mind body mama: Fire Season

In the early morning of December 27 the fire departments of The County Seat and its neighbors responded to a flurry of suspicious blazes in the neighborhood surrounding the two-hundred year old fair grounds. Before dawn broke two houses had burned to the ground. Several cars were destroyed and thousands of dollars worth of property was damaged. Two men died.

Two weeks later another local family was shattered when police arrested their young son on suspicion of arson—and murder.

This past Sunday, Our House of Worship rocked with a lay-led Martin Luther King Day service. After lunch I took Small contra-dancing and ran into the Birth Pie family along the way. It was after sundown when I finally got home and booted up the PC to see how my Facebook friends had passed their day. Sweetie turned on the evening news to get some intel on the slushy mix starting to fall from the sky. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Small on Sweetie’s lap, transfixed by the television screen.

I heard my wife murmur, “Yes, it’s sad, someone’s church burned down.”

In a second I was at their side to see a steepled New England meeting house engulfed in flames. With a few keystrokes I confirmed that this was the church beloved by a new friend; visited often by SpecK; whose minister performed the perfect wedding of the Life Coach and her sweet man in October.

There is something about the image of a church burning that makes me cringe. There is something about the image of a church burning on Martin Luther King Day, in a season of fires, that was too much for me to see. I turned my eyes away but not before my insides curled like singed paper. The picture I could only look at for an instant hit the morning paper above the fold and followed me through Monday. It was gorgeous and repulsive, haunting and indelible.

There is, as yet, no reason given for the fire at the hilltown church. Churches burn, apparently, brilliantly well. They are filled with fuel and oxygen that feed a hungry fire. It is a great blessing that no one died.

On Tuesday afternoon I looked up from my computer to see my factory-working, motorcycle-driving, beer-drinking neighbor coming up his driveway in a suit and tie, his body hunched against the icy rain, arriving home from his mother’s burial. Later that night the Massachusetts Democrats were sucker punched and ceded Ted Kennedy’s senate seat to a right wing centerfold model. A week after natural disaster struck the most devastated nation in our hemisphere, the desperate people of Haiti still waited for help.

I curled up with Small on the sofa and finished reading Dennis Lehane’s masterpiece, The Given Day. The novel chronicles the human cost of the 1919 Boston police strike, the Spanish influenza epidemic, and a few crystalline moments of our nation’s bottomless capacity for racist, xenophobic violence. The next book I reached for was Geraldine Brooks The Year of Wonders, a chronicle of the 1666 plague in a small English village.

Reading, it appears, is not always a great respite. My mind became a soup of suffering, endurance, loss, humiliation and defeat. How tragic the death of any one of us is to those who live on, whether an elderly woman at the end of a life filled with love, or a sleeping young man victim to another’s cruel indifference; a little girl in a fire bombed church or a man fevered with a virulent flu.

Grief clings like ash. There is no getting clear of it; loss defines our time here. It seems almost senseless to speak of it; it is like trying to describe air.

Which is why I am looking upon my neighbors with nothing short of wonder this week. I am amazed that we keep getting up in the morning, given as it is that each of us will die—yes, even our mothers. We dig in rubble every day, whether the rubble of a nation that has nothing reduced to even less than nothing, or the rubble of our hearts when hope is buried by hurt.

I am thinking of that burned church’s congregation and how they will be called upon to love one another and hold each other’s grief and work for their common future. I am thinking of Martin Luther King shot down in cold blood for dreaming and of Sasha and Malia Obama waking up each day in the White House. I am thinking of the workers who died for our rights to an eight hour day and of the fact that someday there will be better health care in this country, whether or not I live to see it. I am thinking of the Democrats and how wildly we screwed up this election, and how nothing is really to be gained by self-recrimination and hurling accusations at one another.

We just have to dust ourselves off and begin again, because we are human, and that’s what humans do.

Mind Body Mama: Bad News, Bad News, Come to Me Where I Sleep

When my mother's doorbell rang at 9:00 am the day after Thanksgiving my first thought was that it would be a friend of Bobbi's come ‘round to meet Her Majesty, my Small. Small is my mother’s first born and farthest flung grandchild and her legend is large around Bobbi and Grampy-land.

I wasn’t particularly in the mood to entertain in my pajamas over my post-holiday coffee so I grabbed up a change of clothes and was bolting for the bathroom when my mom opened the door and I heard an unfamiliar man’s voice say, “Do you have a Sweetiebabyhoneylicious here?”

My first thought was, “Why is someone sending my Sweetie flowers?” My second thought, tumbling over the first, was, “She’s having an affair! And she’s having an affair with a stupid girl—stupid enough to send flowers to her in-laws house!”

Then I heard him say, “Apparently your number is unlisted. Her brother has been trying to reach her.”

And Bobbi said, in a small voice, “Thank you, Officer.”

***

On Thursday morning, when the turkey was safely in the oven and there were hours before the flurry of last minute vegetable preparation, I went for a run in my old hometown. The dips and swells of the New England roads were as familiar to me as if twenty five years had not passed since I rode my bike through that leafy suburb. But around too many curves the vistas I remember were shattered by the decadent development of the last decade. Where once stood hundred-year-old colonials and saltboxes now are miniature castles with four car garages, turrets and crushed white stone circular drives. Houses that were familiar enough for me to never notice are gone and their absence is confusing to my eye.

I live in a hundred year old house. I don’t understand how homes that sheltered families for a century are suddenly inadequate. I could go on and on about conspicuous consumerism and what I think of it. Or how embarrassed I am for the owners of these ticky-tacky mini mansions. “All that money and this is what you did with it?” I think. “Four thousand square feet and you can see into your next door neighbors’ bathroom.” I want to pull the owners aside and whisper to them discreetly, “If you want to see how it’s really done, with wealth and class, the Gold Coast is just a mile away.” I want to take them down the shore road where waterfront mansions—actual castles—sit behind imposing walls, gatehouses and quarter-mile long driveways. I want to drive them through the seaside village where the homes of colonial shipping magnates perch on the hill overlooking the harbor. You might think of them as quaint, historical architectural specimens if you did not look close enough to notice the new copper roof or the Bentley in the drive.

But mostly, on Thursday morning, I was thinking of change. I was puzzling how the road could be the same beneath my feet and the view could be so different. I was thinking of the lines of a schmaltzy Judy Collins song I loved in my childhood which has been coming to mind frequently of late.

…but most of all
It is me that has changed,
And yet still I’m the same.
That’s me at the weddings,
That’s me at the graves,
Dressed like the people who once looked so grown up and brave.

My heart was heavy. I had time to run on Thanksgiving because the old folks are gone this year: there’s no one to visit at the long-term care facility. The last great visit I had with my Gramma—Small’s Gramma Dottie—was two years ago Thanksgiving. She was lucid and sarcastic. And she was thrilled to see Small. It always filled my heart to see Gramma’s eyes grow wide and wet as she gazed upon her great-granddaughter.

We had an hour with Gramma. I even brought Auntie Ollie down from her wing . At the end, Dottie and Ollie were were living under the same roof for the first time in fifty years, but they still weren’t really speaking. Ollie insisted on the visit, I think, because it seemed like a party was going on in Dottie’s room. Ollie never missed a party.

Then suddenly it was time to go. Sweetie looked at her watch and got worried about the turkey in the oven—she did not trust my mother to supervise the blessed bird—and we all got up in a flurry of activity and kisses goodbye. The next time I saw my Gramma she was drifting in and out of consciousness at the hospital, and the next time was her funeral.

***

Our hearts were in our mouths as Sweetie dialed her brother’s number to get the news that chased us into our holiday weekend. We knew death had come, and we didn’t breathe again until we knew that it was her closest-in-age brother who had finally succumbed to the health problems that dogged him for the last fifteen years.

***

Monday night before bed Small had an uncharacteristic melt-down. Her little body finally wore down from the holiday that morphed unexpectedly into hours of holiday-weekend traffic and the tedium of adult visits stunted by grief. Small’s style of unraveling these days is perfectionism, self-recrimination and frustration. She growled and writhed in my arms as she cried, and then suddenly she slumped her little head against my shoulder.

“So many people are dying,” she whispered.

Our family has weathered five losses in the past two years. It seems stunning to me and I’ve lived more than forty years on this planet. I can’t imagine how it feels to a seven year old. And the deaths are coming closer to Small: first a friend of her mothers’, then the parent of her own little friend; first the old folks from the distant nursing home, then her mother’s brother.

Sometimes it feels like a game of Red Rover: we link our hands and brace ourselves for the body blow of the next loss. We wait to feel the impact in our jaws, our bellies. We carry the fear that our elders and our sick will go next and then we are sucker punched by the loss of someone young and vibrant.

I think, “Now I have to be afraid of losing anyone, at any time.”

I have a black dress coat that buttons to the neck in case I need to stand at someone’s grave on a cold winter day. I have a pair of fancy shoes with patent leather flowers and a flash cocktail dress to wear if someone gets married on short notice. I am looking awfully grown up and brave. But inside, I am the same small girl swooping down hills on her blue bicycle, coming around the curves surprised to see the landscape has changed.

Hear the schmatlz here.
Ten points to you if you can cite the other song reference in this post.

Mind Body Mama: Brighting Out

I don’t know what the weather is like on your birthday. Even if I know when your birthday is, I don’t know if you ever scored a snow day and got to spend it building forts in the backyard with your brothers. Or if you go sailing every year but make sure to come in early because there’s usually a late day thunderstorm. I don’t know if the trees are bare and the light brief on the day of your birth, or if you linger outside late into the evening watching the fireflies and feeding the mosquitoes with your own life’s blood.

But you know what the weather is most often like on my birthday. Because September 11, 2001 was one of the most devastatingly, iconically gorgeous days the east coast of the United States has ever known.

This year it rained on my birthday, a soft grey rain like a tired sigh, like a quiet exhale. The fog nestled up onto our mountain like a friend who sits close and takes your hand without speaking. It felt like relief from the relentless color and brilliance of late New England summer, which has become an annual collision of hopefulness and grief in my heart.

Four years ago the School of Love lost another member, tragically and too early—a bright young tai chi student who was also a cyclist, an artist, an activist, a performer. Someone I didn’t know well. Except that she had been lovers with someone inexplicably dear to me. Except that she sparked to my tiny daughter in the way of few adults. Except that she was one of us, one of our chosen rag-tag tribe of peaceful warriors.

Lui Collins once sang, “Did you notice that the trees brighted out, redder than they ever did before?” Meg didn’t just wear the colors of summer brighting into autumn, she was those colors. The chartreuse trees so sudden against their darker neighbors, the flame of orange flicking the tops of the foliage, those rare narrow dark red trees that press against the stunning sky.

I asked her friend once, “Where does she even find clothes in those colors?” Because they were like crazy foreign jewels to me. I was still coming off twelve years in New York and most of what I wore was black. There was some red too—“red and black, anger and depression” Sweetie would chide me. And maybe grey. But nothing to shock the eye into gladness. Nothing citrus and metallic and shiny.

And then Meg was gone, and I realized that I was waiting for her to come into a room wearing orange and bright green because they were my favorite and most beautiful colors and they made my heart sing. This lovely young girl who was not even my friend in the truest sense of that word, who was to me just a fellow traveler beloved to the same circle of women. I was waiting for her to bring me some of life’s joy.

That’s when I knew life is too short not to wear orange.

My closet today is the palette of the mountains’ trees this early autumn: greens to reds to the blush of sunrise and the clear sky blue. Once I could not imagine where to find such colors in the stores and now they come to me, handbags and hats and scarves tumbling riotously.

“Mama,” says Small in our family’s standard joke, “not everything can be bright green.”

And then I buy the bright green anyway: iPod, down jacket, business cards. Unless I buy the flame orange, the magenta, the periwinkle.

A decade ago, I dressed every day as if I was headed to a funeral. Now I grieve constantly, and I do it in color. Life is short. What joy are you waiting for someone else to bring you? Bring it yourself, I say. Bring it. Bright out.

Mind Body Mama: Pit-a Party

Somewhere outside Milford I looked up from my mystery novel and said, “Sister Carrie is going to lend me an ombre pashmina.”

Sweetie was driving us back from Auntie Ollie’s funeral and burial and the family luncheon that followed. Home was far off, past the miles of Connecticut drivers jockying for position in the far-left lane.

Sweetie had sprung Small from the graveside portion of the proceedings to make a donut run. A few months earlier Sweetie leapt up from the computer and ran into wherever I was working,

—ok, that’s not realistic: it’s more likely that she lurched up from the computer and limped into wherever I was working,

—actually, it’s even more likely that she waited, ninja-like, to accost me when I came to her with something urgent on my mind.

“Did you know that one of America’s top ten donut shops is in your hometown?” My mind goes blank in the face of such stunning revelations. “Why haven’t we ever been there?”

A lot of our conversations go like that: I come rushing into the room full of critical information while Sweetie waits, still as a spider, to pounce on me with whatever news she’s been storing up. In this way I fail to convey crucial details of childcare scheduling but learn a lot about donuts.

It wasn’t simply the urgency of the donut shop discovery that led Small and Sweetie to pass on the burial, but also an accommodation to Small’s age and sensibility. It felt important for Small to be with us at Ollie’s funeral, to honor her namesake and the brief, sweet connection they had.

And it felt equally fitting to remember Ollie on a day filled with donuts—and old-school Italian food and family and laughter—because she was a lady who knew how to have a good time.

Like her namesake, Small loves a party and looks for one wherever she goes; in this case, at her great-great-aunt’s funeral. She worked the room, charming every stranger and passing over Sister Carrie, Bobbi and Grampy and Sweetie and me like so much old news. At one point she hissed,

“I wish there were more people for me to talk to. I need some new people.” She brandished the Disney princess Aurora by her gnarled nylon hair. I hate this hideous deluxe edition singing big-head princess with the physical proportions and musical sensibility of Celine Dion. Someone who obviously hates me and all that I believe in gave it to Small.

“Why don’t you go talk to your cousins?” I suggested, steering her towards the lovely young adults in the back row.

“Good idea,” she snapped, heading off with Aurora dangling from her fist.

I wanted a day filled with reminiscences and stories of Ollie, and that day will come—perhaps next month when I sit down with my mother and sister to go through Ollie’s photographs. On this day I got instead the quiet comfort of hours spent with the others who loved Ollie well, who cherished her charming, fun-loving, sometimes maddening high-spirits. I got a day at a funeral with a charming, fun-loving, sometimes maddening little girl. I can’t ever claim I didn’t know what I was getting myself into when I chose her name.

“I can’t help it,” Ollie sighed the last time I saw her. “I’m just a pit-a.”

“What are you, Auntie Ollie?” I said, leaning in close to hear her.

“A pit-a, a pit-a. A Pain In The Ass,” she stage whispered, indicating her head towards Small as if she could be corrupted by such vulgarity.

But I’m pretty sure that Small knows what a pain in the ass is, seeing as her mother and I are such ourselves, and she is shaping up to be one herself at a tender age. I don’t think it’s an accident that Aurora and her schmaltzy ballad are Small’s favorite companions these days.

When the funeral director asked the family settle in the large, upholstered seats of honor in the front row, I asked Small if she wanted to join us or sit with Sweetie in a row of more modest chairs.

“I’ll try that chair out and see which one is more comfortable,” she said, heading to the front of the chapel.

After the service Small asked me to accompany her to the coffin so she could kneel and tell Auntie Ollie that she missed her. I watched her lower her little gold head onto the kneeler and was starting to take a deep, reflective breath when her tiny neck snapped up.

“I’m done,” she said in full voice. She gestured at the coffin. “Is Auntie Ollie really in there?”

The trip home was a full-on pit-a party.

“What the hell is an ombre pashmina?” asked Sweetiebabyhoneylicious, slamming on the brakes to avoid crushing an idiot making his way directly from the highway entrance to the left lane in one smooth swoop. “Is it a dress?”

From the back seat Small shrieked, “I finished reading The Tail of Emily Windsnap!”

“What is wrong with these people? I just want to go the speed I want to go!” Sweetie cursed at the acre of traffic in front of her.

“They’re not out to get you, you know. It’s just volume. If you just go the same speed that they’re going it won’t bother you,” I said reasonably. “It’s for The Life Coach’s wedding. Ombre pashmina, ombre pashmina—what do you think an ombre pashmina is?”

“There are two more Emily Windsnaps!” yelled Small.

“I don’t know—a Persian man?” guessed Sweetie.

“I’m going to get Emily Windsnap and the Monster From the Deep next!” hollered Small.

What a pack of pit-as we were, hurling towards our home.

This morning I caught myself issuing commands at Small faster than she could execute them. I called her into my office.

“Brushyourteethbrushyourhairputonyourshoeswhydidn’tyoubrushyourteethyet?clearthetableputonyourshoes…”

We both started laughing.

“I’m sorry I drive you crazy, Small,” I said.

“You do drive me crazy!” she said. “But I think I drive you crazy too. Do you mind?”

“No, Small,” I said. “I don’t mind. I think you’re worth it.”

“Me, too,” she said.

Mind Body Mama: Shattered

From my writing window, I see a lot of the life of our little town. I see the happy, blond garbage man swing his long body off the green monster of his truck to pick up my neighbor’s recycling. I see the BirthPie family caravanning down the street on some combination of bicycles and running shoes and wonder if they’ll roll past or momentarily burst through my back door needing to pee and play with Small and catch me up on the small details of their lives. I see my neighbor tearing into the driveway in his old green pickup after a shift at the felt factory, and a moment later hear the rev and idle of the motorcycle he built from parts and still tinkers with every day. I see any number of runners and know them as any number of children’s moms and dads. For years I saw the parade of students making their way to the brick schoolhouse on our corner; last year Small and I joined the parade that will start anew in just one week after the short, hot hiatus of summer.

And in the last year I’d see our friend walking his crazy blond poodle, sometimes in the company of his sweet eight-year-old daughter on her little bike. But we won’t be seeing him anymore because, a week ago this morning, he died. Without warning or explanation.

And this does not make any sense.

I keep thinking, he can’t be gone because he’s taking Small to school on Tuesdays like he did last year, holding off her requests to ride a scooter instead, catching the teeth that fell from her gums, never complaining about what a terrible walker she really is, how much longer the commute must have taken with her in tow.

He can’t be gone because the kids are expecting him and that ridiculous dog on the playground every morning, even the kids who are a little afraid of dogs, because he is steady and patient and keeps him under control until they work up the courage to lose their tiny fingers in his soft, curly coat.

He can’t be gone because his beautiful wife loves him. And his friends, the hundreds of whom filled the church yesterday in the sweltering August heat.

And, of course, he can’t be gone because his sweet daughter still needs her daddy.

Last year, when our friend Janice died, I told a lot of people who did not know her what had happened. I had to explain why I came back from vacation glassy eyed, exhausted and grey with grief. I would say, Fifty-two, ovarian cancer, less than three weeks, and they would ask me, Did she have children?

I would want to punch them then, right in their heads. I would want to hold them by the shoulders very, very hard, until my fingers left marks on their arms, and look them in the eyes and say,

I think you did not hear me.

I said, “Janice died.”

We loved her, and she died.

Her wife loved her, and she died.

All of our friends, my teachers and my students, we loved her, and she died.

I knew then, like I know now, what they were asking. They wanted to know if we were in this particular hell of grieving. Not a worse hell, but a specific one. The one where we remember a hundred times a day this daughter, this dad, and feel the incredible injustice of what a child has lost and will miss out on her whole life.

This particular hell of having to admit to our kids in so many words that a parent can die, can disappear; can be suddenly and terribly gone.

I told Small right away when Janice died, but I did not want to tell her that her friend’s daddy was gone. I did not want to take that innocence from her. But Sweetie strode right into it, looked Small in the eyes, and said it plain. Because Sweetie knows that parents die, knows there is no hiding from it, having lost her own dad at thirteen. Which is a far cry from eight, but is still terribly, terribly too soon.

Last year when Janice died, we were shattered with the same disbelief: Didn’t I just see her? How can this be happening? But there was a deeper level to my incredulity, a sense that these kinds of things don’t happen, that vibrant, healthy people don’t suddenly get sick and die. A sense that the sickening rending of our world was unusual, bizarre, far outside the ordinary order of things.

This time, when Birth Pie told me the horrible news in a choking voice, I just thought, “Fuck.”

I didn’t know that I still had innocence at forty until I noticed that I had lost it. Now I believe that senseless, catastrophic loss is part of the fabric of my ordinary life. I wanted to say to Birth Pie, there on the phone, “Oh no! I don’t know what to do!” But, of course, I do know what to do. Because we’ve been doing it all year, grieving Janice.

I know to cry, and talk, and pray and write. I’ve learned from Birth Pie how to write notes and leave messages, make casseroles and bring wildflowers. I know that when the flurry of surprise and shock wears off, when the far away friends and relatives have to go back to their lives, our friends will be walking this path of sadness for a long, long time, and they will still need us.

We left the grieving streets of our little town to take Small to Story Land. “That’s what kids are for,” said SpecK when I told her the sad news and that we were continuing with our vacation plans. “They keep you moving.” I called BirthPie to give her my cell number even though I thought it wouldn’t work in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. “That’s OK,” she told me, “Nothing more eventful than what has already happened will happen while you’re away.”

I chose to believe her. Not because it was true—one terrible thing is not prophylaxis for another terrible thing happening, I know that much. But because we have to act like the terrible is rare and infrequent, or else we couldn’t move at all.

Sermon: Fear and Grace: Lessons from the Martial Arts

Sermon delivered at the Our House of Worship, July 13, 2008.

“The first principle of a warrior is not being afraid of who you are.”

Several months ago this congregation had a meeting to discuss the Society’s budget, as we often do. A proposal had been put forth about which I knew I had very strong feelings. My partner and I talked about the proposal at great and dramatic length (the word “ranting” comes to mind); I fell asleep or woke up more than once thinking about the issue; I sometimes talked to myself about it when I was driving alone in my car. But I didn’t really know how strong my feelings were until I got up to speak at the meeting. When I started to talk, I discovered that I was terrified. And adding to the simple challenge of speaking clearly to a complex issue, I was also crying. I honestly can’t recall any words going through my mind as I realized that I was going to weep through my entire turn at the microphone, but I can sum up the familiar feeling of tenacious surrender with this phrase: “Oh well, here we go again.”

This summer I will celebrate my twentieth anniversary as a student of Okinawan martial arts, and a month later, my 40th birthday. My martial arts practice is, in a very real sense, the story of my adult life. It is the place where—among many, many lessons— I learned to accept Fear as the great teacher that it is. And it is where I experience, again and again, the incredible Grace that comes of being present to Fear, of walking “into those roiling waters,” and coming out whole.

It might be reasonable to presume that the scariest thing about being a martial artist is the fighting part—the “getting hit” part, and maybe also the “hitting other people” part. The recent growth of the extremely violent spectacle that calls itself “mixed martial arts”—which I hesitate to even call a sport—enhances the perception that martial arts practice is about the exchange of body-damaging blows. My practice could not be more unlike this brutal combat activity. In practical terms, the two karate schools at which I have studied practice ju kumite or “soft sparring.” Light contact and control of one’s own body are respected skills which students work hard to master. Sparring practice is playful, joyous and often full of laughter. What then, is there to be afraid of? In a word—everything.

Karate practice asks us to be present—in the stillness of the meditations which begin and end classes, in the learning, mastery and repetition of movements which are simple but rarely easy, and in the partner work where we witness one another’s human, physical vulnerabilities. Karate practice requires that we inhabit our own bodies more fully than mainstream culture ever allows, in ways that few adults remember how to enjoy. And karate practice can be very, very quiet—the rituals of bowing and standing and following instructions leave lots of space for what the author and life coach Martha Beck calls “squirrel brain”—that relentlessly nattering self talk so richly fueled by Fear—to get completely out of control.

For the very confused and sad 19-year-old that I was when I began my karate training at a feminist dojo (the Japanese word for “training hall”) in Brooklyn, NY, this call to be present was nearly unbearable. I couldn’t have told you then, but I understand now, that the dominant fact of my life at that time was Fear. My life terrified me. I was trying to come to grips with being a lesbian, I was trying to go to college—the first in my family to do so—I was trying to grow up, find my way out of a painful and lonely adolescence. On the street, the roar of my own Fear was drowned by the New York City din; the racing of my pulse and my squirrelly thoughts were matched by the City’s relentless pace. But when I entered the quietude of the dojo, I was alone with my internal brew. And I—a classic overachiever, a stereotypical Virgo who loves order and ritual and rules—could not handle the simple routines of a beginner karate class. The first year I studied, I cried in every single class. I rarely lasted for an entire session and I always left abruptly, failing to bow to partners or teachers as I tore out of the building. This didn’t lead to me feeling terribly successful about myself as a karate-ka, a practitioner of the art. Despite the admonition that “each of us is on our own path,” I constantly compared myself to the other students. I realize now that most of them were only in their middle twenties, but they seemed so old and poised and sure of themselves at the time. They asked questions, they never cried, they practiced karate at home. I just came to class and wept. But: I kept coming back.

I have been a karate teacher for a long, long time now and I am still in awe of my first teachers’ incredible depth of compassion and acceptance for the girl who couldn’t last a single hour without tears. Beginners are hard enough to teach. I appreciate now the comedy of knowing with certainty that one of your students is going to flee— but getting to be surprised each time by the exact moment that she does. My teachers, and through their example, my sister students, held a space for me where I could be present with my Fear. Some exercises puffed Fear up and made it seem even bigger and more powerful—the “hitting each other” parts were tough for me, despite our focus on control and contact, as were the “falling onto the ground” parts. But as I found power and skill and happiness in my own body, much of my practice helped Fear to quiet and move away. Kicking has always felt to me as close as the human body can come to flying—it is purely joyful. Although I think this word is overused, it is true in the most profound way to say that I was empowered by the brand of self-defense training I received—which is rooted in an anti-violent, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, socialist feminist polemic of great practicality and deep moral purpose. The moving meditation of simple karate strikes, blocks and kicks taught me to access reserves of calm from within myself— reserves that then became available to me as I moved through the challenge of “getting a life.”

It was a great relief to outgrow the screaming terror of my late teens and early karate training, and settle down as an adult growing into greater happiness and serenity. This process was incredibly gradual and of course, totally incomplete—“squirrel-brain” never really goes away, and Fear is always lurking just around the next life change, big or small. After twelve years in New York City and ten years at the dojo, the time came to move on. When my partner Liz and I decided to move to the Valley we knew two important things: there was vibrant Unitarian congregation, and a well known women’s dojo. It was clearly a reasonable place to live.

Now, I want to stop a moment and tell you what we mean when we talk about “styles” of martial arts. One of the summer reality shows I enjoy watching recruits dancers, most of who are trained in a specific style of dance such as hip-hop, ballroom or tap, and challenges them to compete in dances completely different from the ones that they know. I love this show; I really can’t get enough of it. As a viewer, you know that the hip-hop dancer who’s trying to do Latin dance is much, much, much better than you would ever be. Their training in form and rhythm and choreography is immediately useful as they learn the new dance. And yet, to the Latin dancer on the judging panel—it’s just not quite right.

This is how it is with martial arts. My New York school and my Valley school teach two different styles. Both come from Okinawa, and share influences of both Chinese and Japanese martial arts history. We like to say the styles are “cousins” and that two schools are “sister schools.” But like the hip-hop dancer trying to do a perfect Rumba, the student who switches styles is going to be “not quite right” a good amount of the time.

This is the challenge I faced when I arrived here in 1998. When we first moved I thought I would take some time off from karate, explore other types of moment and recreation, or just eat dinner at 6:00 like normal people instead of being at the dojo until 8 or later. But only two weeks after moving here I showed up at the dojo for a visit, and felt so immediately at home that my commitment to training there was inevitable. After a few months of being a welcome guest, I tied on a white belt and began the process of training through the ranks of a new style.

One of my new training sisters, a newly minted black belt at that time, said to me then, “I don’t think I could do what you’re doing.” I think she meant the re-learning, the willingness to be “not quite right” so much of the time, after ten years of dutiful study, of having been a teacher myself and having earned a black belt rank. And my friend expanded the compliment by saying, “And you do it with so much grace.”

I recall thinking at the time: “Is this woman nuts?” Because just like my first first year of karate training, I felt anything but graceful. Grace, I thought, meant cool self assurance, poise, reserve. All those things I thought I had seen in the older, wiser, twenty-something beginners of my first go-round. Grace must be the Virgo part of me, the part who could smile serenely, arrive on time, and follow instructions. I didn’t run out of quite as many classes the second time around, but I did sit in the car and weep instead of going into the dojo to practice when the enormity of loss and change was unbearable. And I was crabby a good bit of the time, with dashes of bitter and sullen thrown in for good measure, and my squirrel-brain was having a field day.

But what if doing something “with grace” doesn’t necessarily mean doing it “gracefully”? When I looked up definitions of grace I found words like “acceptance” and “approval” or (this one I especially like): “unmerited divine assistance.” Unmerited: which is to say, unconditional—like the compassion extended to me by my teachers and sisters at both dojos. There’s certainly room in unconditional for crying, and for squirrel-brain; for Fear, for clumsiness, for self doubt. Or how about Anne Lamott’s definition of grace as “the force that infuses our lives and keeps letting us off the hook. It is unearned love—the love that goes before, that greets us on the way.” The martial arts come to us from cultures which honor ancestors, and we call our teachers, “those who have come before.” It has been my great good fortune to practice in schools where the teachers who come before us offer great love to their students, unearned, that we might learn to extend the same kindness to ourselves and our students in turn. To rise to a challenge with this kind of grace is just to show up.

And this is the secret core of my karate practice: there is no secret, I just show up. I am tenacious in the work of karate, and not just in the hard sweaty practice of it, which I also really love. From the beginning I somehow knew that karate required surrender—not to Fear itself, but to the presence of Fear. Any time I’m at the dojo, there is a possibility that I’ll leave in tears— but I have every tomorrow to try showing up again. What I knew from the beginning is still true: to do karate, all you have to do is do karate. I just keep putting myself in it, and some days it will flow like poetry, and other days it will stick like mud, but it will always be the same path.

I keep hoping that Fear will leave me alone, and Fear keeps coming around. A few years back, when I was in the home stretch toward earning my second black belt, I wished for a smooth and graceful path, but it kept getting interrupted by physical illness, insomnia, and moments of irrational, ungrounded terror. Trying to pull myself together, I recalled the night before I went into labor with my daughter Alice, when I got lost in the maze of Holyoke Hospital and sank right down against a wall and cried. When grace, in the guise of caring professionals, brought my partner and my midwife to me, the midwife—a member of this congregation—said, “If you weren’t freaking out right now, I’d be worried. You’ve got to freak out if you’re going to do this thing.” This is awfully close to what another member of this congregation said to me when I told her how scared I was to be delivering this sermon (this is the clean version): “It would be screwed up if you weren’t scared.”

I really needed to deliver exactly this sermon, exactly this weekend. Because staring down my fortieth birthday has stirred up a whole new bout of squirrel-brain, and new irrational terror about the next chapter of my life. Once again, I find myself pretty scared, pretty much most of the time. But this time I know Fear for what it is: a travelling companion, a some-time opponent, a teacher, a party to the human journey. I can respect it, I can even listen to it—but if I don’t do what it says, I’ll be fine. And I know who my people are, the community who will help me find my next chapter—they’re the friends who say to me in word and deed, “It would be screwed up if you weren’t scared.”

For years I longed for a stronger connection to this congregation, a sense of undeniable belonging. And wouldn’t you know that crying in front of a room full of Society members at that budget meeting did more to create that connection than anything I had tried before. Committee meetings, small group ministry, making coffee—too easy. I had to love this place, and its members, and my family’s home here so deeply that it frightened me, and then I had to step into the roiling waters of that Fear and tell you all about it.

When I birthed my baby, tenacious surrender in the face of Fear turned out to be my greatest strength. I didn’t fight what my body was trying to do, and only because I had wept and raged the night before. Maybe grace requires that acting out, maybe grace can’t be achieved gracefully. I wish the spiritual path, the martial path, the path to greater connection with this community, the path to my brilliant mid-life transformation, could be walked with decorum and order, maybe with a little light piano music in the background and without ever falling down or crying. But, like childbirth or earning a black belt, the path toward grace is often scary and messy, with long stretches of hard, hard work and a pile of dirty laundry afterward. Fear’s not going anywhere soon, and I’m resigned to its squirrelly incarnations. My path, in the dojo and outside, has shown me that grace abides on the far side of Fear, if not as gracefully as we hope, as abundantly as we ever need.

Worship: Readings to Accompany Lessons from a Hamster (Real and Imagined)

One of the most fun parts of putting together a church service is selecting the readings. Since my early twenties I've considered poetry my preferred form of prayer. I love the opportunity to share my favorite inspirational writings with the congregation. The hard part is recalling, finding and selecting the most appropriate readings.

Here are the readings I actually used to accompany my sermon on January 11.

For the opening words, a selection from the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Jelulludin Rumi (Coleman Barks' translation, of course):

We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste this minute
of eternity. We are pain
and what cures pain, both. We are
the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.

The story for the children was The Old Woman Who Named Things by Cynthia Rylant. I know the adults enjoyed it; I hope the kids did too. Alice said, "Good job reading the story without crying, Mama!" It's a tear-jerker.

The first reading was a favorite poem by Ellen Bass. I had a strong internal debate about whether or not to use this piece, but I decided it would help to set the theme of parenting mindfully.

There are times in life
when one does the right thing

the thing one will not regret,
when the child wakes crying “mama”, late
as you are about to close your book and sleep
and she will not be comforted back to her crib,
she points you out of her room, into yours,
you tell her, “I was just reading here in bed,”
she says, “read a book,” you explain it’s not a children’s book
but you sit with her anyway, she lays her head on your breast,
one-handed, you hold your small book, silently read,
resting it on the bed to turn pages
and she, thumb in mouth, closes her eyes, drifts,
not asleep—when you look down at her, her lids open,
and once you try to carry her back
but she cries, so you return to your bed again and book,
and the way a warmer air will replace a cooler with a slight
shift of wind, or swimming, entering a mild current, you
enter this pleasure, the quiet book, your daughter in your lap,
an articulate person now, able to converse, yet still
her cry is for you, her comfort in you,
it is your breast she lays her head upon,
you are lovers, asking nothing but this bodily presence.
She hovers between sleep, you read your book,
you give yourself this hour, sweet and quiet beyond flowers
beyond lilies of the valley and lilacs even, the smell of her breath,
the warm damp between her head and your breast. Past midnight
she blinks her eyes, wiggles toward a familiar position,
utters one word, “sleeping.” You carry her swiftly into her crib,
cover her, close the door halfway, and it is this sense of rightness,
that something has been healed, something
you will never know, will never have to know.

The second reading was two more contemporary poems--a short one by W.S. Merwin and a longer piece by Mary Oliver. I first read the Mary Oliver poem in the Unitarian Universalist Association publication The World. I'm not sure if it is collected in any of Oliver's books.

Separation
W.S. Merwin

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.


Starlings in Winter
Mary Oliver

Chunky and noisy,
But with stars in their black feathers,
They spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
They swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbably beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

For my closing words, I used a wonderful little piece I found among the readings in Singing the Living Tradition, the UUA hymnal:

Hold on to what is good
even if it is
a handful of earth.

Hold on to what you believe
even if it is
a tree which stands by itself.

Hold on to what you must do
even if it is
a long way from here.

Hold on to my hand even when
I have gone away from you.

I believe the author is Nancy Wood.

Now for the writings that didn't make it into the service. My friend Karen reviewed the sermon and was reminded of one of my absolute favorite lines from the poet Adrienne Rich. I've used this as a mantra for years; there is no explanation for why it did not come to my mind as I prepared this service: "There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors." If that does not describe my sangha, which has been affectionately known as "the crybaby karate school," nothing does.

I did not want to rely too heavily on Mary Oliver, although I do believe her canon may form a Book of Common Prayer for many of us these days. From her collection Thirst, memorializing her partner of forty years:

A Pretty Song

From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.

Which is the only way to live, isn't it?
This isn't a playground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.

Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods
that hold you in the center of my world.

And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers: type me a pretty song.
And I say to my heart: rave on.

And finally, though I loved the closing words I chose, I wish I had remembered this quote from Alice with essentially the same sentiment:

You have to let your life go on
Even when it doesn’t make you happy.
Even when it’s hard.
Even when it’s not what you expected.

Sermon: Lessons from a Hamster: Teaching and Learning About Grief and Loss

Sermon delivered at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence, January 11, 2009

When we received the email concerning the death of Blossom the Hamster, we snickered. The person who sent us this email is the nicest person I know. She was my daughter’s first baby-sitter and first pre-school teacher. She’s cared for my kid, she’s cared for my friends’ kids, she’s cared for most of your kids. She’s a gifted educator and a great parent, but above all, she’s nice. So when Blossom bit the dust, she sent a death announcement to all the pre-school parents encouraging us to talk with our children about their special Blossom memories. It was a very nice email.

Needless to say, my partner Liz and I are something other than nice. I’d say we fall somewhere between snarky and truly evil, but maybe just a little more on the evil end of the scale. We lived in New York City for a long time and we could blame it on that, but I think it’s really just our nature. We’re dark. So when we got the email late at night after Alice had already toddled off to bed, we snickered, we mocked the solemnity of the notification, and then, because we are tired, multi-tasking modern parents, we promptly forgot about Blossom and her tragic demise.

This apparently was not the universal response of the pre-school parents. For example, another mom who is herself extremely nice— if not quite exactly as nice as the pre-school teacher— happens to work as a grief counselor with children. So she and her son sat down and discussed their Blossom memories and discovered they would be best memorialized in an art project/sympathy poster for the pre-school. Evan must have done the artistic scribbles and multi-media while his mom wrote a warm remembrance of Blossom in bold letters.

Generally speaking I think it’s really cool that Alice taught herself to read at four years old. Not because it makes her some kind of kid-genius, but because I have loved to read since I was a tiny person and it gives us something in common. It’s really quite amazing after the tedious toddler years to have an activity we both enjoy equally. “Let’s have a cuddle-read!” I’ll say enthusiastically, and she’ll dive into some volume of Little House on the Prairie while I devour a good murder mystery. She’s warm and she smells good and we can sit under an afghan for a whole afternoon. Nothing comes without a price, however, and I discovered just one of the pitfalls of early reading when we opened the door of the pre-school to be greeted by the memorial installation. With greater accusation than you would think a person under three feet tall could muster, Alice turned on me: “Blossom DIED?”

In the end, the death of Blossom was not a particularly devastating loss for Alice. Perhaps they didn’t have such wonderful memories after all; maybe Al just wasn’t at a place in her development to really process the event. Maybe Liz and I are not completely insensitive twits, maybe our parental radar told us that this was not a crucial moment. But the Blossom adventure did tip me off to the fact that, as with every other thing Alice has learned in her short little life, I would be called upon to hold the space wherein she could discover loss and grief.

Along this parenting journey there have been things Alice has taught herself, like the aforementioned reading and also charming the wits out of most adults. There are the things I continue to try to teach her, like using utensils for eating. And then there are the things we’re learning together, like how to honor and survive the loss of someone you have loved. We’ve gotten a lot of practice this year.

Our family lost two loved ones, one anticipated and one a sucker punch of the worst kind. When my grandma began her final decline last winter I really, truly believed I was ready. She had been careening towards—while steadfastly refusing— her death for ten years, ever since she looked into the casket at my grandfather’s funeral and wailed, “That was my whole life!” They met on the sidewalks of New York when she was 12 years old. Since his death, she endured a decade of physical and mental decline and surrender to the anger and depression that darkened her entire life. I had been missing my stylish, acerbic, energetic grandmother for a long time. Our visits dwindled to obligatory biennial bedside hours when she would noticeably brighten at Alice’s presence, and if we were lucky we might get a glimpse of her old sarcastic self with a well timed one liner. But she was not really living, and her pain and fear and illness were increasing steadily, and we all wanted to see her released from the physical suffering and confusion. So when the news came that she had passed, I thought I felt relief, I thought I felt sadness, I thought I was okay.

I didn’t forget to tell Alice that Grandma Dottie had died. She asked me if Grandma Dottie was in heaven now—all that Little House in the Prairie has given her a fairly complete Calvinist vocabulary. I told her that Bobbi—my mother—probably believed that Dottie had gone to heaven to be with God, and that that belief gave Bobbi comfort. I don’t know if that was developmentally appropriate—I didn’t have time to call Cindy and ask when we teach these things in R.E.. Unfortunately, I did forget to ask myself what I believed about where Grandma Dottie had gone, and worse, I forgot to ask myself what would give me comfort.

To give myself a break here, I could explain that no one in my family was talking about these things either. My mother sighed heavily and added “funeral planning” to her perpetual “To Do” list. She scheduled the burial on a day she felt would be most “convenient” for people, as if the ceremonies of grief were an imposition on our busy lives. There are reasons for this, and I’ve spent enough hours in therapy to recognize Denial when he stops by. But this was the context within which I forgot to leave a space for grieving.

So the real teaching and learning happened a couple of days later when I tried to undertake a simple gardening task—screening a bucket of compost—and came completely unhinged. There was crying, swearing and throwing things; there was broken lumber in the driveway and swathes of dirt in the garage. There was Liz leading my wide-eyed girl away from me and saying in a steady voice, “Mama is feeling really sad and angry about Grandma Dottie dying. Let’s give her a little space.” And a little while later I calmed down, and Alice gave me an extra big hug to help me feel better. So we all learned that day and in the days that followed that people feel really sad and angry when the people we love die, and that it’s good to give them space some of the time, and sometimes to give them extra hugs.

Several years ago, when my grandmother first moved to the nursing home, my mom and sister worked like dogs to clean up her house and, for a while, rented it out. But in the end the house was sold, and razed and something emblematic of our era of conspicuous consumption was erected in the place of my grandparents’ modesty and thrift. Theirs was the only family ever to live in that tiny, tidy 1940s ranch house. I have not visited the spot previously known as my grandparent’s house; I don’t know if I ever will. My mind knows, but my heart does not really understand, that my daughter will never wrap her small hand around the worn red knob on their clattering screen door— a knob placed a good foot below the standard level, so that a very small person might be able to let herself into the kitchen to get some Oreos, or a handful of Hershey’s kisses from her grandfather’s pocket.

It’s that “never-again”-ness that dealt the body blow when we lost our friend Janice in August. At 52 she moved from diagnosis of an aggressive form of ovarian cancer to death in the space of three weeks. This was not a friend in the ordinary sense of the word, someone with whom I might hang out or talk on the phone or share confidences. Instead, this was a member of my sangha, my martial arts community, which I spoke of at length in my summer sermon. This was a friend like a family member, a beloved one of a beloved whole.

Janice loved and kept chickens, and in the days leading up to and following her death, I saw our little sangha as a scratching brood of hens after the hawk has struck down one of their own. We pulled our chicken heads down into our necks and looked up at the dangerous sky, and around at our sisters, and knew that any one could be taken at any time. We felt very small. Grief blew a hole into each of us—you could almost see the doors of our hearts swinging on their hinges and opening to the the wide air beyond. We were crazy with unbelieving and each of us stumbled in turn. I heard the speech of the women I most admire broken with choking sobs. I saw my teacher kneeling and bending her body to place her forehead to the ground, literally bowed with grief. What we had to offer one another was so little in the face of so much pain: Breath. Presence. Compassion. Love. It felt inadequate to hold the enormity of our loss, but it did hold. We bowed, but we did not break.

One of the hardest things , for me, about being a parent, is the sense that the buck stops with me—that I am the safety net, the provider of stability, the grown up. Before I became a mom, I had occasion to look around during a medical emergency involving my spouse and wonder who was going to take care of her. It was an embarrassingly long few moments later that I realized it would be me. It wasn’t a lack of love but a lack of confidence, and an incredulity that this is what adulthood amounts to: acting as if you know what you’re doing, and then finding yourself in charge.

A hierarchical community such as a martial arts school provides people to look up to. It’s part of the system. Seeing my teachers bowed but not broken told me what Alice could see and learn from my grief—that the grown ups could be very deeply wounded but remain whole. That we could be sad and we would all still be safe. Alice danced into the charged room where I collected the email updates about Janice’s rapidly declining condition and read only the relevant words to Liz, not being able to read entire messages aloud: “Cancer.” “More serious than we thought.” “Hospice.” Alice was near when the early morning call came that Janice had died. Alice was alone with me when a joyous song of celebration came over the stereo speakers and I got knocked over by one of those memories that is carried by music—a visceral relocation to a moment I shared with Janice many years ago: hearing that song, being delighted to be together, and looking into her sparkly eyes.

When Janice died, we didn’t wait for a convenient time to grieve. We started right away. My sadness was dark and heavy and I trudged through ordinary life. A day after Janice’s death Alice asked, “Is anything fun going to happen today?” and I truly thought, “No, nothing fun will ever happen again.” But it wasn’t true. On the very day of Janice’s death, when we went to gather with friends and view her body as was her wish, we dropped Alice with a wonderful family from this UU community, who folded her into their multiple child household where she had, by all reports, tons of fun.

Alice was five. She had fun every day, even when when it was hard for her moms to keep up. At the supermarket a few days later Alice sighed and took a deep breath to get her thoughts organized. “I know that we’re all really sad because Janice died,” she said, working very hard to be clear. “But could we just pretend that that’s not what’s happening?” I saw my old friend Denial, and I understood him better than I ever had. He had a job to do, and that was to make sure we all kept having some fun.

In an email update, Janice’s partner told us, “We know that death is not the enemy.” Janice went to her death without regret. She loved her life and in her death she was celebrated by hundreds who loved her and learned from her. This lesson is incredible to me, and to say it is a gift seems too little. It is a precious treasure and in all my sadness, I feel so lucky to have walked a little while with this woman whose life and death radiated with presence. I had the same realization watching Janice’s partner and friends bear the horror of losing her that I did when I birthed Alice. The insight was this: as unbelievable as it seemed, we had the the tools to handle it. Our sangha practice is about being present, it’s about being kind to ourselves and one another. It’s why Janice had an incredibly wonderful life and a peaceful death. It’s how her friends came to bear the unbearable task of letting her go.

After twenty years in a Buddhist influenced art, it still surprises me that I have any skill at being present. I was raised by someone who schedules funerals to cause the least disruption to everyone’s calendar. And I am so imperfect as a parent. Sometimes this parenting gig feels like an endless round of forgiving myself for falling short of my best self. I want to give my girl every tool for having a wonderful life, and I believe that being present, living mindfully, is one of the great secrets. So when the sound of Miriam Mikaba singing knocked me over with sadness, I told Alice why. “I am thinking of Janice, and I am so sad that I will never see her face again.” And Alice said to me with all the bright kindness of her enormous heart, “Mama! Tell me what she looked like. I will draw you a picture.”

As I was writing the first draft of this sermon this fall, I received a death announcement for the Guinea Pig Broccoli Niblet. Broccoli Niblet was the adoptive pet of two successive families with whom my household is very close, so her death affected a number of children I love. I was relieved to learn that Broccoli had not suffered, that she had an easy death, and that she was put to rest in a bucolic spot near the swing set. When I told Alice the news she said, “There’s a lot of getting sick and dying going on around here.” Isn’t that the truth. We were glad to have it said plainly and to know our feelings on the matter. And I sat right down to write a condolence note.