Spiritual Journey First Thursday: Renewal

Dani Burtsfield is our host this month for Spiritual Journey First Thursday, and she's asked us to reflect on the topic of Renewal. I bet I know why. Dani lives in the United States, well north of me, and there, spring is coming. It's a time when the monochrome of winter gives way to bright colors and Lent gives way to Easter. It's a time of rebirth, resurrection, renewal.

Since I live in the Caribbean, a place where the seasons don't change much over the course of a year, you'd think this focus on spring wouldn't mean much to me. But what I've learned is that when you're paying attention, both to nature and to the ways of human beings, there are seasons here too, way more than just four.

Recently I was reading the book Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness, by Ingrid Fetell Lee.

Lee has a lot to say about design and color, and how our surroundings influence how we think and feel. She discusses ten aesthetics of joy: energy, abundance, freedom, harmony, play, surprise, transcendence, magic, celebration, and renewal. See that last one? There's our topic! And Lee associates this aesthetic partly with seasons. She talks about how life organizes itself in cycles. I was particularly fascinated by what she says about seasons in Japan:

“The Japanese are particularly good at creating moments of anticipation. Instead of having only four seasons to look forward to, they have seventy-two. The ancient Japanese calendar divides the year into a series of micro seasons, each only four or five days in length, with names that capture small changes in the surrounding environment. Hibernating Creatures Open Their Doors marks the tail end of winter, followed a bit later by Leaf Insects Turn into Butterflies. In June, the Plums Turn Yellow, and in October the Geese Arrive and the Grasshopper Sings. The names made me think of other seasonal moments that naturally seem to stir feelings of renewal: the whiteout blanket of the first snowfall, the hard drenching of an April rain, the blush of sunrise, and the golden glow of a harvest moon. There is a joy in the first day cold enough to light a fire in the fireplace, the first one warm enough to go outside without a jacket, and the first blinking of fireflies in the summer yard. By building excitement for these subtle transitions, we can invite more cyclical-anticipation into our lives.”

I haven't identified seventy-two seasons here in Haiti, but there are many. We have some plants that bloom all year round, like bougainvillea and hibiscus, but many others take turns. Right now the African tulip trees and the frangipani (plumeria) are gorgeous, and soon the flamboyant (poinciana) will cover the city in red.

I live in the city, so I'm not really in tune with crop activity like planting and harvest, but I do watch the goat population on my walk to school with great interest; right now there are a lot of pregnant mamas, so soon there will be nursing kids. Since I started paying attention to these natural events, I often notice that when I post a photo of the latest flowers or livestock on Facebook, the Memories feature shows me that they appeared the same week as the year before.

It's not just nature, it's the way people react to it, like this season's kites in response to the windy weather.  Easter weekend is traditionally the biggest kite-flying time of the year.

And then there's the renewal inherent in the school calendar. Each year I get new classes. Each Monday starts a new week of instruction. Each quarter their grades start fresh. Each new class period is an opportunity to try again, no matter how frustrated we were with each other last time. From the overawed seventh graders who join us in August, experiencing their first lockers, their first forays into the secondary building, to the jaded eighth graders who in May are ready to move on to high school, and then to the ninth graders who come back to visit me like the swallows to Capistrano every year, huddling in the doorway and whispering nostalgically about their memories of middle school, conveniently forgetting the way they slumped sullenly in their seats some days the previous spring: these are some of the predictable seasons of my school year.

But the best renewal every year is Easter, Resurrection Sunday. After the contemplative weeks of Lent, the lament and self-denial, Easter comes with delight, reminding us that death is not the end. Here's a Jonathan Martin quote I found last year: "The sense of foreboding can be trusted -- a faithful witness to Good Friday. It doesn't feel like everything will be okay, cause it won't be. The message of Good Friday is that things aren't going to end well -- things just end. Violence will always run its course, hope bloodied. The message of Good Friday is that death has the last word, on all of us. The message of Easter is that the last word isn't the final one. Easter doesn't lie to us, doesn't say our own stories won't reach dark ends. Only that our dark ends won't be Love's end, God's end. On Good Friday we remember that death is an inescapable cold, hard fact. On Easter we remember that the mere facts may not yet be the story. Death is reality, just not the ultimate one. Easter is the proclamation that even death must bow, to possibility."

Three weeks from today is Maundy Thursday; three weeks from tomorrow is Good Friday; then the waiting of Saturday and the rejoicing of Sunday.

Here's Jonathan Martin again, this time from How to Survive a Shipwreck: Help is On the Way and Love is Already Here: "In whatever remains in you that wants to create, to make, to birth something new, in whatever corner that longs for some kind of resurrection on the other side of death, something divine quietly snaps, fires, clicks, flickers. This is the Spirit of God, lurking in your own broken spirit."

Welcome, renewal! Welcome, again and again! I long again for Easter, for Jesus leaving the tomb empty. 

Be sure to visit Dani's blog to see what others have to say about this month's topic!

NPM: Day 4

My seventh graders are providing our daily poems these days by reciting poems they have memorized. In other years, I've let them choose their own, and their choices were straying further and further from what I considered good. This year I picked out a pile of short poems I thought worth memorizing, and passed them out. They were allowed to trade with someone else, but other than that, they got what they got.

Yesterday I shared Tracy K. Smith's podcast; on one of her episodes, she talked about memorized poems. She said that a poem you know by heart is "an arsenal of insight and delight." I love that, and have found it true in my own life. I am thankful that I was forced to memorize a variety of poems, and so I feel only limited guilt about forcing my students to memorize poems similarly.

I've had this article open on my desktop for a while; it's a Billy Collins article about the poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." First he writes about why he likes the poem, and then he describes how the poem saved him when he had to have an MRI before he knew what that was.

Here's a snippet:

"Once you’ve installed the poem in your memory, it’s there to comfort you—or at least distract you—wherever you are.

I think that’s one reason I’ve always made my literature students choose a poem to memorize, even if it’s just something short—a little poem by, say, Emily Dickinson. They’re very resistant to it at first. There’s a collective groan when I tell them what they’re going to have to do.  I think it’s because memorization is hard. You can't fake it the way you might in responding to an essay question. Either you have it by heart, or you don’t.

And yet once they do get a poem memorized, they can’t wait to come into my office to say it. I love watching that movement from thinking of memorization as a kind of drudgery, to seeing it as internalizing, claiming, owning a poem. It’s no longer just something in a textbook—it’s something that you’ve placed within yourself."

Another tab is this YouTube channel, "52 Poems in 52 Weeks." I haven't watched all the videos, but I love the idea of memorizing that many beautiful poems. Talk about an "arsenal of insight and delight!" It looks as though he only got about halfway through his project, but still, 26 poems is impressive. I don't know why he stopped and while I found his professional website, it hasn't been updated in a while. Here he is reciting the "Time for Everything" passage from Ecclesiastes.

The fourth line of the Progressive Poem is here.

NPM: Day 3

I don't know much about Tracy K. Smith, the current Poet Laureate of the United States. Before she got her job, I hadn't read any of her work, and now I've only read some of what's available online. (Here's one poem, "The Universe as Primal Scream.") But I feel as though I've been getting to know her by listening to her podcast, "The Slowdown."

Every weekday, Smith publishes a five-minute podcast that includes a poem she's chosen and a little commentary. You can see the poems, plus subscribe to the podcast, here, but unfortunately her remarks aren't included in the written version. That tab is open on my desktop because I like to go to the website and reread the poems I particularly like. I always get more out of them with my eyes than my ears.

Smith's choices are eclectic. Most of the poems are contemporary, but she's featured Langston Hughes, George Herbert, D.H. Lawrence, Emily Dickinson, and many other classic poets. I highly recommend this podcast if you're looking for a little more poetry in your life, not just now, during National Poetry Month, but all year long.

Today's Progressive Poem line is here. You can see the full schedule here.

NPM: Day 2

When I started taking stock of my open links, I was sort of embarrassed to realize I had three from Irene Latham's blog, Live Your Poem. Plus a poem of hers on someone else's blog. I decided to combine all of them into one post, lest Irene feel I was stalking her. If I am, Irene, it is only in the most admiring way. But then, that's a pretty stalkerish thing to say.

I've been reading Irene's blog for years now, and I own several of her books (reviews here, here, and here). She's a lovely writer and a generous soul, sharing her time and talents freely on the internet. She's also the founder of the Progressive Poem. But what I admire her for the most is her delicate hand with a metaphor.

So here are my tabs.

This is my favorite of Irene's poems from last year's NPM, "Let There Be Poetry." Beautiful! This year she's doing ARTSPEAK again, with happiness as her theme.  Here's the first one. This post from Tabatha's blog has been open on my desktop for a while. It has several wonderful poems in it, but my favorite is the one Irene wrote called "Thirteen Reasons Why Not." My favorite part is the end:

and most of all
because I want to know
what it's like

to be an old woman
who loves an old man.

The fourth Irene tab is from 2016, and it's a creed poem. She has several of these in her poetry books, and I've always admired them and wanted to try one. This one is called "I Could Say I Believe in the Ocean." You should definitely follow the link and read it, and/or listen to Irene read it, before you read mine, written with hers as a mentor text. I'm not entirely happy with mine, because my metaphors seem so much more obvious than what she's done, but it was fun to write anyway.

I Could Say I Believe in Flowers


But what I mean is,
I believe in color:
red and yellow and orange,
blue and purple and screeching pink,
combinations no designer would dare.

I believe in roses
and dandelions,
bougainvillea of every shade,
orchids and daffodils and
Queen Anne’s lace and
blowsy zinnias.

I believe in being big or small,
showy or shy,
posing boldly for Georgia O’Keeffe
or hiding in the undergrowth
where nobody finds you
unless they’re quite persistent.

I believe in blooming
when it’s time.

I believe in greenhouses
and hedgerows,
medians left unmowed,
formality like Versailles and
riotous chaos of weeds.

I believe in growing
and wilting,
in dying
and coming back to life.
I believe in fertilizer
and tender loving care,
but also in being left absolutely alone sometimes.

I believe in the Gardener
ambling among the flowers,
loving each one.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com


Thanks, Irene, for everything you do to promote poetry on- and offline. Happy National Poetry Month to you!

Here's today's line in the Progressive Poem, on Kathryn Apel's blog. You can see the whole schedule here.

NPM: Day 1

National Poetry Month is a month-long frenzy of poetry that I enjoy every year, but also I find it exhausting. I read a lot of poetry all year round, but during NPM there is just so much of it. Creative types are doing amazing projects and my inbox has extra poems in it (I get some daily poems all the time, but more in April). I wish I had time to read everything and marvel over all of it, but I also have to keep working during NPM, and I have a family, and life goes on in all kinds of time-consuming ways.

Some years I have attempted to do a daily post in NPM, and some years not, and this year on the whole I thought not, but then I realized that I have so many open tabs on my desktop that contain poems that I could probably post for two weeks just by sharing those. This would allow me to close the tabs, and also it would allow others to see what I've kept open over the last few months. Sometimes I save something because I just want to read it again, sometimes because I want to write something similar. My husband is endlessly horrified by how many tabs I have open all the time. When I run out of open tabs, I have poems I've saved in email that I can share, and by that time I'll have new tabs open, anyway.

The thing is, I know I'll be mostly talking to myself in these posts. All my poetry-loving friends are just as busy during NPM as I am. If you are stopping by to read, welcome, and leave a comment to let me know you've been here.

Today I'm going to start with some song lyrics by Andrew Peterson. I know my life would be much poorer without the poets, the ones I know personally and the ones I just know from their words. As usual, Andrew Peterson expresses well how I feel.


To All the Poets
by Andrew Peterson

To all the poets I have known
Who saw the beauty in the commonplace
Saw incarnation in a baby's face
And in a drop of rain the stars
When there was mud and blood and tears
You sang a song at night to calm our fears
You made a moment last a thousand years
You are the poets I have known

To all the poets I have known
You built a kingdom out of sea and sand
You conquered armies with a marching band
You carved a galaxy in stone
You built an altar out of bread
And spent your soul to see the children fed
You wove your heart in every story read
Thank God for poets I have known

And you keep on dreamin'
When the dreams all fade
When friends desert me
You're the ones who stay
To write the prayers when every prayer had been prayed
You are the poets I have known

You turned your tears into a string of pearls
You held your sorrow high to light the world
When I thought I was alone
In every man you saw the boy
The hidden heart the dark could not destroy
Slipped past the dragons with a tale of joy
Thank God for poets I have known

'Cause you keep on dreamin'
When the dreams all fade
When friends desert me
You're the ones who stay
To write the prayers when every prayer had been prayed

You walking wounded of my life
Who bled compassion in the heat of strife
You stood between my heart and Satan's knife
With just the armor of a song
You are the heroes and the brave
Who with a slender pen our passions save
And chisel epitaphs upon the graves
Of all the poets I have known

So keep on dreamin'
Keep on dreamin'
So keep on dreamin'
Keep on dreamin'
Keep on dreamin'

Some other goodies for today: Jama has rounded up some of the incredibly creative things people are doing for NPM this year. There are teaching tips and poem-a-day projects and videos and it's all amazing. I am so impressed by everybody and happy they let me hang out with them.

And today you can read the first line of this year's Progressive Poem here at Matt Forrest Esenwine's blog. He's encouraging us to try found lines this year. Hmm. We shall see what develops. Meanwhile, I like how he's started things out.

I posted the whole schedule yesterday; you can see it here. My line is coming up on the 7th.

It's National Poetry Month! Welcome to the Progessive Poem!

It's National Poetry Month, and that means it's time for the Progressive Poem! This is the eighth year, and I've participated in all of them so far. Here you can read all the previous ones. While the finished result is always quite quirky, the collaboration is so much fun every year.

The action starts April 1st at Matt Forrest Esenwine's blog. My line will be right here on the 7th. And here's the rest of the schedule:

April

1 Matt @ Radio, Rhythm and Rhyme

2 Kat @ Kathryn Apel

3 Kimberly @ KimberlyHutmacherWrites

4 Jone @ DeoWriter

5 Linda @ TeacherDance

6 Tara @ Going to Walden

7 Ruth @ thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown

8 Mary Lee @ A Year of Reading

9 Rebecca @ Rebecca Herzog

10 Janet F. @ Live Your Poem

11 Dani @ Doing the Work that Matters

12 Margaret @ Reflections on the Teche

13 Doraine @ Dori Reads

14 Christie @ Wondering and Wandering

15 Robyn @ Life on the Deckle Edge

16 Carol @ Beyond LiteracyLink

17 Amy @ The Poem Farm

18 Linda @ A Word Edgewise

19 Heidi @ my juicy little universe

20 Buffy @ Buffy's Blog

21 Michelle @ Michelle Kogan

22 Catherine @ Reading to the Core

23 Penny @ a penny and her jots

24 Tabatha @ The Opposite of Indifference

25 Jan @ Bookseestudio

26 Linda @ Write Time

27 Sheila @ Sheila Renfro

28 Liz @ Elizabeth Steinglass

29 Irene @ Live Your Poem

30 Donna @ Mainely Write

What I Learned in March

In March we entered the season of Lent. Here in Haiti we celebrate Carnival, except not this year; the main state-sponsored festivities were canceled because of the political situation. We did get our week off school, not that we really needed more days off. We entered Lent with ashes as we did last year, and as Christians have been doing for centuries. We remembered that we are dust. Here's something new I incorporated into my Lenten worship this year: a liturgy of Lament offered as a free download by Aaron Niequist.

This month I thought about this podcast in which Krista Tippett interviews Alain de Botton about love and relationships. He talks about how we often are solely focused on the beginning of love in our literature and movies, when really the interesting part is how people work things out, make things last. I started making a musical playlist called "Old Love," named for the Mary Chapin Carpenter song.

So far I have Huey Lewis and the News, Sara Groves, Audrey Assad, Jason Mraz, Over the Rhine, Josh Garrels, Anderson East. Any suggestions to add to my Old Love collection?

I learned about the church forests in Ethiopia in this National Geographic article. In a time when environmental news is almost exclusively terrible, this was a much-needed ray of hope.

This report from Boston University about EDH, the Haitian electric company, came out a year ago, but for some reason it was only this month that the local press reported on it. This made very depressing reading. It has a lot of statistics in it, many of which mean little to me. One, for example, was that the average Haitian person consumes 37 kWh per year of electricity. Because I have a limited idea of what a kWh is or how much is a lot, I googled US statistics for comparison purposes. The average US resident consumes 11,980 kWh per year of electricity. I mean, c'mon now. At this point we are not even talking about the same planet. Thirty-seven versus eleven thousand nine hundred and eighty? And guess which one of these two countries, 700 miles apart, will suffer worse results from global climate change?

In March, a Facebook friend posted this article about civility of discourse. Here's a little taste: "The ego utilizes cruelty because cruelty provides drama, chaos, hate and division - all the ingredients that the ego needs to remain in the driver’s seat; all at a low cost. But is the cost really so low? Our ego feeds off the ego of others. The back and forth we engage in only grows the ego, drains energy, and perpetuates a false feeling that unless we keep going, we are creating a deficit in our identity. To starve the ego, we have to pay the low, low price of compassion. It’s actually not as costly as cruelty in the long run. Compassion produces a tangible return, with interest. In fact, investing compassion into a conversation is about one of the most lucrative investments a person can make."

I learned this month that according to one of my eighth graders, I am a "lit teacher." That's not lit, short for literature (though I am that), but lit, meaning cool and shiny. Or something like that. And she's probably already changed her mind. But it was still nice to hear it.

I learned that according to this article in French from Le Monde, the Haitian cohort in their thirties now, so in their early twenties when the earthquake of 2010 happened, is being called by some people "la génération fin du monde," the end of the world generation. They watched the apocalyptic events of 2010, and survived them as so many others did not; they expected things to change, but somehow that didn't happen. Now, according to the article, they are the ones orchestrating some of the current political upheaval.

After a conversation with a friend in my writing group about narrative arcs, I clicked on this article about other metaphors besides arcs we could use for how fiction progresses. Crystalline? Orange-shaped? Labyrinthine? Spiral?

What a bizarre collection of new directions my mind went in this month! I wonder what April has in store?

Poetry Friday: Discard

Discard

Someone discarded
this library book
Somewhere else.

It wasn’t the latest thing.
It was old and needed replacing
with
Something better.

Someone stamped it
DISCARD

and then
discarded it.

Through
Some alchemy
of pity and generosity
It ended up here,
Somewhere else.

If only
Someone
hadn’t stamped the word
DISCARD
here on this page.

That word
distracts my eye
from the
delicate
painting of
red and yellow and white tulips
with stripy green leaves.

Someone picked those flowers
Somewhere else.
Someone put them on the table,
dewy from the garden.
Someone painted them,
adding each line with a careful hand.

In my mind I redefine
DISCARD
and say instead

transplant

transplant 

to
Somewhere tulips do not grow
where we do not have the latest thing
and

where I take a moment to appreciate
the slender stems
and bright petals
of flowers which were
discarded
Somewhere else
long ago
but which art has preserved
for me to see 

here

this morning.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

You can find today's roundup at Carol's Corner, here.

Poetry Friday: Birthday Edition

I got some music for my birthday this year, and I've been listening to it a lot, so from my new albums, here are some song lyrics for today's Poetry Friday. You know how some people say - and, apparently, mean - that they don't pay attention to the words when they listen to music? I just don't get that. To me, the words are supremely important, and both of these albums have fabulous words. I chose these two songs to share today because they both seem appropriate as I start a new year of my life. The world is a whole big mess, with tragedy and grief everywhere I look. And yet there are glimpses of God's goodness everywhere, too. This year I'm continuing to find beauty and to grow - shedding my snakeskin, as the Over the Rhine song puts it. Continuing to be astonished. Continuing to bet on the muse.

Windows in the World 

So you're sitting at the movies.
You're watching how the story finds a way.
And you've seen it all before,
Still you love to see the hero save the day.

It's a window in the world,
A little glimpse of all the
Goodness getting through.
And all along the way the days
Are made of little moments of truth.

Oh and every Sunday morning
You can see the people standing in a line.
They're so hungry for some mercy,
For a taste of the Communion bread and wine.

It's a window in the world,
A little glimpse of all the
Goodness getting through.
And all along the way the days
Are made of little moments of truth.

It's the way the clouds are burning
From the angle of the light
As the earth is slowly turning you to meet it,
And you're watching at your window
At the ending of the night
--It's as plain as day
So any fool could see it:
It's a window in the world.

I can see the groom is waiting,
He's watching for the moment she appears.
They are laying down their lives for love
And Love is laying waste to all my fears.

It's a window in the world,
A little portal where you get a better view.
And the wonder of it all
Is all you need to see the goodness getting through.

And all along the way the days
Are made of little moments--
All along the way the road
Is paved with little moments of truth.

Andrew Peterson

Betting on the Muse

Another golden evening is dying on the vine
A rehearsal for the final act
When the light that's lost is mine
All this blinding beauty has left me no excuse

I know the sun is setting
Who knows where it’s heading?
I'm still betting
Betting on the muse

My courage often staggers but still we climb the stairs
I lie awake and wonder, are they songs or are they prayers?
This beautiful delusion
If it's all a ruse

It’s such a lovely setting
For my snakeskin to keep shedding
I'm still betting
Betting on the muse

You've got to die inside so many times
While you're trying to learn to live
You've got to get taken for everything
To have anything to give

Your signal is receiving
Some days it's called breathing

I'm remembering your kisses
Our lips raw with love
But the fact that you still make me laugh
Is what I'm most proud of
You learn to be astonished
That’s how you pay your dues

What am I forgetting?
Nothing I’m regretting
I'm still betting
Betting on the muse

What am I forgetting?
Nothing I’m regretting,
I'm letting go
What I'm not getting
I'm still betting
Betting on the muse.

Linford Detweiler (Over the Rhine)

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Reading Update

Here's what I've been reading lately:

Book #17 of 2019 was Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown. I was curious to learn more about Princess Margaret, but it was a little hard to keep track of what was real and what was invented in this "biography."

Books #18 and 19 were a couple of novellas by Diana Gabaldon, The Space Between and Virgins. Gabaldon puts these out in between her monster (800+ page) novels in the Outlander series. I found them in the library while looking for something else and they were quick reads that gave additional background to the series.

Book #20 was Discover the Mystery of Faith: How Worship Shapes Believing, by Glenn Packiam. Packiam's ruminations on how we express our beliefs in worship and how our worship informs and shapes what we believe were thought-provoking.

Book #21 was Hank Green's novel An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. While I didn't especially enjoy this (though I'll probably read the sequel so I know what happens), I did like this quote from the acknowledgements: "I also want to thank every single person who ever says, ‘You have to read this book!’ to a friend. I don’t care if it’s this book; I just want people to remind each other how wonderful books are." (Books are wonderful, friends!)

Book #22 was Many-Storied House: Poems by George Ella Lyon. This book began as a writing assignment, where students were supposed to write about a room in a house from their childhood. Lyon, the teacher, did the same and ended up writing about the house where she grew up in a lot of detail. I enjoyed reading this.

Book #23 was A Place of Healing: Wrestling with the Mysteries of Suffering, Pain, and God's Sovereignty, by Joni Eareckson Tada. If anybody has earned the right to talk about these issues, it's this author, who has spent the last fifty years in a wheelchair after breaking her neck as a teenager. In addition to quadriplegia, she also has suffered for many years from chronic pain, and more recently breast cancer.

Book #24 was A Great Reckoning, by Louise Penny, the twelfth Inspector Gamache book. I liked the new setting of this novel, the police training college that Inspector Gamache is supposed to clean up, but I didn't understand why several characters had to head to Three Pines midway through the book and hang out there.

Book #25 was All He Ever Wanted, by Anita Shreve, a sad, depressing story of a marriage based on a complete lack of communication.

Book #26 was The Chalk Artist, by Allegra Goodman. I really enjoyed this story about creativity, how our brains work, what we get or don't get from our families. I especially liked the teacher character, Nina, and the realistic, sympathetic sections about how she is learning her job. There aren't many books that mine the emotional territory of how hard it is to teach, especially at the beginning.

Book #27 was Out of the House of Bread: Satisfying Your Hunger for God with the Spiritual Disciplines, by Preston Yancey. I liked this, especially the extended metaphor of baking and spirituality. (I'm not a baker, but I live with one.) Yancey is very reflective and goes beyond the obvious. Here he is on prayer: "Kneading is a work of wrestling, of working out something from chaos into something that has form. Intercessory prayer is like that. We are working out with God the mess of things, the chaos of being, and seeing what shape and form it could take on when we turn it over, again and again, back to God." Elsewhere he writes: "Icons are the ordinary signs of miracle. There is never just a cup in this world when every cup brings to mind the cup held by Jesus on the night he was betrayed, when he said it held his blood shed for us. There is never just a bed when every bed brings to mind the command of God to speak of the stories of God at all times and in all places, in our lying down and our rising. There is never just a basin of water when all water is called holy because Jesus entered the waters of baptism with us, called himself living water at the well of Jacob." I will probably read this one again; there's a lot to think about here.

Book #28 was A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015, by Wendell Berry. I think this is the first time I've read a full book by Berry. He is so good to read in this time we live in, when the planet is choked by plastic and heating up and it feels as though we all need to climb on a spaceship and go somewhere else. Berry is so much more in touch with agriculture and the earth than most of us will ever be, and although he is completely clear-eyed about the mess, still he has hope. In addition to the poems in the book, there's an extended essay on Nature, and I loved the discursive commentary about Chaucer and Spenser and Wordsworth and others, and the combination of poetry and farming, philosophy and where you should wipe your feet if they have manure on them. I kept having the feeling about Berry that I used to have when I read C.S. Lewis in my teens and early twenties: that the author would not approve of me at all due to the trivial, frivolous nature of my inner landscape. But I enjoyed the book anyway.

Book #29 was Free Verse, by Sarah Dooley, a middle grade novel about seventh grader Sasha and her tragic life in Caboose, West Virginia. Sasha loses members of her family, ends up in foster care, runs away, and writes poetry. She is a sympathetic character, if a little old-seeming.

I'm in the middle of several books right now, so there should be a new update fairly soon!

Poetry Friday: Sunshine

In Haiti we have lots of problems; perhaps you've heard? That's what we're known for. On Wednesday I read an article in a local newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, summarizing a report that came out a year ago (I'm not sure why they are just now writing about it) from the University of Boston about our local electrical company. (Here's the report if you want to go read it.) That talked about problems, lots of them. An editorial showed that the paper found all of it as depressing as I did; it refers to "the desire of all of us to go looking for light elsewhere" ("notre envie à tous d'aller chercher la lumière ailleurs").

My first thought when I read that was: "Let's look for light here!" but I know how privileged I am to have some backup electricity for those long nights with no city power. The report says that only between 20 and 40% of the households in this country have any electricity connection at all. (And please, what kind of range is "between 20 and 40%?")

I went looking for a Caribbean poet writing about the extraordinary light we have here, fading our clothes as they flap on the clotheslines. That's the kind of light we can count on, because nobody can corrupt it or steal it and keep it for themselves, and I can count on Derek Walcott to write about it:

from The Prodigal

by Derek Walcott

A grey dawn, dun. Rain-gauze shrouding the headlands.
A rainbow like a bruise through cottony cumuli.
Then, health! Salvation! Sails blaze in the sun.
A twin-sailed shallop rounding Pigeon Island.
This line is my horizon.
I cannot be happier than this.

Derek Walcott isn't writing of Haiti, but of his own beautiful island, Santa Lucia, but the quality of the light is much the same. I don't want to downplay Haiti's problems, because they are many and people's lives are terribly difficult. I don't want to pretend that the sunshine makes up for the rest. Of course it doesn't. But the sunshine is beautiful, just the same.

Here's another poem to underline some of the things the rest of the world could learn from the Caribbean, or specifically Barack Obama from Derek Walcott:


The Day I Saw Barack Obama Reading Derek Walcott's Collected Poems

by Yusef Komunyakaa

Was he looking for St. Lucia's light
to touch his face those first days
in the official November snow & sleet
falling on the granite pose of Lincoln?

If he were searching for property lines
drawn in the blood, or for a hint
of resolve crisscrossing a border,
maybe he'd find clues in the taste of breadfruit.

I could see him stopped there squinting
in crooked light, the haze of Wall Street
touching clouds of double consciousness,
an eye etched into a sign borrowed from Egypt.

If he's looking for tips on basketball,
how to rise up & guard the hoop,
he may glean a few theories about war  
but they aren't in The Star-Apple Kingdom.

If he wants to finally master himself,
searching for clues to govern seagulls
in salty air, he'll find henchmen busy with locks
& chains in a ghost schooner's nocturnal calm.

He's reading someone who won't speak
of milk & honey, but of looking ahead
beyond pillars of salt raised in a dream
where fat bulbs split open the earth.

The spine of the manifest was broken,
leaking deeds, songs & testaments.
Justice stood in the shoes of mercy,
& doubt was bandaged up & put to bed.

Now, he looks as if he wants to eat words,
their sweet, intoxicating flavor. Banana leaf
& animal, being & nonbeing. In fact,
craving wisdom, he bites into memory. 

The President of the United States of America
thumbs the pages slowly, moving from reverie
to reverie, learning why one envies the octopus
for its ink, how a man's skin becomes the final page.

I found that poem here.

And here's Heidi's roundup. She's taking on the destruction of the planet today, and who better to do it?

Poetry Friday: Dave Dreams About Carnival

A friend told me about a dream he had, and gave me his blessing to mine his subconscious for a poem. I write about my own dreams often, but rarely about other people's. I wish I had a photo or painting of this one, but I don't, just words - words which I had a lot of fun writing.

Dave Dreams of Carnival

My friend Dave dreams he’s at my house in Haiti
and just as he’s about to knock on the door
it opens
and a Carnival procession cavalcades out,
led by a man on a donkey
and accompanied by raucous rara music. 

Dave wakes up as the revelers push by him,
(I imagine the donkey,
costumed in satin and sequins),
and hours later,
in the pale northern afternoon,
Dave realizes
that today is Mardi Gras.

In New Jersey where Dave lives,
snow still covers the ground this Fat Tuesday
and the particular energies required for a Haitian Carnival
remain frozen.
Meanwhile, here in Haiti,
while it’s a breezy eighty eight degrees,
and the palm trees and tropical backdrop sparkle,
political problems have cancelled this year’s festivities.
In short, Mardi Gras twenty nineteen is rather thin.
It’s Tuesday,
but Wednesday’s coming with all the ashes.

Dave stayed in my house once for about a month,
in twenty ten, another time when Carnival didn’t happen;
that year we’d just had a huge earthquake.
I wasn’t there, since
I’d gone to the US with the children;
my husband hosted him, sort of,
and Dave slept in my daughter’s room
and read books from her shelves in the evenings
after working all day in disaster relief,
while she went to seventh grade in Kentucky.

My house in Haiti is still part of the landscape of Dave’s dreams
just as he somehow knows without knowing that it’s Carnival time
the same day he wakes from the sound of drums and bamboo trumpets
and looks out his window at March in New Jersey.

Fifteen hundred miles away,
I stand startled, watching
merrymakers parade out of my door
dressed in the red and blue of the Haitian flag,
their tall headdresses swaying
as they sashay into the neighborhood
leaving behind the donkey poop for someone to clean up.

Let’s face it, I think,
annoyed by the effects of other people’s imaginations:
that someone will probably be me.

Mardi Gras, 2019

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com


Today's roundup is here.

First Thursday Spiritual Journey: Balance

One night I lost my balance and fell down the stairs, landing on my left leg and breaking it badly. That night was more than twenty years ago, and this morning as I write these words I can feel stiffness and pain as I flex my left foot.

I remember congratulating my doctor after my surgery on the beautiful incision, and how he wouldn’t take the credit: “You’re just a good healer,” he told me. And now the scar is scarcely visible, unless I point it out to you. Most days my leg works exactly as it is supposed to, but sometimes it hurts. It seems most likely to happen when I’ve had several days off in a row, as I have now (our Spring Break is always at Carnival time). When I don’t wear shoes with support, but go around barefoot or in flip flops for too long, the long-ago injury makes itself felt.

I’ve lost my balance at other times in my life, and fallen into the darkness just as I fell down those stairs. Balance is a tricky thing, and so many factors can affect it. The night of my accident, I was pregnant, and my center of gravity was strange to me. I was also half asleep and in an unfamiliar place. Other times, as I’ve lost my footing and fallen into temptation, or despair, or confusion, what caused those tumbles? What made me miss those stairs? My own natural weakness, the circumstances, a moment’s lapse in concentration?

I remember that night after I fell down those stairs, apologizing repeatedly to my husband and brother-in-law as they supported me and helped me to a chair. And I remember other times in my life apologizing to people around me for the state they found me in, as I worked to regain my balance, the balance that I had lost for a moment or a season. How many times have I found myself there on the floor, needing help to stand up again, to keep moving forward?

Once that balance is lost, it’s hard to regain. There’s the whole embarrassing rigmarole of being lifted and carried, there’s the pain, there’s the midnight trip to the emergency room. I was in Japan when that tumble happened, and there everyone takes off shoes when entering a building. Everyone, I learned, includes someone who just broke her leg, and the buildings include the hospital. I remember wobbling as I struggled to replace my shoes with the hospital-issue slippers. Then followed the weeks of crutches, also a challenge to balance.

Balance is a goal I have: a balanced diet, work/life balance, a balanced checkbook. I don’t want to veer too far to one direction or the other; I want to find peace and stability. I work to keep my balance; I eat right, get enough sleep, read my Bible, go to church, pray, talk to my husband and other friends. When I lose my balance, I work to get it back. For that I lean on others, and on God; I practice taking steps again when my ability is temporarily interrupted. I remember my physical therapist praising me because I did my exercises and regained my strength. So many of her patients, she told me, didn’t follow her instructions properly. I’m a rule-follower, and it served me well then. I would be chasing a toddler soon, and it was important to me to be strong and flexible. I remember how I cried when I saw my calf the first time after my surgery, and realized how much it had atrophied in that short time. I wanted to be back to normal.

And now I mostly am. The painful twinges are the exception, not the rule. But those other times I lost my balance, the times I’m not as eager to talk about, they have left effects too: misconceptions in how I see the world, difficult memories, regrets, nightmares.  Lose your balance for a moment and you may feel it for years.

So I hold on to the banister, place my feet carefully. I take the stairs one at a time. And if I do miss a step or two and fall into the darkness, I don’t despair. I let grace catch me. I scramble to my feet again as soon as I can, get the help I need, keep going. When I lose my balance, I trust it isn’t gone forever, that I’ll get it back.

And one reason for that trust is that I lost my balance one night, years ago, and fell down the stairs and broke my leg.  But now I’m OK.


Our host this month is Doraine. Head on over to her blog to see what others have posted for today on the topic of balance.

Ash Wednesday, Mercredi des Cendres

This morning we read from the book of Joel, who passed on the message from the Lord to rend our hearts and not our garments. This year as we begin Lent, our hearts are already tattered, and we hardly need the reminder that we are dust. Each time I hear those words, as the ashes are placed upon my forehead, I remember the earthquake, the way death came for so many at one moment, and a fine dust spread over the city as the wailing rose up.

This year we have had ashes, days of them, ashes from burning tires, as people made in God's image protested the impossibility their lives have become, or sought power, or burned things just because, depending on the individual, and who knows why we do what we do; even in our own hearts we are often unsure.

"La situation est sérieuse," said the priest, the situation is serious, and I think we can all agree with that, the situation in the world, the situation in Haiti, the situation in our own hearts.

Last year on Ash Wednesday I wrote these words:

Ashes

I’m here for the ashes.
I’m here for the dust,
for remembering that that is what I am,
and that that is where I will return.

I’m here for the ashes,
the remains of what I loved,
the palms from last year,
burned
and carefully preserved,
precious dust.
Those palms mattered
too much to toss their remains away.
They became today’s ashes.
And that’s why I’m here.

I’m here for the ashes,
for the reminder that though my flesh is solid now,
it will die.
The smudge on my forehead
will wash away,
but I will still be mortal,
corruptible,
headed for my expiration date.

I’m here for the ashes,
so smear them on me,
whispering as you do,
“Remember,
remember,
remember that you are dust.”
Precious dust,
but dust nonetheless,
a temple filled with the Holy Spirit
that one day will fall
silent
and
still.

I’ll leave with the ashes,
and through my day I’ll see others
with dusty marks on their faces,
as they too have been reminded
of what they are.
Beautiful and impermanent,
valuable and temporary,
glorious
and
needing to be
swept up
with a broom.

There are other places to get
roses and accolades,
work and fulfillment,
conversation and snacks,
but this is the only place I know
where they are imposing ashes today
so
that’s why I’m here.
For the ashes.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Poetry Friday: An Exchange of Gifts

by Alden Nowlan

As long as you read this poem
I will be writing it.
I am writing it here and now
before your eyes,
although you can't see me.
Perhaps you'll dismiss this
as a verbal trick,
the joke is you're wrong;
the real trick
is your pretending
this is something
fixed and solid,
external to us both.
I tell you better:
I will keep on
writing this poem for you
even after I'm dead.

Thank you, Alden Nowlan, for this exchange of gifts. I'm giving you my attention, and you, although you've been dead a while, are still writing this poem for me.

Linda has the roundup today, and she's welcoming spring! And today's your first opportunity to sign up for this year's Progressive Poem: go to Irene's blog to pick your date!

What I Learned in February

I ended my January post with a hope that February would be better, and you know what, it really wasn't. We spent eleven days "sheltering in place" due to anti-government riots, and when a month is as short as February, that's a big chunk of it. Nevertheless I do have some things on my "what I learned" list.

Friends came to dinner early in the month and urged us to take the Enneagram test. I did, and was surprised by my result, but then the more I read and listened, the more I thought that it was right. Then I developed a little mini-obsession with learning about the Enneagram (I know, how original).

My husband and I took a webinar from this author, Lindsey Moses, on working with English language learners. There were four sessions and we didn't watch the fourth one yet, but we're going to finish it up on our week off for Carnival. So far it was interesting and useful, and I always like learning the latest acronyms, which in my experience are mostly what change in the education world.

The next item on my list says "financial crisis in Haiti." The Haitian currency, the gourde, has lost a lot of its value in the past year, and people are struggling for the basics of survival: food, water, medical care, sending their children to school. In addition, billions of dollars have gone missing from the PetroCaribe fund that was supposed to improve life here. These factors and others sparked riots beginning on the 7th of this month, and while the riots themselves are no longer happening, the underlying problems are in no way resolved, so we are waiting to see what will come next. It's discouraging to see Haiti sink into crisis again. We're so tired of the way people have to suffer. The vast majority of people are not involved with the destruction and violence of the riots; they just want to live their lives peacefully. We had plenty of time to contemplate this - and everything else - during our time at home.

I remember when my husband and I were dating, someone told me to imagine seeing him across the dinner table every day for the rest of my life. Good advice. But nobody ever told me to imagine being locked in with him for eleven days of political unrest. (I think I'll put that in my marriage book.) Fortunately he is great in a crisis, and while we were all a bit on edge and stir-crazy, we made it. Let's hope we don't have to shelter in place again anytime soon.

We hosted a professional development gathering for teachers in February and showed this movie, "Most Likely to Succeed." It's about how schools can adjust to the new information-based economy, specifically by focusing on a project-based curriculum. It was very interesting and led to some good conversations.

Everyone is talking about Marie Kondo right now, and her de-cluttering method. My daughter read her book several years ago, so we had already mocked the concept of only owning 30 books. But I found this article really hit the nail on the head. While having a less cluttered living space may make you feel more in control, the reality is that you're never going to have a completely in-control, tidy life. I like it when the clutter is cleared, but life is messy, and that's not going away.

I heard about this Ted Talk by Roman Mars while listening to the West Wing Weekly podcast. It's about flag design, and it is very much worth watching.

In February, I learned again about what it feels like when people talk about evacuation. We've been there before, in that space where some people feel that it's too unsafe here in Haiti and that they have to leave. Everyone's considerations for making that decision are different, but whether or not you understand why people choose to do it (and of course I do understand), you feel abandoned when you're left behind. That's one reason I felt so guilty after the earthquake for leaving Haiti. This time, like in 2004, the clear-out happened fast. Once the embassy starts pulling people out, others follow suit. It didn't help when the travel advisory was raised to level 4, putting us on the same level with countries like Afghanistan, Yemen, and Syria. People are now returning, slowly, but some we may never see again. I learned that in the years since the last time we experienced this, it did not stop stinking.

I had a birthday in February, and I absolutely love my birthday, just as much as any little kid. I learned again that I also love being loved. I wish I could feel that way all the time. By the evening of my birthday I always ask myself how I could ever feel insecure, as I bask in the glow of all the Facebook messages that have been popping up all day.

Oh February, you're over already! Here's to March!

Poetry Friday: QWP

Last year I marked turning 50 by setting myself a big writing goal that I called my Quinquagenarian Writing Project (QWP). After my birthday I just kept going, and I have more than sixty essays and poems in this year's folder as I reach this year's birthday.

I have several thoughts as I look at the year's writing all in one place. One thought is that I often write when I'm sad, and boy, can I be self-absorbed and angsty! I spend much of my life reading writing by teenagers, and honestly there are times when my own resembles theirs more than I like to admit. More and more, I realize that those big feelings of 13 and 14 year olds don't change that much; you just get more experience in dealing with them.

Another thing I notice is how often I have written around a topic again and again, circling back obsessively until I bore myself to tears. But sometimes I end up rewriting the ending, writing myself to a better way of seeing something, to acceptance of a situation that's been bugging me. How wonderful when that happens! It makes the angst worth it. When I see the squirming and obsessing as part of the solution, it helps me be less impatient with myself and my process of figuring things out, and it also helps me do the same for my students.

But sometimes writing works completely differently; it helps me focus on something else besides what I'm worrying over. Here, for example, is a poem I wrote this summer after visiting the Art Institute of Chicago with my daughter and seeing this Monet painting.

Cliff Walk at Pourville, by Claude Monet

The wind blows colors:
Patches of white in clouds, sails, skirts,
A pink parasol,
Blues of sky and sea,
Greens and grays of the cliff.

The wind blows lines:
Rippling, ruffling,
Chaotically planned,
Scientifically random,
Piles of still movement.

The wind blows ideas:
Cleans out the head,
Sweeps away the worries and words,
Carries away yesterday and tomorrow,
Flying over the waves and out of sight.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

You can see the painting more closely and learn more about it in this video:

Robyn has today's roundup.

(Speaking of things I worry about, here's a quick update on the situation in Haiti. Thanks so much for all your concern last week, Poetry Friday friends. Although many schoolchildren in the country are still staying home, our school re-opened on Tuesday and we had a calm, peaceful week. Perhaps three quarters of our students showed up for school; some had left the country during the riots. Many NGOs and international organizations asked their personnel to leave, as did the US Embassy. Haiti's travel advisory was raised to a level 4, putting us in the same category as countries like Syria and Afghanistan. We are concerned about the possibility of more unrest, because the underlying issues have not been resolved, but we're encouraged to have had a nearly normal week.)

Poetry Friday: I Carry Your Heart

i carry your heart with me
 by e. e. cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

                                                      i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Instead of being at work this week reading love poems with my middle schoolers and dealing with their shenanigans, I've been at home "sheltering in place." Anti-government protests have shut down Port-au-Prince and many other parts of the country. All the news stories are illustrated with photos of giant flames. The protests are over real and serious issues: the local currency, the gourde, has lost 26% of its value against the US dollar in the past 12 months. People who were already living in poverty are unable to eat, let alone send their children to school and access medical care when they need it. Enormous amounts of money have gone missing and are unaccounted for. The protesters want the president to resign and in addition to peaceful mobilization there has been looting and burning and extortion as well.

My students are sending me writing via Google Docs and emails about what they are reading, and I've also been emailing with a friend about her novel, of which I was a Beta Reader (capital letters to emphasize how impressive I feel being a Beta Reader), reading enormous amounts, listening to podcasts and watching Netflix as electricity allows, and thinking about a short story of my own. I also had over neighbors who were climbing the walls and treated them to chai and puppy therapy. I know this all sounds fun, and sure, it is, especially compared to what the majority of the people in this country are dealing with, but I'm so ready to be back at work complaining about how sugar-addled everyone is.

I'm carrying many hearts in mine.

This week's roundup is here. 

Edited to add: if you're looking for a US-based source to read Haiti news in English, the Miami Herald does a good job of covering what's going on here.

Reading Update

I'm home on a Monday instead of at work because of ongoing political unrest in Haiti. This is day five of sheltering in place, which has provided lots of extra reading time.

Book #12 of 2019 was Frederick Buechner's The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life.  "I think that a part of what to tell one's story in a religious sense means is to affirm that there is a plot to one's life. It's not just incident following incident without any particular direction or purpose, but things are happening in order to take you somewhere."

Book #13 was Hold Tight, Don't Let Go, by Laura Rose Wagner. I reviewed this book at length here when I first read it. This time I read it aloud to my husband as part of our remembering, commemorating the ninth anniversary of the earthquake. We cried as we read this beautiful, horrifying, hopeful, despairing account of Magdalie's earthquake experience. A friend to whom I was talking about this book commented, "She's a blan, right?" (Blan literally means white, but it's used to refer to any foreigner.) Yes, she's a blan, but one who loves Haiti in all its complexity. She doesn't shy away from what's awful, but she's also affectionate and clearly cares about this beautiful place. "All I can do," concludes Magdalie, "is hold everyone in my heart, the only place I know where I can keep them safe." 

Book #14 isn't published yet; it was a second draft of a new novel by someone in my writing group. It was so fun! I wish I could hand you a copy!

Book #15 was a book of short stories by Ben Fountain called Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. I have had this book for some time, but for some reason I had not read it yet. While sheltering in place I read it aloud to my husband and Ben Fountain became my new favorite writer. Blurbs at the beginning compare him to Graham Greene, Hunter S. Thompson, Evelyn Waugh, Katherine Anne Porter, Paul Theroux, Joseph Conrad, even Kafka. I definitely get all these comparisons, because these are characters in a complex moral universe where it's not easy to keep your hands clean, but Fountain is an original. Several of the stories are set in Haiti, one in Colombia, one in Sierra Leone, one in Myanmar, one in the US, and one in Europe. This book is so beautifully written, and the first and second stories are among the best short stories I've ever read. "Rêve Haitien" has the most amazing ending; it brought tears to my eyes when I first read it, and then after my husband and I discussed the story a while, he asked me to read the ending again. Again, it made me cry. 

 

I checked book #16 out of the library; it was Anne Lamott's Almost Everything. For a while I read everything Anne Lamott wrote, but I haven't read her last few books. This one had some gems in it, like Lamott's description of how reading got her through her childhood.

Poetry Friday: Jacmel

This week I read this article about a bakers' strike in Jacmel, Southern Haiti. Then I wrote this poem and illustrated it with photos I've taken in some of our many visits to Jacmel, one of my favorite places on earth.

No Bread in Jacmel


In Jacmel,
the bakers are on strike.

They say
a few weeks ago,
a sack of flour cost
one thousand seven hundred and fifty gourdes
and this week
it costs
two thousand five hundred gourdes.

They say
they can’t pay their employees.

They say bread is rare now in Jacmel
and people are lining up for it.

The bakers interviewed by the newspaper
speak from their bakeries,
Plan of God
and
Gift of God,

Where today they are not producing
pain au chocolat
baguettes
pain de campagne
or
any other delights
which you could normally find
to carry home
through the streets of Jacmel.

In Jacmel
they know people don’t live
by bread alone.
They have poetry on the beach
and colorful mosaics
and you can buy paintings on every corner.

In 2010 an earthquake
stopped the cathedral clock
but they got it started again
and time went on passing as before.

The ocean is blue
and the houses are painted in pastels
and it looks a lot like it did a hundred years ago
except of course for all the motorcycles
zipping back and forth.

In Jacmel
the bakers pray
that God will give them this day
their daily bread.
And so does everyone else.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Laura has today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Spiritual Journey First Thursday: Home is Where the Heart Is

For Spiritual Journey First Thursday, our host Donna asked us to write about the expression "Home is Where the Heart Is." So here goes...

The subject of "home" has always been a difficult one for me, because I have moved around so much and spent so much of my life apart from people I love. Home is definitely where people I love are, but there are many places of which that's true.

I wrote about this back in 2011:

An Undivided Heart

Teach me your way, O LORD, and I will walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name. Psalm 86:11

I've thought about this verse a lot, and wondered what it would be like to have an undivided heart. It sounds incredibly restful to me sometimes. I don't think I've ever felt that my heart was completely at home in one place. It is always divided. This started when I first went to boarding school at the age of seven, and experienced what it's like to want to be in two places, to miss my parents desperately but at the same time love school and being with my friends. My heart was divided; I couldn't choose.

In fact, maybe my divided heart started even earlier than that. I was born in the United States and then went to Africa as a tiny baby. I was from two places, heard many languages, loved both ugali and pizza, had my blond pigtails pulled by people who were fascinated by my hair.

And now I live away from most of my family and many of my friends and my heart remains divided; there's always, always someone to miss. Divided, loving more than one place, loving more people than I can count, not satisfied with seeing people I love so seldom, with one sentence on Facebook, with not knowing my nieces and nephews, or my friends' children, not being part of their lives.

I guess everyone is like that these days; none of us can live near to all the people that matter to us. I have a friend from high school who was the third generation of her family growing up in the same house, but that's not common any more, and probably I romanticize what that would be like, as someone who has lived in mission housing, or rented houses or apartments, since my birth. It's a missionary kid cliche that we can't tell where we're from; there's no place on this earth where I feel rooted.

Maybe that's not what the verse means; it's talking, after all, about loving God above all others. Other versions of the Bible use language like "purity of heart," "unite my heart," even "focus my heart." God can focus my heart even as I flit about from one task to the next, from one need to the next. Even as I hurt with absence from people I love.

"Some day," posted an MK friend on, yes, Facebook, today, "there will be no goodbye." I can't imagine that day. It brings tears to my eyes to try to picture it. A day of hellos.

Yes, my heart is often divided, but I'm so thankful for the many wonderful people that God has brought into my life and given to me to love.  And "home," the actual place where I hang my hat (we do have a hat-rack, and I literally hang hats on it), is with the people with whom I get to share life right now. It won't be forever, I'm reminded as college mail arrives each week for my tenth grader in the wake of his PSAT. But for now, my heart is at home with my husband and son, and my heart is also with my daughter in college, and my family spread around the world, and my friends whom I love. Better too much love than too little, every time. Love is worth the pain of separation.

In the 2011 post, I wrote that I don't feel rooted anywhere. In 2017 my OLW was ROOTED, and after reflecting more on that concept, and on the verse in Ephesians that talks about being "rooted and established in love," I do feel rooted, right here where I am. Home is where my heart is, right here, nestled in God's love.

Be sure to visit Donna's roundup to see what everyone else wrote today.