Mommy, last week in class we were supposed to give each other compliments, and do you know Tom, the boy with the dark hair?
Uh-huh.
He told me I was short.
What did you say?
I told him, “That’s not a compliment! That’s a threat and an insult!”
Spoken with the force of nature that topples a wobbly head and rules a steadfast heart.
The girl will be OK.
I’ve been doing a little bit more running lately, because a little bit more than nothing is a quite a little bit more. The reason for all of it will roll around soon enough. My friends on the road thought I needed a touch of optimism to shade me from the harsh realities.
This morning I put on my new hat and my daughter saw it for the first time.
“Oh,” she said, accustomed to a world encapsulated in logos, “you must have gotten that at the Life is Good store.”
Yes, honey, I did. I got a lifetime supply at the Life is Good store. Let’s see how long it lasts me this time.
My karma ran over my blogma.
There is an often mentioned yet little understood law called karma. It is not hard to grasp; no, it is always in the palm of our hands. Still, most of us persist in thinking that karma is something beyond us, some unseen force that arrives – shazam! – as random fortune on the whims of fate. Not so. We are karma, and we produce karma. Our present is the product of our past; our future is the product of our present.
And I do mean present. In a series of interwoven, yet still unexpected karmic consequences, my basket has lately been filled to the brim with presents. I array them here for you now, in accord with another fractured axiom, “You read what you sow.”
First, Irene sent me this. It is made of the kind of magic only rarely seen and quickly disappearing these days. Catch it while you can.
Next, Jen sent me this. It was a smash sell-out, but you can still begin at the beginning. I suspect there’s more where it came from.
Then, Kathryn gave me this. She had already delivered the prequel. Do you see the way the circle turns?
Mika, the mommy musician who always sounds a true note, sent these amazing sounds. You’ll be blown far, far away.
Laura, who once worked with me, kindly skirted the issue of mints. In the intervening years I’ve become well-aged but she’s become the big cheese.
Keri made my wish true. Now I wish to return the favor a million times over.
That brings me to Bella, who along with Meg has come up with a way to fill the basket forward. This is your future calling. Bless it.
To all ye perpetrators of holiday deception laboring with the weight of your well-meant betrayal, the fear of future reckoning, this is how the veil is pierced: with a cottony soft tail and whisker kiss:
Mommy, will you remind the Easter Bunny to come?
How gingerly, how tenderly she asks so as not to shatter the dyed green eggshell of my illusion.
Neither parents, nor parents’ secrets, are much mystery to their kin. And this truth-in-common is what we celebrate, indeed, what we should celebrate, every day.
I’m betting the place is hopping tonight.
Using what’s at hand, he finished up the yard. He could use it and know when to quit.
Time after time I’m refreshed by this obscure line from a nearly forgotten verse on a 7th century koan I studied long ago. When you first approach a Zen koan, through meditation, you can get lost in a labyrinth of intellectual incomprehension. Using what? Whose hand? Finishing what? The yard where? And then you might stop wondering for a second and the instructions surface, clear and direct. As clear as picking up a rake, for instance, or sweeping with a broom.
This is how life is. We always have at hand everything we need to finish up. We know how to do what needs to be done and we know when to quit too. It’s what we don’t need to do when we don’t need to do it that is so puzzling.
If I ever wrote a cookbook, this would be my sole instruction: Use what’s at hand. That stark brevity means, of course, that I could never write a cookbook. But I could make dinner out of limp celery and garbanzo beans, as someone once said.
Similarly inspired by the forlorn kale, spongy mushrooms, forgotten carrots, patient potatoes and canned tomatoes in my kitchen yesterday, I made ratatouille for dinner. Not that it was ratatouille from a book, mind you, but what I simply called ratatouille in a spark of who-me individuality and why-not invention. My daughter was so engaged by the prospect of dinner a la Remy that she instructed me to thin-slice the accompanying sausage and array it like “fallen dominoes” around the circumference of the mush. See? She knew.
We always have the ingredients on hand to finish what we already know how to do.
As I write this, by hand, the sun has just risen in the mists between the surf and the cliffs of Orange County, California. I followed a medical transport van here in the wee-hour darkness, a van that carried my sister. Last week, on the first of what was to be seven days of Colorado skiing, she broke her ankle and her wrist. Back home now, she’s doing what she knows to do using the help at hand. Today, surgery to re-set and secure the bones and hasten recovery.
The thought, the mere thought, of losing the use of one leg and one arm is paralyzing, isn’t it? But here she is, with a medical transport taxi to get her to and fro, a couple of good doctors, a home health attendant, and a sister in the waiting room. I would be here anyway. But now, by virtue of life’s passing, I am her next of kin, her domino.
It turns out none of us is paralyzed.
Today I write with my hand the words that you read. It is the writing that makes for reading and the reading for writing.
We all, each of us, come together where we are, as we are, to make one savory stew, one delectable taste, interdependent and whole. In the way my sister is grateful for me today, I am grateful for you. Together we make a meal.
Last weekend I sat in the middle of more than a dozen newcomers who participated in the Beginner’s Mind retreat at my Zen Center, and it was a remarkably powerful experience. Powerful because it always is. Remarkable because attracting more than a dozen people out of the drunken sunshine of a lazy LA Sunday to practice eight hours of silent self-discipline is a miracle. A miracle, I tell you.
Now it’s nothing much to boast about compared to what they’re calling America’s most popular church, the church of Be as Rich as God Wants You to Be.
And it’s a pittance compared to the self-styled gospel worshipped at the altar of Be as Rich as You Think You Should Be.
But it is a miracle in the plain and ordinary church that I frequent, the church where, invite as we might, many are called and stubbornly few ever choose to step even one foot inside, the church of Be.
Sitting there all day in this simmering brew of effort, willingness, endurance, open-mindedness and sincerity, sitting with strangers in a slow bake of solidarity and mutual encouragement, percolating in the intimacy and acceptance of a shared experience, I was overwhelmed with delight and gratitude. When it was over, we all left on weightless wings, sailing on gusts of freshness, into the lives we had, only eight hours earlier, been desperate to leave behind.
Truly, miraculously, we raise the dead.
Please come next time. There is always a next time, and there is always room for you.
With intermittent frog downpours. As soon as I rhapsodize on splendor in the grass, heaven freezes over.
(It’s technically hail, not snow, but still.)
Hail by hail.
I wrote this post yesterday and I was holding onto it for later, but holding on is not at all the spirit of this post, or the teaching of the weed.
I used to know a deeply intuitive and provocative woman, a woman of many arts and aptitudes, who said she was going to write a book called Start What You Finish (as opposed to that book we’ve all had recited to us a billion times, Finish What You Start). I well understood her point. Before we even start something we are already mentally rounding the curve toward the steep and sticky part, the complex, exhausting, immeasurable length of it, the part we can’t imagine doing, and we stop before we’ve begun. How to keep from doing that would make a great topic for a book.
We lost touch with one another, but as far as I know, this was one project she never got started.
This morning I sat down to work on the kind of work I get paid to write. Honest, I don’t get paid much or at all to write this other stuff. So I’m looking at my options on this wide-open morning: to crack into the research brief entitled “Competing on Analytics,” or the “Encyclopedia of Statistics in Quality and Reliability.” (I’m not making this up.) Or maybe I’ll just scroll one more time through my primary source, the white paper I already wrote once, “Making Performance Measurement Work.” I need to pull together an outline and key messages to ghostwrite an industry article on “Operational Dashboards.”
I give up. It’s not happening today.
Today, I’ll weed.
We used to enjoy having a carpet of green weedy ground cover across our rolling backyard garden. I say enjoy but I really mean accept because what, in the end, is more enjoyable than simple acceptance? Our vista looked neat and green, but the ground was mostly weeds. Then when our nervy neighbor began hoisting his two-story addition overlooking our home and garden last year, we raided the retirement fund to landscape the whole schmeer with towering bamboo and darling little mounds of grass called “dwarf mondo.” Isn’t that the cutest name? Dwarf mondo, i.e. little big. Because it’s a little thing that can cover a big space.
We replaced all the topsoil with rich, fragrant dirt and planted precious little plugs of mondo across the roaming whole of it so that now I still have a green grassy ground cover but I do not enjoy it nearly as much. No, I have replaced that sense of carefree disregard with the drive and agitation I imagine a surgeon feels as he surveys his upcoming schedule of life-and-death procedures. Now, I am a backyard neurosurgeon, prying sprigs of weeds from between the delicate roots of my baby mondo, my vast and miniature world, my little big.
When I look up across the endless stretch of the job before me, I surely want to quit.
But if I manage to regain my focus on what’s at hand I realize it’s just one weed. There’s always just one weed to do next. I do it weed by weed, and the weeds always show me how.
I’ve come to believe that every impasse, obstacle and impossibility is just that: one weed, saying, “Pull here.”
I don’t ever finish. But I always start. Weeding is something you start but you’re a fool if you think a gardener is ever finished, if you think a garden ever stays put.
Today I’ll weed. And when I return to the job I’ve set aside, it will start in an altogether different place, a different space, with different openings and perhaps, greater ease. Everything moves through this one place in time, the infinite and unimaginable totality of existence moves through this one moment of motion: the tug, as I dislodge a weed from the earth. When I do that, I dislodge it all.
Starting anything is starting everything. The finish, if you want to call it that, takes care of itself.
In homage to a certain treatise on birds.
Twice a year or so I get this kind of telephone call.
We’ll be in your neighborhood next week. Do you have any donations of used clothing or household goods?
And right away I say yes. Without even knowing what the donations might be I say yes.
The outfit that comes by is called Rescue Mission.
There are things that you and I probably don’t want to know about the used clothing business. There is re-marketing and profiteering. I’m never sure how much of what I pack up will be used, or used by someone who really needs my shredded sneakers and faded khakis.
There is more to this than meets the eye, I’m sure. But I don’t need to know. I always say yes because the time is always right and the need is always great. Because the call has come and the closets are full. Because children grow and parents do too. Because I use my clothing well but I never quite use it up. Because when you have more than you need things grow heavy and dull, dusty, dark, airless and dead. I say yes because it’s a Rescue Mission, and the one being rescued is me.
After days weaving strands on her classroom’s loom, losing hours of sparkling daylight to an indoor obsession, missing recess and skipping lunch to feed her creative fever, more impressed and impassioned as completion neared, she only reluctantly brought it out of her backpack when it was done:
Mommy, when I show people they say it is pretty but I don’t think they mean it.
The artist’s life.
My daughter came home from Spanish class one day last week and plastered signs all over the house. Seeing them everywhere has really shed some light on things.
Over at my friend Shawn’s new review blog, The Chunky Purse, she talks about a Spanish-immersion DVD set for teaching language to young children, and it sounds pretty neat. Eight years ago, we didn’t have that, we had something else.
One of Georgia’s first words was “awa” for water. Whether she was speaking Spanish or speaking English, who can tell. We congratulated ourselves for the clever good fortune of having a babysitter who could not only put Georgia down for a nap, but speak Spanish while she did it.
How we all wish we could lock-in these predispositions. We see the astonishing development of our babies and toddlers – their seemingly effortless learning – and what we might overlook is the amount of practice they put in. From where I sit now I view it all a bit differently than I did then.
Every day from birth to age one or so they practice mobility. Every day from age one to two and beyond they practice language. Without maintaining that level of constant practice, nothing gets very far off the rug.
Now I can see that if Georgia acquired any Spanish aptitude at all during her toddlerhood it wasn’t because of the words her nanny spoke, but because of the love in that sweet woman’s mother tongue.
I’m tired of having cards taped all over the house, but love is one language we could all use more practice speaking. And for that, the signs really help me.
You spend all your time waiting for it to arrive and then it’s gone in an instant.
It’s better when you consume it like there’s no tomorrow.
It weighs next to nothing but puts an extra five pounds on you each year.
They say it keeps in the freezer but no one keeps it there long enough to find out.
If you do have any part stored in your freezer you could well be judged criminally insane.
Even when you’ve had enough, you haven’t had enough.
On their deathbed, no one wishes they’d had any less.
Authored in my official capacity as Cookie Co-Chair for Brownie Troop 1242 where our motto is “Eat the Damn Things and Get it Over With,” a creed which I swear to uphold and uphold to swear.
If you need a little inspirational company this weekend, keep scrolling or take the short cut to my interviews with Jen Lemen, Sally Dworsky and Wendy Cook.
Perhaps it would interest you to know that, through random acts of kindness, Lorianne won the Jen Lemen poster, Phyllis won the Sally Dworsky CD and Andrea won the Wendy Cook button bracelet.
But no one is excluded from these riches. Here by their own inclusion are this week’s initiates into the order of soul sisterhood, an order that naturally has no particular order:
Sandra Jena Strong The Whole Self Mama Zen Lorianne jessamyn denise Shelli Busymomma66 Jessica Girl con Queso Moanna bella Phyllis Sommer kathryn Shawn nyjlm Jennifer marta ladybug-zen Barbara Wendy Jenell Shurn Joan jen lemen Janet Thompson Megan RocketMom Missy k Shalet blissful* Susan shanspec Kyran melody is slurping life Jennifer/The Word Cellar Michelle Shannon Haley andrea scher nina bagley Robyn Mika Someone Being Me Anna and the earliest bird under the wire, Kirsten Michelle.
Looking back, I can say that this was one of the most delightful weeks of my life, and I’m so glad you were here to share it.
But why would I want to look back?
