A little quote

Though it is cloudy and spittingly raining, and my mind feels heavy and slow, and my soul maybe tilted a little off center, the scraps of nature given to me in Brooklyn feel very green and near and lend a fresh, damp sense of peace to my evening. This bit from Marguerite Yourcenar felt familiar. Simplicity!

When all the complicated calculations prove false, when the philosophers themselves have nothing more to tell us, we may be forgiven for turning to the meaningless twitter of the birds or to the distant counterweight of the stars.

I love...

poets and graveyards, and the graves of poets. I promise I am not getting all gothic about it. I just do. I also love Quakers, so I was tickled to run across this bit where a Quaker poet (Henry Taylor) is writing a poem about a poet's grave. There's nothing particularly Quaker about the poem, but the whole situation is familiar.


At the Grave of E. A. Robinson

Decades of vague intention drifted by
before I brought small thanks for your large voice–
a bunch of hothouse blooms and Queen Anne’s lace
and four lines from “The Man Against the Sky.”
My poems, whatever they do, will not repay
the debt they owe to yours, so I let pass
a swift half hour, watching the wind distress
the fringes of my fragile, doomed bouquet.

I beg your pardon, sir. You understood
what use there is in standing here like this,
speaking to one who hears as well as stone;
yet though no answer comes, it does me good
to sound aloud, above your resting place,
hard accents I will carry to my own.

Elsa's godfather, and my brother looking devilish and debonaire, plus two contenders for hairstyle of the year... 

My cat was so mad at me for leaving last Christmas that this time it took 3 days for me to see anything of him but this. I miss him! 

Portrait of the artist... 

Elsa's godfather and two of the chicklets. 

Oh my gosh, suddenly I need a nap, too. 

She's so lovely! She's getting so old! I was this age when we moved to the States. Weird. 

Mr. Blondie looks so bored, while Mr. Redhead looks blissed out, and Miss Big Sister grins.. 

"We're not doing anything to her, honest!" 

More pictures from home...my little photographer brother returning the favour... 

Baby Elsa...this is what I saw all week with my family. So many hands...one little baby! My mom said that the camera with the pictures of the two of us together was destroyed *weep* But still, is she not wonderful!? And only 2 months old! This picture makes me homesick...now I must snap out of being homesick and go pack my stuff. T-3 days! 

As Martin, our humble photographer, so sweetly calls it: "The Quaker Swinger's Club". Maybe I'll use this as my profile photo. Then maybe everyone will think I am as cute as Rob. (Mr. Foreground, there.) Rob, maybe *you* should use this as your profile photo! 

Afterthoughts.

So the visit went really, really well. I prayed a lot, and my family made a big effort, and I made a big effort, and we had the best time together since...well, since before I can remember. My mom cried when I left, (a first) which was terrible, and I told my dad that next time I visit I will pick a fight so that she doesn't. :)

I got a very sensitive, sweet, and appreciating e-mail from her when I got home. Here's an edited version:

"So how does it feel to be back in the hustle and bustle of the big city after the quiet, contemplative life in the country... ;)

The house looks the best it has in ages, and some of that has to do with you! Your energy around the house was very inspiring and being able to rest so much while you were here was awesome! Thank you! Elsa is having trouble settling tonight, and I wonder if she is missing you! The rest of us are - that's for sure! Anna came up to me as I was doing laundry, and asked if I had a sad spot in my tummy like she does.

I hope you had a peaceful visit with us. I know we enjoyed you - and I know I made an effort to not raise any "hot" issues - for instance neither Daddy nor I listened to Rush while you were about - even though we love his satirical outlook on politics. And, as sad as your comment about (sensitive Catholic issue) made me, I did not say anything.

The house seems smaller without you - does that make sense? You made it a little larger with your cheerfulness and esp. the happy play you engaged in with the baby. It made it so much harder to see you leave, knowing she will change so much while you are gone and it is sad to know you will be still further away. Still, we are all very happy for the wonderful blessings God has brought your way."

It was heartwarming and breaking. I wrote her this back:

"Well, I am missing you guys a lot too. I thought this vist went really well, and I wanted to say I really *DO* appreciate and know how sensitive you are being. It's a difficult transition. Sometimes I worry that I seem secretive or awkward. It's just that sometimes I worry that you will take my difference in belief as a judgement. For example I worry that you might hear a conversation between us like this:

Mummy: Do you believe XYZ?
Me: Um, no. ("and therefore I think you are an idiot for believing it, and I don't respect you and I'm way more enlightened")

I know it's not as simplistic as that, but I know how important your faith is to you, and I know it's painful and strange to have your daughter seem to be "outside the camp", seemingly rejecting what is nearest and dearest and integral to your very self. I know how it feels to feel rejected because of difference in belief, and it terrifies me to think I'm causing you pain.

Not in an attempt to justify, argue, convince or otherwise affect you, but just to share some of where I am coming from these days, I thought I'd send you a Quaker article I wrote some months ago. I am also sending you a silly picture of Plain Quakers, (and an unplain Quaker) on playground swings. I am the only one in a dress. :) I also promise to write you an e-mail tomorrow that is full of anecdotes and free of angst.

Love love love
Your Daughter who is missing everyone more than is acceptable and so will now have to come home in September and so is already figuring out how fast she accrues vacation days...."

And I attached a slightly edited copy of my first post on this blog. I hope I did well. I would really love for my family to be at peace with the direction I have been led. I am so happy and so alive in the spirit in a way I never knew before. I'm home, and I've found God, and He is more alive and present to me than ever before. God knows I don't intend to convert them...part of my belief and comfort (call me Universalist if you will) is that God is present in and to all at any time, in any situation or faith, and the the Light pours into our soul from every possible conduit including sacraments of all kinds. I just hope there is a way for them to be at peace with my faith, and not go to bed weeping for my soul (the way I did as a child for my grandparents, since I was told in catechism class that remarrying after divorce was a mortal sin.)

I would love more prayers on this matter, and I'd also like to read more about people who have encountered difficulty with their families over their faith. When I read old books about young people defying their parents to become Quakers, and never hearing from them again, it all sounds very heroic. But when I confront my own parents, both of whom I love very much, and I worry about them being confused and hurt, I feel grateful for their continued love, humble, and sad. It would be much more comfortable if I could have continued to feel self-righteous, but God has softened our hearts...

How my Life is Changing Entirely: an Update in Pictures

So. Remember all that jumble I hinted at a post or two ago? This is it. I'm still in NC, so I'm going to keep it short, and fill in with details later.

1.) I got a job here:





2.) I am moving here in a week:




3.) I've sent a teary goodbye letter to 15th street and will say my in person goodbyes next Firstday. After that, I am going to be going to meeting here:




4.) And that all means that I get to see more of him:




God is good.

Whoof!

Or as Caila, my childhood dog, a bouvier (no presidential connections, I assure you) is fond of remarking "Boof! Boof! BOOFBOOF!"

Things continue on in North Carolinaland. I did not go to meeting yesterday. I strongly considered Liz's suggestion of calling a meeting house for a ride. My parents live way-hey-hey-hey the heck out here, at least a good hour each way from any meeting, so eventualy I decided not to - it seemed like a bit much. I only had one kid with me during the Mass hour, and managed to get in some quiet worship.

There is an unfortunate Barbie doll hanging by her hair in the window blinds across the room. Hmm.

My brothers and I have been bonding over geeky RPG awesomeness. I told you I regress when I go home. My character is a Breton Healer, the closest thing to a non-violent character there is. In pixilated life, being a goody-two-shoes is difficult. The best way to advance in the game is to kill a bunch of people and take their stuff. This way involves lots of wading around in swamps and collecting mushrooms to sell. Also fighting rats.

Oh dear. The two year old monkey, in an early-morning physics experiment, has just dropped a mug into the toilet, where it has broken. Sadly, it is one of those Corel mugs which doesn't break, and doesn't break, and doesn't break, and doesn't break, until it shatters into 6,000 bits. She is now running around the house with a cereal bowl clapped to her bare behind, for no reason I can fathom. Perhaps to protect it from encounters with a toilet full of broken glass? She has informed me that I am to fill it with cereal. Once she takes it off her posterior. Ew.

Off to strategize some toilet-shard removal. I don't suppose the household is possessed of a huge pair of tongs...

Home home on the raaaaaaaange...

Or the electric grill. Either way.

I'm back in North Carolina with the family, knee-deep in kidlets, cats and crumbs. I got up early today and made an epic Father's Day breakfast, since tomorrow they'll all be off to Mass at the butt-crack of dawn, as one of my more poetic brothers likes to say. It turned out wonderfully, and there is something rather terrible and thrilling in the sheer amount of food involved in a Father's Day Breakfast Feast for Fourteen. 2 dozen eggs, 2 loaves of toast, 3 lbs of bacon, 2 gallons of orange juice, 15 cups of waffle-mix (from scratch, mind!), a pot of coffee, and 2 pots of tea. Of course, roughly half of that made its way down the gullet of my 18 year old brother, who from infancy has had the appetite of a starved and blood-scenting great white shark. And there were a few left over waffles to dip in bacon drippings and feed to Finnegan the Big Mutt.

The trip over here was a bit bizarre. All that needs to be said about it is summed up in this: the 30 passenger plane had its own descent music, which blasted from overhead speakers like the deformed spawn of a drunken evening with John Williams and Enya as we dropped out of the sky. The joys of blue-light travel!

The baby is adorable and likes me very much. She is not yet two months old, but she's very engaging and interactive. She makes eye contact and smiles and squirms and flails and makes noises with intent. I know gas, and I know conversation, and this is the latter. She loves to be sung to, and in less than 24 hours here, I already hold the record for putting her to sleep (after my mom, of course.) She looks different from all of our other babies - less immediately beautiful, but with fuzzy red hair and a very intelligent and humorous expression which add cuteness until she's impossible. It took me a while to warm up to the last baby (now the world's funniest 2 year old monkey) but I fell in love with Elsa right away. You can tell already that she's going to be a tough, smart little cookie.

So far tensions are remaining pretty low. My 13 year old sister came up to me out of nowhere last night and announced defiantly:

"I know for a fact that God doesn't hate war. 'Cause he told Joan of Arc to go to war. So there."

I raised an eyebrow and continued to silently wash the dishes. What can you say to that? It was both troubling and amusing. Apparently someone had briefed her on the peace testimony and she'd gone off in a corner to think about it, and why it must be wrong. My teenage brother, schooled rigorously in the rhetoric of apologetics, as I was before them, have tried to engage me in the sort of "if=then" pseudo-logical equations, heavily scented with C.S. Lewis, which turn us into snake-oil lawyers instead of saints. I answered in historical facts about Quakers, trying to steer clear of theology. Then they asked me my political affiliation, and I gave them a wink and a comic-arch "My kingdom is not of this world." Eventually, they realized I wasn't going to be much fun to bait on this subject, and we began to talk about computer games instead. My father seems to ignore the fact that I'm "fallen away", which I take as a mercy, and we've had some good, unstressful conversations about virtue. My mother peppers her conversation with plain speech, which is pretty cute. My brothers are amused by the plain dress, and my little sisters are intrigued. My mom likes it. My dad hasn't noticed.

Silence and solitude are not to be found here, even hiding in the toilet, but I have discovered that I can get a lot of peace and inner focus by throwing myself into the housework. It's the oldest trick in the book, but I never did discover the Zen of the Dishpan when I was looking for it. In a small house, with so many messy little people, a home business, two teen aged boys, and my mother struggling heroically with the demands of a new-born and c-section recovery, there is a never-ending supply of work. I am always astonished, every time I come home, about the back-breaking impossibility of keeping things going for more than 15 minutes at a time.

It doesn't look like I can make it to meeting this First Day, though I've really been wanting to visit some North Carolina meetings. I'm not sure what I'm going to do. If I stay home from Mass, my parents will leave the babies at home with me, so I won't be able to keep worship alone. If I go with them, I'm worried that my abstaining from communion will be a visual reminder of my change of faith which will pain my parents. I am not opposed to participating in the Mass, but I also know I'm considered unfit to receive communion by them, just by virtue of not having gone to Mass in a while. I'm praying about this, and I'd love it if my Friends and readers would, too. We'll see how way opens tomorrow.

I edited this post to add...I was looking at one of my old poetry anthologies and smiled to find this from Yeats:

On being asked for a War Poem

I think it better that in times like these
A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

Excerpt from Rainer Maria Rilke

I came across a scrap of this on the first page of a book of poems a man in a coffee shop was sharing with me. The rest of the poems were his own, and while I tried to keep up a lively interest in them, my mind was turning the words of Rilke over and over and over and over...


"...I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life, even more than I was in Paris, where everything echoes and fades away differently because of the excessive noise that makes Things tremble. Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they come from the seas, here I feel that there is no one anywhere who can answer for you those questions and feelings which, in their depths, have a life of their own; for even the most articulate people are unable to help, since what words point to is so very delicate, is almost unsayable. But even so, I think that you will not have to remain without a solution if you trust in Things that are like the ones my eyes are now resting upon. If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you...as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer..."

Letters to a Young Poet, Letter 4

One more Merton

Sometimes, when I read a passage or a prayer, I find I can learn more about my spiritual state by what repels me from it than by what draw me to it. I've been meaning to post this excerpt for some time, but for one reason or another it hasn't gone up. I've been holding it pretty closely in my all-too-irregular worship, and also in the much more frequent quiet moments on the train or in the park when my mind wanders a little nearer to God. This is a time of huge change for me - changes which I'll share when the time is ripe. More transition, more shifting, and I am searching more, and again, for what it is that stands fast, what is unchangeable, and secure, and tugging gently at my anchor-lines to see if I've come any closer to that silent, abiding and sustaining faith I aspire to. When things come to pieces, even for the better, do I come apart as well? Am I maintaining equilibrium at all? Is one's level of equilibrium a good way to measure one's faithfulness?

I'm not sure. I think God knocks us off our horses often, and that there's a way to fall off in faithfulness. But I do feel that in the past few weeks I've given my emotions far too much reign, and that if I were being more faithful I'd be less easily moved by superficialities.

As I've been meditating on this passage, there have been sentences and words that tugged me with slight discomfort, some that made me doubt my footing and balance. It begins with a long, gorgeous, and detailed prayer, too long to quote here, which has a lot more snags than this bit, and has given me a lot to consider. This quote has been, and continues to be, my Query to myself, and I go a little trembly before it when I stretch up beside it to see how I'm doing. This past week, just as God's blessings have become so abundant and visible in my life, and as I have been up to my armpits in worldly concerns, which have seemed so worthy, so all-important, and so capable of blocking out my whole sky, I have left it behind entirely. I've felt like there are eighty thousand things I must do, eighty thousand things I will surely fail to do, and eighty thousand reasons to fret and worry and plan and freak out, as if everything depended solely on me, as if I had much to do with it at all. I have not been empty at all, but full of my fears and my dreams and my ideas, leaving very little room for the guidance and help, not to mention comfort, of God. My journal this week is full of gloating and moaning and whining and spastic yelps of "what now!??!" It's been a bit pathetic. I'm taking this ideal up again tonight.


This then is what it means to seek God perfectly: to withdraw from illusion and pleasure, from worldly anxieties and desires, from the works that God does not want, from a glory that is only human display; to keep my mind free from confusion in order that my liberty may always be at the disposal of His will; to entertain silence in my heart and listen for the voice of God; to cultivate an intellectual freedom from the images of created things in order to receive the secret contact of God in obscure love; to love all men as myself; to rest in humility and find peace in withdrawal from conflict and competition with other men; to turn aside from controversy and put away heavy loads of judgment and censorship and criticism and the whole burden of opinions I have no obligation to carry; to have a will that is always ready to fold back within itself and draw on all the powers of the soul down from its deepest center to rest in silent expectancy for the coming of God, poised in tranquil and effortless concentration upon the point of my dependence on Him; to gather all that I am, and have all that I can possibly suffer or do or be, and abandon them all to God in the resignation of a perfect love and blind faith and pure trust in God, to do his will.

And then to wait in peace and emptiness and oblivion of all things.

Bonum est praestolari cum silentio salutare Dei.
("It is good to wait in silence for the salvation of God.")

Silly Frivolous Love Song Lyrics.

Because it's summer suddenly and all warm and gooey out, and because I'm feeling like I must do something to get this lovely Bright Eyes song out of my head, and maybe sharing it will have an exorcistic (yep, just coined it.) effect. I wish I could give you guys the melody too, but you'll just have to buy the album: I'm Wide Awake it's Morning (and I am, and it is!)

Really, it's lovely, but it's been on repeat in the old brain sound-system for two weeks now. Plus, Beppe posts about music all the time, and if he jumped off a bridge I'd probably at least look over the side. :) Plus, I'm feeling mushy, and can't make mix-cds to deal with it. So I present to you my favourite song of the moment:

First Day of My Life

This is the first day of my life
I swear I was born right in the doorway.
I went out in the rain, suddenly everything changed:
They're spreading blankets on the beach.

Yours is the first face that I saw.
I think I was blind before I met you.
Now I don’t know where I am,
I don’t know where I’ve been,
But I know where I want to go.

And so I thought I’d let you know
That these things take forever,
I especially am slow.
But I realize that I need you,
And I wondered if I could come home?

Remember the time you drove all night
Just to meet me in the morning?
And I thought it was strange
You said everything changed
You felt as if you just woke up.

And you said:
"This is the first day of my life.
I’m glad I didn’t die before I met you.
Now I don’t care, I could go anywhere with you
And I’d probably be happy."

So if you want to be with me
With these things there’s no telling
We'll just have to wait and see,
But I’d rather be working for a paycheck
Then waiting to win the lottery.
Besides maybe this time it's different
I mean I really think you like me...