Cooking Beans

Cooking Beans June 19 2010


The humble daily tasks --

I shun them often.

They take up time –they make me stop and wait.

I smell the snap beans steaming as I sit and write.

Snap. Snap. Patiently I broke both ends of all the beans, and put them in the pot to cook –

A measured job that took the time it took

And let me rest and know the boundless nature of the present –

Unexpected gift from summer’s bounty.



Reflection

Cleaning, cooking, caring for people and humble objects. I’ve always been impatient with these tasks. They weren’t stimulating, had no glory attached. I clung to my ambitions, to my love for feeling special and powerful. These were jobs for humble people – jobs that needed doing over and over, leaving no mark on history. I longed to do the impressive things!

Somehow, though, my passage through the loss of the person closest to me, my partner Ellen, opened my spirit to the beauty and resonance of those humble tasks. From her I learned that my time on earth is a precious treasure, and that the rewards come from being fully present to the physical impressions and the present moments that wash over me – a cascade of sensory wealth through which I can know the Creator through the created. In performing these lowly tasks to perfection, I both receive and express love. What other meaning is there to Heaven than loving, being loved, and experiencing the Divine? I am grateful for that mess of snap beans and for all of summer’s gifts.

I Love You

I Love You May 29 2010


Three little words – I love you! I love you! I love you!

They are the most important words – no need to improvise, create.

They can’t be said too often,

And each time they’re said, they’re new – never repeating what was said before.

They reflect the feeling of this moment –

I love your crinkly smile, your ready wit, the sparkle in your eyes,

Your gentleness and kindness, the beauty of your soul…

I love you in an endless wealth of ways –

Always newly known and deeply felt.

I love you! I love you! I love you! -- now, again, forever.



Reflection

Love is such a joy! Each person -- each creature-- is a spark of God – reflecting in ways we can appreciate different aspects of the infinite Creator. I can think of no better way to spend a day than to revel repeatedly in the joy of loving, and – like a carillon chime – to peal forth our joy in those three important words – I love you!

Eden

Eden May 29 2010


And God cast them from the Garden.

They lost God’s love.

Losing love – the hardest hurt,

The truest Hell.

Loveless, babies wither, grownups weep.

Without love, I live in turmoil --

Sleep deprived, feeling ill, hating others and myself, tired, lifeless.

Deprived of love, I shrivel like a tender flower in a drought –

Dried up, wrinkled, gray, before I die my many deaths.

I seek out your love, my darling – heliotropic -- drawn by you:

your smile, the pleasure in your eyes,

Your gentle voice, your soothing hands,

Your compelling spirit force.

You nourish and revitalize my soul – your love my nectar.

In trust, I open up, bloom, let myself be tender, give to you the power to hurt or heal.

I learn the might of love to beautify or trample

And give my heart to you withal – witness to your perfect God-love splendor.



Reflection

Building a relationship is definitely not for the faint of heart. The reward is bliss, a more transcendent connection with God, who is love. The challenge is to rid my self ( my ego) of fear – to trust, to be willing to feel hurt, and to continue trusting and loving, knowing that any perceived lack of love is a delusion. God cannot not love. God IS love. Love draws us to each other, and steadily awaits our enlightenment, our acceptance, our understanding, and our willingness to bask in and transmit its awesome light. We are God’s gift to each other. I am grateful beyond words for this gift of ever-flowing love.

Memories of Place

Memories of Place May 25 2010


A beloved house where once we lived--

Its trees, its drive,

Its empty rooms with traces still of long gone memories –

Ghostly wisps of past hours wafting through.

We drive up, we look, we feel the pain of loving still this place.

We walk again the ground, neglected now,

Where once our spirit dwelt in peace and love,

Where once our family ran and played and laughed and argued,

Where once we planted, built, and prayed.

We are spirits from another plane – from timeless, formless space,

Yet our molecules have sunk deep roots into the earth where we have lived and loved,

Entwining heart and body with that soil, that grass, the fiber of that place.

We leave behind so many threads of love – elastic – binding us though we may stretch them thin.

It’s thus that we leave heartprints on the earth wherever we have been,

And feel the earthprints on our souls.



Reflection:

Today I accompanied a friend who was revisiting a home she loved and had left behind. My friend’s attachment to this place was still palpable, years after she had left. Obviously a portion of her spirit dwelt still within that space, upon that ground.

Today I had also learned that the people who had bought the house I had just left were starting to tear out the part of that place I loved the most – cutting down trees and eradicating the wild areas to plant a lawn.

These conjoined experiences, on the same day, have made me go back in spirit to the different places I have loved on the earth and to which I have felt bonded over the decades of my life – from the fields, streams, and Atlantic water of Padanaram, where I spent an important portion of my childhood; to the rolling hills and brushy woods of northern Rhode Island, where I lived for three years as a nun; to the hardpan soil and mine-pocked trails of Old Mines, Missouri, where I wandered in the woods and scratched tiny garden patches into pure clay; to the bracing, cool Pacific breeze and restless ripples of San Francisco Bay; to the majestic pine and hardwood forests of the North Carolina Piedmont – the place I now live. My heart ‘s memory remains entwined with the earth, the air, the trees and grass of each of these earthly homes. When I return to them, I feel their unique magnetic pull signaling my ongoing relationship to each place, even after I have moved away.

As we live longer, we understand better our unity with every person and every place. With every love, we exchange elements of ourself with the beloved. In so doing, we grow ever larger, ever more connected; We ARE more.

Nurture

Nurture May 9 2010

People pause today to sing their mother’s praises –

How she held them, fed them, watched them,

How they learned to love from her,

How she led them gently into earth’s delights.


They’re the fortunate.


Some babies have to scrape for love.

They find it in the hearts of other women,

Surviving, love-starved, as do street kids seeking scraps of food.

As I join in celebrating mothers on this yearly day,

I pray for those whose moms are ill, or dead, or otherwise inapt

To give their children mother love.

I pray that God will give to all his orphaned ones

The love and nurturing they need to learn their beauty,

Trust their worth,

Know their glorious souls, and find deep joy while in this life.

Young or old, we all need mothering.

Blessed are those who nurture others – they shall shine as stars forever.


Reflection

It’s Mother’s Day. Today, I feel separated from the general sentimentality. I realize, again,  that I can’t celebrate my mother’s nurturing care. She was disappointed in me. She was  also ill and depressed. She had no empathy, nor even common sense for caring for a baby. I felt alone and abandoned, from birth. I felt defective, unworthy, unacceptable.

This start has affected my whole life. It created the framework within which I have struggled to accept myself, to enjoy being who I am. My grandmother, my teachers (nuns teaching in Catholic schools), an older spinster who worked humbly as a priests' housekeeper, and the librarian in the small town library where I grew up were my adult friends and supporters. I confided in them, and knew, from their welcome and their support, that I was potentially lovable. They gave me hope. By default, they played the role of surrogate mothers, and I honor their memories today and express my gratitude for the love they brought into my life. 

 I’m not alone in this situation. Many other people’s mental and emotional stability through childhood was preserved by the love of neighbors, teachers, aunts or uncles, grandparents – other grownups who were not our biological mothers, and  who provided real  love -- essential spiritual and emotional nourishment for a child's spirits. On Mother’s Day, it seems appropriate to love and appreciate, along with our mothers, those other adults whose affection helped us to develop a greater reservoir of love to share when we would be grown up. 

. This day should really be called “Raised by a Village Day.”

Memories

Spirit Places April 26 2010



Bare shined floors, stripped now of rugs,

Purified of foot prints, cleared of scuff marks –

Pristine.

Windows washed and clear,

Rooms now unencumbered – no furniture, no projects

That lie about unfinished – eternal paper clutter.

No remaining signs of our four years of living there –

Now a fallow house, awaiting its new life –

My home no more.


Silenced now the shrill joyous cries of children

Racing up the walk to Grandma’s house,

The sound of bouncing balls and happy laughs --

They faintly echo in my heart amid the emptiness.



I speak and hear reverberations -- void. .

I open the toy closet – bare.

I enter our offices and bedroom – blank,

Though I feel in each room its ghostly memories –

Faint shadows of what happened there for us.


Bookshelves -- now just empty wooden cubes – are yawning shadow boxes.

With no clothes, the closets are stripped down to cabinets and rods –

Reminding me of our excitement when we built just what we wanted,

Deciding it was worth it, hang the cost.


The big surprise was when I bade farewell to my dear friends, my trees.

I loved the woods around that house – the trees and wildflowers were my friends.

My spirit frolicked with the birds and squirrels, trembled with the wind- blown leaves.

It was my little patch of Eden, where my soul found rest and joy.



Today I said goodbye,

I laid a crystal underneath the porch --

Giving thanks

For good memories and sad, good moments and hard – the life the house embraced for us.


It’s time to move forward, to give back, to mark the present,

To fully be in peace and love while taking leave.

A raucous crow, calling in the woods, tells me goodbye. I walk away.


Reflection:


It was wonderful to see that others really wanted our fabulous house. It sold quickly – in a few days. I’m happy to know that the buyers are excited about living in the house. I feel satisfaction in having been a good steward of a beautiful place, caring lovingly for its needs and putting good energy into it.

As the closing approaches, I felt drawn to visit the house a last time, walk through it, create a final memory of it as it awaits its next family. It’s my home now only in remembrance. It was time to release it, to say goodbye, to extend good wishes to the people destined to live there next as they create their own recollections of growing, loving, creating a home within its walls. Their recollections will overlay ours, as ours have overlain those of the family that built it and grew up in it before us. With passing years, the house grows richer in loving energy and acquires the patina of respectful care and use. It has been a home before and will be one soon again, though now, in waiting, it’s just an empty house.

I take my times there with me, packed into memory. I move through life, collecting more and more recollections. Happily they take up no space and weigh nothing!

Moving Day

Moving Day April 24 2010


A day of moving—

Pick this up, move it there,

Push this box along the hallway –

Can’t pick it up -- too heavy!

Walk up and down, back and forth,

For miles just inside the house

Till feet cry out in anguish.

The rooms grow cold, and echo oddly

As one by one they’re emptied out.

They’ve absorbed and resonated with our years

Of living, loving, weeping, feasting.

Now, one by one they revert to how they were when we first entered –

Empty, square, waiting.

On the other end, my stuff, filled with all my hopes,

Finds right places in a new house --

Starts shaping new days, new years, new life.

I sit, unfamiliar, in this new home,

Aching -- even as I pulse with hope.


Reflection

This day responds to the fulfillment of hope and purpose. One house sold, another bought; one left behind, another taken up; one leave taking, another exciting beginning We move on in our lives as circumstances change, for both better and worse. Both fatigue and excitement mark these transitions, regret dancing with appreciation, body aches with resurgent energy. Such is life.