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.

In Praise of Co-Habitation

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All of you who live lovingly with others—roommates, spouses, children, extended family members—astonish me. I asked some people what they think praise means recently, and two of my favorite responses were “to honor and recognize holiness” and to stand in awe of. Today I’d like to take a moment to praise healthy, happy—at least most of the time—co-habitation.

Sometimes after work I sit in my car and play word games on my phone to avoid interacting with my cat quite so soon. Granted, none of my former roommates clawed me if I didn’t play with them when I got home, but I started thinking about all my vanmates who get in their cars and drive directly home to care for or simply be with families and spouses.

A friend and I spent last weekend at New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur. That’s three days of sitting in your own room with your own little garden, seeing people only at services, and speaking only during our afternoon walks. I always find re-entry rough, but she has to readjust not only to noise and advertisements and Starbucks but also to another human being, her husband.

Living well with others requires a certain selflessness and self-sacrifice, a willingness to give up some of how you would rather things be, an openness to negotiation and renegotiation. In essence, a daily giving of yourself that can’t help but make the world more loving.

Of course not everyone manages to be as kind as they might like to be every day, but on balance, this daily and often not-so-simple caring for one another is a great good. Huzzah to you!

Judgment Day Every Day

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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

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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

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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.

Talking About the Weather

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Somewhere in the middle of planning my upcoming trip to the midwest, I thought, “This is a bad idea. It’s going to be very cold there.” An alarming thought for a former Coloradan to have.

You see, in Colorado, we are tough, and those of us from mountain towns have the luxury at scoffing at the rest of the world when an inch of snow shuts down an entire city. We accept no excuses. Twenty-four inches in forty-eight hours? No problem, we say.
But now I live in coastal California where the majority of people understand that it’s simply follish to live anywhere water freezes without the help of GE. Why voluntarily be cold–or hot for that matter? We’ll stick with 70-74 degrees Fahrenheit thank you very much.
Having recently returned from Colorado to California, I’m fairly convinced it’s a miracle people from vastly different climates can even talk to each other. The world makes itself felt in a cold climate in a way we 70-74 degree-ers do not experience. You have to plan the weather into your life with time to scrape the car window and snowblow the driveway. And then there are days you have to cancel your plans on account of Mother Nature just to stay alive. If you ignore the weather in California, you might get wet.
Back in California, I was sitting at a picnic table that the nearby tree had covered with tiny flowers no bigger than my fingernail. Yes, in January, but stick with me here winter people. The flowers looked like little green cups. I picked one up and turned it over and inside a tiny bug was weaving its way through the white stamen, each tipped with a yellow dot, and stopping to clean its wings.
The world must make itself felt in gigantic and mysterious ways to this bug, such as when a strange force literally turns its world upside down. That upturning can happen to any of us, regardless of the weather–a death, a birth, an unexpected success, the loss of a job. And during and around all these events this world that is the source of endless opportunities for wonder, that offers so many tiny bugs in tiny flowers, continues.

Birthing Love

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This year I actually wanted to send Christmas cards (not to be confused with the actual sending of them). Every year, as people go their various ways for Christmas vacation, I find myself wanting to connect with all my friends before they leave, whether they’re close and I saw them last week or far and I haven’t seen or talked with them in months.

I’ve been wondering why the need to be together is so strong right now and why waiting until January feels like missing a critical moment. After all it’s only a couple of weeks. No other two-week period has that sense of urgency for me.

I think it’s because the Christmas spirit, which people of any or no religion can enjoy, comes alive when we notice love being born into the world. Love is always being born into the world, but we are impatient and easily distracted beings and often miss it. Luckily, we are also ritualistic beings, and so we build into our lives times to stop and pay attention. When an entire culture pauses and takes the time to celebrate that love, you can feel it.

And when you do, you might want to send Christmas cards or drop five bucks in the Salvation Army bucket or let someone go in front of you in line. Because we are the ones who birth love into the world. As with children or art or any other act of creation, it comes both from us and through us—we participate in its coming into being but are not its only source.

We tend and grow this love in our many relationships, and so of course, when love is in the air, there is an urge to reconnect. To all of you who will probably not, despite my best intentions, receive cards from me: I love you.

Note: The blog and I will be on vacation for the next two weeks. Wishing you all a merry Christmas and joyful new beginnings at the solstice and the turn of the year.

Momma Told Me

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I don’t know why we’re designed to go two steps forward and one step back, but I’m convinced we are. Last week: Zen master. This week: whiner.

I exaggerate last week’s accomplishments, but I did have this miraculous moment of getting over myself. One of the software systems at work appears to have been designed to decrease productivity, and I generally spend a lot of time and energy hating it while using it.

This time a moment of spiritual brilliance flashed upon me. If I changed the goal from finishing the task to being present and paying attention, I could stop fighting the inefficient system because its inefficiency would no longer matter. So I changed the goal. My mind cleared up. My patience increased. My work probably improved, though I have no way to measure that.

Fast forward to this week. While working on another not favorite task, I said to myself, you could use this time as practice; where is your attention? I replied, somewhat snappishly, I don’t want to practice, I want to be miserable and complain. I clearly saw myself making that choice, but changing my approach still didn’t interest me. One step back—at least.

I kept this up most of the day and wore myself down sufficiently that, by the time I was chopping kale for dinner, I could consider the option of simply relaxing and accepting my sour disposition. Then this line from William Stafford’s poem “A Message from the Wanderer” came floating in: “Tell everyone just to remember/their names, and remind others, later, when we/ find each other.” Some days that’s all we can do, remember who we are, and that’s OK because that day is not eternal. The next day we’ll be capable of making different choices.

I’ll end with the rest of Stafford’s stanza because he sums it up so beautifully:

“…Tell the little ones
to cry and then go to sleep, curled up
where they can. And if any of us get lost,
if any of us cannot come all the way—
remember: there will come a time when
all we have said and all we have hoped
will be all right.”

The Light Returns

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Tonight is the eighth and final night of Chanukah. I’ve always loved everything about Chanukah, from cleaning the wax out of the menorah’s candle holders to eating gelt (chocolate coins) to guessing which candle is going to burn out first. My dad, the Catholic, always seemed to guess that one right.

But it’s light in the darkness, watching the number of candles grow day by day, that is the most enchanting.

Menorah on a table full of stuff

I inherited my growing-up menorah from my mom this year because her childhood menorah returned to her when my uncle died. I’ve never owned a menorah as an adult—unless you count the one I made out of a box in China—so this was the first year for me to light the lights at my house.

During the weekend that fell in the middle of Chanukah, I decided to paint my kitchen. Only I didn’t finish because of course it took longer than I thought, and my deconstructed kitchen is still occupying the dining table, the only place to put the menorah.

I restacked things and cleared a spot for it in the middle of the table and commenced worrying—that I was being disrespectful, that I would burn the house down, that it would look ugly amidst all the clutter—but I grew to like the symbolism. Even in the midst of the most chaotic disarray we can create, the light will still grow in the darkness.

And it was just as beautiful as ever, even surrounded by mixing bowls, pots and pans, and a few stray onions.

Giving Thanks

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Here’s something to aspire to: “For all that has been, thank you. For all that is to come, yes” (Dag Hammarskjöld, second United Nations Secretary-General and Nobel Peace Prize recipient). I’m not there yet, but this holiday is good practice.

This year’s selection from the cornucopia of things that make me grateful I’m alive:

Cake batter—and cookie batter and icing of course and the way all of the above cling to the insides of bowls and the edges of beaters demanding that we lick them off.

Cats—because when looked at rationally they are an odd choice for a companion but when looked at non-rationally they are cute and funny and cuddly, at least when they’re not attacking you. Plus they purr. You really can’t beat purring; that was evolutionary genius.

People who make things by hand—weavers, woodworkers, drywall hangers, bread bakers, especially those amazing folk who can take scraps of this and that and presto, there’s a table or a fancy dress.

Home—a sense of belonging, a feeling of safety and peace, an awareness of being loved.

Monastics—monks and nuns of all religions, lay people who are exceptionally contemplative, everyone who holds that sacred space in the midst of daily life. They are doing it for the rest of us.

Camping—all types, car, backpacking, anything that involves sleeping on the ground, frying your toast in a pan, waking up to the smell of pine trees and going to bed having just been reminded of how vast the Milky Way is.

Moments—the ones that take my breath away, the ones filled with laughter, the peaceful ones, the silent ones, the shared ones.

Friends and family—without whom, none of the above would be as fun or loving or wonderful.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.