Rock My World

Stone is the face of patience.       

Mary Oliver 

Even rocks have stories to tell,

deep old stories of time passing through eons, 

slow and fast moving water 

shape the stones over millennia. 

I have such a stone, ancient, from a creek bed in the Colorado Rockies. 

It fills my whole hand with its weightiness. 

Hefty. It feels hefty.

The color of dusky charcoal with white threadlike veins running around it,

tracing the paths of its life, telling the earth's story. But my stone has another story; the story of how it came into my life in the summer of 1982 during a family vacation through the west. 

My husband, our ten-year-old son and I had climbed an easy sloping mountain where we sat, all three of us, hushed by the beauty of it all, the vastness from on high. The only sound, the flapping of a bird's wings. We sat in awed silence for a while, we three, with our own thoughts before we made our way back down the mountain. Our son, always fearless, made it down way ahead of us. It seemed like we all were craving continued silence as we went our separate ways to explore the creek bed, remaining within sight of each other, but feeling no need to talk. 

The creek was lively, yet easy to navigate. As I waded the shallow waters, the rock caught my eye. It was sitting there alone, glistening, serene, tempting. I moved to pick it up, but hesitated for a second, not wanting to disturb it in its ancient bed. In the silence it seemed to call me; a connection on a cellular level that has stayed with us for 32 years.  

She's a good traveler. (I think of her as female.) There is always room for her in my suitcase. She went to Scotland with me where I picked up a couple of traveling companions, two pieces of green marble from Iona. On a tour of the Isle of Coll, we saw formations of gneiss, some of  the oldest rock on earth. I think she felt at home there. 

I look at her every day. I hold her every day. She  has been a silent witness to my journey. She's seen every emotion it's possible for a human to have. Sometimes I look to her for answers. She never has any. What she does have when I hold her in my hand is solidity. She takes me right back to that ancient silence, which gives me the space to be calm and focused. It's her never-ending gift to me. One that I never take for granted. 

The few steady influences in my life are very precious to me. She has been a most steadfast presence. She doesn't judge. She abides. 

Rebekah for the Poplar Grove Muse

Tiny Day of Service and Renewal

 

Last month, 15 women gathered at the Poplar Grove Schoolhouse for a time of communal cleaning and renewal of the space. Our efforts were offered as a giving-back to an organization that has bestowed  so much upon each of us, and an intentional focusing-in on a treasured and transformative home for our writing community. The additional blessings came in how renewed and enriched we all felt by our efforts, as we once again experienced the mystery of how, in giving, we so often receive more than we give. 

Built in 1923, the schoolhouse has seen many transformations/inhabitants/uses over its years of humble service, before its recent rescue and rededication as the home of Women Writing for (a) Change (as well as several practitioners of other healing arts). This summer, our beloved space was violated by trespassers who, perhaps drawn to its welcoming presence, loitered in the off-hours, helping themselves to the wi-fi, congregating on the porches and picnic tables, disturbing the peace of the place, both literally and metaphorically.  Our community, whose basic tenet is “Presume Goodwill,” felt under siege.

The gathering was an inspiration and a celebration. I arrived to a bustle of energy and action already in progress—women lovingly wiping sudsy mugs and scouring appliances in the kitchen, dusting every surface of the place with ingeniously-bristled wands and rarely-seen balletic moves; the fresh scent of cleaners wafting through the brightly-lit rooms; the antisocial roar of two ancient vacuums roaming floors up and down to the accompaniment of doors closing at their approach; the quiet concentration of several brave souls who sorted, organized, and culled nearly 10 years of papers (from a prolific writing community).

As one of the intruding vacuum wielders, I rediscovered in each outside corner of the building two sparkling crystals, a clear pendant and a rounded violet stone, placed there as a blessing upon the building at its opening; polishing them lightly, I returned them to their vigil poses. Vacuuming is a noisy, cumbersome chore, yet I felt awash in an aura of caretaking, and found myself making the effort to move furniture away from walls, take the extra stroke with the massive machine, dig into the corners in pursuit of every cobweb (as I do not always do in my own home).

The festive mood put me in mind of communal cleaning in my distant past—primarily in church settings, where women who shared years of common weddings, baptisms, funerals, and offerings of service to community have gathered for millennia to work together for a common good (so much larger than the feeding, or cleaning, or assisting a family in need that was the immediate origin of the collective action). There was much talk of how we should get together to help one another in our homes (a long-held, rarely-voiced wish of mine), yet the shadow of a shaming fear at revealing one’s less-than-perfect homekeeping certainly crept into my mind.

Afterward, we gathered to do what we do most joyfully—write in community. The talk was of the joy to be found in having every surface touched and made conscious. I offer a few lines inspired by “readback lines” from our circle: invisible specks and clouds and motes; make invisible work visible; summon the companionable spirits; cleaning like worship and ritual; where I can be in any state and be all right; order and calm; this, our home for words and spirit.

Blessings bestowed and received, once again, in community.

Mary for the Poplar Grove Muse

Ritual Dishwashing

What is ordinary.  Ordinary is washing the dishes, tucking children into bed with a minimum of fuss or dramatic, last minute developments, good or bad. It is turning out the kitchen light and having a chance to breathe, to replay some of the day, maybe share a moment with my spouse, get a healing dose of his perspective. 

I was thinking tonight, as I washed the dishes by hand, how hand washing dishes is a meditative activity for me, and how I persist in doing it most of the time, even though the towering structures I am sometimes forced to erect in my too-small dish drainer  endanger the very dishes I cantilever into it, even after purchasing a highly rated new dishwasher, and even in the face of research that proves it takes less water to do it by machine.

I like the hot, soapy water, and except in the deepest cold of darkest winter, when my hands have chapped, then cracked, then bled multiple times, I prefer not to wear the rubber gloves I remember my mother wearing always, a deep bright yellow still today. The pair I don’t use hangs on the side of the fridge, the faint shape of my fingers still in the latex. 

I know the proper order for washing, glassware first, then cutlery, then tableware, then cooking vessels, after which the water will be far too heavy with the precipitate from dinner to continue. 

I find it satisfying to sink the items one by one, or a few at a time, through the faint, crisp cracklings of the floating layer of suds, and into the water, then to twist the sponge into each narrow glass, around and around the mugs, applying the greenie side to the smooth walls of my own tea mug (so long and dark do I steep my first morning cuppa Cheericup Ceylon). In my life, where I continually beat back mess and clutter to little effect, the simplicity of immersing a dirty vessel into soapy water and having it emerge clean enough to eat off of is no small accomplishment, offering no small satisfaction.

Thich Nhat Hanh writes of handwashing dishes as an ideal meditative activity for practicing mindfulness.  At evening, I wash the dinner dishes after a family meal I have scheduled strenuously  to preserve, while my husband and my oldest walk the dog; the youngest disappears to her busy imaginative life.  I am left alone, with my thoughts, or a sliver of NPR, to put the kitchen back to some semblance of cleanliness and order.  I like to think of the long continuity of hand washers of dishes, almost exclusively women, linking back through time and place throughout history. 

As girls, my sister and I loved a Golden Book entitled Nurse Nancy, about a girl who wanted to grow up to be a nurse, and how all her daily activities presented occasions for imaginative play-nursing, including dishwashing: she would pretend that the pieces of cutlery were wounded soldiers, attentively washing their wounds, drying them carefully, and laying them in their beds in the silverware divider in the infirmary-drawer.  I found this unimaginably romantic and clever, even though I never aspired to be a nurse.  I admired, instead, investing one's daily life so thoroughly and observantly with one's feelings and thoughts.  (Years later, I learned as a parent that there was a very gender-unneutral companion book to Nurse Nancy—Doctor Dan; I am pleased to say that my oldest daughter identified totally with the child who wants to be a doctor, rather than absorbing the lesson intended for girls to become a nurse.)

Dishwashing is the final, least glamorous stage of the essential, nourishing rituals accompanying food preparation and presentation.  When the bellies are happily full, the pleasure at the presentation of the dishes has faded, and attention has turned elsewhere, it suits my temperament to make this lesser phase of commensality my domain. 

 Mary for the Poplar Grove Muse

Memorial Day

I recently attended a visitation at a funeral home. Entering the building, I was struck by how little experience I have had with observances of death, and the degree to which I am ignorant of long-held communal rituals that used to be familiar to all. I felt at a loss, vaguely incompetent, somewhat ashamed at my uncertainty.

My parents, on the other hand, have lived for all but a ten-year hiatus in their ancestral home, a relatively small Midwestern city; they know everyone, and recently vowed to try to attend fewer funerals (a tall order, when so many who die have lived a full, small-town life, with more than a casual connection to my folks). They are all too acquainted with what is called for in bringing closure to a life.

I never imagined that I would move so far from my early community, or become so insulated from the natural cycle of death in life. In my mind, the Memorial Days of my childhood linger like a slowly-unfolding dream, stretching out before me in endless summer hours of dewy shade and sunny expanses of lawn. My maternal grandmother lived around the block from us, my grandfather having died when my mother was a young bride. The visits to the cemetery on Memorial Day and his birthday were part of family life, offering their own idiosyncratic highlights.

Preparations for the trip to Hills of Rest were orderly and understood: the gathering of a bright bouquet of cut flowers from the yard (peonies and lilacs being the favored blooms), a jug of water, and a few small gardening tools to clear the gravesite of any unwelcome growth. At a certain level, I think my siblings and I really felt this was a visit to our grandfather, spoken of as such a kind and generous man; it was as close as we were going to get to knowing him. The cemetery was beautiful, carefully tended by quiet men with shovels. The gravestones were mostly flat, brass rectangles flush with the ground, with ingenious urns that could be pulled out of the marker and upturned to serve as vases, chained to the site by brass links. Pulling out the urn, pouring in the water, setting the blooms, all were privileged tasks to be shared in.

The adults would stay for a bit and talk, while we kids would explore the surrounding area, looking in particular for the grave markers of children we had discovered over the years. The icons of Little Bo Peep and her sheep, and a boy with a sailboat, were the objects of our searching, the chilling thought of a lost child inspiring a welter of emotions in each of us.

The more distant rural cemetery, where the previous generation of Norwegian immigrants lies, was a more occasional destination. My overwhelming memory of that windswept site is the narrow alley of trees these settlers planted, first thing, to break the incessant prairie winds from disturbing the peace of the departed.

My husband and I know we are heading into years of increasing loss. His father died two years ago. Unbidden, greater acquaintance with the close of life is on its way.

What do you remember of Memorial Days past? Do you mark the day now, distant as you may be from family and familiar ground?

Mary for the Poplar Grove Muse