It's Easter

I just spent the last hour reading poetry on death, crying through most of them, and thinking each one would be my choice for my Easter poem. But then the next, I always loved the next too. I finally stopped reading on this one.

The Voice

By Thomas Hardy 1840–1928
     

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you are not as you were

When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

Standing as when I drew near to the town

Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness

Travelling across the wet mead to me here,

You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,

Heard no more again far or near?

      Thus I; faltering forward,

      Leaves around me falling,

Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,

      And the woman calling.

From: http://catchingdays.cynthianewberrymartin.com/2015/04/01/how-we-spend-our-days-katrina-kenison/

"My husband props up his iPad at the breakfast table, eats his oatmeal, and reads the Times online. Yesterday morning, I did the same—a mistake. The front-page story was about a young black vet in Atlanta suffering from PTSD who was running naked through his apartment complex. It was perfectly clear to anyone with eyes that he was unarmed. A cop shot him anyway. Twice through the chest. Once my tears began, they wouldn’t stop. I spent the day in aimless mourning, grieving for all that is wrong—with me, with us, with our country, our world. I took a long walk and made soup and talked with both my sons and didn’t write a word.

Today I sit down with my bowl of fruit and the book that arrived in the mail yesterday, Abigail Thomas’s new memoir about aging and writing, illness and grief and friendship. The title is perfect for those of us who’ve rounded that corner into the homestretch of middle-age, who struggle daily to make our own peace with life as it is: What Comes Next and How to Like It. We are all hoping to learn the secret.

“I wasn’t writing all the time,” this marvelous writer admits on page nineteen. “Days, sometimes weeks would go by without my doing anything at all. I began to feel like something left too long in the vegetable drawer. Then I had the bright idea of starting a weekly writing workshop. There would be a point to me!”

No wonder I love her. And oh, the joy of beginning the day with good sentences—priming the pump rather than bleeding the heart.

My husband fills a Tupperware container with the remains of last night’s dinner, brushes his teeth, claps a baseball cap on his head and makes his exit. I’m grateful for his good cheer, his work, his steadiness. It’s not lost on me these days that while I’m between books, he’s earning the salary that allows my life to be what it is: a luxury of time. For the next nine hours, the house is mine.
Resisting Abby’s good company (this is hard, but it’s a writing day) I close my book and survey the scene.

Once, a student in my own weekly writing class told us that she writes every day, all the time—in doctors’ waiting rooms, at stoplights, while on hold on the telephone, in the middle of the night. She flipped open a well-used notebook full of her dense scribbles—snippets of essays and scenes and dialogue and prose poems awaiting her finishing touch. I was in awe of her output. It occurred to me that, really, I should be taking a writing class from her.

Were it not for the words I somehow have managed to write, and the thousands of hours I’ve spent sitting in my kitchen and staring out the window in order to produce them, I could not call myself a writer. I do not write at stoplights or in the middle of the night or while on hold. Not ever. I write in hard-won secret pockets of time, in solitude. I sit still as a hunter perched in a blind in the forest, breathing quietly, waiting for words to come into view.

This morning, before I reach for my laptop, I need to get a few things done. I water the houseplants, fill the birdfeeder, start a load of laundry and vacuum the dog hair off the floor. Scrub the stubborn remnants from last night’s roasting pan, carry the recycling out to the bin, straighten the magazines on the coffee table, scribble a grocery list for later.

Setting the house to rights is unavoidably, irrevocably, part of my process. It’s not always easy to know where to draw the line. The other day my friend Maezen, author of three fine books and an archive of brilliant articles, and a Buddhist priest who knows a thing or two about discipline, posted this on Facebook: “I’ve washed every shower curtain in the house. I think this means it is time to write again.”

My first thought: “No, no, there must be grout to clean yet.” My house is never tidier than when I’m preparing to head off into the silent woods of myself. Before I can slip away, I must always rinse out the sink, fold the dishtowel.

Now, my house-wifely duties done, I stand once again at the kitchen counter, gaze out to the mountains, and call my friend. I listen to a heart-rending account of last days and final hours, family members arriving, memories spilling forth. My task in this moment is simply to be here, phone at my ear, holding space for her tears. It occurs to me that “How we spend our days” goes hand-in-hand with “This too, and this too.” Perhaps they are two sides of the same coin, reminding us simply to embrace all the truths of our lives with wise and tender hearts."

Why can't we?

Taken from the Life Learning FB page:

Views are changing.

"I'm not anti-college. College is the right path for certain individuals and for certain specific career choices, yes. But.... college is not the be-all, end-all; and college is not the path for everyone; and a college degree should not be a status symbol. It's a tool (an expensive tool), and the decision to go shouldn't be taken lightly. The antiquated notion that *everyone* should aspire to go to college baffles me. There are many many different paths one can take to a happy, healthy, and productive life, and many of them do not involve college at all."

Robert Reich

I know a high school senior who can’t sleep because she’s so worried about whether she’ll be accepted at the college of her choice. This is nuts. It’s also absu...rd that a four-year college education should be the only gateway into the American middle class. Not everyone is suited to college, nor does everyone need it. We desperately need a world-class system of vocational-technical education. Many of tomorrow’s good jobs will go to technicians who install, service, repair, and upgrade high-tech machinery. Even today, it’s hard to find skilled plumbers and electricians.

Yet we cling to a cultural conceit that four years of college is necessary for everyone, and look down on those who don’t have a college degree. Germany – whose median wage (after taxes and transfers) is higher than ours – trains many of its young people to be world-class technicians. Why can’t we?

Someone who is unafraid to be herself

Ok so this would take an essay I know, but this kind of idea Emma Stone is expressing here is what I want to teach my girls about beauty. I don't always like the "redefine beauty" campaign ads because I feel like they keep the focus on appearance and I'd rather tell my girls something like,

"Yes, it's true - our culture defines beauty as A, B, and C, and cross-culturally around the world throughout all of time everyone has defined "symmetry" as beautiful. Which means how outwardly beautiful you are deemed is largely luck, and trying to change that tends to to be a soul-sucking goal on which to spend your limited money, energy and time on. The truth is also that most of us do it to some extent but "living an examined life" about how much you want to give toward caring about your outward appearance is very important, because everytime you give toward trying to be more beautiful you will have less to give toward other areas of life.

What I find helpful to remember is that someone else is always going to be more beautiful than you. The less that bothers you, the more space you'll have to become who you actually are - a woman full of confidence, humor and grace. And most people agree that those qualities make for a profoundly better life than traditional beauty."

The consensus also seems to be that the way in which I will have the most influence in helping them learn this is to believe it myself. I really like that.

Everyone has two lives

from: http://www.katrinakenison.com/2014/09/07/life/

"...And yet, what life hands us, again and again, is not the simple ease we ask for, but something different: challenge, loss, pain. What choice do we have, but to figure out how to accept all of it — the care-free afternoons; the charmed moments; the ordinary days; and, too, the unexpected blows that bring us to our knees, the news that makes us want to curl into a ball on the floor and weep. (Maybe growing old – or, rather, growing up – means realizing that there will always be charmed moments, even in the bleakest of times, if we’re attuned to notice them, and that there is simply no such thing as a charmed life. Not for me, or for you, or for anyone.)

So it is that I’ve spent this lovely, mild, gone-too-soon summer finding my way in territory that is at once brand new and profoundly familiar. I know from past experience that grief and grace are two sides of the same coin. That healing is always possible and that it happens in the most unexpected ways. That laughter and tears can share the same moment, the same breath. That there is light even in the darkest night. That faith and mystery are inextricably intertwined, bound by wonder. And I know that showing up and quietly doing what needs to be done in the moment is a more helpful response than either dramatic rescue attempts or worry. For me, perhaps the greatest surprise of the last couple of months has been discovering how much gratitude and sadness it’s possible for one heart to hold at once.

...Even so, finding meaning in a situation that seems utterly meaningless, random, and unfair is hard, slow work. The “new normal” keeps changing. It’s human nature to want answers and plans and promises. And instead we have only the present moment, mystery, and hope. (Of course, we’re kidding ourselves if we think any life is predictable, any outcome assured, any promise a guarantee.) But slowly, bit by bit, the incomprehensible becomes more manageable.

Surrendering to things as they are, we find a new way forward. Despair softens into acceptance. Fear of what might be in the future gives way to a desire to ease another’s path today. Meaning goes hand in hand with connection. And the one thing I know for sure is that we become our best, most compassionate, most resilient selves by stepping outside ourselves. I suspect we all do better when our hearts are fully engaged. And really, as we grow older, as things we love are taken away, one after another, what choice do we have, but to learn to give even more? To love even more? To bring more and more peace and more and more kindness into the world?

As Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein writes in Happiness is an Inside Job, the small, deeply wise, deeply consoling book that has lived in my purse and that has nourished my soul all summer: “Perhaps [this is] the clue about the happiness inherent in caring connections. The frightened ‘I’ who struggles is replaced by the ‘we’ who do this difficult life together, looking after one another. Holding hands.” Yes. Oh, yes.

So, maybe it comes down to a simple fact: to live fully is to allow ourselves to be broken open time after time, even as we grow in awareness and appreciation of all the ways we are upheld and mended and supported by one another. This is life as it really is – so much goodness and beauty, so much unwarranted suffering, so many fragile hearts beating as one.

This morning, I woke up early, while it was still dark, and lay in bed for a long while, listening as the birds began their song, one solo voice swelling and then, within moments, joined by a full-scale dawn chorus. Just after sunrise, Steve and I headed out for a walk with Tess, pausing to marvel at the layers of mist draped over the mountains, at the clear, golden light above and at the sun breaking through clouds.   Later, drinking coffee on the porch and reading the Sunday New York Times, I came across some lines excerpted from a letter by Steven Sottloff, the second American journalist slain by ISIS.

Reading these words, words written in captivity and smuggled out by a former cellmate of Sottloff’s, my heart broke for this innocent man, for his grieving family, for the suffering that yielded such urgent wisdom. And now, sharing them here, weaving this small connection between you and me and a young man whose life was violently taken, my heart heals just a little bit, too. We each awaken by degrees, our bruised hearts softening and growing more supple as we learn just how much is at stake, how much we need one another, how much we have to offer, what a beautiful tapestry we make.

“Live your life to the fullest and fight to be happy,” Steven urged his family. And then this: “Everyone has two lives. The second one begins when you realize you have only one.”

"But this time I chose it, didn't I?"

My good friend co-founded this organization that fights sex trafficking and is committed to helping the victims in the process. Friends that want to donate or volunteer to help a non-profit, passionate, smart, committed organization should click on over and check it out. Or friend her on Facebook (Rebecca Olsen McHood) if you are up for reading posts like these but with more practical steps for how to help the victims of sex trafficking who may not be able to find their way out without more support and ethical laws.

Rebecca really does inspire me more than I can say. And she's super fun to be around. And I can't wait to see her again in March and take a picture with her in all our change-the-world glory that I should already have to put here. For now, this smile of hers will have to do.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/as-an-ex-prostitute-i-urge-all-the-political-parties-to-commit-to-the-sex-buyer-law-9810735.html

"...I eventually managed to escape my ‘boyfriend’. But afterwards I was a car-crash. I needed money to fund my addiction and I was completely messed up. I didn't know how to 'do' normal after years of what my therapist now describes as torture. I felt like I belonged on my hands and knees servicing men. So I went back to what I knew – prostitution. But this time I chose it, didn't I? In my experience, some cages are invisible.
 

Being in prostitution, the abnormal becomes normal. Sex acts became as mundane as making a cup of tea. All the boundaries I had taken for granted were demolished – like the ability to control what happened to my body and the right to say no. Goals shift and mine was survival. I did what I had to do: presented a smile when I had to, massaging egos as well as massaging much more. I started working in a brothel, thinking this might help to keep me safe. It didn’t. You can't make prostitution safe. A nice room and a clean bedspread changes nothing. The violence and hate are part of the transaction: if the johns valued you they wouldn't be using you simply as a body.
 

...The sex buyers didn't want me as myself - a human being with hopes and dreams and feelings. They wanted a living, breathing sex-doll. Someone that wouldn't complain if it hurt. Someone who would flirt and smile and moan orgasmically whatever they did. It wasn't personal. And yet it was so personal. They were touching me, looking at me, inside of me.
 

...What would the UK adopting the Sex Buyer Law mean to me? It would mean that the law would stand alongside me, not against me. It would recognise that what happened to me was abuse. The johns would be under the spotlight for once and held legally responsible for their actions. Exiting services would be put in place for women who are trying to get out - something that would have made a huge difference to me. I was lucky to get out - there was no help available. Even now I'm out of it, it's hard to heal when society's view of prostitution is that it's inevitable, that it's just ‘work’. Prostitution is not a woman's right - something to be protected. It is the end of women's rights. It is about men's power over vulnerable women and girls.
 

...So I hope all the political parties commit to the Sex Buyer Law and that whoever is elected to government in 2015 acts quickly to bring it in. It would mean the law recognising just how damaging prostitution is to the women it uses. After years of having my experiences dismissed - that would mean everything to me."

I can't believe how present the temptation is to "dismiss my ability to contribute in loving ways to a crumbling world."

This guy's writing has been so helpful to me, to remember these kinds of things:

http://drkellyflanagan.com/2014/07/09/why-i-dont-believe-in-grace-anymore/#more-2796

"...I stand in the kitchen with my bad mood and my wife’s grace. And the brilliance of her love quickly becomes clear. Her attack would have only rooted me deeper in my anger. Instead, she has given me acceptance in the midst of my anger, the space to feel it and experience the fullness of my self.

I still feel grumpy, but I discover there is something else there inside of me: I want to apologize.

I go to the bedroom and I tell her I’m sorry, and her response is quick and her grace is complete:
 “You had a long day, you’re allowed to be in a bad mood, and you’re a good man, I knew you’d apologize.”

My wife saw my goodness, even in the midst of my junk. She believed in my light, even when all she could see was darkness. She believed in who I am and who I can be, even while I was being something else.

I used to say I believe in grace. I don’t say that anymore. Now I say I have known grace, and what I know is this: grace believes in me.

How Grace Finally Changes Everything

The healing power of grace does not end with the embrace of our darkness.

When we find pockets of grace in this world—when our true self is finally allowed to the surface—we discover all sorts of beautiful things entwined with our darkness. Like dragging the ocean and coming up with a bunch of seaweed. And some invaluable pearls.

As grace calls our true self forth, we discover magnificent parts of us we didn’t know were there—passions built into us, a purpose sewn into our DNA. Our identity is washed clean and we begin to see ourselves for what we inherently are: creators of beauty, order, and abundance. We no longer dismiss our ability to contribute in loving ways to a crumbling world. We take the grace inside of us, it becomes our guide, and we become it.

We quit dead end jobs and risk our family’s financial security to earn a teaching degree. We stop drinking and we start coaching. We quit living at the office and we invest in the life of our family. We trade in fear for boldness. We quit hiding in our homes and we start risking in the world by uncaging our ideas and our creativity. We stop waiting on perfection and we start wading into the mess.

When we quit seeking change and begin to seek grace, we let go of our frantic effort to be like someone else, and we discover a blessed peace with who we are. Finally.