The swallows have returned.
I saw them today, swarming from a distance as I stood on the bank of the river slough that tumbles through one of my favorite parks. I saw them, electrifying the sky, dancing with paper wings and split tails through layers of blue and white and charcoal. I saw them, and my heart soared.
I don't know the exact date they left. It must have been sometime in the fall, as looking ahead toward winter, their biological clocks chimed their departure. I'm told that from here, they often migrate south to California, Arizona and Mexico to winter, where food sources are more abundant for songbirds. All I really know is that one day I noticed they were gone. The fields lay still in the parks, the meadows absent of song. And I missed them, these birds that enliven the backdrop of my world. And what am I to them, but a giant form moving through their own cyclical backdrop?
Surely they don't know: I am an enraptured observer. A mysterious relative, bound by something more sacred than DNA. A grateful benefactress of their song and dance across the earth.
They came home by the hundreds and thousands. They came home against fantastic odds, obstacles and hardships I am not privy to, inclement weather conditions and sheer exhaustion. They made it, the ones that filled these skies, and I stood on the ground below witnessing their celebration.
Their triumph.
Their dance of wonder.
And it gave me a glimpse of hope.
Joining these words with Kelly and the Small Wonder community.
Also, if you share an appreciation or love for songbirds, I'd like to pass this onto you. There is a brilliant film in its final stages of production, called The Messenger, about the steady decline of songbirds worldwide. Its goal is to raise awareness, to share a glimpse into the beautiful mystery of migration and its challenges, to promote dialogue and actions that may benefit the conservation of songbirds in our world. If you would like to check it out, you can visit this website (click here).
A friend wrote this week about the hardness, the goodness, of remembering where we've been.
I want to remember - and I don’t - the feeling of my own frailty when I held my leg in my hands as if it were the torn wing of a butterfly. As if it were somehow detached from my body. I held it lightly and struggled under the weight of its brokenness.
It was almost three years ago. I had just returned home from the doctor. The visit where my cast was cut apart, after more than a month of seeing my leg post surgery, and I came home with a walking boot I wasn’t allowed to walk in yet. No, walking wouldn’t come for another three months, and that, ever so slowly, like a baby. I came home, gathered courage and strength to shower, and sat cradling my leg as tears spilled down.
I’d never felt or seen myself so fragile.
I didn’t know it then, but this was the beginning of a gradual journey I'm on toward loving myself. All my life, I’d been primed to offer compassion and love to others; I really had no foundation for how to extend the same kindness to myself.
* * * * *
Christian culture, in general, is very good at preaching (though not always acting on) love for others. The Greatest Commandment has been summed up in this, many a time: "Love God first. Love others." All good things, except it completely cuts out the last phrase of the commandment: as you love yourself. We love ourselves too much, this is the message I’ve heard taught and written and spoken in a million different versions. Self love is the root of pride, the root of most sins, after all (or so I've been told), and so we’re never taught it. Or, at best, we hear the last words of the commandment mumbled quickly, as if to say, Don’t linger here. It’s dangerous ground.
But how can we have made it this far cutting off the legs of the vehicle through which we know love and learn how to love others, modifying Jesus’ words into something we think he meant?
How are we to love others if we do not know how, have not even received permission, to love ourselves? How have we so confused selfishness with having a self?
I don't know. But I can say, it is no easy task unlearning a lifetime of teachings.
I know we cannot cut ourselves out of the picture and say, “Well, God is love. We love others with God’s love, not our own.” We don’t need a self, in essence, we say. God is all we need to love.
And I say, we have strangled and buried our selves for far too long in the soil of this dangerous ground.
Love must start here, in our own skin, and permeate from the inside out.
* * * *
On my walk from work to my weekly counseling appointment this week, nerves gnawed at my stomach. I knew a hard session awaited me, for I’d felt it growing the past few days, pushing up below the surface. I dreaded the spilling of pain and longed for the safe outlet for it, all in one. And I wished for a close friend walking beside me, walking me there.
But then I realized, I have everything I need to be that friend to myself.
So I imagined myself, walking alongside me. An arm laced through my arm, tucking in close in solidarity, not saying much. Not saying everything was going to be ok. Not changing the subject. Not berating me for being consumed in the pain of all that’s been pressing in, for feeling weary and overwhelmed and withdrawn . Just walking, gently telling me to breathe deep. Reminding me I can do hard things, that we’ll get through this one step at a time, that I'm brave.
I walked myself to the office and sat down, breathing deep, trying to wrap myself in compassion. And I got through the appointment, breath by breath.
When I stepped on a crowded bus with headphones in my ears after my appointment, holding onto a rail to keep from swaying too far, my eyes were shot through with the same look I often have when I catch the bus home from this appointment. The whites a hazy red. My emotions raw and spent.
I nearly hopped off the bus as it crawled through downtown traffic, wishing for a corner to hide in instead of this group of strangers, as the music swelled their notes of peace in my ears. It was almost my undoing, right there on the bus. Until I had the sense of - Jesus - hanging onto the rail opposite me. He wasn’t there physically, of course, but in my mind he was. I imagined him traveling home with me, not saying a word, his presence saying all I needed to hear.
And it said something like this: We’re ok, you and I. We’re on this journey together, and I’m not going anywhere you aren’t.
I nudged myself to awareness, Did you hear that? Hold onto this, Self. This is good.
And so I stayed on that bus, receiving great compassion from God, from me, until we made it all the way home.
Joining Kate and the Five-minute Friday community with so much more than five minutes worth of reflection on today's word, "Good."
I nearly laughed out loud when I saw it this evening. The beautifully rusted ship anchored alongside the shore, it's side bearing the painted name: Angelic Peace.
Yeah, right?
I'd fled here in a state of desperation bordering on anything but peace. More like the thirst for peace. Or even a sip of it, a whiff of it... or, the sight of it painted on an old metal ship.
Ok, sure. I'll take it in whatever form I can get it.
So I came, bearing all the names that press in with their paint brushes to define me at any given moment these days; many of them, part of the process of healing, transition, becoming; others, names I barely give a nod to, hoping they'll not stick around.
Weary. Impatient. Overwhelmed. Anxious. Alone. Grieved. Numb. Disconnected. Distracted. Not enough.
And I sat down on a fallen tree, in the presence of an offshore Angelic Peace, and soaked from a distance, breath by breath, its invisible strokes across my skin.
Peace.
Peace be with you.
Peace be in you.
Peace anchor you.
Peace.
I watched a flock of coots, their black bodies peppering the water around the ship. And the few stray cormorants, bobbing and swimming and fishing, alighting in a propellant of ash colored wings. It was this sight that finally did it, bringing me to tears at the end of the day.
How they flew with such grace and freedom and skill, the way they always had; the way they assumed they always would. And I thought of the 11,000 like them in Portland that may soon be shot from their nests, shot in flight, because of humans refusing to assume responsibility for human error. And those birds have been marked to pay the fine.
Still, tonight these cormorants swim and fish and fly beneath a beautiful, rusted proclamation of peace while the weary-hearted world goes on and cars inch along traffic-clogged streets and humans plot violence against each other and all manner of created things.
And still, peace hovers close by, anchored in the waters.
Let it be, I whisper. Let it be so.
Linking up with Kelly and the Small Wonder community.
We start by setting our intentions. To be kind toward our bodies. To be gentle. To withhold judgment or expectation in favor of observing where we are in the moment and supporting ourselves where needed, in the weaker places.
I imagine my body, unbalanced in its distribution of strength, the stronger parts coming underneath and alongside to aid the weaker, working together instead of fighting against.
And then come the breaths.
As always, yoga flows from an awareness and direction of breathing. Slow and deep, lower-bellied, rib-expanding inhales, pausing to hold, then drawing-belly-back-inward exhales. After we've directed our breaths, we inhale and push out a resonant aaaahhhhh oooooo uuuummm in unison, three times. It's a gutteral, primitive song, unlike any we humans utter in social interactions, but here it is escaping now, soft and vibrant and liberating.
Our bodies flow with the minutes through this hour, inside this vast sanctuary. Stretching, holding, sitting, bending, rocking, balancing, lowering, lifting, opening, closing. Not only bodies, but spirits, too, flow and hold, rock and rest. I feel the tension in tight places, one side of the body weaker than the other, learning to lean in at gentler angles and roll out of positions slowly. I recognize different parts of my spirit as strong and sturdy, others as tender and tired, not yet capable of bearing my full weight. I'm having a difficult time concentrating. My eyes roam the stone floor with its beautiful cracks and up the walls toward the expansive canopy of wooden beams.
Near the end of our hour, we're holding a balance tree pose and I'm wobbling on one leg. Our instructor gently calls out, "Find a focal point that is not moving or changing," and my eyes latch onto the cross directly on the wall in front of me.
I breathe in. Yes, this.
And just following yoga, my eyes focus in on the table where Eucharist is spread and we all are invited to come.
I breathe out. Yes, this, too.
Let this be my unmoving, unchanging focal point in a swirl of faith upheaval and shifting of balance. None other than this God-feast, this table where all our invited as we are to come and dine on Love. To bring our unbalanced strong-and-weak selves, to taste of kindness and gentleness, to find ourselves in the flow of a more beautiful song.
Joining Kelly and the beautiful community of Small Wonder.
I fled here Saturday morning on foot, as I would to a quiet cathedral midweek or the living room of elders not prone to many words but whose presence speaks volumes. Because for an introvert in the throes of change, people do not often feel the safest place to run. Conversation can easily dishevel the heart.
And because, some days I am drawn into the company of giant old trees and their wind-whispered secrets. So I come.
I found a large tree, downed some time ago, pointing up like the bow
of a ship in the lake, and climbed aboard. In the middle of the trunk, a
resting space beckoned me to sit and lean back against its branch. No
one needs to teach a tree the gift of presence; they instinctively know,
even after they have fallen. Without words, I knew this was God
answering an unspoken plea to be held. And so, the tears came, sweetly.
There is something healing, too, in human skin to tree skin contact. It is not only humans that know how to hold the weary.
I left this tree, reluctant and grateful, heading to the forest. As I wandered deeper in, my skin tingled with the holiness of their presence, with the radiance of life itself, and my heart heaved a holy hush. It is oxygen for my soul, the breath of God pumping healing through my veins, here in the woods.
The birds covered the air with song, far enough removed from the ongoing soundtrack of city. And I thought, awash in wonder, God is in this place. I never want to leave.
Joining Small Wonder, the community at Kelly's, where we weekly reflect on moments of beauty and wonder in the everyday.
She gathers courage in
strands of silken thread.
Thin, translucent fragility
spun filament by filament into walls of strength,
one and then another
and another.
This season of cocoon spinning unfolds
without end,
as she also unfolds,
even as barren trees shift before her eyes
from death to life.
Her colors remain hidden,
her life hidden,
herself, hidden.
She is tucked away, inside this
solitary cocoon of hope,
awaiting her resurgence.
Joining with Kate and the Five-minute Friday community to the prompt of "Gather."
I found her thrust deep into my heart
last August
from somewhere, someone Divine.
Because had I known what loving her would entail,
I’d have balked at the unknown.
I’ve have settled for something
less foreign,
something
less challenging,
something
less costly,
than her.
But she came all the same and I’ve found
glimmers
of a soul as I finger trace
the etches of her shell,
ripples on a pond of bone.
And I awaken to mystery
in the deep beaded pools of her dark eyes.
And I connect with a life,
with imprints of God,
outside my human skin
as I stroke each tiny scale of her leathered
cobblestone legs.
And Love, yes,
I’ve found this, too.
How it gathers in my throat and bunches
in the pockets of my eyes,
as it did the other night when I stood over her new home.
The one my husband and I constructed for her,
our hearts on a singular mission:
make her happy.
With the silent streak of a thousand falling stars
I knew we did this not for a pet,
nor for a project,
nor to indulge the sentiment of “spoiling” a creature in lieu of a child.
We did this for love.
For we do not own her any more than we own the
desert from which she was stolen,
captive.
And out of some deep human shame
covered by some redemptive love deeper than shame,
we did this because it’s right and good.
And that is a wonder, small and full and deep,
older than the earth herself.
Joining Kelly and the community at Small Wonder
