A kind of new

Today is a kind of boring first among continuations. It is the first day I have walked my semi-regular morning path after a week of searing back pain. It is also the first day of Lent, a season that does seem to mark beginnings, but which in outward appearance is about killing things inside us to prepare us for "new" life we over and over celebrate. 

Last week, a still unresolved problem in my back became so intense I could barely walk. After consulting good doctors and a few days of strong medication, I am able to get back to most of my routine. But to be fair, I have to say that the routine had fallen out of favor with my actual practice, so perhaps this is difficulty woke me up.


I had resolved to walk only on paved, level ground, and to be very careful. My usual route is about a mile, but I've only gone a quarter or half that the last couple of days. And only a little into this meditation, I felt the surge: like a glowing, growing brick between my spine and hip. I picture an ugly stone over the coals of demon furnace.

When I reached the grassy area where I intended to turn back the way I'd come, I continued, as if walking the slope of a ditch was a natural act. I can't say this was the right course, or that it produced a mystical experience. I can state (or maybe whisper) there was a moment or two when I thought I could breathe in the stars of the clear sky.

constellations blaze
indifferent to hermits
burning from old places

Toward and Away

Walking, especially solitary walks, is about conversation. In many good walks, we take a friend, or God, or a part of ourselves which needs concentrated attention. Sometimes I take along fear, anger, sorrow, and disappointment. A frequent co-traveler is confusion. At my age, I keep thinking I should know more, or better.  I should be more comfortable with what I do not know.

My strange summer is coming to an end. I can't say I'm going back to work, because I have been working much of the summer. But work will be different, even in the old routines. 

even crows scatter

at the sound of my slow steps

i must be alive

Walking towards something usually means walking away, and only God can talk to more than one person at a time. Even here, where my feet are free and my mind can roam, I must mumble the old prayers and whisper the old cries to reconnect.

Between failures

Between failures, I've been reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, and the act is been a glorious mess. The book is like a long prose poem or meditation on biology, which puts it far over my head. Part of that is because I have no familiarity with the scientists or science she refers to with such ease, and I realize that there is a strange irony there. As I walked today, I realized that of all the classes I took in high school, the only "honors" class I ever had was in biology. Not long after this book of been published and became a bit of a sensation, I was in that class driving my instructor crazy not because of the usual science versus religion crap, but because I couldn't be still to see what I wanted or needed to.  

Once, when we were all supposed to be looking at something on the slide, I just couldn't get close enough. It seems as if I went in just a little further I could see more. Now, I can't recall what it was we were all trying to look at, but I know I wanted to see deeper into the thing, whatever it was. And somewhere in a dreamy distance, I could hear my teacher fairly screaming for me to stop, and I turned the knob on the microscope just a little more and just a little more. Then crack! I had broken everything.

black dragonfly

you have mosquitoes to catch

pause here a moment

This summer work calls to me. Perhaps if I was more honest, I would say that I call to it. After taking last summer off, I have thrown myself – not without some joy – into my job. I have a renewed vigor, and I want to take advantage of it. The loss is perhaps big. There will be no week of walking in the woods. There will probably be fewer sunflowers on my camera. More birds will be left alone. Some colors rise, and some colors fade.  I keep turning the knob. Hopefully with age I am a bit more careful.

In Praise of Companions; Mixed Reviews on the Rain

A number of experts will tell you that one of the most successful factors in weight loss or any other exercise program is community. Having at least one partner in the exercise process has many benefits. However, as I've said here before, my main motivations for walking have been my spiritual and mental health, and the physical benefits have merely accentuate the first two. On the other hand I have walked more recently with a friend, and though I end up going much faster and elevating my heart rate, thus producing lots of good sweat, it is also been good to chat with someone about the stresses of work in a place that's not work, and talk to a friend who can laugh with you and help you laugh at yourself.

In the past few days we have had an uncharacteristic amount of rain. While it has been much needed in our drought-stricken state, it has also brought with it several unwelcome side effects: mosquitoes on the track, soggy shoes on unfamiliar paths, and worst of all, pictures of snakes on social media. I had been thinking lately about how an awareness of death has helped me be less phobic. Then this.

And so again, I alter my course as I take pre-dawn walks, chastising myself for letting such worries get the best of me, patting myself on the back for not volunteering to be the first person in Texas in over a century to be found lying dead of a snakebite in a field only a few yards from home.

porches and streets littered

with storm cut branches darkened

by lightless summer nights

now i hear birds arguing

and thank God i am awake 

Irrational (and somewhat joyful)

It is probably clear to anyone who has read my last couple of posts or been around me for the past month that it is nearly impossible for me to be rational about rain. I know all that stuff about how we need rain to make things grow, and as a lover of food, I really do want things to grow and not cost me a fortune. And here in Texas, we could have weeks of rain and still need more.

 
But it isn't so much the rain, but the feeling of getting beat down. I don't think I have seasonal affective disorder, but I confess I have found it harder to be happy in the winter. Much of that is related to childhood. Rain and cold keeps kids in, and I was obsessed with sports as a teenager. They also cancelled what I looked forward to most. (Sometimes I forget that during lousy weather, I enjoyed reading the most.)

breathing in the first
of spring's sun
i thought: even country
music cannot bring
me down -- then
someone posted about copperheads

This feeling -- of real anger and disappointment-- is silly, I admit, for an adult. The rain has not prevented me from walking, or kept me from most of the other activities I enjoy or care about deeply. It has made a few things harder, but harder is not impossible, and without challenges, we do not grow. As I have tried to think through this, I have also had to admit perhaps the accoutrements of my walks and the confluence of the other "rains" of Life have most gotten me down. In short, I am not good at adjusting my expectations of the world around me, even the world I cannot control.

I've laughed a little, when I've walked the past few days, at the swarms of gnats the freezes were supposed to kill, thinking, "So what good did we get out of that?" But as I said, to be rational is sometimes hard, particularly when hurting or afraid. Don't get me started on my feelings about snakes.

I'm not sorry for my irrationality--usually. I'm humbled and embarrassed that I let so much get to me, and that I pained others around me with my bitching instead of finding reasonable solutions. And yet, I also am hoping that the stupid wonder I find seeing the eye of a bird and the flight of a bee will transfer to the sweet music of rain, bright blankets of snow, and the swirl of grey skies.

Backsliding Away, or Spring Broken

I keep thinking about that old Paul Simon song, especially those lines "You know the nearer your destination/The more you're slip slidin' away."

We have had a lot of ice days here in North Texas, and right before Spring Break. When I have been able to get out, the walking stick is sometimes more of a hindrance than a help, but I took it anyway, sure that letting go of this small thing would spell disaster.

And so the old panic sets in, the kind that looks like too much caffeine and feels like neglect. It isn't just me slipping back into a couple of old habits. I haven't re-habited them. But the world around--the people and the groups and the weather--also seem to have returned to what it thought was normal, but for me is insanity.

snow bright woods

my inadequate shoes

crunching ice and twigs

until my pocket rings

And the inaptly named Spring Break continues with rain doing more to keep me in than the ice or snow. So it is clear I make excuses. It is clear that little is clear. Keep going. I know, but it isn't easy. Why should it be?

Fear of backwards

Every three months I have to go to the doctor for a "meds check." This is where my blood is drawn and I am weighed and my blood pressure taken. Usually it is the P.A. who comes in, asks me some perfunctory questions about "how I'm doing," and then renews my medication for the next few months.

If I have done well in terms of losing weight, I usually leave feeling pretty good. But lately I've felt the anxiety coming on about this appointment, anxiety that tries to convince me of what think I know: that I haven't had as much progress during the past couple of months as I had prior to my last checkup. That, perhaps, I have even gone a bit backwards.

i hear the sound
of ice melting off
fences \ delicious /
but still carry cold
in my wet socks

Protestant tradition contains this odd (for me) concept of backsliding. The idea is that you make a mistake you might know is wrong, but don't see as a big deal, and before you know it, you have fallen back on old patterns and are far from God. And to a degree, that is what this feeling is like. But there is something else here I can't really describe because I cannot pinpoint a decision or event bringing on this--shall I call it fear?

I can't go back. I've left that place just long enough to remember with horror the feeling of being so lost, so hopeless. I don't know if I can, but I must try to fight to keep what's left of me alive.

Meditating on "The Lord's Prayer," find myself a little baffled by phrases I used to think I comprehended. I don't know, for all my study, what "your kingdom come" means. But I do know, without knowledge, that when it happens, all the rent places, all that is torn and seemingly forever broken in me, will no longer be.

Will-ing

As I grew up, The Lord's Prayer was recited, not prayed all that much, in church and in private, like a kind of chant or mantra. Thus there were pauses that seem to eradicate or obscure meaning: "thy kingdom come thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven." And so in my heart and in my head, I think I unconsciously separated or ran together phrases like a schoolchild trying to finish saying a poem, not to enjoy its essence, but to get the whole thing over with so one can return to one's seat.

But recently, as I trudged through mornings with my usual un-Christlike grudges and fears and anxieties, I found myself slowing this prayer down enough to put together what I suspect Jesus did not mean to be rent asunder: "thy will be done on Earth." Ah, crap. Now I'm in trouble, I thought.

how quickly these arms

disappear after hugging

sunshine and bright clouds

cold rain returns as it must

gloves cover my fighting heart

Today starts another Lent, a time some think of as a season for giving up things. And I have much to shed, to remove. But I've also spent a lot of time in life just giving up. How hard it is to give up anger, jealousy, and hurt. One might see the destruction it does to the soul and mind, and easily drop it like a hot stone. But no. It is, it seems, more natural to hold them it close as one might a teddy bear that needs cleaning.

The command is to love. And I honestly don't like it all of the time. Sometimes I wish Jesus would cut me some slack and say, "I want you to love everybody. But I'll let you keep a list of five people you don't have to act kindly towards or think charitably about." Of course, I have the freedom to keep such a list. I know, because I usually carry one like a stone tablet, etched with my own finger, in my head. Yet even if such a thing did not create a barrier between me and God, as it does, it would be a wall between me and the self I was born to be. And in that place is no happiness, no joy.

This Mental Music

I usually do not listen to music while walking. I am not a nature lover, per se, or an outdoors person. I am more of a get outside person. I want to tune in to sounds of the universe around me. Of course, early morning and late evening one can hear birds calling each other and if there is enough wind, one can catches the tinkling of chimes on porches or leaves clinging to their branches as the world breathes through them. It means also the shoo-thwack of cars overhead when sitting under a bridge.

Perhaps because I have music playing during most of the other activities in my life, I often have it looping in my mind during quiet moments. This week two songs by Adam Again have made their way into my meditations, "Dig" and "River on Fire." Beautiful and dark, like the taste of coffee on a lover's lips,  they speak to the beauty of getting through as fragile beings on this confusing rock of love and hate and apathy.




scent of turned up earth
and lingering diesel fumes
as i run from dusk




Another song that made its way into my thoughts was a hymn I do not think I have heard or sung in years, "Veni, Creator Spiritus": "Come Holy Ghost, Creator blest/And in our souls take up thy rest." Not sure what prompted this to happen now, but I loved this song even before I was a Christian, so I was glad to have it come. I even sang a little.

I don't know if I should think of these things as intrusions or distractions. This mental music certainly keeps me from focusing, in most cases, on the beauty of God's world I cannot see on my computer screen or hear in endless meetings. I have trouble, even with hymns, resting my heart on the words or ideas that calm me, open me to love. Yet these are also part of the playlist of the Almighty, perhaps inviting me to merely shut up and attend to what is before and around my restless mind.

A few feet in front of us

All of us walk in the dark. Our eyes adjust to the light around us, or lack of, and we manage to stay upright for more steps than we stumble. But we see nothing fully or completely. Perhaps the false success of rarely falling down misleads us into thinking that even our tumbles have merit.

Much of this week's walking has taken me on a section of road under construction. Perhaps this path has been dangerous. And under other circumstances, many of my phobias would converge to block me from this direction. However, I cannot help but be drawn here, only able to see a few feet in front of me, but so enjoying those feet as I chase a sunset or new perspective on old roads.

5:30 in the morning

and the only lit places

are an alley

and Your dark bridge

 
I usually love the smell of walking, and the pictures of what those fragrances may mean. I've caught the scent of grills in the winter and imagined a man pretending to resent his role in the family's dinner preparation, but secretly thrilled by the sound of small flames on hamburger or chicken and the solitude outside his door. Often a whiff of fabric softener as I pass by a house with one light on makes me think of a tired mother doing all the work to get those who sleep through their day.

Preferring to be unseen, I sometimes walk behind a section of strip of shops. On the human side is a Pizza Hut, a doughnut shop, a hair and nail salon, and other businesses which come and go. On the return leg of one walk, several feet before I could get to the back of buildings, I could smell the strong odor of cigarette smoke from the delivery men who unloading a truck. And the closer I came the more the alley felt like a tunnel, funneling that that smoke, concentrating it toward me. So I altered the route, and passed in front, where kolaches tried to seduce me.

Even in solitude, even before light, there are distractions. And everything is an obstacle for someone. We see where our eyes are pointed. I wonder if we take enough in.

Disappointing Returns

I have had trouble writing this post. It is not that I have not written or made an effort. It is not that I have not walked. But I have thought much about, and spent the past couple of weeks trying to walk off, disappointment, and it is difficult, I see, to write about such a subject without sounding like one is feeling sorry for oneself. Part of this is because of feeling sorry for myself.

Part of the problem is also in trying to define just what one is disappointed about, and whether or not that disappointment is reasonable. Every human being is going to be disappointed in something and someone, and sometimes that disappointment comes because a person or thing has not lived up to reasonable standards; sometimes the standards or expectations are not reasonable. I'm convinced that in most instances of human interaction, the truth is somewhere in between. And rarely will one take the time to put on the glasses required to see one's one part in this.

Much of my disappointment lately is not about what I expect of others that is reasonable or unreasonable, but in what I fear those shortcomings may mean for my future. This fear is a killer. For example, if someone I love makes a promise and does not come through, not because of neglect or ill will, but just because life gets in the damn way, I too often let myself think that the future holds the same disconnection or hurt. But fear obscures reality by making us see a possible, but unrealized, future.

you are infused in me
part of the yesterday
i half remember
and as i age
i am terrified
by the shedding of skin

I've been reading Seeds of Contemplation, by Zen Catholic Thomas Merton. In it, he says, "As long as we are on earth, the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because this love is the resetting of a Body of broken bones." I suspect that "contact" could also be about the desire for contact and what we may think we lack of it. He also writes, "The only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our false self, and enter by love into the union with the Life Who dwells and sings within the essence of every creature and in the core of our own souls."

Much pain is caused by telling people to not be disappointed; pain also comes from trying hard to avoid disappointment. On the other hand, it seems we benefit from it when we recognize the jailer, be it a loved one, the devil, or our own self. I pray with great longing for the day I don't look for a key except in the feet God gave me.

Planting seeds in ice

It seems my perambulations have been longer, perhaps riskier as the new year has started. This is not due to any resolutions. I don't do resolutions. I make promises and commitments. But as I have had, I suppose, a little more time, and much more anxiety than I had expected at this juncture of my "vacation," I have tried a couple of new routes, or at least paths I could not have taken at any other time.

For example, I have walked twice on an expanse of highway under construction. Normally this would have been bustling with people and machines, and I certainly would not be allowed up there. But one walk was during freezing cold, and another was on New Years Day, so area was abandoned and looking as forlorn as abandoned things are in winter.

please don't nod in time

to my melancholy words

agony should be no tune

you can shut off so easily

i'm not a channel to be changed

On another walk, I found myself further down I-30, under an overpass, and some mischievous spirit in me thought it would be fun to climb up so that I could be in the middle of the highway. Maybe an interesting picture could be had. It wasn't, but I did manage to nearly bust my keister trying to get down. I wonder what sort of metaphor is sliding down thirty feet of cold concrete.

I have felt a bit wistful about all this. On Monday, I get back to my paying job, and I've felt no little anxiety that my walks will be shorter, less adventurous, less picturesque. What I had hoped to accomplish in terms of my own journey may not have happened. I cannot tell at this juncture because I have been planting seeds in ice: it feels futile, but I have to have faith it isn't. Ice melts, I'm told.

a psalm

tell me, You,

with your hills and valleys

your deserts and difficult streams

what music is there

in these maddening machines

these serpentine silences

tell me, Secret i'm not

privy to, slogging through

my ventricles, what art

is in this artifice ? what

is the reason for facing

everything but your Face

i wait not patiently as-

well. i wait 

and in return i return 

and turn

and twist

and far off is a sea

where You spoke

and i wish to dream 

myself there

where

where 

Where

i sit i cry out i open

quiet quiets me

and i wait 

still

Presence

Here it is with no poetic language or decoration: this was a mostly bad year. It was full of pain from several directions. I won't bore you with the specifics of what hurt or who (including myself) caused me so much downright awfulness of soul. Because these things don't really matter. Well, some of it matters to my journey to wholeness, but for readers of this little blog, any knowledge is likely to start people thinking with opinions the same way people watching a two minute news piece seems to have answers before the story.

How bad has it been? My prayers have sometimes gotten diabolical: asking for things I should not have or that I am not ready for, begging to be taken in my sleep, cursing some of the good I've been given.

It does not help to say or think, "It could be worse" or "Look on the bright side." Even a paper cut can seem like an amputation in the moment it has taken center of the human stage. So platitudes and advice can do as

much damage as an axe to the head if one doesn't take care. And by this, I mean doling out words with no heart, like tossing change out the window of a Mercedes while driving past quick enough to avoid the stench of the beggar.

It has not been all bad, however. In fact, with all the terribleness came a couple heaps of wonderfulness that I could not have expected and I certainly did not deserve. Here is what has helped me: walking and reading and church. I have lost about thirty pounds this year from diet and exercise, but walking has helped me to think more clearly and pray more honestly. I always been a reader, but this year I rediscovered the joy of what some call "getting lost" in a book. I call it finding more of my true self and place. And my faith community has been exactly that: a community, building me and stretching me. I haven't escaped the world, but found more reason to be in it. It also doesn't hurt to have a comfy chair and an empathetic cat.

But you need to know what has made the most difference: presence. People literally giving me time. Listening, laughing, lamenting (and yes, offering advice). Friends drinking coffee or tea, writing notes, tagging me in funny posts. Family saying prayers and putting up with my shit. My grandson making me laugh and giving me squeezes. And people letting me say, as they have said to me, "You so matter."

i know you can't quite fix me

but thanks for opening 

your workshop

and letting me get warm

I still have some shaky days and nights, and I can't say I see that the coming year will actually be better than this. Because despite all my best efforts, I'm going to fail at something, and despite my good will, somebody is going to die and someone is going to let me down. But it appears I can live through those things, and I won't be alone. That might be enough.

With Us

One of the names ascribed to the Christ during the Christmas season is Immanuel. It means "God is with us." For me, particularly during walking year, the idea has been significant.

During our roughest moments, we need, more than anything, the presence of others. Not just hanging around, but not just being in the same room. I have all sorts of friends and family who have tried to help me during my difficulties, and advice has been helpful. But what has meant the most is that they have let me have a few minutes of just being with me, "[rejoicing] with those who rejoice, [weeping] with those who weep."

sometimes the bread and wine
bring me to tears i don't understand
and sometimes You find me
in the field thinking i'm alone
and feed me again

And solitude is not being by one's self. Prayer has been at times more fragmented, part moan, part exclamation (of praise, anger, frustration), part looking down at the dirt and walking in slow careful steps, part looking at the sky to take in the beauty of streaking clouds and hiding suns and moons.

But it's the "being with" that makes the most difference. Good friends, most of us know, don't always speak in words, and sometimes do not seem to speak at all. I've never been a good friend to God, but He's always been with me, not just listening to my many complaints.

too often i've heard
only echoes of my hurt
my voice bouncing off
the walls of the universe
mouth closing my ears



During the Christmas Eve service last night, our priest said, "And there was Mary, holding Immanuel." I noticed my daughter giggling, and I started to give her a father's frown of rebuke. She made the sign for book, and whispered, "I thought he said Mary was holding a manual."

And so I thought, perhaps we look for God in all the rules, all the things that seem to bring order to life, when the real need is us to accept God with us. Walking. Stumbling. Laughing. Weeping. With us, Being.

Of mud and mercy

This week has been shaky. I've walked, but not first thing in the morning. I've had to pretty much talk myself into it every day. Emotions wrecked, and suffering the post semester let down I should know by now will always come. Then there has been the rain and gray that is always here this time of year. About the only way I've been able to get myself moving is the fear that if I don't do it today, I might not do it tomorrow. I'm pretty good at believing my powers at keeping at bad habits.

 
So I go. Perhaps there is something of me thinking of John Irving's dictum to keep "passing the open windows." But he was talking about being inside and having windows to jump out of. I'm not good at seeing windows, only out of them. Often I find all I have to say or add to the conversation of the world is, "Have mercy!"

 

no dry place to sit
or kneel so i must seek
stillness on my feet

The honest answer to "how do you do it?" when one manages to accomplish something amidst chaos is "I had no choice." This year, I thought about the choices, and doing so has been scary. A choice to keep moving along, trying one's best, trying to seem meaningful despite the soil on one's clothes, despite the gunk weighing down the only shoes one can travel in--well there is a bit of grace in that, yes?

Finished reading Anne Lamott's wonderful Traveling Mercies a couple days ago, from which I found the following: "The truth is that your spirits don't rise until you get way down. Maybe it's because this -- this mud, the bottom -- is where it all rises from. Maybe without it, whatever rises would fly off or evaporate before you could even be with it for a moment."

Walking is supposed to be my time with God, and not just mental and physical exercise. I've taken to stopping during the longer trips and spending a few minutes meditating. But this week I've also realized that I've had too many conversations with people who aren't there, people who won't ever be there, instead of talking to God, or better yet, opening myself up to find what the Holy Spirit has to say to me.

So I'm hoping I can rejoice not only in the intermittent sunshine, but also the mud punctuating my days, caking my feet, slowing my racing heart.

Still whispering

This week has been the first of the Advent season. In my faith tradition, it is the time of waiting and anticipation for the Christ to come. And yet, I have had great trouble looking forward.

We think of Christmas as a time of coming together, but most of my friends are leaving, and I will not see them again until well past the traditional twelve days of Christmas. A friend and colleague died this week, finally losing his battle with cancer. And I must struggle, after months of the push and shove, trials and joys of teaching, to shift gears for a few weeks to rest and less stressful projects. When I imagine it, the rest is easy; when the time comes, I'm a mess.

 hello sun
hiding behind clouds
peeking around trees
still whispering to me

Many are not aware that in the early days of Christianity, Christmas was not a major feast day. The time most honored was Easter, the celebration of the resurrection. Now even the good and wholesome aspects of the holiday bring stress, so many find the whole month difficult.

I know I don't want to think about death so much, even with awareness of the end of the story, where life comes back and blooms. But I suppose that's what faith is about. You hold on because better is coming, all evidence to contrary.

Breathe

Opening my eyes in meditation
I see a broken lamp,
or what seems to be.
With eyes like mine
one can never tell.

Breathe in. Breathe out.
Still, there is breathing.

Across the street
the better tended field is green.
I don't know what it is for,
but it's green defies the winter.
And I stand in brown and pale yellow.

Breathe out. Breathe in.
You are breathing still.

As I head toward home,
I see a sky that rained last night
and will rain again.
It won't be Hell, nor Heaven.
But it will be water.

Breathe in. Breathe out.
Until you are still, breathe.
Until then, find the stillness.
Until God finds you, breathe.