photo by Collyn Ware

We’re made for the light of a cave and for twilight. Twilight is the time we see best. When we dim the light down, and the pupil opens, feeling comes out of the eye like touch. Then you really can feel color, and experience it.   ―James Turrell , American Artist

Twilight is often referred to as the golden hour, that magical transition from day to night, all the world bathed in lavender light. Even the word twilight sounds as lovely as it looks and feels. Artist James Turrell claims that this is the time during which we see best, that we can actually feel and experience color. Author Olivia Howard Dunbar writes that twilight is when the not yet darkened world seems infinitely greater—a moment when anything can happen, anything be believed in.

Twilight is both gloriously of this world and yet not. Perhaps its greatest attribute is that it gives us a glimpse of what’s beyond earth and life, a glimpse into the sacred. I’m convinced–like James Turrell–that there’s something truly other-worldly about twilight and that I can feel color in these moments. I may be twilight’s biggest fan.

Twilight

When twilight comes,
it falls first in a familiar trill through the trees,
a silhouette of a bunting on a fence post,
a sweet sliver of blue light
that taunts the dusk.

It comes as a nether world,
where every mystery flickers across
the iris of time,
across the grasses which give up 
the last breath of day and welcome 
the first breath of night,
across deer who will bed in the timber,
their heads drowsy with dew.

It comes as a herald of dreams
once hidden behind a silken scrim, 
but backlit now,
they emerge like fireflies, 
like galaxies in the lavender light.

It comes as a whisper
that grows finer and lighter, 
its filaments fusing into a single cloud 
of witnesses.

And when it comes,
you spread your arms under the old oaks
which have dropped their crowns towards earth;

you pull the corners of the day 
around the lilies and the yarrow,
around the moths in the meadow,

while magic burns gold and true
across the hills. 

In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it’s wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything

We live in a time when dropping the phrase the miraculous scope of human generosity into conversation may illicit responses that are anything but generous. You speak of human generosity as if you could really find this in the world today. Human generosity? In your dreams! Sadly, we’re becoming more accustomed to scarcity with supply chain issues, shortages, and recession rearing its ugly head. And in the face of scarcity, many–perhaps most–of us tend to batten down the hatches, fearing rougher waters ahead. Like baby formula (toilet paper, cleaning products, and now baby formula???), generosity is often in short supply.

And yet, the miraculous scope of human generosity continues to thrive. Several years ago when some friends and I visited Europe, we turned to each other multiple times a day and said, People are so good. We struggled hauling oversized suitcases (what were we thinking?), reading train schedules, deciphering directions. Time and time again, natives came to our rescue, most often even when we hadn’t asked. I’m sure we looked forlorn and utterly clueless, like a group of grandmas on holiday (which we were!) The generosity of these Italians, Swiss, and French was humbling. We were wholly at the mercy of strangers who loaded our monstrous suitcases onto trains, accompanied us to the places we needed to be to hail cabs and join tour groups. We willingly surrendered before their generosity and understood, even then, that a lifetime of thank yous wouldn’t be nearly enough.

Last month on my birthday, I was in the checkout line at HyVee when the young man at the register commented on the cake I was buying. I told him that it was my birthday, so I decided to pick out my own cake. As he was ringing up my last grocery items, he motioned to the rows of candy behind the register and said, If you had to choose one, which one would you choose? I scanned the rows and said, Snickers, it would have to be Snickers. He asked the employee sacking if he would take over the register, so that he could buy me a Snickers for my birthday. He pulled a Snickers off the shelf, then hesitated and said that he knew they had jumbo Snickers, which was what I should have for my birthday. On the top row, he finally located the jumbo variety and presented it to the temporary checker for purchase. Then he handed it to me and wished me a happy birthday. I pushed my cart into the parking lot wearing one of those goofy smiles plastered across my face. I might’ve even been singing as I loaded my groceries into my car. In Man of La Mancha, Dale Wasserman writes, I come in a world of iron…to make a world of gold. On June 11th, I entered a world of produce and canned goods, an ordinary world which a high school student generously transformed into a world of gold.

In The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker writes:

People do more for their fellows than return favors and punish cheaters. They often perform generous acts without the slightest hope for payback ranging from leaving a tip in a restaurant they will never visit again to throwing themselves on a live grenade to save their brothers in arms. [Robert] Trivers together with the economists Robert Frank and Jack Hirshleifer has pointed out that pure magnanimity can evolve in an environment of people seeking to discriminate fair weather friends from loyal allies. Signs of heartfelt loyalty and generosity serve as guarantors of one’s promises reducing a partner’s worry that you will default on them. The best way to convince a skeptic that you are trustworthy and generous is to be trustworthy and generous.

We’ve all witnessed–or been the beneficiaries of–random acts of kindness: the driver ahead of you in the fast food restaurant line pays for your meal; a woman offers to hold your baby so you can tend to your screaming toddler; a man finds you stranded on the road with a flat tire and changes it for you; and a kid for whom $20 would buy the world runs after you to return the $20 bill you dropped at the concession stand. There are times when people demonstrate their generosity without the slightest hope or expectation for payback. And perhaps generosity does help us discriminate fair weather friends from loyal allies, as Trivers, Frank, and Hishleifer contend. Certainly we’re drawn to those whose generosity seems as natural as breathing. Good people, we say. salt of the earth kind of folk. These are the individuals who frequently become our best friends, the friends to whom we turn in times of joy and sorrow, the friends who anticipate what we need before we say a word. Their generosity is a hallmark of their devotion and care.

French writer Simone Weil argues that [a]ttention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. How generous is the individual who simply attends to your presence! To be noticed is remarkably generous. As clichéd as it may be, the gift of time and undivided attention is probably one of the most coveted gifts. In a world of self-professed multi-taskers, we long for someone to look us directly in the eyes and to assure us that we hold their attention. This kind of attention says you matter to me. This kind of attention is a generous oasis is a noisy, busy world.

We’ve all known truly generous people who open their homes and hearts without a thought. They’ll give the shirt off their own backs, their own beds (and take the sofa for themselves), their time, talents, and money to others. Simone de Beauvoir, a French philosopher, understands the spirit behind this kind of generosity. She writes: That’s what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing. Perhaps the essence of generosity is found in this paradox: giving all, offering, as novelist James Baldwin claims, what most people guard and keep and yet feeling as if this costs you nothing. This paradox also lives in Jesus’s words to his disciples: For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it (Matthew 16:25).

Generally speaking, many of us can be generous when it costs us little, when we find ourselves with an abundance–or at least with some to spare. But to be generous when it costs us much, to be generous when we find ourselves in survival mode, that is the miraculous scope of human generosity that Elizabeth Gilbert contends compels us to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices. To the young man who gifted me with a Snickers at the grocery store, to the multitude of European natives who made my trip so wonderful, to my family and friends who give so freely, and to the many strangers who’ve generously lent a helping hand, I offer my eternal and sincere thanks. I aim to keep thanking you for as long as I have voice.

Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children. –Sitting Bull

When a call goes out for unity, most of us will rally–at least in theory–around the prospect of bringing people together. Some of us who are old and sentimental enough might even clasp hands and break out in Kum Bah Ya. Or perhaps we could belt out a rousing chorus of the 1971 Coca Cola theme song, remembering times when our youth fueled our idealism and certainty that if we just put our minds and hearts to it, we could live in perfect harmony:

I’d like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
I’d like to hold it in my arms
And keep it company

Our grown-up, supposedly more mature selves still elect officials who promise to unite our communities, states, and nation. We continue to live under the banner of unity. We speak passionately about the life we can make for our children if we’d only put our minds together. We understand that our very survival depends upon it.

And yet, we remain–as we’ve always been to some degree–divided. Today, many would argue that we’re not just divided; we’re deeply divided, perhaps irreparably divided. We can no longer even see the other side, who live in another far-off galaxy, lightyears and principles away. In truth, there are more times than not when we prefer not to see them. Better they remain in the black hole in which they belong. Better they live among their own ignorant, misguided, hateful kind.

For most of my life, many people thought they knew me. As a college-educated daughter of a college professor, they professed to accurately identify my politics, my faith, and my principles: Democrat, spiritual but not Christian (and certainly not evangelical), and progressive. As a young college instructor, I learned this early as I overheard colleagues ridiculing a student whose narrative essay recounted her experience at summer church camp. As if this was the most significant thing she could write about, they said, as if she really believed in this crap. They spoke believing that I shared their sentiments, that I was one of them, that we were unified in our common disdain for this young woman’s provincial views and simple-minded faith. But they were wrong.

I didn’t correct their misconceptions because I was fairly certain that I, too, would be cast off and privately ridiculed. At 26 and at the beginning of my teaching career, I was genuinely afraid. And I was convicted that I should work hard to get along with everyone, regardless of what they believed or didn’t believe. I’ve lived most of my life under that same conviction, and to say that it’s cost me is an understatement, for I’ve often found myself in No Man’s Land, that lonely space between ideologically diverse factions, slogging my way forward. Moving forward has meant working hard to act compassionately towards my opposition. Moving forward has meant growing into a certainty regarding my own ideas and principles, while struggling to remain open to others. In truth, moving forward has often meant embracing the complex nature of most issues and forsaking the unity that others appear to enjoy with their like-minded friends and colleagues.

English Puritan writer John Trapp maintained that [u]nity without verity is no better than conspiracy .Herein lies the painful truth of ideological unity: it’s improbable (at best) and impossible (at worst). How does a nation ideologically unify those who believe in life at conception with those who don’t, those who believe that women should have a choice to abort or not with those who don’t? How does a nation ideologically unify those who believe in the tenets of capitalism with those who don’t? How does a nation ideologically unify those who believe the government should fund private and public schools with those who don’t? The list could go on and on. We know it all too well. When people hold ideas and principles absolutely, there isn’t any compromise they’re generally willing to make.

In short, to unify means that some group will lose something–or possibly everything they believe is good and true. And losing is something we’re not particularly good at, especially when the stakes are high and the principles we hold most dear are in jeopardy.

Romanian-French playwright Eugene Ionesco wrote that [i]deologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together. We know that ideas separate us, and, for the most part, we have no common dreams now. Sadly, anguish remains as the sole factor that occasionally unites us. Mass casualities, natural disasters, and sometimes wars unite us as we offer aid and comfort to victims. For a time, our ideas and principles seem to take a back seat as our anguish reminds us of our common humanity. For a short time.

I’m not a cynic who’s ready and willing to argue that unity is the pipe-dream of Pollyannas who refuse to see the way of the world. But I do understand the painful reality of unity. As difficult as it is, we’d do better to accept the fact that there can be no ideological unity. In the court of law and in public opinion, some group and its principles will win, and the other will lose. Losers can pray for the wisdom and guidance to live out their principles in whatever ways they legally and realistically can, working devotedly to affect the kind of change that will one day change policy and public opinion. During the battle (and make no mistake, it’s always a battle), both sides can choose civility and understanding, or they can choose to inflict terrible harm with little thought to the world they leave their children.

photo by Collyn Ware

Everyone likes birds. What wild creature is more accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal as a bird? -Sir David Attenborough 

For much of my life, if you’d have asked me about birds, I’d have probably scoffed and conjured up an image of a doddering old fool decked in camo with an expensive pair of binoculars around his neck and an official Audubon bird guide in his pocket. I say “his”, not to be sexist or discriminatory in any way, but my notion of a birdwatcher has always been male. Probably because my father was a bird person.

From childhood, my father loved birds, particularly homing pigeons. So, we grew up with a backyard filled with homing pigeons, enough to fill two lofts that flanked the yard. We grew up in a home graced with feathers and occasional pigeon droppings. We grew up with a father who spent his Saturdays watching the sky for his birds to return home (and hopefully win the weekly race) and his evenings in a den littered with Racing Pigeon Journals, photos of champion homing pigeons, and large and assorted bird books.

Our home at 611 West 27th Street was a veritable pigeon-central. Members of my father’s racing pigeon club (I know what you’re thinking, but there are clubs of homing pigeon racers!) met there regularly to open their specialized clocks which recorded the exact minute and second that their pigeons returned from races in which they were shipped as far as 500 miles and released to fly home. The winning and losing in these races involved a lot of math, as members calculated the air speed per minute that each bird flew. Silence pervaded as men crowded around the dining table, pencils scratching away on slips of paper (no calculators or cell phones then) until someone yelled, “I won!” These were bird people at their best (or so I’m told).

One Christmas, my mother gave my father a customized sweatshirt that read Strictly for the Birds, and we all understood how absolutely perfect this gift was for a man who knew the intricate structure and feather pattern of a pigeon’s wing, a man who could identify a common barn pigeon from a homing pigeon in the air, a man who once stitched up the breast of a pigeon who’d failed to clear a utility wire in our alley. Indeed, he was strictly and wondrously for the birds.

So imagine my surprise when a few days after my recent birthday, I woke up and said to myself, “Wow, I’m a bird person!” In truth, I’d been becoming a bird person for quite some time, but I’d spent so many years with my head in books or bent over student essays that the realization snuck up on me. The signs were there, though. In the early days, my family snickered when I walked the edge of the timber searching for the elusive indigo bunting whose song I’d heard all day. When I walked into a bush once (my eyes had been fixed on the tree tops), they guffawed. I was becoming the doddering old fool I’d imagined a bird person to be. Outfit me in camo and hang a nice pair of binoculars around my neck, and the picture would be complete.

Oh yes, the signs had been there for quite some time. A solar bird bath, a line of bird feeders edging my deck, and jumbo bags of black-oiled sunflower seeds–always a surplus, just in case we run out. It would probably behoove me to invest in sunflower seed stock at the rate and quantity we buy them. And grape jelly stock, definitely grape jelly. We’ve taken to buying it in gallon cans to keep up with the local oriole population’s needs. This is what bird people do, I’m told. They present a smorgasbord of food choices in an array of feeders. They aim to please.

The naturalist John Burroughs writes:

 The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.

For my father, and now for me, the bird as a poetic subject is gloriously at the top of the scale. How can you not love a creature that’s large-lunged, hot, and ecstatic? How can you not marvel at the gold of the gold finch, the blue of the mountain blue bird, the scarlet of the cardinal and tanager? How can you not be humbled by the dogged persistance of the arctic tern who wings its way thousands of miles from its Antarctic breeding ground to summer in the north? Or the soul of the sandhill crane who mates for life?

So, in my 67th year, I’d like to reintroduce myself: Hello, I’m Shannon. I’m a bird person. Better late than never, I say.

Barn Swallows

As I push my cart of baby carrots,
two onions, and a bunch of green bananas
around the corner of the produce aisle,
a barn swallow swoops 
from the bunting above the meat counter.

Instinctively, I duck.
It flies yards above me,
but I fold myself over the cart,
which I’ve pushed to the side
seeking refuge beside the canned goods.

Silly me, I think, as I push my cart
back into the aisle
and am just passing the condiments
when the swallow slices
the air so deftly
I don’t feel the cut
until seconds later.

I stand agog—
there’s no other word for it.
I stop traffic.

For seconds, I throw my head back and say
(aloud and to no one in particular)
Would you look at that—

And just as I turn down the cereal aisle,
a second swallow bisects the path of the first, 
shearing the fluorescence above. 

Such cruel geometry,
their angles too desperate,
their lines unfixed.

A pair, I think,
star-crossed lovers destined to die
at the meat counter or in the freezer section.

I want more for them. 
I want the blue June sky that opens generously
over the world.
I want the breeze which fans the hardwoods.
I want the waning and the waxing moons,
the sun giving itself to the western hills
all orange and pink and carmine. 

I want to coax them through the electric doors
which stay open and expectant. 
I want the man who will enter after hours with his pellet gun
to find them gone,
to find only melons nestled in their bins,
bottles of laundry detergent and tubs of margarine
tucked in dreamless sleep.  

And in a dark corner of an old barn,
I want them paired and nesting,
the day but a sigh
in the wild, velvet night.

for Judy

I want you to be concerned about your next-door neighbor. Do you know your next-door neighbor?  –Mother Teresa

In the last half of my life, I’ve often heard people lament the fact that they don’t really know their neighbors any more. The folks who move into our neighborhoods may live next to us, they say, but that’s about the extent of it. We know very little about their lives except for the types of cars they drive and the number of FedEx deliveries they average a week. For many, neighborhoods are now defined more by geographical proximity than by relationships.

I’m blessed to live close to neighbors with whom I have genuine relationships. I know that I’m one of the lucky ones and understand that this is no small thing. I could answer Mother Teresa honestly: yes, I know my next-door neighbors.

Over the twenty years that I’ve lived here in rural Iowa, my friendship with my neighbor Judy grew. In the early years, our conversations were held in the yard, often with Judy seated atop her John Deere mower. She’d see me walking down the lane towards the mailbox, kill the engine, and we’d catch up on family and life events. She asked about my work at school, about each of my children, and about my family in Nebraska. She asked the kinds of questions that always made me feel truly understood and appreciated. I came away from our conversations feeling as though all was right with the world–or at least all was right in our little corner of the world on 114th Lane.

When I began to write blog posts, Judy quickly became one of my most devoted readers, responding to each piece mere minutes after I’d posted it. I can’t begin to measure my gratitude for her unfailing readership. As I was sitting in my little writing cabin drafting a new post, I’d imagine how she’d soon be sitting in her brown recliner reading my words, sharing a sacred literary connection with me, her neighbor and friend.

In his book, The Good Neighbor: The Life and Works of Fred Rogers, Maxwell King writes:

In everything he wrote, in all the programming he produced, in the life of caring, kindness, and modesty that he led, he set a very clear example. His legacy lives in the concept of a caring neighborhood where people watch out for one another, no matter where they come from or what they look like.

Recently, Judy died. I’ve had days to grieve her passing and to think about the rich legacy she leaves. Certainly, a vital part of this legacy is that she, like Fred Rogers, created a caring neighborhood where people watch out for one another. When the entire world was cloistering during the height of Covid, I lived in a small, protected neighborhood where I could pedal my boat on the pond, watch the birds from my porch, and talk with Judy and my other neighbors across their yards. For months, our world was small and intimate, founded–in large part–upon Judy’s loving care.

Another part of Judy’s legacy is that she leaves behind her son, Kevin, who has lived with and cared for her the past years. He, too, has become an integral part of our neighborhood, a part of a family who looks out for one another. Like his mom, Kevin often stops to talk from the seat of his mower, a neighborhood tradition that will undoubtedly live on.

Author Rabbi Harold Kushner writes:

The happiest people I know are people who don’t even think about being happy. They just think about being good neighbors, good people. And then happiness sort of sneaks in the back window while they are busy doing good.

Such simple advice: just think about being good neighbors, good people. And yet, it goes without saying that if all–even most–of us would follow it, the world would be a considerably better and happier place. As Kushner advocates, happiness will sneak in the back window as you live neighborly lives.

And who is our neighbor? We claim those who live near us as neighbors, but when an expert of the law asked Jesus this question, Jesus responded with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Being a good neighbor stretches far beyond the geographical and relational boundaries of traditional neighborhoods. A good neighbor, Jesus exhorts, shows mercy to those in need, even–and especially–those whom we don’t know and may not necessarily care to know. Clearly, the world would be a bettter, happier place if we walked humbly and showed mercy to all the Samaritans in our lives.

I will miss Judy. Neighbor, friend and mentor, she is the kind of woman I’d like to be when I grow up. Our neighborhood has been blessed by her presence; we will continue to be blessed by her legacy.

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it. –Toni Morrison

I could hear the four-wheeler rumbling up the drive before I could see it. But I didn’t have to see it to know that my grandson would be flying up the lane, a serious wake of gravel behind him, the whole summer day before him. He pulled up to the porch with inches to spare, dismounted, and flung open the door.

I’ll take you for a ride around the pond, Grandma. He was bare-chested and wearing two different kinds of socks. And so I threw the remaining inches of my coffee down the sink, rinsed my cup, and followed him out the front door. As I swung my leg over the seat and settled in behind him, I remembered how beetles had ravaged the elm trees that surrounded the pond and how a forest of stumps now hid in the knee-high weeds there. I could see it all then: the front wheel catching a stump, the air-born assault, the crash. I tightened my grip around his waist and wondered whether or not it would just be better to close my eyes for the duration of the ride.

I’d seen him take corners, learning into the air as if it could hold him, as if he could bend gravity to his will. Yes, better not to see what’s coming, I thought. Better to hold my breath. Better to send up a silent prayer before we leave the lane. When wild honeysuckle wafted across our path, I knew we were leaving the road and would momentarily descend to the grass around the pond. This was it, I thought. This could be the beginning of the end.

Yet as we rounded the northeast corner of the pond, we slowed considerably. I opened my eyes to see Griffin searching the ground with laser intensity, his eyes working to uncover each hidden stump. And then he was moving among the stumps with skill and certainty, with love.

We’re not going to wreck, Grandma. I know what I’m doing. His back glistened with sweat, and I felt myself exhaling, my arms loosening to my sides, and my face turning to the sun as he drove the remainder of the way around the pond. When he pulled up in front of his house, he turned to me and smiled. Good ride? he asked. Great ride, I said.

For most of us, there are moments when we realize that we’re just along for the ride. We’re no longer piloting our own ships. We’re no longer large and in charge. We’ve become passengers and hold supporting roles. Age, change, and circumstances have intervened, and we become those taken care of instead of those who care for. What a bittersweet transition this often is. We remember days when the very people upon whom we now depend were those we diapered and fed, clothed and cheered. We remember the responsibilities we shouldered and the expectations we met.

My four-wheeler ride wasn’t the first time my grandson had assumed a caretaker role. Last spring during a particularly stormy evening when the power went off, I called my daugher to see if I could bring them a couple of LED lanterns, a 50-yard trip from door to door. In the background, I could hear my grandson insisting that I not come, telling his mother that she’s old and we need her to survive this. Sweet–and funny, to be sure–but words that gave me pause. The fact that he recognized I was old and that he feared for my survival made me feel at once precious and vulnerable, as though I could truly blow away in the storm. Outwardly, I chuckled. Inwardly, I sighed.

I still bandage his skinned knees and wrap him in dry towels when he gets out of the pool. I still know things that occasionally amaze him and stock good snacks. In short, I’m still captain of the ship–for a time. In the end, however, all of it–the care-taking and the being taken care of–is truly a great ride.

If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.
― Anatole France

For weeks I’d worked on a short story that I finally–with some reluctance–submitted to an online journal. A day later (a miraculously fast response from any journal, online or otherwise), I received my rejection letter. But let me back up a bit. I’d physically worked on the story for weeks; that is, I put pen to paper and fingers to keyboard. It had been birthed and percolating, however, for two years. So technically, this story was years in the making.

That I received a rejection letter was no surprise. I’d never submitted fiction for publication, though I often thought about it late at night when sleep eluded me. Writers expect rejection. It comes with the territory of creating something you float out into the sea of public approval. What surprised me was the quick, but sure, response that washed over me as I read the words of rejection. That’s o.k. It was a good ride while it lasted. Actually, it was a great ride, for hours would go by as I wordsmithed and pondered the next paragraph. Hours that retirement has afforded me during which I could lose myself in the writing process.

American psychologist Carl Rogers writes that [t]he good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination. The older I get, the more I like the idea that the good life is a process, a direction towards which we live and move and have our being. Like many things, writing is a process that urges one in a direction, often with no particular destination in mind. American poet Robert Frost understood this well, for he insisted [n]o surpise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. I also like the idea that in simply beginning and pointing myself in some direction, I’m in the good company of the likes of Robert Frost.

For years, my grandchildren and I have made elaborate plans for holiday gatherings. To this end, we’ve become Dollar Store junkies, oohing and aahing over the current season’s wares. Should we get the 4th of July banner AND the streamers? What about those headbands with glittery stars and stripes? And we have to have both dinner and dessert plates that match the red, white, and blue napkins and table ware. Days before the event, we can visualize it. It will be glorious–and unabashedly overdone. As you can imagine, the results could best be described as lovingly tacky. But no matter. It wasn’t the actual product but the process that gave us so much joy. As Gracyn and Griffin grow older (and their holiday tastes grow more refined–and expensive), we’ll undoubtedly make fewer trips to the Dollar Store. But I hope they’ll remember, as I remember, the unadulterated joy of the process, the planning and imagining and shopping.

In his autobiographical travel book, Blue Highways, William Least Heat Moon contends that [t]he nature of things is resistance to change, while the nature of process is resistance to stasis. This is another remarkable thing about process: its resistance to stasis. If you’re in process, you’re moving. And through movement, change is not only possible but probable. When I consider the process of parenting, I can both smile and grimace at my own wild ride. One thing is certain: you can’t stand still, for each day marches forward and lays its spoils at your feet. An hour after I’ve shared sweet moments reading Curious George Flies a Kite, my daughter is screaming from her bed (having frightened both her sisters) that the plant in her room looks like a giant alligator, and she’s too afraid to sleep. Just when I thought I had this parenting thing down, that parents who complained about their children’s bedtimes were deluded–and cleary ineffective–I’ve been duly humbled. And the occasions during which I would be humbled stretched out endlessly before me, ultimately provoking more significant change than I could’ve ever imagined. The process of change through humility continues as I parent adult children. This, as Least Heat Moon contends, is the nature of process. We may resist change, but it can rock our boats in magnificent ways.

I never failed once. It just happened to be a 2000-step process. These are the words of American inventor Thomas Edison. We really don’t like failure, and more times than not, we rationalize it away, ignore it and bury it. In schools today, we pull out all the stops to prevent anyone from failing; we go to elaborate lengths to graduate and promote all (or nearly all). Failure is not an option, as teachers are repeatedly warned, and students are repeatedly assured. It’s all about the product, the final state of being as a matriculated individual. A 2000-step process? Well, that would just be silly and unnecessarily cruel. Still, these words should give us serious pause. When our brightest minds acknowledge failure is not the end but a important part of an even more important process, we should take note. The processes through which most valuable discoveries are made are often long, arduous, and without clear ends in sight. They make take 2,000 steps or 2 million. Failure is simply a gateway to the next discovery if the process is to continue.

Sitting in my cabin the other day, I was watching the birds in the wild honeysuckle bush near the edge of the timber when, without warning or real consideration, I found myself thinking: What if no one ever read a word I wrote? What if I got up everyday to face an empty sheet of paper or blank computer screen? What if I really never finished anything, if the process just continued until I took my last breath? The answer came in on the breeze as the fragrance of honeysuckle wafted through the window: No matter. The path is beautiful, and I really don’t need to know where it leads.

If I ever become a saint—I will surely be one of “darkness.” I will continually be absent from heaven—to light the light of those in darkness on earth. Mother Teresa

As I liberally apply sunscreen in preparation for a session of weeding and mulching, it’s hard to remember that just a few days ago, I was one of many who mourned the delay of spring. It was a long winter, many lamented, a season that seemed to have no end in sight, a cold, dark season that stubbornly held on and on. I was one of those lamenters, zipping my jacket (I refused to wear a winter coat in April regardless of the temperature!) and turning the heat up in my car. I was one who’d increasingly begun to regard the months since Christmas as a dark night of the soul, a noche oscura that St. John of the Cross described as a forlorn feeling that God has abandoned you. I could only muster a sigh of resignation as I woke to yet another dreary day and heard the furnace kick on.

Several years ago, I recall reading about Mother Teresa and was stunned to discover that the woman who’d dedicated her life to the poor and sick, the disciple who’d literally lived as Jesus’s hands and feet through the slums of Calcutta, this saint of all saints, suffered the dark night of the soul for most of her life. In 2007, Come Be My Light, a collection of her private correspondence and personal writings revealed that–with the exception of one short period–she’d suffered from an intense feeling of God’s absence. How could this be, I thought. How could a woman who so completely and devotedly dedicated her life to God have lived for decades without feeling his presence? After all, I reasoned, Mother Teresa is the gold standard of Christian witness, the saintly role model. And yet, the more I read about her life, the more I understood that, like her namesake St. Thérèse de Lisieux (the Little Flower) who decried that God hides, is wrapped in darkness, Mother Teresa sorely felt God’s abandonment.

In her personal writing and correspondence, we can hear her sorrow:

The place of God in my soul is blank—There is no God in me.

I want—and there is no One to answer—no One one Whom I can cling; no, No One. Alone. The darkness is so dark—and I am alone.

Before I used to get such help and consolation from spiritual direction—from the time the work has started—nothing.

To feel a blankness in your soul, a darkness so deep and so profound that God can’t be found, can’t be heard or felt, is perhaps as apt a definition of the dark night of the soul as we’ll ever get. The scandal–yes, scandal!–that her posthumous writings caused is telling, I think, of our unwillingness to acknowledge and accept these feelings of spiritual abandonment. Atheist and longtime critic Christopher Hitchens argued that her personal revelations testified to the fact that Mother Teresa was simply a confused old lady who’d lost her belief in God, a sad woman who served others only as a part of an effort to still the misery within. Hitchens also contended that attributing the title of dark night of the soul to her feelings of abandonment was the Catholic Church’s perverse piece of marketing that sought to spin despair as faith. 

A perverse piece of marketing by the Catholic Church? Really? So many others have written about the authenticity and power of this dark night. Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung warned of the danger of the descent into the dark night of the soul, of the risk of taking the sunset way because it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods, Yet like so many others who’ve lived and written about this dark night, Jung acknowledged that every descent is followed by an ascent; the vanishing shapes are shaped anew, and a truth is valid in the end only if it suffers change and bears new witness in new images, in new tongues, like a new wine that is put into new bottles. American writer, Joseph Campbell, wrote about the universal functions of mythology and is best known for his work with the Hero’s Journey, which also illuminates this pattern of desent and ascent, suffering and return with enlightenment. We know this pattern and these truths; we’ve lived them in one way or another, though many of us have hidden our feelings of abandonment, ashamed that revealing them would also reveal our spiritual weakness. We often fear that our critics will call us out as hypocrites: See, even the believers despair. What good, then, is their faith? In spite of our fear and our pride, though, when the night seems endless and the emptiness eternal, we can’t help but cry out, bereft and alone.

I’ve read about spiritual seekers who cloister or leave for the wilderness, so that they might claim and suffer through their dark nights of the soul. Most of us, however, experience our darks nights in the midst of our ordinary lives and suffer through them in ordinary places. In his book, A Hell of Mercy: A Meditation on Depression and the Dark Night of the Soul, Tim Farrington writes:

You don’t need to retire to a cloister or the desert for years on end to experience a true dark night; you don’t even have to be pursuing any particular “spiritual” path. Raising a challenged child, or caring for a failing parent for years on end, is at least as purgative as donning robes and shaving one’s head; to endure a mediocre work situation for the sake of the paycheck that sustains a family demands at least as much in the way of daily surrender to years of pristine silence in a monastery. No one can know in advance how and where the night will come, and what form God’s darkness will take.

Farrington understands what Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung insisted: the dark night of the soul is a universal experience that manifests itself in very particular ways. Each dark night experience is the same–and uniquely different. It might be argued that we should find solace in a community of fellow dark night sojourners. And while it may be true that some do, many, I fear, don’t.

There are those who can’t find solace in community because they’re wrestling with aspects of their faith that they don’t yet understand and may not know how to express. The solitude of their suffering, then, may be necessary–and ultimately beneficial. Their dark night may be a period of reckoning, of looking into the wormholes of their souls where the truth of their spiritual ailments has taken root. American writer and devout Catholic, Flannery O’Connor, understood this well:

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds the emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints . .

O’Connor has given us characters who, in wrestling with their faith, uncover things about their souls that are hideous, emotionally disturbing, and downright repulsive. Some wrestle their way to redemption, while others are consumed by the fight. When a reader wrote her and complained that her book had left a bad taste in her mouth, O’Connor promptly responded: You weren’t supposed to eat it. In her novels, short stories, and personal writing, O’Connor fearlessly confronts those, including herself, whose dark nights are brutally and necessarily ugly and difficult.

Like Flannery O’Connor, Dutch priest, professor and writer, Henri Nouwen testifies to the necessary role that loneliness often plays in the dark night of the soul. Even as he lived and worked in community at L’Arche Daybreak Community, a home for disabled people, he confessed to loneliness, a feeling of separation from others and from God. He writes:

In community, where you have all the affection you could ever dream of you feel that there is a place where even community cannot reach. That’s a very important experience. In that loneliness, which is like a dark night of the soul, you learn that God is greater than community.

We find it relatively easy to attribute our feelings of loneliness and darkness to the isolation of lingering winter. In confessing this, we may find absolution in a community of others who’ve also struggled to keep the faith during the long, cold months. Truthfully, we find it much harder to attribute our feelings of loneliness and darkness to spiritual matters that have little–if anything–to do with the weather. These feelings are the unmentionables, those you uncover and probe only in the privacy of your own thoughts.

It’s significant to note that after decades of darkness, Mother Teresa began to regard her feelings of abandonment differently than the dark night of the soul described by John of the Cross and experienced by Thérèse de Lisieux. Her dark night, she came to understand, was a necessary part of her vocation. In experiencing her own inner poverty and by sharing the suffering of those she served, she ultimately came to believe that she was sharing the suffering of Christ himself. In recalling the oath she’d made in 1942, a pledge to never deny God anything he’d ask of her, she finally accepted that this meant deferring to feelings of God’s abandonment. I think her deference was, ironically, an ascent from darkness.

Mother Teresa continues to serve as a powerful example of one who lives and works as though God is present, even when he might seem so far away. She was light, in spite of her own spiritual darkness, and sought to light the light of those in darkness on earth. Our own dark night of the soul may be quick and temporary or long and permanent. It may be redemptive or aspiring-to-be-redemptive. It may be necessary or seemingly unnecessary. Regardless, it is human, perhaps one of the most universal human experiences. As such, it shouldn’t be scandalized but accepted and valued.

Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers. –W. H. Auden

It’s the oldest and briefest literary art form, claims James Geary, the editor of the compendium Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists. According to Geary, the aphorism must be brief and definitive, as well as personal and philosophical. And, he explains, it must have a twist which can be either a linguistic twist or a psychological twist or even a twist in logic that somehow flips the reader into a totally unexpected place.

In an age of tweets and sound bites, perhaps it’s the aphorism’s pithiness that is most attractive, that keeps it relevant. If I had to make a sound wager, I’d bet that most of my former students remember little about American Transcendental writer Henry David Thoreau except that he went to the woods and left us with a classic aphorism or two:

–I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

—If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

—A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

The same could be said of Transcendental Ralph Waldo Emerson:

—Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

—To be great is to be misunderstood.

—Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Here are words which, over a century later, grace posters and coffee mugs, t-shirts and greeting cards. Aphorisms like these have lasting power, and generations after they’ve been written, individuals insist that surely they must have been written for them and for such a time as this.

Perhaps the greatest power of the aphorism is the author’s assertiveness which, as poet W. H. Auden insists, stems from a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers. When one writes with such forceful brevity, with such personal and philosophical certainty, we listen. There are too many babblers in the world, individuals who use a universe of words and say nothing. They’ve exhausted us, sucked the very life from us and left us thirsting for a good aphorism. And if the aphorism is not only brief and authoritarian but witty, leaving us with some kind of psychological, linguistic, or logical twist, all the better. For these are words worth knowing and repeating, words that will make us, too, sound wiser than we are.

In his New Yorker article “The Art of Aphorism,” Adam Gopnik quotes English philosopher John Stuart Mill who claimed that [a]lmost all books of aphorisms, which have ever acquired a reputation, have retained it. Gophnik elaborates:

We don’t absorb aphorisms as esoteric wisdom; we test them against our own experience. The empirical test of the aphorism takes the form first of laughter and then of longevity, and its confidential tone makes it candid, not cynical. Aphorisms live because they contain human truth, as Mill saw, and reach across barriers of class and era.

I think that Gopnik’s insight into the human truth embedded in good aphorisms is particularly apt. What’s better than a brief, pithy assertion about human nature? Reading such an aphorism is akin to a 30-second doctor’s visit during which a definitive diagnosis is delivered and cure prescribed. Eleanor Roosevelt offered just such an aphorism when she wrote: No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. The diagnosis: you’re feeling inferior, struggling to see your own worth. And the cure: just stop consenting to feel that way. There it is, short and sweet. Ten words and a few precious seconds later, and you’re on your way to improved self-esteem.

Or consider this aphorism from William Shakespeare: A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool. Short, definitive, personal, philosphical, and with a twist? Check. Insight into human nature? Check. As one might expect, Shakespeare, the aphorist, rocks. Likewise Benjamin Franklin (Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late), George Bernard Shaw (Youth is wasted on the young), Albert Einstein (The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education), and Alfred Lord Tennyson (Tis better to have loved and lost/ than never to have loved at all). The list of famous aphorisms–unlike the form itself–is pratically endless.

Although I love my father’s poetry, like many, I’ve found particular solace and wisdom in his aphorisms:

—Love is what gives legacy a face.

—Anyone who is inclined to wonder edges toward the profound.

—Notice how a child’s cup offered to the heavens simply fills itself up.

—There is no more heroic charge than “Begin again.”

In writing about the art of aphorisms, Adam Gopnik concludes that [w]here big books remind us of how hard the work of understanding can be, aphorisms remind us of how little we have to know to get the point. He understands the real virtue of a good aphorism: that it takes us quickly and easily to the point, for which there is no pre-requisite knowledge or context necessary. To offer the best gift in a nutshell is, indeed, a testament to the gift-giver. Thank goodness there are so many such gift-givers and gifts to be had.

Gentlemen, I am 25 years old and I have killed 309 fascist occupants by now. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?

These are the words that brought an American audience to its feet in 1942 during a speech given in Chicago rallying U.S. support for a second front in Europe. These are the words delivered by a Russian lieutenant, a famous sniper credited with 309 official kills. These are the words spoken by a Ukranian woman known as “Lady Death,” Lyudmila Pavlichenko.

In June 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarrosa, the code name for the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Lyudmila, a history student at Kiev University, enlisted immediately at the recruiting office in Odessa, Ukraine. Even while she was completing her studies, she earned a marksman certificate and sharpshooter badge which she believed prepared her for a unique role in the upcoming defense of her homeland. Unlike most of the female recruits, she would not be funneled into the medical corps; she would contend for a position as a sniper in the Red Army’s 25th Rifle Division.

Even her laurels as a crack shot, however, didn’t earn her an actual rifle in the beginning. She was sent into battle with a single grenade until an injured comrade gave her his Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifle. The rest is history. In a matter of months, she perfected her skills, tallying kill after kill, earning her the title “Lady Death.” A year later when she visited the U.S. with the intent of rallying much-needed support for a second front in Europe, Eleanor Roosevelt, who became a special friend, worried about her likeability. Here was a woman who had killed 309 Nazis, claiming [t]he only feeling I have is the great satisfaction a hunter feels who has killed a beast of prey. Would Americans find her a heroine, sympathizing with her intense desire to defend her homeland? Or would they find her a monster, picking off one soldier after another in cool, measured kill shots?

I’d never heard of Lyudmila Pavlichenko until I read Kate Quinn’s work of historical fiction, The Diamond Eye, a novel that invites us to know Lady Death both as woman and sniper. Quinn confesses to take some artistic liberties but sticks close to historical record for the most part. She argues that because Lyudmila’s personal account of her life and military career is so objectively written–the facts without much embellishment or introspection–she wanted more. And so, in her book, we meet Lyudmila the woman who lives and loves–and just happens to be one of the world’s most famous snipers.

As I read Quinn’s novel, I couldn’t help but think of those Ukranians who are desperately defending their country today. Just as Lyudmila Pavlichenko regarded the Nazis as beasts of prey intent on killing her fellow countrymen and taking her homeland, I suspect that there are many Ukranians now who face each day intent on killing those who aim to destroy their people and country. Like Eleanor Roosevelt who was concerned about the likeability of a woman dressed in drab olive with a sniper tally of 309, there may be some today who privately balk at images of ordinary Ukranian citizens, armed and taking defensive positions in their cities. They may think: Would I take up arms? Would I see the Russian soldiers who invade my city as beasts of prey? Would I defend by taking the offensive, protecting my home and my family by hunting Russian prey?

There are those like French writer Alexandre Dumas who claim that [t]here are no creatures that walk the earth, not even those animals we have labelled cowards, which will not show courage when required to defend themselves [The Vicomte de Bragelonne]. I’d like to think that I could show the courage of Lyudmila Pavlichenko and today’s Ukranians if I were required to defend myself, my family and home. As loathe as I am to take up arms–because I understand that holding a weapon means I must be prepared to use it–I’d like to think that I could if enemies were storming my home or homeland. I’d like to think that when faced with evil, I would not only defend those people and places but the ideas and principles I love.

Napoleon Bonaparte would have smirked at Eleanor Roosevelt’s concern for Lady Death’s likeability. He argued that [w]hen defending itself against another country, a nation never lacks men, but too often, soldiers. Bonaparte understood that even nations under attack would find themselves with more men and women who considered soldiering with real weapons for others–not for themselves. Soldiering is often an ugly business, and at times, those engaged in this ugly business may be regarded as unlikeable. Still, it’s hard to imagine a world without those defenders who even now are digging into the Ukranian countryside, holing up in factories and homes, taking positions in burnt-out tanks and bombed-out buildings.

In Lady Death’s longest sniper battle, she lay motionless for 3 days, camoflauged in Ukranian snow and brush, as she surveilled her Nazi sniper enemy. Ugly, cold business, indeed. It’s probably no suprise, then, that Lyudmila battled alcoholism and suffered from PTSD for much of her life. Defending one’s homeland may be necessary and noble, but it’s also extremely costly. I can only imagine the costs that Ukranian defenders are now paying and will continue to pay long after the battles are over.

The Viet Nam draft ended when I was senior in high school. Although I knew that I had no chance of being drafted as a female, I remember how often I imagined what I would do if I were drafted like so many young men my age were. I watched every Viet Nam movie, television series, and documentary I could, living vicariously through the soldiers portrayed in each, reliving battles in my dreams. I asked myself tough questions. Would I enlist? Wait to be drafted? Conscientiously object? Flee for Canada? All my musings, however, often came down to one imaginary, watershed moment in which a Viet Cong soldier rushed from the thick jungle cover straight at my platoon, ready and eager to kill. I was armed, the threat was real, and I pulled the trigger before he could fire a shot. In this imaginary moment, I acted instinctively and killed a man. For years, this moment haunted me. It schooled me with its clarity: kill or be killed.

In truth, defensive measures often become offensive actions. Lyudmila Pavelichenko understood this at the tender, but seasoned, age of 24. She understood that to protect her country, her fellow soldiers, her family and friends, she must spend hours with her eye pressed to her rifle scope. She must make the necessary calculations of distance and wind, as she lay on her belly in the snow or brush. She must clear her mind and still her breathing until she could finally take the shot. Just a single shot, but a single shot over and over again.

During one of her American speaking engagements, a reporter commented on the dowdiness of her uniform that made her look fat. She responded directly:

I wear my uniform with honor. . . . It has been covered with blood in battle. It is plain to see that with American women what is important is whether they wear silk underwear under their uniforms. What the uniform stands for, they have yet to learn.

I think it’s safe to say that most of us have yet to learn what it means to defend the people and places we love most. Blessedly, we haven’t had to defend America from foreign invaders for almost a century. But others have, and others are now living through seasons of defense. At the very least, we must not hide behind our own indifference and relative safety. At best, we must truly see that there but for the grace of God, go we.