What we need each day in bread and insight

What’s on my joy blog? I asked myself. I clicked on the link I keep in my toolbar, and the poem Love After Love appeared to me like a gift I had left for myself. Thanks, buddy!

Today I wrote to my friend S.D. that I believe in the meaningful alignment of things. I saw her at a reading I attended Saturday (see https://www.facebook.com/fartheralongbook/info). After the reading, she reminded me that this week she is teaching her first yoga class. It is at a time where it may actually be feasible for me to convince myself to go. Today, distracting myself from schoolwork, I went to the yoga studio’s website. As I tried to find if there were any details that could help me really decide to go–I don’t know, like a section titled Hey you! This is exactly what will happen if you come–I found myself reading a page that featured the Dostoevsky quote that I just mailed to a friend in DC two days ago. Seemed like enough of a Hey you! for me. I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to convince myself to make it to yoga. And now I’ve put it on the internet, so of course it has to happen.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I find that I get what I need. When I open myself to the universe, the universe responds. I don’t always realize it at the time, and too many times I’m sure I miss the response altogether. But when I do see it, my prayer is that I allow it to allow me to keep opening myself again.

This weekend, I also lost a part of something that had been bright and shiny in my life for a while. Honestly, I opened myself to the universe a few months ago, and the universe responded with this bright and shiny thing. But now that it has changed, it serves to remind me that I already have the bread of my life: the love and community I share with my friends and family. And I know myself by heart. I can feast on my life.

Grant what we need each day in bread and insight.
Help us fulfill what lies within
the circle of our lives: each day we ask
no more, no less.

(a few lines from a Neil Douglas-Klotz poem)

Give back your heart to itself

Love After Love
Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Beauty in the World

I feel that there is a great goodness.

I’m sitting beside a vase of white daisies. There’s a cake cooling on the table and frosting in the refrigerator. This is the third week in a row that I’ve made baked goods. It feels productive and soothing.

I have also been writing. And spending time with good people. I’ve been sitting on the porch and watching thunderstorms, and watering my blooming hibiscus plants. I have been eating blueberries and peaches. I have been taking walks. I have been feeling very good.

I have been thinking about people I love who need healing and comfort. I have been thinking about community, and about the lovingkindness that is God. I am grateful for the steadfast knowledge that I have friends who will be my friends as long as we are in this world. Friends who understand me, probably more than I understand myself. I have been looking at photos from years past, and I am grateful for all the people and experiences that brought me here. I am glad that I have learned what I have learned. I am glad that I know who I am, what I stand for, and who stands with me through all the best and worst and in-between.

Thank you for being with me on this joy journey. There is so much goodness in sharing life with one another.

 

 

(These photos are merely a brief representation of the amazing community I am so grateful for. Many important people not pictured.)

I found this quote in the back of a book of poems the other day and wrote it down.

“There are things in life that we must endure which are all but unendurable, and yet I feel that there is a great goodness. Why, when there could be nothing, is there something? This is a great mystery. How, when there could have been nothing, does it happen that there is love, kindness, beauty?”
-Jane Kenyon (1947-1995)

 

 

a new life

Joy is holding a sleeping baby for an hour and a half, feeling her little breath on my neck and listening to the varied sounds of her sleep. It is hope for a better world. It is enduring and unconditional love. It is courage and grace.

You can be the person to start the dance party.

Thank you R for sending me this video! I almost cried when I saw it–the rhythm, hesitancy, and building enthusiasm are so palpable. Like you said, it’s those first few people who are courageous enough to commit wholeheartedly who make it safe for everyone else. I want to keep striving to be that person.

Abiding Joy

As I begin this, I have 40 minutes left to get a post in for May. Joy has been on the other side of the sadness this month. I have been surprised by how fervently joy has been abiding with me despite my attempts to discount it as being trite or forced in the face of sadness.

-My friend Janet (www.helpingjanet.com) found out that the percentage of leukemia blasts in her body had increased dramatically since her last round of chemo–but she was accepted to a clinical trial that will hopefully improve the quality and duration of her life. Though she has not found a bone marrow match, she and her team have raised money, awareness, and matches. She and her partner share a love that amazes me, and though she is a plane ride away from her entire community, including her parents and their livelihoods, she is never alone.

-I had a virus that put me out of commission for a week and a half–but I was elated to hear that I had a virus and not a more systemic problem. My symptoms disappeared just in time for me to avoid the kidney-toxic treatment that was recommended for me. I recovered by baking cookies (pictures to follow) and having a flurry of visits with people I love.

-I was able to be with my family to enjoy a baby shower for my brother and sister-in-law. My family is such a blessing and the blessings seem to only increase.

-M & B’s baby Morgan was diagnosed with multiple severe food allergies–but he has two of the most loving, patient, and capable parents I can imagine, as well as a magnificent big sister and community of people who will watch out for him in person and in prayer as he grows up.

-Amendment One passed–an agonizing loss for all the citizens of North Carolina–but the work to defeat it showed the true solidarity and good work that we are capable of. Many individuals and organizations had courageous conversations and spoke out when they could have remained silent. The road to equality and reason is being forged despite the result of the vote.

The summer so far has been humbling and hope-inducing. I feel as though I am moving forward in a new way, a way I have not known for years. Difficult news, personal and political, has made me fear loss. I feel that as I grow into my life and reclaim what was threatened by my illness, there is increasingly more to lose. But I am also better prepared and very certain that I can, and we all can, make it through anything if we remember to look to each other and care for one another. Community and love are really so profound… 

What astonishes is the singing.

Horses at Midnight Without a Moon
by Jack Gilbert

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.

Who knows, maybe I’ll touch a spider later…

Just an acknowledgement that joy is sometimes hard to come by. But there is breakthrough, even if skittle-sized.

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/

Touch each other and keep telling the stories…

PASSOVER REMEMBERED

Pack nothing. Bring only your determination to serve and your willingness to be free. Don’t wait for the bread to rise. Take nourishment for the journey, but eat standing, be ready to move at a moment’s notice.

Do not hesitate to leave your old ways behind – fear, silence, submission. Only surrender to the need of the time – to love justice and walk humbly with your God…

Begin quickly, before you have time to sink back into old slavery. Set out in the dark. I will send fire to warm and encourage you. I will be with you in the fire and I will be with you in the cloud…

I will give you dreams in the desert to guide you safely home to that place you have not yet seen…I am sending you into the wilderness to make a new way and to learn my ways more deeply…

Some of you will be so changed by weathers and wanderings that even your closest friends will have to learn your features as though for the first time. Some of you will not change at all.

Some will be abandoned by your dearest loves and misunderstood by those who have known you since birth and feel abandoned by you. Some will find new friendship in unlikely faces, and old friends as faithful and true as the pillar of God’s flame…

Sing songs as you go, and hold close together. You may at times grow confused and lose your way…Touch each other and keep telling the stories…Make maps as you go, remembering the way back from before you were born…

So you will be only the first of many waves of deliverance on these desert seas.  It is the first of many beginnings–your Paschaltide.  Remain true to this mystery.  Pass on the whole story…Do not go back.  I am with you now and I am waiting for you.

-Alla Renee Bozarth