Carrying Each Other

"Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ." Galations 6:2 A friend in college once talked about how he didn't want to travel to different places so much as live in them because of the different view this gives one of a place. So it is for the last 10 years of my adult life that I have "lived" in different parts of the U.S. on a long, strange trip from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Huntsville, Alabama to Annapolis, Maryland to New York City to Jackson, Mississippi to Longmont, Colorado (with amazement did I recently realize that as a native and second generation Californian and through and through westerner that I had spent seven straight years living east of the Mississippi River and a total of five and half years south of the Mason-Dixon line, even as the deep south denies the southern legitimacy of Maryland). But in all these places, because I or my husband were either thinking about going to school or going to school, my living was temporary. I knew, even when I moved to each place, that my landing was a rest stop.

Now, living in Longmont with no intentions or plans of leaving, I am "putting down roots" here, staking a claim to the community that I don't plan on abandoning. It was at first comforting to know that I am not moving, to have a home that I own. Recently, it has been frightening. I don't have an escape plan once people see who I am, see how messy my family life is, discover me. I don't have a way to escape the difficult people and situations in my life. And then - with no escape - I came to see that in all the places I have lived, I have lived temporarily. I have been a long term visitor, but I have not trully lived there. I now live in a community that not only knows my name, works with me, hangs out with me but that knows (and greets!) all the skeletons, all the cob webs, all the dirty, mucky stuff in my life.

As the daughter of an alcoholic father, being so open and vulnerable is disconcerting. I was trained in childhood to put up defenses - walls, motes, trap doors (no wonder I collected castle figurines and loved the Egyptian pyramids as an adolescent) - to protect the family, to hide our terrible secret (how do you hide an elephant exactly?). Living otherwise comes unnaturally to me even as I struggle to keep the walls low. There was a time even in the last year when I got a creepy feeling after sharing difficult things in my life - the creepy feeling one might get when discovering one's identity has been stolen or house broken into, as if by sharing my secrets, I have lost pieces of myself.

But there was that prayer for close girl friends - perhaps not really my own prayer, but God's hand in my life moving me to pray for a closeness I fear - and the amazing results of finding a tree house I can retreat to, pour out the little items I've collected, trade closely held treasure and coveted pebbles (lowly, lowly things that I hide), and then laugh at the things that I've mistaken for treasure or pebbles or kept so closely held.

I woke up this morning with a brain that was functioning at two miles per hour with the acumen of a single cell organism. My son was functioning immediately at 35 miles per hour, and we had a lot of miles to cover yet for the day. I looked out the back door at the beautiful weather and could not remember what season we were in until I noticed the green plants returning to my garden. I slogged through the day and called Megan in the afternoon - sharing, laughter, jokes and well wishes even as she was telling me about her doctor's visit for the day and two more to come for the week as she figures out why she is critically anemic and if she has Crohn's disease, even as I tell her that I am starting the filing process for a legal separation. I got off the phone no less cured of my life's crisis but highly cured of a fatigued soul. In this community, I have come to see what it means to carry each other's burdens, to be freed of the effort of carrying them, to bundle and hide them so that they all fit on my back, and that I can not go it alone as a castle.

What You Pray For

The saying goes, "Be careful what you pray for." I've had people warn me to especially never pray for patience. But who would have thought praying for close girl friends would really bring down the sky?

While the past five years have revealed the insubstantiality of pieces of my identity - education, national citizenship, career, caretaker, family connections, church - it has been the last nine months that have tried to strip me bare, identities pulled away like the violent loss of a limb. And it started with a prayer for close girl friends.

Someone told me in the past few months that she doesn't know how I get out of bed every morning. The thought hasn't crossed my mind (although, having a coma has). I have horrible days and excellent days and days that just pass me by. My mom once said to me, during one of the past trials that, "Right now, everything is okay." Even though my future is unknown (isn't it always? Sometimes we just forget . . . and then two planes crash into two towers . . . a sister is deployed to a war zone . . . a sister loses her boyfriend to homicide . . . a church is told it has to close . . . a baby is almost lost during childbirth) and about as predictable as a rattlesnake, I can sit here and type and write and really, everything is okay at this moment.

And when things are too tough to feel okay, even in the moment, I hear Laura Binge's, a friend of my friend Megan, phrase "Just take the next right step." My brain will take off 50 years down the road, trying to predict how terrible or how horrible things are, reviewing how terrible I am and the things I've gotten myself into, and I try to back it up and just take the next right step (support my sister as she makes plans for my dad, suffering from Huntington's Disease . . . seek counsel on important decisions . . . make dinner for the kids and get them in bed for a good night sleep . . . put down the work and the housework and the anxiety and play cars with my son).

God does not fail us. In the midst of my sad mud puddle, I have found three amazing friends who not only sit with me in the mud and muck, but bring flowers to it, even when the best I can offer them is dirt covered smiles and thanks. They listen to every dreary detail of my life over and over again, will turn around and give me a hug and then ask to hear more. Even when I feel like it, I know that to them I am not too much, and more than enough. Through their presence, I am reminded that God indeed loves me, more than anyone else ever can (even as His wind tears away my leaves).

Echo's Tree

In late fall, with long shadows criss crossing the park, I watched my son, Asher, swinging, as my daughter, Harper, slept in the stroller. It was warm for fall. I was feeling the desperation of winter following the recent explosion of relationships and bonds, and was left floating, helpless - because of the confusion, the cold, the isolation - in the freezing water under the cracked, thin ice. And then I noticed tree shadows, lying dark and determined in the playground sand. From behind me, the thick shadows extended like the arms of a protective giant on both sides, holding me up.

Wishing, wishing, wishing for words that would not come from a lost friend, I look up at a lovely white aspen's yellowing leaves. The air is still along the whole neighborhood block, but the leaves rustle with a small breeze, whispering, whispering, whispering.

Another argument as we walk home with the kids in a stroller. I want to run or fall below the street or be taken up to heaven right there. Instead, a wind pulls across a tall tree and leaves shower over my head.

So it is in trees, these days, that God reminds me He is here. He is holding me in his arms. He is talking to me. He is caressing my head. He is sending me beautiful quotes about trees when I feel desperate.

I read yesterday an article in Child about names and the impact names have on us. I know this, intuitively. Can it be the same for a blog? As I thought about a name for this blog, I began with Renoir's quote and thought about using a tree's name or a nymph's name. I looked up trees in myth and trees in the Bible and found the importance of trees in both.

And among the nymphs - tree nymphs, oak nymphs, water nymphs, ash tree nymphs - I rediscovered Echo, her ability to speak freely curtailed by Hera in jealous revenge so that she could only repeat what others said to her. She mourned Narcissus' death and was violently destroyed by Pan, envious of her music. Her pieces were scattered over the earth so that she still speaks in echoes.

Like a tree, I expect this blog to grow, to keep going with paths like limbs and branches, starting here and there. I might echo. I might rustle. I might sing, but without fear of Pan's envy.