The Flame Tree

A letter to Hanna on her baptism

Dear Hanna, there are some things that I must tell you. 

First, you come from a long line of people who can not sing. That does not stop them from singing. They sing despite everything! Despite broken bones and sagging eyelids, pre-dawn anxiety, ravaged trees and wasted years. Also, they are not known for their cooking. One exception: your gourmet uncle who dreams of the day he will drive a food truck down the road to Sausalito. He has proved that our weak cooking comes from the lack of desire, and is not an inherited thing...

An inherited thing. An inherited thing. For you have arrived, our precious inheritor. We have so many things for you, each filled with good intention! You will inherit a penchant for sleep, and a love of flight. We deliver to you our indifference to ambition and confrontation, and long legs, blue eyes, and also the tendency to gaze through---windows, people, time, and your own inner pain. From us, you will inherit a love of the smell of paperback books that have been stored in the attic. And a row boat that is now a row-boat table; a lobster boat (ideal for cat living); a dining table that extends twenty feet, and three generations of friends to fill it. Here, my love, is the longing sigh of a foghorn at night, a pile of sanddollars bleached by the sun, and a moonshell birthing its slick purple tongue into your adult dreams. You will inherit the ocean, Hanna---its salt and its lull and its power of resurrection.

We give this to you because we love you and soon, or now, we will fail you. Look, you are just being born. You gaze at the ceiling fan with pure, undiluted love. We can not sustain that purity. We will neglect your spirit one tired morning, damage your grace by accident, break your heart with a careless word. We are known to fall. 

Dear Hanna, I am telling you some things, so I will tell you about baptism. What is it, I do not know. We renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness; we renounce the evil power of this world. We turn to Jesus and put our trust in his love. We believe in the life everlasting? I don't know. But I have moved to a foreign country before, and I know that the more I understand the place, the more it eludes me. And the longer I stay, the better I am able to accept the mystery.

We believe in the Holy Spirit. The Lord, the giver of Life! We believe that, with God's help, we will bring you up in the halo of faith's light, much larger than our own. We welcome you into a world greater than our own. There is wonder in all of God's works, Hanna. You will see. Here is your courage and spirit to know that and to love God. Here it is. Here is the gift of Joy. 

Birches

"...I'd like to get away from earth a while
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better..."
                                Robert Frost, "Birches" (excerpt)

*

We went up to West Point last weekend. We got a free upgrade on the rental car and packed it up with bottles of root beer, oranges, water, sweaters, and crayons for the drive. The Palisades were orange-y red brown against blue, blue sky. It was a perfect fall day, with the smell of football and dried pine needles and America the Beautiful in the chilly October air. It reminded me childhood autumn drives to the cousins in NH or to an alumni game somewhere, crayons melting on the grey Chevy's back dashboard. I loved that grey Chevy----no car seats, no seat belts! I had two black front teeth by the time I was five years old from slamming into the front dashboard at unexpected stops. My brother once cracked the front windshield into the most impressive spider-webby star with his head. Losing control on the highway---that swinging, weightless, back-and-forth----was common enough that I thought it was an honest part of driving, like passing on the left or stopping at stop signs. 

It's a miracle we're alive, my mother says wistfully when the subject of driving in the '70s comes up. It's actually more than getting through the 70s that's a miracle. Life itself is a miracle. But do I remember this? Not so often. I'm usually too caught up in the dread of having to cook dinner. If I were to get away from earth for a while, and return to start over, that would be a gift, and I would seriously consider applying to West Point. In other words, I would come back focused, unapologetic, disciplined---quite the opposite of my current life which often feels like that swaying, slow-motion, conceptual driving of the 70s.

Anyway, we spent the day at West Point----the war museum, root beer under a maple tree, Can we go now can we go now?----and on the way home we stopped at a revolutionary war fort. We had to park on the other side of a very high bridge that passed over a small stream way down below. There was a house by the stream, with a porch, and windows into the living room, yard tools, a driveway. "We're right under the bridge," the family living there must tell visiting friends... "You can't miss it." The traffic on the bridge was highway fast, and there were many pedestrians crossing the bridge and looking down. What a curious life down there, and how curious to hover over it, gazing down at someones humble little life, indifferently. I pointed out to Liv the tops of the huge elm trees that were at eye level, and how rare to see the tops of a tree without being a bird or an angel. She was polite, but mostly she was fascinated with that house. Me too. Though the vertigo was significant.

I have a friend who is undergoing chemotherapy, she has four-year-old twins. Another friend is in chemo too, with four children under ten years old. Another friend is mourning the loss of her mother. Another fights for custody of his children; another is fighting for her marriage; and more are fighting for their home. The 40s, I am beginning to surmise, is an intense decade. Life really kicks in.

The pain can be great. So great in fact, that we do leave earth for a while. For a few moments or a few months, we detach and drift up there, safely protected in the ether acre and looking down at our suffering selves. We're up there at the top of the maples, watching in silence and wondering how it's going to end. 

Once, grace came to me in six lines of dialogue with my husband. It was not a wild revelation, a symphony orchestra, a parade down Fifth Avenue, or even angels from heaven descending to comfort me. It was just a very short exchange of honest words. And then I came back to earth and began over.

This painting is by Marguerite Robichaux----a miraculous, angelic presence on this earth. Click here for more about her and an upcoming show in Boston.

20 minutes of writing before I walk in Central Park

Many years ago, I was out in a remote part of a remote country in Africa working with a well-known non-government organization. There were five refugee camps scattered south from our compound, and the NGO did health-related work in the camps. But I rarely left the compound because I was doing desk work. 

On Sundays several of us took a long walk out behind the compound for a couple of miles across the savannah. During the week I often went out for shorter walks into the small neighboring villages. One Sunday, no one was around and I went out for a walk into the savannah by myself. I realized as I left that I had forgotten my radio somewhere---which we were required to carry at all times-----but foolishly I brushed it off thinking I would just go a short distance.

I was walking in the baking sun and thinking about Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera, how she followed him so kindly everywhere as he chased butterflies. I wondered if they had ever come to Africa because as I walked many little butterflies were fluttering around me.

Then, a series of unfortunate events happened. Three men who I had passed earlier on the path showed up again. I was accosted, they were drunk I now realized. I also realized that I had walked quite far from the road. I knew I was in danger. Soon more men began to arrive.

To this day I am amazed: a self-defense course I had taken five year earlier came back to me, and I carried out the steps by instinct. I was able to intimidate the men----there were more than I care to remember by now----and establish the fact that nothing was going to happen here, and march them, and me, back to the road. A kind but timid teacher also showed up and helped too. Bless that man, he was an angel. When we got back to the road, the village joined into the melee (word spreads fast on a slow day in rural Africa). It was sickening in a different way, a mob-oriented way. But at least I was not isolated and I was getting closer to the compound. Then, miraculously, a truck from the NGO pulled up, and I climbed in, shaking but unharmed.

The other day I was reading some of Nabokov's early letters to Vera in The New Yorker and maybe that's why this incident returned to my thoughts this morning. I was taking a shower when I thought of it. I was in New York City, my husband and children were around, we were off to a ballet class soon. What if that day turned out differently? I wondered. Who or where would I be today? The same life, with darker secrets? Visibly wounded, physically or emotionally? Or maybe, not here at all. 

I am so often in agony over my failures. What is the use of that?

Thinking about the end of the world while walking around the Central Park reservoir last night

I take the path from the 67th Street entrance north the road through Central Park that leads to the reservoir. The road passes the Boat House and a man playing his ode to the day on bagpipes in the Boat House parking lot. The road I take passes trees and couples teaching their babies to walk under the trees. It passes behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A man throws a ball to his little dog. Not many people are passing. Rain water is dripping off the leaves of the trees and the bushes. The blossoming trees smell amazing. It's quiet because it just rained and will rain again soon, and it always raining. But at least the grass is long and lush.

I walked and thought about the end of the world. I made a list of what my last thoughts might be if today truly is the end of the world. I wondered if, in the intensity of the world ending, my mind would offer up memories that I couldn't conjure up myself now. I gave myself that possibility. I thought of the warmth and weight of my newborn just placed on my chest; the reflection of a drifting seagull on the stone house window on a grey sky in November; a friend, dying of a cancer, lifting a water bottle to spray a small plant on her hospital bed table; the smell of the grey Chevrolet, of the first German Shepherd, of the brackish ocean. Of course all the lovers would come crashing in, every one. High fives, what fun, thanks for the good times guys---see you in heaven. Then some jokes about that. 

The ledge at the office where we smoked cigarettes those first weeks in Uganda; one glance when I knew. The Chick. My brothers. Snow. A mountain in Maine. The smell of the church. I listed more as I walked and the memories flooded in---wonderful things---wonderful things by my side for the glorious instant before obliteration. 

Or will I think this----- Oh God, I am 43 years old, and I've only just started my life. 

Telling the Story

One for the writers.

"Telling the Story" means, in this series I'm writing on faith, how our stories intersect with the Gospel. But that task is beyond me, so I'll just write what I know.

Creating something from nothing:
1. Write what you know.

I just glanced at the digital clock on my computer. It read 11:11 and I made a wish. I won't tell you the wish---it won't come true if I tell you!---but I will suggest that it had something to do with  pleading and begging for help in the effort of creating something from nothing. It's the same wish I've made for the last 100 years.
 
I recently watched a wonderful talk by Amy Tan entitled, Where does creativity hide? She has good, solid, methodical advice. How do we create, you wonder? How, out of nothing, does something come? By miracles, she says. And God's will, serendipity, luck, fate, coincidence, and accidents.

2. Miracles and God's will.

Last week I was walking.

There were a whole lot of stories and words and thoughts and ideas and justifications and explanations and memories and concerns going through my mind when I came, after an hour of walking, to the wall along the rocky cove.

I stopped and for a moment the stories, words, thoughts, ideas, justifications, explanations, memories and concerns stopped too. Along the top of the wall there was a series of stone sculptures. Each with its own message: very simple and quirky and harmonious and gentle. (The sculptures are pictured here). It had the startling effect of coming upon a cave painting after crossing a desert alone for five years. Suddenly there was a message. Here was language, someone whispering to me. Here was language at its most startling and perfect.

It was language and it was telling me to please be quiet and, for once, just listen.

3. Listen.

A friend writes: courage. It takes courage. Most of the world, I believe, does not like the messy dark enclaves of creation---the birthing, the drama, the agony. Most of the world is perfectly happy to sequester the imagination away and be done with it. (My son is three and has, we are discovering, quite an imagination. This is a mother's dream, you think. But even I have noted certain unexpected  emotions within. Yesterday, as usual dressed as a pirate in silk Chinese Pajamas and a big black hat, carrying a piece of cardboard he found on the street and claiming it was his fish, with pink-painted  fingernails, my son flopped down in the sand under the slide among all the Upper East Side carefully-dressed children and lay there supine, singing. I thought, Where will this go? Will he have a life of rejection for his outlandish ways? Would it not be easier, I thought even then, to be a banker in a suit?)

The messy dark enclaves of creation; courage. Why did I go to Africa? I've been wondering lately. Partly because of this: here is a place on earth where the realm of imagination has not yet been banished. Here, because it is dark at night, and because people without education believe in spirits, and because people without medicine must pray desperately to God---here the imagination still roams. It can be quite scary and spooky and exhilarating and dangerous. 

4. Courage

Annie Ernaux writes of her jealousy of another woman in her book The Possession: "This woman filled my head, my chest, and my gut; she was always with me, she took control of my emotions. At the same time, her omnipresence gave my life a new intensity. It produced stirrings that I had never felt before, release a kind of energy, powers of imagination I didn't know I had; it held me in a state of constant feverish activity.
    "I was, in both sense of the word, possessed.

    "This state kept my daily troubles and cares at bay. In a way, it placed me outside the grip of life's usual mediocrity..."

We have felt this way, in one way or another: an intensity of feeling, a possession. It can be anger or pain or joy. The intensity brings us outside the grip of life's usual mediocrity.

Outside the grip of life's usual mediocrity. It is ultimately irresponsible, and can be an addictive way to live. It is ultimately destructive, but sometimes necessary too.

5. Possession

There is such imbalance in the world. The weather is disturbed. Tons of money is going to war and not so much is going to education. People can't connect, despite so much technology that connects us. You know the rote: it's always something. Maybe, like the Navajo, we can restore some harmony and balance by chanting the world back to health. Maybe to find balance we need more space for darkness, imagination, contemplation, and, ironically, wildness.

6. Balance

I just made all of this up, but it came out pretty good.

Thoughts on Forgiveness

Here are some of the thoughts I had this morning, just between us, just for fun:

• You are a fool to think you're a writer; you kind of suck. You have barely broken the surface of this book and it's been six months. You should be done by now! Mozart, if he were you, and if he were a writer, would have been done by now. You space-out too much, just write the thing, goddammit, and stop being so precious.
• Why so mean? Can't you be nice, always, constantly, like a saint would be? Can't you be like one of those rosy winged angels in a painting, even when it's 9pm and the kids are still awake and calling for you and the apartment is a mess and there's a mouse in the kitchen and you just want to read The New Yorker? Why can't you be a rosy, winged angel, hovering over your children with infinite patience and joy, even then?
• If you had any discipline at all, you would go to the 6:30am yoga practice.
• You should run a marathon, by the way.
• You wasted yesterday.
• Why don't you wear make-up? And you should buy some perfume because you smell a little like wet wool. Your kids are going to remember you as as coffee breath and bad hair and the smell of wet wool, is that how you want to be remembered?

It's noon. I am at the library. It's the perfect day because the room isn't full and the people here aren't rustle-y. There is a pink folder next to me with some UN work, and a purple folder with writing. "All morning, I did the work I love." I just exchanged emails with my brother. I can't believe I have two brothers who are so capable and tall and funny and cool. I can't believe they still love me after all the crap I've done and said in this life. I can't believe that this morning, Liv, about to trot off to school with her father, came upstairs instead and into the bathroom where I was in the shower and said: "Mom? I want another kiss goodbye." I can't believe how pretty she looked in her pink tights and new dress, and I can't believe how loving and generous her father is to us all, despite all the crap I have done and said.

There is a grey sky out the window. The wild gorgeous exhilarating snow storm of Monday seems a long time ago. It's warmish today, almost tropical warm, like Bermuda feels before a storm. When I was 16 or so, I spent a week in Bermuda with my older cousin who was studying oceanography there. I haven't been to Bermuda since, but certain weather always reminds me of it. My cousin was a complicated inspiration to her younger cousins---she lived a very warm and colorful life, ambitious, alternative, even sultry. A sultry life. She pushed boundaries, she blew down any restricting walls. She never heard when someone said, "You can't do that." She was not afraid. The world was her familiar; the oceans were just paths to cross. She died of cancer five years ago, and left her husband and three beautiful daughters, and we miss her every day.

Why is it so hard to forgive yourself? I know there are a million layers to peel back on the subject of forgiveness, and that the more one thinks about it the more complicated and convoluted and scary and serious and stony it becomes. saying that, I know---well, I think I know---that I forgive others, but until I wrote that list just now, I hadn't realized how little I forgive myself.

To forgive loosens constrictions. Forgiveness is really flying. Forgiveness is not all squinched up, drinking poison in a room without windows. There is no fear after forgiveness and no people to hate, and there are no walls and there is just oceans to cross when you live with forgiveness. Live with it.



Helen Frankenthaler, Southern Exposure (2005)

Thoughts on Prayer

It is Tuesday morning and cold, cold, cold. Wind whips down the avenues, my hair is frozen. My eyes all watery. And it is almost March, so no one wears their winter hat and there are sandals in the store windows and bikinis too. That funny thing about people acting like spring, even when it is still clearly winter. I went to college in Maine and we were always wearing t-shirts and drinking beer on the porch on Saturday afternoons in late February, even though there were great swaths of snow still burning up the lawn; and some would even take an ice-y leap into the frozen ocean probably to be cool and impress the girls. And it was cool and did impress the girls. Because that, I suppose, was an act of faith.

Spring returns every year. I have not been here for the last seven years to witness it, but they say it is so. The crocus pokes its little yellow head out of the ground, through the layer of dead leaves still mulching from last fall. Forsythia bloom. I remember it certainly from childhood. We are acutely aware of spring in New England because it comes one month later than it would if it were polite. It is a late guest. That one month of waiting---February, even into March---is the tough one. Though the days are growing lighter, they are still pretty dark. Bleak. Salty highways, bare black trees; last week the stroller hit a bump on the curb and tipped forward and over, caught by the ridiculous wind. Haakon fell out. My coat was flapping and my scarf was all twisted and my hat was over my eyes and the wind was disorienting and cars were going by. I couldn't reach him. His blue magic wand rolled into the street. He panicked about the wand. The wind was so strong I couldn't gather it all up. A man who was pushing a rack of dry cleaning stopped to help. The rack of dry cleaning started to roll off. I had scratched my knee in the melee. I felt like the worst mother, like a pretend mother who didn't even know how to push a stroller. I really wanted to cry, but Haakon was crying and it was so windy and awful, and racks of dry cleaning were rolling down Park Ave and my stupid Russian hat was covering my eyes, so I couldn't even cry.

That, ladies and gentleman, is late winter.

So what is prayer? Prayer is spring. Prayer is when the darkness and bleakness and harshness of winter is cleared away, if only for a moment. Who doesn't hear the crocus groan itself out of the cold damp earth? Who doesn't hear the first returning birds rejoice? Listen: that is prayer. They say you can pray when you are driving your car or feeding the kids lunch, But I don't 100 percent believe it. I think it deserves and rewards to clear a little space for prayer. A house of worship is fine because it is already done: the candles, the lack of distraction, the peace and divine. But you can light a candle in your bedroom and take three minutes there too.

And here is what I'm beginning to learn. Praying is not always asking, or negotiating, impressing, begging or whatever we do in our usual conversations. There is a part of prayer that is this: listening. You can ask and negotiate, but don't forget to listen. Sometimes, not always but sometimes, it's amazing what you hear. If you give it the time and space, the world will guide you. Prayer is cleaning a space. And it's opening the window and listening for spring. Hm, yes. Yes, prayer taking a moment to listen for spring.

The sketch, "Purple Crocus - Sun Reaching" is by Alice Kelsey, whose work can be accessed here.

Thoughts on Worship

Lately---I can't remember what triggered it---but lately, I've been thinking about worship. There is something about the word 'worship'---along with words such as devotion, prayer, repose---that I adore. They are beautiful words that haven't yet been worn thin by overuse.

Up until recently, I thought of worship as an act---a supplication, a bowing down to. I also thought of it as something that I didn't do. I'm not very a passionate or supplicant type----I do not throw myself down before altars or make pilgrimages or set up shrines. To worship, I thought, one had to sort of clear away a big, scared space: temporal space such as time away from obligation and distraction. Or literal space such as an ancient cathedral or a snowfield at dusk; a silent shoreline; a mountain, magnificent in the still afternoon heat of an African savanna. 

But here is something: worship, I am realizing, is not always so sweeping and intense. It is sometimes but not always. Worship can be little: a gesture---a gesture and another and another that becomes a series and then a lifetime of gestures. What you worship is simply (but not always) what you think about a lot, what you dwell on. I'm not sure, I might be making this up. But anyway, this is what is interesting to me. 

Here is David Foster Wallace's thoughts on the subject, from a commencement address he made to Kenyon College in May 2005 (two years before he would, sadly, commit suicide):

There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect---being seen as smart---you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

"Worship," one minister recently shared with me, "means creating a space for God." Insert your God there: "JC or Allah or YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess"; or your money, your lover, your ambitions or desire for power. It is a rather simple exercise, actually.

Worship means creating a space for God. I like that.

The photo "Checking the ice on Flagstaff Lake" is another by Lizzie McGhee, who definitely worships the good things.

The Month of Light

I had this great idea for how I would survive my first January back in the States (after seven luscious green-infused-with-red-flowers Januarys in East Africa): that I would defy reality and experience instead A Month of Light. It happened like this. At the end of December I realized I had 20 yoga classes remaining to complete by the February 1st expiration date. I had done ten classes in two months; now I would have to do 20 in one month. Interesting how that happens. Meanwhile, the church I recently started to attend, St. James, offers a seven-week series---a group that meets to explore and experience the way of Christian faith as we understand it and live it at St. James’ today. The meetings started the first weekend of January, I had signed up a while back.

I admit that I was intimidated by the idea of 20 yoga classes in 30 days; and no one would argue that it might be hard to give up lazy Sunday mornings for eight weeks. But I turned my fear into power: this situation, I thought, would be a Great Opportunity. I would immerse myself in faith, variations on prayer and peace and light and contemplation and beauty and wonder. I would capture it, shape it, paragraph it up to you, Dear Reader, and we could all bask in the anecdotes and insights----the shards---cast from this great light together. I would change my life.

Well the Month of Light has not been a total failure, but was thwarted, as I mark the second week of family illness----here in bed, surrounded by mountains of tissue and glasses of orange juice and bottles of Advil and pools of resentment. Yoga is a distant dream. My faith---any sort of faith---is lame and weak. I am not feeling the Light, or the inspiration---or the anything good.

I'm irritated and totally annoyed, snappy and regretful: I am indeed the opposite of how I set out to be.

Someone more entrenched in the subject of faith---a monk or a yoga teacher, among many others---would naturally interpret this experience more intuitively and wisely than I. But as I begin to emerge from this irritation of illness, I am going to accept this month as a lesson. And the lesson is: I can not (the world is telling me) simply clear my calender and postpone all commitments and obligations to begin a Life of Faith. I can't just schedule in a Month of Light at my convenience (especially during this most dark of months, and one particularly plagued with GERM-Y germs). Life, in other words, gets in the way of ... Life.

Maybe that's why---for me---faith (in what? In God. And what is God? The beauty of the world.  But what of suffering, does God just ignore those pockets? ... ) begins with seeing God and beauty in the minutiae of our daily errands and pursuits. Like a how a poet lives, unveiling tiny moments of peace. Like how this little cup of tea with its spoon next to my bed last night had such a simple, glorious way about it.

Well, it's not a Month of Light, but it's a start.