exactly how I feel right now

my loves

Happy 11th Sis! You are hands down my favorite person in the world.  And I love, love, love you.  

 

Valentines day should be spent with best friends whom you love and lots of beautiful cake and tea.  And if you can’t decide between the pear & rose pie, the chocolate molten cake, and the vanilla bean raspberry ganache you should not even think twice about getting  all three and a pot of orange blossom tea to go with it.  

 

I love the rain.

But I do not love it in my shoes. And I do not love it for six days, and I do not love it in puddles in my jacket pockets.

Ward street & my old friend Wendell

I just can’t get enough of these. Natures little nod to Valentines day?

Been returning to some of my old literary loves lately. There are these times in my life when there is just so much new, so much change, so many ideas to swim in, that all I can do to weather it all and not loose myself  in all that new is to cling to some of my old prophets. The old friends, with whom I have an understanding, who spoke to me when I was first finding a voice to my opinions. Emerson, and Wendell Berry, Abigail Adams and Henri Nouwen among others… 

In that same vein this morning, I was flipping through some of my favorite Wendell  Berry Essays and I saw something I underlined back in 2005.   Just so beautifully said. I believe this fully. 

It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are. The path to wholeness depends on our discovery and acknowledgement of and then response to, a greater goodness that contextualizes us. Our fundamental mistake is that we have presumed to be the authors of ourselves and our destinies, and thus have forgotten that we are part of a great co authorship in which we are all collaborating with God and with nature in the making of ourselves and one another. We can only become what we truly are by acknowledging that we do not exist by, from, and for ourselves. 

Our lives are rooted in a natural and cultural community, so that to cut ourselves off from these roots, whether that be in the name of progress or human liberation, is to ensure the eventual withering and then death of life. Once we have forgotten or denied our biological kinship with the earth and its inhabitants, it is hardly an accident that so much of human spiritual life is premised on an escape from rather than an affirmation of this life.”

–Wendell Berry, The Art of the Common Place

for you

Mom,

Do you remember when I was a little girl and we used to run the Red Bud Classic 5k in Oklahoma City? And do you also remember how according to my very refined five year old worldview, the only appropriate way to run such a race was in my patent-leather dress shoes, with my white ribbed socks pulled as hard as I possibly could stretch them up to my knees? Socks that naturally, were designed with the intention to be pulled just past the ankles and cuffed over nicely. Though, I am sure that on race day you were less than surprised with my behavior. This sock obsession lasted a couple years I believe? You would remember better. I can only imagine how secretly satisfied you must have felt when slowly but surely I would ruin the elastic in the whole pack of socks, making them impossible to hike up in the desired, yet less than complimentary form I had perfected.

I think we might even have a picture somewhere of us at this particular race. We are posed in front of a little make believe tipi (my Native American phase)- you in your running gear, me in my running gear and dress shoes. I bet all those other suburban running moms were silently judging you. Not only were you making your 5 year old race, but you didn’t even have the decency to buy her some running shoes.

Only now, as a semi- adult, am I starting to realize the courageous audacity you had in raising me. How you let me live exactly how I felt happiest, most myself, even when it looked totally nuts to everyone else.  And how you never held that against me, but rather encouraged it.  Maybe you knew then, or maybe you just hoped, that twenty some years later these small decisions would be the foundation of the way I think and move within the world- what I love.  A million things you did like this, like when you let me turn our whole backyard and even most of our front yard into a giant pumpkin patch just because I LOVED LOVED LOVED pumpkins. Even when all the vines turned dead and brown and dusty- that stage when the patch is an absolute mess but the pumpkins need to still sit and grow and ripen, even then you let me keep it. Then the neighbors complained that our house was looking abandoned and unkempt, and even then you defended it.  You knew that I was learning one of the most important lessons in life, the lesson that with care wonderful things grow.  Amazing to think how that decision allowed those pumpkins to form in me a passion for the earth and soil, how naturally now, my vegetable garden is still one of my favorite things in my life.

There a million examples of these details that you sewed in me, seeds that have now grown into great big grown- up passions and strongholds in my life.

I was thinking about all this the other day as I was riding my bike to class.  In the past week and a half all the trees in Berkeley have began budding and flowering and the red buds near my house are especially striking.  They make me remember Oklahoma, all the crazy things we did. I’ve been thinking of you a lot lately, of us. Probably because my life right now reminds me so much of what I envision yours to have been like in college. Or maybe I imagine that if we had met, you 24 and me 24 we would have been friends. Interesting friends, but friends I am sure. That 24 year old Eileen would have loved everything about Berkeley; the little shops, the grand libraries and used bookstores, the farmers markets, riding your bike everywhere.  Just earlier this week I had to laugh a little at myself  because I caught myself without realizing it- riding your old scwhinn, while wearing your knit blue turtleneck, and sporting your old red north face back- packing  jacket.  You and I are so much the same, and so much different. I have never met someone so much the same and so drastically different than me in my entire life. You must feel that too. Which is probably why my teenage years were especially brutal for us.  I am actually amazed that anyone in our family came out alive from the carnage I created in our house during those years. So besides the great thanks I owe you for just about everything in my life, you’ll be getting extra helpings of dark chocolate in heaven for those “special” years.

It would be fitting that I would get a Valentine in the mail from you on your birthday. This is who you are, who you’ve always been, someone who loves in the details.  You are brilliant mom, I tell people all the time that you are the smartest woman I have ever met. Ever.  A difficult legacy to follow, but one that I am so very proud of. You’re a worker too, you work so hard for the things you are passionate about; your career, the church, the pregnancy center. And more inspiring is the way you work at the less glamorous things too, the ones that are unseen, the day to day. I believe wholly that when there is a will there is a way, a value that I have no doubt inherited from you.

Perhaps this is a curse of an only child who grew up with a single mother, our little two person team- But I find myself constantly as concerned with the way your life unfolds as I do my very own.  And out of that deep place of comradery inside me all I can say is, Can you believe it Ma?  How it all turned out?

So good.  So right.  Full of so much richness.

So thank you Mom, for all you do, but mostly for who you are.  Your life is beautiful.

Happy Birthday, wish I could be with you today to celebrate.

love,

C

superbowl sunday

The best thing I can do for myself is to be attentive, to watch carefully what is happening, to feel out the direction, to sense what movement I can. It’s like trying to work my way along a wall in the dark, it doesn’t serve me to turn and rail against the wall.