Take my advice (I’m not using it)

 Lately, I have found myself spending an inordinate amount of time, encouraging others to not lose sight of the value of what their creative pursuits bring to a world hungry for a tiny beam of light. And yet, I falter in following the advice I so freely give others.

To traffic in hope right now feels like walking through a raging battlefield blindly tossing daisies on the path in front of you trying to convince yourself that flowers in and of themselves are a form of ammunition.

To traffic in hope right now feels like cradling the children of war who hunger and thirst trying to convince them that everything will be okay as the bombs fall around you.

To traffic in hope right now feels like standing in the path of molten lava waving a paper fan, hoping it will cool the flow before it overtakes your feet.

 And yet, traffic in hope we must. Because the alternatives will never move us forward and will only deaden our souls.

And so, today I am going to take my own advice and begin again.

 I begin again not in denial of our present circumstances but because of them.

 I begin again because to cease to notice and celebrate tiny moments of grace and mercy is perhaps the most criminal of acts.

 And perhaps, most importantly, I begin again because proclaiming hope in a world filled with despair and uncertainty is our sacred responsibility…

to ourselves,

to each other,

and to the world in which we live.

Twenty dollar grace

My mother, who declared, “you are making the biggest mistake of your life“ when I married my husband, many years later adopted him as her “very own boy”. 

When she began to need more care, I was still working and he was recently retired, so my husband took on all of the duties that I wished I could...mostly doctor visits and the periodic changing of a lightbulb, after which she always called me and exclaimed how amazing he was that he could change a lightbulb that fast.

As she entered her 90’s and started having a greater need for medical appointments and procedures, they developed a bonding routine. After every doctor appointment, she would complain vigorously about the treatment, he would listen, and then they would seek solace in the one thing she said was keeping her alive - a cheeseburger Happy Meal and an apple pie.

She was a fiercely independent woman, and so whenever my husband took her to McDonald’s, she would pull a twenty dollar bill out of her wallet and announce that lunch was on her, and he could keep the change for helping her out.  My husband would get her settled, go to the counter, and then he would pay for lunch with his own funds. At some point during their lunch, he would secretly slip her twenty back into her wallet for their next trip to McDonald’s.

I think that that twenty dollar bill made it back into her wallet for more years than I can count. And it was waiting there after her last doctor visit when she sat across from my husband at lunch for the last time and declared that at 95, she was done.  A week later, she transitioned from this planet to the next life.

After she died, we went through her wallet and found that twenty. As we laughed at the memory,  I looked across at “the biggest mistake I would ever make” and realized something about his gesture towards her all those years.

My husband was not hiding her twenty to save her money. He was giving my mother a sense of independence and preserving her dignity . He was letting her love him in the only way that she knew how – treating “her boy” to lunch to thank him for his kindness. And he was showing my mother grace - one twenty dollar bill, one cheeseburger Happy Meal, and one apple pie at a time.

Hope is a green duck with sunglasses

My German immigrant mother once reflected that I suffered from Weltschmerz growing up …a weariness or sadness arising from an acute awareness of suffering and evil in the world.

... a “world-weariness.”

Of course, a certain amount of that feeling was probably related to adolescence and the inevitable coming-of-age moments that color and shape our lived experience. But in these recent unpredictable and often cruel times, I have found myself once again battling that soul-deep discontent and sadness.

The only way I have found to keep that dark wave at bay has been the daily ritual of walking in natural places whenever I can. And that deep hunger for a moment of peace took me to Birch Bay State Park today on a very windy and cold morning. Since the campgrounds were closed, a walk underneath the towering cedars and firs was almost guaranteed to be solitary, and though the wind moved wildly through the tops of these trees, the air beneath was still and beautifully quiet.

During that walk, as the poet Rilke suggests, I tried to live the questions that occupied my mind, but in these days, the question on repeat was, “Why? Why? Why?“ Knowing the dangers of obsessive thinking, I tried the antidote: notice what is happening in this moment.

• My golden retriever was analyzing the world through her nose.

• The stream song was quieter today than the last time I was here.

• The frogs started a choir, and their practice songs were a warm blanket in the cool air.

In the middle of my noticing, I looked down, drawn to the sound of some small creature skittering around a tree, perhaps celebrating the arrival of spring. My gaze settled on the base of the moss covered trunk. Someone had perfectly placed a bright green plastic duck with sunglasses in a small opening in the tree’s bark.

Raw joy exploded from my heart before I could defend against it. It was as if the forest had been holding its breath, like a child playing a practical joke, just waiting for someone to discover this little intrusion into the natural world.

Emily Dickinson would tell us that “hope is a thing with feathers,” but today I tell you that hope is sometimes nothing more than a green duck with sunglasses hidden in the hole of a cedar tree, a moment of unexpected joy in the most unlikely of places.

And today, that was just enough to keep the Weltschmerz at bay.