A Short Anthology for Ellen

A couple of years ago, my friend Ellen and I decided to celebrate birthdays a little differently. Having visited Rwanda and made close friends there, and feeling very keenly the abundance of our lives and the scarcity of resources elsewhere, Ellen requested that friends and family who felt compelled to give her a gift simply make a donation to the African Great Lakes Initiative. Each year since then, I have done just that.

But we also have a tradition of giving small things, inexpensive or not involving money at all: a used book or a favorite recipe, for instance. Because Ellen is a fan of poetry anthologies, and because it’s been a long time since I added any links to the poetry page on this blog, I’m posting a mini-anthology in honor of Ellen’s birthday.

“Passing Through” by Stanley Kunitz

“Found Letter” by Joshua Weiner

“won’t you celebrate with me” by Lucille Clifton

Learning to Crawl

I spent much of last week marveling at my two nieces.

Elisa is learning to crawl. She’s going to get there any day, and the Deacon and Deaconess have realized how quickly they will need to baby proof their house. During a short week’s visit I got to watch as she learned to clap – she had been working at it for awhile but finally got both hands to arrive in the same place at the same time – and to eat Cheerios with her hands. This is the first food she’s been able to mostly feed to herself.

The last time I saw Nora, she was fairly content to rest in the arms of whoever was holding her at the moment. Now she works to pick her head up, to squirm into a position she prefers. The muscles in her face are developing into wonderful expressions – the Deacon noted how she purses her lips often, as though she has appraised your baby handling skills and moderately disapproves.

Both girls work feverishly towards their next task, their next movement, their next little bit of independence. How quickly we give up as adults. How quickly we refocus on what comes quickly and easily, rather than what learning might bring us more independence, happiness or wisdom. How long has it been since I wanted anything as keenly as these two wonderful creatures want to develop and use their own strength, their own personalities?

Heretic Dream

I dreamed a woman I knew years ago was pregnant and wearing a black dress. We were standing in our old church, the one I grew up in, in a room used for gathering after the service. I had wanted to talk to her because I knew she was undergoing a kind of spiritual transformation. She had some kind of spiritual experience she couldn’t ignore, and this woman, who had always had a certain rigid religiosity about her, was finding Spirit and Mystery in a whole different way, one that didn’t jibe with the tenants of the church we were standing in. This hadn’t happened to her by choice. It had just happened. She was on a new path she couldn’t bring herself to turn back from.

In the dream I’d felt compelled to find her out of a sense that she must be helped and supported on this new path, and it seemed there were few in her life that were willing to do this. I didn’t particularly like her, or her family. But I knew what she was doing was absolutely the right thing. We spoke at some length about how her husband was leaving, even though she was pregnant with their third child, because he felt she was so in the wrong and could not support her new vision. I asked about her father, a man I knew in waking life as one of the most blindly and unpleasantly fundamentalist people I’d ever met. He hadn’t disowned her, she said. She was still his daughter, though of course, he disagreed vehemently with her. She was exhausted, she said; she took medication just to get to sleep. She had two other children to consider in addition to the new one she was carrying. 

Yesterday I was reading Monika Wikman, who writes that the word “heresy” has roots in the noun “hairesis,” the act of choosing. She says, “Me might again rethink heresy and see it as in the days of old, as our ability to choose, to embody our inner visions and knowing, including the ways we must carry our dissenting sense of the nature of the microcosm and macrocosm” (From Pregnant Darkness). 

I find myself wondering what new and interesting dissension my dream heretic is pregnant with, what inner vision it is that I will need to help bring forth, on the ground of what old order.