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)

Poison & Wine

Yesterday was Mom's birthday.  She would have been 63.  It lands 7 days after the anniversary of her death.  I felt peaceful this year around the 11-year mark, wondered how her birthday would feel...all that's predictable is unpredictability.  I woke up at 5:30 and sat down with a cup of coffee and my laptop.  Turned on Christmas music and started writing an email to a friend and had breakfast and Jonathan left for St Spiridon's and then it hit me like a mack truck and drained me out like a newly slaughtered animal.

I missed her so much I could scream.  Hard, wracking sobs that make me just gag.  Tears that burned away my skin like sandpaper, scraping away delicate layers around my eyes, leaving the raw exposed.  Lonely & unsure & lost.  Trying so hard to access her ontology, to know really that once upon a time there was actually this woman in the pictures, and she did know me and she did love me.  So angry at God that death exists and that any of this can possibly be ok.  How does right even begin to prevail in this??  Trying so hard to get to an actual, felt remembrance of her having been alive, of her having been my mom, for her life to seem real.  And even when approaching that place, feeling sickeningly dizzy in my head, disoriented in my body...like all that's real is this loss and it's everywhere in me...and what's real of her just feels illusory in the worst, trickiest way.  This year it was way worse than the one right after she died.  For that one I was numb.  This is much harder.

And better.

Scott Peck says that if it's not paradoxical it may not be true.  My entire life feels paradoxical sometimes.  It's what helps me know I'm real.

So was she.  The battle and the heart's reach help me know it.

When he came home Jonathan folded me in a hug.  "Let's make coffee and you can tell me about her," he said.  It wasn't what got said that mattered.  We had Common Ground last night.  The auditorium was cold but most of the quivering came from inside me.  He put his arm around me and I felt stillness.  Presence matters.

I've been coming back to this for the past month or so as we prepared for last night's program.  It speaks to all kind of things in life.  It's prayer.  The band did it live last night and yes, the tears that fell still stung my skin a little even hours later in the day.  Thank God.  I had skin.  And could feel.  And could welcome the tears.

She's still gone.  And I'm still ok.


©2011 Mindy Danylak

Grounding

I'm crying again.  Eleven years ago I was crying at this time, late morning, on this day, November 10th, as I flew to Walla Walla for Mom to die.

The anniversary of Mom's death doesn't hit me the same way every year...some years it's full of struggle, other years it's poignant laughter.  A different kind of struggle for life.  You know...the way life is.  I'm glad it's that way.  But today I'm on the phone again.

Every year I work on a project at Thanksgiving and again at Christmas that involves phone calls to around 100 of the patients/families I work with.  And every year those calls inlcude women exclaiming how they'd forgotten it's nearly Thanksgiving.  They are so consumed with their spouse/parent/child/friend/ex's process through transplant, serving as the 24/7 caregiver these patients require, that loving toward life takes over the mundane things, like holidays.

The week after Mom's funeral was Thanksgiving -- we spent it with our neighbors, Truman and Nina, celebrating Thanksgiving a couple days after marking what would have been Mom's 52nd birthday on Nov 20.  God she was young.

As I go into this weekend, I remember...that flight back to Walla Walla, the yellow begonias at the front door that held on through the frost until Monday morning when she finally died, the smell of the bedroom, the cap on her hairless head...the laughter of Mom's voice as she talked on the phone, the reliability of her green car on the corner when school got out, the notes and lists as she planned holiday meals, her diet Coke on the desk in the kitchen, the beautiful papers at Christmas, the fuzzy black coat that now hangs in my closet, the box i keep of letters and cards she sent over the years, her brilliant blue eyes & glorious red hair.....

And so I'm crying again, talking to these patients because I know why remembering Thanksgiving is unthinkable, is not even on the radar, and how much the call from someone who does remember brings me back to earth.

And I welcome the ground.



©2011 Mindy Danylak

How did you meet? And then what happened?

Eight of us gathered 'round the candles, voices swinging across the planks, stories spilling laughter and tears, resonance and incredulity, criss-crossing here and there as life is wont to do when four couples start passing pasta.

"So tell us the story of how you met," went the refrain, and each couple filled in blanks.  Our marriages are 8 and 9 and over 30 years long.  They include a boatload of talents, regional and global long-distance, letters and emails, high regard, college love affairs, arranged marriage, some altered states of consciousness, many kinds of intelligence, deep hurt and healing, transitions, children and no children and grandchildren, foreign languages, crises and near-misses, passion, trust, varying plays of other people, and the mysteries of time.  Searching for and abandonment to love and its remarkable ways.

The next morning I woke up early and unloaded the dishwasher, wondering about the point at which people stop telling those stories of meeting and marrying....because people do stop....other stories stand out more and take their place.  Or after time, recollecting can lose some sparkle...for some times, for some folks, remembering becomes bittersweet, painful even, depending on where the relationship has gone.  I suspect there's not a couple on earth that can't look back at their early relating and find inklings of their relationship's eventually more developed pathologies.  I suppose that sometimes in very early marriage those meet & marry stories are the ones that couples tell partly because not much else has happened in their lives together.  Later we tell them because they are charming and fun and as the song goes the beginning is a very good place to start.  But even where the eventual strengths are sturdy, and even as the sweetness prevails, we didn't all get married to have that one early chapter be the whole book.

When you read good novels you should be able to find intimations of the whole story in the very first paragraph, like harmonics that ring at the slightest touch.  Those lines should suck you in, whirl you around, and stir your bones in such a way that the story lives with your very breath, every sentence a respiration.  I'm reading a book like that right now -- it's almost 542 pages and I can't put it down -- I read the first half in two sittings.  The opening paragraph starts like this:  "It's so hard to explain what the dead really want."  You're with me, right?

Openings are gates.  And open gates are irresistible.

It's well worth it to write good openings in novels.  And no less so in life.  We all want good starts, right?  So the novelist rewrites those first lines endlessly.  The editor reads the manuscript and you make pre-printing revisions; but in real life you don't get that luxury.  Or is it a luxury?  Isn't the essence of craft life?  We get redemption, we get transformation, we get process, but not re-writes.  Our lives flow -- sometimes roughly, sometimes smoothly.  Each story its own paragraph and flowing from the previous.  At some point the story has to be let loose to tell itself.  The only way that first paragraph gets sweeter is with the liberal permeation of time's release.  The constant becoming.  Not the re-writing....the writing.  And I can't wait to keep reading.


©2011 Mindy Danylak

What are you?

A few months ago three friends started coming to my house every Wednesday afternoon.  Shannon, Colleen, Jana, and I fill our coffee cups and settle in.  I love autumn.  It's a good time to settle in.  We range in age from 36 to 61.  The first time we met, we watered our laps with tears...tears for ourselves and for each other...and I knew that the meaning of life was present.  I've known each of these women for a long time, years, but never in this way and every week my heart is astounded at the richness of it all.  Our conversations usually overflow the clock.  We take turns emailing something ahead of time...poetry, quotes, pictures, stories...so we have time to reflect a bit before filling our cups together.  Conversation is never boundaried by those words from others...they do not define...but they do weave, inspire, assist.

This past week, the text below was our launch.  I haven't studied Maya's life and I've only briefly read the Unity School's "Lessons In Truth" and whenever this remarkable woman is mentioned I always think about the remarkable women who Oprah will never notice and I want to be in the room with them instead.  I love being in the room with them.  At the same time, Maya's poetry is beautiful too and I too hope to be more amazed the older I get and Mamma's faith seems so solid.  So on Monday these words landed in my in-box and on Wednesday Shannon read them aloud to us, her northern Alabama accent lilting the words warmly, and then followed with this question:  What are you?  And so I ask you:  What are you?

Many things continue to amaze me, even well into the 6th decade of my life. I am startled or taken aback when people walk up to me and tell me that they are Christians. My first response is the question, “Already?” It seems to me a lifelong endeavor to try to live the life of a Christian. I believe that is also true for the Buddhist, for the Muslim, for the Jainist, for the Jew, and for the Taoist who try to live their beliefs. The idyllic condition cannot be arrived at and held on to eternally. It is in the search itself that one finds the ecstasy.

One of my earliest memories of Mamma, of my grandmother, is a glimpse of a tall cinnamon-colored woman with a deep, soft voice, standing thousands of feet up in the air on nothing visible. That incredible vision was a result of what my imagination would do each time Mamma drew herself up to her full six feet, clasped her hands behind her back, looked up into a distant sky, and said, “I will step out on the word of God.” The depression, which was difficult for everyone, especially so for a single black woman in the South tending her crippled son and 2 grandchildren, caused her to make the statement of faith often.

She would look up as if she could will herself into the heavens, and tell her family in particular and the world in general, “I will step out on the word of God. I will step out on the word of God.” Immediately I could see her flung into space, moons at her feet and stars at her head, comets swirling around her. Naturally, since Mamma stood out on the word of God, and Mamma was over 6 feet tall, it wasn’t difficult for me to have faith. I grew up knowing that the word of God had power.

In my twenties in San Francisco I became a sophisticate and acting agnostic. It wasn’t that I had stopped believing in God; it’s just that God didn’t seem to be around in the neighborhoods I frequented. And then a voice teacher introduced me to Lessons in Truth, published by the Unity School of Christianity.

One day the teacher, Frederick Wilkerson, asked me to read to him. I was 24, very erudite, very worldly. He asked that I read from Lessons in Truth, a section that ended with these words: “God loves me.” I read the piece and closed the book, and the teacher said, “Read it again.” I pointedly opened the book, and I sarcastically read, “God loves me.” He said, “Again.” After about the 7th repetition I began to sense that there might be truth in the statement, that there was a possibility that God really did love me. Me, Maya Angelou. I suddenly began to cry at the grandness of it all. I knew that if God loved me, then I could do wonderful things, I could try great things, learn anything, achieve anything. For what could stand against me with God, since one person, any person with God, constitutes the majority?

That knowledge humbles me, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in their gums. And it also liberates me. I am big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I’m a spring leaf trembling in anticipation.

- Maya Angelou, from Wouldn’t Take Nothing For My Journey Now

Making a Marriage

Eight years ago today Jonathan and I married each other on a hot sunny day in Seattle.  He wore a tux, I wore a big dress.  Our families and many dozens of friends celebrated with us.  The flowers were lovely, the food was divine, the wines were fantastic (all from Walla Walla, of course).  We vowed and sang and kissed and were photographed and took a ride in a fancy car.  We mixed our losses with our gains and shed tears of missing with those of joy.  There are things I would do differently today but that's because we're 8 years older now and we've changed a lot.  But that being said, we loved the day and love remembering it.

I had imagined I might never get married.  I wasn't opposed to it but I didn't feel like I had to get married.  I am not a a squishy romantic.  I grow weary of fluff & flourish quickly--I am sentimental and desire richness but not the flowery or the gushy.  I also didn't love dating, and dating is sort of a prerequisite for marriage.  I did date several guys through college & my early 20s and all but one were good men.  But I figured that if the confetti fell from above & prince charming emerged from the sparkle I would be right there and recognize what was in front of me.  In fact, I sort of hoped that it would happen that way--fast & clear & smashingly passionate--and that's pretty much exactly what ended up happening!

I love being married with Jonathan.  He is kind and loyal and gets to know the neighbors.  He remembers people and continues to call someone "my friend" years after they last saw each other.  He has absolutely THE greatest laugh in the world hands down--it should be a ring tone!  He loves to dance and doesn't hide his tears.  He is philosophical and he thinks.  He's artistic and abstract and he sometimes sets things down and loses them; he also makes mobiles and does origami and leaves data models all over the house.  He likes keeping papers out where he can see them and when I swish things into piles and hide them in the dryer before company comes he gets worried we'll forget about the credit card bill.  He tracks our finances on these spreadsheets that blow my mind.  He may not know how much money we have but he takes great delight in designing the spreadsheets.  He never misses the Stanley Cup or the World Cup and yells robustly at the television during games.  When I go out with my girflriends for the evening he stays home and sautes onion into perogies and drinks vodka and the house smells like a Russian kitchen when I get back.  He is occasionally irreverant and generally not overly serious.  He's funny in the mornings, which is a big plus, and he sings in the shower and pays my library fines and he kills all the spiders.

However, anyone who has ever been married can tell you that it takes more than that.  So I thought about it--what describes the spirit of us?--and came up with three things:

     1.  We're each responsible for cleaning our own bathrooms.
     2.  We value the life in each other.
     3.  We encourage each other to be in rich friendships.

I'm sure there are other ways to describe it, but so far the best of our relationship can be described by those three realities.  Everything pretty much lines up behind their essence.

Jonathan doesn't always sing in the shower and take out the trash.  We don't always feel in sync with each other and the occasional season has felt a little more like mid-winter's wait for the burst of hyacinth.  My nightmare version of marriage is when it looks more like a merger, when there's so much "us-ness" that you can't find the two people inside it.  But with Jonathan I don't have to worry about that.  I am not obliterated in our relationship.  If anything, our work with each other is more about attending to being found than to not being lost.  And I do go flippy when our relationship's best is experienced in 3D.

I've always said that love messes with our sense of timing, and I think I'll add the spatial realm to that as well.  Just when you think things are linear and known, there's this firework...sometimes pretty and celebratory but also fire-y and bound to disrupt the status quo.  And when life is chaotic and messy there can still be this internal calm.  Sometimes the best of times all go together and there are periods of playful rest.  And sometimes the worst of times all go together and the darkness is also bleak.  But when they do, they are not the final word.

In her reflections upon marriage and ontology, Madeline L'Engle writes:

A Russian priest, Father Anthony, told me,

"To say to anyone 'I love you' is tantamount to saying 'You shall live forever.'"

I am slowly beginning to learn something about immortality.

I don't entirely know what that all means but I am drawn to it.  What I love most about marriage is that it is life.  Being married is different from but not outside the hallmarks of any kind of life.  Dynamic, creative, and real at its best.  And in any event, not static.  Not even tied by time.  Eight is a number.  It represents a passage of time but it does not boundary or define what has been nor what will be.  And for both what it has been and what will be, I am grateful to be in it with Jonathan.  It's right.

Happy anniversary, love!
May you live forever!

___________________________________
©2011 Mindy Danylak

Mouldywarp

The other night it was pretty late and I was trying to fall asleep. I don't usually have to try -- my siblings and I have all been blessed with a remarkable ablity to conk out at the mere suggestion.  But I was laying there, not falling asleep, and Jonathan says, "ok, what are you thinking about?"  He knows I've been thinking a lot lately but it floors me how he can feel me thinking.  "Moles," I say, "I'm thinking about moles."  He busts up laughing.  They're not in my usual repertoire.  Yes, the little guys who pop out of the ground in my back yard in the middle of the night.  They left evidence of their tunnels last week.

I aspire to write something every month to post here, but July came and went and now it's into August and there's no July post.  Maybe it's because it's finally summer in Seattle and I'm starting to feel human again.  I was starting to feel like summer was ignoring me; and then when it rained a few days after the sun came out I was worried it was just gonna skip me like a joke I didn't get.  But now it's actually been over 60 for several days in a row and it feels miraculous.  I think I've almost forgotten how much I felt like a shadow all "spring."  Almost.

At any rate, this summer I've read a lot and celebrated a lot and and worked a lot and walked a lot and spread a lot of bark and am launching a new venture with a dear friend.  (More to come soon on that.)  I've spent countless hours thinking about memory and time and stories and family and landscaping and the economy and cooking for crowds and dream interpretation and communicating vision and web hosting -- and, yes, moles (did you know there are none in Ireland?) -- and frankly I sometimes just get tired of thinking.

So I'm considering all of that evidence of my own tunneling, sniffing my way along a process and a path, knowing that something new and noteworthy is about to pop up, that there's a whole lot of life under the surface in smaller yet vibrant spaces and that when the time is right there will be a different kind of evidence of me.  And that will have to do in lieu of a "regular" blog post.

In the meantime, I give you an excerpt (in italics below) to enjoy from Mary Karr's fantastic memoir, "Lit".  Her writing in this story shares the kind of energy I feel like I'm in these days...pithy, rich, reflective, basic, to the point, meandering, leaving some things unsaid but carrying much and being fully tuned in.  I also love the way they talk about God.  And that Mary Karr's healing involves a near-blind nun who has a weakness for cookies and a very wise heart.  If I were a nun I'd want to be like Sister Margaret.  The below is Mary's writing, not my own....it's not even necessarily relevant to what I've been thinking about, certainly not to moles, let alone to web hosting.  But sometimes in the tunneling we find other people's work & know that certain proteins in the roots are found in our own roots.

How do moles decide when to pop up?

***

The night after the train debacle, I drive under a sky black as graphite to meet my new spiritual director for the Exercises — a bulky Franciscan nun named Sister Margaret, patiently going blind behind fish-tank glasses that magnify her eyes like goggles.

Asked my concept of God, I mouth all the fashionable stuff — all-loving, all-powerful, etc. But as we talk, it bobs up that in periods of uncertainty or pain — forlorn childhood, this failed relationship — I often feel intentionally punished or abandoned.

How’s that possible, I say, if I have no childhood experience of a punishing God?

Margaret says, We often strap on to God the mask of whoever hurt us as children. If you’ve been neglected, God seems cold; if you’ve been bullied He’s a tyrant. If you’re filled with self-hatred, then God is a monster-making inventor. How do you feel sitting here with me now?

I don’t know, like some slutty Catholic schoolgirl.

She laughs at this and says, I see you — she peers through those lenses — what I can see of you, as my sister, God’s beloved child. The hairs on your head are numbered, and we’ve been brought together, you and me, to shine on each other a while.

So you don’t judge me? I want to know.

For what? she said. I don’t even know you.

Well, I say, I’m not married, and I aspire to be sexually active again some day.

She says, I’m not naive. But Jesus might ask: Should you be vulnerable to a man without some spiritual commitment? Is that God’s dream for you?

God has a dream for me? I say. I love that idea. It sounds like a Disney movie.

I know, Margaret says. Her pale round face opens up. Everybody uses the phrase God’s will or plan. That has a neo-Nazi ring to it.

I like the Disney version.

I feel you, she says, and I sit for a minute silently disbelieving she’s a nun. She adjusts her heavy glasses, and her eyes once again magnify.

Let’s eat a cookie and pray for each other’s disordered attachments, she says. Mine involves pride and cookies.

Mine, I say, involves pride and good-looking men.

Together we bow our heads.