is not essential, to get to the bones of reality, the essence of truth.

THIS AMAZING GIFT

2010-11-03T09:45:00.000-07:00

I’ve been keeping a secret. Maybe you figured that out in the two months that you’ve heard nothing from me. Maybe, on the other hand, you felt concern—some of you have written asking if I’m ok. (I am, by the way, just fine.) I’m in love. Imagine that! Saturday will be my seventieth birthday, and I’ve fallen in love again. What a surprise. See, my future was all planned and it was to be spent alone at Sunshine Hill—writing, enjoying nature and solitude, participating in my little church community, keeping in touch with all my loved ones far and near. I’d just settled into the stability and calm of this plan when I got caught up in a whirlwind. I met John Sack.

He first came to my attention some years ago when I read his novel, THE FRANCISCAN CONSPIRACY. Visiting his website http://www.franciscanconspiracy.com/ I discovered that he lived really close to me in Jacksonville, OR, and that as writers we had similar goals. We spoke briefly on the phone and planned to meet at a coffee shop where he wrote each morning. But before I had a chance to do that, my husband, John, had a recurrence of cancer. More than four years passed. Last April I read YEARNING FOR THE FATHER, a profound book about the Lord’s Prayer, also written by John Sack. Again I decided to contact him to finally have that cup of coffee and talk shop. We were engaged in a similar kind of writing (novels and spiritual books), had similar goals, background (he was a novice of Thomas Merton’s when he was young) and I just thought he would be a good person to know.

But he no longer lived in Jacksonville. I found him through a new email address at his website and we began to correspond. First I fell in love with his mind. Then, after several months of correspondence we met in person. He called our experience “instant recognition.” We seemed to have known one another forever.

As time goes on and we allow this relationship to develop, you will no doubt find references to him here. In fact, it has become difficult for me to share life at Sunshine Hill without mentioning him. Please rejoice with us as we open our hearts to this amazing gift of new love in the final chapter of our lives.

SOMETHING MORE

2010-09-06T14:58:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Krista Karels for this photo

Yesterday I drove to town for Sunday Mass hoping for something a bit More than usual. Dreams had presented me with disturbing images of paralysis: being blocked by snowstorms, losing the wheel off my scooter as I tried to make my way south, and finding the house in which I'd taken refuge about to collapse in upon itself. The night before, I'd been thinking about the state of the world, wondering where the good fruits might be of the tree called "our generation." I felt like apologizing because with many of my colleagues I must have gotten it wrong, and I worried about every one of my students and all my readers just in case the vision I shared with them led to a dead end. Maybe a bit of this sort of thinking is the bane of approaching one's seventieth decade. I wished I could go back to the beginning, taking everything I'd learned along the way as a guide (do this again – don't do that; do something else instead.)

I got to Shepherd of the Valley and entered the big general purpose room we are using for Mass until the new church is built and sat close to the front. The "charismatic choir" was singing "Beautiful One, I adore…" and I took out my lapis rosary to which I hadn't paid enough attention lately. The way I'd felt, it seemed a good thing to meditate on those mysteries of Christ's life. But how could I keep from singing? So I sang, which caused Kathryn and Lou in front of me to turn around, take my hands, and smile at me. More music, clapping of hands, chatter of people greeting each other in the back, then five minutes of relative silence as we prepared for the sacred action we were about to undertake.

Father Theo is new in every way. Young. Just ordained. Just returned from years at the Jesuit College in Rome. Just arrived at Shepherd of the Valley as parochial vicar. He seems to have no walls around him, so that as he leads the liturgy –how can I describe this?—he waits upon the Lord. He's actually praying. I want to hold my breath, he's so transparent. (I sort of hope he doesn't read this. Probably he doesn't know the blog exists, so I won't worry.) Anyway, I told him after Mass how much the Holy Spirit blew through him in every way, a Divine Wind through his words, his gestures, his ability to be aware and incorporate the community happenings into the sacrament. So if he does chance to read this he probably won't be surprised that here I am raving about him once again.

No, I won't repeat his homily here. (Inspiring through it was.) But there's a story from this Mass that must be told.

Father Theo had invited the children to come forward for the Children's Liturgy of the Word. They numbered about fifteen, the youngest seeming no more than three—she was carrying her favorite blanket. He was in the middle of telling a story about his own childhood when his mom would sing back and forth with him: "Theo, do you love God?"

"I do love God."

"Do you really, really love God."

"I really, really love God."

When suddenly from the left of the worship space a boy of about eight or nine came running and yelling garbled sounds. Tourette's, I thought. He broke into the group of children, right in front of Father Theo, across the entire front of the room, turned the corner, and suddenly in the middle of the yelling and garble came the words, "JOY TO THE WORLD!" Then more yells and he was gone.

Father Theo grinned and in a low voice repeated, "Joy to the World," and then with a great flourish, lifted his hands and cried out, "Praised be to God!"

From that moment onward, throughout the Mass, within the community of people gathered, I felt the unmistakable presence of Something More that promises, "Behold, I make all things new." This includes small boys with Tourette's Syndrome who become prophets of the Coming Age – and seventy-year-old women and men for whom it is never too late to begin again.

MAMA OF ONE-HUNDRED YEARS

2010-08-31T13:37:00.000-07:00

Today, August 31, my mother would have been one-hundred years old. I'm grateful for the words of Kathleen Jesme, Mama's dear friend and mine: "It's that time of year, again, when I think much of your mother. She was born and died in August, and I think she was an August person--redolent with life, golden, richly hued in temperament and personality. She was of the moment when everything reaches its fullness, that same moment at which it begins to fall."

It's true. She lived life at its apex, a stance not always easy—maybe never easy. She could see the chasms all around her, the way the darkness filled them while she danced there in the sun. "This is the first year I failed to dance the New Year in…" she commented in her diary at the beginning of 1931. That was the year she discovered she was ill with TB and would spend over nine months in a TB sanitarium. Much of her life was like that, I think—the moment of fullness just before the fall.

Some years ago I wrote a still unpublished memoir about the two of us which began like this:

After she died in 1993, I put my letters from Mama in plastic page-savers, organized them by date, and stored them in a black loose-leaf notebook. It’s here, by my chair on the bottom shelf of my bookcase. If I begin to read a letter, my mind calls up her voice. I don’t do so often, not because I don’t want to hear her, but because I do, and the pull of her upon my heart reveals another cord that never broke.

Mama’s old typewriter sits on a little stand against the wall in front of me, under a photograph of her from 1923. I’ve placed two dried red roses behind the corner of the frame, because of her name: Alyce Rose.

Her letters bear the personal marks of her now ancient Smith Corona. Some of the lines are skewed to the side. Some letters aren’t inked as well as others. She used a ribbon divided between red and black so she could emphasize certain words not only by the pressure of her hands on the keys, but by color.

I’m older now than she was then and I’ve observed her future right through to her death and past her death almost fifteen years. But her letters—the word—connects us in a moment outside of time, a concept the poet T.S. Eliot explored extensively in Four Quartets: "Burnt Norton," moving toward his description of the locus of an eternal moment, the gathering of past and future into his famous "still point…"

“The words are in my fingers,” my mother used to say, and her words collapse time. Instinct warns me that by following the trail of her words, I will walk the path not only of her life, but of my own. Do I want to make that journey? Does it matter what I want? Must I follow it, regardless? The word is where the dance is. Maybe if I follow her, we can dance together upon this trail to that August Apex that her life represents.

FLORIDA RAIN

2010-08-18T14:04:00.000-07:00

When it comes to family, the Weber's have it pretty much down to an art form. I can say this without a terrible arrogance since I was not born into them, but am there by choice. So let's just say I feel pride and a whole lot of love to be counted among them. Family fills my mind and heart today because I just returned from a reunion.

We've been getting together every other year since 1985. I missed that one—not yet having become part of the family, but I owe my life to it since, as a result of their mid-life get-together and a discussion about "old girlfriends," John decided to find me again.

It's a big family, scattered across the continent, so depending upon who has volunteered to be host, we've found ourselves trapping Dungeness Crabs off Camano Island in Washington State, fishing for tuna off the Pacific coast in California, eating deep fried turkey for Thanksgiving in Louisiana, picnicking in a park in Denver, gathering around the pool in Minnesota, playing in southern Oregon's Siskiyou Mountains—the Rogue and Applegate valleys, swapping stories and meeting more distant relatives in Wisconsin.

This year we went to the Gulf Coast of Florida, to Grayton Beach where the sand is fine and white as powdered sugar, with no oil globs that any of us could see.

Jim and Laura rented a large beach house with a mammoth screened in porch overlooking the sand dunes and the high surf. On Sunday a tropical depression came down from Georgia to stall right over us. I now understand the inglorious metaphor "buckets of rain."

There it is again. Rain. Rain seems to be a prime image of this journal. As I see it right now, it became an enclosure for this year's Weber Reunion—a veil of care that surrounded all of us. No family is without its suffering; maybe every family is a microcosm of the world.

Job's have been lost. Businesses have closed. David has cancer. Tede's once keen mind is losing its bearings. Brothers and sisters in "my" generation have passed from this world, and though their names remain in our hearts and our stories, their chairs are empty. But all around the emptiness rain falls. Through rain the children run, and we laugh to see them, our hearts filling with something that defies loss. And though one by one the elder Weber's stand where the surf pounds, thinking of those whose "absence is our perpetual company," young shouts and giggles interrupt our reverie, and we turn to lift our children in our arms.

SHIPWRECK OR SHINE

2010-06-29T19:28:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Krista Karels for taking this picture!

June 28, 2010

Early morning sunlight angled onto the hill while dew still clung to the air. I felt infinitesimal drops on my skin, not coming from above me where the sky was the color of a jaybird's wing, but from all around me. Instead of rendering itself as mist, the dew acted as a prism, giving more intense color to all it touched. How can you not catch your breath, and letting go, lose your boundaries to the endlessness of beauty?

I've set this day aside to consider the gift of comfort. This wealth of time for such focus comes as a gift of my parish community through Joyce, the ministry coordinator, who invited me to share thoughts with parents of those children attending the Vacation Bible School. My research of the twenty-seventh chapter of ACTS OF THE APOSTLES has been completed now for a week and the talk is tonight. All that remains for this day is to let the Light shine through.

Beauty, goodness, truth, love, faith, comfort—most qualities of experience can be accessed at varying depths reaching from the surface through to the essence of the Divine. In the Starz series, TUDORS, one of the characters—I think, Sir Thomas More—says, "You can't go to heaven on a featherbed." It occurs to me at the beginning of my ponderings that often when we pray for comfort in the chaos of our lives, we do so in the mistaken notion that we can. So—is comfort a featherbed? Is comfort instant deliverance from pain? Is it a pill? Those who promote surface comfort would say yes.

The story from ACTS deals with Paul's imprisonment and a winter trip by sea to Rome during which the large trading vessel encountered weeks of cyclonic weather and was finally wreaked off the coast of Malta. During this time, Paul had a vision in which God spoke to him, promising that all of the crew, passengers, and prisoners would survive the wreck, but on condition that no one abandoned ship, that they cast off all excess baggage—even the grain in the hold, and that they work together to get as close to the coast as the ship would go, and finally that they would help one another swim to shore. THIS was the comfort. Not a magical end to the storm, not a lifting of the pain of hard work, fear, hunger, exhaustion--but a choice to participate with God in deliverance through the chaotic storms in which we are sometimes tossed.

In scriptural language water, especially of the sea, is symbolic of chaos . Chaos in our lives comes in virtually any form--from financial concerns or actual collapse, to the pain of misunderstanding or even betrayal in relationships, to illness, and to death. Our hearts cry out for comfort – like the Apostles fishing on the lake while Jesus slept, and the waves threatened to engulf the boat: "Lord, save us, for we are perishing." My own heart cried out like this while John was in such pain from cancer. It's almost impossible not to.

Comfort is not a featherbed. My friend, Alla, often says, "There's no way out but through." Comfort, the word, means "Com=with, Forte=strength." It is participatory—WITH another. It is a sharing of strength, of fortitude. Together with one another, strengthened by the promise and power of God within us, we come through. When calm returns we'll be struck with wonder, as were the Apostles: "What kind of man is this? Even the winds and sea obey him."

There are times the ship will be wrecked, when all that is of this world will be lost, when we've lost what we think is all of it, tossed it over the side into the churning sea, hoping, hand in hand, that God's promise will be true—that when we jump God jumps with us, and together we all make it to the other side, the shore. And there, lying on the rocks of this new land with nothing left but our souls, panting with exhaustion, aching from exertion, having offered everything in return for the strength/the comfort of God, we begin to feel it flowing through us. The Light. The Morning of our New Life. And covered with the dew of newness, we shine.

REBIRTH OF A BOOK

2010-06-24T09:11:00.000-07:00

Surprising news came in my mail the other day. Scribner/Simon&Schuster is re-issuing my novel, Altar Music. It came out originally in the year 2000, and thrust me into a flurry of travels, readings and signings I'd never imagined for myself. It was great fun, and I met many amazing people. At that time I felt an almost symbiotic connection to the book itself which had both pleasant and painful consequences. When "my" novel was compared favorably with Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy I actually felt shimmers inside me. But when THE OREGONIAN reviewer said it was "purple prose," I felt like going back to bed and hiding under the blankets.

After all these years, the novel no longer feels like another part of myself, but rather as a good friend who is getting a chance at a second life. I called Sammie when the letter arrived, and her excitement stimulated, maybe even resurrected something I'd silenced in myself when the publisher took the book out of print and relegated it to the remainders list—then shredded all remaining copies. Now they are bringing it back and all at once I want to celebrate the book's successes:

PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY—First Fiction Award for Spring 2000

INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS – Booksense 76 Award

LOS ANGELES TIMES—Best Books of 2000

OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY LITERARY FESTIVAL--Featured novel/lecture

Now its publisher is recognizing it as one of their notable books, and bringing it back out in its trade paperback edition. It will be once more available for purchase at bookstores and at Amazon.com in both paperback and Kindle editions.

Really, it never occurred to me that such a thing might happen, and on this bright summer morning, it has me smiling.

WIDOW WEBER MOWS THE LAWN

2010-06-07T14:15:00.000-07:00

Of John's former tasks here at Sunshine Hill, mowing the lawn is the one I've most liked. More rain has fallen this spring than in any since we moved here, and just the other morning, looking at the beautiful, long grasses, I wondered if our drought of even more than the biblical seven years had passed. The rain is something I need to keep track of. On the day Google shows me the sunshine peeking through the clouds and predicts a temperature in the mid to upper seventies, I know that by late morning the grass will be dry enough to mow. This means I don't take a shower, but go directly from my long nightgown, that is wet with dew all around the bottom from my morning walk through the long grass with Mo, to jeans and a denim shirt. I eat breakfast and write for a while, and then put John's Valley View Winery denim cap on my head, slip my work gloves on my hands, fill the gas tank of the mower and start 'er up.

You know, I think as I make my turns around the acre of lawn, this mower is working pretty well since Ken tuned it up last summer and then I bought the new battery this spring. I'll have to thank him again for all the time he put in. Maybe a nice card this time. On cue the mower engine began to lurch—forward-pause-forward-pause. What IS that? It's got gas. Did I kick the tires? (but what would that have to do with the engine?) I didn't kick the tires. I look at them, they look just fine, not coming off the rims like they did that first summer (and the second summer). It's such a hassle for Ken to have to take them off, put that gook in them, and put them back on the rims. "Kick the tires," he tells me every time. Oh well, it's still moving, even if I do feel like I'm learning to drive with a clutch and don't quite have the technique down. Ohhhh, of course! The clutch. I'll bet something happened so it isn't fully in gear.

So I'm thinking about all this as I'm negotiating the little hill on the west side of the house. The first year I didn't dare to mow this hill. Now I've figured out the straight up, straight down technique. Can't do it sideways or you'll kill yourself. I'm congratulating myself now both for figuring out about the clutch AND for this new technique I've developed. Who says I can't do this house and yard all by myself? (Except for occasional visit from Troy who weed-whips a fire-boundary for me—something I have to add for the sake of full disclosure. And Ken, of course…mustn't short-change all Ken does for me.)

Now, I've never had much visual-spatial intelligence—not real aware of where things are in space. When I was a little kid I feared I might walk off the dock into the river just because I seemed a bit uncertain where the edge really was. My head's in the clouds (my feet sometimes too—firmly planted in mid-air, as Mama Cass sang). Anyway---I'm mowing up and down the little hill, thinking, being proud of myself when . . . BANG! I hit a tree. Yep. Going downhill. Mower won't move. I didn't hit it head-on, but sideways—not taking account of the mower-plate or whatever that big round thing is called. Not taking account of the enormous grass catcher tube (what IS that thing?). Who knows the words for machine stuff? Not me! And now it was starting to smell like rubber. TURN IT OFF! says the John-voice in my head.

I do it all in order. At least that. And there it sits, jammed up against the tree. It won't budge. The front wheels are all catawampus. Phooey! It's probably broken. If I could just get it moving, I could straighten out the wheels. Maybe. I try to imagine what John would do. Would he get the Suzuki-Mule over here and use the winch? Maybe. But first he'd put his shoulder to the job. What if I could get it rocking just a little, unhook the grass catcher thingy from the tree and release the mower guard/plate/whatever? If I couldn't get it to move, I'd end up having to call Ken again. Oh Man!

So I pushed. I leaned on that machine with all my strength. I actually got it rocking. And it released! Yay. OH NO! It was rolling the rest of the way down the hill. STOP!! And it did—right against a large bush; head-on this time. I yelled and then laughed. OK, let's see if it will start. I climbed in among the branches onto the seat and turned the key. Nothing. Hum. I looked around at the various components of this – now enemy – machine. Oh. The mower blades were still engaged. I hadn't been able to get them all the way up when they'd been stuck on the trunk of the tree. Fixed that, and the mower started up. I backed away from the bush, then went forward out of the wilder part of the property up to the road and lurched my way back into the yard where I completed what mowing I had left.

I won't be mowing the grass again this week. Guess I'd better call Ken about that clutch.

FEATHER ON THE BREATH OF GOD

2010-05-31T14:00:00.000-07:00

It's a soft day here on Sunshine Hill, one with a lavender haze, cool air, and the background sound of birds. The little bushtit re-visited my window, still fluttering to enter, several times this morning, and last night a hawk rode the air currents so close I could distinguish individual feathers in his wings. Afterwards, sleeping, I dreamed I flew just like that, my first flying dream since my thirties when I experienced that exhilaration often. In the same dream, however, my legs had collapsed leaving me helpless on the ground. Joyce, the ministry coordinator at the parish, tried to help me but failed. Then I just rose up, slowly, slowly, and I thought, "I think I'm about to fly," and with that thought I went higher and higher until I spread my arms and floated like the hawk.

Lately I experience connections becoming interpenetrations. The membrane between the individual and the wholeness is a veil so fine and permeable it's barely there at all. Breath passes right through. Prayer passes through. In the mornings I whisper your names, one by one, and there is no distance between us. It must be God, I think – the Breath within and beyond the breath, the Word within the whisper, the Divine Current lifting us up when we are helpless, lying on the ground. Hildegard calls us feathers on the Breath of God.

It's Memorial Day and so I watch with love each feather that floats in memory on this Divine Breath. The metaphor is stretching now almost to the breaking point. But I do have feathers, actual ones, some of which go way back to a gull on the shore of Lake of the Woods. Feather-down that filled a bird's nest in a Christmas tree Pat and I once had in the house in St. Paul. Tiny blue feathers from a trip to Ireland. Brown feathers edged with gold on the Indian flute John found for me at the Grand Canyon. Tiny feathers P.J. tied in the ribbon around a gift.

Words come to memory, "i turn my face,and hear one bird/sing terribly afar in the lost lands."

ee cummings, visiting my mind again, saying it all perfectly, when I cannot. I pick up his book to look for that poem and find this one instead, placing it here for memory's sake.

in time of daffodils (who know

the goal of living is to grow)

forgetting why,remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim

the aim of waking is to dream,

remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze

our now and here with paradise)

forgetting if,remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond

whatever mind may comprehend,

remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be

(when time from time shall set us free)

forgetting me,remember me

wind has blown the rain away

2010-05-20T13:30:00.000-07:00

………a wind has blown the rain

away and the leaves and the sky and the

trees stand:

the trees stand. the trees,

suddenly wait against the moon's face.

It's ee cummings again whom I brought in to tell about yesterday's new oak leaves hitting these windows in clumps, and branches falling into the yard, and ponderosa pines waving back and forth like long grasses in the field while I sat watching, laughing, and shaking my head because I'd set aside the day to prepare for a talk on the Holy Spirit. "…suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a mighty wind coming: and it filled the whole house where they were sitting…and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit." (Acts2: 2,4)

Last night I gave the talk, driving to the parish late in the afternoon after the wind calmed and the trees stood tall again. Did wind blow last night through the group of believers in the small room where we met? I thought I felt the wind, not mighty now but swirling, bringing wisdom from their hearts, bringing tears into our eyes.

I don't remember whether, on my way home afterwards, the treetops touched the moon's face. But I do remember now how much I love to teach and how long it's been since I've allowed myself to give and receive that gift. John always used to tell me I could reach so many more people with my writing. But that's not really the point, now, is it? The point is in the meeting, in the dialogue, in the creative wind we feel as ideas are shared and questions asked and widened into horizons of wonders never before imagined.

What will I do with the leaves that now litter my yard at the wrong time of year for such detachments? Maybe I could pick them up, lay their beauty out upon the pages of a book, learn from them some truth about myself, about creation, maybe even about God that I have yet to see.