Category: life

Open Up the Door

Rachel Henry1 Comment

In case you didn’t know, The Beatles were really, really smart. They summed up what I learned this week:

When I was younger so much younger than today
I never needed anybody’s help in any way
But now these days are gone, I’m not so self assured
Now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the doors

Last weekend, I was staring at a pallet full of wood flooring held together with two impressive steel bands. Over the phone, my dad recommended using a Sawzall to cut them because I didn’t have a tin snips. I had used a Sawzall before, so it was no longer in the category of scary power tool. But then he said, “You might want to put on some safety glasses if you have them.” At that moment, it became very relevant to my life that my neighbor’s garage door was open.

I had watched my neighbors build a bunk bed frame and so concluded that they probably owned many tools, including, perhaps, a tin snips, a tool that does not require safety glasses. I wandered into the garage and after calling some hellos met not my neighbor but a friend of theirs who lived around the corner.

There were no tin snips, but this young man knew all about Sawzalls. He could tell a blade designed to cut metal from one that cut wood in a single glance. He quickly noted that the metal blade I had inserted was old and dull and therefore might fly apart mid-cut. And then he volunteered to do the sawing for me. I said yes.

I’m happy to report that no shrapnel flew, no one was rushed to the emergency room. I’m even happier to report that a few minutes later, the young man came back to borrow some aluminum foil for barbecueing corn and stayed for a few minutes to ask me about my water softener.

It struck me that it took such a small letting go of self-assurance “open up the door,” to transform our relationship from “people who live next to each other” to “neighbors.” I spend a lot of time trying to convince myself and others that I can do it on my own, but The Beatles have it right: Help!

 

Note: The blog may be sacrificed to the home improvement gods the next couple of weeks as my dad and I install the above-mentioned flooring. If you know of any other sacrifices that appease these particular gods, please don’t hesitate to perform them on our behalf.

Comfort Food

Rachel Henry1 Comment

I don’t know about you, but I needed a Julie Andrews moment today:

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things.

I know we had a moment a few weeks back with the apple strudel, but today I was thinking about comfort; we turn to these very concrete things when we need comforting. Personally I go for hot chocolate or homemade macaroni and cheese.

This is what baby blankets and favorite sweatshirts are all about. It is why we get on airplanes we will complain about later and travel thousands of miles to visit friends and family. It is the magic that printed books and hand-written letters still hold. It is the reason my purring cat was not immediately booted off my lap when he started to bat at me while I typed.

I don’t know anyone who, when the world is weighing heavily, prefers a philosophy book to a cup of tea with a friend. I hope even those who have known suffering and grief I can’t imagine or understand can touch things that comfort them.

And yet my relationship to the physical is often one of obligation or control. I tell myself, sternly, to eat four servings of vegetables a day (rarely happens) or to water the plants so I don’t feel guilty about killing them. It would be so much more life-giving—to me and the plants—to spend a little time admiring how beautiful they are or to be aware for a few breaths that I am so connected to them that I am breathing in what they recently breathed out.

My most joyful moments arise when I am physically present with other people or with nature, so why not trust that? Please pass the brownies.

Reading Hopkins in the Pizza Parlor

Rachel Henry1 Comment

I am sitting in the pizza parlor on campus thinking about Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Pied Beauty,” which my mom brought back to my attention this week.

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

That first line always makes me think of the shadows of leaves on grass and park benches. After looking up “brinded”—gray or tawny with darker streaks or spots—I picture the irregular clumps of brown on Guernsey cows floating through the sky. I’ve loved this poem for years simply for sounding so good, not knowing at all what that second line meant.

leaf shadows
© Copyright Derek Harper and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons License

MTV U plays endless music videos on multiple, large TV screens, and I am the only one watching. The college students at whom the barrage is aimed don’t spare it a second glance. I wonder if they would notice if it simply disappeared. I suspect the students would notice their own words, suddenly lacking a soundtrack, made loud in the silence. They might notice the steadiness of light when the images flashing continuously at the edge of their vision disappeared. In other words, they would notice both absence and presence.

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

I Google images of chestnuts to confirm that they are indeed dark enough to resemble coals in a fire. My favorite part here is the simplest—”finches’ wings”—because how spectacular in their complexity and function are birds’ wings.

Or maybe the students’ brains are wired so differently from mine that I can’t conceive of what they would and wouldn’t notice. I sometimes think of how impossible it is for us to enter another’s point of view, to know what they’re experiencing in any given moment even if we know that person well.

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

Anyone who’s flown over the Midwest has seen “Landscape plotted and pieced.” And who can deny the beauty of a well-plowed field, straight rows ready for planting or already harboring the seeds that will magically feed us?

I could add to this list the green-browning hills around campus, the triumphant wildflowers hidden alongside the music building, the bodies of the young men and women surrounding me, perfect in their physicality though likely none of them knows the beauty of their own smooth skin. But MTV U? What would Hopkins make of this constant bombardment of sounds and images?

I suppose it is, after all, dappled. Glory be to God.

Pied Beauty
By Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things – 
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 
                                Praise him.

 

Less Head Time, More Streudel

Rachel Henry3 Comments

News flash for the week: my perceptions are not reality. Shocking, I know. Go ahead and sit down—that was probably a hard one to absorb since you thought I had this whole existence thing figured out.

For example, I tell myself a story about a group of people at work. It goes like this: they tolerate me because they have to, but I always get work to them late, I constantly tell them they can’t do things they want to do, and I don’t offer them as much support as they would like. So imagine my surprise when at a meeting last week they told me I was a joy to work with.

I don’t bring this up to brag (OK, maybe just a little) but because based on this headline in The Onion—Report: Today The Day They Find Out You’re A Fraud—other people might tell themselves these stories, too. People who are a joy to work with are walking around not knowing it, and these people might be you.

So of course we’re all going to implement a radical perception shift, and these thoughts will disappear by the time you finish reading this blog. If you figure out how to do that, let me know. In my experience, this type of shift doesn’t happen at warp speed, and if it does, there’s a lot of pain involved.

Pain is not up there with cream colored ponies and crisp apple streudels on my list of favorite things, so instead I’m going to practice remembering that the voice in my head lies. And I’m going to get some apple streudel and share it with the people who bring joy into my life and tell them that they do so that they have a little evidence to present to the voices in their heads.

Here’s a poem by C.K. Williams about a moment that broke through the cloud of misperception. One cool, nerdy thing about this poem—it is all one sentence.

The Dance
By C.K. Williams

A middle-aged woman, quite plain, to be polite about it, and
somewhat stout, to be more courteous still,
but when she and the rather good-looking, much younger man
she’s with get up to dance,
her forearm descends with such delicate lightness, such restrained
but confident ardor athwart his shoulder,
drawing him to her with such a firm, compelling warmth, and
moving him with effortless grace
into the union she’s instantly established with the not at all
rhythmically solid music in this second-rate café,

that something in the rest of us, some doubt about ourselves, some
sad conjecture, seems to be allayed,
nothing that we’d ever thought of as a real lack, nothing not to be
admired or be repentant for,
but something to which we’ve never adequately given credence,
which might have consoling implications about how we misbe-
lieve ourselves, and so the world,
that world beyond us which so often disappoints, but which
sometimes shows us, lovely, what we are.

–from Repair by C.K. Williams, reprinted in Good Poems, edited by Garrison Keillor

So Many Ways

Rachel Henry1 Comment

It’s National Poetry Month! I know you’ve been waiting all year for the return of the Everybody Can Love Poetry Series. It has arrived.

For those of you who started following the blog more recently, last April I posted a couple of poems each week in hopes of convincing people that there are wonderful, meaningful poems that you can understand without a degree in English. Welcome to round two.

One of the wonderful things about poems is that they are beautiful, the way a piece of music or a painting or a sunset is beautiful. I walked to my neighborhood grocery store this week right after it had rained. One of the neighboring houses was surrounded by poppies, which always display their most gorgeous side in profusion. Another house sported a few well-trimmed, carefully placed flowering bushes, and I thought, there are so many ways to be beautiful.

I think about this sometimes when I look at my cat, who is quite handsome. We think cats with all different types of coloring are cute. Black and white cats, like Tux, can have four white paws or only a couple; their faces can be all black or a little white or half white with a big freckle on the tip of their nose, and their owners think they’re adorable regardless.

But sometimes we don’t extend the same generosity to ourselves. We face ourselves in the mirror and wish this or that looked otherwise. We look at how we’ve lived our lives and how others have lived theirs and find ourselves wanting, yet if we expected a poppy to look like a rose, we’d miss its beauty.

Here’s a poem from Mary Oliver that I think speaks to how we might recognize our own beauty.

The Buddha’s Last Instruction

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal — a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire —
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

From: House of Light

 

 

 

Painting Lessons

Rachel Henry4 Comments

If you thought that painting your house was not the activity most likely to produce profound philosophical insights, you were right. Here are some mostly not-so-deep but potentially useful lessons learned from my recent painting adventure:

  • Before you pick up the cat that’s been locked in the garage for five hours, make doubly sure the paint on your hands is actually dry.
  • Abba is good painting music. Wait to start dancing until your roller has made contact with the wall.
  • If you know it’s going to take two days to paint your bedroom and you’ve put your bed in the middle of a pile of furniture covered by plastic, don’t put the air mattress you’ll need to sleep on under the plastic with everything else.
  • If you forget the advice above, have the good sense to look in the garage to see if by any chance you put the air mattress there instead of under the plastic as you thought you did.
  • Invite lots of friends. Some of them will come, and they will make your life so much more fun. Plus, a lot more paint will get on the walls in a shorter amount of time.
  • Tall people have amazing super powers that allow them to reach high ceilings in a single bound. Ok, there was no bounding, but there was also no ladder.
  • The back swing of someone using the long handle for the paint roller is dangerous. Use the skills you learned playing Mario Brothers to time your crossings on the upswing.
  • Plan some time to put things away. Otherwise it will be Thursday and all your stuff will still be shoved together in the middle of the room. Or at least so I imagine. Clearly I wouldn’t do anything like that.

Let’s Play!

Rachel Henry4 Comments

The answer to the world’s problems might be a good game of tag.

Everyone who walks into my office comments on how good the view is. It takes in our shiny new science building, the nearby volcanic peak, and a range of hills farther off. Earlier this week, all that was eclipsed by between fifty and a hundred grade school kids running around on the lawn outside the building, playing tag and laughing.

It looked like so much fun just to chase someone. College students don’t do that, and neither do university employees. Which I think is mostly too bad because joy was spilling off those kids. (OK, a friend and I chased each other down a hallway in the new building before it opened, and it was awesome.)

I think that would be one of the great gifts of parenthood—the excuse and the opportunity your child gives you to play and be silly. I don’t think we stop needing to do this as we get older, but sometimes we forget we need it.

Play renews us. It loosens our hearts and spirits and helps us take everything a little less seriously. There are plenty of serious things in this world—disease, the loss of a job—but there are many more things that we blow out of proportion. I suspect that many of my catastrophes would melt away after chasing someone around the yard, having a tickling match, or jumping on the trampoline.

It’s so easy to forget the importance of having fun, and I am grateful to those giggling kids for reminding me that running can be much more than exercise, that life is more fun when we’re not worrying about who’s watching, and that joy is as easy to find as a game of tag.

Judgment Day Every Day

Rachel Henry3 Comments

There’s nothing like a little loving kindness meditation to bring all your really nasty thoughts into sharp relief. I recently did a meditation that moves from offering loving kindness first to yourself—may I be happy, may I be well, may I find peace—then to someone you love, someone you feel neutral toward, and finally someone you don’t particularly like. Then I went out into the world and watched all these instant and cruel judgments about others flash through my mind.

For example, I was leaving church (seriously), and someone with what I considered to be an offensive bumper sticker cut me off on the way out of the parking lot. The thought that went through my head was at least as hateful as the bumper sticker.

I’ve known for a while that I am, to borrow a colleague’s phrase, a judging machine, but I don’t usually feel the spite attached to these thousand small opinions I form about others. Unfortunately, it is most certainly there.

The idea that world peace starts in our own hearts suddenly became very concrete. If I can condemn someone based on a bumper sticker—or the shoes they’re wearing or what I think I hear them whisper to their daughter in the pew in front of me—what are the odds that whole nations of people like me with the added difficulty of trying to bridge cultural differences are not going to kill each other to get resources?

There is a bright side, though: I saw those thoughts and knew they were thoughts, not truth. I can’t eradicate them, but I can continue to watch them and let them go. They won’t disappear, overnight, but with time, they may quiet down a bit.

If anything’s worth practicing, surely this is it. May you be happy. May you be well. May you find peace.

Make It Ordinary

Rachel Henry1 Comment

Mainly as an act of self-preservation, I’ve been trying to spend more time with Tux, my cat. I’ve decided to play with him when I get home so that I can choose the game. All the games he chooses seem to involve claws and teeth, so he always wins. Also on the program is giving him some lap time in the evening when he’s constitutionally available for lap time, as opposed to those times when he’s constitutionally available for running back and forth between the bedrooms. And I’m trying to do it more regularly, as part of my ordinary.

Cat poster: I don't always attack people, but when I do it's immediately after rubbing affectionately against them.
This is not really Tux, in case you were wondering.

Liturgically, the ordinary consists of those things that happen the same way at the same time during each mass or each day or each year. Which could make something ordinary in the sense of everyday or boring or in the sense of unexceptional due to a lack of care or thought. On the other hand, a routine can help us pay attention to where we are.

I was sitting on my office floor the other day and noticed my copy of The Little Prince. At one point in the story, the fox asks the little prince to tame him, an act that requires the little prince to visit the fox at the same time every day. “If you come at just any time, I never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you,” the fox says.

If we sit down to write or meditate or eat dinner with our family at the same time each day, our hearts will be ready for whatever the activity is, and according to the fox, we’ll be able to enter more deeply into whatever it is we’re doing: “One only understands the things one tames,” he says.

I think I’ll try to make 2014 a little more ordinary.

The Size of Small Things

Rachel Henry2 Comments

My friend Anne wrote a book called A Friend That I Can Do For, and I was lucky enough to be in Chicago on the day of her book signing. The event taught me a thing or two.

Anne interviewed people who gather on Tuesday nights at a food pantry sponsored by All Saints’ Episcopal church in Chicago. Some come to volunteer, some come for a hot meal, and all come for a bit more—community, friendship, a surprisingly unmasked being with each other. The book tells people’s stories in their own words and has no sections, so the story of the pastor is mixed in with that of the man who sleeps in the park and knows a cop who brings him sandwiches and hot soup around 1 a.m. Whether people initially come to the pantry to serve or to be fed, it becomes clear after only a few pages that giving and receiving happen in equal measure regardless of economic status. There is a real humility on both sides that helps break down that need we all have to categorize.

The book signing directly followed the first service on Sunday, and all the profits went to the food pantry. On the way to church, Anne had wondered how the book would be received and whether anyone would buy it. As her husband and I stood in the church hall watching the line form, we kept revising our estimates as to what percentage of the congregation was buying a book. Our final estimate was nearly 100 percent. Of the 100 copies Anne brought, she might have had fifteen left, and there was still another service that morning.

A Friend That I Can Do For will probably never hit the New York Times bestseller list, but its importance to this small community outweighs, for them, that of any John Grisham or Harry Potter novel. I have a tendency to think that the things I do don’t count because they’re not big enough, not grand enough. This small book sticks its tongue out at that attitude and says, “Get a grip! Look what I did. I fed people.”

As the inscription in the book says, may we all be fed.

Note: The book also features striking photographic portraits by Charlie Simokaitis and will be available soon on Amazon.