Tesseract

For those who need the home of their selves this Christmas.

It is a delicate thing to hold both beauty and harm.  For those of us who bear marks from those who were meant to shelter and nurture our frail and precious human forms, the eve of today and dawn of tomorrow can make for a treacherous path to walk.  At times this indistinguishable line of memory blurs the heart’s inner knowing.  It is the uncertainty of surviving abuse.  What was awakened in you, what was put to sleep, how you managed to hide your soul to survive, the powerlessness of being subservient to one with the power to find it, what was good, what was evil, and if it is over now why does the thing feel worse than some days years ago?

Your exodus, the ensuing loneliness, the unutterable shame, a seemingly relentless grief keeps chasing you towards something, anything, to remember what exists.  I can feel the catch now and I know the fear.  How is it, how could you ever have known goodness there, of all places?  Oh the lengths we will go to forsake the search for peace.  And it’s true, you must name it, you must name the harm and not look away.  But, more than likely, you have done so again and again and in so doing pushed yourself farther and farther away.  The trouble is, your soul is very, very patient and will never leave you.

Have you read a Wrinkle in Time?  Do you know the story of that girl and her faults whose father left and she with her fiery heart was all that could save the world, and him, from It?  Sometimes I wonder if it really is a tale of just fiction.  Well, in this story, the girl who would very much like to be rid of some parts of her self, gets hurt from the Black Thing.  She wakes up on a planet far away needing to heal and is tended by a beast, Aunt Beast, she is called.  And this is the part I needed to tell you, on this planet everything is grey and really unremarkable such that the creatures don’t even have any eyes, because that’s not how they see.  They “do not know what things look like...[they] know what things are like.”  Imagine understanding food and color and even stars in this way—in the middle of a grey world.

Christmas Eve is a good time for a memory like this.  There is a song, about another girl.  You probably know one arrangement of it, but this one is really the best: Franz Biebl’s Ave Maria .  We’d listen to it every year, and only once a year, ‘because too much would spoil the thing’.  The evergreen twinkling in the darkness and everything else silent.  I’d sit there and each time could never decide which way the light was moving.  I always felt Aunt Beast knew, but for seven and a half minutes I wondered, never knowing if the melody was sunrise or set.  When you listen, you can try to decide for yourself, but I recommend leaving the matter unsettled.  Beauty is like that, often a holy moment within histories of harm.  It is not isolated from the rest of the story, nor does it make an excusable anomaly.  And I came to know beauty here, in this song on Christmas Eve, between many other days of darkness.  Such a thing does not undo what was done, but the loveliness is woven in and not silent.  At times one cannot decide if such truths betray the healing you’ve worked so hard embody.  Is this really the place?

Now, I listen over and over again, because something like that doesn’t spoil or fade no matter what they try to tell you.  These younger stories are waiting for you to see.  Your beauty and pleasure were never a product of harm, but always present—hidden, because they belonged to you.  These spaces and sacredness exist because you created and inhabited them here first.  You too know what things are like, especially in unseeable worlds of grey.

Christmas is a tesseract.*  Let your story wrinkle to the place it wishes to be and listen over and over again.  Sunsets and rises are there for the Wondering. 

Ave and amen

 * “a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.” - A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle

Ave Maria by Franz Biebl, as performed by Chanticleer on the album Our Heart’s Joy: A Chanticleer Christmas (track 9)

Dragons

For my daughter, on her third birthday

You were born on a Saturday afternoon.  You mostly let me finish my breakfast, and we settled in after dinner, together, except this time in my arms.  We’ve both grown.  My short hair is long, I’ve got some wrinkles, and you are no longer my Colorado ‘baby’.  You are becoming.  Feisty, wild, and sweet, lover of unicorns and this moment, your presence is incredible, your timing, ridiculously serendipitous. 

I was not ready for you, but you moved with me.  I remember my belly in Tunnels, swimming through blue soon to be seen in the color of your eyes.  You were the indecision that held my hand, the unexpected life that birthed my own voice: my ‘never again’, ‘not anymore’, and ‘this is no longer how it will be’.  Your heartbeat gave fierceness to mine.  Fingers and toes and doubled blood count nurtured our reach for a place that was safe and good and true.  Your delight and joy are precious to me as one who was an intimate witness to the hard work of healing I began before, and have continued since, your arrival.

There has been a lot going on in this way of change and it’s hard to see you be resilient so young.  I want more for you.  I want different.  But I know the only way forward is through.  You do too, just like your book “We’re going on a Bear Hunt.”

This place we live, desert, altitude, and mountains all require more to inhabit.  You choose to widen; your world is much—albeit often inconvenient to basically everything else happening at the time.  And such is the necessary work of one’s young heart.

Sometimes I feel worried, what does showing up in my story mean for you and your siblings?  Am I just taking with time and expense and emotional weariness resources you all need?  What’s it worth?  And if it’s not, what am I to do with the fact that there’s not another way round—at least that I can, or believe should be, taken?

So when you threw one of your magnificent, unstoppable, glass shattering, affects and then calmed yourself down: you answered.

“My fire dragon.”  You called her.  And then you began to tell me more, about you, about her and what she needed, and her other names, and how she makes you feel, and all the ways you understand all the things she and you both have to say.

As you went on, the audience of your parents’ captive, describing your soul in freedom, beauty, and detail, I glanced at your father and we wept.  For all the ways I’ve labored in secret for so long, to tend to wounds recent and ancient, here was the result.  You have no fear, or shame, or reservation in knowing the wonder of your own heart.  It’s no surprise you love to reflect your inner workings through things fantastic and magical because you are fearless to the depths of your being.  You belong to you.

And, I suppose, because I just so happen to get to be the one who walks through with you for these next few years, that, if you are fire and dragons, I am a mother of them too.

Orientation

“As the nighttime bleeds into the day
tomorrow spills across the sky
And the sun’s a harsh reminder why
we are feeling barely human.”                                           Grip- Seeb & Bastille

Welcome to the desert.

There’s the obvious: yes, water and food are difficult to come by.  Lots of normal things won’t work: WiFi—pens, meditation, seatbelts, the oven, in fact save yourself the energy of being surprised.

Sunsets and rises you’ll be fine, even happy— alone, midday heat, midnight cold you’ll manage.  It’s late afternoon and the end of third watch when you need someone.  Pay attention to who you meet.

I won’t romanticize it, but well, you’ll see.  Sure, find the beauty etc. etc., soon enough that will let you know who the newcomers are—if you run across anyone.  Best to just listen and wait. 

You’ll know the one.  And remember don’t be afraid.  As an exile yourself, any enemies you make are your choice here on out.  It’s one way to survive, I suppose.  You see the ones delirious with mirage and always clamoring about the oasis?  Making somewhere else to be leads to making someone else to blame and if that’s your thing, you’ll find plenty of company.

Anyways, about the cold dark morning.  Your first encounter will be mistaken for singularity, everyone does it.  You’ll think if you work now you’ll never have to do this again, that you’ve found the way out.  So, when it happens next, best begin a playful tally of dark-before-dawn days you wish you’d never known.  Moon and Sun and Time bring no judgments to the world’s turning.  It helps to remember this when you swing your feet to the floor.

But, when tempted with gravity to collapse on the ground—consider the birds, little babblers.  Watch them dance in the dust those mornings.  Their eggs are the blue of shallow water if you’re parched for color.  You’ll be jealous, watching community ease survival, but notice—they depend on two.  One stands watch high in the branches, open to sky and prey, a decoy or herald of danger, and the other, their mate (the group’s only couple) shares the tasks to protect and defend the little flock.

Your only task is here.  Learn the dance between surface and depth every mourning, make oxygen holy communion.  I know, the loss of faith and hope and joy, perhaps love too are more than one is able to bear.  Go ahead and say it, ‘peace, peace, there is none.’  You are alone.  Only you are welcome here.  Only you are here.  Only you can welcome here.

If you’ve watched the birds though, you’ll soon notice the companions.  One’s presence heavy like a winter coat in a storm, cherished and bundled up with nothing, soothing like a shot of whiskey in the chest, drifting to the limbs.  They’ll make days a trance and the night so welcome, creating a shelter of sorts.  This caretaker is one who is not waiting for anything because whatever happened already arrived.  Rest with them supporting your feet on the cold morning floor, watch how tenderly they gather the scattered remains of prayers you need not lift anymore.  Some people think the name’s acceptance—to soften truth, but it’s not.  This is despair.  You’d rather it was someone else, I know.  You may think you need hope instead, but you are weary and hope is permanent disruption, despair is the beloved’s scar and you’re going to need both to get anywhere.

Rest awhile.

When you’re ready… Hope is standing in the flame of desire you are finally able to allow presence.  Despair is bowing to the weight of sorrow you are finally willing to bring presence.  These two are lovers, like the birds, and together they guard exiles in movement and rest.

This is the desert, hot and cold, faith, doubt, joy, grief, hope and despair, all together waiting as love moves peace through polarity.  Welcome the desert.

Welcome Advent.

“This is already bigger than love.”                                              Bigger than love- Oh Wonder