The Cold
How exactly good it is
to know myself
in the solitude of winter,
my body containing its own
warmth, divided from all
by the cold; and to go
separate and sure
among the trees cleanly
divided, thinking of you
perfect too in your solitude,
your life withdrawn into
your own keeping
–to be clear, poised
in perfect self-suspension
toward you, as though frozen.
And having known fully the
goodness of that, it will be
good also to melt.
~Wendell Berry
Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.
~Frederick Buechner
I’m not paying close enough attention if I’m too busy looking for kleenex. It seems the last couple weeks I have had more than ample opportunity to find out the secret of who I am, where I have come from and where I am to be next, and I’m loading my pockets with kleenex, just in case.
It mostly has to do with welcoming our children and their friends back home for the holidays to become a full out noisy messy chaotic household again, with lots of music and laughter and laundry and meal preparation. It is about singing grace together before a meal and choking on precious words of gratitude. It certainly has to do with bidding farewell again, as we began to do a few hours ago in the middle of the night and will do again in two days and again in two weeks, to gather them in for the hug and then unclasping and letting go, urging and encouraging them to go where their hearts are telling them they are needed and called to be. I too was let go once and though I would look back, too often in tears, I knew to set my face toward the future. It led me here, to this farm, this marriage, this family, this work, to more tears, to more letting go, as it will continue if I live long enough to weep again and again with gusto and grace.
This is where I should go next: to love so much and so deeply that letting go is so hard that tears are no longer unexpected or a mystery to me. They release the fullness that can no longer be contained: God’s still small voice spilling down my cheeks drop by drop. No kleenex needed. Let it flow.
“How joyful to be together, alone as when we first were joined in our little house by the river long ago, except that now we know each other, as we did not then; and now instead of two stories fumbling to meet, we belong to one story that the two, joining, made. And now we touch each other with the tenderness of mortals, who know themselves…”
Wendell Berry
Thirty one years ago today we became one story, a story still being told. What joy it is to know you and be known by you!
May our story have many more chapters celebrating the poetry of life together, with a minimum of plot twists and cliffhangers.
We’ll trust the Author who touches us with Words as tenderly as we touch each other. It is bliss to love and be loved from the first page to the last.
“Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.”
Emily Dickinson
My adjustment to our children being grown and away from home has been slow: I instinctively grab too many plates and utensils when setting the table, the laundry and dishwasher loads seem skimpy but I wash anyway, the tidiness of their bedrooms is frankly disturbing as I pass by. I need a little mess and noise around to feel that living is actually happening under this roof and that all is well.
Now it has been three days since my husband went out of town for a work-related conference and I’m knocking around an empty unbearably oversized house, wondering what to do with myself.
I have a serious case of the dwindles. The cure will be arriving back home tonight, and another fix arrives on an airplane a week from tomorrow, followed by two other remedies arriving for shorter summer visits in a month or so. I realize, like the fading of the dwindled dawn, these are cycles to which I must adapt, appreciate for what they restore in me, and then be willing to let them go.
But now I know: time without you diminishes me.
I’m a bit confused here.
While more states, including my own, grant the legal right to marry to same sex couples, more and more heterosexual couples are rejecting official marriage that includes a signed “piece of paper”, preferring to bear their children out of wedlock. What one minority segment of U.S. society has fought hard for over several decades, now granted through society’s expanding acceptance and tolerance of diverse lifestyles, the heterosexual majority increasingly deems marriage worthless and to be avoided.
Can someone shed some light on what is going on here?
I’m all for celebrating legal sanctioning of personal commitment. I have seen what happens when there is no commitment to commitment. Without steadfast loyalty, dependability, predictability, and honoring of promises made, relationships flounder and fizzle, descending into selfish silos of an “every person for themselves” approach to life. I watched it happen late in my parents’ marriage as their focus became less on the inherent value of the union of two people who made vows before God to stay together through thick and thin, and more on what’s best for the individual when needs go unmet. Any divorce is heartbreaking and painful, but the implosion of a 35 year marriage is truly tragic and unnecessary. Ironically, their original commitment reignited ten years later as they married again for the last few years of my father’s life.
There are now too many scarred and scared young people unwilling to take the step of marriage, having grown up inside the back and forth visitation homes of divorce or in a home offering no significant modeling of long term emotional commitment. Even monogamous devotion to a new sexual partner is seen as unnecessarily restrictive, while an unplanned new life conceived within that relationship becomes too easily postponed until it is “convenient” for the unprepared parents. We have forgotten what promises mean, what stability represents to a relationship and children, how trusting obedience to the longevity of the union should trump short term individual desires.
My clinic day increasingly is filled with the detritus of failed and failing relationships. Too many of my young adult patients who describe symptoms of depression and anxiety struggle with whether they want to continue to live at all, sometimes expressing their misery in escalating self harming behaviors or anesthetizing with alcohol or recreational drugs. They describe the chaos of parents living sequentially with multiple partners, of no certain “home” outside their school dorm or apartment, unsolvable complications with half- and step- sibling relationships, and all too frequently financial uncertainty. Many grew up supervised by TV and computer games rather than being held accountable to (mostly absent) parental expectations. They are more comfortable with on-line communication than risk being truthful about who they really are with flesh and blood people they see every day. They fear failure as they have seldom been allowed to make mistakes and subsequently experience forgiveness and grace from those who love them. They are emotional orphans.
In short, they know little about how love manifests through self-sacrifice and faithfulness.
Keeping commitment becomes the light that illuminates our lives, as reliable as the fact the sun rises every morning.
At least on that we can depend.
On Halloween day in 1985, I packed up my clothes, a roll up mattress and a few kitchen things, locked our rental house door for the last time, climbed in my car and headed north out of Seattle. I don’t recall looking back after nine years in the city. My husband had moved to Whatcom County two months before to start his new job. I had stayed behind to wrap up my Group Health practice in the Rainier Valley of Seattle. I was leaving the city for a rural setting and an uncertain professional future.
I knew two things for sure: I was finally several months pregnant after a miscarriage and two years of infertility, so a family was on its way, and we were going to live in our own house, not just a rental, complete with five acres and a barn. A real (sort of) farm. Since no farm can be complete without animals, I stopped at the first pet store I drove past and found two little sister tortoise shell calico kittens just waiting for new adventures in farmland. Their box was packed into the one spot left beside me in my little Mazda. With that simple commitment to raise and nurture those kittens, life seemed very complete.
I will never forget the freedom I felt on that drive north. The highway seemed more open, the fall colors more vibrant, the wind more brisk, our baby happily kicking my stomach, the kittens plaintively mewing from their box. There seemed to be so much potential though I had just left behind the greatest job that could be found in a city: the ideal family practice with a delightfully diverse patient population of African Americans, Cambodians, Laotians, Vietnamese, Muslims and Orthodox Jews. I would never know so much variety of background and perspective again and if I could have packed them all with me into the Mazda, I would have.
We started our farm with those kittens dubbed Nutmeg and Oregano, soon adding a dog Tango, then a Haflinger horse Greta, then goats Tamsen and her kids, a few geese, chickens, Fiona the Highland cow, then another Haflinger Hans and another, Tamara. I worked as a fill in locums doctor in four different clinics before our first baby, Nate, was born. Again, new commitments and life felt complete– but not for long, as we soon added another baby, Ben and then another, Lea. Then it really was complete. Or so I thought.
Twenty six years later our children are grown and gone, off to their own adventures beyond the farm, each to a different big city. A few cats, two dogs, and a hand full of ponies remain. We are grayer, enjoy our naps and the quiet of the nights and weekends. Our second larger farm seems more than we can realistically manage by ourselves in our spare time. My work evolved from four small jobs to two decades of two part time jobs to one more than full time job that fits me like a well worn sweater 24 hours a day. My husband is talking retirement in a few years. I’m not so sure for myself. I have never not worked.
The freedom I felt watching Seattle disappear in the rear view mirror meant I no longer sat captive in freeway rush hour bumper to bumper traffic jams for an hour, but now commute through farm fields, watching eagles fly, and new calves licked by their mamas. I am part of a community in a way I never could muster in the city, stopping to visit with friends at the grocery store, playing piano at church and serving on various boards. I love how our home sits in the midst of woods and corn fields, with swans overhead and salmon in nearby streams. The snowy Cascades greet me in the morning and the sunset over Puget Sound bids me good night.
It all started one Halloween day with two orange and black kittens beside me in a little Mazda and a husband waiting for my homecoming 100 miles north. Now, twenty six years and three grown children later, we find ourselves on our own yet again, still pregnant with possibility for our future together.
It’s spring. My dove just hatched her single egg yesterday after two weeks of faithful brooding. I was puzzled when I approached the dove house as she was in the outside enclosure sunning herself for the first time in those two weeks. Inside, on the nest, her mate was dutifully taking his turn sitting atop the hatchling, making sure the little naked baby didn’t get cold in the brisk morning temperature. He was giving her a break from her 24/7 job yet he himself had been her constant companion during those two weeks, sitting on a perch where he could watch her and protect her and the egg if the need arose. Who was going to give him a break from his vigilance?
They are monogamous and committed partners, these two. It does my heart good to see such instinctive drive to cooperate together to raise the next generation. There are a few species who prove over and over again how beneficial it is when two parents work together to raise the young. I’m not always sure humans are one of those species. Monogamy is taking a heavy beating in today’s society.
More children are born out of wedlock now than to married parents. More children grow up in single parent homes than in homes with two parents. More children are left alone to their own care, or to the care of the internet or television than at any time in history. They are raising themselves~~disastrously. There is no one sitting on the nest.
In the mean time the adults are struggling to sort out just what they want for themselves. While one segment of society is fighting hard for the legal right to get married (and of course divorced), a majority of heterosexuals are increasingly rejecting legal marriage in favor of a “roommates with benefits” arrangement. No harm, no foul. Those who do spend an average of $20,000 for a wedding ceremony and reception can anticipate a 45% divorce rate within fifteen years. Not a great return on investment. I wouldn’t gamble that kind of money.
A New York Times article this week reported on the increasing divorce rates in rural communities as traditional womens’ roles in the home have been turned on their head by economics, politics, education and changes in moral and spiritual values. Women are opting out rather than staying put in a relationship that doesn’t meet their expectations. Some are taking their children with them, others choose to leave them behind. The article is disturbing enough to read, but even more so the hostile and vitriolic comments about marriage and monogamy that follow the article. My comment in defense of the covenant implied in marriage vows, which takes precedence over the desires of the individual, was a distinct minority view. Most people want their “pursuit of happiness” to include escaping the bonds of marriage if that is what it takes. I once attended a wedding where the couple’s vows were “as long as we both shall will.” Oh really? And how long might that be?
So just what did they expect? The princess wedding dress and crisp tuxedo suit with a half dozen attendants along with the anticipation of “happily ever after” is not enough to carry a couple through many sleepless nights, baby poop and toddler vomit, pounds gained and jobs lost. It can be an interminable tough slog. It’s not long before it isn’t fun and fantasy anymore, the passion is past, and it is hard work to stay together. Some people move on, still looking for happily ever after, wherever they may find it: in material possessions, in status and income, in another partner’s bed, in a bottle, or in the haze of smoked substances.
I’m blessed to be bound nearly thirty years in marriage to someone who I celebrate every day, even in the times when it is work to share our nest. When I look at my dove’s devoted partner, I see that same protective look that I see in my husband’s eyes in his commitment to stay by my side no matter what, helping to raise our youngsters until they fly from our nest to their own adventures and someday families. And I am committed to stay with him, just as we said in our vows to each other (from Thomas Hardy): “And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be— and whenever I look up, there will be you.”
When our nest is empty, now only in a matter of a few months, we will still have one another to keep us warm.
Happily together ever after, as long as we both shall live.
Our sons were always skeptical
of movies filmed in black and white
until they saw the classic tale
where steadfast George fights Potter’s might.
Amusing most was their clear view
that Mary, George’s gentle wife
was“hot” and it was very true
that she would love him all her life.
I want to be like her for you
when times are hard and uncontrolled.
I won’t forget what we’ve been through
to be your shelter in the cold.
I’m ZuZu’s petals tucked in close
whenever you are lost in storm.
Your pocket full of scent of rose
to bring you home to where it’s warm.
I needed to revise this to a metered, rhyming format for a poetry class I’m taking–my original version is here
A pass of the blade leaves behind
rough stems, a blunt cut field of
paths through naked slopes and
bristly contoured hollows.
Once swept and stored, the hay stays
baled for a future day, its deep roots yielding
newly tender growth, tempted forth
by warmth and summer rain.
A full grassy beard sprouts
lush again, to obscure the landscape
rise and fall, conceal each molehill,
pothole, ditch and burrow.
I trace the burgeoning stubble with gentle touch,
fingertips graze the rise of cheek, the swell of upper lip
and indent of dimpled chin with healed scar, the stalwart jaw,
the terrain oh so familiar it welcomes me back home.
Not long ago on winter mornings
Waking dark to part
From your warm side,
Leaving behind my soft imprint,
I wrap up in robe
To walk the gravel drive
For the newspaper
Our hilltop farm
Lies silent amid fallow fields
Moon shadows
Broad across my path
Star sparks overhead
Tree lined yard shields
The house from road.
In ink of early morning
I walk noiseless;
Step out to the mailbox
Then turn~ startled~
A flashlight
Approaching on the road-
An early walker and his dog
Illuminate me in dawn disarray
Like a deer in headlights:
My ruffled hair, my sleep lined face
Vulnerability suddenly
Uncovered in the darkness;
Exposed.
Now summer morning
Wakes me early to streaming light
Poured out on quilt and blankets.
I part from your warmth again
Readied for ritual walk.
Dew sparkling below
Rich foliage above
Road stretches empty
For miles east and west
Crossing to the mailbox
I reach for the paper
Suddenly surrounded by
A bovine audience
Appreciative and nodding
Riveted by my bold approach
In broad daylight.
Yet abruptly scatter, tails in the air
When in rumpled robe and woolen slippers
I dance and twirl
In hilltop celebration
Of ordinary life and extraordinary love
Exposed.
Barnstorming 