Stumble Upon

Rachel Henry1 Comment

Here is what you can do with a paper thesaurus that you can’t do at thesaurus.com: You look up the word “happening” and somehow work your way around to “existence,” which you discover is the first entry in the thesaurus, a location delightfully fraught with meaning. Along the way you somehow manage to pass by the word “yeshiva.” (Yes, this really happened to me, though I cannot now reconstruct how “yeshiva” got in there.)

I worry sometimes that this running into what we weren’t looking for gets lost online, that when all our content is algorithmically processed to appeal to who we already are, we can no longer stumble across those things that will shape us into who we will become. E-books can’t fall off the shelf at you. Google can’t tell what’s in your soul from your geographic location and the list of Ted talks you’ve downloaded recently.

I think of chance encounters as the universe’s way of trying to get through to us, of circumventing our too-busy minds with well-targeted wake up calls. So I suppose it’s a little egotistic to think that the universe can’t handle this electronic device we’ve invented, as if we’re clever enough to disrupt cosmic communications by snagging them in our World Wide Web.

Here’s how synchronicity might happen online: You Google “couples snuggies,” and one of the links sends you to a scary website that puts a nasty virus on your computer. You take your computer to the computer store, where the person who helps you uses the word “yeshiva,” which happens to be just the word you needed to finish that poem you’ve been stuck on for weeks. (No, this didn’t really happen to me, well not exactly, but don’t Google couples snuggies and don’t ask why I did.)

I will still take the paper thesaurus down from the shelf sometimes just because it’s so much fun to wander around in the relatedness of words, but I’ll also keep in mind that the bigger relatedness out there can use any of the tools at its disposal.

There Is Enough

Rachel Henry3 Comments

Here’s something to add to your list of things not to do: spend a week talking about God and art, fly home, go directly to the outlet mall. Not sanity inducing.

I spent last week at the Glen West Workshop in Santa Fe. I feel as if it reversed the spin of my subatomic particles—in a good way.

While searching for what might have shifted my perceptions, I realized that I spent so little time last week wanting things: wanting people to be different from who they are, wanting my life—or at least my income source and the state of my bathroom floor—to be different from what it is, wanting more dessert (OK, so there were eight flavors of self-serve ice cream, two of them chocolate, which was pretty magical).

We talked so little about discontent. We talked about poetry and writing habits and how to construct a play and where we were from and whether the worship service had gotten us to a prayerful place. And when we discussed difficult things, we focused on our experiences and what we might do next rather than assigning blame.

I do not think this happened because we were a gathering of saints who never speak ill of others in our daily lives. I think it happened because the Glen somehow managed to create an environment that says, there is enough: enough time, enough opportunity, enough talent, enough people who care, enough love. An environment that is the opposite of the one I found at the outlet malls.

Granted, it is easier to believe this when someone else is cooking your food and doing the dishes to boot, but I’m convinced that our everyday existence could be filled with so much more enoughness than it tends to be.

I don’t know how yet, but I intend to find out.

A Good Week

Rachel Henry4 Comments

There are small mysteries in this world, such as why no one seems capable of producing a generic band-aid that sticks to your skin for more than an hour.

Then there are larger mysteries, such as why right when you are feeling hopeless about the writing business, you win a contest, as I did this week. I won the Peter K. Hixson Memorial Award—$1800 of services from Writer’s Relief, a company that handles submissions for authors. They will submit excerpts of my novel to seventy-five magazines for me for free. That’s a rather fabulous number of magazines, and I am ever so slightly excited. (Check it out—my name appears on someone else’s website!)

The day before this happened, I said to God, “OK, I know I’m supposed to be trusting you, and I can see that when it comes to getting things done and to writing, I’m not. Nothing else is working, though, so I will.” I guess God enjoys a good spectacle now and then—parting the Red Sea, smiting folks, the Transfiguration, and winning writing contests.

I don’t think you need to be someone who talks to God for this kind of thing to happen to you.  Grace—“that blind benevolent side of even the fiercest world”—happens to everyone (“Grace Abounding,” William Stafford). Sometimes it comes when we are at our lowest and have done nothing to invite its presence except perhaps needing it.

But I think oftentimes, trust creates a crack in our doubt, our routine, our self-sufficiency—whatever it is that needs cracking—for grace to sneak in through. Sometimes trust might feel more like letting go or giving up, not resignation, but relaxing our death grip on having to do it ourselves or needing events to resolve in a certain way.

So keep the faith, whatever your faith happens to be, and may we all learn “that floating, that immensity waiting to receive whatever arrives with trust” (“Afterwards,” Stafford again).

Note: I will be at a writing workshop next week, and so the blog will be on vacation. Yes, I realize there is a certain irony in not writing because I’ll be writing.

In Praise of Leftovers

Rachel Henry5 Comments

Last week I enjoyed a large bounty of one of those simple wonders of modern living: leftovers. They are often unappreciated and sometimes even maligned, but I think whoever invented leftovers was brilliant.

Maybe leftovers got a bad rap back in the day when humans were killing wooly mammoths and the tribe ate the same meal for months at a time. That whole lack of refrigeration problem meant that each day the remaining mammoth meat tasted a little worse or else you had to go through the effort of drying and salting and, let’s be honest, it was a bit tough after that.

But now, leftovers are brilliant. Here are just a few good things about them.

Thing #1: You don’t have to cook. Or dry and salt. I like to cook, but I also like not cooking every day. It’s a treat to have a little extra time to accomplish something worthwhile, like checking Facebook.

Thing #2: You don’t have to figure out what to cook.

Thing #3: Leftovers are kind of like loaves and fishes. If you put some into a separate Tupperware, you suddenly have a whole other meal called lunch.

Thing #4: They taste good—usually.

Thing #5: They are free. OK, not really, but they are already paid for as opposed to almost any other option available on nights when you don’t want to cook.

Thing #6: You don’t have to cook. Did I mention this already?

Thing #7: You can freeze them and then you don’t have to cook some other day. You can even freeze them in individual containers and eat them now and again rather than five days in a row. Or so I hear. I have never been organized enough to take advantage of this particular benefit.

Reading this list might lead you to believe that the essence of what makes leftovers fabulous is that you can be lazy. That might be true. Let’s make it Thing #8.

A Poem on Her Birthday

Rachel Henry2 Comments

Following the “It’s your birthday, you get to pick” tradition, I’m going to beg your indulgence and post a poem instead of a reflection this week.

I found Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” in high school, and it has been one of my favorites evey since. It’s long, and you might want to listen to Thomas read it. He was a Welshman with a resonant, made-for-radio voice that’s nice to listen to even if you don’t understand the poem.

It’s not the easiest poem I’ve posted, but it so wonderfully conveys the timeless, innocent feeling of childhood. Who hasn’t had their “wishes race through the house high hay” or pretended to be “prince of the apple towns”? Of course, the poem takes away that timelessness even as it’s offered, so perhaps it’s a bit of a melancholic choice for a birthday poem. But what more can you want than images like “fire green as grass”?

Just feel your way through the few confusing phrases–I don’t know what “below a time” means but I like the way it feels removed from the every day–and skip the British words (a “dingle” is a valley) and spend some time playing with the young Thomas in the Welsh hills.

Fern Hill
by Dylan Thomas

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
     The night above the dingle starry,
          Time let me hail and climb
     Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
          Trail with daisies and barley
     Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
     In the sun that is young once only,
          Time let me play and be 
     Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
          And the sabbath rang slowly
     In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
     And playing, lovely and watery
          And fire green as grass.
     And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
     Flying with the ricks, and the horses
          Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
     Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
          The sky gathered again
     And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
     Out of the whinnying green stable
          On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
     In the sun born over and over,
          I ran my heedless ways,
     My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
     Before the children green and golden
          Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
     In the moon that is always rising,
          Nor that riding to sleep
     I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
          Time held me green and dying
     Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

With thanks to poets.org for the correctly formatted poem.

You Cannot Improve It

Rachel Henry1 Comment

I experienced a moment of not worrying about anything last night. My sister and I had just finished video chatting about our backpacking trip. I was reading a friend’s post on Facebook and listening to my sister and my dad, who is visiting, catch up.

Nothing was more in order than it usually is. It was after 9:00; I hadn’t begun this blog post; the dinner plates were still on the table. But for unknown reasons, none of this particularly concerned me

Maybe because it is summer, and in summer, unless you are a farmer, it is a little easier to let things slide, to revel in the earth’s bounty, to believe that everything is going to work out. Or maybe we simply don’t care so much if it doesn’t because after all it is warm and sunny outside and the jacaranda trees are blooming.

Or maybe the Facebook post  gave me piece of mind. It showed a post in the xkcd forums that consisted of an entertaining series of historical quotes, beginning in 1871, about how we’ve always thought that life is speeding up, that people are too distracted to think deeply, that the new form of communication is ruining our use of language.

I wonder if this larger tendency of the human race is reflected inside my head, if the endless hamster wheel of how I and the world could be better “if only” is really no more worrisome than the fear that reading newspapers in the train car kills the art of conversation and makes people antisocial.

Chapter 29 of the Tao Te Ching says, “Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it? I do not believe it can be done. The universe is sacred. You cannot improve it.”

Bird song is floating in through my window. Just for today, I might try believing Lao Tzu.

Note: The blog and I will be on vacation in the high Sierras next week. Here’s wishing you all a few breaths of alpine air.

Love One Another

Rachel Henry3 Comments

This week I was reminded that life pretty much boils down to one thing: love one another. I didn’t make this up. I heard it at church on Sunday.

The priest didn’t make it up, either. Jesus said it a few times. And he didn’t make it up—he learned it from the Jewish tradition. I don’t know all the world’s wisdom traditions backward and forward, but I’d be surprised if any of them didn’t at least mention this idea.

I don’t always remember to love, though, and even when I do, I don’t always practice it. It’s not a complicated teaching like algebra or a foreign language, which can be hard to learn and easy to forget. Yet I don’t spend the majority of my day thinking, “What would be the most loving thing to do in this situation?”

Or maybe “love one another” is hard to learn and easy to forget. Hard to learn because we’re taught that other things—wealth, success, physical beauty—matter more; easy to forget in the constant barrage of daily messages advertising any number of things that are supposed to make us feel loved, none of which include loving one another.

On top of that, there is this whole problem of being human. For reasons I don’t understand, we have a lot of fear and failings built in. No one had to make up greed and envy either, we do those unprompted.

But we also love unprompted and maybe we just need to practice more. It can be daunting if we start with the equivalent of the quadratic equation or irregular verbs, so we could take some guidance from David Roche, who leads the Church of 80% Sincerity. In the Church of 80% Sincerity, as Anne Lamott puts it, “everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but with a shelf life of about eight to ten seconds.”

And miraculously, that is enough. The priest said one other thing: only love will change the world, not policies, not wars, not this cause or that one, only love. Amen.

Things Being Various

Rachel Henry1 Comment

I got in touch with my inner consumer this week by running the box store gauntlet twice in one day. This stretch of road passes between all the box stores you could possibly want on one side and all the box stores you didn’t know you wanted but now that you’ve seen you can’t live without on the other side.

Simply being surrounded by so much available stuff triggered the “I must need something” center in my brain. I felt the steering wheel pull to the right and had to consciously resist entering the parking lot where, of course, all would be lost. It helped that I was already late to my destination.

A few minutes later, I saw a wounded crow on the side of the road. It kept trying to fly and rolling forward instead. I’m not sure it could even walk. In all likelihood, a hawk ate it by the end of the day.

I’m sure I have no idea how a dying crow views life. I’ve been thinking recently that I don’t know how my cat conceptualizes me, whether he’s capable of understanding, for example, which part of me is my mouth and that he has a body part with a similar function. I spend much less time with crows than my cat spends with me, but the crow seemed to me in need of some comfort; he appeared panicked every time his body didn’t work the way it was supposed to.

So I pictured him being held by a loving force and eventually flying away. It was all I could do, and there’s no way to know whether it had any effect. But this is how I believe the world works—that somehow sending out that thought or energy can make a difference.

It’s so odd that in this same life, on this same stretch of road, there are times to resist the mundane temptation of too much of everything and times for the complete mystery of holding dying crows in our hearts. Stranger yet and more difficult is the attempt not to count one more dear than the other but to consider that because they are both here, they both have a place in this world.

Note: I stole the title of this post from the poem “Snow” by Louis MacNeice.

Being Together

Rachel Henry3 Comments

My apologies for missing the blog post unannounced last week, but I have a great excuse: I was visiting some longtime friends, which reminded me how life-giving it is simply to be together.

A couple of these friends I met in college, and I often forget how well they know me. When you live with someone for two or three years, you see every side of them—the kind, the impatient, the elated, the dejected. It’s rather miraculous that we’ve hung onto these friendships for more than half our lives because in that many years, we are all bound to do more than one something that pisses the other person off.

The remarkable thing is that spending time together is more important than the particular activity. Whether eating rhubarb pound cake at the up-and-coming restaurant in town or hamburgers at home on an overcast Memorial Day, playing with the toddler or meeting the cats and touring the new condo, the company made the moment. The rest of it was fun but secondary.

I don’t know why this is true, but I know it is. I’ll probably always remember certain moments listening to live music, watching theater, or eating great food, but I don’t think any of them will enter as deeply or mean as much as sitting with these friends and wondering about nearing midlife or catching each other up on daily happenings or not talking at all.

I think we’ve all done a good job of valuing our friendship throughout the years, but it seems that the older we get, the more deeply we understand just how lucky/fortunate/blessed we are.

Maybe love, like wine or cheese, can improve with age. And like the wine in its oak barrel or the cheese in its cave, it does so by simply being in the presence of those we love and appreciating who they are.

Should No More

Rachel Henry6 Comments

Usually, if trying to weigh myself down, I will eat excess Ben and Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk, but when a friend wrote about unburdening herself this week, I realized I choose other weights as well.

My friend discussed both the physical clutter in her life and the time she spends mentally distracted from what she truly values. I don’t usually think of myself as burdened, much less self-burdened, but I certainly have my share of material and mental junk.

When I imagined myself as mentally unburdened, a number of the things I habitually feel I should do lost their urgency. Another friend told me recently she thinks of the word “should” as mental terrorism. You, too, can now feel guilty of mental terrorism and tell yourself you should stop.

I am really good at the shoulds. At any given moment, I could list off at least fifty things I should be doing.

I tend to think that without the shoulds, I wouldn’t do any of the things that make me a functional member of society. Assuming for a moment that functioning in society is desirable, here’s the thing: that ancient laptop I should have taken to the e-recycle years—yes years—ago is still sitting in my office. The shoulds aren’t causing action, they’re just making things heavier.

When I entertained the possibility that the world was not going to stop spinning on its axis if the pile of papers on my bedroom floor didn’t get sorted this week—it has been there for months—it actually felt more possible that the pile might disappear someday. It also made it easier to prioritize the bedroom pile over the office pile because neither one held dire consequences anymore.

We may never escape our sense of duty, and that may or may not be a good thing. But life is going to give us enough truly difficult things to deal with that we might consider cutting loose the ballast we don’t need.