Hello, again

Hello, two readers. Thank you for checking back in. As of late, this blog has fallen on hard times. You can thank facebook for that, surprisingly. I get my writing fix over there in bite-size portions. It may not be very meaningful, and the posts are necessarily short, but I can dash off a line or two between classes and feel that I have contributed something to the world.

I am currently involved in a love/hate relationship with facebook. What I hate is the weird feeling I sometimes get that I'm being a voyeur--that I'm somehow sneaking around and reading your mail. The public nature of facebook is feature that is both unsettling and comforting--unsettling, because I am not used to having friends and people I once met in the grocery story reading about events in my daily life; comforting because as everyone "goes public," I am discovering that what makes us similar to each other is much more apparent than the characteristics that make us different.

I love facebook because it has had a ministering effect to me. I have filled in gaps, placed exclamation points, and put periods at the end of relationships from long ago. I have found unexpected joy at re-connection to an old friend; I have been encouraged by the many ways God has provided for the myriad of people I have met along the way; I have found healing in the stories I read via fb emails--stories that I would have never had any other way of knowing; I have a renewed sense of hope that God is still performing miracles in the lives of His people.

I'm going to stick with facebook for at least a while longer; but I will try to get back here more regularly, hopefully with pictures and words that are also hopeful and good.

Jana

To my mother

Billy Collins is one of my new favorite poets; he served as the poet laureate of the U.S. from 2001-2003, and he is the plenary speaker at the Christian Scholars Conference in Nashville this summer. This poem recognizes the irony that exists between the gifts we give our mothers and the gifts our mothers have given to us. I don't know if my mom will like this poem, but this I do know: she will accept it as a gift, just like she always does. I love you, Mom. (I never made my mom a lanyard, but I did make her a leather ponytail holder with her initial. I'm sure she loved it, especially since she had very short hair, and to my knowledge, has never worn a ponytail.)


The Lanyard by Billy Collins

The other day as I was ricocheting slowly
off the pale blue walls of this room,
bouncing from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past --
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sickroom,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the archaic truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

On families . . .

I've been thinking about birthdays, especially those of my kiddos. Their birthdays are milestones and moments that cause me to measure, sift, and count the days. I think about the way God put our family together--how longing and prayer met two gifts of mercy and grace. I think about the fact that they weren't chosen by us--but how God chose them for us, bringing us together in moments that defy description.

I recently read Cynthia Rylant's short Newberry award winning novel titled Missing May. It is the story of a young girl who is adopted and raised by her elderly aunt and uncle, whom she adores--and although they have very little, they give her a home and hope and a life. One summer, her aunt suddenly dies, and she and her uncle have to find a way to keep on living--"to keep missing May but still go on with their lives."

Help and healing come in the form of a letter she finds from May; May writes:
"I used to wonder why God gave you to us so late in life. Why we had to be old already before we could have you. I was almost as big as a house and full of diabetes. And Ob an old arthritic skeleton of a man. We couldn't do none of the things we could've done for you thirty or forty years back. But I thought on it and thought on it until I finally figured it out. And my guess is that the Lord wanted us all to be just full of need. If Ob and me had been young and strong, why, maybe you wouldn't've felt so necessary to us. Maybe you'd've thought we could do just fine without you. So the Lord let us get old so we'd have plenty of cause to need you and you'd feel free to need us right back. We wanted a family so bad, all of us. And we just grabbed onto each other and made us one. Simple as that."

Maybe the way families are put together are just as simple as that. I don't really know. I've tried many times to write about how I feel about my children, and about my profound gratitude for having been chosen to be their mother. I don't understand this gift I have been given in words--I only understand it in my spirit, which wisely doesn't need the words, after all.

The Peace of Wild Things

I appreciate the poet Wendell Berry, who is a believer who is now making a name for himself, even in very secular anthologies. Here is one of my favorites:

The Peace of Wild Things (Wendell Berry)

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water,
and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Marble and Mud

I saw on someone's blog a while back a quote attributed to Nathaniel Hawthorne: "Life is made up of marble and mud."

Isn't that the truth?

The mud is SOOOOO easy to identify. It's cakey presence covers up so many good, beautiful objects of God's glory. If one does not look carefully, she will see only the mud.

Even the mud has its purpose.

But . . . don't forget to look for the marble.

Speeding ticket finale

Thanks to the process of "deferred adjudication," I did not have to pay my DEcember speeding ticket until today--the state apparently has a sense of humor and had the Christmas spirit, giving all the December outlaws a break. Thank you!

I hope I'll remember this day vividly the next time my foot gets a little heavy. This was also a good lesson for my children, who had the pleasure of standing in the ONE HOUR LONG line at the municipal courthouse with me, thanks to 1/2 day school for Luke and a throwing up babysitter--which made my teaching day very complicated. Anyway.

The people in line were diverse, except for this--every person was scowling. I wasn't really scowling--I was just trying to keep Grace entertained, which included not ever letting her feet touch the ground--I thought my arm was going to break. When we finally got up to the BARRED window to pay the fine, Luke said, "Well, this is embarrassing." Yep, that about sums it up.

Glad to be done with that. It is really too bad that the best lessons always have to be learned the hard way.

Jana