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Inspired by Eve

Ronna Detrick is one of the first people I met online, and our initial digital connection blossomed into phone calls, emails, and the persistent hope of an in-person weekend sometime soon.  She writes about spirituality, about what it means to live with grace in this world, and more than almost anyone else she makes me believe in the existence of a benevolent presence out there in the universe.  When I read Ronna’s writing, I am able to let go of my white-knuckled grip on every single part of my life and trust, if only for a moment, that there’s something good, and kind, and gentle, out there taking care of me.

Today Ronna publishes a beautiful work called Inspired by Eve, which is, in her own words, an invitation to self-trust, deep knowing, and a delicious life of desire (along with the discovery of a God who offers the same).  As an aside I’ll note that Eve has always been a figure of tremendous importance to me.  I’ll never forget the junior paper (a precursor to our senior thesis) I wrote in college, which was titled Eve: the Heroine of Milton’s Paradise Lost.  I’m pretty sure my 75 year old male professor had never read anything like it.

I am fortunate enough to have read Ronna’s wise, thoughtful, provocative work and I urge you all to give yourself the same gift.  Ronna makes faith tangible, accessible, and provides a safe place to explore all the ways in which we can each feel at home in a world that can be scary and chaotic.

To celebrate the publication of Inspired by Eve, I an honored to share a guest post Ronna wrote for all of you.

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Do you ever wonder of the bedtime stories Eve told her children?

Whether you know her as sacred historical narrative or ancient mythic archetype, imagine the tales she would have told. The kind you didn’t want to end. The kind you’d work to not fall asleep to. The kind you’d ask her to tell again and again, night after night. The kind you could picture, feel, and almost taste. The kind you’d will yourself back to whenever you were slightly afraid of the dark or feeling just a little bit alone.

If you’re anything like me, there are times (if not long, painful seasons) in which you long for the calm, lulling voice of a mother, her cool hand soothing your brow, and fantastical stories that accompany you into the most mysterious and beautiful of places; stories that keep a spark of hope alive and burning within; stories that remind you that maybe, just maybe, such beauty is possible yet again. Because truth-be-told, whether or not you’re still slightly afraid of the dark, you do still feel more than just a little bit alone. At least sometimes.

Eve is that mother. To her two sons, Cain and Abel, both born east of Eden. And to me, to you, to us. We need her. And we need her stories – in full and radiant daytime light. Hearing them, hearing her, changes everything.

Sadly, we’ve forgotten what her voice sounds like. It’s been drowned out by a different story – now centuries old, and oppressive in its weight and weariness – of succumbed temptation, willful disobedience, dangerous desire, sinful choices, consequences and curses, banishment, and shame.

But if you listen closely, still she speaks. If you are restless, still she soothes. And if you seek, still she accompanies, guides, befriends, and mothers. Still, she longs to offer you hope in her real stories of gardens and green, animals and trees, delicious fruit and crafty snakes, walks in the cool of the day with God, passionate desire and eyes wide open…

Once upon a time I lived in the most beautiful of gardens. Everything I ever needed was already mine. I was loved. I was strong. I was smart. I was free. I was passionate. I was full of desire. And God was there – intimate, kind, protective, and real. Once upon a time you lived there too…

You can again.

I am convinced that Eve longs to tell you her story and, that like the best of mothers, she will whisper it into your ear again and again and again. Even more, I am convinced that in hearing it anew, yours will be changed. The darkness will flee. Desire will guide. And God will show up.

Listen…

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Ronna Detrick provides Spiritual Direction to both individuals and businesses. Picture a hybrid of the iconic Oprah Winfrey and the slightly-irreverent Anne Lamott and you’d have a glimpse of both her love for significant, meaningful conversation (without the national media platform) and her impassioned writing bent (without the dreadlocks). She gets at deep truths and talks about a God and faith you’re hungry for. Learn more.

The soundtrack of those long, dark weeks

I sit at my desk in my small third-floor office, the only sound the click of the computer keyboard as I write a few sentences in Scrivener.  I listen to You Are My Sunshine wafting through Whit’s closed bedroom door and sit back in my chair, quiet, letting the song wash over me.  The song changes to Puff the Magic Dragon and my eyes fill with tears.  I go stand in his dim, nightlight-lit room, watching him sleep.

The shadowy room is full of ghosts who whisper to me.  I can hear the faint squeak of the yellow rocker as I sit in it, pushing back and forth, back and forth.  I hold a sleeping baby Grace and my tears splash on the blanket in which she is swaddled.  I lean over and plant a kiss on her forehead, my face wet with my crying, and murmur to her I am sorry.

I listen to those long-ago years, listen to the story they tell of a mother as newborn as her baby daughter, of a woman startled by the yawning cavern that has opened up right in the middle of her life.  I hear myself rushing through bedtime, desperate for an hour when I’m nobody’s mother.  I listen to Come Away To Sea, to Blackbird, to Baby Mine, to the soundtrack of those long, dark weeks and months.  I listen and I ache, wishing I could have those nights back.  In part because I want to do them differently, with more love, more patience, less frustration, less impatience.  Because I want my first experience of motherhood with my first baby to have been different.  But also just because I want those nights back.  Every single one of them.

To listen to You Are My Sunshine, to hear myself sing it in a whisper to a sleeping baby in my arms.  One more time.

Please click over to Momalom for lots of beautiful writing on today’s 5 for 5 topic, Listening.

The afternoon of life

I am 37 years old.  I’m not going to pretend it is without angst, this early middle age of mine.  Two summer ago turning 35 made me very thoughtful and somewhat melancholy.  I got what felt like endless emails that summer protesting that 35 is not middle age.  But I disagree: I view middle age as a range: literally, the middle of life.  And there is no question in my mind that’s where I am.  The ferris wheel that I write about over and over nears its apex, and the view is breathtaking.  I can feel in my stomach, however, that we’re lurching close to the voyage down the other side.

I’m in good company, by the way: Carl Jung said that middle age begins at 35.  (he called it the beginning of the “afternoon of life,” something I read for the first time in Dani Shapiro’s gorgeous Devotion.) And life does have a different flavor these last few years.  The evidence that I am an adult continues to pile up: two children, a marriage, a graduate degree, a mortgage, a station wagon.  Oh, and the wrinkles.  I feel like a grown-up in the full sense of the word, which is both liberating and heavy.  Part of fully leaning into adulthood seems to be accepting all the things that will never be, and there is a deep sorrow in that though also a kind of sturdy settling, like an exhale.

But at the same time I feel a persistent disbelief that I’m actually an adult.  I still feel like I am 18.  I am still waiting for the real parents to come home and to take over with Grace and Whit.  It’s not a secret that one of the things I struggle most with is time’s passage; I wonder if my apparent willful ignoring of my own maturing is a way of refusing to acknowledge this reality.

I’m not sure.  It’s just one of the ways that life continues to surprise me, I guess, this oscillating between feeling very old and very young, sometimes in a single moment.   The constant letting go of what I thought, over and over again, that is never enough.  Releasing my hold on what might have been in order to embrace what is.  What is, in all of its new-wrinkled, dark-circled, surprisingly-achy middle-aged glory.  Maybe that will be primary joy of this afternoon of life: acknowledging and appreciating this life, this 37 (almost 38) years, right here.

Click over to Momalom to read many beautiful posts on today’s 5 for 5 topic, age.

Pictures

I am the official photographer.  It’s almost always me curating the memories of an event, corralling people into group shots, taking pictures of the flower arrangements, capturing candid images of laughter and conversation.  Sometimes, dancing as joy-filled as it is cringe-worthy.

I also take photographs of the non-events in my life, which is of course the majority of it, a large swath of ordinary days filled with images of the sky’s changing colors, the tree out my window, the faces of my children, the glasses on the table.  I take pictures of everything, and as I’ve noted it is often the most random images which, ultimately, carry the most salient memories.

Words are my lingua franca, there’s no question; words are my default way of capturing an experience and my instinctive way of trying to express an emotion.  But there are some things that are beyond the reach of words.  Often I grab at those things using my camera.  When I look back at pictures I’ve taken of the sky, or of Grace’s teddy bear packed in an overnight bag, or of Whit’s baby foot against my hand, I can see something that I haven’t yet been able to put into words.  This is when I feel most frustrated by my attempts at writing, when words seem clunky and imprecise, as though I use ten sentences to circle around a kernel of truth without really conveying it at all.

If I had to choose one way to record my life it would be words, certainly, but I am deeply grateful for the texture that pictures provide.  There are others who would choose another way, of that I’m sure.  People for whom the instinct pushes them to pictures, or perhaps to music; other ways to translate and share their human experience.  I think this Gilchrist quote gets at some of that:

I think colors made sense to him the way words to do to me. – Ellen Gilchrist, Winter

What’s your most basic language?  Words, pictures, music, or something else entirely?  What makes the most sense to you: color or words?

Please visit Momalom for a host of wonderful writing as part of 5 for 5.

 

A word after a word is power

Grace wants to be a writer when she grows up.  Well, that and a vet and an Olympic athlete, too.  And a mummy.  All of it.  And I don’t have the words to express how grateful, and proud, and overwhelmed I feel by those ambitions, dreams, hopes.  So I revisit, as is my habit, the words of others who can convey that inchoate swirl of emotion right under my breastbone in a way that I can’t.

Just recently, Grace swapped out the pink duvet cover that’s been on her bed since she first slept in it for one covered in peace signs.  Obsessed with peace signs, she is.  As part of her “redecorate my room” campaign, she asked me to take down a framed poster that had hung on her wall for years.  And, with a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes, I did.  The poster had a picture of her at the age of 4 writing her name, and a copy of Margaret Atwood’s poem Spelling.

This is a poem I have loved for a long time.  It was the epigraph to my college thesis.  I thought of my choice, 16 years ago, to include this poem (with a photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe‘s naked breasts and hand) in my thesis, which was about the mother-daughter relationship.  I thought of the ways in which I was then anticipating now, this very girl who grows in front of my eyes, this moment when I was the mother, and I had that dizzying experience where time collapses on itself.

Before I took it off the wall, I read the poem to Grace one last time.  And more than once, I had to pause to regain my composure and to swallow back the tears. Reading this poem to my eager daughter while looking at pictures of her writing her very first word. Pictures of her first word, her name. Grace. grace. Dear, dear universe. Thank you. Words, poetry, pen on paper, names, spelling, grace.

Gracie, my grace.

Spelling (Margaret Atwood)

My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
read, blue, & hard yellow.
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.

*

and I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.

*

A child is not a poem,
A poem is not a child.
There is no either/or.
However.

*

I return to the story
of a woman caught in the war
& in labor, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.
Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.
A word after a word
after a word is power.

*

At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.
This is a metaphor.

*

How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky, & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.