foolishness, friendship and forgiveness

I found this reflection in a folder labeled “potential blogs”, and was encouraged and inspired by it. Since my current mental and emotional state can’t touch this level of insight and articulation, (due to past-my-bedtime T.V. viewing all week of “So You Think You Can Dance” and “The Office” episodes) I am posting this past reflection for you edification…


I hurt my back again this weekend. It is a common occurrence for me; every three or four weeks I do something that throws my body slightly out of wack, and am set back anywhere from 24 hours to a week, depending on the infraction. I have suspicions that no matter what kind of shape I get into physically, my back will remain a liability to my active lifestyle, until I change my belief systems. You see, I carry around too much mental responsibility on a regular basis, and it is completely natural that this imbalance would manifest itself in physical disability. How strange that knowing this, I do not change the way I think about myself and the world of people and things I interact with. How strange that I stay in this cycle: too much mental weight=painful injury=willingness to let go of too much responsibility= needed rest.


“As we observe our mental and emotional flow over a period of disciplined time, we recognize that we largely create our own experiences. I know this is embarrassing and some of us deny it, but it’s true. We have the power to decide what each moment means and how we will respond to it. We have power when we know we have the ability to respond freely.”
~Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs, p. 106, The Crossroad Publishing Company~



I am grateful today for my friends who pray for me when I hurt my back. I don’t mean that they get down on their knees with hands clasped before their faces and their eyes shut tight (although if any of you are praying that way for me, by all means, don’t stop). I mean they are carrying me around in their thoughts, and wondering how they can encourage me. They are taking time out of their normal routine to ask the question, “How can I be a friend to someone who is suffering?”

I appreciate the phone calls, where there are offers for help with groceries and child care. I am touched by the empathetic verbal responses to my description of where I’m in pain, and the medical advice concerning icing, drugs, stretching. Mostly though, I love the non-judgmental space created by the conversations that allow me to see the reality underlying my cycle of injury and healing. My current set of friends are hopeful, patient people who are not trying to fix or reform me, rather willing to show up and get their hands dirty in the garden that is my life, pulling a weed they see here, or watering a sapling that is drooping there. They want me to know I’m not all alone in the process of encouraging new growth, so that I might enjoy the hard work; breathe deep and see clearly what needs to be pulled out or nurtured.

It is humbling to be accepted and loved in this way, and very freeing. It makes me okay with the fact that I am stubborn and foolish, and even laugh at that. It makes me forgive myself for being such a tyrant to my husband and kids, in the initial stages of the “last straw” being laid upon my back. Because when the pain really hits, my ordinarily calm self turns into an unpredictable tornado of responses. I go from patient to angry to patient almost instantly; from apologetic to accusatory, then accusatory back to apologetic. My husband and kids have learned a new routine for the times when I’m injured: they get me my journal, a Bible or a book of ancient Suffi poetry, a lawn chair and a cup of tea or ice water. Then they help me out the door to filtered sunlight, or into a quiet bedroom. They give me permission to do what I’m resisting giving myself permission to do in the hours or days leading up to my injury:

*stop being in charge of anything or anyone other than myself for a moment or an hour or a day

*stop answering questions and making decisions for anyone other than myself

*isolate, meditate, and do whatever it takes to remember my humanity: my limited capacity to accomplish any task without proper rest


“We have defined freedom in the West as the freedom to choose between options and preferences. That’s not primal freedom. That’s a secondary or even tertiary freedom. The primal freedom is the freedom to be the self, the freedom to live in the truth despite all circumstances.”
~Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs, p. 108, The Crossroad Publishing Company~


The truth I come to when I enter into rest is the realization that life is a gift, and there are reminders of life everywhere to sweep me away in gratefulness. When I stop worrying about the role I play with everything and everyone I’m involved with, I start noticing things like wind and sun painting shadow pictures on the leaves of the oak trees, or steam swirling inward and outward and up into the infinity above my teacup. I start remembering crazy things I did in my childhood, or kind words emailed to me by my friend from Pasadena. I stop taking things for granted, without even trying to, and find myself forgetting to be angry at even the most obvious things, like my back pain that can’t be touched by Tylenol with Codine. This is the truth I come to when I rest, but it wouldn’t be my truth if I was still caught up in the restrictive web of unforgiveness.


What do I mean by forgiveness? I guess I mean a letting go of all the people and things that have maimed you in your past and embracing the possibility that despite all of that, you are exactly who you are supposed to be in this moment of present existence, and a whole world of healing is open to you. I also mean a letting go of all the people and things that you have maimed in the past and an embracing of the idea that you can be free not only from cycles of violence you’ve participated in but also from all the shame and guilt and condemnation spoken against you because of them. I mean a state of grieving, celebrational acceptance, where you humbly agree that nothing else matters right now except the fact that you are alive and have more life to live. Forgiveness is the hardest and craziest thing we are called upon to participate in in this life. It is the most rewarding thing too, because forgiveness opens the heart up to gratitude, and gratitude changes our perspective on everything.

Saved

I am saved daily by so many things:

The great oak near my backyard
“Live Oak” it is named,
perhaps to emphasize the way
it stretches out its bark
to breathe in sky


The finches too,
untie my knotted heart
because they do not scatter in strong winds
but flow and flex around each other’s
wings and breasts and necks as if
their very life depended
on togetherness


And clouds!
From dragon claws to kitten’s paws
kitten’s paws to pillow fluff
pillow fluff to hands
Cloud hands
How wonderfully they shift without
addiction to the past or future plans


I’m learning how to live like that

I’m learning how to give the things I have:
the touch of human hands
the words from human tongue
the love that comes from being freed from grief too large
to carry on my back

(sometimes I choose to carry grief and hurt my back)

But
I am freed from that
when I believe it

A poem I found in my journal

This is not a test
This is your life
This is not a fail or fly but rather a fight for what is right

It’s right to be given a fair chance
It’s right to have a choice

Not because you’ve worked hard
Not because you’re nice
Not because you came to the right place at the right time

Oh Jesus
This is about obedience
Standing Up
Learning how to stand my ground when decency is threatened to be bulldozed out

There is a cavern in my mouth that screams in disbelief
There is a bayonet that sits inside my ribcage

How careful I must be
How ready now to wrap myself in full humility
And yet
How willing I must be to do the deed so foreign yet to me:
To fight and fight and fight for
my own justice

Continued... Pink Elephants

This one is especially for J.J.

I know I promised not to apologize, but I feel compelled to break my own rule and say, “I’m sorry.” I’m sorry because I can’t write about my broken neck right now, even though I left you hanging in the middle of my story. I tried to pick up where I left off, but everything I typed tonight was as boring as plywood. I tried three times. So to those of you who don’t know the rest and are now left in a state of suspended curiosity… I owe you one.

Ahhhh. It feels nice to take the pressure off. The muddle in my mind is already un-muddling, now that I’ve stopped trying to force an ending. Perhaps there is a different tale wanting to be told, pushing on the doorbell of my mind. What if I just open that door and write about the first thing that strolls in when I get to the end of this sentence, like… (Drum roll, please)… pink elephants.

I’m remembering the time I saw some on the ceiling of my grandparent’s bedroom. My grandparents were living in Oregon at the time, and my sister and I had gone to stay with them for a few days while my parents vacationed. I got very sick that week, and couldn’t bear my own heat, so I was moved out of the steamy guest bed onto the cool, white sheets of grandma’s. They were fluffy like clouds. I felt myself floating up toward the ceiling. I was happy.

Then the elephants came, blowing horns and riding tricycles. The elephants were pink, and that didn’t seem right to me, so I called grandma in. I had to call many times, because my voice was echoing and weak, and the elephants were getting noisier. Finally I saw her, leaning down close, asking me what was the matter. I’m not sure exactly what I said, but it went something like this: “The elephants make me dizzy. Their horns hurt my head, and I want them to stop riding their tricycles on the ceiling.”

Clearly, I was not seeing too straight, due to the influence of my fever. But it didn’t help me one bit to have grandma explain that I was seeing imaginary things, nor to perceive that she was worried about my condition. It did help when she brought grandpa in, and he made a joke about the elephants, filling the room with his laughter. It also helped to know that my grandparents would stay with me until the elephants quieted down, bringing cool rags for my forehead and speaking soft words of sympathy.

What good advice this story suddenly gives me! I’m often sitting with folks whose reality has been bent by homelessness, alcoholism, or severe forms of trauma and rejection. Whatever the elephants on the ceiling may be—an immense inheritance that was stolen away or a wife who kidnapped their children—it doesn’t do a damn thing for me to reason away the pain. Nor does it help when I’m too worried about their sanity to listen. What does help are kind sighs and words of sympathy; cool rags of time spent sitting there together. Sometimes, after the stories get so noisy and pink they make me dizzy, a joke comes bubbling up between us, and we laugh together. That laughter helps a lot. It heals something inside them that I can’t fix. It can quiet the trumpeting elephants.

Of everything I remember from that vacation I spent at grandma and grandpas, nothing is as vivid as the memory of those elephants. The other images are fuzzy: going to see the strange doctor, then feeling well again. Before I got sick I played outside with my sister on a wonderful teeter totter my grandpa had made that also spun around in circles—even that memory is as gray as the rain. But the cool sheets like clouds, the tricycles and horns held by pink pachyderms, and my grandparents staying with me until the elephants left—these things are positively unforgettable. When I look back, I mostly feel like giggling at the absurdness of my comments to my grandma. The elephants look so harmless from this angle.

Harmless elephants. I want that for my friends who are constantly battling sickness of one type or another. I want to partner with a community of people willing to stick around long enough to be part of a vivid memory of healing. I want to have faith enough to believe that someone can overcome a 20-year meth addiction, and humor enough to laugh with them, even in the midst of it.

I want to tell stories about living, walking miracles—not just the one I carry around in my bones, but the others out there waiting to happen. I don’t want to miss my chance to be the one to see at last the x-ray that matters most. Brokenness needs protecting.

There is nothing wrong with a story that ends (or begins!) with a person becoming a paraplegic. But that wasn’t my story to live. I’m taking you out on a limb here (and you may believe that I’m seeing the world through crazy pink elephant lenses) when I say to you:

PEOPLE HAVE STORIES THEY’RE MADE FOR.


To be continued…

Cont. from Oct. 2: Surprised by Gratitude

Gratitude. It is the great magician in our lives. It can pull joy out of sadness, and laughter out of weeping. It can surprise us with hope when we think despair is winning.

When I broke my neck at age 19, I didn’t expect to be grateful. I didn’t think my active, super-independent self could survive such a drastic change of plans. Six days after my ill-aimed dive into the Okanogan River near Canada, I was lying in a hospital bed in Spokane, WA instead of riding my bike like the wind down Idaho back roads. I was pleading with nurses for early doses of pain medication instead of packing my bags for a study abroad in Latin America.

It was a nightmare, yes. It took me a week to get my x-rays for the very fact that I KNEW my life could drastically change in the instant I found out the facts; I delayed for five days in excruciating pain in an act of denial so great, my dad still shakes his head, amazed. To be told that the surgery I needed was serious enough that I’d have to wait three MORE days wrapped in IVs until the man who could fix me came back from vacation… that was unbearable, yes. Yet more than that, it was a miracle almost too large for me to grasp. I was not only alive, but I had the use of both my hands, and feet, and head. I had the ability to hear what was said by folks who visited a 21 year old boy across the hall. He had also dived awry (into a pool nearby), yet had not yet opened his eyes to complain about the bedpan, or all the ways his accident had changed his plans. The knowledge of the fact that he was lost in some place between life and death, while I was still able to talk and cry and laugh, was not lost on me. I grieved for him. I celebrated for me. I was overcome with a gratefulness I couldn’t help but have. I don’t like to take credit for the shift that happened then--my next six months of fearlessness and peacefulness and sense of good things happening amidst the bad--because I wasn’t using my willpower to choose an “attitude of gratitude”. I was grateful. Just that. I was grateful for the life I had.

In three days time the surgeon came to talk to me about the vertebrae displaced inside my neck. He explained about the way it could be linked (by metal plate) unto the strong and stable bone beneath. I did my part of fasting and of waiting for the surgery that never came that day because he was delayed by NINE emergencies. There were nine surgeries performed that day that couldn’t wait because they were not the same as mine--they were labeled “life and death”. While I waited for my turn the nurses brought me in to get more x-rays, (cat scans? MRI’s? I actually don’t recall the shot that saved the life I had....) They said the surgeon thought it best to use the time to gather evidence. Thank God. I still thank God.
The surgeon would have tried to seal my wiggly bone unto a bone that was not strong or stable, rather BROKEN. He probably would have sealed my fate as a quadriplegic on that day. Which may have turned out okay. But I am here to say that I am grateful for the night he saw that break and stopped the anesthesia.

To be continued…

Continued from Oct.1: Good Living

I ended yesterday's post with a quote of my own, "Good writing comes from good living." In my case this is true. When I’m not living well then my writing spells it out--stale sentences, cliche word choices, and insights that sound all too familiar. I find myself frustrated with the process of putting thoughts into words, instead of swept away by the magic of rhyme, alliteration, and metaphor.

But what do I mean by “good living?” What does it consist of? I’ve been mulling this around in my brain, and reflecting on the strangeness of my truth: good living doesn’t usually FEEL good in the moment. Quite the opposite. Good living often feels PAINFUL, SCARY, OUT OF CONTROL IN EVERY WAY when I am living it. I shall explain.

A common theme I find when I reflect on the most profound times of “goodness” in my life is this: suffering. Also this: surprise. And of course… the ways I fought like dynamite to PROTECT AND DEFEND myself from what later became—you got it—GOODNESS.

For example, there are circumstances that I would not have prayed for in a zillion years, like that day I displaced a vertebrae in my spine, and fractured another one below it.
There are surprises that felt like curses, like the unplanned pregnancy of my first-born son. His heart is now a well of mercy so deep I am constantly catching my breath and wondering how it is that he can forgive me the way he does--how I ever got so lucky as to be his mother.

Conversely, I’m reminded of times of comfort, happiness, and predictability, and struggling to remember anything REALLY GREAT in them. I find that those periods of good and plenty aren’t impressively memorable. Maybe it’s just me, and I’m a drama junkie, or I struggle from emotional-historical amnesia. You can believe that if you need to, if I’m MAKING YOU UNCOMFORTABLE.

I believe something so much bigger is at work, and it has EVERYTHING to do with...

(to be continued tomorrow)

Plan A revealed: Getting out of the Dead Marshes

I’m going to try a little experiment here from now until Halloween. I’m going to force myself to post a blog each day for the next 30 days, whether or not I like what I write, or think it is worth posting. I’m going to make my Draconian internal editor sit behind the soundproof window so that when she starts lecturing me about how boring I am, I can turn my back, start singing the lyrics from Peter Tosh’s “Get Up, Stand Up , For Your Rights,” while she pantomimes the “hand-drags-knife-across-the-neck” to her lonely heart’s content. For the sake of your reading sanity, I’m going to apologize now for making you read what may or may not be boring, tedious, repetitive, or offensive in any way... and then delete any future apologies that come flying off my fingertips (“limping off” would be more accurate, considering my typing abilities). I think the risk of writing dross is worth the taking, because I have been wandering in a bog of writing resistance for so long that I don’t even remember what the Shire looks like anymore. Soooo, even if I have to look up the lyrics to Hannah Montana songs and start singing them at the top of my lungs to gain compliance.... I’m going to start blogging again this month and keep blogging.

For those of you who are my loyal supporters, yet unable to accompany me through the Mordor of my psyche, I’m going to make one request. I’m asking you to participate in this experiment with me this month by reading my smorgasbord as often as possible (or staying up late on Oct. 30, letting my blog be the entertainment to justify your microwave popcorn and Milkduds ) and send me your list of the things you hate(d) and love(d) when we get to the end of the journey. I’m not interested in politeness here, just honesty about what is profoundly refreshing and immensely annoying to read. If you do this for me, I will be deeply grateful. I may also be feel obligated to serve up yummy morsels all November.

I’ll end today with a quote that has been running around in my frontal lobe: “Good writing comes from good living.” More on that, tomorrow...