Resonance

I posted a new blog last night & shared it on Facebook.  I knew it would likely strike a chord but I woke up this morning to a couple dozen comments, phone texts, private messages, emails, and more coming in.  I feel deep gratitude to my family & friends who have loved me well through the past several years.  And immense heart and thankfulness for those of you who shared some of your own story in your responses.  You are not alone.

On In/Fertility. And Children. And Being People. And All That.

A friend recently sent me an article about Anna Karenina. The timing was perfect, partly because I was in the midst of re-reading the book (before seeing the new movie, which I want to see for its fabulous costumes) but also because the writer's point about the idolatry of giving one's entire self over to a person dovetailed with things I've long thought – and have been recently thinking about again – about marriage and children.

Jonathan and I have been married for a little over 9 years.  I always felt that if we had kids it would be good and if we didn't it would be good.  There has always been a little underlying question there for us, but I wasn’t worried about it.  But since we didn’t have children over the years, I especially appreciated the women who got me – who understood my blend of openness to having kids, occasional uncertainty and fears about having kids, and contentment if we never had kids, all of it woven with awareness of both grief and celebration in either case.

Plenty of women feel it differently.  They’ve always wanted kids.  Or they got married and wanted to have kids.  Or some have never wanted kids.  For me, it’s not that straight, and while I didn’t want my fears to rule, neither could I “fake it till I make it”.  As I searched for voices that would resonate with mine, I found them hard to find.  I've heard polarized versions certainly but not mine.  So I’ve felt a bit of a compelling draw to see if I can articulate a few thoughts here in a way that describes my experience, creatively and maybe with a little humor confounds a few assumptions, helps illuminate something of the width of being God's in this world, and offers accompaniment for others. That oughta be easy enough, eh?

Jonathan remembers me talking early in our marriage about liking the idea of having 3 kids and he also remembers periods when I wasn’t sure I wanted to have kids.  I’ve always felt that mix.  Motherhood never felt like an imperative for me.  I've never been one of those women who felt like I had to have kids, that it's what I "was made for".  It wasn't something I was adamantly opposed to; but it also wasn't a centering point for me.  I knew that even if I was a parent one day I couldn’t see finding my sense of self in my children.  I felt the same way about marriage and still do.  I wouldn't trade Jonathan for anything, I utterly adore him.  But even as we are each transformed in our relationship, neither of us finds ourselves in the other.  Being married with him is not who I am in terms of grounded identity.  The same is how I see having kids.  If it happens, it happens.  If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.  It changes a lot, but the essence of who I am is not defined by that.  I turn to God for that.

But when I got married it seemed like kids were almost assumed.  Why else would you get married?  You might feel uncertainty around parenting but of course you’d have kids.  And voicing something beyond that was almost heretical when it was really only disruptive.  Truthfully, it really bothered me because those questions about motherhood don't usually start by asking about who you are; they start with wondering why you're not one, or when you'll become one, or don't you want to be one?  At a party earlier this year Jonathan & I got into a conversation with a couple.  The wife talked a lot about their sons, the husband his work.  After a bit she asked us if we had kids.  When we said no, the conversation literally stopped, I kid you not.  It was pretty uncomfortable.  I tried to fill the space for a moment or two with what we were involved in, but they were clearly done.  Neither of them had anything left to say.  It’s like parenthood becomes the central pin you’re identified around.  Absent that, you’re almost nothing.

Both Jonathan and I have been blessed by people who do not have kids and who are committed to caring for others in ways they couldn’t if they were parents.  I deeply admire and respect them.  What about them?  And what about people who can’t have kids?  If having children is so key as to be assume-able, what’s being said about people if they are childless (I hate that word) in either case, by choice or by chance?

While we weren’t "neutral" on the topic of wanting kids, neither Jonathan nor I assumed we would be able to have kids. We certainly didn't marry with a plan around having children. In fact, our pre-marriage conversation about kids fell sometime in the final few weeks before we got married – it was fine to not know numbers and timing and have a plan, but I thought we at least needed to know if either of us definitely didn’t want kids.  It went something like this:

Me:      So we haven't really talked about kids, do we need to?

Him:    I'm not sure.

Me:      Do you know for sure that you don't want kids?

Him:    No

Me:      Ok

End of discussion.

Those of you who know me well might find the brevity of that surprising, but that's really all there was to it. It was similar to our pre-marriage discussions about finances, community involvement, retirement, cohabiting, career aspirations, vacations, vegetarianism (ok, not really) and other kinds of Big Things you’re supposed to talk about before the vows.  And so we were married.  And honestly, over the years "kids" really came up relatively little.  We'd meet the topic here and there, and there remained unexplored questions, but neither of us expressed much urgency around it.

Because it’s who I am, I would check in every now and then to see what Jonathan was thinking. When he turned 40 he told me, "it's not that I'm dying to have kids right now but I don't want to turn 50 and regret never having tried." So we decided to try. For non-fertility related reasons, I'd been off birth control for several years and in that time had only one or two unexpected "I wonder if I'm pregnant" moments (I wasn't). For brief stretches during those years we tried getting pregnant but frankly being so focused on it really wasn't very fun, and I am not a good fertility tracker. Absent a compelling expression (like his directness when he turned 40), I was content sailing along in other streams. But he turned 40 and we got serious.  And several months went by. I eventually signed us up for information sessions at two adoption agencies and a fertility clinic.  We weren’t committed to adopting but it was an option and we wanted to explore it.  I’d never felt like I had to be pregnant to have kids (although I have thought a pregnancy wardrobe would be fun – the clothes are cute!) but it was an option too so we explored it as well.  The doctor at the clinic said, "here's what I think, here's what we'll do, and you won't be doing the same thing in a year."  I loved her.  For several reasons, we went that route instead of adoption.  So I knew that in a year we'd know:  we're either having kids or we aren't.  That was over a year ago.

I have friends who've given birth, who've adopted, who've never done either, who don't want to, who would love to but are single and don't want to be single moms, who have given birth or adopted as single women, who’ve been through termination of a pregnancy, who’ve given children up for adoption, who've gone through multiple miscarriages and multiple failed adoptions. Women whose stories around having kids are full of fullfilment and others whose stories are full of pain. Many whose stories blend a lot of both.

As we started this process last fall I felt a genuine curiosity about how it would be for us.  I didn't see it mostly as me becoming a mom, I saw it as us having a baby, and on a route that was familiar to us through many couples we know but experientially new for us.  Some of it was as easy and blasé as brushing my teeth.  And some of it was really, really hard.  Emotionally draining.  Physically uncomfortable.  I got tired of tests and procedures.  Very tired of it.  Anxious about a few.  Angry occasionally because it mattered to Jonathan too yet it fell to me to research procedures and schedule us for information sessions and appointment times and ultimately to put my body on the table.  He had his moments too...babies require two people.  There were times when I was ready to be done, when it felt like the damage to the soul was almost too much.  Toward the middle of summer as we talked about it one day Jonathan said he'd rather be with me than have kids with someone else, which was sweet and good timing and something I knew, but which I grasped the truth of with both hands because there were times when I didn't know how much longer I could keep up.  We didn't go as far as you could, but you can't undergo much around fertility treatment without some sense of being invaded.

The cycle of hope and disappointment can be devastating (for both men and women).  That wasn't the hardest part for me.  The hard part for me was the waiting, the staying in it.  And in that staying and waiting, I carried my uncertainties and fears and my full-on openness.  I tried not to leave anything behind.  Staying in a process whose end was somewhat clear but ultimately would be defined by us.  I didn't feel free to make commitments that might last more than 8-12 months, and that meant not doing a couple things I really wanted to do.  Trying to figure out the balance between putting some things on hold and yet not putting ourselves on hold – the heart of that personhood/identity crux.  Jonathan and I had decided where our limits were and that helped.  We knew we'd try some things but not others.  Some options simply felt more drastic than would meet their value to us.  But in the meantime we were going through this process that I knew we'd set aside a year for but could actually last longer than that.  Because you do enough cycles of everything and then at some point you decide you're done.  Or you take a break and re-tool for the next step, if you want to take the next step.  But even if you've paid your final bill from the clinic and deleted the medical assistant's phone number from your speed-dial, you know that unless a surgical procedure occurs there's always that off-chance of pregnancy and you wonder if you want to remain open to that possibility or if you'd rather just say "no" to it so you are free to say an unequivocal "yes" to other things.  It's a bizarre place to be, and it was the part that brought me to tears and exhaustion.

I'm married to a fairly placid man, and I mean that in the kindest sense.  He is sentimental and intuitive and cares deeply.  He also doesn’t express things with much volume, and even less under pressure.  It takes a lot of work to get him riled up enough that the more juicy bits come out.  And I know...I've tried many times over the years to push him to that tipping point.  At any rate, when he is ready to speak it’s always worth listening.  While I knew we both cared and felt invested in the process, I came to know that Jonathan & I also felt that in different ways.  It’s a little terrifying…the questions…“when will we know we’re done? and will we both know it at the same time? and what if we don’t?”  I knew that the year-end would bring a very different kind of grief for him than for me if it meant we weren't having kids.  We'd both feel it, but for different reasons.  There's no way to prepare for that, it was just a reality I began tracking with.  How to be together in our own ways.

A few of our family and close friends knew what we were in, and talking with them was usually good.  I knew that I could carry everything to them and they wouldn't look at me like there was something wrong with me.  Or I could not talk about it and they were ok with that.

One of the most gracious gifts came from my sister.  Six and a half years ago she had their second baby.  That summer when they were over for a weekend Mel and I sat in my sunny living room talking.  I’ve always admired how after she had kids Mel was still so actively interested and inquiring about people and the world.  I appreciate that about her deeply.  That summer, we were both at transition points, her with another baby and me with a shift in commitments.  From the outside it seemed like the perfect time to have a baby.  But I acutely felt a desire to not have kids during that period.  I struggled with how to describe my heart to her, my not knowing, my uncertainty.  In the midst of it all, she said the most loving thing anyone had ever said to me about it:  "Mindy," she said, "I think you'd be an amazing mom.  But if you never have kids that's fine."  Even though her words were what I knew to be true, I seriously felt like I’d been set free hearing her say them.  My sister has three kids.  She adores her children.  I knew she’d adore mine.  She loves being a mom and holds motherhood in very high regard.  I knew that it was something she would enjoy doing together with me.  And in that moment I also knew (again) that she loved me too.

Here's my bottom line:  I think that life is basically about creating life, in all the many varied ways that happens.  In the midst of everything, I always came back to that:  what is it for me to create life right now?  I felt like my constant prayer was “God, remind me who I am, who you are, and how that creates.”  Because even if somewhere in this process something "worked" and we had a child, it would be fundamentally altering, and I would be bringing myself along.  My heart, my soul, my energy, my living.  However life goes, with or without children, creating is vast, a realm wherein we get to hear and experience the voice of God in our very selves and others.  It’s a truly phenomenal thing to know that we matter that much!  A few years back I revisited the question “what is the voice of God in my life?”  I came to know that the voice of God is in my own voice, my own life, my own being.  As it is in everyone’s.  The person I am is completely and fully unique across all of place and history – no one, ever, has been exactly like me and never will be.  The individual person that I am, that I was created to be, matters.  Cosmically.  As I play out in the world, whether with kids or primarily in other ways, an en-livening is possible.  And THAT is stunning to me.

And that's what I wished was the dominant thread, the affirmation I wanted to hear. I know there are millions of women out there who say that they were made to be moms. And I can believe them, that they really do feel that way; but I also suspect that being a mom is like other meaning-ed undertakings in their life:  it’s on the path to becoming who they’re made to be. That's not to say their motherhood is not fulfilling or enriching or transforming or grounding.  It can be all that and more.  And yet it's not enough.  It'll never be enough.  It'll be powerful and influential and pivotal.  But if they had never been moms they wouldn't cease to be or make significance.  They wouldn’t be less of a woman.  Their story wouldn’t be over.  I know because of my own life, and because of the millions of women out there who would desperately love having children but who aren't/can't, and are still vitally alive and creating in the world.

It's now December, with Christmas just a couple weeks away. We put up a Christmas tree last Saturday afternoon and hosted the neighborhood shindig on Sunday night. The year allocated to tests and procedures has ended. And since I know you’re wondering, I’ll tell you:  we're expecting a baby in June!  And all that comes with it.  I am slow to excitement around most things in life, it’s not my immediate go-to response; but Jonathan was immediately on cloud nine and the whole thing is starting to become more real for both of us.  And we are both deeply happy.

And I keep thinking about all the things I usually think about and am dreaming about some endeavors I want to undertake.  I fully anticipate profound changes.  A friend was over at the house recently & commented that "it's finally going to look like someone lives here!"  You laugh at that being a profound change...  Messier though it may become, I'm pretty sure I still won't like stuff strewn all over the place.  (Except shoes....I'm good with shoes being everywhere.  As long as they're cute shoes.)  With all that and more, though, I'm also pretty sure my heart will remain drawn to the things God opens me to see in the world, and those will expand, simply because that's how life – and love – works.  It’s grounding and it’s moving.  There is always more to the story.

This baby that started growing a few months ago will forever be attached in some way to us but we are not the extent of its being.  In fact, we are barely the beginning.


©2012 Mindy Danylak

On Posting Drafts....

If you're reading this, it's because you've signed up to be automatically emailed when I put up a new post.  And you might have just gotten a new one in the last 10 minutes.  And believe me, it's not ready for posting -- I hit "Enter" at the wrong moment and horror of horrors, it posted!!  I immediately reverted it to draft (and will post later tonight) but wanted to let you know in the meantime that if it seems incomplete that's because IT IS!!  So if you wouldn't mind deleting it before you even read it that'd be delightful.  At a minimum, come back later when the real deal is up.  Cheers!!  ..Mindy..

4 women | 4 stools | 4 microphones | 4 stories

I love that format.  And I am so excited about this event.

Organized Religion: Women Speak, unedited & unrehearsed
4:30 pm | Sunday, September 9 | Seattle WA

We have all been part of groups & systems of many kinds (religious & non) where we've felt and seen both support & harm, sometimes all at once. Your own personal story may run along parallel lines or be very different from those told by the women who will be on stage at this event. In either case, hearing women speak their lives prompts us to consider more deeply our own thoughts and experiences, as well as the gatherings & systems we have been in or currently are part of.

In addition to hearing others' stories, I also think that speaking our own prompts that same kind of consideration, providing opportunity for celebrating what has been healthy and life-giving for us, as well as helping heal where we have been hurt, and simply exploring our lives along the way.

I really hope that as many of you will come as possibly can. For folks for whom the evening's themes resonate and are personally familiar, I think you'll find the kind of encouragement that inspires, that says you are not alone & the story is not finished. For folks for whom the evening walks you into unknown territory, you will learn and be prompted to wonder about what might be your own contextually related story. For folks who think they'll find themselves at odds with the evening, I ask that you simply wait on that until after you've come....you probably have more in common that you think.

the soul must...without concern for others' opinions, go freely where it finds its best director,

going where God inspires it to go,

and giving the new encounter every benefit.

... jean joseph surrin, 17th century french christian ...

I am thrilled to be co-sponsoring this unique event, produced by my dear friend Hillary Augustine, on Sunday September 9. For tickets & more information about the event, visit www.hillaryaugustine.com.  Please join us on September 9.

 

____________

As a sponsor, The Front Porch Series -- Shannon & I -- will be present with information about our upcoming women's retreats on October 6 & 13, or go ahead & contact us to sign up now. Find more info under the Events tab on our website.

Meditation

Birdsong in the morning is prayer to me.

Meditation

Sometimes when I'm out for a walk I wish I could do it in my socks because shoes make too much noise.  When Puget Sound's summer fog rolls through my woods in the early mornings the play is utterly magical.  A great variety of birds twitter through the treetops on any day of the week but the density of fog....  This morning it played a timpani tribute, falling water droplets creating a symphony of sounds and tones as they dripped, leaf by leaf, to the ground, blended by the brush strokes of moss and cedar bough.

     I have heard this music before,
     saith the body. 

     ... Mary Oliver ...

And so I stopped to just listen.

©2012 Mindy Danylak

Introducing Melanie: Blue Marble God

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you. There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too. 

... Frederick Buechner ...

When Shannon and I launched The Front Porch Series, we knew we were onto something.  We'd sat with many many women over the course of years, hearing stories and longings and celebrations.  And we knew that people (and most of the people we meet with are women) need places to take their stories, and themselves, to.  Places to speak and be heard.  To practice and express self.  Where presence is healing, supportive; even if it doesn't change circumstances.  And, importantly, places that are a bit removed from but still very close to the everyday.  We are huge believers in counseling (done with good therapists), but one thing we have both also known is the parallel need for a typically-people-ed existence...a process-oriented, grace-experienced, love-offered space with the people who we normally live life with but in settings and experiences that are not the usual normal.  That are a bit more sacred and protected.  One cannot replace the other:  we encourage people toward counseling when needed, we offer the parallel.  Among many other things, time and again the groups we've led highlight how life bumps up against spirituality.  Questions about meaning, about God, about the abuses and joys of gathering around faith.  And as we send people out after a day retreat, we want them to continue a connectedness because we can't carry all the day forward for them....they have to do some of that work in their own life, in their own way.  But we know amazing people who love well.  So we keep a list.  Some are counselors, many are not.  They are mentors, spiritual directors, good hearts, women who listen well, who have experience in certain domains of the every day of life.  For that is where we live:  in the every day.  And being accompanied in the every day is phenomenally powerful.  Here is your life.  Be in it.

And Melanie is one of the people you might want to be in it with.

One of my absolutely favorite women EVER is my friend Melanie Poole Gillgrist. I think I cried with Melanie the first time I met her (always a good sign in my book!) somewhere in the ballpark of 2004, sitting in her office at Northwest Family Life.  I volunteered for a little while at NWFL...their executive director, the amazing & incomparable Nancy Murphy, was on a world-wide speaking/conference tour & I checked her mail, voice mail, and email while she was away then did some work on a research project I no longer remember the details of.  But Melanie was there and helped hold the place together, and I spent at least as much time in her office every week talking as I did at Nancy's desk working.  My mom had died a few years before, I'd lived abroad, I was in a relatively new marriage, I was figuring out who I was at that time, and I was in need of a friend who was a bit older than me and wiser but who would love me in a way that didn't make me feel the difference between us.  The kind of woman who would give me a vision for the future without her trying to do it.  I found her in Melanie.

Melanie is one of those women who gets under your skin and settles into your heart simply by bringing who she is.  She speaks soul and humor and comfort.  She is brilliant, witty, analytical, comfortable, contemplative, kind, focused, poetic, strong, and completely memorable.  I fell head-over-heels in love with Melanie and her husband Rob and will never be the same for it.  Melanie's compassion and steadiness and thoughtful conversation, Rob's intensity and intellect and hearty laughter...the authenticity and emotional warmth and relational style they each bring...availability and health....as two individuals and as a couple they are a gift of passionate life (and I think 'passion' is a tired word so for me to use it is saying something!). 

They became friends for both Jonathan and me.  (Photo on the ferry to Bainbridge, 2005.)  The four of us shared meals and ferry rides and coffee and work.  We drank wine and ate pasta and talked as the candles burned down.  We watered our plates with sprinkles of tears and waves of laughter, moving through life's turns both good and, frankly, terrible, and then in moments of redemptive amazement.

Rob & Melanie moved to Minnesota a few years back and then to Butler, Pennsylvania (which, ironically, is where my mother-in-law grew up).  I would move heaven and earth to get them back here but, alas, God hasn't left moving heaven and earth up to me.  But she's now on the Internet, which is sort of like the human version of being everywhere at once!  Melanie's new venture, Blue Marble God, launched this week & I'll be reading every post.  When I read, it's like being with her.  Her words speak the integrity of honest spirit and everyday life.  They come simply but from deep personal exploration, marinating the soul toward places her gentleness might belie.  Because I know her, I know:  she knows.  Melanie has lived a textured life...she is acquainted with deep grief and loss and sheer fun and delight.  Her heart for contemplation and integrated spirituality beats strongly.  If you've ever wanted a spiritual director Melanie's your woman!  Cheers to you Melanie!  The word needs your voice.  Its sound is so lovely and I am grateful for the vibrancy of it that I still experience today...a heralding of God....in my everyday.


©2012 Mindy Danylak

The Backward Glance Carried Forward

Ten years ago last weekend I boarded a plane in Seattle, competing with a winter storm all the way that blanketed much of Europe in snow and ice.  The haunted cold of lovely Prague matched my mood perfectly upon arrival.  I've loved that city and always will.  I met Megan in the train station where we hugged and cried and then rode the rails to Ostrava.  It was the last place I wanted to be.  I'd been living there since mid-November, the 2 weeks at home with my family over Christmas a welcome respite.  Those eight months in the Czech Reublic rank as the hardest thing I've ever chosen for myself.  I knew early on that I wasn't drawn to the venture so much for reasons of place or people or work, although those each had compelling elements in their own ways, but rather for God, and for myself.  My mother had died exactly one year before I moved to Ostrava...she was gone, and I needed to know where I'd gone.

We arrived four hours later, Megan taking a bus to her & Priya's flat, me to mine & Brooke's.  I walked to the apartment where my teaching director and her husband lived, had dinner, got my keys from them, and then wheeled my suitcase through the snow to my building across the street.  I entered the lobby and walked to my door on the first level, flipping to the right key...raised my hand to open the lock and stopped short.  The lock was gone, an empty hole all that remained.  In the darkness I looked up and saw crime scene tape criss-crossing the doorway with instructions to call the police department and not enter.  I literally felt like I was in a Law & Order episode.  I wasn't sure whether to cry from exhaustion and back away from the door as instructed or whip out my camera and start photographing something I'll probably never experience again.

Lest you wonder, as I did in that moment, who had been murdered in our flat over Christmas, it was simply that winter reared her head.  A window left open a crack wouldn't ordinarily have been such a problem but Ostrava had experienced near record breaking cold and our heat was turned down, causing a pipe under the window to freeze and then burst, flooding and spraying at least 50 years of gritty black radiator gunk all over the place.  It seriously stank to high heaven.  Messy, inconvenient, costly, thankfully not flooding anyone else.  But honestly, that wasn't what bothered me.  In fact, it potentially made for a fantastic story and I figured it would be a great one for the book someday.  What I struggled with were reactions that bubbled in the ensuing days...I probably would have been able to laugh it off had it not been for that.

"Crazy American girls," some said. "Who leaves in winter with the heat turned off?!"  "But it wasn't like that," I wanted to protest.  It's my blog so I can set the record straight and say that in truth, it was not off, just low, and if the window was open at all it was seriously barely open, and it wasn't like Brooke and I had wanted to spend a couple nights sleeping on a kitchen bench waiting for the men in haz-mat suits to give us the all-clear.  We'd never lived with radiators -- the house I grew up in had walls ten inches thick and triple-glazed windows and was so energy efficient that we heated rooms simply by turning the lights on and off.  But I didn't say any of that, I just apologized and tried to be gracious and understanding.  I didn't feel like there was space for a different conversation, and all things considered I wasn't sure how to make the space myself.  And besides, that all sort of side-steps the point.

A few years later I met a woman who'd heard the locals' side of the story and laughingly relayed it to me as such.  I ground my teeth a bit and called her a mean name in my head but a grace also occurred to me in that moment, I'd been so busy trying to be open to the new around me that it never occured to me the locals experienced a certain culture shock of their own in having me there and they might not have known it.  When we're the main cheese most of what's around us is familiar, or at least our tacit knowledge trumps, lulling us into a deceit of ease and located normalcy.  And for the most part, we tend to think we're the main cheese, regardless of where we are and who we're with.  All I could do was wait and deal with the moment.  Which we did.

They say that when you move abroad there's a honeymoon period where everything is great for about 3-4 months.  Then, what was new and exciting becomes just frustrating and irritating and from there you start working your way to a new kind of good.  It didn't go quite that way for me -- for me, it was hard from day one and I just slowly moved through it.  Cultural navigation had only a little to do with it.  Having been through the previous year, I was far from expecting a large Czech city to provide the solace and renewal I needed.  Mine was an internal process of adjustment that occurred in a foreign country, supported by a small circle of incredible women who loved me deeply in shared experience, buttressed by the long-distance care of family and friends far away, given local color and interest by good Czech people with whom life intersected for a brief while.  It couldn't occur anywhere else or in any other way.  And I felt a fundamental ok-ness regardless of what was happening around me.  Which, truthfully, was much good.

I tell that story partly for the fun and memory of it but also because I was thinking about it when I awoke this morning and it's not entirely unrelated to other things I'm thinking a lot about right now. You've seen in the last 3 posts that my mind has very much been in another part of the world, one that is new for me, one that is also 'a place where peace is not the frozen silence' ... related to issues that I have worked nearby in different ways over the years and can't stop thinking about ... where my understanding is experiential and storied ... where alteration comes only in time, being in and seeing as much as we can of what's actual and hoping for better, all in the same moments.  By the time I came home from the Czech Republic in July 2002 I was good, and I was better for it. Those months made for a difficult time.  I would do some things differently now but I don't have that choice for the past and it's a past that I would never give up, a time that I innately knew would move in beauty....a movement that I carry in me still, unto the ends of the earth.

So I crawled out of bed and found my old journal to see where my thoughts were on this day back then, after I found my flat a disaster, wanting the mess to go away and for people to be more...well, more of whatever all I needed them to be at the time.  I'm not entirely sure whether the words would be what I'd turn to today, but there is surely still a resonance with what I inscribed in my journal ten years last night, January 6, 2002, as I settled even then, as I try now, into what I was chosing, dealt with what I wasn't chosing, words that helped me to meet the now-ness that is life at its widths, be that relaxed or strained:

Peace is the centre of the atom, the core

of quiet within the storm.  It is not

a cessation, a nothingness; more

the lightening in reverse is what

reveals the light.  It is the law that binds

the atom's structure, ordering the dance

of proton and electron, and that finds

within the midst of flame and wind, the glance

in the still eye of the vast hurricane.

Peace is not placidity: peace is

the power to endure the megatron of pain

with joy, the silent thunder of release,

the ordering of love.  Peace is the atom's start,

the primal image: God within the heart.

-- Madeline L'Engle

©2012 Mindy Danylak (for all original content; not including Madeline L'Engle poem)