Sunday Brunch

An onion from the garden, sauteed slowly with home-grown thyme, oregano, and garlic. A dash of salt and pepper. Parboiled potatoes of all colors, dug by Trinidad last night at dusk, sliced by Sam, now sizzling in pan. The eggs our chickens have recently begun to lay in and out of the hen house, hidden delinquent in potato beds, collected by two and four year old hands with eyes shining. A renegade kale that popped up in the onion bed is diced and added with feta from a local goat farmer, fresh basil and chopped tomatoes from the garden.

A side of bacon -- not local, but kindly grown. Unfortunately, I haven't found a local bacon I like!

For dessert, a crisp with local peaches, plums from across the street, and blackberries the boys picked with a friend. We'll probably add the indulgence of ice cream to that....

In Order To Find Abundance?

I am making a mess. Yellow plum juice squirts through my fingers and the pits shoot upward and land God-knows-where. Plum slime slides down my kitchen window and across the table. Thick stringy yellow splotches adhere to the "clean" dish rack, the bench and the floor. It looks as though an Irish Wolfhound has projectile vomited in my kitchen.

I am initially appalled at the mess. I had thought this would be "the fun part" of canning today. Now, I look around me and my nose wrinkles. I feel every muscle in my chest contract as I resist the chaostrophy I have created. I have to wonder.

In the backyard, Trinidad is digging a hole. He plans to make it big enough to trap some innocent adult who wanders past. He is covered with dirt to the extent that he appears to be some nationality that he is not. I ask him to sit somewhere other than the couch.

Why is Trinidad's mess liberating, a clearinghouse of structure and order in the name of raw creation? Why does he embrace this expansiveness effortlessly while I cringe to fling pulp in what was a tidy kitchen? Where has my youth gone?

An intimate once told me that he seriously questioned whether abundance was the order of the universe. Our relationship ended much sooner than I'd anticipated, and now I wonder if he's right. There is a certain chaos in abundance -- a running over, perhaps even a lack of awareness. In this moment, I can imagine abundance, remember the feeling of fingerpaint running down the insides of my sleeves in kindergarten, recall sensations in my body back in the day when it did not bear the responsibility of Clean Up Time.

Yep. The feeling's still alive. But now, I am in ebb, quietly stockpiling my energy to prepare dinner and organize the lives and household of a family of 4 or 5 (depending on who's counting themselves aboard at any given point). I turn the tide inward in the face of this mess, drawing it toward me in an effort to localize the chaos so that I do not have to stretch much to stow all in its place before bedtime.

I wonder if the Willow tree does this, too. I wonder if right now, as that majestic tree appears to grow effortlessly in abundance, it actually holds its water carefully, turning silvery leaves away from the sun. I wonder if the wide expanse of its limbs bear introspective cells that order its efforts by design, an invisible and soundless ebb that necessarily keeps the tree rooted in its skyward thrust.

Perhaps abundance is only a portion of the equation. Saying "half" seems too divisive, as if the word could be separated from its opposing force. Perhaps that force is not scarcity, but conservation -- care and awareness of the current life cycle we are offered, the totality of abundance and conservation equaling an ultimate sustainability.

In that view, scarcity is not related to abundance at all. It is a falling out of trust in presence and sustainability over the long-haul, the acrobatics of an ego self-entranced.

Hmmm. Just see what busy minds can create out of a mess....

We Can Work It Out

"Mom, I don't tell a lot of things to M that are really important to me, even though he's my best friend." Trinidad's face was solemn.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Well, when I tell him something really exciting that I did, he usually says he doesn't believe me or that he's done something even better. I just feel really sad about that."

"Is it that you would like to celebrate with him your new accomplishments and share what you're really excited about without him thinking that he or his accomplishment is in any way 'less'?"

"Yeah. It's just really competitive, and so I don't want to talk to him much even though I really like to do things with him."

"I think it goes both ways in being competitive, don't you?"

"Yeah, I guess so."

"Have you ever thought about telling him what you'd like?"

"Tell him what?"

"That you'd really like to be able to celebrate something special that you did and ask that he only focus on that accomplishment and not share anything he did for a minute?"

"Yeah!"

"Would you really like for both of you to have that kind of time and space for celebration?"

"Yeah! I think I will talk to him," Trinidad said and looked much relieved.

Yesterday, Trin did tell M just that. He told him everything we talked about and Trinidad said they also made an agreement to believe what the other said (or at least not to say they didn't) in addition to making space for celebration.

"And guess what, Mom!" Trinidad shared with a beam. "M said he was just opening his mouth to say the same thing to me when I said it to him!"

"All that about celebration?" I asked.

"Yep. It's important to him, too. And then we spent hours telling each other all the things we'd been saving up and not saying for so long."

Conversations

With Trinidad....

"Oh! That blue jay just caught a snake." Trinidad's face falls, then relaxes into calm. "Well, I guess that soon all the cats in the neighborhood will be over to catch the blue jays, and before you know it we'll have mountain lions coming through the backyard to eat the cats. They do come into town, you know." He's right about this.

"Mmmm," I say. "Two days ago, I saw an enormous hawk take a jay baby out of a nest in the tree across the street in front of M's house. That jay mama threw up such a squawking! The hawk flew it's dinner over to that big tree next door and ate it."

"What? There's a jay nest in M's tree? He thought it was too big to be a bird nest. He thought it was an abandoned squirrel nest!" Trinidad's whole body grows and tenses with the news. "I am so excited! I am going over there right now so we can climb up and take a look at it."

On tree climbing:

Trinidad told me this while we drove through country south of Roseburg. His words floated from the backseat like a meditation rising from the hot Earth, herself. I tried to jot down phrases soonafter, but I doubt I did justice to the poetry of his words in the moment, or the relief and satisfaction that I felt in his safety and meaningful pursuits.

"I know my foot on any tree," he said. "Each tree tells me which branch to grab and which limb to step on. Every tree is challenging in it's own way and every tree is easy in it's own way. The thing that is easiest about one tree is the hardest thing in another. They are individuals and I learn them while I climb. As I move up in the trees, I listen for where to hold and I know that the tree is guiding me in the safest way. Each tree moves differently and I must move with it, as only it moves. It teaches me something new every time. Each time I climb a tree it is like the first time, but we also remember that we know each other."


With Sam....

"I knew that was why the sky is blue," said Sam quietly after we read an in-depth explanation of atmosphere and light on the internet.

"You did? Why didn't you tell me so when I asked?"

"Because I wanted to make you think I was more like a kid. So I didn't get over myself."



~Sometimes, I think that "wide-eyed" is just my natural state.~

Belonging

"I want to go home," says Sam.

"Why?" I ask.

"I don't know. I just do," he says.

We return home, and both boys run to the backyard. The door hangs wide open behind them. With fixed gazes and hips set, they aim and throw rocks at a chosen target east of the pond. Over and over stones are hurled, then the boys run to retrieve them. I no longer watch the game protectively to interrupt if they threaten to pelt each other by mistake.

I stand quietly at the kitchen window. A bowl of blueberries sits on the table beside me with a bag of canning jars that someone mysteriously left on my step. The wind lifts tall willow branches into a dance of light, silvery leaves bending and stretching in the afternoon sun. For a moment, I choose not to think of what's for dinner, or anything else. For a moment, I only feel.

A surge of bittersweet belonging fills me. The boys are rooted here, a sense of place. This grounding feels healthy, coherent, integral. Yet, this land, too, shall pass. They will move on, with or without me. They will come home to me wherever I am, or I will bring this sense of belonging back to them when I come to visit.

Rooted. Countless generations behind me and one at the pond just ahead. The ache fills me. I have been alive lately with what I perceive as the rich reality of my relations. Colorful language, fiery forthrightness, and purposeful independence are the trademarks of my known tribe of origin. I masquerade as a post-modern hippie, but the Kool-Aid and jello that stained my cheeks as a child sitting riverside reveals my backwoods pedigree. I did not eat nutritional yeast until I turned thirty.

Part of me is becoming proud of what I once perceived as a "shadow" in my raising. My compassion stretches into celebration, a fierce devotion to the soul that pulsed in my mother and father's lineage despite poverty, alcoholism, and abuse.

My grandmother tells a story of visiting her grandmother in a hospital after her grandmother had fallen from a ladder picking cherries. The eighty-something woman had broken her neck. "What are you doing here?" she demanded of my grandmother from the hospital bed. "Those cherries are ripe! You get out there and get picking!"

I was raised on wild venison and duck meat, cheap grocery hamburger, corn from the garden, and canned green beans. Food translates to the soul of me. It is who I am. In everything my parents killed, harvested or touched I tasted the generations of hands that bore me into this world. The cans from the food bank, sheepishly accepted, tasted like wounded pride, and that, too, shaped me.

"Where did you get your faith in God?" Seda asked me through the kitchen window last night.

"Adversity, I guess. Funny thing to ask through the window," I said.

There are parts of my roots that the children barely recognize. Parts of Seda's roots as well. Where once I wished to hide what unfurls deep beneath me, I now seek to share openly but gently. Roots are, in their right, sacred. They can be damaged.

The understory is alive in me. Nothing to outrun, outrace, or cast off. It is my path into light.

There, my boys throw rocks under the sun. In our protected wilds, a small city yard consumes them. They belong.

And so do I with them.

Technology Found Me

It finally happened. I went out and bought my first computer of my own volition. I set it up and tinkered with the applications. Then I placed my first call on it to Ben.

The new computer is an iphone. Ben, my honey who brazenly told an acquaintance that he didn't need anything more than his iphone and his girlfriend, finally tempted me into the flock. The recent "upgrade" of the iphone left last years model obsolete, so I rushed out to buy one for less than $100.

I justified it as a homeschooling expense, and it appears to be working. We moved our campus to the coast Friday and Saturday. I had my handy cell (i) phone in case of emergencies. When we arrived and unpacked, Trinidad went straight to the creek to hunt crayfish. Sam and I played cards at creekside, and I turned the iphone onto a recording of Billie Holiday's "Night and Day" that I am learning to sing for Market next month. Over and over, my tiny "transistor radio" played a soft accompaniment to Sam and I giggling and stealing each other's cards. Then Trinidad turned up with crayfish and freshwater clams. "Are these clams edible, Mom? Why don't you Google it?" he asked.

Trinidad knows that I use the internet extensively as a resource. If I want to know which part of the herb to harvest and when, how to kill a chicken humanely (paradoxical phrasing, hm?), or whether to be concerned about the leakage of peach juice in the canning process, I fire up the web.

Now I have it creekside. After procuring reassurance that he had, in fact, caught dinner, we took some pictures (iphone) of the critters as Sam grappled with them fearlessly. We could have emailed the photos to my mom, but I don't have the account set up for it yet. We downloaded (for free) an application that shows us what the constellations are in our night sky by the iphone's location, and if I forget which direction is north (how embarrassing), there is a compass application, too. In the morning, we checked the weather and tides online, then headed to the beach to tidepool. If I need a gas station, there is an application that tells me where I can find one within three miles and the directions to get there. Not that I typically do need gas (my bike is decked out and well-worn), but even hanging close to home is going to be easier with internet support.

Dude. I can even place a call on it.

The only thing I have to hang up is my pride in roughing it.

Where's the hook?

Survival Giving

What is a gift?

I give my heart, my hands, my thought to the comfort and well-being of my family, my community. I take joy in cooking, creating, cleaning, and organizing for myself and others. I most love to give from the place of abundance, not looking behind me at any cost or consequence in the giving.

There have been consequences.

I did not learn to give from abundance. I learned to give from fear. Raised in a family that struggled with domestic violence, I did what I was told. Daily from the age of seven, I completed long lists of chores with bitter determination. I learned the trade of homemaking well, and I am grateful for the efficiency it offers me as a mother.

I am also grateful that I saw early on that giving is a skill in itself. I saw that people welcomed my company because they saw me as "a giver." I have been told I am angelic, kind, and generous in my adulthood. The skill of offering my efforts to others were born in a home where my father threatened and chided me for laziness if I missed a corner in the vacuuming. They are only skills.

I learned to give because it met a need for power. I'm sure I wished to contribute, too, but in all honesty, the need for power resonates just now. I needed power desperately at a time when my voice and my needs were silenced. I clung to power as I watched helplessly while my father pushed and swung at my mother. This power shined so brightly that I could see myself in the dark when no one else could see me.

Giving was a strategy, a means to an end for safety, acceptance, and love. It served me well.

I remember hearing about school shootings when I was a young teenager. As the people around me shook their heads in horror, I could understand why the man in question pulled the trigger. I could understand the disjointed fear and helplessness, and most of all the power behind that cold piece of steel. I felt confused; didn't everyone else know what it was like to be in that place?

I didn't dare say it. I couldn't tell them how I could feel what I imagined he felt, that it made perfect sense to me why and how he could see his action as all-powerful and still meaningless, ultimately inconsequential. So fragile and so loud.

Giving, running, hiding, striking out, and striking back --all can come from such exquisite pain. And now I see that it is not the giving that had its consequences. Any resentment I now harbor is not from having given too much, or even from seeing myself as "forced" to give. My giving is ultimately inconsequential; there has been nothing taken from me or anyone else in its offering. In this sense, giving was a gentle strategy to have settled on.

What is left when I reconsider my history of giving is only the pain that birthed the strategy that I trusted to keep me alive. What is left is looking back and into the constancy of fear I was raised with, the eruptions and undercurrents of crisis from within.

Perhaps holding this pain will truly free me to give from my heart.

I am humbled, again, to witness the gift of compassion, no matter how terrifying or cold, that my childhood bestowed upon me.