At the Root

There is a pain in my chest

Across my heart

And lungs

As big as

A mountain

Hard to climb

Hard to breath

At the top

A black tree

Shuddering and creaking

What is at the root of this?

I wonder

I hold you like my child

You do not speak

You only cry and scream

Shhh, I tell her, there, there

It will be alright,

I hope

Baba Yaga

In honor of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes who I had the pleasure of seeing yesterday...

(as soon as my piano is tuned i will post the song)

i need a hairy woman

with a few extra pounds

a very old woman

who hobbles around

in a house

with chicken feet

in a yard covered in bone

i need a witchy bitchy woman

cause she knows

what's going down

Baba Yaga can you light my fire?

Baba Yaga can you light my fire?

cuz my light has gone out

and i've lost my mother

my light has gone out

and the world is cruel

my light has gone out

and i need another

even the evergreen branches scratch my skin

am i leaving or returning again

all i need is a thought a word a seed

cuz i can't see the moon

Baba Yaga can you light my fire?

Baba Yaga can you light my fire?

Hello Again

Yes, it's been WAY too long since my last post...but I'm still writing! Here's a little bit from the memoir....

I am flying over Lake Michigan in a small shaky airplane. Ever since 9/11, I have nightmares about planes crashing, exploding, nose-diving, dying.

“That’d be the best way to go,” my husband would try and assure me—which was never helpful when we were up in the air experiencing turbulence so strong you’re bouncing out of your seat. “It would be over before you know it, and it wouldn’t hurt a bit—at least not for very long.” Luckily I’m flying alone today, so I can try to find my own inner peace without his sunny commentary on my impending death. Going down in a plane would be bad enough without him smiling at me the whole time.

I don’t care what people say, humans don’t belong up here in a rickety metal machine that was two hours late to take off because of mechanical difficulties. We were created to have our feet on the earth, that soft muddy ground way down there, where the snow has melted in the dirt making it black and fertile. It’s so far away right now. And I am here, in a dream, up in the clouds, hardly real, hardly human to those down there looking out their windows at a shiny silver speck in the sky.

I take deep breaths and try to put it out of my mind. I watch Ela’s tummy rise and fall, her eye lids flutter. I wonder what she dreams. She passed out on the take off. She’s so peaceful, so unaware of all the worries that dance through my head. I hope I can hide them from her for a long time. I hope that I can create a safe space between my arms, room enough for her to bloom.

It helps that spring is near and the sun is warm against my arm. I lean my face towards the window. It has been a long winter. I peer at our little lives below, our little houses on little plots of land. I find the rigid patchwork of perfect squares menacing, false evidence that we have conquered the earth and ordered her mystery. I find relief in the wild rivers and lakes and their curves—their unpredictable moves, round spontaneous and womanly. The sun sparkles and dances in the water’s reflection; it’ so bright I have to shield my eyes all the way up here. The trees are wild too—those that have been left uncut and alone. They are clustered near the water, defiantly natural and free. I am disturbed by a few neon green squares of water I see sitting dead in trenches cut deep into the ground, holding toxins, holding the waste of all of us, seemingly contained. The illusion is control. But the truth is wild.

I’m not only scared about being in the plane. I’m also scared about going to back to Rome, New York. Specifically, I’m nervous about visiting the charismatic church we attended, where my first memories of God and church began. I thought there was no way the group would survive the 80s. But when I looked them up on the internet I discovered they were still around. Not only that, but the same pastor is still there. I dashed him off an e-mail and he responded quickly saying that he remembered me and my parents. I told him the dates I wanted to visit and he said I picked the perfect weekend because a prophet was going to be at their church and they believed it was no coincidence that I was coming too.

Rome Christian Center traces its roots back to Charles Finney. Finny was an American evangelist in the early 1800’s who held powerful revivals all over cities in New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Finney had a radical conversion—in the woods apparently. He would retreat in the trees to read his Bible in private. There he could shout out the questions of his heart, weep and pray. He was a lawyer by profession and was embarrassed by the sudden compulsion to seek God and see if Christianity had any merit. He was also plagued with heavy feelings of guilt that were uneasily swayed—even by a lawyer. One day under the green canopy he finally let it all out. Confessed everything. He claims a profound feeling of love washed over him. It was so powerful he couldn’t keep the experience to himself. He had to tell everyone. And when he spoke, something strange happened. The same feelings that washed over him, washed over others too.

Revival broke out almost at the sound of his voice. I read some of his sermons, they were long and very lawyery and difficult for me to fully understand, at least without my head hurting. They were given in a cultural context which was apparently ripe for his words. Looking back on them from my computer screen I am amazed how hard it is to touch even recent history. Finney was preaching in a town close to Rome called Western. People from Rome began swarming the meetings so much so that Finney believed the Spirit was preparing Rome for a revival too. When he finally arrived in Rome, he preached three times on a Sunday on Roman’s 8:7, “The mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God.” Heads lowered, people wept with deep conviction. For many days after local leaders gathered in people’s homes with Mr. Finney to inquire about what was happening. At each meeting, the crowd grew larger. People were overcome with emotion. Finney urged them to keep composed to go quietly to their homes to pray. But loud wailings erupted; people were slain in the spirit and fell down on the floor where they had been standing. Eventually Finney needed to find a larger space to conduct meetings. In the twenty days he spent preaching in Rome there were over 500 conversions in the town. During the conversions, three local skeptics were drinking at the bar and ridiculing all the happenings around them. When they got up to walk home one suddenly fell down dead. From that point on, any doubt that was left in the minds of the locals quickly and fearfully dissipated. Soon the whole city had changed. You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing people praying, reading their Bibles, weeping or laid out cold in the Spirit.

Ministers and folks from all over began visiting Rome to see for themselves what they were hearing. Upon entering the town, many confessed feeling the presence of God. When Sheriff Bryant of Utica came to Rome on business, he was cynical about the revival happening in the sister city. In fact, he and his friends had a great many laughs about it. Riding into Rome on his one-horse slay he crossed the old canal about a mile from town. As soon as he crossed the canal, a strange feeling came over him, awe, wonder, sorrow, something totally unexplainable. The closer he got to town the stronger the feelings became until he had to admit that the presence of God saturated the air around the city.

In the late 70s something of a revival had broken out in Rome again. Keith Green—a passionate folk musician with a wild John the Baptist flavor, challenged his peers to kick drugs, new age spirituality and the free love values of the time and live authentic lives committed to Jesus instead. Keith was deeply moved by the religious history of Rome, New York and with his rising fame he brought new attention to this spiritual place in some writing he did on Charles Finney with his wife. My parents along with other post-long haired hippies joined the movement. Some flocked to the area of their own choice. My father was stationed at Griffiss Air Force Base on his first assignment. After finishing up his Master’s degree at Texas A & M, he was now employed by the US government as a weatherman.

Pastor Ned says on his website, “We believe that Rome—and Rome Christian Center—will be the site of end time revival in this area, continuing the work that Finney began here in the 1820s.”

~~~

The land beneath me is changing. No longer perfect squares, but roads that meander and twist. Trees are everywhere and I can see through the forests which are naked without leaves. I can see the paths worn down between the trees. I can see everything from the sky. I pretend I am looking for a fugitive, some missing person below, some stranger who is on the run, seemingly safe in the woods.

Christmas

Light a lamp for me

Here in the dark

I can’t see the moon,

or my mother

Even the evergreen branches scratch my skin

The dirt and needles stick to my feet

Am I leaving or returning

or turning round in circles?

A candle in the night

One light to lead me home

All I need is,

A thought

A word

A seed

Some new beginning

Enough to save the world

Madison, WI

I have recently begun a sort of pilgrimage, traveling back to all the places I have lived, revisiting the many different kinds of churches I attended, trying to make sense of my life, my faith. Here is an excerpt of some of my writing on my visit to Madison, Wisconsin this past February.

The sanctuary is dark when we walk in. The only light illuminating the space is filtered in through the stain glass windows which are everywhere. The hair on my arms stands up. The air is thicker in here, but not stale, no it is moving, alive, mysterious. Some churches feel dead on the inside. You can taste the bitter words that have been spoken, smell the despair that weighs people down. This space feels different. It feels like the prayers of the congregation are still lingering around the pews, like whatever source of strength they fed on came in large quantities and there are leftovers here still.

“We used to sit right there,” my mother points to an overflow area in the back left corner. I spot a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe upon the wall nearby; underneath her is a small table that holds candles and matches for prayers. I love that she is there, the divine mother, pregnant with hope looking over those in despair, the young woman who appeared on the hills of Tepeyac and commanded her presence known to the bishop—to the world. Many thought she was an apocalyptic image from Revelation, her belt a symbol of pregnancy, her sash holding the cosmos. The end and the beginning together in her.

Mom snaps a photo of me by the baptismal font which is up front by the altar. But something is not right. In the pictures of my baptism, we stand against white walls, not in the illuminated shadows of the sanctuary.

“Mom, is there another chapel in the church?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t remember much about this place.”

We walk around the hallways until we find a sign that says, The Good Shepherd Chapel. We stand outside the closed wooden door and look up at the skylight at least two stories above us. The sun illuminates one giant painting on the wall in front of us. Thick strokes of browns and pinks muddy the canvass like watered earth. Tucked in the shadows and mire, a small white sphere emerges, fragile yet forceful. Is it the pearl of great price? Is it new life itself? It reminds me of a photograph I saw recently taken inside of the womb just after the egg has been fertilized. I was haunted at the sight: before limbs or head or a body can be seen, we are all cliffs and valleys, we are desert. We are all Adams—which in Hebrew simply means ‘earth creature’.

My mother is fascinated with a different picture, a smaller one in the corner—one of the empty tomb. It is colored in the blackest black, shiny and thick like oil. A single ray of light points to a white linen once wrapped around a body no longer there.

I wonder who thought to put these two pictures side by side. Did they hope we would see the tomb and the womb together?

Inside the Good Shepherd chapel my mother’s memories are not stirred. But I think it was here, against this plain wall, in the small cozy place of this modern chapel that I was baptized. I take a picture of the font—a colorful ceramic bowl atop a square blond wooded stem.

“This is style is totally 70s,” my mother remarks, confirming my intuition. I remember the photograph well, my grandfather is holding me. I am in a long white dress, only a few weeks old. He is wearing a mustard shirt with his clerical collar and a beige blazer with elbow pads. My aunts and uncles are standing around me, young kids in paisley prints and dark horned rimmed glasses...

... On the drive back to the cabin, my mother talks about her father’s death. It’s about four in the afternoon now—that time right before the twilight, where the day begins to mix with night, when two worlds overlap and for a few moments become one. There is regret in her words. And longing...All around us the hilly farmland glows orange. The last rays of sun spread over the thin layer of snow like twinkling warm molasses, melting the spaces between us, warming our skin, like our ancestors and their unseen world are close.

Bodily Functions

This entry is dedicated to my sister, Emily, who is the only one I know who fully appreciates the unique and colorful ways that the body functions.

Just when I started to think I had won a free pass out of the dark side of the winter/cold season, life smirked and said, "just kidding." It all started on Friday. I was standing in line at the Lorraine H. Morton Civic center in Evanston, Illinois waiting to hand the cashier a check for $12.00 so I could purchase my daughter’s birth certificate. At first I thought it was just the way a government office building can make you feel. I had to stand in line at the Office of Vital Records and fill out paper work requesting the certificate. Then I had to go to the Cashier’s Office to pay for the certificate. Then I had to return to the Office of Vital Records (by way of a warm 4x4 elevator—which, I decided on the spot, if I was ever going to be stuck in an elevator, this one would be the WORST ONE EVER TO BE STUCK IN). Claustrophobia was a mean girl and she had her hands around my neck. Ela gained at least another roll of fat since I walked into the building and the travel Graco car seat was hanging on the radius bone of my arm (which promised to crack if one more person cut in front of me in line) and of course, as all babies do when standing in long lines at government offices, my baby, who rarely cries, was screaming.

As soon as I had obtained legal documentation proving that I had pushed a baby out of my own vagina, I ran outside to breathe in some cold fresh air. Instead of sweet relief, I suddenly realized that Old Man Winter had come and turned the tables on me. I thought I was so above it this year, so acclimated, that time was just going to flying into spring. But no, the concrete underneath my feet was bristling and ugly, aching and screaming out for warmth or fresh snow, or something, “Don’t just leave me here to die in this God forsaken tundra!!!!! Nooooooooooo!”

I slam my car door. It’s too much. It’s almost 2 p.m. and I realize I haven’t eaten lunch yet. So I type P A N E R A into my Garmin and hope that some food will make things all better. I order my favorite food: the turkey avocado sandwich, a bowl of claim chowder, and a tall green iced tea. The restaurant had shrunk since the last time I was there. I must have knocked out half a dozen customers with either Ela’s car seat or the diaper bag depending on what shoulder they hit first. I found the tiniest table in a corner which I quickly filled up and over shared my space with a cute college girl in green boots and tights who blew bubbles with her gum as she flipped through magazine pages.

There was no other place to do it, so I whipped out breast A (under my paisley nursing cover), the one that was two cup sizes larger than breast B at the moment, and was ready to explode a gallon’s worth of mother’s milk like a concealed bomb going off in the middle of Panera. Thankfully, Ela decided to eat instead.

I try a bit of my sandwich, but the turkey juice that’s dripping on Ela’s head reminds me of the water that you soak your dirty dishes in for two days before you can get to them. And the soup tastes like they added a special ingredient: glass shards. I down the green tea and leave the food. But then my stomach becomes an angry ocean and I’ve got another bomb inside me—only this one has to explode in a public restroom of all places. Thankfully no one came in and they just happened to have the baby changer in the big bathroom stall so I could secure Ela while I did the deed of horror. (Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!!!) I NEVER poop in public. EVER. But there was no stopping the torrent. I was either going to do it here or in my jeans. I had to choose. I had hoped that this would be the end of it. And come to think of it, didn’t I did eat a whole lot of Mexican food last night? After breaking my most sacred rule of public etiquette, I ran out of there as fast as I could. But that’s when I knew that this was definitely not over.

My first impulse was to throw up on the welcome mat heralding the front door of Panera. But I liked Panera too much to do that to them and I didn’t want to ruin their business for the rest of the afternoon. Woozy and drunk-like I scanned the corner of Sherman and Church Street. Should I just throw up in that trash can? Or the sewer? Or maybe that back ally? I decided to run to my car, put Ela in the backseat and shield the crowd on the sidewalk from my moment of glory with my open car door. I threw up every last ounce of green tea along with a few chunks of turkey, a spoonful of chowder glass shards, and a bite of bread. It all splashed onto my parking space that I had paid a good seventy five cents for and the meter still had thirty minutes on it. I wish I could have told the grey Honda van that stopped traffic and waited patiently for my space with its yellow blinker flashing to just go ahead and move on. But there’s only so much non-verbal communication one can do when you have a slimly string of turkey chunks dripping from your chin.

I called David to let him know that I was sick. He has the great idea that I should drive out to his work and pick him up so he can take care of me and Ela for the rest of the day. That drive proved to be the biggest feat of my life. Worse than labor breathing, try not-trying-to-throw-up-breathing while you’re driving on the interstate at 55 mph. I pulled out every good mind control trick I knew. I thought my way into sunny Californian beaches, crisp clean bed sheets that smelled like summer, and the space between Edward Cullen’s two lips. I reminded myself that all thoughts are physical manifestations so I think I feel great, I think I don’t feel like throwing up all over my steering wheel. I think I don’t feel like scrubbing mucousy green tea out of my floor mats. All my Jedi tricks worked until I picked up David and they continued to work until we were almost home. Wouldn’t you know I lost the fight on the busiest street that feeds into our town? I reached for the paper cup that was already stuffed full of napkins. David cranked the steering wheel to the right and stopped the car at the most perfect angle so that everyone driving into Lake Forest can see me open up my car door and hurl right there in front of all those big beautiful houses on Suffolk Lane.

I decided to ditch the force and give in to this virus sith which caused me to retch for the next ten hours straight. If life had a fast forward button, I would have definitely used it here.

For the next three weeks, someone in our house is sick at any given moment. (And maybe here too.)

We live in a house that’s over one hundred years old, and one of the few annoying things about the house is the original wood flooring upstairs. The strips are a good five inches wide and the space between each floor board can be as big as a whole half inch. Sweeping is a waste of time. Everything just goes into those deep cracks and once it’s it, it never comes back out again.

Of course, when Ian gets sick, he doesn’t quite make it to the bathroom. I awake in the middle of the night, blind as lady justice without my thick glasses or contacts on, to find a little fuzzy figure standing at the foot of my bed.

“What’s going on? What’s happening?” I ask David as I pat the surface of my nightstand in search of my glasses.

“Ian just threw up. Everywhere,” he says.

For a moment I stopped looking for my glasses and retreat back under the sheets to find my super mommy strength. The vindictive part of me was secretly happy that Ian was sick. Earlier that day he called me a “stupid idiot” and said he was ready to go live with a different family. I wanted to savor the moment. So, you need your stupid idiot mommy now, huh? But I found my better self somewhere in the covers and came out a slightly more empathetic and ready to clean up the mess with my super mommy powers intact.

But this is the memory I need to forget. As I’m scooping up the half pound of…what? Onions? Red peppers? Well, whatever it was, it was soaking through the pathetically thin pieces of one ply toilet paper tissue that I was holding in my bare hands. Going green has certain down sides like: we never buy paper towels. And wouldn’t you know it, all those little chunks of mystery vomit slipped away into those nasty floorboard cracks, unreachable for all of eternity! Not only in my bedroom, but Ian had also thrown up all over his bedroom as well. So I just decided to spray it all down with my all natural cleaning solution: which was aptly named, What-EVER!

A Still Small Voice: Reflections on 1 Kings 19:11-14

I. Wind

Goliath wind, you push me around like a school yard bully, maligning me inside my pea coat jacket. The black trees stand with their frozen feet, like fair weather friends who would rather watch the show down than shelter me from impending doom. They shake their barren branches, taunting me—lest I hope—there is no new life in the dead of winter.

II. Earthquake

And I am here in this place again, looking into the eyes of my enemy, so much larger than life, this little life, almost swallowed by the macabre. The pale sky seems so much farther away now, like blood drained from a face—like God’s seeming absence. And they are there in Haiti, in Sheol, where people cry a thousand tears a day. And we wonder if we are alone—or worse—seared together forever with a loss as big and invisible as the howling wind.

III. Fire

Then red Kali comes wearing her necklace of skeletons, yielding her knife to no one. She dances on the wounds that opened up to tears and fills them up with wood. Without hesitation she tosses in a match and sets the sorrow ablaze. Some fight for justice, some go berserk, and some sit like phantom kings upon their indignant thrones and feel nothing at all. Was it you who toppled the rocks from their cliff as you passed them by? Or were you in the devouring mouth that swallowed up all those precious children? Or were you in the raging flames of heat that passed through our chests when we all stood abject—eyes shielded—from the unbelievable mountain of ashes?

IV. Silence

Or are you a seed beneath this frozen earth, quietly making your new life?