Thank God for music and musicians. Today I'm grateful for "Lost Girls" by Tilly and the Wall, and "No Children" by The Mountain Goats. But most of all I'm thankful for the poem, "Having It Out With Melancholy" by Jane Kenyon.
"If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure." -A.P. Chekov
Don't look at me as though I'm crazy.
All children feel panic deep in the purple night
when they wake from dreams
about the enormity of what they've done
in kicking down an ant hill.
All children seem to hear and feel,
too late, the ants struggling in the dirt
beneath the sunny crust,
suffocating slowly in their tunnels.
They hear the orphaned ones
screaming for their mothers
trapped beneath the rubble.
They hear the ants cry,
"They hate us for our freedom!"
at rallies to rebuild the grief-stricken colony.
All these little children run out into the moonlight
while their parents sleep, unknowing.
These midnight mourners cry in shame
with dirt-streaked faces.
They know full well
the late-night ant bites
don't hurt enough to make up
for what they've done.
Dad: Harper, what would you like to thank God for tonight?
Harper: Daddy.
Dad: Oh, good, that's sweet. Anything else?
Harper: Beards.
Dad: Beards, okay. What else?
Harper: Teeth.
(Teeth? So, basically, she's thankful for everything on her dad's face. I guess I am, too.)
So, this was last night. This morning out of nowhere, Harper informs us that she would like to thank God for boobies. "My boobies," she clarified as we choked on our laughter. I almost told her that she didn’t have boobies, but then I stopped, realizing that junior high boys would tell her that soon enough.
I’ll never forget the day in ninth grade when in Speech and Drama we had to do an exercise requiring a flat surface. “I got your flat surface!” yelled one of my male classmates. “Kristen, come over here, they say we need a flat surface!”
I am mystified by people who say high school was the greatest time of their life.
We saw the Avett Brothers in Tulsa last weekend. Awesome.
The gift- and the curse- of good books and poetry is that it changes the way you view certain things. I blame The Lord of the Rings for the anthropomorphism I harbor for trees. Menacing or protective, all trees are living things that watch the world with silent eyes. Which may explain my gut-wrenching reaction as I saw a tree being uprooted- murdered- the other day. In the midst of the still and windless trees that lined the road, I saw one shaking wildly, trembling as though it was crying or in great pain. When I got closer, I saw that a bulldozer was knocking it over, and I drove by just at the moment her roots were ripped from the earth. The tree didn’t make a sound, though I knew it was screaming in pain and fear if I had only had ears to hear. It broke my heart. Tolkein, you bastard!
Sometimes people ask me how I am doing. I never know quite what to say. I hate going to the doctor and trying to explain. So many people suffer far worse than I do and at times the whole world seems to throb with pain like a hammered thumb. But that sounds a little crazy when you’re sitting in an anaseptic office across from a total stranger. My sister congratulates me that at least I’m sane enough to know when I’m sounding…or thinking…crazy.
When I was a school nurse, I had a little boy that came in almost every morning but would never speak a word. It took me a while to figure out that he was starving- for food among many other things. I think his pain was so great he was unable to speak.
There really aren’t appropriate words for pain. Those of us who hurt hesitate to speak because the words- the true words- are too heavy to come out of our mouths. Deep pain, be it physical or mental- feels impossible to convey.
When one has been through great pain, there is a secret language that can be read by others who have been through a similar burning. These ones who have made it through the fire, scarred forever, love you and hold your hand and watch you burn, for they know that is all they can do. As Wendell Berry says, “We burn and see by our own light.”
Love the ones who speak the less.
So.
I really love Jesus.
But...there are still a few problems that I struggle with, even with the Carpenter. A few years ago, I decided to read through the New Testament in the Message version. I got half-way through Matthew and put it down. I told Micah, “Jesus seems mean in this version. Angry and short-tempered. Like a housewife with too many children.” I guess he did have twelve of them, after all.
Also, what about the time he told the disciples to “cast not their pearls before swine”? I'm not sure I like Jesus comparing humans to swine, especially on the days I find the metaphor apropos. I really want to attribute that statement to Paul. Doesn’t that sound exactly like something Paul would say? (Except if Paul said it, the swine would equal women instead of people who don’t care to listen. I’m kicking Paul’s ass when I get to heaven. Just once. And then I’ll be good.) It also sounds like something I might say at the end of a long day. But I don’t want Jesus to say it! Jesus is supposed to be more long-suffering than I am, right? Right??
And then, the whole “Dogs get the crumbs from my table” story. I feel like a dog most days, and I think what I get most of the time is crumbs, which is more than I deserve, so perhaps that is how I should read the story, but still find it disturbing. Is this the same Christ who spent time with the woman at the well in Samaria? I wonder if the disciples ever took some artistic liberties?
"With all those books upon your shelves
there is no need for certainty..."
-Beat Radio
"With all the sand that gets into this world
we should all be mfkin' pearls."
-Antje Duvekot
There's a woman at work whose voice makes me feel constipated.
(Voices have always affected me strongly. I have a friend whose speaking voice is musical, which is lovely. But by the end of the day, I am so thankful for my twenty minute ride home with nothing but Silence. It gives my ears a chance to let all the little annoying sounds and words to trickle out and get blown away on the breeze, so that by the time I get home, they are clear enough to hear my favorite voices: Micah's and Harper's.)
It's Monday night. Long day, for everyone, everywhere. I was telling a friend today that nurses are largely a group of unhappy people. Way over half the people I work with every day are unhappy...every day. It's strange and difficult to be working around that many unhappy people, and the challenge is to still find ways to reach out when I'm not all that happy myself.
Tonight Harper had another freak-out night terror. I tried for thirty minutes to get her to calm down, and I used all the tricks in my mommy bag. No go. Thirty minutes later she's still screaming and now screaming for Daddy. Sigh. Fine, Micah, let's see what you've got.
Ten minutes later the house is an oasis of calm. So quiet you could feel the Xanax kicking in and hear the angels faintly humming. "Okay- what did you do?" Micah tells me that he did all the same things I did. Sigh. But then he says, "Sometimes when she's having a really bad night...I pray with her."
What?
What?!
Okay- so I have a difficult time with prayer. But so does Micah. Lately we approach the christian faith in a more practical, social way. We work for the Kingdom. We care for the poor and the earth, forgive enemies, blah blah blah. So I was mystified to hear that he had been praying with our child behind my back. ;)
"For how long? What do you say when you pray with her? Does she like it? What have you told her about God? How much do you think she understands?"
She's only two. I didn't know we'd started! Having not wanted to tell her that God is a Big Man in the Sky, and after Christmas and playing with "baby Jesus" figurines, I haven't said much. Micah tells me that Harper likes to pray, that he prays all the same things I would, that she probably doesn't understand it but it seems to soothe her, that she loves to say "amen", and that for now, she thinks Jesus lives at church.
Then I'm all teary-eyed, thinking about him praying in there with her, and not telling me because he didn't want to seem overly spiritual or braggy. Then I'm all, "You've got to fill me in on this stuff! I want to watch you do the spiritual formation stuff, even though I have no idea how!"
Then he's all back-tracking, "Oh, I don't know about prayer. But, hey, it's calming. I don't know what's really happening there. Maybe it's just the neurological effect of meditation on the brain..."
Whatever, you big goofy prayer warrior. I don't buy the cynical act, not tonight. You're a big prayer softie, and I'm on to you.
So Micah wins the parent award again, but at least I get to watch him work.
A few weeks ago we had our pigs “processed”. Micah picked an independent, family-owned and operated place in Chickasha and took Harp with him to drop off the pigs. (Traumatic for Harp: “Hug pigs! No bacon!”) A week later, Micah asked me to go pick the meat up. As I pulled up to the plant, a smell assaulted my nostrils that can only be described as liquid death. I opened the car door and passed out. When I regained consciousness down in the gravel of the parking lot, I swore that I would become vegan. But I still needed to carry out my farm-wifely duties, so I entered Garcia Processing Plant, blank check in hand, fighting back nausea.
Here’s what I saw: a clean cinder-block building, sheet-rocked walls not covered in paint, several workers who spoke a hybrid Spanglish, a huge American flag stretched across the wall, and a glimpse of a very clean and frigid killing room filled with gloved people of many races who were wrapping cuts of meat into pristine white paper packages. While they boxed my order and washed their hands, I began to look around more closely. One wall featured many grade-school hand-drawn pictures. The artist had clearly been indoctrinated already, evidenced by the “Just Say No to Smoking” propaganda (sample caption: “Stop Smoking or Go to Jail!”). But what caught my heart were two penciled pictures, taped up side by side. A little girl cries in the first picture, which reads, “Before Garcia Processing Plant Came Into Our Lives.” An identical girl grins in the next picture, which reads, “After Garcia Processing Plant Came Into Our Lives”.
By the time the white woman with no teeth, the black man in falling-apart clothes, and Hispanic gentleman who spoke no English came out with my “puerco”, I was a little teary. I walked in believing myself to be in a Sinclair Lewis novel, I walked out inside The Grapes of Wrath.
As writers (or crazy people) will, I began speculating about this nameless eight year-old artist and how bad things had to be for her family that she would draw pictures about her gratitude for a meat processing plant. I think it’s likely that this Plant gave her father and/or mother jobs, when possibly they had had no jobs before…possibly because of their education level, lack of English language skills, or race.
I called Micah on the way home, my car weighed down with a serious load of puerco, and said, “I don’t know that I ever want to eat meat again, but if you do, the Garcia Processing Plant is the only place we should use from now on. Por favor.”
When we ask Harper if she knows how much we love her, she spreads out her arms as far as she can and yells, "Toooooooooooo much!" The girl is smart.
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