the day after easter

the day after easter
is when we still walk around radiant.
love has come to defeat death forever.
and love stays--to comfort, sanctify
and redeem all of the broken.

we wait
and don't wait.
we have
and don't have.

we wonder
what the full glory light will reveal
and somehow also know, now.

as i see my husband and child laugh together
as we stand as a family of the church
eating the bread
drinking the cup
we know
that even though we wait
and long
deep down, deep down:
it is finished.

Three months old. Lately when she wakes up at 5 a.m. and it's just too early to get up yet, I go in and bring her in bed with us. She relaxes immediately with her arms thrown over her head, snuggles in and sleeps a while longer being near us. When she eventually opens her eyes in the morning, these are her happiest moments of the day. Laying between me and her dada, she looks up and finds the ceiling fan and flashes a big, gummy grin, arms and legs waving in excitement. She starts talking to me and ducks her chin down in this coy way that I can't resist. Eyes bright, cheeks warm. I smother her with kisses. Her name, Ada, means happy and noble.

Pause life here. Just here.

This is love, definitely love.

***

Recently I was riding in the back seat of a friend's car on the way to hang out with some of my favorite people. We left the babies home for the night, which hasn't happened too many times yet and still feels strange to me. My friend was driving and talking with her daughter on the phone. She spoke a blessing over her: May the Lord bless you and keep you, may he make his face shine upon you and give you peace. It was such a tender and beautiful moment that I felt like I was intruding on something very precious just hearing her speak these words to her child. There is a lot of love, a lot of love in the voice, in the words.

Again, today I was reading another friend's writing and she said she prays this same blessing over her daughter at night. I've seen both of these friends fight for things they care deeply about, fighting and holding on desperately to promises of blessing and hope when the season is dark. It may seem strange to say it this way, but such raw trust is so moving. It helps me remember what matters, and there is nothing shameful about it. It is why they take the care to say such a blessing with their small ones. It somehow reflects the glory of God in a way not much else can.

***

Ada's middle name, Amani, means “peace” in Swahili.

We now say the blessing together. Me and the baby girl.

There is this, now. Just this. It may all be messy and confusing, but here we are together. With the love that almost doesn't feel like it gets to be chosen, but rather has happened to us. Irrepressibly, much like grace.

When I feel this love it is easier to remember who we are and what has been given us.

May the Lord bless you and keep you,
May he make his face shine upon you
and give you peace.

He has and he will.

amani ya mungu

After tea and some sweets shared, we sit in a circle in their living room in the early spring evening. The lights shine out onto the street and inside it is warm. We sing and pray and read some scripture. It occurs to me that sounds familiar to this baby will not just be the car radio, or the traffic passing on our walks in the park, or mama and papa talking. She will already have heard the voice of a friend reading Psalm 102 and the sound of others praying for the cares and concerns that are close to home and across the world. The sound of acapella singing of hymns will be something she already knows. A soft shuffling rhythm and a melody that stays with you through your day. "What is the Lord's peace? It is a mystery..."

But I do know that it is good to be part of a family.

***
Amani ya Mungu kweli ni za?
Ni za ajabu
Zaweza kwenda juu
Zaweza kwenda chini
Zaweza kwenda mbele
Zaweza kwenda nyuma
Upande, upande
Kwa mataifa yote
Upande, upande
Kwa mataifa yote

What is the Lord's peace?
It is a mystery
It can go up
It can go down
It can go in front
It can go behind
It can go all around
to all the nations
It can go all around
to all the nations

***

Ephesians 2:17-22

"17Basi, Kristo alikuja akahubiri Habari Njema ya amani kwenu ninyi watu wa mataifa mengine mliokuwa mbali na Mungu, na pia kwa Wayahudi ambao walikuwa karibu na Mungu. 18Hivyo, kwa njia yake, sisi sote, Wayahudi na watu wa mataifa mengine, tunaweza kumwendea Baba katika Roho mmoja. 19Basi, ninyi si wageni tena, wala si watu wa nje; ninyi ni raia pamoja na watu wa Mungu, na ni watu wa jamaa ya Mungu. 20Mmejengwa juu ya msingi uliowekwa na mitume na manabii, naye Kristo mwenyewe ndiye jiwe kuu la msingi. 21Yeye ndiye mwenye kulitengeneza jengo lote na kulikuza hata liwe hekalu takatifu kwa ajili ya B wana. 22Katika kuungana naye, ninyi pia mnajengwa pamoja na wote wengine, muwe makao ya Mungu kwa njia ya Roho wake."

"17 And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. 19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, 21 in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. 22 In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit."

consider

A prayer waiting for the baby: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?"

"I’d rather have the mystery and the madness and the rains
cause hell’s the only place you can be free of all love’s pain

I have no claim on the future
so here I lay me down
and God is a friend to lovers
he makes the bone, the flesh, the ground
and he walks with us, make no mistake
and holds us when our hearts, they break

And I can hear the band of angels singing now
like a story from the page is read aloud
but this is not make believe"

all the miles
sandra mccracken

"There are things you do because they feel right & they may make no sense & they may make no money & it may be the real reason we are here: to love each other & to eat each other's cooking & say it was good." storypeople

when in the early

when in the early morning hours
we wake up to unexpected spring,
i push the hair back from your forehead,
your even breathing the same
as in your just-before dream.

i, too, dreamed.
dreamed of waking up and seeing your face,
and then i did.
and the trees swayed outside the window,
and the warm wind creaked in the eaves.
and then i thought of a hundred other miracles
that i had never noticed before.

*****

photo by neil e. das

~Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love.~ psalm 107

Some days we can't seem to see far beyond the night. The darkness threatens to overcome us. I find myself always coming back to this, to whatever happens during the waiting of the long winter. To the quiet, sustaining, faithful love that keeps us all together. The glow of the houses, gold against the blue twilight. Branches creaking and bowing under the ice and snow, the howl of the wind. The promise of things at work, deep under the surface, the faith in things unseen.

This year the seasons are measured not by events, but in the counting of weeks. We are now to twenty-six. A few days ago I saw the wee baby spinning and spinning in the womb, held fast in a photograph the nurse took as he or she took a perfect pike position with feet over the head, sitting all to one side in my lop-sided belly. Hello, love.

We dream of spring, trying to be contented with the breathtaking blue sky and ice covered trees shining in the high, cold light. The sliver of winter moon and sharp stars. Even quieter than usual, quieter than ever before, we find poetry in the stillness of the long nights. In the hush of snow on the lawns and streets and roofs. We all hunker down, drink some tea, and wait. Trying to remember that eventually there will be the thaw of the brown earth, and first green buds that now hibernate safely under the surface. Through the weeks we are moving slowly along with the fears and joys and sorrows, remembering to give thanks and wait patiently for signs of spring, and to pray for who we will meet and and to surrender to the one who guides who we will become.

happysad

our small corner of the world wakes up to rain one morning. the bitter frost has decided to interrupt our one long september. i watch as those around me do life: raising kids, finding someone to spend the rest of their lives with, making vows, experiencing loss, wrestling with calling and career, seeking out their true names. i look around during this time of stillness and waiting and see that there is Someone telling a bigger story. and see that the redemption that is pushing its way through is not something i can presume to rush or understand. i think of the places where ache and falling apart haunt some with sleepless nights and terror filled days. what sense does this make in the story? yearning and hope together that the promises are true.

o come, o come.

we put on a new mix, a birthday mix. the kind of music that hits you so softly right in the gut. so beautiful that all you can do is cry, the feeling of home in songs first heard yet familiar. the wind gusts against the windows and i take up the task of baking again. the house has needed this. i have needed this; the return to works of the hands that allow the heart to meditate on other things. the sounds of things being accomplished in a slow and prayerful way, and the music that fills the warm house are a balm. small works of cultivation all around, the sense of simple joys.

the sound

three wise men and mary

from "Kings in Judea", a play in The Man Who Would Be King by Dorothy Sayers

***
Caspar: Alas! the more we know, the less we understand life. Doubts make us afraid to act, and much learning dries the heart. And the riddle that torments the world is this: Shall Wisdom and Love live together at last, when the promised Kingdom comes?

Melichor: We are rulers, and we see that what men need most is good government, with freedom and order. But order puts fetters on freedom, and freedom rebels against order, so that love and power are always at war together. And the riddle that torments the world is this: Shall Power and Love dwell together at last, when the promised Kingdom comes?

Balthazar: I speak for a sorrowful people--for the ignorant and the poor. We rise up to labour and lie down to sleep, and night is only a pause between one burden and another. Fear is our daily companion--the fear of want, the fear of war, the fear of cruel death, and of still more cruel life. But all of this we could bear if we knew that we did not suffer in vain; that God was beside us in the struggle, sharing the miseries of His own world. For the riddle that torments the world is this: Shall Sorrow and Love be reconciled at last, when the promised Kingdom comes?

Mary: These are very difficult questions--but with me, you see, it is like this. When the angel's message came to me, the Lord put a song in my heart. I suddenly saw that wealth and cleverness were nothing to God--no one is too unimportant to be His friend. That was the thought that came to me, because of the thing that happened to me. I am quite unlearned, yet the Word of God was spoken to me; and I was in deep distress, when my Baby was born and filled my life with love. So I know very well that Wisdom and Power and Sorrow can live together with Love; and for me, the Child in my arms is the answer to all the riddles.
***

in memory, Dr. Vincent A. Das

psalm 84

How lovely is your dwelling place,
O Lord of hosts!
My soul longs, yes, faints
for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and flesh sing for joy
to the living God.

Even the sparrow finds a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may lay her young,
at your altars, O Lord of hosts,
my King and my God.
Blessed are those who dwell in your house,
ever singing your praise! Selah

Blessed are those whose strength is in you,
in whose heart are the highways to Zion.
As they go through the Valley of Baca
they make it a place of springs;
the early rain also covers it with pools.
They go from strength to strength;
each one appears before God in Zion.

O Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer;
give ear, O God of Jacob! Selah
Behold our shield, O God;
look on the face of your anointed

For a day in your courts is better
than a thousand elsewhere.
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God
than dwell in the tents of wickedness.
For the Lord God is a sun and shield;
the Lord bestows favor and honor.
No good thing does he withhold
from those who walk uprightly.
O Lord of hosts, blessed is the
one who trusts in you!

a timbered choir: 1996, V
~wendell berry

Some Sunday afternoon, it may be,
you are sitting under your porch roof,
looking down through the trees
to the river, watching the rain. The circles
made by the raindrops' striking
expand, intersect, dissolve.

and suddenly (for you are getting on
now, and much of your life is memory)
the hands of the dead, who have been here
with you, rest upon you tenderly
as the rain rests shining
upon the leaves. And you think then

(for thought will come) of the strangeness
of the thought of Heaven, for now
you have imagined yourself there,
remebering with longing this
happiness, this rain. Sometimes here
we are there, and there is no death.

from Frans Wright. "Arkansas Good Friday: III"

"And I have heard God's silence like the sun
now I long to return to it.
no matter my infantile clinging
to this gorgeous material of such early wisteria and
lilacs, the wind
in the redbud and light-giving new heart-shaped leaves
music visible if completely unheard, I'll return.
The angel's going to raise his wings and sing that time is
no more
nor tears: that numbered
sea of them is gone--
now there is a new sea, new earth, new sky--
And I will know what to say at the end: what end?
And I can add I found this world sufficiently miraculous
for me, before I'm changed."

mornings

(inspired by bob)

mornings are slow.
no longer the feast of competent productivity,
the rushing here and there from appointments, to jobs to tasks.
a class and conversations in between. attempting to manage many lists.

the morning starts with tea and my husband reading the Psalms.
it takes longer to get going.
held back by the natural order of things,
there has been loss--
priorities change whether i want them to or not.

misplaced identities stripped away.
a humbling time, this slowing down.
a time to carry very small things,
to live in between.
and to receive.

to take quiet walks hand in hand,
slivers of yellow leaves flying
on the warm autumn air.

praying with hands outstretched:
only You can supply what i need.
only You could have guided toward this very small
joy.

a few thoughts.

"I ask you right here to please agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived." Chris Cleave, Little Bee

Lauren, it must be said, is one of my favorite writers: "Everything seems deliberate when it could seem so aimless. The delicate fury in our desire to emerge from the most ordinary sorrows."

I need to thank her for sharing this song. Yes please. That lovely trail led me nicely to this one. I didn't know I could like a version as much as Neil Young's, but the strummy guitar, the harmonies of favorite voices, the beer bottles clattering on the floor in the background noise. It is just so on this fall night when outside it smells like woodfires burning, and inside the warm lights glow.

Coming soon: Saturday, October 16!

These branches are part of my contribution to Artists for Pakistan, a community wide fundraiser being organized by my friend Dassler. To find out more details about the event, go here. I also have a couple of mobiles that I will be contributing as well, but have not yet found a good way to photograph them.

I appreciated the invitation to be a part of this, and the opportunity it fostered for slowing down, taking time to create and taking the time to pray for those who have been and will be affected by the flooding in Pakistan.

equinox

We passed the day of equinox and somehow I missed marking it. Now the night is longer than the day, and our mornings hold a warm, quiet, late sunrise. Evenings, though I try to hold them, slip quickly away. We walk around the fountains in early dusk, we ready to hibernate.

I remember what I can and cannot keep.

***

I was talking to a friend about longing and hunger and grace. That something in us that attempts to take what we think we need, arrange our lives to dull the quiet ache of a heaviness that it was proved we could not carry, could never carry or fix.

Try to hold life and life. Try to make sense, and grieve what ends and give thanks always. Learn to receive what is new.

***

Even now, I think of the place far away, the place that I could not hold. The smell of incense as I walked home through the alleys in Tollygunge. Home from buying a coke at the corner store.

I walked by and saw the semi-circle of women sitting in the warm night air in their beautiful saris, singing. In the temple there, they sat most nights singing bhaktis with the accompaniment of a drum and the small finger cymbals. I looked in briefly and nodded to them, my neighbors. I watched a cat steal away into the maidan. I heard the running water of pans being washed in the narrow space outside Maya’s house, the single lightbulb shining, the voice of Momta talking to her little brother. The television flashed a bright Bollywood movie and mingled its songs with the singing of the women.

A Thursday night, community worship night. These times were some of my favorite. The singing together, sharing the word, a meal for hearts heavy and hungry. Bread of life. Dusk fell early there too, but the cold did not come. We sat on the rooftop smoking and talking. Memory and longing and hunger, joy and sorrow. A different equinox, a long time ago in another life.

I remember what I can and cannot keep.

glow.

Day full of blue sky. So full it had to end early. Not yet cold. We are on the cusp of big things today, tonight, forever. We but just now, we are are on our way to the lights.

Night falls. We take a pilgrimage from my house over to the softball fields in the park. A group walking with a yellow farm wagon; four kids madly waving glow sticks. Acorns litter the sidewalk and we crunch them underfoot. The night is warm on the edge of cool. The road traffic is a ruckus, cars playing a sort of pinball to secure parking spots and outsmart others stuck in the jam. It is gridlock; policemen are impatient with their directions and brusque conversations with people leaning out of their cars to find the source of the slow-down. On the road, no one wins.

Only those walking make it through to the lights and whistles. Somewhere along the way, Ollie gets exited as only a three and a half year old can, waving a glow stick and exclaiming with great triumph: I am SUPER MARIO!

We make it up to the place where the balloons are tethered to the ground and wade through the crowd. Those sitting and standing and milling, those trying to escape wagons and strollers. Past the junk stands selling plastic blow up hot air balloons and beads, paper parasols and all other manner of unrelated junk. We make it through to the inside, in the corridor where we are standing between the tall, soft, swaying silk balloons. Kick up the dust and look around, heads lifted to the glow and magical float of the balloons in the sky all around us.

undone

"We will be inheriting soon
real reality, all
the peace of the universe:
unending night and the still hugely nameless
majority of the stars." franz wright

~~~

It has not been found.
A lull—that is us…holding. Face in hands—
holding
till we can’t see straight—
only spinning,
nothing but feedback.
Then everything stops except a
static noise whistling.
It all unravels.

~~~

In the beginning it was a surprise. It taught me how to write backwards. From the bottom to the top. I suppose because I could see the end of the story before the beginning. It has always made more sense to me to go from last to first--
Backwards story the pushing to used am I.

~~~

That night--music spinning,
I saw that this person was a whole new way
of seeing the earth and how
words could work and how
a life could be lived.
It was strange to see this now—this going backwards.
All I can say is something in me that understood time and love
and the proper way to tell a story
became undone.

Listen
--w.s. merwin

With the night falling we are saying thank you
We are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings
We are running out of the glass rooms
With our mouths full of food to look at the sky
And say thank you
We are standing by the water looking out in different directions

Back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
After funerals we are saying thank you
After the news of the dead
Whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
In a culture up to its chin in shame
Living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you

Over telephones we are saying thank you
In doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
Remembering wars and the police at the back door
And the beatings on the stairs we are saying thank you
In the banks that use us we are saying thank you
With the crooks in the office with the rich and fashionable
Unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you
With the animals dying around us
Our lost feelings we are saying thank you
With the forests falling faster than the minutes
Of our lives we are saying thank you
With the words going out like cells of a brain
With the cities growing over us like the earth
We are saying thank you faster and faster
With nobody listening we are saying thank you
We are saying thank you and waving
Dark though it is.