Terrapin Station

A little nutty

I am usually operating on a pretty even keel. As a 9 on the Enneagram, that's actually really central to my sense of well-being: being unaffected by life. That's how I am comfortable. SO: I am working on taking risks (not life-threatening ones!), allowing myself to get really excited, really hopeful, and (gasp!) really angry. It's not always easy.

Anger, in particular, is very frightening for me. I didn't learn to feel or use it in healthy ways, growing up. Angry meant "not nice" and I was a nice girl. In my 20's, a therapist suggested Harriet Lerner's brilliant book, The Dance of Anger. "But I'm not angry," I said. He said, "yeah, and that's why you need to read this."

Not shockingly, I read that whole book (I am eminently compliant as a patient) and recognized NOTHING in it of myself.

I guess I had to get some years on me.

So, now, at 49, with the years and a bit of Enneagram work, I am reading the book again. And it's all about me.

The nutty: yesterday was stressful. I felt overloaded and a little panicked, and unsure of myself. I felt worried. The news is disaster. The murder in Houston of Rev. Israel Ahimbisibwe, his wife and young son. So many things.

I got home at about 8:30, and my husband was watching the news about the death of Muath Al-Kasaesbeh, the Jordanian Air Force pilot who was burned alive by ISIS.
The station that was on had an anchor who'd watched the whole video narrating it; he was clearly deeply, deeply shocked. Then the station showed one still from the murder. I didn't see it, because by the time that came on, I had my fingers in my ears and my eyes closed. I got up and left the room.

I don't feel that I should have looked at that, or that I shirked anything by doing so. I think we need to refuse to look at it, in fact. Know about it, yes. Look at it, no. That's what THEY want us to do.

But the depravity and misery and inhumanity of the world sometimes rushes in so fast and so fully that I am swept away, with anger and fear and rage and grief, and I try to escape.

I tried to dissolve myself by reading Facebook. By reading a silly crime novel. By riding my exercise bike. Finally, by eating a pickle sandwich with mustard (long time childhood favorite go-to food). I am trying not to let food be my comfort, but sometimes there it is.

I read something recently that said, when we are despairing of the bad in the world, we are forgetting about God. So I sat still and tried to find God. I thought of God coming to Anne Lamott's houseboat and quietly sitting in the corner of the room, after her abortion. Surely, if God was there for Anne, God was there for me.

I went to bed. Today I got up. There are trees on the way to work, and I see them because I am walking to work these days. I walk by and touch the trees as I go. It helps to ground me.

Today is a new day.

 

My new favorite season

All my life I've declared that Spring is my favorite season. For all the reasons you would expect: new life, greens you can't see except in new leaves, bulbs coming up. I'm not so big on the usual, warm weather reason...because the weather generally gets really warm here, and our Spring is usually not very long. Not long enough.

Today I decided that Fall is my new favorite season. I'm gaining an appreciation every day of the beauty of experience...on a face, in a hairline, in a soul.

So the sweetgum trees I pass every day are dropping their seed pods (very fun to play with - earrings, anyone?)

and just a few of the leaves are starting to turn...eventually will look like this:

Cherished, because we don't get much in the way of Fall color besides these.

It will be in the 70's for the next week, glorious Fall weather. Cool at night. Sunny in the daytime. Eventually, colder weather will come, but it doesn't often stay very cold for very long.

The oaks are dropping leaves faster than we can rake or mow. The squirrels are storing up. Pecans aren't ready yet, but the trees are hanging heavy. There's a fruitfulness to fall that we sometimes forget, in our rush to adore the new growth of Spring.

Sure, Fall is about aging and dying. And there's no new life without aging and dying.

Don't you forget it.

I never thought it could happen to me

One day I took time off from my job.

I earn vacation time at a high rate due to seniority, so I have plenty. I don't have to be afraid I'll lose my job for this.

to drive two counties northeast to pick up a new truck for Ken's business.

We own a successful family business, which has occasioned a tremendous amount of work and a good deal of satisfaction over the years.

(We both have graduate degrees, by the way.)

One of us was handed her education on a silver platter of expectation and tradition. The other worked very hard and completed on his own.

We left Denton in my air-conditioned vehicle and drove East on Hwy. 380

The car was full of fuel. We have good tires, plenty of oil, and good roads on which to drive. Traffic was heavy but orderly.

On the way we stopped for more fuel and restrooms,

and both were readily available, in multiple locations.

The countryside was beautiful. We passed bois d'arcs and pecans and big oaks.

There were abandoned farm houses and rundown stores, but there were no remnants of bombings or attacks.

We arrived in Cooper and bought a used one-ton truck from a horse farmer.

Ken found it on the internet. The title and transfer forms were signed and handled easily and cordially.

I met a puppy named Reddy who bit my toes.

He was the scariest being I encountered that day.

On the way home, we missed our turn a few times, but eventually we returned to our cool, safe, lovely home.

No one stopped us to challenge our right to travel, our citizenship, or anything else.

Not a day in my life have I ever been afraid,

not the way that people in Ferguson or Trenton or Fallujah or Gaza are afraid.

Once I heard a former official with the UNHCR talk about her work with refugees.

Every person she talked to said the same thing: "I never thought it could happen to me."

I never think it can happen to me.

Because: white privilege.

So, I think I need to expand my definition of "me." If it happens in Ferguson, Trenton, Fallujah or Gaza,

It happens to me.

What am I going to do about that?

Yeah, what?

 

Friday Five: The Week in Review

Sally set this Friday Five at RevGals, but I wasn't able to do it then. Taking a quick minute to look within and see:

This week, what has

Encouraged you? The messages of support, particularly when we were stuck in the Tallahassee airport for 6+ hours on Thursday. Those are times when you need to feel less alone and the Facebookies came through for me!!!

Inspired you? The staff of the Tallahassee airport who went above and beyond to make us feel as comfortable as possible during the long wait. They brought out airport cookies, bottled water and ice...but also several boxes of Girl Scout cookies that I am certain were personally owned by one of them. They carried cookies around to the passengers in serving trays made of coffee filters. :) The airport kept the snack bar open for an extra 2 hours so we could get dinner, and the staff there could not have been more cheerful and helpful, given the unanticipated Friday night overtime.

Challenged you? Helping my mom get (as smoothly as possible) to the funeral of her sister, where there was significant potential for very nasty conflict, and staying centered and NOT in a place of fear. It all turned out well. God is gracious and oh, people are generally so gracious too.

Made you smile? Spending time with a cousin that I have never known well and finding a real kindred spirit. She is the daughter of my mother's favorite cousin. Wonderful symmetry.

Brought a lump in your throat or a tear to your eye in a good way? Seeing my only maternal first cousins (Aunt Nancy's children) again...it has been many years, at least 20. Hearing Mother Terri say those words at the graveside: "We are all dust, and to dust we shall return; but even as we go down to the grave we make our song: Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia."

A Kind-Hearted Person Lives Here

There's a symbol in hobo language that means:  "A kind-hearted woman lives here." 

According to Kind Hearted Woman Gifts, "A century ago hobos traveled the land using a system of pictures to communicate with each other. These pictures would be carved on trees, fence posts or buildings or chalked on pavement near homes. The symbol of a smiling cat meant a 'kind hearted woman lives here.' Someone who would likely extend kindness and hospitality."

My mother has said that my grandmother probably had one of those signs up near her house, because often and often a tramp would come to the back door (always the back) and ask to work for food.  She always gave them work (giving out work was a specialty of hers), and then she always gave them a plate piled high with food, that they sat on the back steps to eat. 

My husband's office is in our home, so if people come to the door during the day, he's the one to answer it.  He has, over the years, hired many people for similar sorts of labor, folks who were down on their luck. 

Today I was reading and heard a knock at the door.  It was a man who said he was homeless and wanted to work - but for food, not for money.  I told him I'd ask Ken if he needed any help. 

Ken declined, so I went back out and told the man I'd be glad to make him some sandwiches but we didn't need any work done.  He declined, even when I tried to insist. 

I'm sorry about that.  But I'm glad that if there's a word on the street, it says that a kind-hearted person lives here. 

 

Friday Five: Vital Connections

Sally says at RevGals:  OK I'll admit it, right now I am exhausted, there is so much going on and so much to do that I fell like I am running around in small circles, add to that the fact that there is so much that I'd like to do ....

What I need to do is give myself permission (make myself) to stop and to refocus, to breath the air and smell the roses to get perspective and to rest in God's presence, and sometimes that can be hard to achieve but I know that the harder it gets, the more essential it becomes. Somewhere deep inside I hear the Spirit whispering to my soul:

Live in me, make your home in me just as I do in you. In the same way that a branch can't bear grapes by itself, but only by being joined to the vine, you can't bear fruit unless you are joined to me... (John 15: 4)

So I want to ask you:

1. How do you intentionally make a vital daily connection with God? What roots you and gives you life?  I go out in the morning to pick up the newspaper, and I face the sunrise, and I say good morning to God and give thanks for yesterday, today, and tomorrow...pray for the things that are on my heart at that time.  Ask that I might be God's person in the world today. 

2.  Do you have a favourite space/ place that you go to?  outdoors and birds are the constants.  I love to go outside, usually in my yard, or often I stop at a pond in a local park on my way home from Jazzercise and listen to birds.  The Cornell Red Tail Hawk cam has been fascinating me lately.    One of my favorite birds and it's such a gift to get to see them up close this way.  I've found a whole world of bird webcams through this site, but this is still my favorite.  It's a good meditation place for me.  

Watch live streaming video from cornellhawks at livestream.com

 

3. Is there a particular passage, phrase or prayer that brings you immediately into God's presence?  When I was a little girl, this was often used as the opening sentence as  Morning Prayer  began: "The Lord is in his holy Temple; Let all the earth keep silence before him."  (from Habbakuk).  And to me, that means, settle in; it's time to pray; God is in God's house and so am I."  Conveniently, I now experience God as anywhere that I am.  

(The Lord was definitely a Him when I was a girl.)

4. Music- essential ingredient or distraction- discuss

When I'm trying to pray and listen, music doesn't work.  Often when I'm working, it doesn't either.  But sometimes when I am working, it is a blessing.  It might be sacred music; yesterday I listened to about an hour of Bach cantatas on Spotify.  I'm also very fond of Pandora's Yaz channel. 

5. Silence and solitude or engagement with like minded others?  I really prefer to be on my own when it comes to refreshing. 

Bonus, a poem, piece of inspirational prose or music that speaks to you of that vital connection...

To Live in the Mercy of God

By Denise Levertov

To lie back under the tallest

oldest trees. How far the stems

rise, rise

               before ribs of shelter

                                           open!

To live in the mercy of God. The complete

sentence too adequate, has no give.

Awe, not comfort. Stone, elbows of

stony wood beneath lenient

moss bed.

And awe suddenly

passing beyond itself. Becomes

a form of comfort.

                      Becomes the steady

air you glide on, arms

stretched like the wings of flying foxes.

To hear the multiple silence

of trees, the rainy

forest depths of their listening.

To float, upheld,

                as salt water

                would hold you,

                                        once you dared

To live in the mercy of God.

To feel vibrate the enraptured

waterfall flinging itself

unabating down and down

                              to clenched fists of rock.

Swiftness of plunge,

hour after year after century,

                                                   O or Ah

uninterrupted, voice

many-stranded.

                              To breathe

spray. The smoke of it.

                              Arcs

of steelwhite foam, glissades

of fugitive jade barely perceptible. Such passion—

rage or joy?

                              Thus, not mild, not temperate,

God’s love for the world. Vast

flood of mercy

                      flung on resistance.

Denise Levertov, “To Live in the Mercy of God” from Sands from the Well. Copyright © 1996 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Reproduced from poetryfoundation.org

If I ran the zoo...

No, no, no...it's "if I were preaching"

Or maybe it's "what I need someone to preach to ME this Christmas"

Anyway.  That's what the RevGals are thinking about on this Friday, December 23: what message will they bring to their congregations this Christmastide? 

Here is what I have heard in the last week that grew into the idea really makes it Christmas for me this year. Darned if I can remember where I watched or heard or read it: 

God became a human person. Most religions' deities stay comfortably where they are, but not this God, our God, the God named I AM. 

God loved us so much that God became a human and lived and died like a human.  And you know, human life can really be awful. Especially when Jesus was born, in ways that I doubt we in the 21st century western world can really imagine.  Infant mortality, murders by dictators, rape, incest, child abuse (wait, this is from yesterday's newspaper...)

What really transfixes me on this incarnation idea is not the lovely (? ask Mary about the adjective) birth part...babies don't really remember much of that as they grow...but the not-so-lovely life and death part. 

Whether you believe that Jesus' death on the cross was God's plan, or that it was not necessarily God's plan but was still what happened (all in the name of redemption, of course) -

it was horrible. It was the worst and most painful and humiliating way to inflict suffering and death in the first century. 

In this year when my loved one has been betrayed by his body and by modern medicine so miserably (all in the name of healing, of course) - 

I see that incarnation just a little bit differently. 

I have said for years that when I see God, the first thing I am going to do is kick God in the leg, because the ways most bodies break down as we age and die seems like such a betrayal. 

Sure, I know of people who have lived happily and vigorously to age 78, and then died suddenly in their sleep. "What a great way to go." But we all know that is not the prevailing way, not in this Great Age of Medical Innovation that keeps us alive longer and longer to receive more and more exquisite tortures intended to help us.

(You see why no one is actually going to let me preach this...right?  That's why I blog). 

Here's the money line:   Jesus didn't know what was going to happen to him...but he signed up for it anyway. He accepted the job and essentially said, "okay, whatever this ends up meaning for me, I'm going to work to overturn the rotten rule by people and introduce the kingdom of God on this planet." 

In the years following Jesus' death, we have tried to carry on what he taught and planned. We seem to have gotten off track a good bit, as we fuss and stew about church schisms, resolutions and covenants. We forget about the infant mortality, murders by dictators, rape, incest, child abuse...that would likely have been of more interest to Jesus than policies and procedures and what color the paraments are this week. 

The challenge of Christmas is to think how we will live. How we will use our wild and precious lives to bring the kingdom.  And to know that whatever pain, loneliness, illness or torture we may confront and experience, Jesus knows what that's like; he's been there. 

What do I have to do, then?  For years I've been unable to watch TV commercials that show abused animals - I have to leave the room.  Same for children in poverty.  I sponsor some women and children through various agencies, but it's all very safe and comfortable, and I wonder....

And recently I read something by Pema Chodron that advised to embrace the thing you fear.  Smile at your fear.  Lean into the sharp places.  There's a lot I am afraid of.  But I'm going to take a step and see what volunteering at the animal shelter might be like.  There's a training session in January. 

I've always said that when I see Jesus, the first thing we are going to do is hug, and he's going to say, "Mary Beth!  I've been looking all over for you!" and then we will sit down and play jacks together. I do realize that the Trinity means that Jesus and God are the same person. I need to work on connecting that in my head and in my heart. No kicking.  Just loving. 

Picture found at Theology Lived website, produced by the Office for Faith and Learning at Biola University.

Just Do It

You know how you always read advice that when someone is ill or having a hard time, don't say, "let me know if there is anything I can do..."  because they will never ask. 

Just Do It. 

I'm learning that, these days. 

Things are challenging at my house, with Ken ill.  On top of that, he owns his own contracting business, and unlike my position with the state (where, when I'm sick I say, "Bye, see you later" and take sick leave) he has to keep things going.  One of his workers quit with no notice last week.  The other has been remarkably unreliable this week.  There is a huge amount of work to be done. 

So Ken's friend Johnny drove over from Mississippi to help out for a week.   He just did it.   If you need your parking lot striped in the West Point, Mississippi area I recommend this striper. 

A friend send me a note the other day.  She just did.  A real live card that she put a stamp on  and everything!  I pulled it out of the mailbox just at a time when I needed a little virtual hug.  It made me cry. Another one sent a pretty little card. 

Yet another friend calls periodically and leaves messages telling me she loves me.  Aaaahhh, it's like having her there. And emails from church friends mean the world. 

And my sister, sister-in-law, and nephew (none of whom have a web presence to which I can point you) came over to my house today, while I was at work, and cleaned it.  Really.  They cleaned my dirty, dirty house.  I am so grateful.  They also brought meals and left them in the fridge, and made a grocery run for me. 

They JUST DID IT.  Because they knew I needed help, to feel not alone.  I'm not sure they can know how much better Ken and I will both feel, coming home to a clean house that we didn't have to clean.  Maybe someday I can help them know. 

I have a better idea now why "just doing it" is the way to go.  And I promise to do more of it myself. 

PASSWORD

This video made my hair stand on end.  I think I have heard it before, but today it was the lesson I needed. Take the 20 minutes.  It's a gift I think you will appreciate, passed on via my friend Terri and the Words Matter Project. 

WOW. 

And that brings me to the password story. 

You know those affirmations you are supposed to say to yourself in the mirror every day?  Have you ever actually done that on a regular basis?  Not me.  I've tried it.  It feels ridiculous. 

But something from a blog I read regularly^* spurred me to use a version of one of those phrases when my computer password needed to be changed several months ago.   And it's had a profound effect on me.  Daily, sometimes more often, I have to remember and type in that combination of letters and numbers and symbols that essentially says something to which I automatically respond, "Oh, come on!"

(For example, it might be:  "I@m@wesome222".)

It's something I'd tell you I believe...and yet, I'd be embarrassed to reveal it to anyone as my password (not that I would ever tell anyone my password anyway...)   Because it sounds conceited? Because I don't really believe it about me?  

But here's the deal:  Each day that I use it, I become willing to consider believing it just a little bit more.  I become more willing to "believe that I'm worthy of love and belonging" as Brené Brown says in the video. 

And that's no small thing. 

***

^* Single Dad Laughing, where every Sunday there's a feature called "This is Beautiful You." 

Jazzercise Made me think of this...

My last post about Jazzercise reminded me of something important.

In addition to the physical and emotional benefits of doing Jazzercise, I realize that it's a community of mine, and an important one, even though I don't have any close friends who attend there. Going there makes me feel happy: I am with positive people who are doing something good for themselves, taking time away from their busy schedules to do so. They are an example to me!

I have been thinking a lot about community in recent weeks, especially after the RevGals BE and conversations about what is community, what is church.  What is ours to do about our friends who don't attend a church and see no need to? 

My friend, Rev. Teri Peterson (she blogs at Clever Title Here) preached an amazing sermon in January. You can read it here.   AND, you can see her preach it here.  Worth your listening time.  The rest of this post won't make sense unless you watch or read...

    It's great. 

After that Sunday, Teri expressed surprise and some concern afterward because many people told her it was "her best sermon ever." She didn't know what made it so good; in fact, she didn't think it    was even in her top three. But I thought it was amazing.

Why did it whack ME between the eyes? Partly because she told her own personal story, which I happen to like as a homiletical tool. And partly because her story is really pretty fascinating and amazing, and she PREACHES THE WORD with it. 

And partly it hit me: because of my BFF. She has attended some special music or holiday events at church with me, but she is an agnostic (raised Catholic).  She is not interested in any church, anywhere.  Not in a box, not with a fox. 

She also will not drink the Jazzercise kool-aid with me. I've invited her to try it many times, but she is sure she would hate it; she doesn't like that kind of exercise, she likes to go to the gym. Okay, I can respect that. I just mention it sometimes, when there is a special or free classes. Because, there are some other things I suggested to her, that she didn't think she would like, and they have turned out to work really WELL. (And some have NOT and that's a whole other story from Big Idea Woman...).  And, selfishly, I'd love her to like it too, and go with me sometimes.  (I cannot lie.)

Back to inviting people to church:  I respect the fact that BFF is an agnostic. And so I don't invite her to come to regular services with me, because I don't want to offend her.  Because that's not how I was raised, and I don't want be an "annoying Christian." 

So if I am more willing to "evangelize" for Jazzercise than for church...what's that say?

Just pondering.