The autumn rain was not warm, but soft,
the kind that makes everything shine.
Even the sidewalk. Even a Tuesday.
Likely the air smelled of leaves and cut grass.
Likely the birds were a riotous chorus,
because that’s how it is here in fall.
What I remember so clear is how you
rushed out the front door
in your favorite hand-me-down dress
with brown velvet polka dots
and a pink satin sash—
mighty fancy for a day spent at home—
and began to dance on the driveway,
both arms lifting into the drizzle,
an elegant twist to both small wrists,
one leg stretched straight,
your bare toes pointed to the pavement,
your face raised up to the rain.
It’s your smile that startles me,
then and now, a look of deep contentment,
measureless pleasure in being.
Over ten years later, I still see it in you,
something utterly unfakeable, wildly true,
the capacity for joy beyond the frame.
It vibrates in me like the tone
of a gong struck gentle and long,
until I too am shining
with trembling reverence,
astonished by the grace that’s here.
Even when it’s gray. Grayer. Even when it’s cold.
Posts Tagged ‘grace’
If the Heart Could Dog Ear a Day, There Would Be This Moment
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, daughter, grace, memory, photograph, rain, reverence on March 12, 2024| 11 Comments »
Talking with Andrea
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aliveness, friendship, grace, language, praise on March 5, 2024| 12 Comments »
I do not understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.
—Anne Lamott
With every cell, I listened
to her familiar voice,
her thoughtful silences,
her precision with verbs,
and though we spoke
of showerheads and
grocery shopping,
elections, underbellies and
standing beneath the moon,
we spoke only of grace, every
sentence somehow stitched
with the most stripped-down
kind of praise, the kind
that doesn’t sparkle,
doesn’t sing, doesn’t
shimmy, doesn’t offer
sweet perfume, the kind
of praise that is so naked,
so plain, so bare
there is nothing at all
between us and the
sheer magnificent truth
that we are here.
I long to name such aliveness,
at once composed
and uncontainable,
but it slips my attempts—
it’s like trying to fit a dress
on a sunbeam.
But I felt it, how
as we spoke I went
from being stone
to being sky. Oh glory,
with my everything,
I felt it.
Amazing Grace
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged control, grace, grief, will on January 15, 2024| 13 Comments »
At what point in the avalanche
do we realize there’s nothing
to be done but be pummeled
and tumbled and broken
by the world?
At what point do we know
that no matter how hard we swim,
the current will carry
us over the falls and
to the rocks below?
At what point are we sure
we can’t save our beloveds,
not from the world and not
from themselves?
In that moment,
and perhaps only then,
grace comes in to do
what the will cannot,
and whatever it is
that is larger than us
makes a home in us.
If we survive it,
sometimes it stays.
A Choice I Never Noticed Before
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dance, daughter, grace, grief on January 2, 2024| 15 Comments »
For no reason, this morning
I dance through the rooms,
my socks sliding on the wood floors
and I twirl and glide and chacha
as if the house is an empty stage.
I think of my daughter who chassés
and leaps—in toe shoes no less—
and I have none of her finesse,
and yet this morning something in me
says dance, though I woke
feeling broken, though I woke
wearing the great gray cloak of grief.
Who could say where it came from,
the impulse to shimmy, to raise
my arms above my head
and swirl my wrists and
fling back my neck till the grief
is light as gauze? I am grateful
for this mystery, how it saves me,
grateful for this inner beat that says,
dance, time to dance, dear woman,
you have everything to gain
in this moment if you dance.
Going Deeper Into the Mystery
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blame, failure, grace, grief, humanness on October 23, 2023| 16 Comments »
I don’t know why I did not see
my son’s choice to take his life as a failure.
Not as his failure. Not as mine.
Not the failure of the world.
Not the failure of his friends.
It’s not as if I’m a stranger to failure—
I who can endlessly beat myself up
just for failing to remember to return a call.
I don’t know why I did not need to blame.
Don’t know why I didn’t rail at God.
Why I didn’t contract
into a crumpled ball of shame.
I don’t know what grace stepped in
and turned my heart again and again
toward compassion, toward humanness.
Don’t know why it only occurred to me
to love him. To be gentle with myself.
I don’t know why the world
met my broken heart with such generosity,
obliterating any walls of failure
before I could even fashion the bricks.
I don’t know how it works,
this mystery of acceptance,
but it saved me,
never trying to rewrite the story,
asking nothing of me except
that I let myself be led through every moment
by what I cannot know.
Evanescent
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, ephemeral, grace, shadow on February 12, 2023| 8 Comments »
For a few minutes a day
for a few days of the year,
the sun shines low through the window
and casts a shadow high on the wall,
as this morning, when I see
the shape of six chrysanthemums
splayed in diffuse gray
just below the ceiling
and I put down my work to marvel.
It’s simple science, really,
how opaque objects
placed in the path of light rays
do not let the light pass through.
But there’s something so beautiful
and temporary
about the giant spectral blooms,
so I do what the heart asks me to do—
I watch as the ephemeral bouquet
intensifies, then fades away
until the wall is just a wall
and I am just a woman
beside six purple chrysanthemums
who was found by a moment of grace.
Winter Evening
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communion, friendship, grace, laughter, memory on November 21, 2020| 4 Comments »
Though I sit alone
on my couch at home,
I’m somehow also sitting
with Rachel and Julie
and it’s summer and
we’re laughing, laughing
until we tumble
into each other’s laps,
laughing as we collapse
into a puppy pile of giggles,
laughing because it feels
so good to laugh—
even now I laugh aloud
with no memory of why
we were laughing then,
but many years later,
it’s still contagious.
Sometimes we tumble
so wholly into the grace
of a moment
that it opens in us forever,
continuously blooms
and spreads its perfume
like night-blooming jasmine,
christens everything
with its fragrance,
even this empty room,
even this tired woman
now so surprisingly awake.
Surrender
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grace, nature, peace, surrender on April 27, 2020| 6 Comments »
Some mornings I wake and the peace
that I tried to find yesterday finds me—
arrives in the open palms of the river scent,
in the erratic path of the warbler,
in the low golden angle of sun as it slants
through the gray knuckled branches of cottonwood trees.
Even the broken watering can seems to bring me
news of what’s been here all along—
the peace that holds up the turmoil, the mess.
And the dried grasses in the field
and the tiny new leaves on the currants
gather me into them. They’re like old friends who say,
It’s okay, make all the mistakes you want
around us. Some mornings, through no effort
of our own, we are gathered into the peace
of the patient lichen and the still pond.
It’s the difference between breathing
and being breathed, between asking for grace
and finding that grace has been asking for us.
The Inner Cupboard
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bread, grace, love, parenting on April 22, 2020| 6 Comments »
No one else knows, as they eat the bread,
what’s been slipped into it,
how in with the flour, the yeast, the salt,
a stubborn devotion has slipped in.
It hides in an inner cupboard. Even the baker
doesn’t have the key. But when
she would rather not be loving—
because she is tired, because
she feels wronged, because she’s distracted—
that’s when the cupboard opens itself
and mixes into her the kind of devotion
that cannot be manufactured, the kind
of devotion that rises up not out of duty
but from some mysterious, infinite source
that guides her hands as they knead
the soft dough. It infuses her with a longing
to be big-hearted, a longing to love, even when love
feels unreasonable. She can smell it
as it fills the whole house with its generous
scent. Even now, as they sit and eat the bread,
it astonishes her, how ferocious
this drive to nourish, to love.
They pass the butter, the jam. She smiles
as they eat it together, slice after slice.
Grace
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged falling, fear, good enough, grace on January 25, 2020| Leave a Comment »
After all these years of falling, falling,
terrified of my own weight, terrified
of gravity, after all these years of dropping
through the sky, through all these fears
of not good enough, certain I will crash,
I will die, I find myself now wearing
a great white parachute that appeared
as if I were dreaming, to save me.
After all these years harnessed only to fear,
I land gently, as if on a flat green lawn.
And I’m not just safe, I’m smiling.
I try to reason it logically: Air resistance
with a chute is greater than gravity.
But there is no logic here. How
did the parachute appear? I
didn’t even ask to be saved. Here I am,
good enough, two feet on the ground.
After years and years of falling,
I’m okay. I’m wildly okay.