there is a moment when the sun is going down that the ball of fire on the horizon disappears. official sunset. but the light lingers in the sky and the color stuns. it is seemingly a grey area between day and night. you can call it either – “it is still day,” you can say. “it is now night,” you might relent. it depends on where you sit and when we are hiking in the woods and still have a couple miles to go we prefer to think of it as ‘still day’.
it’s all a matter of perspective. the eyes through which you view all that around you. the shoes in which you stand as you look out on all that is happening. are you on one side or the other? are you bipartisan-ly, so to speak, looking at life? john avlon recently said, “where you stand depends on where you sit” and i couldn’t agree more.
opinion is a personal matter. indeed. free as we profess (or is it purport?) to be, we are all entitled to our opinions. on everything from food preferences to healthcare in our country, from clothing styles to immigration policies, from decor in our homes to gun control or the lack thereof, from coffee brands to what we individually choose to call a divine universal power and how we lift that divinity up, from places to live to how we feel about blatantly incentivizing people to stay under earning limits…it is all a personal matter.
and yet, it becomes not personal when we are unable to view others’ opinions without demoralizing them, without a listening ear, without educating ourselves before being reactionary and spurting out inaccuracies. when we turn a blind eye to what befalls others. when what is best for us supersedes what is best for all. when riches – in its first definition: wealth or great possessions; abundantly supplied with resources, means or funds – is not meant for the populace.
it becomes not personal when we fail to realize, allow for, negotiate that where we stand – truly does – depend on where we sit.
right now as the sun sets on 2019 it is still day. or has night come?
we are all bombarded. two days before christmas and we wonder if we did enough, bought enough, wrapped enough, entertained enough, baked enough, decorated enough. we are surrounded by images – piles of presents under ornate christmas trees, horse-drawn sleighs on currier and ives backroads, families gathered at tables merrily chatting, churches full with congregations happily singing and the bells in the belfry ringing. the kind of images that nag you into thinking, “more. i must do more.”
the other evening, gathered around bowls of homemade hot thai soup, 20 said, “it’s hard to keep things simple.” the three of us share some profound times of conversation, of life’s changes and choices, of simple togetherness. he talked about soup and wine and chocolate and conversation, of appreciating each other’s company.
the catalogs arriving in the mail and the ads in the paper and the online streaming advertising all pander to the indulgence of our insecurity. of not enough. how do we respond and say no?
it’s hard to avoid. it feels like we have to say yes to everything. or we don’t quite measure up. we search for meaning. in things. we are searching outside of ourselves. holding ourselves to some sort of external standard of holiday-completeness.
how do we seek more centeredness? more connectedness? more moments held in the stillness of awe?
i found a note the other day, tucked inside a book. it was a jotting-down-of-a-memory and was a quote from The Boy. he was five and he said, “look at how i can snap (my fingers). at 5 years old!! i could become a snap teacher and teach everyone how to snap!” never too young to dream.
jen is zealous. she is reallyyyy zealous. i don’t think i have known anyone who is as zealous a learner as jen. it is invigorating and inspiring to be around someone who embraces all she does not know with questions and a hope for understanding, as opposed to resistance or suspicion. she actively seeks out ways to learn the new, the unknown, wholeheartedly jumping in and swimming. she knows that vitality comes with opening yourself to new things.
pantene recently ran a new video series. it’s referencing the holidays and in it transgender people talk about what it’s like to go home. it’s breathtakingly sad the number of LGBTQ women and men who are not welcomed at home because someone cannot learn, ask questions, try to understand. instead, resistance and suspicion and a whole lot of judgement fiercely reign and the dream of being all together celebrating is devastatingly dashed. squelching another’s dreams is not the ultimate job of our job as humankind.
yesterday i conducted a christmas cantata. ahead of time, i had, for hours and hours on end, researched songs to find the pieces i felt would resonate with people, the pieces that would be generously bestowing of spirit and not off-putting. i looked for the language i thought would tug at their hearts and remind them of the light, the miracle of the season. when one song didn’t quite fit for me after i had chosen it, i wrote a new one. they were labeled ‘contemporary’ songs, with melodies, rhythm, chords, years of copyright differing from the hymns in the hymnals. over thirty people participated: a choir, a ukulele band, a worship band, a violinist, a violist. the result was truly beautiful, the message clear and the music gorgeous. our little church – a church that proudly purports to be reconciling and all-embracing – had moments truly holy in that service.
h is 93. every week at rehearsal he is ready and willing to learn something. he is steeped in traditional – after all, he is 93, his year of copyright long ago. and yet, those new melodies, harmony, challenging rhythms he has learned to sing have brought a freshness of life to him. never too old to dream. he knows that vitality comes with opening yourself to new things.
but back to yesterday. i remain unfulfilled in one way. because the sad part about yesterday? all the work and time that these dedicated volunteers had put into this cantata – with my careful choices based on over thirty years as a minister of music – was not seen by the first service folks. the word ‘contemporary’ made it unfathomable for that service to host without complaint, relegating it only to the second service. the spirit of camaraderie, the support of the efforts of others in their own church, the truly beautiful music that was made was lost on this first service. i try to understand their dedication to traditional music, to choice, and i heartedly honor it in selecting music for every other week of the church year. but i fail to understand their unwillingness to even try to embrace something else, something ‘new’. i fail to understand any reinforcement of ‘different’, of divisiveness. especially as simply one day and a festive community celebration of the holiday. especially when churches are constantly looking for relevancy and vitality is one of the necessary ingredients. they do not know what they missed. closing off. what they are missing.
jen and h would like each other. they both openly embrace new. they both openly embrace others. they both dream dreams, happily engaging in life, snapping. what a gift to be around.
frank made sure to bring us the dvd. our favorite of the hallmark christmas movies, a season for miracles was scheduled for tv viewing at a time we were not available. and he knows. frank knows how much we love this movie during this season. we, i have to admit, spend just a little bit of time watching hallmark christmas movies, despite their obvious indulgence to happy-endings-aficionados. a season for miracles is such a story, but there are these lovely lines spoken by patty duke toward the end, that inevitable-anticipated-yet-yearned-for end. she wisely advises one of the stars of the movie, giving him something to consider, “i forgive you. there’s a lot of power in those three words. they can change the world.”
yesterday i sang these lyrics, “all these pieces broken and scattered, in mercy gathered, mended and whole. empty handed but not forsaken. i’ve been set free, i’ve been set free.” (broken vessels – j. houston, j. myrin)
in true cliche, i would, indeed, say we are all broken by pieces we need to forgive, things for which we need forgiveness. we carry these burdens like heavy luggage, dragging them day by day, place to place. nary a moment goes by without our minds summoning up a reason to be dismayed or disgusted with someone, disappointed in ourselves. we are not free.
is it pollyanna-ish to believe that the world would be changed if forgiveness were paramount? is it an irrational, unreachable panacea for all the divisiveness and turmoil? is there just too much purity – too much hallmark – in those words, in that kind of peace-seeking?
if you could, who would share the third seat in a room with you and forgiveness? with whom would you seek forgiveness from? who would you forgive?
is it better to be mended and empty-handed than holding-on-tightly-burdened with sharp, broken pieces that pierce your heart? where is your free?
“live generously and the world will treat you royally.” (crown royal commercial)
“practice makes perfect,” it says on an index card in the piano bench of my old piano downstairs in the basement. written in the careful-penmanship-printing of me-probably-as-an-8-year-old, i have kept this card in my bench for over 50 years. i’m sure there were multiple times i rolled my eyes at this, as i opened the bench to take out and work on lesson music. i still roll my eyes. everything takes practice.
everything. including living generously. there’s always that moment when you have to decide to either take up the rope, as they say, and tug back or let the rope lay still. so much easier to pick it up and tug, letting it lay there and not touching it requires sheer grit-your-teeth-restraint sometimes. it’s too easy to tug, to even wrench, and too royally hard to let a sleeping rope lie.
but in those moments, the really tough ones and the little ones, that you actually and intentionally choose to mother-teresa your way through, your generosity spins outward in concentric circles and goodness spreads. goodness has a way of coming back, returning to center, with centrifugal force and your heart in the middle. gravity draws back goodness and keeps close the spirit of all with whom you have been generous. kindness bestowed upon you is royal treatment; it is the world treating you royally. we are all so fortunate. we are already receiving lavish unconditional love. what would happen if we practiced living generously even more?
it seems to apply everywhere, to everything. i can’t even remember what margie, in her 80-plus-year-wisdom, was talking about when she said, “it’s all a bunch of phooey.”
phoo-ey: (informal) exclamation: used to express disdain or disbelief; noun: nonsense
yes. it seems to be relevant. no matter where i look. each arena with its own bunch of phooey.
to what do we each ascribe? truth? phooey? do we straddle the line? how do we couch our opinions? why are we encountering so much phooey? how do we justify phooey? what parts of life are exempt from the phooeyness? fred rogers said, “try your best to make goodness attractive.” goodness > phooeyness
my sweet poppo never cursed. well, hardly ever. but in those moments that he felt absolute and extreme exasperation, he would exclaim in a burst, “this is bullsh*t!” he would be camping with me these days, simply because 1. he’s my poppo and 2. he would be exasperated. he would agree with margie.
even with more words, and i have plenty of words stored up but am reminding myself that less-is-more-less-is-more-less-is-more, i don’t think i can add much to margie’s wise ones: it IS all a bunch of phooey.
jen pulled the sliding glass door open for the fourth time (within a short visit of potlucking time around the kitchen island) and we all laughed. sweet henry and chester wanted out. wanted in. wanted out. wanted in. this is a familiar tune. dogdog finds it irresistible to demand to go out and then not want to miss anything and want back in. on repeat.
andrea and scott have two golden retrievers. impeccably trained, they wait for a sign or a word to do most anything. they are not the in-and-out-ers that dogga and henry and chester are. i remember them as calm and happy and i vowed that one day i would have a dog as well-behaved. this is not that day.
but dogdog is, yes, dogdog-ish. his sweet face watches our every move, trying to anticipate to which room we might be moving, trying to assess why we are feeling what he knows we are feeling. he doesn’t like conflict; he doesn’t like the sound of metal touching metal. it took him a while to warm up to the ukulele (which he now loves and wishes he could play) and the piano draws him into the studio. he won’t touch food on the counter or the table or really anywhere unless given permission, but his direct eye contact begs for a bite every breakfast. he destroyed very few things as a puppy (well, the kitchen cabinet door and the table legs count) but de-heads every toy he is given and un-stuffings them. he bows to all things babycat, yet loves to drag him around and taunts him until babycat asserts his ruling paw. his aussie-ness makes him intuitively try to keep track of all people and animals in the house, a tiresome and difficult chore when one is peculiarly averse to going upstairs or downstairs. he is quirky.
on island he was quiet. here at home he is a barker. i guess he knew the littlehouse wasn’t his. he loves errands both places. he ecstatically runs miles in circles in the backyard and certain names will make his eyes wide and his australian-shepherd-jumping-bean-dog-heart jump with glee. he clocks out of all responsibility late at night, content to quietly languish in whatever room we are in, happy to have pets and go sleepynightnight. sweet, sweet dogdog emerges from constant-motion dog.
i don’t remember the story we were talking about around jen and brad’s island. i’m sure it was one of tripper’s many idiosyncratic tales. we rolled our eyes and laughed. and brad said, “you should be proud that you raised an independent dog!”
my sweet poppo ended up in solitary confinement. shot down over the ploesti oil fields in romania, he was a WWII prisoner of war and was being held in a prison camp in bulgaria. he was courageously condemning the rat-eaten stale bread the prisoners were served, throwing it down, and he was hauled off to solitary confinement. after months of imprisonment my dad, along with others, was able to escape this POW camp and find his way to freedom. freedom.
each of us has our own freedom route, courage to summon up. i look at both of my children as they make their way in this world. they are courageously carving out their lives. they are scrappy and they make sacrifices to seek happiness and freedom from fear of any kind. my sweet poppo is cheering them on, both of them.
this calendar page hangs in the choir room. the words seemed particularly timely to us, for many reasons, on many levels. we looked up the person to which they were credited: thucydides. a studier of human nature, he: “also has been called the father of the school of political realism, which views the political behavior of individuals and the subsequent outcomes of relations between states as ultimately mediated by, and constructed upon, the emotions of fear and self-interest.”
we owe the freedom of our country to the veterans, like my sweet dad, who we honor today and to wise, thoughtful, inspired leaders of this country. we have much to be grateful for.
and yet. these savvy words of this ancient greek historian…”the emotions of fear and self-interest”. this is relevant.
my poppo sat in a prison camp cell representing a country fighting against leaders filled with self-interest and the indiscriminate propagation of fear and atrocities upon innocent people. his courage was buoyed by the courage of his fellow soldiers. my father was staunchly determined to put others’ needs first.
i fear what is happening in our country today would sadden him; his response would be that our leaders are not acting out of courage, not out of a rallying call for equitable independence of all, but instead, out of bullying and grandiose self-serving.
and i believe my sweet poppo would throw down the rat-eaten stale philosophy of this current government. with his great courage. in true freedom.
the first snowstorm took us by surprise. heavy snow fell on southeastern wisconsin at a time when we were just back from being on island and struggling to figure out where we were in what felt like a time warp. it was, indeed, the end of october, but it just didn’t feel like it.
the snow was beautiful and heavy and, in our neighborhood of old houses and in-the-trees power lines, it bowed branches and pulled down those lines. we lost power early in the day.
having no power these days doesn’t just mean you can’t warm up your chicken soup for lunch or (perish the thought) make a much-needed afternoon nespresso. it means no wifi, no technology, no dropbox. i couldn’t do the laundry for a trip the next day. it put us on pause.
we wondered how the people of california were functioning with millions of them power-less in a vague effort to avoid more fires. i wondered how many people were still struggling without power in puerto rico, for what is an interminable amount of time. i was reminded of the big flat-line-windstorm that happened in our ‘hood back in 2011, hundreds of trees uprooted and no power for days. pause is acceptable for a few hours, but after that….
as it got darker we pulled out candles and a battery-operated-lantern that my big-ikea-fan-poppo purchased. we put our chicken soup in a picnic basket and went out seeking a microwave in which to warm it up.
we got a text from john when he got home, “do you guys have power?” later, we could see an impressive glow of candles in his living room windows.
my favorite moment in a day of challenges that included having no electricity, came when he followed up on the power company update we texted him. with john oz wit and his you-do-what-you-have-to-do outlook he wrote back, “the dachshunds ate by candlelight.”
“no distinction is made between the sacred and the everyday.”
“our attitude toward the world resonates in the objects around us. they reveal our intention.”
(from plain and simple, sue bender)
the first day i walked into the tiny lobby at TPAC i wondered why the table holding brochures was light blue. it matched nothing there and was a statement of a kind of thoughtless we-need-a-small-table-does-anyone-have-one thoughtfulness. all season long i kept thinking that it should be painted black. the very last day in the theatre, outside in the chill air, surrounded by golden and crimson leaves, i painted it. it dried fast and we placed it back in the lobby. still the same little table doing its job, but its new distinction mattered and it fit in the space. it did my heart good.
with multiple bags of old mayonnaise and mustard, an old container of kale and a moldy loaf of some kind of unidentifiable home-baked bread, i finished cleaning out the fridge, an appliance i had never opened for an entire season. clearly, others had, and the accumulation of old-ness was ripe. i scrubbed it out and stood back to look at how neat and tidy it was. the whole kitchen area looked neat and tidy, a new keurig replacing an old coffeemaker and broken carafe. shelves cleaned, toothpicks that had poured out swept up, a welcoming backstage entrance for staff and artists. moving that space up to sacred-everyday from messy-everyday did my heart good.
the last couple weeks have been nesting weeks at TPAC, moments when d and i have had the space to ourselves. having now passed through the shoulder season, it’s empty and it’s quiet. the 250 seats wait for the next event, the off-the-shoulders season, the next new high season. i can feel its curiosity, its expectation.
we sat in various seats around the theatre, talking about the dreams we had when we first saw it. getting mired in the muck of being the you-aren’t-from-here-newbies had slowed things down. it had paused our ownership of the actual space. eh, who am i kidding? it brought most of that to a screeching halt. drama, three board presidents and a reticence to consider change from people hired as change agents (us) brought the gate down before we could even start.
we discovered the word ‘glacial’ and applied it generously to the direction we were going. we didn’t try to change a space that didn’t feel like ours yet. we didn’t try to change too many processes. we stopped trying to change mindsets.
instead, we embraced people. we listened; we learned. we set out to weave relationships where they had eroded, where tattered feelings were wrung out, where we were told no relationship could work. we befriended those we were told would never like us. we struggled to understand allies who weren’t so much allies. with deep roots of experience, we led with intention, with the questions of what would be best for this space, what would be best for the artistry on this little island, what would be long-lasting and truly make the making of art – whatever the genre – foremost?
and so, it was in the last days, when it was quiet and empty that we were able to take the time to really listen to the thunder of the silence of that really beautiful space. we strove to honor the sanctity of this art-making place. and we intended, with every move of cleaning and straightening and re-arranging and planning and yes, dreaming, all the best things we could. it did my heart good.
reverse threading 