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?

A Pig Stye to Play In

The Photographer’s Aunt Ruth, who died this week, ran her own business for years painting houses. He described how his Mom used to help when he was a kid, and sent him and his brother out back to play, where once or twice, too young to think anything of it, they decided it would be fun to play with the pigs, to imitate them, and wallowed around in the pig stye. Ruth looked out the window and howled with laughter. The smell was terrible on the drive home. It must have driven his poor mother nuts, washing the pig stye out of their clothes. 

He told me how Ruth stirred paint on the hood of her car, how she didn’t seem to care when it splashed over the sides and speckled her hood all different colors. When comments were made, she said, “Like it? I did it myself.” And at some point she took a paintbrush and ordinary house paint and repainted the whole thing. 

Last night, in the paint section of the hardware store, the Photographer broke into a goofy dance to the music coming through the store speakers for my amusement. I love the way his playful spirit expresses itself, serious one moment, utterly silly the next, with no warning, and just for the fun of it. There are people in our lives who teach us valuable skills, how to read, to cook, to drive, to balance a checkbook. I have Ruth to thank for giving the Photographer a pig stye to play in.

Promises to Nora June

During a family gathering a couple of years ago, I found myself talking with the Nurse and the Artist about baby names, and what they might name the children they hoped to have someday. 

Some time later, I had a vivid dream of sitting with them at their kitchen table. In my dream, the Artist was pregnant. They told me the baby was a boy, and they told me what his name, first and middle, would be. Back in waking life, I told them about the dream, and they replied, wow, that’s something – we were sitting at the kitchen table last night, talking about the possibility of naming a boy with those very names (though in their version, first and middle were reversed). 

Nearly a year later when I heard the Artist was pregnant, I wondered if the baby was a boy, and if so, if they would use the name. I thought about what a fun story it would make to tell the kid as he grew up, a little piece of family mythology. It’s amazing how quickly and easily we transfer our dreams onto the next generation, creating expectations for them even before they fully exist here with us.

Yesterday, Nora June made her entrance into the world. It was an unexpected kind of entrance to parents who had spent months actively preparing for a natural birth, and years more thinking about how they would start and shape their family. Nora was a breech baby, who, despite all efforts to get her to turn, remained staunchly in place, feet down. We all assured the parents, only half jokingly, that she knew how she wanted to come into the world, that she was simply insisting on doing this in her own way. It was a powerful reminder to us all. Forget the plans and expectations; this baby has her own reasons for being here and her own things to do. 

When my first niece, Elisa, was born, I made some promises to her about the support I will offer in this life she’s just starting to live. Already these two have different ways of coming into and being in the world, so I think different promises are in order. My promises to you, Nora June: I promise to always dream beautiful dreams for you. I promise to support you in finding your own way of moving through the world. I promise to read you your favorite stories over and over again, and to listen over and over to the stories you’ll love telling. I promise to teach you everything I can about this beautiful world we live in. I promise to remind your Dad of all the crazy and stupid things he did when he thinks something you want to do is crazy and stupid.

In-Person Minutes

I resisted getting a cell phone for a long time. In fact, I never really proactively got a cell phone. My father, the Engineer, works for a telecommunications company, and this just baffled him. And because I often drove the distance between St. Louis and Nashville alone, at night, it also made him nervous, so I got a phone, and he added me to his family plan. 

As is the case for many people, I began as something of a technology contrarian, but my resolve has steadily eroded. I now work for an international organization, and a good chunk of the human interaction I engage in most days is via email or conference call. But I have held my ground about some things. I refuse to in any way attach my cell phone to my body. I recently uninstalled an IM application from my office computer in silent protest, but I don’t know that I’ll be able to get away with that for long. In all truth, the technologies that enable us to stay connected to one another have been Godsends in a lot of ways. But I also feel the pressing importance of drawing a personal line in the sand. 

A post at Soul Shelter outlines some great values when it comes to using cell phones: looking at the world and not the phone, spending “in-person minutes” with people, willingly disconnecting.

My additions are: take real vacations and real time off, recognize when technology is enabling me to connect with someone and experience the world vs subtracting from those aims, insist, sometimes, on only doing one thing at a time.

New Year, New Mind

Photo by Lauren Luton Stinson

I got to ring in 2009 with family, including my fabulous new niece, Elisa, who is just a few weeks old.

I watched her experience everything in the incredibly complete way only a new mind/body can experience things. She can get lost in an interesting pattern on someone’s shirt, or the contrast of black and white in a picture. Watching her process the sensation of being lowered into a warm bath was amazing (she still isn’t quite sure how she feels about the whole bath thing).

I was reminded of the practice of beginner’s mind, which entails putting away preconceptions, beliefs and expectations in favor of experiencing the moment fully and directly. At this point, Elisa has little choice but to experience a great deal fully and directly. She brings her new mind, her new body, to everything. We lose this new mind of ours quickly; we have to if we are going to thrive in the world. We can’t be endlessly fascinated with things all the time. But I also believe that developing into an adult doesn’t mean we lose our younger selves. We still carry the ability to be fascinated by simple experience on that level. We can chose to go through the world that way for short periods of time.

Watching Elisa’s beginner’s mind at work at the start of the New Year provided a timely image for me. Usually the new year is my time to return to basics. I clean up my living space, throw out what I don’t need, incorporate some new ideas, and remind myself of how I want to live my life.  This year, I returned home with a powerful reminder of what beinnger’s mind is, and what it means to experience life fully. I take that into the new year with me.

Promises to Elisa

About a year ago, the Deacon asked me what I thought a good brother was. He had given a great deal of thought to what it meant to be a good husband, but he wasn’t really sure about being a good brother. I was stumped and told him I’d have to think about it. Fortunately, the Nurse came up with a response that captured what was in my heart pretty well. It was about accepting each other as we are, and expecting only that each of us will be true to ourselves and what is in our hearts.

These days, the Deacon is no doubt busy thinking about what it means to be a good father, since his beautiful daughter, pictured here, was born just a few days ago. For my part, I am definitely thinking about what it means to be a good aunt, since this is a new role for me.

Today, I came back to the Nurse’s words, and they helped remind me that being a good aunt, a good sister, a good parent, a good anything, means being true to one’s self and one’s heart. I hope I will be able to serve this little one well in the years to come by doing exactly that.

So, little one, here are my promises to you: I will try to be a good aunt. I will try to show you, by example, what it is to be true to yourself. I will support you when you follow your own heart, even if it means disappointing someone else’s expectations (even mine). I will always be on your side, even when it means disagreeing with you in the moment. I will teach you everything I can about this beautiful world we live in. I will try to calm your parents down when someday you get a freaky tattoo. All my love now and in the years to come… Aunt Kat.

Bare Branches

Last weekend, my cousin got married in a beautiful little church on a historic property in Tennessee. It was a cold, rainy afternoon. The sun was just going down. The altar was decked with candles. Very simple, very quiet.

The minister said, before things began in earnest, that the ceremony presented would be just as it would have been on this same property in the 1830’s. She indicated the plants that stood over the ceremonial space and the near-winter landscape outside and said, it takes courage to stand here in this space, with no distraction or lavish wedding elegance, to  declare love for one another under bare branches.

She was right. It was a powerfully simple, emotional ceremony.

The time of year when summer cools and begins to turn into fall always feels like a relief to me, the frantic, heated energy of one season giving way to  the cool calmness of the next. It feels like coming home, like remembering some deeper peace that got lost, for a moment, in the heat of things. This ceremony felt like that too, like a remembering of something ancient and true, like a peace that could only have come in this season, with its bare branches and cold rain.

On Getting Lost

“Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger”

David Wagoner, from Lost 

I have a particular talent for getting lost; I do it better and faster than most people I know.

This wasn’t something I cultivated. This brain of mine, which does a number of things fabulously, does not hold more than 3 turns at a time, and it is likely to remember at least one of those wrong at least half the time.

So recently, in Vermont, when given the task of wandering in the woods for half an hour or so,  I dutifully picked a familiar direction. I took only 2 turns, and I was careful to note them exactly in the map my mind was making of where I had been. I was so cautious. And somehow I got lost anyway. Even later, walking in that same stretch of woods, I was unable to figure out where my wrong turn had been. It seemed, on turning around, that there were choices I didn’t remember making, forks in the road I had not seen as forks at the time. My mind tried to make something of that, to ask itself what other choices it might have made without even realizing there was a choice. But ultimately, the question came to nothing.

I found my way back. I wasn’t all that lost to begin with. I had picked the right direction, just the wrong trail, so once I got within a reasonable distance, a friend saw me, called out my name, and guided me back to the group.

Despite my best efforts to know where I am at all times, and where I’m going, I have come to believe that I will just get lost from time to time. It seems to be part of how I operate in the world. That’s not easy for a woman who is used to doing most things well and efficiently right from the beginning. I do have a sense of direction; I do find my way back. But it may take me longer than most people, and it may make for some embarrassing moments when it becomes apparent to people that I’m not actually as together all the time as I might like them to think. All in all, though, the moment of being found almost makes up for it. Thank God for the friends and family who somehow manage to meet me halfway down the trail, time and time again, to help guide me back.

The Room of Spiders

The Photographer and I are staying with the Nurse and the Artist this weekend, in their attic room that doubles as a studio. Showing us to the space, the Artist warned that there were brown recluse spiders behind the walls, so she understood if we preferred an air mattress in the living room to the studio attic futon. She showed us where she had placed cotton balls soaked in eucalyptus (which apparently brown recluses don’t like) and sticky traps around the edges of the room. She brandished a small wooden stick and said, “I call this my Death Stick.” It was used to kill spiders that were found half-alive in the traps. 

I was sure the Photographer would prefer the living room air mattress. He was sure I would as well. But ultimately we unanimously opted for the studio attic, because it felt good to be in a creative space that was real enough to incorporate a little danger. The Artist talked about how they challenged her to be deliberate in her studio. A piece of fabric left casually on the floor would be an invitation to an approaching spider, and a careless moment of picking it up less than thoughtfully could mean a poisonous bite. We talked about the association of spiders with creativity, in myth, because of their web weaving ability.

Falling asleep the first night, I thought that the good thing about brown recluses was that they are, after all, reclusive, and prefer the darkness and safety of the space behind the walls to the frightening openness of the room. We tend to think of all dangers as though they are stalking us, poised to attack. Reality is a bit different. Most dangers we live side by side with, and when we understand a danger’s nature and limitations, we can often trust it in a certain way.

The Photographer dreamed that he woke and pulled back the covers to find a spider where his feet should be. But it was a gentle scare. All in all, we slept well in the room of spiders.

Odd Companions

In his book the Water of Life, Michael Meade retells an old story about a group of companions on a quest. At the center of the story is a prince, and in the course of his journey, he picks up a strange collection of characters: one who can see great distances, one who can hear all the way to the center of the earth, one who can swallow whole oceans, and so forth. Nearly all are physically marked in some way, such that their oddness is immediately obvious. And all, in the beginning, are isolated, but of course, as the story progresses, they learn to work together quite well and are able to accomplish amazing things.

The story is not new, but it does show up in contemporary culture (think X-men) as often as in folklore. When stories show up again and again, it’s because they resonate with us on a deep level, deep enough to transcend the various zeitgeists we progress through and speak to the center of the human condition.

I have always been a bit drawn to friends who are obviously unusual in some way, sometimes in many ways at once. The world being what it is, those who wear strangeness are often a bit on the outside, because our choice of companions reveals something of where we truly are, and most want to to deny strangeness. In truth, though, everyone is strange, and even those who keep it less than visible feel its isolation from time to time.

This Saturday, I’m graduating after what feels like a lengthy era of juggling way too many things at once. If I had actually thought about everything that would need to happen so that I could come to this point, I would have said it was impossible, like swallowing the ocean or hearing to the center of the earth.

Luckily I found my own collection of odd companions with various superpowers they were willing to lend me. (Sorry if this comes as a shock to any of you, but you people are quite bizarre, and I mean that in the best possible way.) So as I’m finishing up this week, I wanted to take a moment to thank all of my odd companions. Thanks for lending me your superpowers, for blessing me with your strange company, and for occasionally helping me swallow a whole ocean when the need arose.