everyday life

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me

I am downright obsessed with my annual holiday card.  I spend as much time choosing the message as I do the photographs and design.   When I look at the messages I’ve chosen over the last several years, a distinct theme emerges:

2005 – Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me
2006 – Throw your arms around the world at Christmastime
2007 – Dona Nobis Pacem (grant us peace)
2008 – Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me
2009 – Love came down at Christmas, love all lovely, love divine
2010 – May the wind be always at your back

Imagine my delight when, this week at Grace’s school holiday assembly, they sang both Dona Nobis Pacem and Let There be Peace On Earth.  I was thrilled, and my heart soared with the high-pitched voices of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders.  I’ve been singing Dona Nobis Pacem under my breath all week and Grace excitedly told me a few days ago that she recognized it as a song that was going to be in the concert (it was not the one her class sang).

This has been a season of quiet, house-bound afternoons and evenings for us.  I’ve been spending a lot of time with Grace and Whit, not going out hardly at all, doing my work in the hours that they are in school. One morning this week Grace’s advent calendar said “sit by the tree and watch the lights while drinking hot chocolate.”  And so we did.  After dinner she, Whit and I curled up on the yellow couch with mugs of hot chocolate and admired the tree.  Grace dashed upstairs to get a small comforter to pull over the three of us, and then we read several Christmas books (and the defiantly non-Christmas pop-up book about dinosaurs that Whit chose).  It was pretty divine.

The night of Grace’s concert we made pizza.   As they were eating, the children decided they wanted to hear “Let There Be Peace On Earth.”  So I youtubed a version of it, and then another, and pretty soon it was on repeat in the kitchen and Grace and Whit were spellbound by the music and the images that accompanied each rendition.  Whit said to me, “This song reminds me of What a Wonderful World, Mummy.”

And how.  What a wonderful world it would be if everybody chose peace.  Wouldn’t it?

It’s impossible for me not to think of Saint Francis’s iconic prayer.  And of last year’s haunting video of Sarah McLachlan singing it.  I urge you to listen to it: it’s gorgeous, calming and inspiring at the same time.  It makes me want to work harder to be worthy of this blessed, brutal, beautiful life, and of my children’s instinctive orientation towards goodness and peace.  So, Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

And let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.

Trying to say thank you

In keeping with Grace’s startlingy wise observation recently, that praying is saying thank you, I’m trying to infuse this holiday season with as much gratitude and as little materialism as possible.

Results are, I think, mixed.
For the last several years the children have shared a LEGO advent calendar.  This year I made Grace her own advent calendar. I bought a calendar with empty pockets on etsy, and filled each with a directive for something to do. I got this idea from Ali Edwards, though I wrote most of my own suggestions.  The daily directives include selecting some toys she doesn’t play with anymore for goodwill (something we do approximately monthly anyway), writing a thank you note to someone just because, reading a Christmas book to her brother, and the one she worked on this week, creating a list of ten things she’s thankful for this year.
As you can see, “the world and being alive” just makes the list, under her ipod touch and “all her toys.”  Hmmm.  I suppose there’s some solace in the fact that her friends and four healthy grandparents are above her things.  Still, I think we might need a refresher course that without #10, #1-9 would not exist at all.

My children constantly bemoan the fact that I do not decorate enough for holidays.  They wish I was more like one of my best friends, who celebrates everything with tremendous vigor and enthusiasm.  It’s one of her very best qualities.  This year I’m making an effort.  We have a wreath, hung up with a thick gold ribbon, in the kitchen over the sink.  And we have this garland, which I had made, showcasing some of my favorite Christmas carol lyrics, over the kitchen table.  And there is, like every year, a big boxwood wreath on the front door.  I’m trying!

I had these silhouette ornaments made of each child for our tree.  Grace loves hers.  I also have their silhouettes on pendants that I happened to be wearing today when the ornaments came.  I highly recommend Le Papier Studio‘s work.  I have a big framed silhouette of the children walking away – always, they are walking away – on the wall by my bed.The kids’ school has a new rule that doesn’t allow parents to buy teacher gifts at the holidays.  Instead, Grace and Whit are hand-writing notes to their teachers and decorating them with black and white ink stamps.  Grace’s are neat paragraphs full of her favorite things about her teachers.  Whit’s are more minimalist but no less charming, in my view.

That’s the update from the land where we trip and fall, often, in our efforts to say, adequately, thank you.

Turning our brokenness into something beautiful

This is the darkest season; we wake in darkness and we watch the sun wane again before the clock has hit 5:00.  The light in the middle of the day is often pitched, somehow, at a high, wavering note; it is full and thin at the same time, endings tangible within it.  Somehow, the dark bothers me less than it used to.  There is an internal light that helps keep the thick, sometimes-threatening darkness slightly at bay.

The optimist in me feels a wild surge of hope about this: perhaps I am witnessing the birth of my own faith. This is a holy month, after all, full of imagery of light, regardless of your religion. Perhaps it is the flickering, nascent light of my own belief that illuminates these dark days. The candles in windows and the holiday lights strung on trees and in windows everywhere I look both reflect and contribute to that internal flickering.

We move towards the solstice, every day closer.  The winter solstice may well be the single holiest day of the year for me.  I definitely prefer it to the summer one, which demonstrates as clearly as any detail about me how much the promise of something (good and bad) impacts me.  Even at the height of summer, with the longest days we’ll ever know, there is something gloomy to me about the solstice.  It represents the turning back to dark.  That’s the preemptive regret that I’ve written about, which can completely occlude any present radiance for me.  This solstice, two weeks away, is the opposite.  It promises a turning back towards the light.

A year ago I read some of Meg Casey’s thoughts on the holiness that exists in darkness.  They moved me so much then, and continue to, that I want to post them again.  Once in a great while I read a piece of writing that makes me want to kneel and press my head to the ground, saluting its gorgeousness and ability to evoke emotion. This is one such piece. Please read it.

December is a holy month. Maybe it is the dark silky silence that descends so early, that speaks to me of reverence. Maybe it is the promise that December holds–that no matter how dark, how cold, how empty it can get, the light is coming back. Something always shifts in me when December arrives–I embrace the darkness and am eager for the coming solstice when the whole world is still and holds its breath, waiting to be reborn again. December whispers to me of midnight mass, of ancient choirs, of stained glass windows turned into gems by candle light.

Meg then goes on to talk about the connection between holiness and wholeness, using the image of a stained glass window: Broken, jagged, sharp pieces of glass held together magically, transformed into one perfect design not by gold or silver but by something as mundane as lead. And, of course, it is the light that animates the beauty.  Meg’s post reminds me of one of my very favorite of Anne Lamott’s lines: “Love is sovereign.” Yes. As Meg says, Love is the transformative power that turns our brokenness into something beautiful.

I love this because I think we often think of light as exposing flaws, unearthing chinks, revealing ugliness.  Yet in Meg’s metaphor it is light that knits disparate pieces into a whole, that reveals the light that exists within them.  Love as light.  Transformative, healing brokenness, uncovering worth.  May we all strive to be this kind of light, even in the dark moments of our lives.

There are some themes in my writing of which I’m very conscious.  Others emerge organically, and I’m not aware of them until I reflect for a moment.  Light and darkness has been a message to which I’ve returned this year, over and over.  I am often moved to tears by the quality of light in nature, and the metaphor of dark and light has also been one to which I am consistently drawn. Light and darkness.  Holiness and grace.  Radiance and shadow.  We keep on turning, and the shadows keep dancing, the light flickering.  All I can do is keep watching.

Day 4 of Reverb10 – Wonder

#Reverb10, day 4 – Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?

I let go and let my children lead the way.  In particular over the summer, which was full of wonder.  That wonder was tangible in adventures both big, like Story Land and Lego Land, and small, like hysterical laughter in the morning before tennis camp or Whit finally learning to swim.  I don’t know why it’s taken me so long, but I feel like something finally dissolved this summer, some final wall between me and my life crumbled.  And on the other side was wonder.

Things whose days are numbered

Things whose days are numbered:

1. The Sweet Dreams Head Rub and Ghostie Dance being enough to assure happy slumber for both kids

2. Sitting on the floor of the gym, a child on my lap, singing our hearts out at the Pre-K, K, and 1st grade holiday sing-a-long at school

3. Whit wearing little briefs printed with robots, dinosaurs, and boats

4. Carrying Whit to bed after taking him to the potty at 10pm.  His legs already dangle alarmingly near my knees

5. Grace happily holding my hand walking down the street

6. Buckling carseats

7. Two children in the bath together

8. Shopping for clothes at Baby Gap

9. Whit picking Goodnight Moon for me to read to him before bed

10. Grace’s sheer wonder at a visit from the tooth fairy

Honestly, the truth of this makes my heart throb.  Makes it ache as though it might split open, like an overripe peach.  How do others handle this, the irrefutable drumbeat march of time?  There’s no question this is my rawest wound.  It is a cord of feeling that vibrates painfully inside me and a shadow that haunts the edges of even the sunniest day.

Adrienne Rich asserts of Marie Curie that “her wounds came from the same source of her power.”  I’m still trying to ascertain exactly how my deep hurt about the impermanence of things might also be a strength.  I am not at all clear on how the source of this  churning well of feeling to which I return again and again could also be a source of power, strength, confidence.

I want my heart to dwell here, in the rooms of my days.  I can only recommit, every single day to trying to remember that, to tugging myself back to now.  I do that even knowing full well my own tendency to mourn an experience even as I’m still in the midst of living it.  I wish I could stop grieving that which will be soon gone, but I’m not sure I can.  Most of our last times happen without us knowing, slipping into the past tense in the narrative of our lives almost unnoticed.  I am more aware than many of this, but even so I fail to mark these transitions all the time.

So, here I go, into the season of white lights and carols, paperwhites and holiday cards, eyes and heart wide open.  This may be the last year that Grace believes in Santa Claus.  May be the last year Whit wears a Baby Gap sweater.  May be the last year they both cite that baking cookies with me is their very favorite thing to do.  More numbered days.  They all are, though, aren’t they?