For a Nation, For a Single Life

I cannot wrap my mind around the suffering that is Japan, a nation. Neither can I conceive of the loss of a single life, at the home of a friend this past week.

Then my little girl brings crystalline purple into the house, smiles. "All the crocuses are open outside!" she beams. I cannot hold the experiences in tandem.

For a long time, I stare at the way the light is coming through crocus petals. The petals are already wilting, and I know that tomorrow they will no longer be a filter for light, for day.

I open pages to a book called, simply, Beauty. (Thank you, Kathleen.) The words console, though at the same time nothing could ever, ever console...

At birth we were awakened and emerged to become visible to the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark to become invisible. Awakening and surrender: they frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty...

All the frailty and uncertainty was seen [by the ancients] to be ultimately sheltered by the eternal beauty which presides over all journeys between awakening and surrender, the visible and the invisible, the light and the darkness.

I look at the crocus and see that the light has moved on. And I wait for tomorrow.

I Remember

Just last week, I took this picture at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. The photo I photographed is mother and child, beside the child's coffin tree. In the Chinese village where the original photo was taken, the tradition is to choose such a tree at a child's birth. When the child grows into old age, she will order the tree to be cut down, carved and hewn, made ready for her eventual burial.

One week later, I learn that my gardening grandmother has need of such a tree. A few months short of her 95th birthday, she leaves me to remember her. So, I do, with this small excerpt from my book. Thank you, Grandma, for holding me close like Mother and Child. For leaving me with memories so dear I set them down to share with the world...

When I look out across this river, I see the cliffs and mountains that shelter a special place…a house I loved to go to as a child. Inside its walls, pickles and jellies poured off shelves and pies marched from an ancient oven—cherry, apple, rhubarb, peach. On its property, berries swelled into round moons of pleasure. Vines curled, climbed in the clefts of rock walls. Trees swayed and bowed, dropping fruits into my eager hands. I stained my lips purple with mulberries, dirtied my nails digging potatoes, tripped through golden grasses chasing tiny blue butterflies. My grandmother rose early to care for this place, donning denim overalls and shading her face with a wide straw hat. She sweated dark circles around her neck and armpits, perched red-faced on towering ladders to prune and shape. She combed the lake in her rowboat, lifting lily pads like fainted water nymphs to build a pyre of amber green beneath the flames of the sun.

Photo of Mother and Child (original photo by Lynn Johnson), by L.L. Barkat.

I Did Not Try

The night before I went to Mount Hermon, a dear friend of ours passed away quite unexpectedly— a massive stroke, in a young man. The day I returned, I had news from another friend, whose sister just lost her newborn son. My trip, so life giving in many ways, was bookended by death.

Yesterday, a wonderful speaker, Jason Gaboury, came to our church. He talked about what it is like when we have a bad day, a bad year, or even a bad decade. I realize that when it comes to the issue of death, I, along with my community, have had a bad decade, striated with seemingly senseless deaths (all death of course is senseless in its way, but we more readily accept the passing of a person who has had a "fullness of years").

Gaboury, looking at the book of Daniel, asked us to consider whether we could see God in the midst of dark times of captivity. Indeed, he urged us to listen for God's footfall in the shadows. Somehow this came together for me in the words of Krista Tippett, regarding the execution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer "just weeks before the collapse of the Reich."

She says, "His death seemed to me a puzzle, a piece of religious irony. Wasn't this a failure of God, a rebuttal of the very idea of God? Yet some irrational aura of triumph— defying my sense of time as flat and contained — surrounded Bonhoeffer's legacy. I could not fathom this... and I did not try." (p.42)

In her words, I realize that I am two-dimensional when it comes to trying to understand these matters. My sense of time is flat and contained. I cannot fathom the whys and hows, the shape of death and the mystery of eternal life that transcends it. And, in her words, I find the comforting thought that it is okay to put my head down and weep. To say, along with Tippet, "I did not [even] try."


Striated Rock photo, by L.L. Barkat.

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Shaping Our Pain

I remember reading Freud, ages ago. And he seemed to be saying that humans live by the principle of pain avoidance. To some extent, he was right.

Yet it is ultimately unrealistic to live our lives according to this principle. Pain, unavoidable pain, is sometimes our surprising companion. We cannot escape it.

This past week, I began a journey through such inescapable pain. As did so many of my friends, my church community, who knew and loved the dear brother-father-husband-scientist-elder who passed away.

Around the middle of the week, one of these grieving friends shared a song with me. And I had, without knowing it, shared my poem with her. At the end of the week, another friend told me how she had taken the funeral flowers (with the widow's blessing) and saved the ones that were still fresh, to rearrange them in new designs. She wept and wept as she rearranged them. And so her tears and flowers bedecked our refreshment tables on Sunday. Each of us had begun to touch and mold our pain, through our own particular gifts and loves.

In The Burning Word, Judith Kunst notes that the Jews have long relied on words to shape and reshape their pain. Discussing the book of Lamentations she says, "This painful kneading of words and grief binds the poet to his despair, and at the same time it pushes him through it, toward hope..." (p.55)

I realize that I shape and reshape my pain through writing. In this way, I do not avoid my pain but am bound to it while also experiencing a sense of pushing through it. As I told my friend who shared the song, "I write and the mending begins."

(On a totally different note... today marks one year since Seedlings was born.)

Lilies photo, by L.L. Barkat.

Seedlings Invitation: If you write a post related to this post and Link It Back Here, let me know and I'll link to yours.

Instructions

What to do when a best friend's husband dies
on the eve of your little girl's birthday...

Hang up the phone, lean into the counter
in a kind of conscious faint. Moan.
Moan, a deep cry that comes from a place
you didn't know existed, tremble
and feel the ice cold sensation that begins
rising and falling within you like
Northern Lights
shimmering up and down
a midnight sky.

Take out the black-handled
Henckels and a yellow onion
and chop the pearly flesh into perfect
little squares. Mince the summer
garlic. Scrape it all into a cast iron
pan. Add dried oregano, because you can't
think about harvesting right now... the fresh
oregano just outside the kitchen door.

Turn to the sink and begin. One glass,
one dish at a time. Watch the suds play
at the edges of cobalt blue, fall onto
stainless steel, slide down the drain. Moan
again. A labored moan rising to a muted wail
(you dare not wake the children).

Curse the maker
of lawn mowers. Beg the man
to come back and this time decide
upon a nap instead of the simple exercise
of back and forth on green, where he has
fallen. Did fall. Ask God to turn back time,
if only for this one whose heart has failed
him. Let it not be so, that he has
fallen.

Turn off the pewter faucet,
the blue flame. Put wilted onions
and herbs in the bottom of a crock pot,
where they will have to wait until tomorrow.
Flick off the recessed lighting.
Go up red oak stairs. Sleep,
a dreamless sleep.

In the morning, sing happy birthday
to your eight-year-old. Kiss her on the
cheek and forehead. Hold her to your
heart. Give her the black-handled scissors
so she may go out into the green.

The birthday sauce will be needing basil, fresh.

And she will go out skipping,
snip it for you at the tender neck.
Put it in your hand with soft, round
fingers. Toss her head, and smile.


Poem and Dying Hosta photo, by L.L. Barkat.

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