Holy.....a word for the year

Oliver bounced around the kitchen while I opened a can of tuna.  New Year’s Eve creates a certain excited energy for a 6 year old who’s always been sent to bed early without even knowing it and is suddenly clue-ing in that there’s an occasion at hand.  Lunch finally on his plate, I described that tonight we’d each have a chance to share words about our hopes for the coming new year and he could participate in that, or share a word that seems important to him for the new year.  “How about holy?” he asked.  I shouldn’t have been but nonetheless was taken by surprise and asked him to say more.  “It just makes me think of Jesus” he said.  “Is that a word you’d like for the new year?” I asked.  “No, it’s for you,” he replied.

Holy.

For me?  A year ago, for the first time, I thought I might consider a word for the year and unexpectedly heard ‘attend’ come my way.  It has proven a powerful word for me, the right word, a felt word.  On the face of it, the English suggests active attention but its roots pull on ligaments, tendons, stretching.  On risking, a space of discomfort yet still one of vital connection.  Intention….just beyond the stretch point.  I’d thought I might take it with me for another year.

                Holy.

And this might go with it.  It shouldn’t surprise me that this is the word my child might hear.  He surprises me often but in ways that completely make sense.  There is something to his spiritual sensitivity that seems both out of left field and also completely of-course.  I suspect this is true of children generally.  It is something I have ardently nurtured across his short life.  And it’s his own as well, something I’ve tried to remember finds its own space for itself regardless of my nurturing.  And here it is, alongside a can of tuna, unexpected gift for me.

What is holy attending?  This might be a year to explore that more.  The past year has felt as holy as any I’ve ever lived and I know in my crevices that God is deeper still, greater yet, closer than I have possibly felt even as much as every stretch has been toward solid mysteriousness. Holy. I feel very open to the presences of this word and its reality that I’ve known….and to stretching them.  May it be so.

Thy Will Be Done

Note....this post is at least as much of a bookmark for me as it is anything else....I was deeply moved this morning, something that rarely happens for me in church-the-way-people-usually-think-about-church.  It tapped into a number of things that run deep in me.

When we go to church in the "get up & go to church" kind of way, we usually go just a few miles from home to Edmonds United Methodist Church.  Pastor Sandy Brown is in the midst of a sermon series on The Lord’s Prayer and the phrase of focus today was here:  “thy will be done.”  Regardless of your spiritual leanings, have you ever thought about that line?  Really thought about it?  Have you ever said these words?  Really said them?  Trusting that, even knowing what was highest and most honorable in your longing in that moment, you too would be better served by at least uttering such a phrase and probably by the fulfillment of it?

In unfolding his thoughts on this line and the havoc wreaked in our societies and connections as we live for our own self-interests, he referenced a beautifully written obituary penned by the late Senator John McCain.  Read it at the link below.  The words of a man, about a man, both of whom understood what it was to hold fast to their convictions and in that to also honor holy humanity before them.  The service closed this morning with a hymn that speaks the same dynamic.  A third verse is added to the UMC hymnal but I offer the traditional first two in the below recording.

Salute To A Communist.  John S. McCain

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/opinion/john-mccain-salute-to-a-communist.html

This Is My Song

(recording here, lyrics below)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvz9PvczUMI&list=RDCvz9PvczUMI&index=2

This is my song, O God of all the nations,

A song of peace for lands afar and mine.

This is my home, the country where my heart is,

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine.

But other hearts in other lands are beating,

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine. 

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,

And sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.

But other lands have sunlight too, and clover,

And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

O hear my song, thou God of all the nations,

A song of peace for their land and for mine.

Living From The Heart

It’s the strangest thing, really.  I’ve never been much of a baker.  But suddenly I found myself wondering about notes in mom’s recipe box and eyeing the bread pans in that lower drawer.  Noodling about the qualities of ‘chew’ and tasting the salts and dried herbs in my cupboard.  And feeling curious…is it true that wrapping a loaf in foil protects it from drying yet won’t turn the crust soft?  I found a book called “The Spirituality of Bread” and wandered down memory lane revisiting loaves across the globe.  Czech rye, French croissants, Italian ciabatta, German soft pretzels, English crumpets, San Francisco sourdough, grandma’s cornbread, bagels from Polish street vendors, Ethiopian injera, fresh warm tortillas, Alabama buttermilk biscuits, mom’s cinnamon rolls, a whole grain loaf from Katie’s oven three houses down, rosemary flatbreads baked over the Easter morning beach fire, croutons toasted on my stovetop, flatbread pizza at our favorite date spot after Taize.  And the elements they’ve been paired with.  Herb infused olive oil and decadently syrupy balsamic vinegar, warm goat cheese and parsley, crumbly parmesan, sauerkraut, garlicky hummus and bright green pesto straight from my food processor, the dozen mustards in my fridge, a loose pack of arugula and a runny yolk poached egg, my own Caesar salad dressing, spicy pizza sauce, a smear of avocado with a sprinkle of sea salt, homemade raspberry jam, thickly sliced tomatoes, Dad’s pickled herring, fire-in-your-mouth lentils, chopped egg with fresh dill.  I envisioned a weekly bread-making Friday with Oliver, his little hands kneading away, flour dusting his nose, music playing in the background, a special little bread-making blessing created just for our morning.  And sharing the loaves….I sketched in my mind a family-oriented communion meal around our table with friends….a blend of tasty evening nibbles, a beautiful salad, an awe-inspiring wine, the ceremonial slicing of the center loaf, a sensory liturgy.  So I searched for flour blends and bought the yeast packets and…..  Well, that’s all.  That’s as far as it got.

Somewhere in the middle of the baking aisle, the romance and the reality collided.  The flour dusting on Oliver’s nose turned into a bag of flour dumped all over the floor.  The yeast packet turned into yeast lost because the water was too cold and it never activated.  The sweet time with my boy turned into the frustrations of parenting.  The gathering devolved from an I’m-perfectly-ok-with-child-energy-around-the-table vision to a let’s-just-get-through-this disappointment as the buzz of evening meals with lots of little people peppered my imagination.  The airy quality of the loaves we were making fell flat.  I couldn’t decide on meal accompaniments.  Would Oliver take a nap that day and be good to go, or would he be unable to sleep and turn into a hot mess around 4:37pm?  I wanted to open the bottle now.  Forget it, I thought.  It can’t work to host these things in this season of life.  Just forget the whole thing.

Mindy.

The voice was quiet.

There’s a fresh loaf there on the counter.

Oh.

There’s a bottle in the pantry.

There is?

Sit.  Eat.  Drink.  Do this in remembrance of ME.

***

I'm part of a 9 month cohort in a course called Living From The Heart offered through The Selah Center (which I also work for....full disclosure).   Each module folds together a cohort day retreat, ongoing individual spiritual direction, a soul care group, reading, reflective project, and contemplative practices.  This is my reflection launching from our opening retreat, David Benner's Surrender To Love, and Henry Nouwen's The Way of the Heart.

©2016 Mindy Danylak

Breathing Underwater

In fifth grade I was invited to a school friend's birthday party.  I remember sitting in the car after school one day, seeing my friend's mom jump out of their car and talk to my mom for a minute.  When she slid back behind the steering wheel, Mom said that there would be a movie shown at the party and my friend's mom just wanted to make sure it was ok for me to see it.  Apparently it was ok because I went to the party.  The movie, Splash, is the only thing about the party that I remember.  Other than the old reel-to-reel films shown in school and the time Mom took my sister and I to see The Sound of Music at the public library, I'd never seen a movie before.  Any movie.  Ever.  And I haven't seen Splash since but I still recall scenes from it in vivid detail....Daryl Hannah as the mermaid in a lab tank, incompatible salination of the water causing her distress and making her tail flake and peel....love and vision prompting Tom Hanks to shed his known life on the beach and risk diving into the waves at the end, discovering not only companionship in life but that he could breathe in his new, underwater world.

Fast forward several years to my sophomore year of high school.  My brother had a Nintendo system our parents had given him.  We didn't have a TV so we played games on the computer monitor they'd gotten for the Nintendo.  I'm not sure what prompted it but we decided to rent a movie.  Dead Poets Society.  (The irony of that choice is not lost on me.)  We picked up the movie and a VCR (also rentable at that time) and headed home where we escaped to the basement to hook up the VCR and watch the movie on that computer monitor.  That is, after shutting up the house like we'd all died.  Blinds closed on all the windows.  Doors locked and deadbolts secured.  Every upstairs and outdoor light turned off.  No one could know we were watching a movie (was it a Saturday night? if so, then especially then).  No one should know we were even home.  Even the door from the garage to the kitchen was locked, a door no one could have reached unless they'd broken into the garage to begin with.  To have any chance of seeing the flicker of a screen, someone would've had to have parked, come along the side of the house, opened a tall gate, and snuck down to the middle of the lower level of the backyard in order to peer in through a single window....a venture likely to be unsuccessful because we'd pulled the blinds down.  None of those things....breaking into the house, sneaking around the property....would have been undertaken by the kind souls in our church.  Our ministers did have a key so the element of being surprised was certainly real, but they generally didn't come in the evenings.  Definitely not on a Saturday night.

Many watchings of Dead Poets Society (and other movies) later, we were old pros at the routine.  Go get the movie, come home and secure the house, steal away downstairs.  At the hint of the doorbell, the volume would be silenced.  The walls in that house were 10" thick and the front door a floor away, but there wouldn't be any taking chances.  I'm not sure what we thought would happen in the extraordinarily unlikely case that we were 'found out'.  One of my aunts was married to a man who wasn't in the church and they had a TV in their basement, we'd heard of others who had one in their closet, I dated a guy whose family actually went to the theater....something I did for the first time my senior year when my AP American Lit class went to see Huckleberry Finn during school hours.  And nothing bad happened.  But hide away we did.  Movies were not allowed.  And while my family walked the line on some things, that wasn't one of them.  At least, not publicly.

A few years later when we were moving towards leaving the church our leaving was a closely kept family secret until the very last minute.  You don't grow up in this group unscathed.  You certainly do not walk away from it without consequence.  My mom was adamant that she was leaving on her own terms, not being excommunicated, and my parents knew a number of people to whom that had happened.  The upheaval would be difficult enough...uprooting from the center of life-long social and cultural connections....choosing something that would automatically disrupt extended family ties for a long while and bring a swift end to friendships...  We did a lot of work ahead of time to try to mitigate some of the impact that leaving would bring, but you can't necessarily mitigate the relationship side of that kind of thing.

Over sushi downtown last weekend, a dear friend asked me what my life would be like if I'd stayed in the group.  Tears came to my eyes.  I found myself unable to even think such a thing.  When I was 19 I'd determined to leave no matter what, even if that had to happen before my parents were ready to leave.  I wasn't sure how that would play out, and I had some fears about how it would affect them if that were to be the order of how it happened, but I knew I was done.  I lived my entire life with that tension....being inside and trying desperately to live authentically but even as a child not completely buying into it.  If I'd stayed...I can't imagine.  I'd be utterly depressed, possibly suicidal.  You cannot have your spirit squashed the way mine was and survive.  Which is why I knew I had to get out.

I knew it would all be worth it.  So worth it.  Not without considerable costs, but gaining something invaluable.  Discovering that what I trusted to be true is actually true....that I can, in fact, breathe underwater.


©2015 Mindy Danylak

Monday of the Third Week of Lent: Prayer

The moment my baby boy was born he was placed on my chest where he rested quietly for the next four hours.  We were each attended to with him lying right there.  He gazed at me and blinked but mostly he was still and watchful as we began the process of seeing one another.  I did not experience childbirth as particularly painful; rather, intense.intense.intense, and demanding complete focus, relaxation, and calm.  I felt good when he arrived but I was admittedly exhausted.  It had been hard work.  Very hard work.  "Thank you Jesus!" were my spontaneous words when he finally emerged.

Three days later I stepped into the shower at home and the tears finally came, streaming until the water ran cold.  I believe tears are one of the body’s deepest languages.  There was simply so much to express…my entire life frame moving from pregnancy to labor to birth in a matter of hours, the profoundly cellular engagement every nerve of my body participated in during those hours.  There is no way to process any of it as it happens…you just move through it moment by moment and go about the integrating work later.  But that work happens on the go, blended with the early days of having a newborn and moving into a new life.  Over the coming weeks and months I would find myself at my wits’ end, depressed and feeling utterly lost.  It seemed nothing was the same and I was unfamiliar to myself.  I was tired, yes, although that wasn’t the hardest part.  My baby had a dream temperament but I was in the throes of an adjustment that felt more like crawling through thick mud at midnight.  There were some very, very dark days.  I recall one afternoon when my sweet babe was barely a month old, sitting with him in the bedroom, tears drenching my face and thinking, "I have died.  Something in me has died, and it's just going to be this way.  Maybe in a few years I’ll come back but right now I’m just gone.”

Richard Rohr calls the soul the place where the human meets the divine.  While my prayer upon my son’s birth was a two word offering of gratitude, my prayers during the ensuing several months were one word long.  Or less.  And some combined with words I rarely use.  And there were lots of those prayers.  I gave up mascara for the first few months because I cried so much.  I don’t recall exactly but I think the leaves had turned colors before my husband could leave for work most days without seeing me in tears.  But trying to feel God in the midst of the blur kept me closer to some semblance of self-connection even as I felt pretty unhinged.  Often crying was all the language I had, and I used it unsparingly.  I had to.  And I couldn’t help but do it.  I had to voice what was going on in some way.  And it helped remind me that I was actually alive, with a sliver of hope in my heart.  My soul was right there.

I don't have strong traditions around Lent, but this year Jonathan and I are reading through a collection of poetry, one each evening.  The poets range from Alcuin to Anne Bradstreet to Bob Dylan, and span several centuries with everything from slave spirituals to church hymns to modern day jazz lyrics.  We're loving it.  A couple weeks ago I posted a beautiful piece from Joyce Rupp and this evening I have to share George Herbert's thoughts on prayer.  Prayer can be a bit of a moving target...it's not an end in itself but it somehow seems prone to gathering moss along the way, becoming a 'technique' with a list of required elements, and often laden with expectation.  Herbert disallows that.  His list is a little more sunny than I’d like – there are some less “pretty” ways of authentically praying that he doesn’t mention – but I like it nonetheless.  There have been times when I’ve borrowed ancient prayers and times when I’ve cried out with a simple “Help” and times when my heart was simply known to God.  I’m confident we could all add our own lines to Herbert’s list...the varied ways in which people pray is limitless.  For me, this sonnet underscores the living nature of prayer, the breathing of it.  As I reflect this Lent on the past several months, I’m grateful – deeply grateful – for the voice of prayer, for the intertwining of rest and movement in life even when it feels stuck, and that prayer, even when all seems as dross, is yet dynamic as a reach toward hope and liveliness.

Prayer the Church's banquet, Angels' age,
     God's breath in man returning to his birth,
     The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth;

Engine against th' Almightie, sinners' towre,
     Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
     The six-daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
     Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
     Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The Milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

     Church-bels beyond the stares heard, the soul's bloud,
     The land of spices; something understood.

Prayer (I) by George Herbert, 1633

---------------------
©2014 Mindy Danylak (except George Herbert poem)

The Cosmos Dreams In Me

The cosmos dreams in me
 while I wait in stillness,
 ready to lean a little further
 into the heart of the Holy.

I, a little blip of life,
 a wisp of unassuming love,
 a quickly passing breeze,
 come once more into Lent.

 No need to sign me
 with the black bleeding ash
 of palms, fried and baked.
 I know my humus place.

This Lent I will sail
 on the graced wings of desire,
 yearning to go deeper
 to the place where
 I am one in the One.

 Oh, may I go there soon,
 in the same breath
 that takes me to the stars
 when the cosmos dreams in me.

-- Joyce Rupp --

Seeing Through Fog

The small town I grew up in nestles near the foothills of the Blue Mountains.  In winter, fog settles in like a close friend, creating layers of gray that bathe everything like a soft focus lens.  To this day, I completely love fog....its gentle envelopment and quiet mystery.  I feel comforted and held by fog.  It's sacred space for me.  Rest and solitude.  Light and voice.

Where I live now, I am just a few minutes' walk from Puget Sound where vessels large and small make their way through the steel waters all night long.  This week, the fog arrived....mornings of opaque misty gray, amazing banks of clouds hovering over the waves, lit at night by the full autumn moon.  Tonight a symphony of foghorns sound their way across the water into my home.  It's cold out but my windows are open, inviting in the deep resonating tones as boats make their way through the night.  It's a lonely sound and a calling out.

My sweet baby is down, cuddled in soft pajamas and blankets, his ear inclined toward the open window and the foghorns across the way.  He had a long day with little napping so he's somewhat agitated in his sleep.  He cries out periodically and I go to him, offer the gentle pressure of my hand on his little body, lay my head next to his.  He gently sighs his way to letting go.  His tiny hands wrap mine to his chest even in his semi-sleep.  I listen to the foghorns as he sounds his way to rest, warm tears dampening my cheeks as the struggles of this journey flood my heart.  Even with moments of clarity and the growth of an intensely deep and abiding love, the last four months have been foggy.  This is so hard.  And this moment is so right.

I am saying goodbye to a friend this week, a woman I've known for a short period but whose space in my heart is marked indelibly.  Our tears today were hard.  Very hard.  I don't want to let her go.  I listen to the foghorns and reflect on her experiences.  She has taught me about reaching out, about making moves one at a time, about risks toward unseen hopes, about staying in and naming realities, about the "-ing" of faith and in human relationships.  She reminds me that we do not wrap up life in our places, that we take our stories as we move.  She is courageous and loyal and seeks living honestly, and I am better for her voice.  Our relationship reminds me that when the future, even the very moment, is foggy, there is still a sounding to do.

The foghorns are peace for me tonight as I say goodbye to my friend, pause to settle my sleeping child, wait to hear the resonance of my own heart in the moment.

Despite the dangers in movement, the ship dares not be silent nor still. 
We must move through fog.  And the only way to do that is one layer at a time.

10 years & 1 baby

Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate.

Anne LaMott ... Bird by Bird

Jonathan and I have had a pretty consistent tradition of doing something to celebrate our anniversary every year, be it dinner out or breakfast in, toasting with fizzy water on a picnic or bubbly on the patio, staying in town or exploring on the road.  I almost always write a card for him.  Two years ago I wrote a little piece on the occasion of our 8th wedding anniversary and shared it here.  This year we did something completely different.

Yesterday, Saturday, was our 10th anniversary.  It's the first time we've had an anniversary on a Saturday and we started celebrating Friday night with a bottle of bubbly, both of us hoping for an easy end to a rough day....baby boy received 5 vaccinations on Friday morning and was so out of sorts we skipped going to a dinner group of friends I'd been really looking forward to seeing.  So bubbles hit the glass and we smiled and kissed and toasted.  And before I got two sips in baby boy woke up.  A few hours later I woke up around 3 am to feed him and had a sore throat and stuffy nose, a full-on cold in the brew.  In the morning Jonathan made pancakes and I made oatmeal (I'm doing gluten & dairy free for the little guy...) and it was almost 1 pm by the time we got out of the house.  We stopped at Whole Foods for picnic food & took off for a park we'd never been to for a walk we'd never been on.  The clouds turned dark as we drove north and it started sprinkling just after we turned off the main road.  Ten minutes we later discovered that the bird sanctuary stroll we'd been looking forward to started a couple thousand feet down a gravel road past a water treatment facility, complete with treatment pools and the sheriff making an arrest.  We ended up eating our picnic on a table not far from the parking lot, camouflage fishing boats on the launch nearby, then strolled down the river for a little bit before coming home, where I crashed at 4 pm for an hour with a major headache and Jonathan kept the entering-evening-fussiness baby relatively happy.  I was back in bed by 9 pm with the finally-asleep baby boy while Jonathan babysat a book on data warehousing.  I even forgot to have someone take a picture of the 3 of us.  We plan to reschedule our 10th anniversary.

But in the meantime, I have this to say:

When we brought the little guy home, Jonathan carried him into the house and my sister got our bags out of the car and we set up shop.  And a couple days later all hell broke loose as exhaustion and hormones kicked in and breastfeeding appeared to be an utter failure and my body began to process having been through an unmedicated 12 hours of labor plus 4 hours of pushing out an 8 lb 11 oz baby with a 15 inch noggin.  I honestly never felt like it was more than I could handle, but giving birth to him was hard work.  Really hard.  And my body needed to say so.  On top of that I was super tired and completely overwhelmed.  So the tears started and they lasted for about five weeks.  I'm almost not kidding.

I'll share more of that story eventually, but I give those details simply to tell you that my husband is amazing.  Every morning I would eat the five-star breakfast my sister whipped up, feed the baby, hand him off to her, and then crawl, sobbing, back into bed, where Jonathan would simply hold me until I cried myself into sleep.  Jonathan was so tuned into me and himself, processing through his own experience of everything around our little boy's birth and listening as I processed through mine.  Our little roommate is entirely disruptive.  And entirely good.

I've heard women say they fell madly in love with their baby upon the moment of birth, but honestly I felt that more toward Jonathan than my baby.  I adore my baby, but my sense of need for and connection to Jonathan was primal.  We're both pretty independent and the downside of this is that it's too easy to live more parallel to each other than we'd like.  That took a monumental shift in the first few weeks after our son arrived.

As much as I love celebrating in a festive way, I feel like the real celebration of what Jonathan and I are (which I wrote about here) spoke its most powerful voice in those days when we were both simply trying to keep our heads above water and generally not being able to do so, but were instead able to simply be moved along the drift and tumbled through the waves to a better place.  I don't think there's any great honor in seeking out hard stuff for its own sake, but I do think that the most pivotal experiences in life are usually the most difficult.  At least, that's been the case for me.  And like our own personal development, relationships develop new bonds through those times too.

There is no one on earth I would rather be married with, creating life with, moving through reality with.  Happy 10th anniversary, my love!

Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created,

so that together we become a new creature.

To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take…

If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not,

as many people think, a rejection of freedom;

rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom,

and the risk of love which is permanent;

into that love which is not possession, but participation…

It takes a lifetime to learn another person…

 

When love is not possession, but participation,

then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling,

and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.

 

Madeline L'Engle ... The Irrational Season

Singing with Jamie

I remember the very first time I met my sister-in-law, Jamie.  She was sitting on the brick wall outside the north entrance to Seattle's University Presbyterian Church.  It was a chilly Saturday morning in early 2001 and she was helping out with a work day offered by college students preparing to go abroad for the summer.  I don't remember this, but I'm willing to bet she was holding a Starbucks Americano.  A few months later she, my brother Ned, and two others left for Turkey for the summer.  They came home with carpets and stories and Jamie's filled journals and Ned's newly pierced ears, dyed red hair, and Bono-style sunglasses, and both of them with stars in their eyes.  Shortly thereafter they started dating and I moved to Europe.  Ned called me a few months later when they were engaged in February.  Jamie and I talked on the phone a time or two and she sent me Crayola markers and cards she illustrated and a verse from Zephaniah:

 

On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem:

 

"Fear not, O Zion;
let not your hands grow weak.
The Lord your God is in your midst,
a mighty one who will save;
he will rejoice over you with gladness;
he will quiet you by his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing.

I will gather those of you who mourn for the festival,
so that you will no longer suffer reproach."

I get chills from the words and the song in my own heart is wet with tears.

Jamie and Ned were married the following August on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon.  They made promises and danced and shed tears and laughed and Ned spontaneously kissed the bride at the beginning of the ceremony, prompting a mock rebuke from their pastor that it wasn't time for that yet and charmed, delighted laughter from the gathered crowd.  Their lives continue to play like that.  Four children and eleven years later they are still singing, this time a song that mixes in sorrow but that rings clearly with their thick, abiding love for each other and echoes of profound living.  Here is her song this morning.  I love you, Jamie.

http://nedabenroth.blogspot.com/2013/08/an-update-from-jamie.html?spref=fb

Reached

When my mom was diagnosed with melanoma I had no idea how important people I barely knew would become to me. I've always been one for rich, meaningful friendships and leaned toward having a small circle of close friends over a large gathering of more casual friends. It doesn't have to be one or the other, although for many reasons I found that I could enjoy a larger circle but felt more alive in a closer one. Mom's diagnosis came when I was about 21 years old and I turned to my family and a few close friends in that time. But when her disease progressed I discovered I was also leaning into the larger communities I'd become part of. They were rich, healthy communities, able to help carry the weight of reality in life...the joyous and the grave...for so many of us. It was a natural leaning for me because it was a relational one. I hold the memory of some dark days with the sweetness of those connections. I also saw how a bouyancy formed out of the hearts of people around the globe...people who simply heard a story and followed their hearts' responses.

Now I find myself in different but familiar circumstances with my brother Ned's cancer journey and see again how the comfort of established friendships and the rising of new ones form the love God meets me with. I usually have a lot of bandwidth for life's harder curves, but right now much of my capacity feels used up by the recent birth of my son and the play-out of some postpartum depression. At times I feel the ground in everything going on right now and at times I don't. In all of it I am grateful for friends and family who also live in light of love, shared love, love that embraces and accompanies. We don't usually know why new relationships enter our lives at certain times but I know that the advent of new circles in my life this past year is no accident. They widen my heart without diluting meaning...rather, enriching it. They carry part of my story, helping to remind me of what I know and marking pages for me to come back to. I am deeply grateful for friends old and new....in relating we can be for each other expressions of God's heart.

Ned's in surgery right this very moment and his post this morning shares a note he received from our sister Britt, a true illumination of the kind of love and living that most moves me....moves me toward desire for closeness with those I love and deeper appreciation for the massive host of humanity we are graced to be part of.

See the post here, click on his blog title for all of his posts:

http://nedabenroth.blogspot.com/2013/08/i-consider-myself-luckiest-man-on-face.html?m=1

Ned's Stories

It's a little after 5 am on this Friday morning.  I've been up since 3 am ... fed the baby, tucked him back into bed with Jonathan, and returned to the kitchen nook where I've been staring at the slowly dawning day for the last hour and a half.  The sprinklers are clicking away outside, soft music wafts through the room, a dim light shines above me, and summer's silent night breeze cools the earth as the ground prepares for the upcoming heat of day.  I'm at my dad & stepmom's house in Walla Walla, my hometown, for a weekend gathering of a few close friends & family to celebrate the birth of Jonathan's and my new, 6-week old baby boy.  I really should be back in bed, I know that sleep is one of the things I need most these days.  But the writing I've done in my head is aching to hit the page so I need to be here.  But I'm staring out the window instead...

While I'll share my own recent experiences, I need to start with this, my brother's blog.  Ned is not quite 4 years younger than me.  He's married and has 4 little kids.  He's a creator, an instigator, full of ideas.  He's a dreamer who makes things happen.  He's energetic and smart.  He's forward thinking and a risk taker.  He's reflective and he seeks meaning in everything.  He's fun and longs for joy.  He embodies the essence of Life and lives the wisdom he has come to know.  And he has cancer and he's writing about his story because shared space is where he knows his story already lives.

I love you Nedly!

The Gift of Cancer (& Other Tales)
http://nedabenroth.blogspot.com

Easter

Now is the shining fabric of our day
Torn open, flung apart,
Rent wide by Love.
Never again
The tight, enclosing sky,
The blue bowl,
Or the star-illumined tent.
We are laid open to infinity,
For Easter Love
Has burst His tomb and ours.
Now nothing shelters us
From God's desire --
Not flesh, not sky,
Not stars, not even sin.
Now Glory waits
So He can enter in.
Now does the dance begin.

Elizabeth Rooney

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)