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)

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