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

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©2014 Mindy Danylak (except George Herbert poem)

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

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)

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.

Holding On

"To be alive is to be vulnerable."
-- Madeline L'Engle

There's an office building about half way down the block that has a steep gravel driveway running behind it, from the street level up to a hilly area in back.  I walk that stretch of Eastlake twice a day.  They were a ways ahead of me but caught my eye immediately when I stepped outside onto the sidewalk.  She, in her faded jeans, worn jacket, tennis shoes and backpack.  He, in black pants, black shirt, black baseball cap and gold hoop earrings.  He had a backpack too, a nicer one.  Purple.  He may have been as old as 22.  She definitely wasn't.  It immediately felt off.

As they walked she ducked her head slightly toward him the way 17-year-old girls do when they're insecure and under the control of someone who they think loves them.  He paid her no heed.  They didn't speak.  He never looked at her.  She was with him but they were not together.  And his grip....  He held on to her, not by the hand but by the top of the wrist.  They weren't going somewhere; he was taking her somewhere.

I was getting closer when he turned up the gravel ramp toward the weeds under the Mercer Street ramp.  By the time I crossed the street they were at the top of the ramp.  He cut off along the chain link fence and they were gone.

I know she was not safe.

There are times when the sense of paralysis is swift and overwhelming.  "You have to do something!" careening through your brain mixes with "There is nothing I can do to stop this."  The whole thing lasted seconds but my thoughts covered a lot of ground in that time.  Angry tears flushed mascara to my lap as I drove home.  I was livid.  With him, with me, with the whole situation.  Should I have tried to talk to them?  I was so far behind I'd have had to make a bit of a scene to do that, but I've made a very public scene before on behalf of a young woman and it worked and I would do it again...and better.  But do it and say...what?  Or call the police?  "Yeah, um, I think the girl down the sidewalk is in trouble; could you send someone right away? and I'll climb the fence and try to find them in the foot-trails under the freeway and if I do I'll follow or stall them until you get here."  Maybe I should have called.  The police here have done a fair amount of work around trafficking issues.  Or maybe I should have attracted attention in hopes that they'd think I needed help.  Sometimes, though, attention places the girl in more danger than she's already in.  The need to prove loyalty intensifies.  The wrist grip tightens.  To notice her is personal.  She is not there for her.  No one should notice her.

And yet, notice is imperative.

There are a couple of women in my life who I wonder about all the time.  They are young but adult, relatively independent, making choices.  They have taken and stopped many a hand extended toward them.  Some of those hands were extended for good, some for ill.  They don't always know the difference.

We have this idea that we can do so much.  We raise money, we write letters, we call our senators.  We host awareness events, we attend conferences, we volunteer on work trips.  We write books, we change laws, we throw people in prison.  We rescue and we provide counseling and job training and we talk about systemic problems.  The modern-day abolition movement runs on the very idea of eradicating slavery forever.  It won't happen.  At least not in this lifetime.  It's good work but I don't believe any of it is enough for all time.

But I do believe in doing it.
And then in doing it again.

"Write me of hope and love, and hearts that endured."
-- Emily Dickinson

A month ago Jonathan & I attended a fundraising dinner in Walla Walla for a nonprofit that provides orphan support in Jamaica.  Money was raised that night for three projects, each of them valuable investments in the furtherance of life for thousands of orphaned children.  A few months ago a I helped a friend with a scholarship fundraiser here in Seattle, benefitting young people trying to move beyond extreme poverty in the Philippines.  Last night I spent hours pouring over the website and mission materials of an orphanage in Kenya.  A gal I've met with visited someone there this year, putting it on my radar.  I'm deeply drawn to this kind of work for a number of reasons.  It's along a path I've been on the past few years.

Noticing is part of who I am. I know that none of these projects can fill all the gaps.  I've been through enough grief to know that sometimes you just have to accept the holes and learn to live with them.  Loss is real.  But it's not all the same.  We all face losses but some losses are more ripping for us than others.  So these projects are important pieces of protection and care, of notice, and where the fill is love the holes can become less sharp around the edges.

Kids become orphans in many ways.  For many of them, their bodies tell heartbreaking stories of abuse and neglect.  In her address at the dinner, Carla Francis Edie, head of Jamaica's Child Development Agency, emphasized that many of the children in their system need extensive psychotherapy to deal with the profound abuses that landed them in the state system to begin with.  I hope that one way or another they'll get it.

But that's not all I hope for.

Carl Robanske, EO's founder, interviewed a 14 year old girl whose story was shared at the dinner.  She held up her hand, showing him the scars she bears from the time her mother flew at her face with a machete.  If she hadn't raised her hand...  Carl spent very little time discussing EO's work but he didn't need to.  He summed it up in 3 words:  "We hold them."

I'm for holding.

I feel haunted by the girl on Eastlake.  I know we all have our versions of this story...real scenarios, and if not our own then others'; and, when others', where we wonder if we should step in or not, where we wonder if we made the wrong decision, whatever the decision was.  There are all kinds of reasons not to, many of them good ones.  The decision is not always straight forward.  I don't berate myself, but I do feel the bind.  But she feels it more.  Well actually I don't know about that -- she may not feel it.  But I know she's in it, and someday it may become more than she can bear.  Regardless of whether it does or not, though, it's heartbreaking that she is bearing it.  Some people say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.  In some cases that may be true and life is found in or from all of it; but in any case I'd rather strength be gained by what we are behind, by the good that we hold, not at the hands of exploitation or pain for its own sake.  I tend to think that's the only way pain makes us stronger....we gain strength through the hands held out to us that offer hope, whether they are the hands of people or the hands of Hope in the heart.  It's a given that there will be pain and grief.  I don't deny that nor, even in my losses, do I wish it away.  But it should not be the only thing that grows us.

I am just home from a week in Alabama and South Carolina, where I spent hours and hours listening to women tell defining stories from their lives. Holding was thematic, literally for some...holding a dying child, wanting to be held by a deceased mother, holding a depressed husband, dreams of a grandfather's hands. And then there's that holding of the wrist...  Holding is not neutral. And at its best it won't be enough either. But where it is loving presence and support, affirmation of human value, rest, redemptive touch and respectful offering, it is good.

I'm for that.

_________________
©2011 Mindy Danylak

see also at:
http://geographyofgrace.com/2012/10/08/holding-on/

Good-bye Robin

"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."
-- Emily Dickinson

A few weeks ago I stood in the foyer at College Place Presbyterian Church on Easter morning, reading a letter my mom wrote over a decade ago to our pastor and his wife, Robin & Kriss Peterson.  "They thought we should have this," Mel said, handing the envelope to me.  "Do you want to read it?"  Mom's handwriting spread across the paper expressing her gratitude for Robin & Kriss's kindness and care, how she felt about her upcoming treatment process, her resonance with him as the two of them moved through cancer diagnoses together.  Several months later he & Doug Barram together led my family down the aisle at her memorial service.

I handed the card back to my sister, thinking about him.  Mom was not alone...there are thousands of people whose lives are peppered with these kinds of stories, who Robin walked with in their life and whose casket he stood by in their death...many kinds of aisles people do not want to walk alone...the moments that mean "to live."

Robin Peterson died yesterday.

Walking will continue but it does feel like the earth takes a brief pause to re-adjust itself when people die.  The very lilt of a day is altered by breath, our own and others'.

I am grateful to have known this man who lived the kind of startle that is awakening...who tended hearts and animals with equal passion...who cared for his land and prayed for his community...who saw and who was with and who recalled...who spoke the language of the soul...who sang joy and whispered peace...who rained kindness and lived generously...who was honest about himself and grieved his losses...who understood and entered the story...who pursued love.

Thankful tears fall for you.
Good-bye, Robin.

Easter

Holy Week is a lesson in how life is.  Some Christians emphasize celebrating the risen Christ and triumph over death, others emphasize his death, the darkness and the grave.  But love is both.  Both are real and important, for themselves and for each other.  I am by nature more optimistic than pessimistic, but I have also known more pain than I'd like to have known for my age.  I know it's both.  I'm feeling a little blah lately; and, even with that being said, I think this year I'm landing more in the celebratory mood around Easter.  Maybe I need it as the balance for where I am.  At any rate, this coming Sunday is Easter and I can't wait.  I've been looking forward to it for a year.

I didn't grow up celebrating Easter.  My family was quite 'religiously involved' but the group we were in didn't observe any of the traditional Christian liturgial seasons...Christmas, Lent, Holy Week, Pentecost, Ordinary Time...none of that.  Actually, I didn't even know there was such a thing as a church calendar until my early 20s.  No, we weren't Jehovah's Witness...it was probably not a group most of you have ever heard of unless you know me and we've talked about it or you grew up in or around it yourself.  There's some information out there but it doesn't convey the experience.  I'll share more of my story someday when I get around to writing it, but for now I'll just say that it was a Christian-esque group with some idiosyncracies that included not paying attention to the church calendar.

So the group didn't do Easter.  I knew that many people celebrated Christmas as a religious holiday, although we celebrated it as a fun family holiday.  But Easter was a mystery, almost entirely off my radar, and we didn't do anything around it.  I vaguely remember two of my aunts talking about their families gathering for Easter...the big dinner and the family photos and all that but I never understood what the big deal was.  A couple years Mom hid plastic eggs full of foil-wrapped chocolates around the house but it was a little odd.  I understood gathering for Christmas, because we did that.  But Easter?  It felt like any other Sunday to me.  I barely noticed that it was Easter at all, let alone that it meant anything.  My relatives were all in the same religious group as us so I figured it was just something they did for some reason that my family didn't do.  I let it go and never wondered about it.  Then we left the group in 1995 and it was sometime in those years, so probably in the early 90s, that I realized that on Easter Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.  But realizing it, even observing it every year, didn't mean I developed an attachment to it.  Until last year.  Before that, there were a just couple years that stood out as significant Easter seasons for me.

2002.  I was living in the Czech Republic that year and took the train up to Krakow for the weekend with Brooke, Megan and Priya.  We attended mass at the Dominikanie Krakow (Dominican Church and Monastery) then walked up to Wawel Castle.  Poland has been a santuary for me...it had been a rough couple years and the gorgeous, sunny, warm Krakow afternoon, in the company of dear friends, and under the canopy of a very old church and traditon, was just what my battered heart needed.  We wandered through Josefov where a few boys threw water balloons at us.  I think Brooke threw one back.  Polish tradition.  The city was alive with people -- people in church, people walking, people dressed to the nines, people just wandering around, out and about enjoying the day.  At the castle I sat down on a low stone wall, watching people and writing, enjoying the sunshine and the Bach Unaccompanied wafting from the music shop across the lawn.  I was going through a period of deeply missing Mom and it was hard to connect with the liturgy; but the liveliness all around me sank in...the transcendence of God.  I felt the truth of Easter...the exhasution and the relief...the beauty.  I brought home a double-cd set of the Bach.

2003.  The year Jonathan and I got married.  We went to church on Easter Sunday.  I wore a lime green silk dress.  I love that dress.  I still have it.  I bought it on a sale at Talbot's on my way to my friends Matt and Sharon's wedding in Portland right after I moved back from the Czech Republic in summer 2002.  Jonathan also taught me that spring how to dye eggs in the (his) Ukranian tradition.  Pysanky.  He actually got college credit for it and does amazing work.  His brother came to visit this past weekend and we dyed eggs most of Saturday.  Jonathan puts on Rachmaninoff Vespers, we cover the table with brown craft paper, and we work.  Eggs are fragile.  Sometimes the shells are left in pieces, the insides running all over your hands.  Getting good at the craft necessarily involves becoming ok with brokenness.  You have to love the creating, not just the final piece.

A few weeks ago we drove to Portland to visit our friends Alex and Jessica and we went to church with them on Sunday.  It's a fairly small, very unassuming little building.  Warm, friendly people.  We sang old hymns and all the people prayed and I was captured by the amazing cross hanging on the front wall...grape vines stretched out, wrapped with these intricate hand-knit roses of varying sizes, in the most amazing red you've ever seen.  And I remembered.

Last year we went to Walla Walla, my hometown, for Easter weekend.  Jonathan and I don't go to to church much right now.  That's another story too and you shouldn't read much into that.  I just say it to provide a contrast - my church in Walla Walla is a special place for me.  When we're in town we almost always go.  It's the church my family started going to shortly after we left the old group.  I feel at home there.  I have history there and people there.  I moved away from Walla Walla a few months after we left the group, but that church has always felt like mine.  I'd heard about their tradition on Easter but never been in town for it.  You take a large wooden cross. You wrap it in chicken wire. At the end of the service all the kids walk up the center aisle.  As each child comes forward they give their flowers to an adult who tucks the flowers here and there into the chicken wire, and as the congregation sings the cross blooms.

It moved me beyond anything I expected.  I sat there singing and as the cross bloomed I felt breathless.  There were dozens and dozens of children, and within seconds the line of kiddos filled the sanctuary.  One of the adults tossed my sister and me a glance asking for help.  We started taking flowers from the kids' hands, anchoring the stems under the chicken wire.  By that time the flowers had been clutched in little hands for a long time and they weren't in the greatest of condition; but it didn't matter.  I sang and watched the congregation as I took the flowers and bloomed the cross, and something inside me found familiarity.  I saw my mom's close friend Kathleen sitting out there and thought, "yes, something is coming full circle here."  It was like I was going through my first communion or something.  I found Easter.  Easter now had a participation that gave it a personal, experiential meaning for me, one that was rooted in beauty and creativity.  It's where elements once living are cut down and then give life again.  It's where I participate with my body and my soul, singing and watching and blooming.  It's where profound Love is honored and remembered and celebrated.

So we're going again this year. We will visit with my family and take care of our 2 year old nephew while my sister and her family go celebrate my brother-in-law's grandpa's 90th birthday for the day. Then Sunday morning we'll get up and go to church. We'll go to the early service. Usually we go to the later service because getting everyone out the door for the early service is just asking too much. But on Easter we go early. The kids each carry a little fistfull of flowers cut from their (or the neighbors'...) lawn and climb into the car and off we go.

I will take my blah-ness with me.  I'll take my tiredness with me.  I'll take my losses and my questions with me.  And I'll take joy.  I will find rest and comfort, energy and pleasure, meaning and depth.  I'll find Love and Beauty.  And at the table on Sunday afternoon, I will look around me and be profoundly grateful for Life.

"Love" by George Herbert

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
   Guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
   From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
   If I lacked any thing.
"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here."
   Love said, "You shall be he."
"I the unkind, ungratefull? Ah my deare,
   I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
   "Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame
   Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," sayes Love, "who bore the blame?"
   "My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," sayes Love, "and taste my meat."
   So I did sit and eat.

Daily Bread

"Food is nothing less than sacrament."
-- Leslie Leyland Fields, "The Spirit of Food"

I'm not much of a baker...yeast freaks me out.  But I love cooking, and meals are a favorite way for Jonathan & me to spend time with people.  I always light candles and I know that the typical tea-light will last about 3 hours.  When friends are over, we rarely leave the table before the tea-lights have burned to silent pools in their holders.

I'm reading a book right now called "The Spirit of Food."  Each chapter is written by a different person, sharing stories about the intersections of faith & food in their lives.  Some chapters are better than others.  But I love the Introduction.  It makes my very soul water.  I've read lots of these lately -- The Spirit of Food edited by Leslie Leyland Fields; Take This Bread by Sara Miles; Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver; and others.  They make me feel alive.  And they make me want to plan meals & invite friends & track down the best-tasting whole ingredients possible.  Flavors & tastes fascinate me, plus it's just relaxing for me to chop an onion or mince garlic or stir a pot or flip french toast...and I love eating with friends so it works well!

My sister Melody is an incredible cook.  She doesn't just understand gourmet, the science and the art of ingredients & mixing and combining, she was born as part of the definition.  There are some people who learn & others who are.  She is both.  She is a student and a natural.  I've learned a lot from her over the years.  She puts together meals the mouth remembers.  I love watching her kitchen turn into a tornado of flour dustings and spices and heavy knives on butcher block cutting boards, pottery bowls of spiced shrimp in the oven and mixing bowls of sliced peaches on the counter and double boilers of melting chocolate on the stove, her 3 kids swirling around the room.  Sometimes, preparing for holidays or special occasions, we all eat dinner and then put the kids to bed, cooking more later in the middle of the night, talking all the while.  The best conversations happen at those times.  A meal at her home is a thing of delight.  It feels like home to me.  It feels like her.  It feels like love.

I'm not a fancy cook.  I don't have the patience for it.  But I have a version of her passion.  I like watching prosecco bubbles climb the edges of a flute, or hearing the sizzle of a shallot in hot olive oil.  I like the oily pucker of an olive and the relief of sea salt on chocolate covered caramels.  I love how sage and rosemary permeate a kitchen or fresh basil perfumes mozzarella.  I love the artistry of a table & making sure each person has space.  I like the forethought....thinking about who's coming & what they like & don't like, how I get to become more creative as a cook for friends who have allergies or are vegetarian or who are Muslim so don't eat pork.  I love to anticipate.

When we have friends for dinner we start with a toast.  As people gather toward the table Jonathan pours.  Each person gets a crystal shot of pomegranate vodka and we raise our glasses at the same time.  I love hearing Jonathan offer a toast at the beginning of the meal.  A couple weeks ago it was a twist on Julius Ceasar's "veni, vidi, vici" (I came, I saw, I conquered) -- he told this little story & ended by toasting with "I came, I ate, I stayed" (in Latin).  We were having dinner with 2 couples, old friends and new friends.  It was the first time the 6 of us had all been together so it was perfect!  A few years ago at a dinner with 3 couples who didn't know each other, Jonathan whipped out the New Testament & read that story of Jesus cursing the fig tree, and then toasted "for faith that can wither fig trees." !!  That one made me nervous because it was so off the wall but conversation never lagged and now I recall it with a smile.

When I think about my growing up years, family circles around the kitchen table, or company in the living room, dessert & coffee in hand, invariably pop to mind quickly.  I grew up with groups around the table & loved it.  We had people for Sunday dinner virtually every week.  My mom didn't especially love cooking but she cared widely for people.  I learned from my mom about hospitality, about blends, about thinking about who would be present, about caring, and about ways of expressing myself in the midst of all that.

Conversation happens at tables.  Life is shared.  Cooking & eating is creating & creative space for me.  It's narrative.  It's creative.  It's life and conversing.  With every meal there's a story to create, a story to experience.  The arc unfolds across the duration of the meal, each person at the table helping write it.  The story cannot be controlled, it can only be joined in.  Life and faith are no different.

Next week I'm having a cooking class in my kitchen with a few friends.  We'll learn a few kitchen tricks and drink a glass of wine.  Women who love cooking will be right at home, and those who consider themselves inexperienced & hopelessly lost cooks will go home with a trick up her sleeve & a guaranteed successful meal she can make at home.  But mostly we'll do it together.  We'll prepare a meal together, and we'll eat it together.  Together being the operative word.  I don't mind being alone.  When I'm by myself I eat things like bread & cheese with sparkling water.  Spinach leaves wilted with a drizzle of warm olive oil.  Snap peas tossed in a pan with a little garlic.  A scallop wrapped in proscuitto, roasted in lemon zest & black pepper.  Being alone is no excuse for eating badly.  Food speaks.  But eating it together is better.

"This is the first salmon of the season.  You all know the tradition that fishermen kiss the first fish.  Anyone do that today?"  My oldest son rolls his eyes, wanting only to eat.  I hurry on.

"I'm going to read something before we start."

I pull my Bible onto the table, and before anyone can resist, I begin:
"This is from the book of Job:

But ask the animals and they will teach you,

Or the birds of the air, and they will tell you;

Or speak to the earth and it will teach you,

Or let the fish of the sea inform you.

Which of all these does not know

That the hand of the Lord has done this?

In his hand is the life of every creature

And the breath of all mankind.

Everyone listens, watching the food.  I want to say far more, to deliver a sermon, but I stop, knowing the wafers of fish on our tongues will deliver its own message."

-- Leslie Leyland Fields, "The Spirit of Food"

A scandal afoot

Charissa Jones is one of the world's most amazing women. She is kind, fun, gracious, strong, gentle, and wise. To be with her is to experience the best of what it is to be a woman, to be a person. I also just simply enjoy her company. Charissa speaks from time to time at her church, a beautiful Episcopal parish in Seattle. Here (and below...if this isn't working) is a link to a sermon she gave in December. I always love hearing about women!

http://www.epiphanyseattle.org/media/2010Dec19/Sermon.mp3

Thoughts on Haiti

Last week we demolished a massive brick & concrete block fireplace in our living room and dumped the rubble on our front lawn. The pile is about 3 feet high, 30 feet long, and 10 feet across. It weighs several tons and it gives off a strong, concretey sooty smell when it’s wet from the rain…which we’ve been having virtually non-stop for over a week now. All that remains where the original fireplace stood is under the living room floor…a long trough filled with broken bricks and blocks. On Monday night, I looked at that trough and turned to Jonathan. “That’s the beginning of what I imagine when I think of earthquake rubble,” I commented.

Then Tuesday happened.

Driving to work Wednesday my eyes spontaneously filled with tears as I listened to news reports of damage and death and destruction in Haiti. It was early…despair didn’t seem to be setting in but desperation seemed palpable, even across a radio broadcast. As I listened while driving home later in the day, I became aware that I was shaking my head…back and forth…no, no, no…how long had I been shaking my head? Tears streamed down my face…involuntary, effortless, unstoppable.

Ten years ago that morning (January 13) I flew to Manila with 9 friends for 10 days. The first day we were packed into a jeep and driven through the sweltering city. It was my first glimpse of people living in cardboard boxes, the overwhelming smell saturating the humid air, kids blocking the road begging for anything you’d give them. The sunsets were amazing but children’s lungs look like they’ve been life-long smokers due to the smog. Poverty and street life in a devastating collision. On January 24 I went back to work and one of my colleagues asked how it had been. I looked at her and replied my honest reality. “I would be willing to change everything in my life.”

I had no idea. Six months later, I left the family law firm I’d worked for since before I finished college. I took a position with a financial services firm that I held for a few months. Mom died before Thanksgiving. A year later I moved to the Czech Republic and less than a month after arriving I found myself one weekend in Cheb, on the western border with Germany. The area was first settled around 800 AD. Population today is around 30,000. And it is a hub for child prostitution and human trafficking through Europe. Babies are sold to pedophiles. I’m not kidding.

I arrived home and looked at that pile on the front lawn. My house is ripped up and compared to my regular life it’s highly inconvenient. But in comparison, it’s not. Not really. My rubble is organized. It’s creative. I planned for it and paid for it. It’s even government sanctioned…I have a permit for it. I have a truck coming to take it away. And there’s no one under there, dead or dying, reaching out with an empty hand or a gasping plea for help.

Haiti. Death, injury, disease, trauma, government, shock, displacement, refugees, exploitation. And that was off the top of my head. For nearly 15 years now my life and work have linked with people in difficult and sometimes dire situations. I would never presume to “get it”…to relate, understand…especially in this situation. That might be the height of arrogance. But in my humanity I have been caught differently with this one…the intersection of reality and my heart and things brewing right now. The inclination is strong to find a way to “do something”…“to go.” And for some people, that is entirely appropriate and needed. For all kinds of reasons, that’s not really what I should do right now. But one thing I do know is that moments create movements. Some moments live in their own kind of time…they are part of and they are different from…and they need to be honored as such. And even when they are part of something else it can all be so imperceptible. But in their coagulating they create something. I have been here before. Each time it’s different but hazily familiar, and somehow that sense is instantly recognizable. I know this place. I’ve been knowing it for some time. And I suspect that, in your own life, you do too.

I don’t often carry Bible verses in my mind, but I do carry images I see when I read them. Among the most vivid is the Old Testament story of when the Israelites crossed the Jordan River. After they were safely on the other side, they gathered stones and created memorials. These stones represented reminders for them. I can see them, walking, deciding which to put down and leave behind, which one to carry…gathering them together and telling the story. I have released and collected some stones over the years…some literal, some figurative…some I’ve selected, some were given to me. Some of them carry meaning, but mostly the meaning is in the story. I’m not sure yet what I will “do” around Haiti and what is happening there. But one thing I do know…I will save some of those stones in my front yard. It is part of my movement right now. It’s part of Haiti in my life. And those stones and broken bricks in Haiti…they’re not going away any time soon.

©2010 Mindy Danylak

Relationship Disaster: "Twilight" or "Sadomasochistic Teenage Erotica" ?

There is a lot going on in this recent blog entry from Kimberly George and some of you may be drawn to other parts of it, but I wanted to share the following section about the violence at work in the "Twilight" stories. While I admit to not having read the series, I very much share Kimberly's concern about models for relationships -- and this is not the first time I've heard the word "heroin" in a description of Bella & Edward's relationship. For those of you who have read these, what do you think?

What Twilight Has to Teach: Today’s Normative Gender Restrictions and the Marriage of Sex and Violence

As we talk about normative gender restrictions, I think it’s important to highlight one extremely popular script currently in vogue, particularly for teenagers: the bestselling Twilight books and movies. The second book in the series, New Moon, just came out this fall as a movie. The gender stereotypes in these stories are as damaging as any of the religious beliefs around gender we have so often analyzed on our blog. Here, I will restrict my comments to the original book in the series, Twilight, which is the only one I have read, but reading summaries of the others in the series has assured me the problematic gender scripts only get worse.

The drama of this original, bestseller revolves around the awkward Bella and the “god-like” Edward falling tragically in love. She is the new girl in town who wins the attention of the aloof, mysterious sex symbol. He is a 108-year-old vampire in teenage form who is disturbingly volatile and controlling, but only because he “loves her” and is trying to “protect” her. Our vampire-hero is so intensely moody—the reader late finds out— because he is edgy from fighting his vintage patriarchal battle: Bella’s so darn attractive to him, that he is in immediate danger of losing all control, dominating her, and leaving her dead. And so we read on—never quite sure if Bella will end up being a bloody mess should the teenagers decide to consummate their relationship. The intimacy in this book is like heroin—thrilling, dangerous, and flirting with death—and the drama of it makes Twilight a page-turner.

I am horrified, to say the least, by the 498-pages of dysfunction that passes as romantic entertainment in Twilight. Just when did “sadomasochistic teenage erotica” (as my colleague Kj Swanson terms it over at her brilliant blog) become so overwhelmingly popular? Twilight is unabashed in its reflection of some of the worst elements of our culture’s patriarchal dysfunctions: domestic violence patterns, eroticized violence deemed “romance,” and harmful power differentials between men and women that are either not noticed or are mindlessly condoned. In fact, the power differentials in this book are the very foundation of its plot. Bella is constantly being saved and infantilized by Edward; his moods continually switch from angry to intimate like a typical perpetrator; and the reader awaits whether the sexual tension between the characters will lead to Edward enacting violence toward Bella. It is her sexual attractiveness that arouses his desire to suck her blood and kill her. Because of how attractive she is to him, she is forbidden to initiate any physical relationship. It all must be led by him, and she must risk her life during any moment of intimacy.

And this is what teenagers (and many adults) are imbibing?

Remember

Last Saturday, Seattle Police Officer Timothy Brenton was shot & killed as he sat in his patrol car on the side of a neighborhood street. His funeral procession was yesterday morning. The two-hour procession covered several miles & involved over 1000 vehicles and law enforcement officers from across the continent. Images from along the procession route are very moving...saulting boy scouts, grieving citizens, honor guards, drums and bagpipes, dark vehicles moving slowly through the morning drizzle.

I always feel a momentary pause well up from my deepest heart when I see funeral processions. The ritual and tradition of acknowledging death has been a powerful thing for me, ever since early childhood. I honestly do not remember the first funerals I attended - I was probably still a baby. In the religious group I grew up in (which my family left in May 1995 when I was 20), we went to lots of them. There were a lot of old people in the group, plus that's one of the things the people in that group just do a lot of (funeral-going). There was plenty about the content of those funerals that was lacking, preachy, and frustratingly impersonal; and there were plenty of funerals we went to simply because culturally in the group that was what you did; but all the same, funerals became very normal and non-frightening for me. In the year or two before we left the group and since then, funeral-going has become a very different thing for me.

My mom's name is Marion Diane Dahlin Abenroth. Everyone called her Diane since Marion was my gandmother's name too. She was born November 20, 1948. Next week marks the day my she died, November 13, 2000. Ten months after her death, I checked into a small hotel in a little town a couple hours north of Seattle and proceeded to write down every detail I could recall of Mom's death and the days surrounding it. The writing process I went through was highly intentional, ultimately good, very relieving, and wrenchingly excrutiating; and remembering it all...those days around her death & those days when I wrote...is painful. There are books to write about all those days, and each day leading up to & following them. But for purposes of this writing, I'll simply share pictures I carry from the day of her funeral. Her funeral was November 18, two days before her 52nd birthday, at the Presbyterian church my parents had been attending for a few years. My sister & I watched through the windows as car after car drove into the lot. Over 500 people attended the service. I bodily remember walking down the center aisle to the front pew of the church...Dewight, Melody, Me, Dad, Ned. I distinctly remember the five of us standing up in that pew at the end of the service while each person filed past Mom's rose-covered casket. In the midst of our own grief, I think my family were the comfort-providers, simply in standing there, acknowledging reality, looking each mourner in the eye and holding their hand momentarily as they walked past.

Although the two are intertwined, I think sometimes I feel more myself in moments of mourning than I do in celebration. I could stand being better at celebrating - that's one of the things the group I grew up in was not good at. But I'm grateful that marking death & grief feels organic for me because in our culture it seems the harder part. I remember the day we picked out Mom's casket...it was a Wednesday morning & I had a raging headache...standing in that room in the funeral home, feeling utter disbelief at what we were doing...I remember telling Dad, "We should NOT be doing this." We had to but everything in me resists having had to. The week seemed blurry...sort of on auto-pilot, but the day of the funeral I felt grounded until the end when I just wanted everyone to leave my family home and go away. But after that... I felt like the world should stop. My very mother had died and everyone was just going on with life. There were a blessed handful who remembered, who mentioned, who waited, who spoke...who still do that.

I didn't want to wear black for a year but I understand something of that tradition. It's difficult for Americans to be present in mourning. It is granted such a brief allotment of time in the rhythm of our days, and it's relegated to the realm of privacy. I can relate to people's confusion around what to do, what to say. But the failure to even simply say that to one who is grieving bothers me because more often than not the default then is silence. Not expressing uncertainty, not acknowledgment, but silence.

Last month I attended my uncle's funeral in Spokane. The funeral home is next to the cemetery where my maternal grandparents and other family members are buried so before the service Jonathan & I drove into the cemetery and made our way quietly to their section. I got out of the car and walked to Grandma's grave. I stood there in the barren, freezing morning and felt profoundly grateful that, even with the inadequacy of our efforts, we humans do this kind of thing. Every culture has its way...varying of course from people to people...but we humans do not fully just ignore death and the dead, and when it does happen that way we feel like something is very wrong. Life matters. Death is real. Pausing helps. Traditions can be supportive & healthy. These kinds of rituals and observances always make me feel the fundamental beauty and sacredness of mourning & remembrance.

©2009 Mindy Danylak

Borderlands

there is a place
beyond the border
where love grows
and where peace
is not the frozen silence . . .

to get to that place you have to
go or be pushed out
beyond the borders,
to where it is lonely, fearful,
threatening, unknown.

only after you have wandered
for a long time in the dark
do you begin to bump into others
also branded, exiled,
border crossers,
and find you walk on
common ground.

it is not an easy place to be,
this place beyond the borders.
but it is a good place to be.

Kathy Galloway
(the above is an extraction - see first comment below for the full piece)