Ascension and Pentacost

This Sunday, I'll sing Christos Anesti, the Easter song, for the last time this year. In the Greek Orthodox tradition, it's Ascension Sunday; in the Western tradition, Pentacost.

You probably remember this part of the story: Jesus dies, the earth shakes, some rich guy offers to provide a new grave for his body, which is carefully guarded. A bunch of faithful women discover that his body is not there and hear the angel explain that he’s risen, as he said he would. They are overjoyed or full of fear, depending on which version you read, but either way, they run off and tell others, who tell others, who tell others, and the church, as we know it, with all of its flaws, is born.

And that's where the story of Jesus' life on earth would end it wasn’t for the Book of Acts (and the tail end of a couple of the Gospels). After the Resurrection, Jesus returns to walk among his followers, who sometimes recognize him and sometimes don’t? He finally ascends to heaven “for real” 40 days later in front of their eyes? Then, the 120 followers who have been hiding out decide to cast lots to replace Judas? (I always feel sorry for the guy who didn’t get chosen—I mean, why was it so important to have 12, or, for that matter, that they all be men?).

If the Ascension story wasn’t weird enough, there’s Pentecost, which is even more farfetched—the Holy Spirit comes down, everyone speaks ecstatically in tongues, and Peter tells off the mean people who think they’re all drunk, explaining that they’re actually filled with a spirit non-believers will never understand.

Already, lines are being drawn between who matters and who doesn’t, who gets left out and who gets let in. Already, Jesus’ message of inclusiveness seems to have been forgotten. Yeah, yeah, I get it—they were hiding out for a reason. They really were in danger—I mean, he’d just been crucified. Still, I can’t help but feel it’s odd that the same method used to split up Jesus’ clothes among the soldiers after he was stripped for a whipping was used to determine who would replace Judas as the 12th Disciple.

But more than anything else, I think my writer-self is just bothered by the way the Ascension and Pentecost mess with what would otherwise be a beautiful and neatly tied up story of Jesus’ birth, life, and Resurrection.

But I suppose that’s the whole point. No one’s life story reflects a perfect narrative arc. I talked about this with my Creative Nonfiction students this semester. So many of them were confused about where to end their pieces—a challenge for any creative piece, but especially challenging for autobiographical work. Of course it’s important to reflect the messiness of life, but the piece can’t be such a big mess that it has no center. Storytelling is, after all, about making meaning out of experience, either actually, when using the material of our own lives, or figuratively, when using the material of our shared humanity.

I come from a tradition that believes the Bible to be the word of God. God, like a divine lot-thrower, made sure that, out of all the versions that were written down, the right versions got into the book. God also inspired the writers to put down what they knew, to tell the story in the best way.

As a literate and thinking person, I can’t actually believe this; there is simply no way to discount how the Bible was actually put together, and the historical and political reasons certain versions were chosen over others. Not to mention that if God had really controlled the writing and putting together of the Bible, why do we have four vastly different versions of Jesus’ life? Yes, each writer had a different perspective or way of understanding Jesus, but even aside from those personal differences, the fact remains that even basic facts about what happened when, what Jesus said and didn’t say, conflict. To say that those who hunger and thirst will be blessed is vastly different than saying that those who hunger and thirst after righteousness will be blessed—and yet, the Sermon on the Mount, one of my favorite set of verses in the Bible, is completely different depending on which version you read. I don’t get how the Evangelicals—or the Greek Orthodox, for that matter, so I don’t pick on any one group--can’t see this. It’s so incredibly obvious, even on a first read.

In his final portfolio reflection, one of my students wrote that he continued to be bothered by the fact that I’d told my students it was OK to lie in their creative nonfiction pieces. That’s not exactly how I put it, but essentially, he’s right. I don’t believe it’s OK to completely alter what happened when writing nonfiction, but if you need to combine minor characters, or write a dialogue even though you don’t remember the exact words that were said—if doing so will make the story better, and make the reader’s experience of reading better—then I believe it’s OK. Good writing requires details that even the most observant person, even the best listener, won’t get right. The alternative, to me, would be to never write anything autobiographical at all or to write really boring, summarized pieces that didn’t read like—well, like good writing.

Did the writers of the Bible know that their words were going to be studied and prayed over and believed to be the word of God? I doubt it, but then, I also don’t believe Jesus had any real understanding that he was special (something that also does not coincide with my tradition’s view of Christianity). I think he was a brave, thoughtful guy who got in trouble with the people in power for speaking against them a little too often, for telling the truth. I believe he healed people, and spoke wisely and honestly, and loved deeply, and knew he would eventually die for what he said and did. Was he God’s one and only special son? I don’t know for sure, but I do believe his teachings are worth reading carefully and considering thoughtfully, and I do use them as the basis for my own spiritual practices.

But I also think that the telling of stories mucks up the truth as much as it preserves truth. We have to tell our stories to make sense of them, to make connections with others. But what we tell and what we lived are two vastly different things, and we can’t pretend that one is the same as the other. What I know about who I was at 10, 15, or 25 is different than what I experienced then and different than what I wrote in my journal soon after I’d lived the events of those periods in my life. That’s just how life, and recording life, work.

Some traditions tell us that the Church is the keeper of truth, and others tell us that the Church is ever-changing, based on the love and lives and actions of its members. I think the reality is somewhere in the middle. There are traditions worth keeping—the core messages Jesus meant to pass on, about love and inclusiveness and generosity and healing. There are changes worth making to traditions to meet the needs of an ever-changing world, but of course those needs remain, on some level, the same—there are still people who are left out, considered untouchable; there are still people who don’t have enough to eat and who are sick; there are still people who enjoy having power over others and people who are empowered by community and a desire for change.

In the end, the writer can only do so much. The reader will meet the writer only part way, will make sense of every story she reads in light of her own understanding and education and beliefs. And, a reader will read the same text at different times in her life and find different meanings. There is no such thing as objectivity; we all come to the page not as fully realized selves, but as selves that are ever changing.

But maybe that’s the point of the Ascension and the Pentecost stories. They tell us that the story doesn’t end after the Resurrection. They assure us that the boundary between the living and the dead is not as clear as we might have thought, that no story is ever completely over. This is a comfort to me in a way that the idea of heaven has never been. I believe for sure that people live on in those who are left to tell their stories, to pass on some essence of who they were. I don’t know if I believe in a heaven per se, but I do believe in legacies, in stories told, retold, and even mistold in ways that are far better and more meaningful than a simple recounting of what actually happened.

If I had to summarize what my religion is in five words or fewer: I believe in the power of stories. Oops, that’s seven, but that will have to do.

Too Young, Too Old

A woman I knew, five years younger than me, died this weekend. I can’t really call her a friend, though I’ve known her since I moved here nine years ago—at her funeral, I realized she is one of the few people who has been a constant in my life for all nine of those years, someone who truly seems to me to embody this place, perhaps because I’ve known her in a number of different contexts.

During my first couple years here, she was an activity aide at the nursing home where I ran my service-learning project. She stood out because she was always joking with the elders, finding some way to both poke fun at them and with them-- she seemed to love her job. I was also a frequent patron at some of the bars in town around that time, and we would often run into each other, have a couple drinks—though for the life of me I can’t remember a single thing we actually said to each other. Later, she was a student involved in service-learning classes and in feminist work on campus, juggling a family life that included six kids, a recent cancer diagnosis, and her schoolwork. Always, she and her husband were connected to students I knew and loved; those students became alums, and moved away, but she and her family stayed. And now, four years after her battle with cancer started, she is gone.

I am not sure how to make sense of this loss. I can remember her out at the bar, dancing like crazy. I can remember her walking down the street, her children trailing her, the oldest daughter her spitting image, a baby in her arms—and how she walked so tall and confident, even in all of that chaos. I remember her interviewing me for a feminist project on campus, how she seemed, then, too, confident even though she was never the best student. I walked with her and two of her daughters two years ago at Relay for Life; she was strong then, her hair growing out, and she looked glowing and beautiful. I dropped off food for the family a couple times, which she received with a characteristic smile, but I never lingered. I never, ever dreamed she would die.

I have memories, too, that couldn’t actually have happened. I remember her pressing one of her children into my arms, but I’m fairly certain I never held any of them when they were babies. I remember her walking across the stage at graduation, wearing a pink bandana—but she didn’t finish her degree, so I know this couldn’t have really happened. It’s strange how the mind plays tricks on us, confuses us—perhaps wants to comfort us with knowledge or hope that wasn’t really there.

We went to some of the same parties, some of the same events, drank together occasionally over the years—but in short, I didn’t know her, not really. Still, some alumni who were helping to plan her memorial needed a place to work on the program and do some other planning for the memorial, and I ended up being available and spending the day with them. I felt honored to be able to play a role, however small.

The service was simply a time for people to share memories. There were so many stories. At one point, Her husband and an older relative got out their guitars, and then there was dancing—most poignant of all was her daughter, about the age I was when I lost my mother in my early teens, dancing with the same passion her mother used to show on the dance floor, a ribbon of bells around her ankle. I wondered if it was the same ribbon her mother had always worn.

When a young person dies and leaves children behind, or when somebody who seems to embody the town in which you live in a way that few others do passes away—it is impossible not to feel sad, confused. As one of my friends put it, “After this, how can you possibly believe in God?” But I do. Watching her daughter dance, I knew there was a Spirit among us who perhaps couldn’t have saved her, but could comfort everybody now.

I want to believe that things happen for a reason, to fall into a simplistic faith, but I can’t. Some things do seem to happen for a reason—S coming into my life, for instance, or her brother, who will soon be adopted, finding his father, or my ending up in the middle of nowhere in a state whose name I didn’t know, prior to moving here, how to spell, where I am clearly meant to be. But other things—this woman’s death, a student’s recent suicide—they don’t make sense, can’t possibly. And I am OK, now, with recognizing that I will never understand the mystery.

It is easy, too, after something like this happens, to wish there was more I could have done, to want to change the story. I wish, for instance, that I’d lingered a bit when taking the family food instead of rushing away out of a fear that I would be intruding. I wish that I’d taken them food more often. I wish I’d called when she wasn’t able to keep coming to classes to see if there was some way she could, despite her illness, finish her degree. I wish I’d gotten to know her children so that they would feel they could talk to me now—I know what they are going through because of my own mother-loss at their age, but there is no way to connect with them now because I didn’t earlier.

But these regrets are useless, and in some ways, they probably are based in ego rather than love. Who is to say that I could have helped them, or that what I didn’t do wasn’t done by someone else, maybe someone closer to them or someone better at doing whatever was needed than I would have been? Who is to say that the children don’t have plenty of people to talk to, people who truly knew their mother? And yet, as I write this, I wonder what is the bigger sin (for lack of a better word)—that I want now to excuse myself for what I didn’t do, that I didn’t do it in the first place, or that I think I could have been that necessary to the lives of people I don’t know well?

I have been thinking a lot about what it means to live in this community because of our community’s many recent tragedies. After nine years, I’m at least familiar with most of the family names, and can recognize many, if not most, faces. A little girl who needs a liver transplant is the daughter of a student I had in my first year of teaching. Since then, I have worked with her grandmother in two different capacities in my role as service-learning coordinator. The student who died recently was the brother of one of my former students and friends with many students I have now, though I didn’t know him. A woman who died because she was too drunk to get safely home on a cold winter night lived nearby; we saw each other frequently, and I could point out the house she’d lived in, but I’d never learned her name. It is impossible not to think that there must be more that could have been, or can be, done for suffering people, especially in a community this small.

My daughter has made a list of all the ways she plans to raise money for the little girl who needs a liver. Will she follow through on this list? I don’t know, but I do admire her willingness to help someone she doesn’t know, and I hope I will be able to help her do at least some of the things she’s planning.

“I get that from you, Mom,” she said when I praised her for wanting to help. I’d just gotten back from the funeral, and we were finishing supper.

I’d only been half-listening as she read the list to me—my mind was still on the teenage girl who had danced at her mother’s funeral, on the beauty of that simple decision--and immediately, I felt guilty for not paying more attention. “Sometimes, though, I don’t feel like I help enough,” I confessed to her.

“You do what you can, and when you don’t, you just have to forgive yourself,” she said.

“How old are you?” I asked her.

“Fifteen. Why?”

“Just checking.”

“Was that something too young or too old for me to say?” she asked, genuinely confused.

“Too old, you dufus.” I smiled at her, and she smiled back, and then we began to do the dishes without talking about it—me washing, her drying, the chore she hates the most and does least willingly.

“Did you notice anything, Mom?”

“Yeah, you’re not complaining about your chore.”

“That’s right. I’m not. That’s older than my age, too, isn’t it, mom?”

I nodded. It was going to be a good night.

Honesty

Note: I wrote this about two weeks ago, but I’m just getting around to posting it.

Before S, my house (and my phone line) were safe spaces for people to come and talk about nearly anything. Although my life has changed significantly, I still have phone and in person conversations when S is in the vicinity that she probably shouldn’t hear. She understands this, but doesn’t always remember not to repeat what she knows. Finally, after some talk about this in our family counseling, we have managed to figure out how much she should know about other people’s lives and how to set up boundaries.

There is also the question about my own past and our family’s history. What should and shouldn’t she be told, for instance, about what kind of father my father was? About my dating history? These issues are a little less sticky, as I have decided honesty is, in general, the best policy here. I don’t have to tell every detail, but it’s important for S to have some sense of the history that she would have either lived through with me or learned piecemeal over several years if she’ d been my birth child. The basic facts are necessary, and some details come in handy when she is assuming I can’t possibly understand something she is dealing with.

What I didn’t realize until last week that I was holding back from S was how hard it is sometimes to be her mother. In the past month, she has gotten lazy about getting up on time. When we started homeschooling for the first two periods of every day, we agreed (and I told my supervisors) that I would go over what she would be doing the night before, and she would work quietly in my office from 8-10 each morning. I would be available to help her, and on some days she would definitely need more hands-on help than others, but most of the review of her work and the instruction would happen in the evening. Lately, getting her out of bed has been a struggle, and nothing has worked. Even when she is up on time, she’s rarely fully ready to go by 8. I have as a result fallen further and further behind on my work, which has led to late nights, less sleep, and a decreased ability to stay calm.

She’s also begun to get more verbally and physically abusive—so much so that it is not realistic for her to get consequences each time she cusses at me, for instance, or even each time she lashes out physically. The consequences I’d used in the past aren’t working. In short, I realized recently that things were really falling apart, but I think I was so tired I couldn’t see just how much.

A couple days ago, things came to a head. I screamed at her in the morning, something I work hard not to do, telling her I couldn’t take it any more, I needed to get to work at 8, I needed more sleep but couldn’t get it if she didn’t fulfill her part of the deal and allow me to get to work on time, etc., etc. She said she was sorry and promised to get up on time for the rest of the week. We set up a reward she would receive at the end of the week if she did so. The next morning, when I asked her for about the seventh time to get up, she called me a bitch.

I decided to just leave at 8. It was the best possible thing I could have done. I was angry, and I didn’t want to yell at her. I’d tried waiting in the car for her; I’d tried going into her room and doing silly things like jumping on her bed. I decided the best plan was just to go to work, do my work, and let her deal with her own morning routine. I returned to take her to school. She was quiet, and had managed to get through her routine, but she was also reading a horse book instead of studying for her test or doing her English. I calmly told her that I was glad that she was up and ready but that, again, she hadn’t completed her English or her study hall work. I was going to have to give her an incomplete for English, and she would have to make up the time she had missed because of sleeping in. She apologized, and seemed sorry on the drive the school (i.e., uncharacteristically thoughtful and quiet).

That night, on the two hour drive to see her counselor, I said I thought she should talk to her about her behavior and how she could be more respectful of me. She mostly ignored my comment. When she came out of her session, she said she had some things to tell me. First on the list was how bad it had felt for her to be yelled at a couple days earlier. Second, she told me she needed to also explain that this time of year was hard for her because of some abuse memories. We talked briefly about both of these things, and then I heard myself saying, “I’m sorry this is a hard time of year for you, but now I have to tell you something.”

I went on to explain how hurtful it was to be physically and verbally abused. I got tears in my eyes. I explained that I really felt we couldn’t go on like this. It was too painful for me to get so little respect from her. I said that I needed to be able to get more work done in the mornings and that I couldn’t do so because of her refusal to take seriously my need to be at work at 8. I pointed out that this also was selfish and disrespectful. “I never envisioned being the kind of parent who yells at her kid, but I seriously can’t cope,” I said.

“So it’s all my fault?”

“No, I should be able to control my temper. But I will tell you it would be a lot easier if you weren’t so mean to me and if you were more respectful. Also, if I had more sleep, I would be more in control of my temper.”

“I still feel like you’re saying it’s all my fault,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I’m saying it really, really hurts me when you call me names. You can’t just do that and think it won’t affect me. And I’m saying it really, really makes me feel disrespected when you won’t bother to get up so that I can be at work on time. If I had any other kind of job, I would have been fired by now for not showing up on time, but the consequence for the kind of job I have is that I have to be up late making up the work. You don’t seem to care how this is affecting me.”

“Why haven’t you told me this before?” she asked.

“Your social workers warned me about this. They told me you’d try to break me down as soon as I finally got you to make some progress. They said you manipulated all your foster parents into giving up on you.” At this point, my voice broke. “But I’m not going to give up on you. No matter how much it hurts and how hard you make my life, I’m not going to give up. But I wish you would stop trying to get power over me. They told me I should never let you know how hard it really is to be abused by you because as soon as I did, you’d have all the power. And now I guess I’m giving it to you. I don’t know what else to do.”

There was a long silence. “The social workers didn’t really know me,” S said finally.
“Maybe not,” I said, “but I think they might have been right about this. I think you’re terrified about the fact that I expect you to have a future and you have no idea how to treat me, so you’re pushing me away.”

“I don’t want to be the kind of person who hurts other people,” S said, starting to cry.

“Then stop doing it,” I said, firmly, gaining control of my own tears. “Just stop doing it.”

Of course, I know it’s not that simple. She can’t wake up one morning and stop resorting to “bitch,” “fuck you,” “go to hell,” “I want to kill you and myself.” She can’t just suddenly stop using violence to deal with her anger. But at least now there is an awareness and a willingness to work on changing her behavior.

Then she added, incredibly maturely, “I mean, I need to know these things, Mom. I never have any idea how you’re feeling. We have to be honest with each other if there’s going to be any trust.”

Duh.

The next day, the morning went swimmingly. She got up, did her morning chores, got ready by 8. She worked quietly in the morning. We wrote up a plan to make up the missed English classes, and she agreed to it. On our dog walk that afternoon, we processed how well the day had gone and why.

“I finally feel like all the tension’s gone between us, because now I know why you’re upset. It’s not because of what I’m doing, it’s because of how what I’m doing hurts you.”

This seemed so odd to me. How could she not realize that being called a bitch, being told to fuck off, being kicked or slapped, hurt me? And then she answered the question before I could even ask it. “Everything I do and say seems normal because I don’t know any other way. And nobody’s ever told me that what I do and say matters to them.”

“We’re a family,” I said. “You’re not just using my house as a place to sleep at night. Of course everything you do and say affects me.”

“I know you want me to have a future,” she said. “I know that’s different than the people from before.”

We got to the house of a daycare provider we know well. The children ran toward us, kneeling down to play with the dog. It’s finally really spring, I thought to myself. I’d missed the long walks, missed seeing our neighbors, missed the talks that happened naturally as we were walking. I thought briefly, as I often do, of how things could have been different for S if she hadn’t had the childhood she had, about what it would have been like to have had her since birth. I thought about how she might have been among children like these, whose parents love them, who are with a gentle, kind woman for much of the day. And then I thought of what a miracle it was that I have S now, that we’re talking again instead of bickering, that the day unfolded with sun and tulips and budding trees and after the longest winter I can remember, we were walking around in short sleeves.

Maybe this was part of the problem, too—it is harder to schedule time to talk when there aren’t natural opportunities. We were at least a little out of practice. Even our two hour drives each way to and from her counselor’s hadn’t been as fruitful as they usually were. The wind, the cold, the endless snow and sleet and bad weather, had somehow made us tired and lazy. We needed to keep working at it. I’d been so focused on fixing things at the school—after several more problems with her IEP, finally switching caseworkers for next year, and then dealing with the fallout that happened as a result—and we’d been so focused in family therapy on talking about the school issues—that we’d forgotten to talk about the big things, like what it meant to be a family, like how important trust is to building one.

Tribute to Deborah Digges, and Fear, and Sweeping

Note: This was written three weeks ago; I am just getting around to posting.

Each time my life seems to settle into a rhythm, something changes again.

Right after writing that, I said out loud, “What am I talking about?” My life, truth be told, has always been chaotic. I think maybe I welcome this chaos, even if I don’t choose it exactly. Or maybe I do choose it. I chose, after all, to take S into my life; I chose to leave my partner of six years; I chose to move to a small town in the middle of nowhere and to make a home here. Each choice has meant leaving behind, starting over. Each choice has irrevocably changed me.

Sometimes I imagine moments in my life when I could have chosen differently. Not gone to the college I chose. (I might not have become a writer, or a teacher, or a person who cares about the world beyond herself). Not moved to Cincinnati to work in publishing. (I might not have finally come out). Not kissed the woman I would spend three years loving and hating—the worst relationship of my life. (I would have suffered less, but also known less). Taken the other job, closer to my graduate school home in Arizona. (I can’t even imagine what staying in Arizona would have meant, can’t imagine myself not living and loving and learning here). Not left my partner three years ago (I wouldn’t have S).

There’s nothing profound about this—our lives are a series of choices, and everybody can look back at the decisions they made and wonder, “what if…”. But I am lucky enough to not have any regrets. I wonder how many people can say that. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve made plenty of stupid mistakes. I have hurt myself and other people plenty of times. But I’ve learned from all of these situations, and I feel lucky.

A few months ago, I was convinced I was losing my job. All the signs were there: the university was facing a major financial crisis, and I am in the most vulnerable class of workers, not tenure-track, and also not unionized. And, over the last couple months, I’ve watched plenty of people lose their jobs. A friend has worked closely with me for nine years; two weeks ago, she learned she had won one of the university’s highest honors, and last week, she received a layoff letter. We sat together at the faculty/staff dinner, and I watched her get her award, then followed her out into the hallway and wept with her when she couldn’t hold it together. Later, a group of us went out and had a few too many drinks, talking about the unfairness of it all.

In the meantime (as I mentioned in last post), I’ve learned that I’m not going to be fired, but that my job will change—I’ll go down to teaching one class a year and administrating an office that combines my current halftime job as service-learning coordinator with other work related to outreach. At first, I was sad—being a teacher is so central to my identity that I can’t imagine not teaching—but since then, I’ve come to see this change as an opportunity to build something new from the foundation of the current program I coordinate, to rededicate myself to what I consider to be the center of my life and work, the triad that started this blog in the first place: writing, spirituality, and social justice. Also, truth be told, I am getting burned out on teaching, finding myself more irritated with my students than I’ve ever been before, tired of planning lessons and grading. I think the change will be good for me (and my students) in the long run. And although my work may involve more evening and weekend commitments, they are the kinds of commitments in which I can involve S, whereas grading papers until 3 a.m., as I was doing last night, separates me from her rather than helping her to grow.

It is hard, though, to be happy and grateful when people I love are losing their jobs. I can’t fathom how it would have felt if my trip to the dean’s office had had a different outcome—if I’d been told I was getting laid off rather than that I was getting a new opportunity (even if that opportunity does not come with a raise).

The woman I know well said to me the day after she’d heard the news of her layoff, while weeping, “I know deep down inside that when one door closes, another one opens.” It sounds simplistic, and yet it is so true. I think about how devastated I was the first time I got close to getting a book published but didn’t. The experience made me rethink what would really make me happy, what I really wanted. I think about how sad I was when I didn’t get a job I really wanted a year before I got this one—I never would have ended up here. And the kids I’d inquired about before S came into my life, the ones for whom other families were chosen? They weren’t my kids. It’s that simple. S was meant to be mine.

This week S and I had our biggest fight to date, and she physically hurt me for the first time. I didn’t fight back, didn’t touch her, and I know that because of this I have kept her trust. But I’ve grown more wary of her moods; frankly, for the first time, I’m afraid of her. I spent the week trying to make sense of this fear, and doing so has made me look closely at the nature of fear itself.

I was afraid I wouldn’t have a job, and now, I’m afraid of failing at this new one, of not making myself valuable, of losing my job the next time around. More to the point, I am worried that whatever I do won’t be enough, that people will look back at it years from now and think it didn’t really matter. And, of course, I worry about S’s future—she’s backsliding after so many months of progress. I am afraid of what the future holds.

But maybe fear is not meant to be avoided. Maybe it’s also not meant to be fought. Maybe we’re supposed to live inside it, to let it teach us a new way to see.
Deborah Digges, a poet whose work I love, wrote in her poem “Late Summer,”

Mercy’s at best approximate,
like the first weeks of blindness
before the other senses’ stunned quartet have learned to translate
inside the skull’s black paradise
some recovery of touch, this odor of apples, sea-wind,
hearth-fire, this prophesy
of rain or danger,
this autumn or spring dryness in the leaves.

Deborah Digges must have stumbled around a lot, as I have, to have written these words. She must have also understood that stumbling can lead to translation, to a new way of understanding—she knew fear, and perhaps more importantly, knew how wonder and fear could coexist.

I can’t write this, though, without also mentioning that Digges killed herself recently. I can’t understand it, but then, I didn’t know her, only her work. She was a visionary, though, and it is sad to me that someone who can make words come to life the way she did would want to die. I wonder about this, what makes some people strong enough to live in the “first weeks of blindness,” hoping there will be “some recovery,” and what makes others stumble, never learning to live with their own fear, expecting some kind of salvation that is not possible or real, not realizing that “mercy is at best approximate.”

The longer I live, the clearer it becomes to me that fear is always with us, holding on tightly enough to keep us safe—we need to know our own limits, to understand our own vulnerabilities and frailties. But fear grips harder on some than others, warping words, actions and thoughts. The outcomes of fear, its effects on one’s life, reflect one’s life circumstances, and maybe also some genetic predisposition for survival.

As I stumble through these last two busy weeks of the semester, this start of my third year as a single person and my second year as S’s mom. It is almost summer. Most of my seeds have sprouted and are waiting patiently in my enclosed front porch to be put into the ground.

Digges wrote,

Once I asked myself, when was I happy?
I was looking at a February sky.
When did the light hold me and I didn’t struggle?
And it came to me, an image
of myself in a doorway, a broom in my hand,
sweeping out beach sand, salt, soot,
pollen and pine needles, the last December leaves,
and mud wasps, moths, flies crushed to wafers,
and spring’s first seed husks,
and then the final tufts like down, and red bud petals
like autumn leaves—so many petals…

Even now, I am sanest when I can take the long view, backwards or forwards. Maybe happiness isn’t real except in the whole narrative of our lives, which we understand only from a distance. Later in the poem, Digges goes on,

And so the broom became
an oar that parted waters, raft-keel and mast, or twirled
around and around on the back lawn,
a sort of compass through whose blurred counter-motion
the woods became a gathering of brooms,
onlooking or ancestral…
gone in motion, back and forth, sweeping.