Poem for Saturday

"In a hole in the ground..." -The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien

I'm at a picnic table instead of a church pew this Good Friday evening under an A-frame covering with a steeple faintly silhouetted against golden hour amidst budding limbs of spring.  The sky is not dark, rather, its pastel blue dissolves to faint rose warmth.  No one else at the house wanted to attend a service, which helped me realize I didn't either.  So I'll sit with the avian evensong until the mosquitoes discover my perch.  Today's the first taste of summer and again I didn't notice how happy I am to relinquish the cold.

Just a few weeks past I found myself in a tomb.  It's older than the pyramids, 5,200 years to be exact, and the inner chamber is cruciform.  The ancients who built it masterfully crafted a resting place for their deceased while living outside in thatched huts.  The roof has never leaked, a credit to the engineered grooves in the structure for the rain to pass through, and with river rocks and ocean stone they made a burial mound for their dead.  The door is open with a carved monolith at the entrance displaying trinitarian spirals, serpentine waves, and diamond patterns.  This particular grave opens to the winter sunrise.  The ground follows the natural slope of the hill underneath allowing horizons to cross paths with the rolling landscape to the east.  For 17 minutes one morning every year (if it's not cloudy) the sunlight shines straight back into the cave filling the innermost chamber with a persistent glow.  They let you inside with a guided tour and simulate the dawn of that singular day.  If you rest your face on the ground in the interior you can see out the front door.  This place, along with its summer twin, open to the zenith of their season.

I've written for several years now about burial, it's the third to be exact, and never anticipated I'd find myself in a real tomb.  

I bent down to touch the edge of the light as it shone in the back of the cave, then stood, crouching only briefly again to exit the hole in the ground.  

Outside there were birds and full sun (on an island that rarely sees any) a few old stones and just across the hedge, a small pasture with a flock of lambs.  

We left.  And I wrote this poem: "Faith"

Covered up
Rocks kept out fresh water
The door will let the light in
Uphill
In a straight line

These solstice fathers could not see
spring's daughter with a harvest love

They built a tomb
It's beautiful

and empty

"Already it is starting, the getting better." -A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith

Beyond

"You know who you are." -from the film Moana, lyrics by Opetaia Foa'i and Lin-Manuel Miranda

You told me not to post any pictures, because it would make you upset.  I should have realized then, that you were not my friend.  And I wish I'd known later, when you said as much out loud, that it didn't make me any less yours.  Fidelity is the invisible sister to betrayal.

I think I understand now what horizons tell you and why the image is haunting.  They whisper a secret you long to hear but have never stepped out of the boat to discover.  There's too much space and not enough boundaries.

I know the feeling.  When I was a little girl, I used to be frightened by photos of stars taken from outside the earth.  It was as if the atmosphere of my heart was uncovered and I didn't know if I would survive without the pressure.  These weightless glimpses offered euphoria borderline to fear and I couldn't decipher which to believe.

It is odd, one needs a unknown strength to hold infinite space where there is not even breath between us.  What happened is, but might not, matter as we witness the light of the other piercing a void of darkness.

Nothing can separate us; it does, and yet revolution continues in an empyreal system.  Another time around the sun may allow enough breaking of the dawn to crack stone; making belief where there is room.  Here is more space at a broken table than the one you continue to clear and set.  It is not the people that you believe are unhealthy, but what you're consuming.  Making rules to guard eventualities of heartache or harm all the while denying your desire to live.  You said you'd grown up, but don't you know an aging star eventually collapses inward?  The light you're so desperate to give will eventually swallow you whole, as you stay in a place of security where even the photograph of a dream is too much to look upon.  

What if I told you I found what you didn't know you were looking for, beyond the laws of nature we so diligently lived by?

To begin, speak your fears.  Tell the truth.  To the mirror, to your friends, to your lover, to your sisters and brothers, to your husband and your wife, perhaps even to the stranger in the street.

Some will accept.  Another will question.  Most choose unbelief and a few will receive you.  The one you least expect may reject you.  It is in that moment, as your soul falls unsupported, you will hit the ground.  Hard.  On hands and knees like a woman about to give birth.  You will push and the earth will push back.

When you collapse through the scaffolding of a tower of safety you never wanted to build, and find in the dust that it is you.  The real you is still there and the only thing that mattered and was truly alive.  Well.  Then, you let go.  And get up.  Feeling a love so big and wide your heart must keep breathing open to hold it all.  In this space your dance becomes one that is not of survival but with the others you told your self to reject.  We have learned to go barefoot amongst all the shoes that dropped and kick them off the edge of a world constructed without permission.

There's an open invitation to a place beyond belief.

"And the funny thing was that when all three finally lay together panting in the sun the girls no longer felt in the least tired or hungry or thirsty." -CS Lewis, from The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

Belief

"I believe; help my unbelief." Mark 9:24

We sat at a coffee shop.  She didn’t believe me, but I didn’t know that as I confided what as yet is one of the most traumatic events I’ve experienced to date.  For the next several years in one another’s homes, or over another latte, she would check in on my recovery.  It was nice of her, but not kind.  Nice has no weight and needs no truth.  Kind is brave and takes courage.  I wish she knew it was safe to be ambivalent or afraid, and even more to say so.

I brought her coffee.  It was on an impulse.  We sat in her living room and I confessed what as yet is one of the hardest apologies I’ve offered to date.  For several years in one another’s homes or over a latte with someone else, I was not kind.  I wasn’t even nice.  Each word had weight and showed forth the ugly truth.  She was brave and forgave me with so much courage.  I was learning it was ok to be ambivalent and even better to say so.

In between these moments in time, I learned my heart wasn’t well.  It skips beats and adds extras to make up for gaps.  I was due any minute with my third child when the doctor gave ominous predictions, and back in the lobby I called the first friend in tears for reassurance that everything was going to be alright.  From places I’ve known in her story, this was a space of acceptance where I was held.  It was only until a few months postpartum that things began to unravel.  We are creatures of belief and unbelief desperately trying to evade the conflict.

Almost a year passed bringing me to the coffee and apology, where soon after I was weighed down with the pregnancy of my fourth.  The arrhythmia still beat like a dissonant melody testifying to the abnormalities my life was beginning to take.  Without giving too much away of a story that deserves its own song, I found myself on a hot day being driven to the hospital by none other than the second friend whom I denied.  The scenario was an exact match to one she had experienced herself where I didn’t believe her.  I had showed up, helped out, made myself available and present to all but empathy.  Amidst contractions, blacking out, and attempts at breath, she reached over to put her hand on mine.  And I wept.  It was only a few short months since I had begun a rewrite in a time of repentance and here was a space where I was loved.  We are creatures in need of belief with unhindered potential, while desperately trying to hold a grasp on reality.  

The other day husband said that empathy is the something that you must sell everything to find and in these places I was halfway through the necessary loss of possession by way of betrayal and instinctive confessions.  It is the pearl of greatest price and like the treasure hidden in a field, you must unearth and lose all to find.  A campaign against sexual assault at one of the schools we attend bears a simple message: I believe you.  That says it well.

It is a terrifying union to enter the dark space of a soul without consuming or being consumed by the other.  The places we’d rather not see are usually the ones we dismiss as specks in another because it resembles a piece from our own tree of life that fell to the ground somewhere in a garden we burned to escape long ago.

Lent is an invitation to this wilderness.  The 40 days in the desert are prerequisite to atonement and testify in the broken bread of sacrament.  Temptation is not language for enticement to indulgence; human desire to satiate pain is secondary trauma.  It is much harder to accept wounds than fallibility.  Did God actually say, ‘do you want to be healed’?

The labor of new life is not one easily endured by faint hearts.  So when I knew the day had come in a new home and a new state with friends no longer there nor close I tried not to let the cavernous presence of absence swallow me up in grief.  It has taken me four children, like Leah, to admit what this body has known all along and through the beginning waves of active contractions I finally let her cry, kneeling on white tiles in a bathroom alone.  This road to belief is so narrow.  

She told me to get out and push, I still didn’t trust her judgment or my own strength.  I was spent in every possible way and as much I wanted this day to be over, didn’t think it was time.  I felt the transition unbearable and yet somehow not powerful enough to deliver this baby into my arms, but my heart kept beating.  This memory of eternity passed between ready to push and wanting to die, over and over.  With the others I had always willed myself to stay and somehow this time I slept.  Feeling her descend, inch by inch, but retract with every effort I held awareness through fire I’d not known before.  
Push.
Forward. Back.
True. False.
Woven.  Undone.
Let it be.
I believe.  Help my unbelief.

Today I sit by myself, at home with a latte and the kind company of being human.  I am healing and ambivalent.  I even believe it to be, dare I say, beautiful.  

"Do not fear, only believe." Mark 5:36