But even without talking, she taught me to let into my insides the real of this place. From her I learned the deep of here.

Strange As This Weather Has Been, Ann Pancake

 

Come from away is a common moniker on the easternmost island off Canada, Newfoundland.  I live on Vancouver Island, off the opposite coast of this country, and I am considered a “come from away.” Literally, I came from roughly 3000 miles or 4800 kilometers away, not very long ago. I might be asked by Newfoundlanders, “where ya ‘longs to?”

For a few days, I’ve been reading an old journal from spring 2014, where I lived two homes ago. I wanted to find an incident that happened around that time that I may have written down. Sometimes I can remember events in relation to where I was located in time and place. I didn’t look further for that one event, though.

The beginning sentence I’d written in the notebook I dug out was intriguing enough. “New for more reasons than the other journal is full—this one is beginning because I am.”

As I continued to read what I’d written before, I found unexpected familiarity—those pages could have been written yesterday, longing to belong, to find my place.

My old journal notebooks are also commonplace books, where snippets of whatever I’m reading are nested into musings about what I’m worried about or celebrating or just considering. The quote from Ann Pancake’s exceptional storytelling was just there on one of the pages where I had copied it without making the usual connection to my current circumstance. Now, the grandmother’s wisdom stands out.

Re-reading those surrounding musings rekindled some of myself that I’ve missed.

I see my longing to belong and be at home with myself. I also see the separation, independence, the fret, and disillusionment of trying to “do” what seems worthy or in line with what may or may not actually fit me. Maybe that is part of my hope for the first line about newness and beginning. I had just finished my dissertation and was struggling with the voices that demanded I prove myself and do something relevant and the constant striving and relying on my own intellect, always with more to do and prove.

Reliving my wonderings, I remember the sustainable reason I do daily writing that I keep forgetting—to discover truths about my life so that writing is a spiritual practice, not for intellectual striving or proving my worth.

I’ve been saying that, in one way or another, over and over. And over and over, I am wavering in the discipline to do this kind of writing, daily, and forgo the need to say too much. I have been writing to uncover that deep inside. I write in my journal, or morning pages, or to figure out something on scraps of paper, or in more formal places. But, somehow there is that old striving and proving that creeps in to keep me on the surface of the deep.

The way forward is to keep on. I know that.

Anne Lamott says in Bird by Bird that she wants, people who write to crash or dive below the surface, where life is so cold and confusing and hard to see…to plunge through the holes—the holes we try to fill up with props. In those holes and in the spaces around them exist all sorts of possibility, including the chance to see who we are and to glimpse the mystery.

All those things, all my reading, my puffed up and everyday writing, those notes on random pieces of paper and in notebooks, the books I’ve studied and read for pleasure, the lessons and contemplative moments I’ve experienced have contributed to the deep. We do need discipline, formation, ritual, and even teaching, however, these are little more than channels or props for the lived experience of something deeper.

That’s what the writers who have been formative for me do; they tell the stories of their lives. I don’t always see the deep cold in everything I write, it doesn’t come by crafting or striving. That deepness will be visible by and by, if I just keep telling the stories, making the connections I love to make. So that my day’s words, however brief or long, I can tell them and let them be—and they will rise up to teach me when the time comes, and that might take a while.

Back in 2014, near the end of the journal that I said was a new beginning, I posed a new question: What is another way?

I, of course, posed a few possibilities. One way is writing, I said, and thought I could write other things than the push of academic scrawl. And then, I wondered, if the way might be:

• Away from everything I know how to manage and survive
• Out from under reputations I’ve built for myself or maybe even more apt, visions I’ve built for myself
• Away from the high expectations and disappointing returns

I am a “come from away.” What are the ways to let into my insides the real of this place and learn the deep of here?

Yesterday, I told my husband, “I’m going to do less, today.”

A funny thing to say, it might seem, since every day now is kind of a day off.   Maybe though, it’s a change of heart rather than habit.

You see, for two days, Sunday and Monday, I kept a time log of everything I did. I want to spend my time more intentionally —to limit the time I watch television or read emails or whatever else I fall into that isn’t nourishing or necessary or productive in my mind’s eye. When 8:00 in the evening rolled around, I was spent and needed to sit a spell.

So, that is why I said that yesterday was going to be a day to “do” less. As I look back on the day of letting go of expectations, an odd thing did happen.

It started first thing in the morning. I read a book instead of my usual morning routine of Lectio and centering prayer. Okay, so the book was Putting on the Mind of Christ, but I just wanted to get back to this book that I laid aside a few weeks ago. I didn’t write down any significant revelations in my dandy notebook, I just stood fast in the few pages I read at that moment.

At 9:15, my usual zoom yoga class began without me. I thought I might catch an online offering later on, but I didn’t. Sitting in a meditative pose to read and later a restorative child’s pose to rest was enough for the day.

I kept reading—short pieces—and watched video lectures for the first week of an online class my friend and I are “visiting.” I say that because we are participating, but at our own pace and assignments are optional. Since I don’t have to adhere to the have-to’s, I stopped when my interest had peaked.

I did wash a load of towels. I seem to be doing that more frequently these days. The glorious part was that I leisurely hung them to dry on my makeshift clothesline. The warm sunshine and gentle breeze did the work of drying and infusing them with that smell and crunchy texture that make me happy. And I experienced that warmth and freshness all over again when I reached for a towel this morning.

I continued to clean the microwave that I moved to a table on the deck. Hopefully, the fresh air and boiling vinegar will work to dissipate some of the odour—I burned rice on one of those days I was keeping track. Hopefully, this microwave, too, just needs some time to heal itself.

As the evening rolled around, I made a familiar supper. I know my mother’s directions by heart. She wrote them down for me before she died in 1993. I can’t properly say I follow her “recipe,” since there is no “amount” of any ingredient. It fits in with doing less today—no need for measurements.

And then I remembered my capacious heart that I wrote about in my journal and found the William Maxwell book to savour that one short story again, and posted a blog, inspired again by that last line of the story.

 

Today, I did join my zoom yoga class, a restorative one and guess what my guide read? Mary Oliver’s poem from A Thousand Mornings.

 

Today

Today I’m flying low and I’m

not saying a word

I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

 

The world goes on as it must,

the bees in the garden rumbling a little,

the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.

And so forth.

 

But I’m taking the day off.

Quiet as a feather.

I hardly move though really I’m traveling

a terrific distance.

 

Stillness. One of the doors

into the temple.

 

Ahhhh, it is another day to fly low, my friend.

The final paragraph in William Maxwell’s short story, The Thistles in Sweden, is 36 lines. I love his abandon.

The short story is about nothing and everything—it chronicles the lives and details the surroundings of the narrator and his wife, Margaret, and their cats that live on the top floor of the brownstone on Murray Hill. Maxwell’s style expands Jerry Seinfeld’s comedy decades later—a story about the minutiae of daily life that adds up to something.

Much like all our days during this unprecedented time of being homebodies, Maxwell’s sense of time in his short story is malleable—the story is written in the present tense. Time doesn’t exactly stand still though. At one point, the narrator reminds himself that time passed in that apartment “is not progressive or in sequence” but “horizontal surfaces divided into squares.”

The narrator reflects on those squares in the last paragraph:

Now when I walk past that house I look up at the windows that could be in Leningrad or Innsbruck or Dresden or Parma, and I think of the stairway that led only to the trapdoor in the roof, and of the marble fireplace, the bathroom skylight, and…Mrs. Pickering sitting in her bedroom chair with her eyes wide open, waiting for help… the guests who came the wrong night, the guest who was going to die and knew it…the sound of my typewriter…a paintbrush clinking in a glass of cloudy water…and Margaret’s empty days…

 And after many more lines of quotidian sacredness, he concludes:

…and I think if it is true that we are all in the hands of God, what a capacious hand it must be.

And I believe that might be true, today, as one day blurs into another without our usual markers of time.

I woke up in the morning with a capacious heart. My heart is expanded with gratitude. I don’t recall a time when I just started out feeling so grateful. I didn’t try to “feel” grateful, or pray a prayer of gratitude, or even “be” thankful; it just was there. A capacious heart, breaking open to what is right now.

I am grateful looking out my kitchen windows to see trees open with new life. For new growth emerging from the harshness of my paved patio, yes, up through the cracks, never mind that some might arbitrarily call them “weeds.”

I am grateful for Mitch, the one I spend 24 hours a day with now. I am awed that he isn’t daunted by what might not seem possible or probable or difficult to pull off now that will bring new life to our circle of influence.

I am grateful for my adult children, both at great distances physically, but closer than imaginable. Yesterday, my daughter called for practical advice and I am reminded that I don’t have to strive to help or offer unsolicited advice, but simply be available if and when she asks.

I am grateful for a reimagined relationship with my son. He called yesterday, too, deeply reflective, to share his insights about daily living in these times, to ask what we were reading, and to share his own recommendations for films and books to savor.

I am grateful for close friends, some physically far away, who quietly provide for their families doing what naturally flows out of a deep center.

If I lumped all those sentences together in a William Maxwell-esk way, I, too, will end with:

I think of the happy green grocery on Mackenzie Avenue who stocks the freshest produce, the friends who bring ice cream bars (carefully wrapped in newspaper) sharing Mitch’s birthday while sitting 2 meters away on the lawn, and our son’s birthday letter, and our grandson dancing barefooted in the kitchen with his winter hat still on his head, and the sound of lawnmowers that mean that spring has arrived, and the mountains in the distance still covered with snow in the bright sunshine of a clear day, while we wait to cross the street on our walk around the neighbourhood, while bicycles race by on the not so busy street, and

I think if it is true that we are all in the hands of God, what a capacious hand it must be.

This is not the story I wanted to write. One week left and I have slowly and ever so cautiously slipped.

It is not my usual custom to deprive myself of chocolate or rutabagas for Lent. I do take seriously that this particular season is a good time for deep reflection and mediators, that take many forms, do help. In past seasons, I’ve worked through particular themes or wiser people’s Lenten studies. I have taken on new or reimagined practices (often overcoming some fear) that have stayed with me, like my studio yoga practice.

This year I needed to give up “the news.” I might need to qualify that I mean news from the United States that was sucking the life out of me.

Five weeks ago, I began my Lenten journey with the story of Jesus’ temptation. I wondered in my journal: What temptations rule me? I knew I wasted both my energy and my imagination checking the news—an easy and addictive diversion to whatever I could be doing that would be more filling. Even though it was not my intention to get immersed in the milieu, I had some level of desire to see the drama unfold that was US politics.

I wanted to believe that somehow, somewhere, there are people who are honest in their desire to make the world better for everyone, right? Well, I do want to believe that, but it is not the reason I clicked on multiple news outlets. So yes, I do have less than noble reasons for checking in on the day’s “spin.”

I casually pursued headlines and occasionally listened to cable news elucidation that viscerally affected me. I wanted my side to prevail, you know, the people who share my worldview.  I wanted to read that the people who, according to me, misuse their power or privilege are called out by the masses, lose, and even fail. I wanted to hear my own beliefs echoed back to me as I chose shallow and complex engagements over deepening simple truths.

The season of Lent offered me a charge to be better. Change is always possible. Some speak of the parabolic imagination where reversals are possible and sinners become saints and the blind see, see the world as it could be and participate in that transformation. I thought that by refocusing that time I spent that precipitously derailed me, I could develop new relationships with trouble.

I decided to still read the local Times Columnist and watch the Vancouver Island News in the evening. I have seen glimpses of a different way of viewing the news. There was the story about a little dog determined to carry a tree trunk (rather than a sensibly sized stick) along a narrow trail. His owner inspired by his tenacity and sagacity.

I found inspiration myself in the story about a formerly homeless man who has transformed his rented apartment into a work of art with an eclectic accumulation of stuff. Even in this time of unprecedented news making, I find relief in the most constant face of the pandemic where I live, the calm and steady voices of caution and compassion— three women who are provincial and national health ministers. Dr. Bonnie Henry ends each day’s briefing for British Columbia with: Be calm, be kind, be safe.

How could I build a better relationship with troubles? I’ve slowed another anxious part of myself by not checking “news,” or whatever might be tempting that I know is soul-sapping.

How might I build a Lent that becomes a life and cultivate a closer relationship with goodness? I can seek out those voices that are kind and true like our Health Minister and maintain distance from those that are not. I am learning ever so slowly to observe my thoughts, even the ideas that incense me, without commenting or judging or expanding upon them. Let them pass. That will take a lifetime, I know.  I wonder if this is the wisdom of building up treasure; the kind that is seen in secret and will be reward enough.

I am reminded of Socrates’ advice for choosing our words: “Is it true; is it kind, or is it necessary?” Maybe I could apply that filter when choosing news to hear—worthy news.