Identity – Page 14

September 7, 2015September 7, 2015

A Peek Inside My Office (or, The Case of the Broken Prayer Beads)

Go ahead, open the door to my study. The room is messy. My small desk is covered in books written by friends. There are more stacks of books on the floor. On the door hangs a framed saying that my friend Bryan Allain gave me. It’s a John Irving quote from one of my favorite books, A Prayer For Owen Meany:

“If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.”

Look to the left – there’s a seven foot high bookshelf. On one of the shelves is a small glass bowl, and in the bowl lies a mound of beads, a string, some decorative silver pieces. These are the remnants of the prayer beads I bought in Istanbul when I was writing the life story of a man named Stan Steward. He was dying of cancer, he became my friend, and he passed away about six months after I finished writing the book. Now he’s buried somewhere along the Euphrates River.

The thread snapped one day while I carried the beads in my pocket, and now they are there in that bowl, waiting for me to restring them. But it’s not time yet. I don’t know why not. For now, I look at them and sometimes I pick a few of them up and stare into their cloudy whiteness, and they remind me that I will not be here forever. They remind me that my friend Stan is gone. They remind me that there is more to life than the books I want to write, the audience I try to please, the platform I try to build.

* * * * *

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about things like perseverance, fear, and the power of time. I’ve examined my willingness to stick with something for the long haul. I wonder if my past failures (or non-successes) have affected my ability to start new things with passion and commitment. Maybe the last five things haven’t taken off the way I’ve wanted them to – does this mean I should lessen my hope, have “more realistic expectations”?

I’m not sure. These are all questions I mull over.

* * * * *

I was watching a show recently where two men tried to climb a mesa in Utah, one of those steep, rocky plateaus. They had to go sideways along the cliffs for a long, long time before they found a way to the top.

Are we willing to climb, not up, but sideways, for months, years, decades even? Are we willing to do the hard work, the regular everyday work, the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other work?

We need to spend more time celebrating the fact that we are HERE – wherever HERE is. Because we have all arrived HERE with great effort, along trails fraught with danger, the summit constantly in view but for most of us, for now, inaccessible. For once, let’s not worry about THERE. Let’s celebrate HERE.

And if you’ve found a way of life you love, for goodness sake, find the courage to live it.

What aspects of your life right now do you need courage in order to live?

I decided to walk away from my Facebook and Twitter accounts in June (you can read more about that HERE), at least for a time, so this little space of mine depends entirely on you to spread the word. If you read something you enjoy, please share it.

Also, if you’d like to receive my twice-monthly newsletter (basically a few bonus blog posts every month plus information on upcoming books) you can sign up for that HERE.

September 3, 2015September 3, 2015

The Long Lines Between Us

Abra walks with me to work
her pink flip-flops flapping the sidewalk
all the way to the cafe, where she
sits on the tall red chair
huddled behind a swimming pool
of hot chocolate, and cuts out
photos from her magazines
to go with the letters at the top
of the worksheet: M and N and O.

Across from her
in my own red chair
I work with words to help a family
tell the story of their daughter, how she
pulled her hair out by its roots
strand by strand
how she cut long lines in her pale arms
with a broken tape case
how she poured her old pills
into a mason jar
where it stratified, a rainbow
of sand art, documenting everything
that didn’t work.

Abra draws long lines on her
paper, a rainbow of colors
and somehow gets hot chocolate on
her forehead, a dark mark on her
pale skin. We laugh, and I wipe
it off, and we watch the traffic go by below us
on Prince Street. Then, as Abra sits across
from me reading The Moffats,

I spill the words, the story of this tired
young girl, twenty years ago, who wrote her last
journal entry, explained how she would not
make it through October
how the pain was world-heavy
how she planned on walking into the water.

She was a little girl, once.

Life with my Abra is August, and it is hot.
Nothing like that October when the girl
walked into the water, nothing like that.
October has smooth breezes and rainbow leaves.
August shadows are dim and uncertain, like
underwater lines – October shadows are long and
sharp.

The cafe windows are clouded with dust. There
is no clear view of the sky.

Abra and I walk home along the lines of traffic,
past cars idling,
waiting for the light to turn,
waiting in the August heat. We walk Prince Street, and
I hold her hand the entire way.

September 2, 2015

What’s Happening Every Moment

“Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.” Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

Our small backyard garden, lost in the cement jungle of this city, shows all the signs of the end of the season. Withered beanstalks wait to be turned over, weeds pop up between the old rows, and vines of snap peas yellow, dust returning to dust. Even the tomatoes and the peppers are showing signs that summer will not, thank God, last forever.

It’s amazing to think that, somehow, the rich brown soil, once clear and holding seeds of promise, is now spent for another year. Winter will take it all back as we bury our compost in the dead earth. Spring will return it to us again, offer her gentle arms and wispy rains and then seedlings will, so improbably, unfurl into summer again, green and hot, the seasons always folding over each other like waves on the shoreline.

* * * * *

What seeds are being planted in my soul this very moment, at five in the morning on a Tuesday, with music playing quietly and five children sleeping in the rooms above my head? I can hear Maile’s footsteps, more seeds planted by this morning. Soon the sun will rise above the buildings lining James Street. What is being planted in me this moment? This moment? What about this moment?

What cosmic messages, what prophetic visions, what desires, what boredom, what dreams? What hope, what bitterness, what patience laid bare in the turned up furrows of my soul, folded over?

This moment? This one?

* * * * *

August came and went this year like a wave of heat rising off the pavement. Came and went. What are these days, these months, these years, if not vapor? What are these mornings, if not moments planting seeds in me? Quicker than the sunrise, 2016 will be here, a year I’ve not contemplated in my mind until this moment. 2016? How can it be that I live in some futuristic movie?

I look ahead less than I used to. Each day holds enough for my mind to consider. Each day with its moments. The years ahead are gossamer threads heavy with due. Heavy with moments.

Next year I turn 40. My grandmother turned 40 in 1973, three years before I was born. My father turned 40 the year I turned 20, the year before I met Maile.

These heavy stones drop in deep water with a resounding !thunk!, and the ripples go all the way, stirring the shallows.

* * * * *

What are these moments planting in your soul?

September 1, 2015

The Secret to a Happy Marriage

Can it really have taken me
sixteen years to realize you can
live in the same house with someone
and still lose track of them?

It’s true.

We occasionally lose
each other, somewhere among
discarded Legos and Everest piles
of laundry, too many words to be written
or deciding the best way to teach
dangling participles
or the size of the solar system. Our words
cross and mismatch and fall,
seeds on parched August ground, hard
as pavement. Is
there a more complicated maze
than the everyday household routine?
Is there anywhere easier to lose someone
than in the daily humdrum of a life?

The two of us
we go from found to lost
in the time it takes to zombie-walk
to the baby’s bed at 2am and fall
asleep on the scratchy carpet, in the time
it takes to nurse a child’s hurt feelings on
the third floor, coming back to bed
only to find the
other has already fallen asleep.

Maybe the key to this thing called
marriage
isn’t remaining in love
(Lord knows I love you)
or sticking to those vows
(rules parch and crack and can’t
keep a meaningful thing together)
but maybe
the key is finding the energy
the courage
to keep finding each other again
and again.

They leave us after dinner, all
five children, and we’re staring
the vast distance from one end of the table
to the other, because a family this size
requires a large table, and the distance
from one end to the other
can feel like the span of the Sahara. Lost
and found.

But then one of us moves closer
and we talk quietly while the sound
of their steps rains down from above.
Or we walk this city in which I love you,
holding hands
breathing in the lights
remembering the sweet feeling
that casual ecstasy
of being found again
by someone you have loved for so long.

Maybe the key to finding each other
is discovering ways
every day
that we can get lost
together
all over again. Maybe the seeds
that fall on pavement can still
find the winding crack
burrow deep
and sprout green life
in this city.

I decided to walk away from my Facebook and Twitter accounts in June (you can read more about that HERE), at least for a time, so this little space of mine depends entirely on you to spread the word. If you read something you enjoy, please share it.

Also, if you’d like to receive my twice-monthly newsletter (basically a few bonus blog posts every month plus information on upcoming books) you can sign up for that HERE.

Finally, if you’d like to receive these blog posts directly in your inbox, just enter your email in the field at the bottom of the right hand column. Thanks!

August 31, 2015August 31, 2015

The Toughest Thing To Do

I sat across the small table from a good friend in Prince Street Cafe and I held the mug of coffee in both hands. I stared into its dark depths and I told him it still feels like a year of waiting, a year of not-quite-yet. I can’t say it’s an ache but it feels like things are holding their breathe. I’m not naturally patient. I’ve never found it easy to wait.

“That’s your word for the year,” my friend said. “You talk about that every time we meet. Wait.”

Then he smiled and said he gets upset when people are praying for him and ask God that he’ll have patience. He doesn’t want patience! He wants to move forward! He wants to take the bull by the horns! He laughed.

“I want to tell them they can hang on to their prayers, if they’re going to pray that I have patience.”

I know that feeling.

Waiting involves embracing the silence, something I’ve been trying to get better at. Sit in the present, and for just a moment let go of my hopes and dreams, my plans and strategies, the web I’m weaving in my mind. Let the wind of this present moment clear all those cobwebs. I want to turn down the volume on this noisy world, recapture my own senses, let them find life again.

Is that, I wonder, the essence of waiting? Finding life again?

August 28, 2015August 28, 2015

Regarding the Phrase, “Time Heals All Wounds”

“Time heals all wounds,” they say, which I suppose is mostly true, although my uncle lost part of his pinky finger in a wood-splitting accident and, while the wound healed, his pinky did not miraculously grow back. Then there’s my friend whose dad lost his hand in a tragic farming accident – yes, the wound healed after quite a lot of time, but now he lives life with a hook. I’m guessing we all know people like this, or perhaps are people like this, who have had a serious physical injuries, and more often than not those serious injuries heal, but that is not to say they have left us unchanged.

Which is perhaps why we feel there is something inherently missing in the phrase “Time heals all wounds.” There’s something about those words that feels inaccurate, or at best a bit callous. This is because, once we reach a certain age, we learn that the healing of the physical wound is not the same thing as being returned to one’s original state of being. “Time heals all wounds” does not equal “happily ever after.”

But maybe remaining unchanged is not the measuring stick of life, because I see the way my children laugh and laugh and laugh when my uncle holds his shortened pinky up tight against his nostril and it looks like his finger is reaching up into his skull. And I heard story recently about how my friend’s father, the one with the hook, reached into his wallet with that very same hook, pinched out a hundred dollar bill with its grasping mechanism, and paid for the entire family behind him in the line at the buffet.

Maybe “Time heals all wounds” is true. I don’t know. Or maybe we should be less concerned about the wound and more concerned about the kinds of people that this mixture of “time” and “wound” is transforming us into.

What kind of a person are your wounds changing you into?

I decided to walk away from my Facebook and Twitter accounts in June (you can read more about that HERE), at least for a time, so this little space of mine depends entirely on you to spread the word. If you read something you enjoy, please share it.

Also, if you’d like to receive my twice-monthly newsletter (basically a few bonus blog posts every month plus information on upcoming books) you can sign up for that HERE.

Finally, if you’d like to receive these blog posts directly in your inbox, just enter your email in the field at the bottom of the right hand column. Thanks!