The story of a rabbit

We recently had a visit in our home, sort of, from a little rabbit of about teenage status. He came in through the dryer vent. My husband heard him late one evening when he went downstairs to turn out the lights before bed. The trapped animal was crying and scratching to get out of the exhaust tube he’d fallen into. Wisely, my husband didn’t tell me about the dilemma in our basement until the next morning when he set about calling a specialist in wild life retrieval to come and get the creature out of the tube. At the time we didn’t know what it was although suspected it to be a chipmunk, which are abundant in our yard. Years ago, one had slid down that same exhaust tubing.

The wild life retrieval specialist came and disconnected the tubing from the dryer and from the outside venting structure and caught the little rabbit in his gloved hands as it slid out. He told me he’d rescued lots of animals from dryer vents but never a rabbit. With great care, he carried the little rabbit outside and told me to get it some water, which he waited for—such kindness—before setting it down. I took a good look at the rabbit and recognized it as the one that had come up to our front door and looked inside just a few days before. My husband and I both met him then, face to face for a good half minute or so, and we thought how unusual to have such a close up meeting with a little rabbit, and then he hopped away. Now here he was again but not in a good way. He was trembling. He barely moved. After the retrieval specialist left, I went back in to work, but walked back out to check on the little rabbit every 5 minutes or so. After just a short while, though, it was apparent he was doing very poorly and so I put him in a shoe box, along with some grass and water, and covered it with a screen to keep flies away.

I texted my daughter-in-law who texted her sister, who frequently rescues all kinds of animals from all kinds of situations, and she suggested putting a heating pad under the shoe box. I microwaved a rice heat pack and put it alongside the box on the side where the rabbit was standing, and then went online and started putting in search terms to find someone or something that could help this little guy. Let’s call it divine intervention. It took only a few minutes before I pulled up a spreadsheet of names of “Permitted Wildlife Rehabilitators in Minnesota.” This list cataloged who to call for ducks and squirrels and even bears. Yes, rabbits too. Regular people who do this as volunteers. I picked a name from my county and called, leaving a message.

About an hour later, a woman called back, her voice full of kindness, full of concern, and since she lived only about 10 minutes from me, came right over to pick up the little rabbit. When she got there, she picked the rabbit up in her bare hands—such gentleness—and turned him over to examine from all directions. He was injured and infected in ways I hadn’t been able to see, and she figured that he had probably tried to hide inside the tubing because he was ill. She would take him home and see what she could do to nurse him back to health. I said to her that given how many rabbits are in all of our yards, and how so many people try to keep the rabbits out of their gardens and so forth, that it was remarkable that she would go to such lengths to help a little rabbit live. She said, “But he’s here and he needs help.”

The next week I emailed her to see how the rabbit was doing. She wrote me back that she had given him a number of therapies, including injectable fluids, pain meds, and antibiotics, but that he had died the next day. She wrote how at least he had died without pain and in a warm and safe environment. I read her email with a huge lump in my throat, which is back now as I write this post. It’s not only that I came to care for that little rabbit, but it’s also, to a huge degree, that I’m overwhelmed that this woman was there with such love and care and that she is there for more creatures than this little rabbit guy and that there are more amazing people like this all over, under the radar. With all the emphasis placed these days on vocation, all the talk about how we need to carefully follow our calls, all the assessments so many of us make about what will bring us money, first author status, top billing, on and on, the image of this woman carefully examining this little rabbit and carrying him to her car is going to stay with me a long time.

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[Photo: taken of a boardwalk at a nearby place of beauty]

Your Creativity Archive

I recently read a post on Austin Kleon’s blog, “The Garden Where Ideas Grow,” that I found encouraging and even life-giving. For those of you who don’t know of Kleon, he writes about creativity and is the author of several books, most recently Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad. The blog post spoke of creativity as being like gardening, which rang true for me even though I’m not a gardener, in the literal dig-in-the dirt sense of the word. Each of us has notes for some creative idea planted in a number of places, such as emails or letters, journal pages, new project files, the margins of books, blog posts, and so on, and these seeds don’t go anywhere while they’re in those places. But then—and often rather out of the blue, because you didn’t realize at the time when you wrote these notes or phrases that you were really planting seeds—a moment comes and you’re surprised to see something germinate and push toward the light, and you realize then that all this time that seed had been growing tender roots. I discovered that this week with something I had worked on over 3 years ago.

I had been reading Dancing on the Head of A Pen by Robert Benson, and he wrote about how he writes 600 words every morning related to an emerging project and uses the rest of the day, all of the rest of the day, to work on projects that are further along or market the ones that are already out in the world. As I read it I thought how wonderful and wise, that this is how the work gets done, but the next day as I got ready to start my day job, I felt nearly upset at what I’d read because it so clearly leaves out someone like me, and perhaps you, who has to give so much to other things like earning a living. Then I remembered the little project from 3 years ago, and it clicked together in my brain with the Kleon blog post about creativity being like gardening and the clue from Benson of giving a certain number of words per day to something new, and so now something new is slowly growing and in a fun way, come what may from it.

I mention this because maybe it will cause you to think of something you started once upon a while and to wonder whether roots have yet formed hidden.

~~

Related posts:

• Beyond Work

• One Lifetime Isn’t Long Enough

• Writing From A Messy Room

~~

[Photo: Dusk, the evening after summer solstice, at one of Minneapolis’s beautiful lakes.]

A New Venture

This blog space has been quiet the last several months. At the turn of the year, now already more than 5 months ago, I had planned to pull back from writing here for a time so as to devote more time, in the already too few hours unclaimed by work and other commitments, to moving along my manuscript on hope, which already has taken way too long. But just as that plan was made, I found out that Kalos Press, the publisher of Finding Livelihood, my book that came out in 2015, had gone out of business.

While I was still absorbing this news, grieving it actually, and wondering what to do, the book's editor, Jessica Snell, emailed me to say that she and the book's designer, Valerie Bost, were on board to help me republish it if that's what I wanted to do.

Republish it?

I hadn't even gotten that far in my thinking yet. But, yes, I did want to republish it. I think this book still has some good to do in the world. My new publishing venture, Metaxu Press, was born!

Instead of having a next draft of my hope manuscript to show for these months of silence, I now have a second edition of Finding Livelihood. I've been learning about copyright law, and the Library of Congress, and business structures, and book distributors, and pricing models, and printing options. Thankfully, I didn't have to also learn about book design because Valerie allowed me to use again the same cover design and, slightly modified, inside design (did you know that a book's cover and inside design belong to the designer?).

Valerie also designed a new logo, which I love. Whether I publish anything else through this new press in the future, I can't say for sure, but it's been a fun process. So maybe I will?

The new edition of Finding Livelihood is now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online booksellers. Kindle and Nook versions too, although the Kindle version hasn't loaded yet for some reason.

You can also order it from Hearts & Minds Books and Eighth Day Books. If you live in Minneapolis, you can buy it at Milkweed Books or Magers & Quinn. If you live in St. Paul, you can buy it at Next Chapter Booksellers (formerly Common Good Books). No matter where you live, you can ask for it from your local bookstore and they can order it.

All books need some help, even second editions finding their own way out into the world. If you wanted to help this one along—and if you did I'd be ever so grateful—here are some ideas:

• Post something on social media, such as an excerpt from it or just a word about it

• Order it from your local bookstore or ask them to stock it

• Ask your library to order it (this is surprisingly easy to do)

• Write an Amazon review

• Buy a copy for a friend or for your church library

Thank you for being here and reading along. I promise I'll get some new content up before too long.

~~~

[photo: taken of the Lilies of the Valley in my yard. It was such a long winter here; the appearance of these triggered a surge of joy.]

On Hope and Fear in Birthing Hope

In Birthing Hope: Giving Fear to the Light, author Rachel Marie Stone writes:

“Hope: believing that some alleviation, some hand to hold or some hands to hold us, some ark, some higher place is always on its way, that our suffering, our struggle, our death, even, somehow generates life of some kind; leads to some homegoing, some rescue, some return: salvation.”

I first read Birthing Hope last summer. The title attracted me given my current work on a manuscript about hope, plus the book’s cover is gorgeous. I’ll admit I read it rather quickly, looking for how Stone developed the topic of hope. The writing was beautiful, yes, and the story and rumination compelling, yet I’ll admit it left me puzzled. The title had given top billing to Hope, while Fear held secondary billing in the subtitle position, yet the book’s primary gaze was on fear not hope. Hope is so often linked with desire that this way of looking at hope as linked to fear took me by surprise. I had to think about it awhile.

Late last fall, I reread the book and what came forward to me was the title’s first word: Birthing. Birthing is what is front and center. In the context of fear, when living with fear, what is the role of hope? The author likens the ability to hope in spite of fear to the birthing process, where labor is indeed frightening, but the hope for the new life to come keeps the delivering mother moving forward.

Stone continues:

“There’s a bit of false etymology that’s grown up around the word hope, and I like it, even though it’s not true. Hope, some people have claimed, comes from the word for hoop. I like it because hope should be round. Hope, like wholeness, like holiness, years for healing, resolution, closure. Hope believes that the circle will indeed be unbroken, by and by.”

The metaphor of labor, with its attending fear and hope, includes each one of us: aren’t each of us giving birth to something, waiting for newness and life to emerge?

What are your thoughts on hope and fear? I’d love to know.

~~~

[Photo: taken of a slice of the book’s cover.]

Excerpt used with permission.

The Transcendent Time Continuum of Hope

Everything Happens for A Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved, a book by Kate Bowler, came out last year from Random House and to considerable acclaim. At the age of 35 years, Bowler, an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School and mother of a young son, was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. Fortunately, her cancer is the “magic” kind, as Bowler likes to call it, meaning it responds to a new kind of cancer therapy known as immunotherapy. Take a look at her website and you’ll see her there in photos smiling and looking the picture of health.

The book was an interesting read for me because it gave a human face to therapies that I write about in my medical writing day job. For several years, a good part of my work has been writing about these therapies that help the person’s own immune system kill cancer cells. The book was an interesting and compelling read, also because it showed a person coming to terms with living in a state of great uncertainty about the future.

As Bowler writes,

“Plans are made. Plans come apart. New delights or tragedies pop up in their place. And nothing human or divine will map out this life, this life that has been more painful than I could have imagined. More beautiful than I could have imagined.”

Given that I’m writing a book about hope, I was also interested in how hope might be at play in her story. I found that while throughout the book, Bowler both struggled with and lived with hope, the topic of ‘hope’ per se was never overtly discussed. It felt a bit like a missing beat; I had wanted her to take on hope. Not that this at all takes away from her book or her story, it was just a perhaps selfish desire on my part to learn how she thought of hope.

Then the end of last month, Bowler had a cover story in the Sunday Review section of The New York Times. In “Hope Isn’t Only About the Future” (see below for link), she describes how her cancer diagnosis and treatment took away the future tense of her life and grounded her in the looped present comprised of treatment cycles. Hope as typically used, pointing to the future, seemed irrelevant when what she wanted was all now: life with her husband now, life with her son now. For her, hope had been a “kind of arsenic that needed to be carefully administered.”

She writes about trying to resolve the present:future dichotomous time continuum on which hope dwells for her as a person living with such uncertainty. Towards the end of the essay, however, she writes words that emerge from her personal struggle that spoke to me, and my guess is, they might speak to you as well.

“The terrible gift of terrible illness is that it has in fact taught me to live in the moment. But when I look at these mementos, I realize that I am learning more than to seize the day. In losing my future, the mundane began to sparkle. The things I love—the things I should love—become clearer, brighter. This is transcendence, the past and the future experienced together in moments where I can see a flicker of eternity.”

~~~

Note: The essay’s title in the online version is “How Cancer Changes Hope.”

[Photo: Taken from a corner of the cover illustration in the article’s print version in The New York Times.]

~

With thanks to Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver, superlative poet and essayist, died this past week at the age of 83. I first started reading her work, particularly her essays, in mid-life when I was in graduate school. Reading her was like having a friend next to me, urging me on to pay attention, to pause, to look, to wonder, to praise. In Long Life: Essays and Other Writing, Oliver wrote:

“And that is just the point: how the world, moist and bountiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning, ‘Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?’"

When I heard that she had died, I took Long Life off my bookshelf and went through, re-reading the lines I’d starred and underlined.

Here are a few of the other lines my eyes landed on:

“What does it mean, say the words, that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live?”

And this:

“I walk in the world to love it.”

And this:

"And here I build a platform, and live upon it, and think my thoughts, and aim high. To rise, I must have a field to rise from. To deepen, I must have a bedrock from which to descend." ( I had wanted to use this as an epigraph for Finding Livelihood but due to permission issue I had to cut it.)

This morning, here in Minneapolis, the sky is blue and sunny, the air cold. New snow, not much, is glistening white. Although the thermometer reads –1°, it is all so beautiful. Oliver wrote, “There is a rumor of total welcome among the frosts of the winter morning. Beauty has its purposes, which, all our lives and at every season, it is our opportunity, and our joy, to divine.”

May you divine much beauty, live the life yours to live, think thoughts and aim high, walk and love. I thank Mary Oliver for writing and sharing her deeply meaningful words. If you have some words of Oliver’s to share, I’d love to read them in the comments.

~

I’m experimenting with providing an audio version of my posts. Let me know what you think!

~~~

To read other posts I’ve written about Mary Oliver, click here.

[Photo: taken of a painting viewed at the Minnesota Museum of American Art: “March Idyll or Winter Landscape, Woodstock” by John Fabian Carlson; used with permission. I love that crack in the sky in the upper left corner that tells you the sun is about to break through. I think Mary Oliver would also have loved it.)