faith Archives

the training

and its quiet cousin

We went where the children were, into the concrete buildings that announced themselves from a distance by their rectangles of fluorescent light before dawn, each classroom another illuminated cell in which a small republic would soon attempt the impossible.

We drove there carrying lesson plans, coffee, sharpened pencils, and private theories about service. Some of us had hints about some calling. We also hoped to one day be worthy of homes and worthy of citizenship, despite the wayward, wandering nature of our pilgrimish selves. We privately fingered some phrases about the nature of this calling, as with prayer beads. We learned to do this while sidestepping certain reflections, their attendant questions. To serve whom? Serve what? Serve how?

Inside the lit boxes of concrete, copy machines predictably jammed and bells divided the hours into predictable portions. Loudspeaker voices droned on, with a scripted confidence that seemed to expose our own uncertainty. Lord, I believe, I prayed on my knees, rosary between my shrinking breasts, heal my unbelief.

There were forms for absences, interventions, accommodations, referrals, observations, evaluations, emergencies. Somewhere beneath the paperwork, a quieter practice breathed its ragged breath. It was not the sort to be documented, so tended to be found lacking when it came time to speak in its defense. We were quiet in meetings, or coughing.

Some of us imagined that if we served long enough, well enough, we might eventually become free of ourselves. It seemed noble at the time. No one warned us that the self is not only the thing that interferes with attention. It is also the place from which attention is given. Grind it finely enough and something essential becomes dust.

It settles everywhere. The children breathe it. So do we. Outside, the century acquired stranger habits. Bats slept with white upon their noses. Birds disappeared from places that had always expected birds. The seasons arrived carrying unfamiliar weather. We learned new acronyms faster than new names. Every year another expert assured us that the future had finally been measured correctly. The children kept arriving anyway.

***

The week before I began teaching, I attended a county training wearing the best clothes I owned: a purple spaghetti-strap dress beneath a crocheted sweater arranged carefully across my shoulders, an improvised modesty. I needed a paycheck before I could afford professional costume. I can’t remember what I did for shoes.

I arrived late after misjudging the parking and found the last empty seat beside two young men who already seemed entirely at ease in the room. They were funny, bright, and quick-witted with soft jibes and easy answers. They were the sort, I see now, upon whom institutions instinctively confer authority.

“That’s a rough school,” one of them said when I told him my assignment. Then he explained how I ought to meet the moment. I listened carefully because I assumed he knew something I did not.

Twenty-two years later I remember almost none of his advice. What remains is the question that kept me listening. It was too raw to say aloud. What do the children need, to live here now? The two questions occupied the same room, and rarely acknowledged one another.

Years before, when I was the age that my children are now, a teacher had handed me a box of tissues and gave me space to sit awhile. She did not explain my sorrow or try to fix it. She did not ask me to become more positive or more resilient or more realistic. She recognized that bewilderment sometimes accompanies seeing and let me sit in her office as long as I needed before marching on to my scheduled class. This was some of the most profound instruction of my life.

***

In the decades since that first training, I know more now about curriculum, assessment, language acquisition, trauma, literature, and revision. Mostly, though, I know about the limits of certainty. Enough, perhaps, to stop mistaking certainty for wisdom.

Meanwhile, the children continue arriving, carrying entire worlds that no data set, policy document, or professional development session could possibly anticipate. They arrive laughing with friends. They arrive grieving grandparents, translating for their families, having crossed borders both visible and invisible before first period. They arrive eager, despite everything their forebears have constructed around them.

This, the part that steadies me on my better days, still knows nothing of expertise. She places all the eggs of her shaking faith in a single basket, calls it nothing. It is neither measurable, or scalable, or capable of surviving particularly well in committee. It’s nothing, but a stubborn belief that another consciousness can still be met with attention.

Each morning another consciousness walks through the door asking, Will someone meet me here?

The loudspeaker begins its announcements. The attendance form waits to be filled, then saved. Somewhere beneath all of this, another lesson clears its throat. The children are here. For now, that is enough to begin again.

faith before marble

notes from the preservation wing

how long the devoted
will look
toward the ersatz rendering
of vanished man
pretending vigilance

how long?
pretending
vigilance
will the vanished
render looking
toward the devoted

how vigilant
the keeper
of this pretense

how

look at me
his only prayer

Saola

and other endangered unknowns

I first knew you by your other, less-specific name, as unicorn.

Which is to say, as a creature of wondrous, near-impossible beauty.

A miracle, so I drew you at the center of a depiction I was prompted to make by my first-grade teacher. This was Catholic school in the Reagan Era in suburban New York. This is when and where and how I learned that you were forbidden.

“They did not have unicorns in the Garden of Eden,” Mrs. McClosky announced. I did not think to wonder at the time who They were, or how she had come to interview them. She wore a brooch and so knew things. I wore saddle shoes and an ill-fitting uniform and vomited in the parking lot every day, in dread of my arrival in that dark space of stone hallways, urgent bells, and seemingly inexhaustible legions of certainty, all certain I was wrong for fearing them.

I thought I knew you, so had been happy about this assignment, the first I had loved since entering school, other than the opportunity to give a staged reading of The Gingerbread Man to my kindergarten class.

You can’t catch me, you can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man!

Later I learned the word myth. As in mythical. Which some would use to mean fake but which I took to mean the real in story. Or the real that is larger than seen.

––And I connected it to this misunderstanding that my first-grade teacher had about you, who while real, were mythical, like The Garden herself. Which naturally led to other questions.

These questions led to others, and one day I was old enough to have learned to no longer give my first answer to the question: What do you want to be when you grow up?

A Unicorn! I had announced.

This was my first opportunity to learn that you were not a valid response where the subject was imagined possibilities. Having reflexively rejected this wholesale, I had to learn again in first grade. And did––learn something, anyway.

Later still, I began to see this I, whoever she was supposed to be, as a sort of mythical creature, possibly imaginary. She lived in dreams, and she lived in the dark. According to most official sources, most of who she was, was categorically forbidden. She was simply too––much of everything unnecessary, this creature.

Learning this was almost too much. I forgot what I could in the name of persistence. For what, I sometimes could not remember. By then I was half dead ––but the other half was living, as are you.

You only needed cover to persist, and space. Foresters removed your cover and trappers set traps in your space. These were not meant for you, specifically. You died in them anyway.

I write this hoping that you will recover. That we may recover––enough forest to protect you in the shadow regions, safely ensconced in the unseen, beyond the range of anyone who comes to count you, beyond the bite of any snare so indiscriminately set that it would capture and kill you in its teeth.

I write this praying that you may continue non-existing for your doubters.

I am not worthy, but believe.

I write this that you heal the rest of me, however well she was supposed to have learned by now, to treat the best of herself as a forbidden creature of mythical fear.

I write that we may live.

I write in the shadows, in whispers, that you may hear me.

And live that I may join you, some forbidden someday.

***

For more about the endangered creature at the center of this piece, consider The Saola’s Battle for Survival on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Safe Passage

For shelter in the event of this now.

How do you enter?

What, you mean this? It can help to know that you are already here.

Parents have been sending the children to school with special stickers: names, telephone, blood type––in case, in the event––unmentionable, but. Some schools made these stickers mandatory. They have been practicing. In case of fire, one drill; bomb, another. The idea is not to panic.

How?

It can help to know that––

Not to say too much. We want them to feel normal, say the mothers.

What now?

We pray, says one mother. We pray a lot, she says, for peace.

But how can––

Look. We are already here.

But––

We hold the babies, hold the prayers. We hold on, and the windows are shaking.

Shhh, we say, shh. What else?

***

For the mothers and the babies, the brothers, fathers, the missing, and those holding in solidarity and love.

Sources referenced: Foreign Policy and Today.

Sounding Branches

On phantoms, limbs, and being an instrument.

The phenomenon of the phantom limb, the doctor explained, was once regarded as a purely psychic hallucination, the sort of thing the mind does when it is grappling with loss, denial being a well-trodden pathway for managing grief. The sense of moving fingers even after the arm is gone was compared to the way that you might see a loved one in their bathrobe and slippers muddling down the hallway looking for the light switch, in the days and weeks after their death.

But it turns out there is more to it, they realized, as the tools for observation expanded what researchers were willing to see––and listen to, for that matter. A pianist long versed in playing music through the body will continue to do so even after the loss of an arm. The music runs through the musician as practiced, even as only some of it reaches the keys.

The discovery raises certain questions about the nature of what was considered phantom and suggests that the idea of limb might also deserve some expansion. I am wondering about the word instrument, too––how immediately we tend to assume that these are what the musician uses to create the art, that the point is somehow mastery of a tool and not instead the long practice of erasing the old ideas of the boundaries of a body, smoothing its distinctive forms and shaping hollow wells of space, tending it daily so as to leave it well enough and ready to be moved.

***

This post was inspired by something I heard over ten years ago on a radio interview with the late Oliver Sacks. I found a related anecdote in his chapter “Phantom Fingers: the case of the one-armed Pianist” in his Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.

Complementarities

Corresponding data suggests.

Here’s the tearing sky again; hold it close. See if you can stand a minute inside the detonating histories of the next flyover. I read this morning that the spider relies on the wind to spin fibers of a web between trees and still they go one loop at a time and my faith, by comparison, is weak. If light can be particle and wave, then knowing must be mind and universe at least, and maybe also body, in its necessary histories, these visions of the past, dreamed and remembered fresh with each new vision of the days ahead. Now what.

Gutter Prayer

You held what was before you in your hands, giving of your heart until it was done.

Let’s touch them, you said. Of the disposable––the lonely, too.

Never eat a single mouthful, your mother told you, unless you share it.

When asked for beliefs, you disappointed. Only here, only this.

It’s not that you hadn’t sought more. It’s not that you hadn’t gazed into the heavens with an aching heart, waiting for some response. Finding nothing only made the ache worse, so you turned what you had of longing to those who mirrored it, to offer the comfort you would seek.

I remember the time. It was a year of massacre, mass suicide, mass extinction. The machine won the chess game. I was finding Joan Didion, the epigraph from Yeats framing her chronicle of the end of an era of wild hope. For? The promise of a new age, Turning and turning, some human achievement promised, but the falcon cannot hear the falconer.

It wasn’t going to work, was it? Meaning, any of the ideas.

You were done with ideas, too. Only love, you offered. Only this.

Unbreak my heart, we sang, our fragile candles in the wind. We were building a mystery, but it seemed to be swallowing us whole, like Jonah’s whale, the secret gardens of our imagined inheritance forever a million miles away.

No, you insisted. Only here. You held what was before you in your hands, giving of your heart until it was done.

And wasn’t this the ultimate hope, some finite relief to our dreams of immortality? That there was something we could do, really do––not dream, not imagine, not vision our way into or out of–– with all its messy, mundane details, its fluid and its stink, its inevitable decay, and the inevitable rejuvenation of this endless, wanting need? We could meet it just as endlessly until we couldn’t anymore, until we could be relieved of the pressure of our promise, swallowed back into the great void you saw everywhere, especially when you sought an answer or a cosmic face toward which to offer your prayers. Only here, you said. Only these outstretched hands.

We could meet them, again and again. This you can do, you showed us. This you can do until you are done.

This morning, I am reminded that on this day, in 1997, Mother Teresa died, so I am considering the legacy of her life.

What We Miss When We’re Not Looking

We need healing more than ever now, in many ways. How often we are pushed to forget what this means.

This is a story about loss and healing, adapted from a story I read in the Salem News earlier this week.

God forbid, Mary would think, at the slightest thought of cat against car. She would take off her own shirt, wrap the body, clutch it to her chest. Use her own mouth as needed. A soft toothbrush would be better, to mimic the mother’s tongue. She would rock and hold and hum, use a dropper to feed if she had to, until well.

But when Max disappeared, there was no body, only an open screen, as if to say, here is the trace of love leaving, and it reminded her back to similar spaces, too many to count. The cool side of the bed, the left-behind toys, the unnecessary landline that only solicitors called, which she kept active anyway, just in case.

Max, she called. Max! He did not come. She called every shelter, even a pet psychic. She walked the neighborhood. She drove the surrounding neighborhoods. She looked differently at every bush, every alley and drainpipe, gulley and ditch.

Phonecall, phonecall, phonecall. Hour, hour, day. Weeks, then months. Then it was years. An ache like that will swallow a person whole unless they find something else to do with it.

She found some others with similar aches, needing someplace to put them. They went about finding the lost kittens. They brushed them with toothbrushes, wrapped them in clean towels, bottle fed them until they could eat. They paired them with the mother cats who had lost their babies. They took in dogs, too. A few birds. They took in so many that they needed a bigger space. They became an organization, a shelter, an adoption center, a rescue for animals and each other.

Max, by the way, came back. This was six years later. He had fleas in his ear but was otherwise fine.

I can’t help but wonder how much good would never have happened if Max hadn’t decided to go and stay missing when he did. About all the littles that would have died in the elements, undiscovered, if no one was looking with such an ache. Or about all the lonely people wandering without any place to put their dangerous aches, becoming dangers to themselves and others. All that needed saving, left untended. All the answers to other questions, left undiscovered without the first one, Where is Max?

The pleas of others that might have been missed, except that someone was listening in earnest, for answers to their own. I’m reminded how often I’ve been moved by loss and heartbreak, into places I would otherwise never have found. I suspect that much of the visible light in others is a function of what escapes through the breaks.

If Max had not returned, this would still be a redemption story, but I wouldn’t know it. Not because there wasn’t a shelter created after he left, but because the creation of the shelter was something long and slow, and not the sort of event that lends itself to a story in the news. A disaster works for a story, if not its aftermath. Same with a sudden victory. The essentials are there – who, what, where, and when, at least, if not why.

Growth in numbers is a news story. But numbers are abstractions, not living things. When it comes to the healing and growth of living things and human creations, sometimes there is only a why, to begin with. Who, what, where, when – these emerge over time, and they tend to be diffuse, influenced by many people, doing many things, in numerous places and ways, over and across time, slowly, in ways that are neither sudden nor singular nor dramatic. In fact, if you show up looking for something on which to report, in any given growth area, what you find may look like nothing at all. Loving patience is a practice, and as such it is almost never a happening. Loving patience is what allows the living to grow and heal. We need healing more than ever now, in many ways. How often we are pushed to forget what this means. The question is ever, What’s Happening? and the answers we tend to find in response tend to be the ones that have us perpetually missing the greater possibilities in a given moment.

Real growth and real change is slow work, and often looks like nothing to report. Unless you look hard and long, the way only someone with a full or aching heart will do, unable to stop.

The story that inspired this post can be found here. I’ve taken liberties with names, backgrounds, and imaginative elements, as appropriate for my wondering purposes.

Angling

Writers keep tackle boxes of images, memories, metaphors. Bait the hook. Cast into the dim light of early morning, over the blank page. This loud hunger, shhhh. Try the next metaphor. Vary the retrieve. Look and wait.

I recently came upon a character who is fishing. I don’t do this, so this means it’s time to research some. What test for what catch, what lure, what line, what basic knots? What bait for bonito, how to prepare guitarfish, how to vary the retrieve when catching halibut. Sometimes you want to move slow and steady. Other times it’s crank, crank, twitch. What I find is supposed to be for these characters, but I can’t help sampling some. I’ve always had it, this waiting pose, looking out.

“Oceanside Pier 4” by Dmitry Lyakhov on flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 2.0 Generic license.

Anglers have their rods and their lines; their lures and their five gallon buckets. Writers keep tackle boxes of images, memories, metaphors. Bait the hook. Cast into the dim light of early morning, over the blank page. This loud hunger, shhhh. Try the next metaphor. Vary the retrieve. Look and wait.

Now I have an excuse to go to the pier, just looking, waiting like the others, but without a line. To watch the angler in the blue jacket, and hold a silent one-way conversation.

What are you bringing up now? Is that mackerel? Maybe you will filet it yourself when you get home. Maybe there’s someone waiting to add it to a bowl with jalapeños, lime, cilantro, oil, as her mother did when she was a girl. And who taught you what line, and what taught you how to wait, and what longings are behind the eyes you cast over the surface now, reflecting back the deep? And who meets you in the silence of your sunset reverie, and what other shores do you remember, and what aches would you rather forget? What makes you limp when you move now, back to the folding chair? Is it simply stiffness of hard work over time, or something else? There are no grays visible beneath your ball cap, and yet your face is etched with deep lines, like a bronze sculpture. Angler, where are the young promises of new life you once held on your knee, raised up, up! — above your head, just to admire? Who laughed back, cooing, and what is it like to remember them at a distance, and what makes them laugh now, do you know? And who holds them now, and are they gentle, and can you bear to ask?

Reasons to Start Again

Because sometimes the best I can offer any other life, in an age of senseless killing, visible and invisible, is a living reminder that death doesn’t get the last word.

For the breath of new beginning, the stomach-knotting tension of preparing to leap, how it tightens the best web I can make for landing in. To honor the construction of what is intricately made and yet untested.

For practice protecting the fragile and not-yet-realized: children, the neglected; ancient wisdom and this still-beating heart.

Because when the wind blows a body sideways, sometimes the best way to keep from falling over is by moving with it; because watching a baby learning to walk, not stopping until he hit the next resting place for his hands, or fell down, reminded me of this.

Because sometimes the best I can offer any other life, in an age of senseless killing, visible and invisible, is a living reminder that death doesn’t get the last word.

Because the opening notes of a familiar song are enough to remind me what music can do. Because I refuse to fail for nothing. Because I want each heartbreak to count for something.

Because the decaying bits of once-flowering dreams that died on the vine to fall into this soil have left their bodies in it, the inanimate materials of their still-future lives, and I want to bury these hands in their essence and feel what’s still getting ready to be born.