Moths and Light Revisited

Dear Readers: I wrote this morning about not making pain the enemy, about pursuing goodness and releasing control. Tonight I received a call from my dear friend Shannon that her 5-year-old son's cancer is back. I am reeling; they are even more so. It is a suffering that I do not understand, but I am being offered yet another chance to practice what I wrote.

I wrote about journeying with them through Caden's cancer when I lived in Kansas City last year, in a post that's about 13 months old. The title is above. If you pray, would you please pray for my dear friends, and those who are standing with them?

With deep gratitude--a.

Goodness vs. Perfection

The Greek idea of excellence is stiff and static;
the Hebrew idea of goodness is dynamic and leads
to freedom. The Greeks were concerned with the
pursuit of perfection, believing that it existed
and could be attained. Plato, in his Republic,
talked about "forms" and thus the platonic ideal
came into existence. There was a perfect way,
and it was what men lived to attain. The Hebrews,
in contrast, were concerned with the idea of
goodness. When God created in the beginning
of Genesis, he called things "good" and "very
good." Perfection is never mentioned. Instead
of only one possibility, there are many. The idea
of goodness is one that has infinite permutations,
and always has the possibility to become more good.
We move from being anxious puppets trying to attain
an impossibility, to being co-creators in a story
we are helping to write. Goodness is a dynamic idea
which speaks of interaction and community, freedom
and growth.

I am reminded of the last chapter of C.S. Lewis's 
The Last Battle in his Chronicles of Narnia. The
children have come to Narnia to stay, and they are
exploring the country. The more they explore,
the more they see their beloved Narnia become
better and better..."deeper, more wonderful,
more like places in a story: in a story you
have never heard but very much want to know."
It wasn't a static place, but one that was
truly good.

I want to live life unflinchingly, running
"further up and further in," as the children did,
in pursuit of the freedom only the pursuit of
goodness--and the one who is called Good--can
bring. And so I take another step this Monday
morning into goodness, away from perfection.
I am moving in the wonderful, terrifying reality
that while this journey is good, there is much
I cannot anticipate. I know already that an honest
journey in this world sometimes brings excruciating
pain. There is so much I cannot control, and that
in itself is a good thing. It does not feel so,
especially when faced with headlines that read
of cholera outbreaks, religious and ethnic murders,
a 5-year-old kidnapped and killed by a shot of
acid in the heart.


We do live life outside the garden. I can make
the pain my focus, letting it pile up in the
middle of my life, a stinking stack of excrement.
I can grab a shovel and try to control what comes,
spilling my energies on managing what no one through
history has ever been able to manage. Or I can
grieve that life is not as it should be and continue
my journey, letting the pain fertilize what is already
growing. I am learning to see that doing this frees me
to create with what I have been given to steward. I
have the choice to channel my strength toward living
well in the midst of what I cannot control, so that
my pursuit of what I call good is more in line with
what goodness really is.

Meltdown: A Mostly-True Story

NOTE: In a slight departure from my usual ruminations, I am posting a letter I wrote to Mars Snackfood about an aspect of their marketing that I find troubling. The letter originated to help a friend by creating an example of what her class was working on (testing advertising claims and then writing to the company about the results) but is based on real life. Believe me.





Mars Snackfood US
Attn: Consumer Care
800 High Street
Hackettstown, NJ 07840

Dear Customer Care:

I am a person who believes that chocolate should be added as one of the major food groups, and my favorite type of chocolate is found in the form of M&M’s. I love how many ways there are to eat them, from savoring them one by one during a movie, to throwing a massive handful into my mouth when I’m trying to escape having to share them with my brother. However, I am writing to ask you to address a significant concern that I have. One of your famous slogans is that M&M’s “melt in your mouth, not in your hand.” I have run several tests and have found that this claim is not true.

I began my scientific consideration of M&M’s claims in the summer of 1985 and continued every year on a quarterly basis until 2008. Since my testing has covered nearly a quarter of a century and my findings are consistent, I believe that it is time to ask you to address these discrepancies for me, and for other consumers who may be similarly led astray. My data for a sampling of years is as follows:

1985 1988 1991 1995 1998 2000 2003 2006 2008
Spring Melted Melted Melted Melted Melted Melted Melted Melted Melted
Summer Melted Melted Melted Melted Melted Melted Melted Melted Melted
Fall Melted Melted Melted Melted Melted Melted Melted Melted Melted
Winter No Melt No Melt No Melt No Melt No Melt No Melt No Melt No Melt No Melt

Beginning when I was eight years old, in the middle of a Colorado summer, I took my precious M&M’s, stood in my driveway and clenched eight of them in my right fist, holding them for five minutes. (I timed it on the digital Snoopy watch I’d gotten for my birthday). Sweat dripped down my brow as I waited to see if what M&M’s claimed was really true. When five minutes was up, I opened my hand to find a sticky mess of smeared colors, chocolate, and broken candy shells. They had always melted in my mouth this way, but, according to your claim, were supposed to retain their integrity in my hand. In an attempt to save my precious chocolate I licked my hand, getting a gooey mess in my hair, on my face, and on my favorite shorts. (Try as she might, my mom was never able to get the stain out!). Thus, my mission began. I continued to conduct testing, but decided that once a season would be enough. I also took precautions that kept me from ruining my favorite clothes and making my mom mad. And as I continued my testing, in three of the four seasons, I found that M&M’s melted in my hand as well as my mouth. I think that it is important to consider that in Colorado, the winter temperatures are often below freezing, and that I have risked frostbite to hold M&M’s in my bare hand, finding that it is only in these extreme weather conditions that I have found your slogan to ring true.

It is as a result of this extensive testing that I want to ask you to consider withdrawing this advertising claim and replacing it to reflect something that is more like the experience of your chocolate-loving consumers. I understand that the spirit of your claim is to communicate that your candy is so delicious that someone eating them doesn’t leave them in their hand long enough to melt. However, what you say is misleading, as my extensive testing proves. In light of this, I want to suggest that you change your slogan to “They’re yummy, and melt anywhere you put them except in the winter.” I think that the truth of this statement will bring integrity to your brand in a way that the catchy “melts in your mouth, not in your hand” will never do.

We are living in an age where many corporations think that they are immune from having to tell the truth. I want to encourage you to keep from beginning to slide down the slippery slope that has left companies like Enron and Qwest in moral shambles. If you don’t give attention to this matter, I—and many others like me—may switch over to a brand like Rainbow Dots, which makes no such misleading claims. However, I want to give you a chance to address my concerns before taking such drastic measures. I am grateful to you for your attention to my concerns, and sincerely hope that they have been both constructive and useful.

I look forward to hearing from you in regards to this important matter.

PS--I sent this letter two days ago. Any bets on what might happen?

PPS--Turns out I'm not the only one troubled by this M&M's advertising claim.

A Beautiful, Terrifying Thing

I can taste fall in the air, its chill tempting me to remain wrapped in my quilt later than I should. So I bundle myself warm and return again each morning to my desk, to welcome the words I know will arrive. This morning words are like minnows, schooling around my ankles, tickling their way onto the page. I sit at my basement desk, looking up toward light that filters past late summer flowers from a sky that is clear and blue. When people told me that writing was a frightening proposition, I nodded, and thought I understood what they were talking about. How often my life confronts me with the disparity between what I know and what I truly understand.

In my window well, along with the industrious spiders, a toad drops in to keep me occasional company. He has been here three times before, leaping each time with persistence against the screen, startling me. Or he sits on the concrete lip of my window with meditative quiet, as if watching me. Sometimes I think he's gone, only to find him blending with the chunks of bark that cover the ground outside the window. But then later, when I peek out to see where he is, he is not just camouflaged; he has disappeared. How? This morning my answer arrived when I saw him inching, Spider man-like, up the corner of the window and frame, scaling a smooth surface I thought was impossible.

I have begun a conversation with some friends about what it means to hope. I knew the definition, but wanted to see where the word came from. This is what I found in the Online Etymology Dictionary:

hope

O.E. hopian "wish, expect, look forward (to something)," of unknown origin, a general Low Ger. word (cf. O.Fris. hopia, M.L.G., M.Du. hopen; M.H.G. hoffen "to hope" was borrowed from Low Ger. Some suggest a connection with hop (v.) on the notion of "leaping in expectation."

© 2001 Douglas Harper

Hope is in frightfully short supply these days, and misunderstandings of what could sustain its weight abound. What does it mean to live in a forward, expectant direction, with the piercing sadness and crippling fears that life in this world inevitably brings? And what happens when we put our full weight onto a dream that itself offers no promise? What else is there? Once I might have been quick to offer what I knew; I am learning to embrace what I do not yet understand, to be present to the is, rather than the ought.

Monday is my deadline to have the first draft of my novel finished, something which still feels like I'm still six inches shy of scaling the impossible. And yet I have this knobbly-skinned visitor to remind me that there is a deeper magic than fear, leaping against my window to surprise me. Hope thrives in the unknowns, when life escapes my control. What a beautiful, terrifying thing. I am on a journey toward hope; writing is one of my means of discovery. I write because it exposes my unknowing, and because when I do, something inside of me leaps.

Learning to Enjoy The Ride

My desk sits before a four foot window in the basement, looking out at five feet of corrugated iron that makes a window well. Spiders are active spinners this time of year, and have found this protected place perfect for their thin webs, unbothered by a roaming dog or the inevitable Bocce games of a late summer's evening. The breeze still moves through here, stretching each web, pulling its inhabitant back and forth like slow breath.

And so I set about each day, spinning my own stories in this unbothered place, hoping that the thin filaments of my ideas can bear the weight of the words I hope to catch. I sit still here, me and my arachnid companions, each of us vigilant for what we know unexpectedly will arrive.

Two nights ago a thunderstorm hovered above the house, pouring its energies downward, clearing the window well of everything but wetness. The next morning each spider not busy climbing back up a spout was once again spinning, creating a space to catch what might come their way, what they knew they needed to sustain themselves.

Finding poetry is something that happens by intentional chance. And so I continue to spin, learning readiness in the most unlikely of places. I get writer's block. I feel fear and doubt and other things I need, but that overwhelm me. I touch dark places, and places pulsing with light. And when the breeze blows, I hang on tightly as this world breathes on me, learning to enjoy the ride.

My Life in Metaphors

Mother's Day I spent the early afternoon helping my mom to plant her garden, to anchor the seedlings she had bought into the ground: rhubarb, broccoli, various lettuces, chard, peppers, summer squash. The beans we planted as seeds, pushing the oblong pearls into the soil, covering them thoroughly with black dirt. Now there is no evidence of their presence, just flat soil. I know from doing enough of my own planting that this isn't how it will remain, but the row of nothing-but-dirt lies in stark contrast to the inches of green that poke from the ground around it.

The last day of April I flew to Kansas City to begin to close my unexpectedly-short chapter there. I bought 100 yards of rope, rolls of packing tape, plastic tubs, snacks for the long drive back to Colorado. When I arrived, the Oak and Walnut and Dogwood trees had begun to poke out a few leaves; by the beginning of May's first week, the intervals of warmth and rain had unleashed a riot of greens from the trees. Spring seemed to happen all at once, surprising me. And so I drove away from Kansas City last Friday as I had arrived, in a U-Haul, with many boxes of books and some furniture packed in the back, trusting that spring of a different sort might surprise me again.

Last night I lay awake into the early hours of the morning and listened to the coyotes howl. Then I fell asleep and dreamt: a miscarriage that would not stop bleeding; trying to find a place to sleep in a crowded house; driving a car down an icy hill, trying to stop, careening out of control. My life in metaphors. I continue to mourn losses, and find a continued need for rest. I have never experienced so much change, so quickly. Two moves across two state lines in less than a year, a life now stowed in storage, sending tax returns to three different states, a bittersweet freedom to come and go as I please.

Hamlet, in his famous soliloquy: "To sleep, perchance to dream--ay, there's the rub." His thoughts were shaded by the tunnel of ultimate despair. Yet I wonder if Shakespeare also is hinting at the risks of dreaming while still awake, of leaning into the hopes of what might be, and the risks inherent. Hope deferred does make the heart sick. And yet I am learning slowly that there is a difference between hoping in and hoping for. I am learning not to try to steer a destiny which is not mine to control, choosing not to live in fear of what else, or what next. I am coming to understand trust as a choice, and am learning again and again that the One who asks for this trust is worthy of it.

And I am reminded of another stark metaphor, one that would have fit into the sequence of my dreams: Unless a kernel of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed, but if it dies, it brings forth much fruit. No, even in the heaviness of the news this week of Myanmar and China and Zimbabwe and the Middle East, I won't minimize my grief, or refuse to plunge headlong into the uncertainties I face. There can be no resurrection--or redemption--if there has been no death. Touching my own sadness helps me to enter more fully into a world that is not as it should be. I refuse to live cowering in the shade of despair, but to live with the metaphors I have now, believing that there will soon come signs of my own spring.

Deeper than I think

Confession: I trespassed today, all bundled in my snow clothes, crunching along the snow-packed road down to walk along the river. I wasn't looking for the elusive moose that lives in the area. I was looking for the chance to stand beside quiet waters that run in the valley near where I am spending these few days. Like the shepherd-poet David, I have come asking that my soul be restored. It has been a quiet day of writing, reading, drifting off to sleep, dreaming, waking, cloud-watching, praying, writing...and then, trespassing.

I stood for a long time, leaning against the green metal of the bridge, listening to water run over rocks, watching a pair of mallards swim upstream. And I wonder: what brings restoration? How does it come about? How can my soul be an environment hospitable to such change? A thin layer of snow lay like cotton gauze on the bridge's flat parts, melting quickly when I breathed on it. Finally, I moved on, up the hill and back toward the house, past waist-high piles of shoveled snow. I passed the "No Trespassing" sign without seeing anyone, let alone someone with the intent to prosecute.

It is good to get away, and even more, to be alone. In the quiet, I am again aware of how noisy I am inside. It is unsettling that I have not been more aware of this, that it has taken me this long to notice. Perhaps the restoration I long for goes deeper than I think.

Listening Into The Silence

Winter began, according to one solstice expert, at 1:08 AM on 22 December. This Midwest winter had a long prologue, with ice storms and snow scribbling its welcome script onto the thin pages of November, spilling ink into the darkening days of December. The humid cold is slow, like fog over the Thames, settling into the dark morning hours, finding its quiet place in the gray days of winter's welcome.

Weeks ago, as I drove across the border from Missouri into Kansas, a line of geese were flying south. Against the dark orange of sunset they appeared as an errant pencil line scrawled onto the light-burnished clouds. They moved like a ribbon of flight caught in the winter wind, pushing the air beneath their wings toward the icy ground, flying somewhere else. Not here.

I find myself again in a place where I don't know where home is, am pierced sometimes with a longing to return that tumbles me like a storm breaker. But return where? To what? Or to Whom? C.S. Lewis's take, in The Problem of Pain "There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else....It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds."

The fierceness of my longings--both of the having and the not-yet-realized--has brought me to my knees of late. This fierceness catches in my throat when I least expect it, and leaves me exposed in the ache of what is, rather than what might have been. And yet I refuse to retreat to a safer version, one that feeds on Prozac, blunted. I will not be numb. My enemy is not my pain, nor my insatiable hunger. It is something else entirely.

Considering Hafiz, in an untitled poem from his book The Subject Tonight is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz:

Don't surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice so tender,

My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.

***

When I wake up in the middle of the night, my impulse is to look around, to find a way to see. I trust my eyes when they can do nothing for me. An easy metaphor for faith. But how quick my impulse is to reach over and flip the switch on my lamp, to reclaim my vision and therefore to live in a perpetually weakened state of daylight. No, there are things to be discovered when my preferred sense is absent. When home is uncertain. When winter offers days full of tangled branches and short shadows, ice-covered surfaces and sadness. Things are not as they should be. They are as they are.

There's a guy somewhere in Arizona with a tattoo across his chest that reads "Grace grows in the winter." God, I pray he's onto something. In my mind I know that without a winter solstice, there could not be a summer solstice, a day spilling over with sunlight. What feels true and what is, are two different things. Two months have passed since the darkest day of the year, and yet I still find myself living in more shadows than light. The valley of the shadow of death is real. Why do I spend so much time pretending it's not?

From Mary Oliver's poem Wild Geese

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.

I will make the choice to reside in the strangeness of today's fresh grief. And I will listen into the silence: to the call of the geese, to my raw longings, to the pulse of an idling train engine, to the words beneath the words spoken by a stranger. There will always be much to be seen. Yes. But even more to find when this sense fails me. There is much I cannot see today, much I do not understand. I will make the choice to let my imagination feast on this new fare; on a world that I welcome in its harshness, find again to be exciting. I will not run from my aching need, or from the God who resides in the places I fear most. And maybe, in the darkness, beneath the snow, grace is growing. Many things are not clear from where I stand. But being here for now will be enough.