cool blue stole my heart

i recently saw some portraits of birds, done by a local artist. the small paintings were whimsical and pictured different birds wearing different hats made from things in nature—a cardinal wearing a crown of sunflower seeds, a chickadee wearing a wild, red strawberry, a tiny bluebird wearing a headband of acorn scraps or a goldfinch wearing a flush of small yellow buds. the artist told me she imagines each hat to be something the birds could make themselves, from things they can find in nature. each hat was playful and protective. each hat seemed to identify each bird as unique, and at the same time, seemed to camouflage them in the woods. in each small square of canvas, the artist tells a whole story about wildness, about pride, about survival and about god’s lavish creation.

this past week, i was walking alone around the lake at Radnor, and just as i entered the woods, i caught a flash of a small bluebird just beside me on the trail, perched on a branch close to me, just above my head. it was impossible not to notice his blue body in the midst of the trim, winter landscape. in so much brown, even the smallest blue miracle is so pronounced.  as i walked, he talked and bounced from branch to branch along the trail. he stayed so close beside me for so long that i walked in amazement at the persistence of this little bird and what was happening between us. was he following me? or was i following him? eventually, twenty minutes later, we came to a place in the trail where other people were stopped and gathered. i lost the bluebird there, when i turned my attention to a family of deer eating and chewing and smelling the ground.

we often think we are alone, but we are never alone. i want to wear the memory of that bird close to my body all winter long—the small, blue miracle—like a hat to announce me and protect me and keep me going. it’s a story about how god stretches out alongside us. it’s a story about pride, about survival, about the complicated beauty of this wild world. it’s a story about how each one of us is set down here on earth, a miracle among miracles, and about what we make for ourselves from what we find in the woods.

sermon : we were like those who dream

audio of a sermon delivered at Vine Street Christian Church in Nashville, TN on October 25, 2009. based on the following scriptures:

Jeremiah 31:7-9

For thus says the LORD: Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob, and raise shouts for the chief of the nations; proclaim, give praise, and say, “Save, O LORD, your people, the remnant of Israel.” See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north, and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labor, together; a great company, they shall return here. With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back, I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble; for I have become a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn.

Psalm 126

When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then it was said among the nations, “The LORD has done great things for them.” The LORD has done great things for us, and we rejoiced. Restore our fortunes, O LORD, like the watercourses in the Negeb. May those who sow in tears, reap with shouts of joy. And those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.

homily : an armor of roses

a homily for the Ammerman / Van Meter wedding, delivered at the Cane Ridge Meeting House in Paris, Kentucky on November 1, 2009. based on their reading by Rumi, posted below.

An Armor of Roses by Rumi

Take January’s advice. Stack wood.
Weather inevitably turns cold, and you

make fires to stay healthy. Study
the grand metaphor of this yearly work.

Wood is a symbol for absence. Fire,
for your love of God. We burn form

to warm the soul. Soul loves winter
for that, and accepts reluctantly the

comfort of spring with its elegant,
proliferating gifts. All part of the

plan: fire becoming ash becoming
garden soil becoming mint, willow, and

tulip. Love looks like fire.
Feed yourself into it.

–

i’m thinking about how this room is built from Kentucky ground.  these walls were built from Kentucky blue ash—these logs cut and hewn by people who knew how to live off this land. oak and chestnut trees were used for beams and supports. the folks who built this church drove posts down into this fertile Kentucky soil, the same soil that grew those tall trees. they were in the work of splitting planks, carting lumber, setting each piece in place, truing up corners and mixing the mud to make mortar.

leave it to these two punky brewsters to get married on All Saint’s Day, a day we remember all the saints, known and unknown—those who have died, who are already at rest throughout the world. leave it to them to celebrate new life in marriage on the very day we make memory of lives already lived. leave it to them to make a ritual of looking backwards with gratitude, while looking forward with joy.

packed into this old fashioned church, it’s impossible not to think of the generations and lives that lived before us—people we love who’ve already passed through this life and moved into another one with god. in this room, we remember our ancestors, who are together somewhere else easy to be, where they can dance with their broken bones. but oh how they also are in this very room with us too—their hopes and dreams stretched out across the bone structures in our faces and their stories inside hand-me-down wedding bands, tarnished and shiny with their own stories of love and of striving. with us and with these two punky brewsters, those already gone from us, are celebrating.

Rumi talks about making fires to stay healthy, studying the grand metaphor of the yearly work that is cutting the logs, stacking the wood, building the fires and learning something from the burn. it’s like lighting a candle for someone we love—to memorialize the past and say a prayer for the future. meanwhile, the woodpile needs attention. meanwhile, the wood needs chopping. meanwhile, we’ve got to find a way to get through winter.

while we light fires to memorialize the past, we stack wood for the future. standing in this little country church, in the spirit of all our saints and on the eve of wintertime, we know this is how to build the sacred room of marriage: to let the people we love be our tall trees, our floorboards, our headboards. to put stakes in the ground for one another. to look backwards at who came before, to light a candle for every name, to haul the logs, place them somewhere special, burn form to warm the soul, say our prayers out loud, always looking forward—and back.

Sarah Wylie and Griffin, you are passions & boldness & punk & purpose. this is a really beautiful wedding, and we’re  all here to witness it. but we’re here to witness it, because we believe in an even more beautiful marriage. we’ll be here like so much more firewood for you when you need it. an armor of roses. fire becoming ash becoming garden soil becoming mint, willow, tulip.

god bless, the wooden frame of your faces. god bless your unbridled passions and all your devotion. god bless this sacred Kentucky spot and all the trees felled to build it. god bless you as you live into this love.

angels in the architecture

there’s a tree at Radnor Lake that used to look like a tall Jesus—a thin trunk for a body, with branches for arms, dark skin made of bark, round knots for compassionate eyes and a simple line that stretched into a kind of understanding across a long face. my mom pointed this Jesus out to me one day on a walk and every time we passed it after that season, we looked up and could see him there with arms branched out, stretching towards the whole forest of living things.

as time passed that year, the Jesus in the tree got harder to see. we would look for it, but some smaller trees got bigger and changed our view—branches broke off, bark peeled away or we walked the path from the other direction and this tree became just another tree in a forest of so many trees.

this happens with our images of god; too much changes in the course of our lives for God’s face to stay the same—our parents die, our babies get sick, we lose our jobs. one season moves into another one and new perspectives get bigger and crowd out old ones. god doesn’t change, but the look of the face of God changes as the conditions around us change, and we can’t see like we always saw.

changes wear down those images, high up in the sky. since I’ve been back in Nashville, I’ve been walking at Radnor and almost daily, I see a small cross of sticks laid across the same bench on the trail—tracks of someone else’s strong faith. i’ve made my own stories about the one who leaves them there. and now, each cross on the bench is just like the old tree—another face of faith in the forest—so humble, so close to the ground.

clap hands, clap hands

just before moving to Nicaragua, i received a very routine surgery on my right hand for carpal tunnel, in which the doctors made an incision into my palm to widen the place where my nerves run through it. while the symptoms of carpal tunnel are gone and the scar is healing nicely, the spot is still so tender that i can’t put much pressure on it or clap my hands at all.

i recently moved into a new place and have made a morning routine of walking a block down my quiet street and across another busy one, to a house where a few sisters make corn tortillas every day of the week. when i get there, i am greeted by the big extended family and place my order, which is almost always the same. i love to watch these women make the tortillas; their arms are strong from working the corn, and their skin is smooth and shiny. i imagine their hands feeling like worn pennies to touch—hard and soft at the same time. they grind, knead, press and pat the dough at a tall table, dipping their hands into one cloudy bucket of water on a stool. they slap thick, pressed circles of ground, wet maiz into perfect tortillas with their right hands, while spinning the thin plastic discs beneath them with their left. the rhythm of their work is so satisfying to watch, and the sound of the slapping is so visceral, it almost hurts my still-tender scar to hear  it.

from these frequent trips, i have learned to bring my own flat plates for carrying the tortillas home. i pay my money and they place a neat stack on one plate and cover the stack with the other one. and i walk home, shifting the piping hot prize from hand to hand, always aware of the tender scar. the things i like about living here i can count on my one hand. this little morning thing is one of them, and i’d clap for it if i could.

but the mother and child reunion is only a motion away

this morning, i was invited to go to a church located just on the edge of Managua, on top of a sloping hill. the church building was one huge room and as soon as i entered it, i felt like i was inside a big box store—the walls were plastered with simple language and easily calculable equations; there was an allure to the sleek packaging of stuff for sale around the perimeter of the huge gathering hall, and the vastness of the place was so over-stimulating that i felt small and ordinary inside it.

after i lot of walking through the crowded hall, i sat in one of thousands of plastic chairs that had been set up in rows on the concrete floor. there were walkie talkies and fake flowers, electric water fountains, plastic rocks and crushed velvet money bags being passed down each row. there were prizes for raffle, an outfitted rock band up front and an impressive light show on every white wall. soon after we found our seats and sang some songs, we listened, through an amped up sound system, to a dozen testimonies of how god has increased portions and provided monetary miracles in the lives of those sharing them. this theology sank my heart, and this physical environment saturated my senses so much that it was hard to know what to do with my body, my eyes, my vision, my thoughts.

a short row of chubby, church-going family members sat in the seats in front of me—what i assumed to be a mother, father, grandmother and her grandson. this little boy, maybe two years old, spent most of the service in his grandmother’s lap. she was fat and dark-skinned, and when embraced between her two thick arms, her grandson would giggle into her delighted face for what seemed like a brief eternity. occasionally, he would leave her to run between the plastic chairs or down the aisles; i watched him drink all the soda from his dad’s thermos, swat at a bumble bee on the wall and pull on his mom’s blue earring. after doing each of these things, he would run back into his grandmother’s arms to check in, like he was bound to her by some joyful tether. and always so delighted, she would love him up there and they would share face to face time so contagious, it made me ache to be held so close, by someone so big. and then, quickly, he’d be gone again, weaseling under a chair or making eyes with another child or tugging on his own sandal.

after two hours of church, the little boy fell asleep in his grandmother’s arms. he looked heavy to me and hot, like children often do when they sleep. his chubby cheeks were so relaxed that his opened mouth leaked down the soft, loose skin around his grandmother’s elbow. everything about her body holding him close was a sermon about god for me—the boy so tired from all his wandering and she, all soaked in his sweat and spit, but still strong for him, still so full of love for him. and so this was my way of going to church in that church—with my gaze stuck on them, thinking about god like this, thinking about love like this, feeling myself tethered, trying to feel myself held.

light enough to travel

i am spending the week in El Tuma de Dalia, a small village that is fresher and greener than Managua, almost four hours north. i am here with Elliet, the consultant who is conducting much of our nutritional research in the several different agricultural communities across the country for a food security project that will last the rest of the year. she and i have met a handful of times for meetings prior to this trip, but my bi-lingual colleague Rosa has always been in those meetings too, and in turn, Elliet and i have usually spoken through her. today is the first day of our first trip and our first day alone together; we will spend most of the next twelve weeks traveling side by side. i’ve been nervous about these trips for several reasons, primarily because so much time traveling together requires good communication. and while i’m doing pretty well with Spanish, there are a lot of reasons it could still be difficult to communicate well.

but we’ve begun, and Elliet is lovely. she speaks slowly, in a way that allows me to understand every word. she is smart, direct and i think she likes me; she laughed and asked for more when i taught her some of the Nica slang i’ve been collecting. we arrived at our motel tonight when the sun was just setting in a dark orange glow. we passed through the modest entrance, and in the distance, i saw the silhouette of a brisk, older woman with crazy hair rummaging around a desk, looking frantically for something. i finally heard the jangling of keys and she came towards us with a flashlight, telling us with zero apology that there was no light, there had been no light all day and not to expect light to return before morning. Elliet and i dropped our stuff into our dark bedrooms, and walked down the street to a small restaurant for dinner, where there was also no light. we ate beans and rice by candlelight, and while were eating, i wondered how many people sit at two-tops in restaurants by candlelight asking each other questions like “Could you tell me again how to pronounce your name?”

after dinner, we walked back to the motel in the pitch black dark, along the road that was pocked with holes and mud puddles. we held onto each other’s shoulders and arms as we walked. i literally couldn’t see anything—my feet, the ground, Elliet—and there was no moonlight by which to read her lips. i was feeling around for everything—how to make it back in the dark, how to move the conversation forward in a language i can kind of speak, how to hold onto her but not too tightly, as we lumbered down the steps to the motel. when we finally arrived, Elliet held out her keys and we felt around together with our fingers for the longer one, the one that would get us in the front door. she asked the Senora in charge for two candles and a box of matches, and we bid each other goodnight in the pitch black dark.

now i’m inside my motel room with my one lit candle. there is a small bat who’s hugging the ceiling and i kind of like the company. it seems like he’s bumping into things he doesn’t know are in front of him. but even though he looks ridiculous, i’ve just remembered how deftly he can navigate in the dark. it’s part of who he is, part of what he’s been given and part of how he moves through the world. still, he looks so small in this big, dark room. i’m not sure how i’ll pass the next four or five hours more before bedtime, but i’m certain they’ll include a conversation with him or maybe a simple barter—some of my sick Spanish slang for a lesson about finding light enough to travel.

to dream the impossible dream

a few weeks ago, i came home to my precious Nicaraguan family and the usual bustle of evening commotion—the kitchen was busy in dinner preparation, the two-year old Jeshua was running around in his sandals and cloth diaper, a soap opera was screaming from the television, a woman was selling rice pudding and yelling her price from the street and all of us were hustling to pull the clothes down from the line before they got wet in the evening rain.

back in the kitchen, huddled over the tiny stove, i was tasting Martha’s soup with a spoon when Wendi, her adult daughter told me she’d found a job—something she’s been looking for since i met her over two months ago. Wendi was smiling, but Martha, who was making lemonade over a big plastic bowl, was not. i asked Wendi how she found the job, what she would be doing, where it was located in the city, which bus she would take. she answered the questions one by one, and ended in quiet tears as she explained that the work was outside of Managua and she’d be moving three hours away to Chinendega to take the job.

at some point this week, we inherited a gigantic cardboard box, and Jeshua and his nine year-old cousin Ali have been rolling across the tile floor inside of it with their four legs and two heads sticking out. the box has been crushed and flattened and has ceded any of its former shape and hard edges to the rough love of these little boys. watching them roll around in it, stopping only for cement walls and so much laughter would make anyone believe that lack of resources keeps people together, keeps people talking, keeps people in the same room to invent with wild imagination how to pass time. since being here i have received a lot of mail and email from friends and family who express a want to escape the excesses that life at home affords. i totally get these sentiments and understand how attractive a simpler life often seems to those of us burdened by too much activity choice, responsibility or stuff. from a distance, those of us with plenty can reach a conclusion that poverty somehow equals a simplicity or a basic happiness that we who are comfortable are not capable of living.

but i don’t think anything about my Nicaraguan family’s life is simple, certainly not their poverty. while we were watching the cardboard box game and eating dinner, i asked Martha how she felt about Wendi’s new job. her whole body held worry, grooves of heartache worn into her face like tattoos, like marks that will never leave her. she kept her eyes on her grandsons in the box and slowly listed the things she hoped to be able to give her daughter before she left—a big bag of oatmeal from Pricemart, a couple pounds of rice, some beans, a few dollars worth of minutes on her cell phone—but she didn’t know if she would be able to do it.

poverty busts up families, often at the cost of draining their one greatest resource—each other. chronic poverty ruins dreams or replaces the human capacity for dreaming with something sadder than i have the words to describe. most days it feels like i am living among people who do not dream, who’ve not been taught to dream, who cannot afford to dream, or in Wendi’s case, whose one dream of raising her child comes at the cost of living apart from him, at the cost of missing his most precious growing-up years.

i watched the boys in the cardboard box until it was time for all of us to go to bed. Wendi called her son Jeshua into her arms and he gave her the biggest, wettest kiss on her eye. i went into my room and washed my face with soap that cost at least three-times as much as the combined cost of those modest things Martha wanted to send with Wendi. and when i turned out the light and pulled the sheet over my tired body, i cried for i don’t know how long. as the reality of their poverty unfolds, i pray every day that my tears aren’t ones that paralyze, but ones that galvanize. that there are many people living without dreams only makes me want to work harder for my own—the impossible ones that would establish economic justice—ones that require a few of us having a lot less and a lot of us having a little more.

the today show

every weekday, i take a morning walk with a bunch of the women i live with. i wake up at 4:55 for a 5 AM departure–just enough time to get dressed and put on my shoes. if i woke up even five minutes earlier, i think there would be time to convince myself to sleep instead of walk, which is, of course, exactly what i would do. but once i’m on the walk, i’m more or less glad to be moving and i start to wake up. as we go along, we gather little pieces of information about our neighborhood and our neighbors: who’s dumping their garbage into the stream that goes to the lake or who’s lighting theirs on fire; who’s drunk and strolling home at such a late (early) hour; who hasn’t cleaned the dog-doo off their stoop. last week, we saw the man who lives across the street kissing his next-door neighbor’s maid goodbye at five in the morning. the week before, we huddled around a hole where a lime sampling had been pulled up and stolen at some point in the night. and the week before that, we were only thirty-five minutes late to a minor crime scene and a pool of the perpetrator’s blood was spilled fresh on the sidewalk as proof. we see shirtless men in their house shoes and old women wearing thin nightgowns. we see bony dogs with pink skin, long tits and dried scabs. we see drug deals on the footbridge and tiny gorgeous children getting dressed for school. we see men squatting on corners with emptied bottles of rum and the light of television sets inside every home. we see tortillerias opening up, the men working the coals and the women working the masa. we see neighbors sweeping up yards of dirt and hosing down dusty sidewalks. it’s our version of the today show that unfolds in real time, where we take the pulse of how the night passed and how the day before us might unfold. it’s weather, it’s local news, it’s how we open up our day—just a long and sleepy loop around the block.

so much present inside my past

the summer after i graduated from high school, i took a trip with Sarah and Katie to the Newport Folk Festival—a real pilgrimage for anyone who grew up on good songwriting or kept collections of concert playlists and ticket stubs. in so many ways, it was the ultimate road trip, complete with mix-tapes, camping out, a million inside jokes and a map of every vegetarian restaurant between Nashville and New England. we packed so many miles onto the wheels of my little white Volvo and racked up an obscene amount of roaming charges on my mom’s car phone. but despite these things, it was an incredible trip together.

someone brought dozens of sheets of little ladybug stickers for the ride and before we’d left Tennessee, we’d started putting one on ordinary things we passed along the way that were made special for us by our encounter with them—public toilets, payphones, restaurant booths, road signs, gas pumps, license plates and sometimes people. the stickers were such a real part of that whole experience that it seems like we would have had some clearer understanding of what they symbolized, but i’m not sure we did. maybe we thought we would pass certain things again and each sticker would serve to help us recognize those things in a future time? or maybe we thought that we would never pass certain things again and we wanted to mark them in recognition of having lived them in our past?

regardless of our reasons or our reasonlessness, what i love about this story now is that we looked out the window for the ordinary things, that we slowed down for happiness, that we let the regular stuff matter and that we ritualized the present moment. i want to pull off the road tonight and stick a little ladybug on the occasion of that bright, young wisdom.