An Unlived Life

I’ve read this poem many times (and perhaps have posted it on this blog a time or two) and it always has something to say to me. Pay attention, pay attention, whisper the words in between the lines. It came to me again this morning and I’m paying attention. Maybe it has something to say to you as well?

I will not die an unlived life,
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise…

-Dawn Markova

Standing in Line for Ashes

This coming Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent. Maybe for you this day will be like any other. Or maybe you will go about your day but imagine a swipe of ash across your forehead. Or maybe, like me, you will go to a service, stand in line with others—likely some who are stripped bare or who carry a quiet grief or any number of everyday anxieties—and a minister or priest will make the sign of a cross on your forehead using ash from palms burned from last year’s Palm Sunday.

My friend Daniel Thomas has just released a new collection of his poetry, Leaving the Base Camp at Dawn. The poems explore how a long relationship of love is like a spiritual practice, and this exploration often comes disguised as narrative about forging streams and climbing mountains. A couple weeks ago I started reading his book and came upon the poem “Ash Wednesday.” I read it. Then read it again. And again. I closed the book and opened it and read it yet again. Please read it now yourself.

Go to this link. Read.

Then scroll to the bottom of the page and listen to Dan reading the poem. Reading and listening are two different things.

Carry the words with you and the way they made you feel into the beginning of Lent. Read and listen in imagination or anticipation of ash on your forehead, of standing in a “ragged line,” of carrying or observing “grief concealed.” 

~~~

[Photo: a field in February.]

The Clean Daughter by Jill Kandel: A memoir of adventure, grief, and mercy

My friend Jill Kandel has just released her second book, The Clean Daughter: A Cross-Continental Memoir (North Dakota State University Press). Her new book is a memoir that tracks a couple different aspects of Kandel’s life. It is about her cross-cultural marriage, Jill from North Dakota and Johan, her husband, from the Netherlands. It is about living in other foreign cultures, with Johan’s job taking them to live in Zambia and Indonesia. (If you’ve read my blog for awhile you may remember that I wrote a post about her first book, So Many Africas: Six Years in a Zambian Village.) It’s also about Jill’s difficult relationship with her father-in-law, Izaak, a “judgmental and arrogant” man who made a controversial final decision about his life. This is the thread that interested me the most.

Years after her father-in-law died, Jill set about trying to learn more about who he was and why. She spent years researching, traveling, talking to relatives and family friends. She uncovered the story of his life as a teen and young man as Nazi Germany took over the Netherlands and the years of recovery after Germany was defeated. She learned of her father-in-law’s heroism, his generosity of spirit in those dark days. Although the hurt she experienced from her father-in-law never completely went away, she came to see her father-in-law in a new light. She came “[t]o see him as human, both frail and strong, with foibles, faults, quirks, and grace.” She came to see her own judgments and arrogance in relation to him. Her story made me wonder about the unknown stories of people with whom I’ve had trouble relating. The stories of people whom I’ve judged. The stories of people I haven't paused to consider.

Just this last week my father and I have spent time thinking about and discussing a woman in our family ancestry about whom we only knew a bit of story. We started probing those few lines of story. We started wondering about and talking about what that story would have required of the woman. The shape of her life has now grown in substantial magnitude in my mind from what it was before. Whereas this woman had been little more than a name on our family tree, now she was a woman of great strength and bravery. We spent a couple hours; Jill spent years.

In the final pages of The Clean Daughter, Jill writes, “I’m learning to value mercy and to extend grace to both Izaak and myself.”

Among the birch trees

I recently went to The Museum of Russian Art, which if you’ve read my blog for a while you may remember some prior posts about this beautiful place (which has had a Ukrainian flag prominently painted on the front of the building for the last couple months). The first painting I saw on this visit landed my attention and my affection as well. I’ve been thinking about it for several weeks. It’s called “Among the Birch Trees” by Akhmed Kitaev in 1962. I hope you’ll click this link to see the painting before you read further.

The painting seemed at first to be a picture of a forest of birch trees. Beautiful cream, gray, and brown bark, bright green leaves, long lean trunks. But then I saw the woman. If you clicked the link above, do you see her now too? Peering out from behind one of the trees is a woman. Was she posing? Or did the artist capture her as she was walking through the forest and just emerging from behind a tree? It almost seems as if she was hiding behind the tree and just now emerged to say, “Here I am!” There’s something playful about her. See the tilt of her head. Look closely and find the bouquet in one hand and the single flower in her other hand. She wears a clear plastic rain coat and a clear plastic rain hat held under her neck with a pink plastic tie, and a black purse hangs over her wrist. Her rain gear all has a pinkish hue. She wears a watch and a dress, not pants. Her hair is dark and worn typical of the 1960s.

She looks like an ordinary middle-aged woman of her time and place who went out to do some shopping on a rainy day, but instead of walking down gray sidewalks on a gray street to a neighborhood store, she instead stepped into the forest and there takes a stroll gathering flowers and being flirtatious with the beauty of the birch. I like to think that she is playing hooky from her errand to the store. That she ditched the errand and strolled boldly into the forest. Maybe she enacted a stealth walk, veering only at the last minute away from the store and toward the forest lest anyone notice. Maybe she hid around corners of buildings, kept her head down, bent over more than necessary to tie her shoe or fix a stocking to escape the questioning gaze of a neighbor or coworker. When the coast was clear, she made a dash into the forest and hugged the birch. She breathed deeply. Lifted her face to the sky. Leaned back against a tree and rested.

Or maybe she was simply taking the long way to wherever she was going. Adding joy and rejuvenation to her day wherever and whenever she could. I much like that idea as well. I love this painting and hope you’ll look at it awhile. Maybe you’ll come up with your own story about the woman in the painting.

~~~

[Photo: A slice of the painting described in the post. Click through to enjoy it in full!]

2022: The Year of Repair

Alan Jacobs, author and professor, recently declared on his blog that 2022 is "The Year of Repair." For himself and for his readers, he urged stopping the focus on disruption and instead focus on fixing what needs to be fixed, which can mean small things like mending a shirt or tending to an overgrown garden. Or big things, like fixing a broken friendship or making even a dent in racial disparity. He included a line from Unapologetic by Francis Spufford: “Don’t be afraid, says Yeshua. Far more can be mended than you know.”

Good food for thought here.

Art exploring Mary as a model of faith

Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA) states its mission as three-fold: called to creative work, devoted to the church, and present in culture. For this Advent season, CIVA has put together a virtual art exhibition entitled YES! to explore Mary as a model of faith. CIVA's website says the aim of this exhibition is to "visually guide us during the days of Advent as we anticipate the joy of the incarnation, reflecting upon how we are being called to respond in hope to the 'how can this be?' moments in our own lives. Where and how might we say with all our heart: 'May it be done to me according to your word.'"

I hope you'll click here to visit the gallery and take a look at the art that's been gathered and the statements by the artist's about their work. In particular, please visit this page to see an entry by my good friend, Pamela Keske.

Daniel Bowman's On the Spectrum: Autism, Faith, & The Gifts of Neurodiversity

Daniel Bowman, associate professor of English at Taylor University, editor of Relief Journal, has written an important and captivating memoir in essays, On the Spectrum: Autism, Faith, and the Gifts of Neurodiversity (Brazos Press), about his experience as a creative writer, professor, husband, and father after receiving a diagnosis of autism at the age of 35.

Through his experiences, he guides the reader to think about autism not from a pathology model but from a paradigm of neurodiversity.

Here's the thing: Neurodiversity is real, it's not going away, and people ought to be excited about such a momentous breakthrough. We are unveiling layers of mysteries about what it means to be human....

[L]et's be curious; let's be in awe of how complex we all are. Let's get excited when the frontiers of knowledge open up even just a little. And let's be aware of what it means: that for the first time in human history, a certain group of people have a better chance to be understood and affirmed and to get what they need in order to flourish and contribute to the flourishing of the culture. That's a wonderful thing.

After reading Bowman’s book, I’ve been thinking about relationships I’ve mishandled or people I’ve misunderstood. About how easy it is to wrongly assess a person or situation—or to be wrongly assessed oneself. On The Spectrum teaches its readers about autism but it also models and calls out humility and compassion, persistence and calling, friendship and joy.