these are the things my soul was made for

This morning I woke up a bit disoriented by the still-dark sky and had to blink at the clock for awhile to figure out what was wrong. After I dragged myself from bed, I texted a good morning to my daughter, and she returned with a disoriented, “Why are you up so early??” reply from France, who is still on the old clock. Outside, the frost had returned and all the daffodils were bent over at the knees, but the geese and the ducks, sun-centered as they ever are, were entirely unfazed by the new time-keeping. The sun came up and shortly thereafter, the food and water arrived; they honked and chattered their way out of the pen and into the new week. It’s a kind of simplicity that tugs at something deep within me.

In a somewhat serendipitous moment last week, I finally found a copy of Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism (which so many of you have told me to read!) and spent the weekend highlighting it and reading passages out loud to my family. (I just love it when I find a book that echoes all the thinks I’ve been thinking and says it even better than I ever could.) I realized there are about 30-ish days left in Lent, so I’m beginning his Digital Detox today. No technologies “including apps, websites, and related digital tools that are delivered through a computer screen or a mobile phone and are meant to either entertain, inform, or connect you,” for 30 days. (Exceptions for essential work-related tech, which for me includes my blog and email on a limited basis. I’m also keeping limited text messaging and my photo journal since that is a daily project I don’t want to disrupt.)

My favorite part of this Detox though, is not just eliminating time-wasters and distractions, it’s the encouragement to craft a new life: “During this monthlong process, you must aggressively explore higher-quality activities to fill in the time left vacant by the optional technologies you’re avoiding. This period should be one of strenuous activity and experimentation.” I convinced my husband to join me (such a sport) so I’m looking forward to a fun month. I can see that this would be a good practice yearly - more like twice a year, if I’m honest - since technology has a way of sneaking up on you and hooking you when you don’t even realize it. I’m no longer tempted by social media, but don’t ask me how many times a day I read the New York Times and the comments. (Why??) That addiction to novelty is always needing to be tamed.

~ Truthfully, I feel like I am circling ever closer to the life I am supposed to be leading. I have a mental playlist of images and quotations, the witness of particular people, that I return to continually. And there are certain themes that spark a flare within me every single time I encounter them. It has only been recently that I’ve realized that they are endlessly fascinating to me because they are mine. These are the things my soul was made for and I will only ever be my best self when I fully embrace them.

Terry Tempest Williams wrote a story last year for Orion magazine in which she talked about her reciprocal relationship with nature, the way it is always calling to her and she is always calling to it, and how they are constantly calling each other into being. I think about that in times like this, how often I hear the world speaking to me, urging me toward what I know is my own truth. I do not mean truth of a theological nature, per se, but the truth of who I am in this earthly community and my purpose for being here.

A few years ago, maybe a decade or more, I was walking with my family on my Grandmother’s property. The kids were chasing each other around in a grove of Russian olive trees and the rest of us were climbing the rise along the horse pasture. It was a beautiful day, not too hot, though the sun was overhead and bright. We followed a line of old elm trees and I let the others wander ahead. I had heard an owl calling in the trees and wanted to look for it. I walked around, squinting up into the canopy with my city-blind eyes, but I couldn’t find anything. I gave up and left the trees behind, heading out into the open pasture. The kids were shouting and laughing, the voices of my husband and uncle drifting down the hill. There was a scent of sun-warmed sage in the air. I turned to look over the land my Grandmother’s family had homesteaded over a hundred years before. Just as I turned, there was a snap at my ear, a taffeta rustle that brought a kiss of cool air. It was a Great Horned Owl, skimming the space above my shoulder. It flew to the low branch of a tree directly in front of me and bobbed its head. I locked eyes with it for just a moment, dazed, grateful, astonished. Then it hunched itself and leapt into the air again, gone. All these years later I can still feel the pull of him, drawing me into a world of solitude, stillness, attentiveness, space. He was calling me to my own life, though it would take me so many more years before I recognized it as anything other than a memorable experience.

I believe there is purpose in my being here now, and so I believe the world is as much in need of my presence and witness as I was in need of that Owl’s and all the other living things that have graced my path. I believe it for all of us, whether we speak with the hurricane or the whale or through other languages of faith and presence.

This next month I’m going to be listening deeper, following the path I know I’m supposed to take.

Tell me, what are the messages your life is bringing you? Who are your messengers? I’d love to hear more.

peace keep you, friends,

tonia

EDITED: I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote this earlier and talked about the New Moon. Clearly it’s a Full Moon now. Whoops! I wasn’t quick enough to edit it out before the post went out via email. :)

"we should consider..."

Spending a little time with William Stafford on his (rainy) birthday.

~ “Everyone is a conscientious objector to something. Are there things you wouldn’t do? Well.”

~ “Here’s how to count the people who are ready to do right: “One.” “One.” “One.”

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

“…And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider -

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give - yes or no, or maybe -

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.”

Martinmas

I love that Martinmas and Veterans Day coexist on the same day (at least in the U.S.) Even as we remember the sacrifices women and men have made for their country, we’re reminded by St. Martin, the Roman soldier who became a Christian and then refused to kill, that there is a third way we can choose. (And this reminds me as well that although religion has been used to justify enormous amounts of persecution, war, and violence through history -and is still doing so now, God help us - it can also be a catalyst for conversion and peace. Anyone else need that reminder?)

When my children were at home, we always made Martinmas lanterns and hung them from the chandelier for a candlelit supper. Many other children and families take their lanterns on a walk through the night. I think it’s a lovely image to represent Martin’s witness to peace shining through the darkness of war and oppression.

On this day, I also like to spend time with other pacifists. Since I don’t really know anyone in my everyday life, it means revisiting the writings of William Stafford, Walter Wink, Thic Nhat Hahn, Leo Tolstoy, Vera Brittain, Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others. I think most of us who come to pacifism and nonviolence arrive there after a struggle between what we know to be true internally and what the rest of the world is determined to make us believe. Having a day to remember those who have stood courageously against the tide of public belief is a lovely gift.

So Happy Martinmas, my friends! May we be reminded of what is possible and courageous enough to believe in peace.

***

This would be a great time to revisit Desmond Doss’ powerful story. And here’s a poem from William Stafford, who spent WW2 in a Conscientious Objector’s Camp:

Learning

A piccolo played, then a drum

Feet began to come - a part

of the music. Here came a horse,

clippety clop, away.

My mother said, “Don’t run -

the army is after someone

other than us. If you stay

you’ll learn our enemy.”

Then he came, the speaker. He stood

in the square. He told us who

to hate. I watched my mother’s face,

its quiet. “That’s him,” she said.

just keep moving...

Happy November!

I snapped this photo on my way out the door for my morning walk yesterday. It fascinates me a little that I seem to always take pictures of myself for the internet outdoors, just out of bed and sans make-up. (It’s a long road from the 80’s teenager who wore a staggering amount of pearlized cosmetics and Aquanet and never let her appearance-guard down for a moment, even in the privacy of her own bedroom.)

I think I snap these photos because they represent moments when I feel happiest - on my way out of doors to move my body. That makes it sound like I’m one of those bouncy, energetic people who loves to be outdoors, but it’s not true. I’m actually a low-energy, low-stamina person who likes to be very, very comfortable all the time, pretty much what you’d expect from a writer. :) But somewhere along the line I decided that wasn’t going to serve me well and I needed to move. So I do, nearly every day. I keep it up because now that I’m in my late-forties (ouch) I find that not moving daily = stiffness, sore joints, back injuries, bad moods, mental fog, and weight gain. No thanks!

So many times I talk to people my age and older who think eating right and exercise are not worth the effort, or it’s too late for them to make any changes, but “too late” doesn’t happen until you’re dead! and feeling good is worth every bit of the self-discipline, even when it happens slowly (as it does for me.) Recently, I made an inspiration board for my husband and I and put it on the fridge to keep us motivated, pictures of older adults who are/were going strong with diet and exercise past the time others thought they should slow down. (Like Tao Porchon Lynch, Dr. Ellsworth Wareham, Rich Roll, Joan McDonald , and the fabulous Twyla Tharp among others!)

There’s always a transition period for me with the colder weather, and I’ll have a few days where I don’t want to leave the warm house, but if I just keep putting on my shoes and going out, eventually I start to look forward to those crisp mornings. It’s a better energy booster than caffeine to get me going for the day and I need that for all the hours I spend sitting in front of a screen.

November goals:

Move.

Eat more veggies.

Move some more.

(Oh, and finish the first draft of this novel! So close!)

peace keep you, friends,

tonia

in celebration of Wendell Berry

In honor of his birthday today, some treasures from Wendell Berry, whose words seem always timely. Every year on his birthday, I stop and give thanks for good, wise, kind, sane men. Long may they live.

From Thoughts in the Presence of Fear, written in response to September 11th:

“What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced and active state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness. We have, for example, several national military academies, but not one peace academy. We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable leaders. And here we have an inescapable duty to notice also that war is profitable, whereas the means of peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money.”

From the essay, In Distrust of Movements (both of these essays are found in In the Presence of Fear):

“I have had with my friend Wes Jackson a number of useful conversations about the necessity of getting out of movements - even movements that have seemed necessary and dear to us - when they have lapsed into self-righteousness and self-betrayal, as movements seem almost invariably to do. People in movements too readily learn to deny to others the rights and privileges they demand for themselves. They too easily become unable to mean their own language, as when a “peace movement” becomes violent. They often become too specialized, as if finally they cannot help taking refuge in the pinhole vision of the institutional intellectuals. They almost always fail to be radical enough, dealing finally with effects rather than causes….Ultimately, I think, they are insincere; they propose that the trouble is caused by other people; they would like to change policy but not behavior. “

One thing that makes Berry a voice to listen to is his fidelity to the ideas he espouses. His life is local, committed to community, land, and family and the good of others. His wife Tanya is a big part of making that life possible. There’s a nice essay about her in YES! Magazine:

Here’s my portrait of Tanya Berry: This white-haired 81-year-old is a fiercely independent thinker who embraces interdependence. Someone with a deep humility who gives others credit reflexively, and a self-confidence that makes her comfortable telling you what she believes she’s good at. A kind person who doesn’t hesitate to offer blunt advice. A woman who kept records of her prodigious canning in the kitchen while also serving as discerning first editor of every novel and short story written by her prolific husband.

“My mother,” daughter Mary Berry says, “is a complicated woman.”

Tanya also complicates assumptions people might make—not only about her relationship to her husband’s work, but about homemaking, farm life, small towns, and a Baptist church.

[…]

Wendell has pointed out that it’s difficult to make a public defense of one’s private life, but he asks to weigh in (the only time he does in the four days I’m there). “I want to give you a little of my testimony,” he says. Tanya’s role in his writing starts long before he reads that first draft to her, because as he writes he is thinking about her reaction. Knowing he will read it aloud to her—“to somebody I care about and am trying to impress and cause her to love me”—is especially intimidating, he says.

“I haven’t worked alone in any sense,” he says. “I’ve been by myself a lot, but I haven’t been alone. I’ve been accompanied by her, and I think our companionship has left me very willing to accept the companionship and criticism of other people.”

Wendell says his wife’s lack of interest in literary reputations also has been beneficial. He recounts a story that sounds often-told but authentic: “I brought in a review, somebody praising my work, and I said, ‘Look at that.’ Tanya said, ‘It’s not going to change a thing around here.’”

The full article can be found here.

And a link to one of his poems here.