rush hour was a contradiction
this afternoon—I could see the
stalled cars for what looked like
miles in front of me, so I dove for
the exit and the open spaces.
I saved no time, but I did keep
moving, winding down Durham roads
I rarely travel; my daily world is
small. I would do well to explore the
edges, the in-betweens, to take
the streets less traveled—at least
for me—I was discovering nothing.
Those houses have been there all along,
the cafés, wholesale meats, salons—
I am at the edge of their world,
ten minutes from my front door.
Saturday when I arrived at work I met one of my colleagues who was wearing a t-shirt that said,
“Stories Matter.” Naturally, I wanted to know the story behind the shirt. He told me it was for something called the 12×12 Initiative that is a twelve week road trip across country, starting yesterday from Raleigh to highlight twelve nonprofits across the country. They describe themselves this way:
We believe in the power of stories to motivate action and inspire compassion.
The 12×12 Initiative exists with the hope of connecting people with causes through the power of story. We want to see individuals get involved in their own communities, embracing the stories around them, and becoming part of one themselves.
Here is their video.
And here is the link to their Kickstarter campaign, which has only hours left and is so close to their goal. (I love that they drove out of town not knowing if they were fully funded.) And I love the quote I found in the middle of their page:
“[Stories] make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don’t know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them—if the storytelling is good enough—we imagine them as being, essentially, like us.” — George Saunders
One of the lessons I learned about preaching fairly early offered a bit of a paradox: if I wanted to say something that applied to most everyone I had to preach to someone in particular. To make global statements was to miss most of the crowd; to preach thinking of individuals who needed a word of comfort or even challenge meant a whole bunch of people came out of church saying, “I felt like you were talking to me.” The truth is shared best in stories rather than grand statements.
bell hooks speaks about the power of “particular”—telling our specific stories rather than proclaiming the broad strokes—and she used her story of life with her grandmother, Baba, to make her point.
We have too often had no names, our history recorded without specificity, as though it’s not important to know who—which one of us—the particulars. Baba was interested in particulars. Whenever we were “over home,” as we called her house, she let us know “straight up” that upon entering we were to look at her, call her name, acknowledge her presence. Then once that was one we were to state our “particulars”—who we were and/or what we were about. We were to name ourselves—our history. This ritualistic naming was frightening. It felt as though this prolonged moment of greeting was an interrogation. To her it was a way we could learn ourselves, establish kinship and connection, the was we would know and acknowledge our ancestors. It was a process of gathering and remembering.
Story: the process of gathering and remembering. That’s as good as any dictionary.
My friend, Paul Soupiset, who tells stories through both words and pictures, offered a link—What’s So Special About Storytelling for Social Change?—last night that has kept me thinking about the power of narrative. The author, Simon Hodges, is looking at the way storytelling has taken hold in our time, focusing on a storytelling community in Amsterdam called Mezrab. As he talks about the need for new narratives, he says:
[C]limate change, inequality, violence and other challenges can’t be solved by doing more of the same. We need new narratives that connect with peoples’ deepest motivations and promote more radical action. Stories engage people at every level – not just in their minds but in their emotions, values and imaginations, which are the drivers of real change. So if we want to transform society, we must learn to tell—and listen to—a new set of stories about the world we want to create.
He then goes on to tell what he learned listening to the group in Amsterdam, and he echoes what hooks learned from her grandmother.
So far so good, but what actually makes for a good story in this sense? That’s where my visits to Mezrab were so instructive. For one thing, the storytellers that got the most attention were not necessarily the funniest or wittiest. Instead, they were the ones that were most prepared to put their skin in the game, to state something that was uncomfortably close to how they saw the world. This radical subjectivity—perhaps the basis of all great art—is a crucial lesson for anyone who wants to communicate a complex topic. When we allow our own insights to organize the telling of a story, we give a more compelling account of events. Why? Because our deepest values are closest to what we share with others.
And then he mentions another community that used storytelling to bring healing:
A more local example came in the wake of the killing of British soldier Lee Rigby by two self-proclaimed Muslims in Woolwich, southeast London, in 2013. This event outraged the far-right English Defense League (EDL) who organized a protest outside a mosque in York. Knowing of this plan and anticipating violence, members of the mosque invited the protestors in for tea and biscuits. In the discussion that followed, both parties realized that they had a common interest in ending extremist violence. The protestors’ anger was successfully defused, and the day ended in an impromptu game of football.
The leader of the mosque, Mohamed El-Gomati, initiated a dialogue to identify elements of a shared culture among members of both the EDL and the Mosque. We can do the same with our own stories. Whenever there’s a situation in which we tempted to label one group as ‘the other’, telling a story that reveals shared values aids in the creation of new communities. The narrative ceases to be the property of one side’s rightness over another side’s error. Instead it becomes a story of co-creation and mutual responsibility.
Hodges talks about the power of stories to undermine belief systems. I love the sentence, even as dangerous as it sounds, because the truth is belief systems are constructs, walls that divide us; stories are relational tethers, the stuff communities are made of as we gather and remember, as we come together to tell the story of Love that is at the heart of what it means to be human.
Once upon a time . . . .
It was a dark and stormy night . . . .
In the beginning, God . . . .
No wonder one of my favorite hymns begins, “I love to tell the story . . . .”
Look it up and you will see the dictionary doesn’t deal with the word too kindly:
of no special quality or interest; commonplace; unexceptional; plain or undistinguished; somewhat inferior or below average; mediocre; customary; usual; normal.
And yet, I’m happy to report today was an ordinary day—and it was good.
According to the same dictionary, the part of the Catholic Mass that is repeated every time is called ordinary. In that context, the word carries some sense of essential, of ritual: meaningful repetition. I also think of the season of the church year between the end of Pentecost and the beginning of Advent that we refer to as Ordinary Time. I have come to see it as the time where we get to tell our part of the gospel story. From Advent to Pentecost, we follow the life of Jesus and then the beginning of the church; in ordinary time we have room to figure out what the story means on a day to day basis.
Today was a beautiful day here in Durham. Spring is a season that actually follows the calendar in this part of the world, so there was a cool breeze to accompany the sunshine. I had time this morning to read and write, had lunch with a good friend, picked up a few groceries, read and wrote some more, took a nap with the pups, cooked a little, listened to some music, and read a few email messages. One of them came from an old friend who introduced me to a new poet—Mark Nepo—with this quote:
My efforts now turn from trying to outrun suffering to accepting love wherever I can find it.
The words sent me searching and I found these words of his as well:
The further I wake into this life, the more I realize that God is everywhere and the extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary. Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond, and music is in both the flowing violin and the water dripping from the drainage pipe. Yes, God is under the porch as well as on top of the mountain, and joy is in both the front row and the bleachers, if we are willing to be where we are.
I did a little bit of searching and learned Nepo is a cancer survivor, poet, teacher, and seeker. His journey has brought him to a profound sense of the importance of daily life, from what I read. I am grateful for the resonance I found there.
Maybe ordinary does mean all of those things the dictionary says, but not today. The dailiness of our lives is distinguished by how well we pay attention to the details, how well we turn habits into rituals, how deeply we sink our roots into the commonplace. We live ordinary lives shot through with love and grace and mercy, and we have the chance in our comings and goings to offer those things to one another when we meet over meals, in grocery lines, or just passing on the sidewalk, if we are willing to be where we are.
One of the people who has mentored me through her writing over many, many years is Madeleine L’Engle, going all the way back to Ms. Reedy at the Lusaka International School reading A Wrinkle in Time to us at the end of the day if we finished our work. One of the sentences that has stuck with me from her nonfiction work, and that rises to the surface every so often is her observation that during wartime our vocabulary shrinks. I’m haunted by the sentence I think because I feel as though our American vocabulary, particularly in public discourse, has continued to shrink over my lifetime. We have lived as a people constantly at war, if not with someone or something else, then with ourselves. As a nation, war comes close to be our defining metaphor.
I thought about L’Engle’s observation when I read this paragraph from bell hooks:
This is why it has been difficult to honestly talk about race. We are surrounded by a profound silence about race. And the talk we hear, the public talk about race is usually a pouring of gasoline on the fire. Most of it does nothing to end racism. It’s the profound silence that we live within because we lack a language that is complex enough. Our task as people who love justice is to create that language.
To wage peace requires a more versatile vocabulary than us and them. For justice to be restorative, we need to expand the language of forgiveness and reconciliation. To create community, we must work together to find a more expansive articulation of inclusion.
Accordionated (ah kor’ de on ay tid) – adj. Being able to drive and refold a road map at the same time. Bovilexia (bo vil eks’ e uh) – n. The uncontrollable urge to lean out the car window and yell “Moo!” every time you pass a cow. Exaspirin (eks as’ prin) – n. Any bottle of pain reliever with an impossible-to-remove cotton wad at the top.
I spent many an afternoon with the kids from my youth group trying to come up with sniglets of our own. Though our intent was frivolous and humorous, the practice of looking for what needs to be named matters. John begins his gospel by saying, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” As people created in the image of the Creator, we are called to create and make things more complex, to find the words we don’t have and speak them.
In another section of the book hooks says,
Creativity is not quiet . . . . The root meaning of the word ecstasy is to stand outside—that’s what creativity does, it allows the creator to move beyond the self into a place of transcendent possibility—that place in the imagination where all is possible. And in that process one is both moved beyond measure and awed.
It’s true that our dictionary grows every year. Some of the words are created to explain technological advances, others are slang or cultural colloquialisms. Many in the media and in politics have mastered the art of the euphemism, which has less to do with being creative than it does providing something to hide behind. The business world often fashions words into new usage (I almost wrote they bully the words) in an attempt to make the language more pragmatic. (Please tell me why we now “gift” someone something, when we have been able to give it to them all along.)
None of that is what I am talking about. To move to a place of transcendent possibility is to move together, to talk together, to listen to one another. We have etymological work to do as well, learning from one another what connections we make between words—normal, gender, dominant, equality, to name a few—as well as the history of the words’ impact. If I am going to speak the language of love and justice, then I must think about what my words mean to my hearers and not assume they understand them the same as I do. Here in lies one level of the messy, deliberate, frustrating, hopeful, galvanizing work of building community and making peace.
And I think it is less about making up new words than it is coming to terms with words we have and learning how to speak the truth in love. To learn those words, I have to step out of my circle, read books that do more than affirm what I already know, listen to those whose presuppositions about life and faith and race and whatever else are not the same as mine, and leave a few of my questions with them. These are not conversations that are going to take place on the twenty-four hour news channels; their vocabularies are shrinking on purpose. We must share our words in coffee shops and churches, around dinner tables and on street corners. We must become subversive vocabularies determined to learn and share a language worthy and capable of the community we want to create.
As King Lear said,
The weight of these sad times we must obey; speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
“As we dedicate ourselves to one another, and thus experience daily and directly the diverse array of gifts that contribute to our living, gratitude will take its rightful place as the fundamental disposition that guides and forms our ways.” — P. Travis Kroeker
“Communities of care are sustained by rituals of regard.” — bell hooks
thankful
we get our best view of the world
when we are turned toward each other;
say it again, and then again,
until it is deep ritual:
repetitive significance
that bores its way into the core
of our beings, planting the seeds
of gratitude that will become
the stuff of earth that matters most—
our fundamental disposition.
this is who we are at our best:
not the same but all together,
thankful we are here together;
say it again, and then again
until it is deep in your bones.
My friend Claudia is an artist and graphic designer here in town. We get together about once a month for lunch. Besides just hanging out and catching up, she brings some sort of drawing and I bring a poem and we swap them with each other. The idea is then she goes home and paints whatever she sees in the poem and I write about what I find in the painting. We still don’t know where the project is taking us, but we are having fun on the journey together, which was our intention.
We meet for lunch at the same place each time: Old Havana Sandwich Shop, which is one of my favorite places in Durham not only because of the amazing pork dishes, but also because of Elizabeth and Roberto who own it. They are good at what they do and they are good people. Their restaurant is a labor of love, and they have worked hard to make it one of Durham’s treasures. This past week, they planted their first crops on their farm that will be connected to the restaurant. The journey has not always been easy, yet they have kept moving forward with grace and focus.
I went a bit early for lunch because I was hoping to get to talk to Roberto, mostly because I love talking to him. He has a kind and dedicated spirit, always ready to offer a hopeful word. I also love to talk to him because he is usually trying something knew, or has something to share that he has learned, and that usually means I get to taste something really good.When I got there he invited me to come back into the kitchen so he could keep working while we chatted. He slow roasts about one hundred and fifty pounds of pork a day, and roasts the whole hog. While we talked, he was taking the meat from the bones and preparing it to go to the service line.
He worked deliberately and carefully, handling the meat with gentleness and even regard. He kept a steady pace, but was not in a hurry. And there was a place for everything; he wasted nothing. As he worked, he answered my questions about how he used the bones, the rendered lard, and even the skin. He told me one of the women who worked in the kitchen was Mexican and showed him how to make salsa de chicharrones, or pork skin sauce, which requires to take the cooked skin and boil it down with tomatoes and other things until it becomes the consistency of paté. It was a part of the sandwich I had for lunch, and it was so rich and flavorful.
During most of the days this Lent, I have not decided on the word for my Lenten Journal, but as he worked and told stories, I knew today’s word would be intention and I would tell you about Roberto, who infuses his life and his cooking with it. He is a man intent on making his best offering.
After lunch, I met Ginger so we could spend the afternoon reading and writing together, though on separate projects. I went back to bell hooks’ belonging: a culture of place, which I have set aside for a few days, picking up where I left off. The essay I read was about her grandmother, whom she called Baba and who was a quilter. hooks described her and her work:
She was a dedicated quiltmaker—gifted, skillful, playful in her art, making quilts for more than seventy years, even after her “hands got tired” and her eyesight was “quitting.” It is hard to give up the work of a lifetime, and yet she stopped making quilts in the years before her dying. Almost ninety, she stopped quilting. Yet she continued to talk about her work with any interested listener. Fascinated by the work of her hands, I wanted to know more, and she was eager to teach and instruct, to show me how one comes to know beauty and give oneself over to it. To her, quilt making was a spiritual process where one learned surrender. It was a form of meditation where the self was let go. This was the way she learned to approach quilt making from her mother. To her it was an art of stillness and concentration, a work which renewed the spirit.
In the margin next to that paragraph I wrote, “cooking”—and I thought once more about Roberto because how she described her grandmother’s connection to quilting is how I felt watching Roberto cook: it was an art of stillness, concentration, and renewal.
The Latin root of intention is intendre, which means “to stretch toward.” I love the image that creates in my mind. To live with intention is to stretch toward wholeness, toward grace, toward connection, toward excellence, toward love. To watch Roberto cook with intention stretched me to see my day differently, as did hooks telling me about her grandmother incarnating the “ongoing practice of patience, combining spirituality with creative imagination” in her quilting.
With our monthly meeting, Claudia and I are stretching toward being better friends and better artists by creating interdependence, even as we are being fed by Roberto, who cooks with patience and kindness and whose dishes taste like invitations. From both of them I am reminded we are called to stretch toward one another, to live with the intention of creative community.
I can name several friends who have marked the anniversary of a parent’s death, some who are facing difficult decisions about their jobs, others dealing with illnesses and uncertain outcomes. That just skims the surface. Pain is common currency, along with disappointment and loss. One of life’s lessons, I suppose, is that pain is woven into the fabric of our existence and is not something other than life.
That’s enough to take in on its own terms. Then I came across these words from Stephen Dunn in The Poet’s Notebook:
What does it mean if you know that a particular disappointment or sadness in your life cannot, relatively speaking, compete for emotional attention with a normal day for a normal person in the Sudan, in Bosnia? Do you write the poem of disappointment differently?
Perspective:
a particular attitude toward or way of regarding something; a point of view;
a true understanding of the relative importance of things; a sense of proportion;
the art of drawing solid objects on a two-dimensional surface so as to give the right impression of their height, width, depth, and position in relation to each other when viewed from a particular point.
A sense of proportion. I miss my father—and my grief is real, even as I don’t know how it feels for a son whose father has been imprisoned at Guantanamo for who knows how many years without being charged or tried. We hear gunshots in our neighborhood sometimes at night and I never worry about a car bomb going off at the Durham Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning. We feel inconvenienced in going to the grocery store and women in Africa walk miles and miles to get water everyday. The contrast is as obvious as it is tragic, and there is more to perspective than simply ending this paragraph with #firstworldproblems, which is why I like Dunn’s question:
Do you write the poem of disappointment differently?
I heard a speaker, who was working hard to help the audience understand the magnitude of world hunger, paint a picture this way: instead of giving a big number he said, “Imagine a 747 packed full of children crashing every ten minutes all day everyday; that’s how many children die of hunger in our world.” The image was graphic, even evocative, but I didn’t know what to do with it except feel horrified and helpless. I couldn’t get “the right impression of their height, width, depth, and position in relation” to them, if you will. I didn’t know what to do with the distance between those kids and me, between understanding and change.
I look back at the definitions in the earlier paragraph and I see the word can go two directions: a point of view or a sense of proportion. The two are not necessarily synonymous. If my point of view is self-serving, I stand little chance of a “true understanding of the relative importance of things.” I can’t find my place in this world if I am convinced I am the center of it. I won’t be able to grasp what a normal day feels like for a normal person in Iran or Afghanistan, or even across town, if I look with eyes colored by fear.
And—not but—my grief an my disappointment are real. I don’t think Dunn’s question is rhetorical. The pain any of us feel is not measured by competition, as I am reminded by an old favorite, Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese.”
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
Here’s why we write the poem differently: those dying in the streets of Baghdad are family, as are those planting the bombs. We are connected, related, with all the complications and hope that come with those ties. Grief in any language fluently spoken here.
the words are falling
out in twos and threes tonight . . .
a trickle of thought and
thankfulness trying to
keep a promise:
I said I would meet you here,
and bring a word:
mosaic: diverse pieces forming a more or less coherent whole.
Start with the shiny
shards of my day:
the old woodworker
with an evergreen spirit,
the young teacher
with a student’s soul;
dinner with old friends
who fed us with
the hope of our history—
then I baked cookies.
life is not that sequential—
a collection, instead,
of the details, the tiny
bits of nevermind
that become something
of value all together,
even when the glaze
machine is broken
at Krispy Kreme.
Before I left for work today I perused the shelves in my office to find a book to accompany me at lunch. I picked up The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of Contemporary American Poets, which I have had for a long time. I looked to see when I bought it and the inscription said, “October 2000. On the way to Marshfield,” which means I rode with Ginger when she was interviewing at the church there and must have picked it up along the way. I’m guessing I got it at the Borders at Braintree. It’s no longer there.
The premise of the book was to print from the notebooks poets carry with them to jot down ideas, observations, and whatever else they choose to collect. The list of contributors includes Stephen Dunn, Donald Hall, Carolyn Forché, Charles Simic, Mary Oliver, and William Stafford. I flipped back and forth, following no particular order, and then continued the practice when I sat down to write tonight. I stopped when I came to this question in the middle of Mary Oliver’s musings:
Which would you rather be, intellectually deft, or spiritually graceful?
My mind went two very particular places. The first was a scene from Fight Club:
Narrator: Tyler, you are by far the most interesting single-serving friend I’ve ever met… see I have this thing: everything on a plane is single-serving… Tyler Durden: Oh I get it, it’s very clever. Narrator: Thank you. Tyler Durden: How’s that working out for you? Narrator: What? Tyler Durden: Being clever. Narrator: Great. Tyler Durden: Keep it up then… Right up.
The second was a song by The Story, a now defunct duo that was Jennifer Kimball and Jonatha Brooke. It is called “Grace in Gravity.” It was the title song to their 1991 album.
what we are and what we were once
are now far estranged
coming to the biggest city
in the dead of summer
you were chosen ’cause you
would not close your eyes.
you danced among the finest–
black and blue in revelation,
a melancholy nothing could describe.
this is grace in gravity
grace in gravity
touring in South Africa
the mountain roads one day with a friend,
visions to the ocean off the coast.
(so blue, so green)
he was white and you are black and
this makes some vague difference after
twisted fire and glass and steel,
you’re silent as they try to explain…
this is grace in gravity
(in another world now)
grace in gravity
and what we are and what we were once
are now far estranged
what we are and what we were once
are now far estranged
your friend is cared for promptly now
but you must travel further to
another saving grace that takes your kind.
this journey marks a step
that no one knew was irreversible,
you say there is forgiveness
and they say you’ll never dance again…
this is grace in gravity
grace in gravity (don’t know where you’re going)
grace in gravity (going, going)
grace in gravity
and what we are and what we were once
are now far estranged
what we are and what we were once
are now far estranged
I heard them sing at Club Passim in Harvard Square soon after the album came out. They said the song was based on a true story of a black ballet dancer who, after a car accident in South Africa, was paralyzed after the ambulance drivers chose to take the dancer’s less gravely injured white companion to a better hospital before they took her for treatment.
you say there was forgiveness . . . .
Deft is a shield; graceful is an invitation.
Deft is a power move; graceful is a risk.
Deft aims to rise; graceful is how you fall.
Deft is alone; graceful is together.
Which would I rather be, intellectually deft, or spiritually graceful?
The question feels like a prayer.
