To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.   –C. S. Lewis

Children all over the country have gone back to school. Parents, caretakers, and grandparents hand them off to bus drivers and teachers, who take them in all new-clothes-shiny and weighted down with gargantuan backpacks stuffed with a year’s supply of crayons, tissues boxes, and hope.

But oh the vulnerability on the faces of all! Children entering new classrooms with new teachers, new classmates, new routines. And those left behind in the parking lots who watch until they can’t see the backs of those they’ve so lovingly offered.

Just yesterday, I entered the office of an elementary school I’m working with and saw a second grade boy, his hand to his ear, crying that he didn’t feel good and wanted to go home. Alone, without his mother or teacher, he stood before the school secretary, wholly vulnerable to whatever would come next. I cringed. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. If I could have scooped him and taken him home, I would have, for in that moment, I saw all of us–the boy, my children, my grandchildren, myself–breakable, penetrable, and vulnerable.

In his novel, Atonement, Ian McEwan writes:

From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.

Here was a child, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended. This awareness is both buoying and terrifying. For some, such fragility prompts tender responses; for others, nothing but meanness. Vulnerability is that space where possibilities of tenderness and meanness hang in the balance.

There are many photos of my grandson, Griffin, that unsettle me. Often he is unwilling to be photographed, hiding behind his sister, pets, costumes, and available furniture or trees. Two years ago when I asked my daughter to take a picture of my husband, me, Gracyn, and Griffin for our family Christmas card, she could never get a single shot of Griffin looking directly at the camera and smiling. Ultimately, she resorted to photoshop, artfully piecing together his torso and head from other more successful photos. The fact that Griff lacked an arm in the final photo (hidden, blessedly by my jean jacket) was yet another casualty of photographing one who often regards the camera as something that might penetrate and break his very soul.

Dr. Brené Brown, researcher professor at the University of Houston, has spent the last ten years studying vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame. Her TED talks are some of the most viewed, and her visits to popular talk shows are widely anticipated. Brown has much to say about vulnerability. As a result of her research, she claims that the greatest barrier I see is our low tolerance for vulnerability. We’re almost afraid to be happy. We feel like it’s like inviting disaster.

This is the look I often see on my grandson’s face when he is in the presence of others who wait for his joyous reaction to something. He turns away or scowls. He defies joy to flood his face. He refuses to be happy–at least while others are watching. I have seen this response from countless others who, too, fear inviting disaster. Truthfully, I have responded in a similar, albeit more adult, way. I recall sitting on the back of a convertible that was slowly making its way around the football field during the halftime of the my college homecoming game. As queen, I was crowned and cloaked, taking my celebratory ride. But not even half way around the track, I remember thinking, I’d better not get too excited about this because tomorrow will be just another day. Tomorrow, I will just be me. Brown’s claims ring true for me: there have been many times when I have personally suffered from a low tolerance for vulnerability, preferring instead to cocoon myself in self-talk designed to ward off disaster.

Brown’s work with vulnerability has struck a nerve with many. Her TED talks are some of the most watched, and her books are best-selling. When she speaks about our collective issues with vulnerability, people are listening:

Society has taught us that vulnerability is synonymous with weakness—but it’s just the opposite. Vulnerability is the willingness to show up and be seen by others in the face of uncertain outcomes. There’s not a single act of courage that doesn’t involve vulnerability.

Like Griffin, I have feared uncertain outcomes. But being seen by others? This is often just too much. I wouldn’t go bowling with friends in high school and college because I would be seen at something I wasn’t good at and the outcome was, indeed, uncertain. Bowling in public would have been an act of vulnerability. And courage.

Author Madeleine L’Engle writes that children often think that when they grow up, they will no longer be vulnerable. She concludes, however, that to grow up is to accept vulnerability. . .To be alive is to be vulnerable. As I consider the little boy who cried in his school office on the first day of school, I can imagine well-meaning adults who might confidently assure him that he would grow out of this vulnerability, that he would grow up and leave these feelings of helplessness and fear behind him. And herein lies the real truth of vulnerability: we simply don’t have the stomach for it. We can’t bear to see or feel it, to relive it through our children, to own it.

As daunting as the challenges of vulnerability are, though, Brown offers positive words:

Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.

Most of us would argue that we would never give up on love, belonging, and joy, and yet, at times, most of us have. We have run from people and situations that expose and threaten to undo us. Like T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, we slip behind our selves to prepare faces to meet the faces we will meet.

Still, when I see the sweet vulnerability of my grandchildren–of children in general–like Brown, I feel the urgency to help them embrace it. For it is in this very embrace that their courage will grow an abundant life marked with love, acceptance, and joy.

If you’d like to listen to Brown, check out her TED talk below.

Late July

A sea of periwinkle moves

across the south pasture towards the timber.

The wild chicory has spread triumphantly

with taut stems which hold fast to the baked clay

of late July.

In a season of drought,

here is water of a different sort:

a quench of blue stars

undulating wildly in the brown breeze.

Spring-fed from a deeper source

it is that thing you call upon

when dust dulls you

and you sleep, dreamless, in small corners.

That place you go

when you must gather your children behind sod walls

and sing the songs of spring

your voices, lovely specters, rising

from the stubble around you.

This is water with no volume,

no hydrogen or oxygen.

But it flows just as surely,

cascading in ancient pools

from which we all drink

and through which the sun shatters

into prisms of life.

Seasons of Angst                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   for Collyn and Gracyn (and other fellow angsters)

Worry grows along the banks of the furrows

which run decidedly along your brow.

Darkness is not your friend,

and it often comes

in a single, suffocating rush—

a hothouse of angst.

You are the exquisite recipient of genes that rise,

eager to leave their fermented husks,

destined to torment.

But what a lovely façade!

Freckles which spread like constellations

across a sky of milk-white skin,

wisps of ash blonde hair which fall

in single strands across one azure eye

and then another.

Who would see the shards of doubt that threaten—

even in the glow of a bedside lamp,

even in the happily-ever-after of a favorite book?

Who would feel the prick of night

ever present, ever eager to fracture

all that is innocent and good?

Oh that I could take them back,

these genes that have passed too assuredly

from generation to generation.

But failing to–like those before me–

I can only offer trembling hands

which hold the glittering pieces

of love.

Let it be said that I am a master of angst. And lately, the prospect that I have been an unwilling genetic donor of this brokenness has put my angst into overdrive. Angst is that feeling of deep anxiety or dread, typically an unfocused one about the human condition or the state of the world in general. 

Oh, there are those with acutely focused anxiety and dread about the state of the world today. All you have to do is tune into any talk radio program or turn on the television, and you will get an earful of this sort of dread. But the unfocused type often lies just below the surface of all that appears to be lovely and innocent, all that seems to float heedlessly like a brilliant buoy across the turbulent sea of life. This sort may appear tightly and individually focused, but in truth, these worries are but metaphors which have razor-like edges that cut more deeply into the general grain of our humanness.

One of my sisters recently lamented the fact that our mom was often unavailable to her for the hour (hours?) after bedtime because she was consoling me for yet another worry or transgression. I once worried for nights about my fear that I may have given my fifth grade teacher an “unpleasant look” as she walked through the aisles during silent reading time. And there was my mom sitting at the foot of my bed, reassuring me for the hundredth time that this act was undoubtedly imagined, not real, and that I had nothing to fret over. This may appear like an eleven-year-old worry, something fleeting and altogether insignificant, but it was not. It was the awkward beginning of a lifetime of brooding over my position–and then the human position–in the universe.

Angst of my sort often morphs into something uniquely terrible. Without boundaries, my angst can suffer from attention deficit hyperactive disorder. Dread scatters like water drops into a skillet of hot oil. Here to there to there to here. . . ad nauseam. This is angst on amphetamines. When I forgot my dentist appointment last year, did I call immediately and beg forgiveness? Or did I wait for them to call me and act duly penitent then? Will Home Depot still mix paint colors that they haven’t had in stock for a decade? And what if they don’t, what then? Why can’t I remember the new science teacher’s name? Why don’t I really listen when I’m introduced? This is the real me, isn’t it? And this is the nature of humans–that we default to self-consciousness when we should be looking outward? I should’ve been paying closer attention, but I was looking at how white her teeth were, and–and I really need to check to see when my dentist’s appointment is. Have I missed it already?

Tragically, angst is a pervasive cancer which finds fertile ground in sensitive souls. So it was no accident that I found kinship years later with confessional poet Sylvia Plath. Plath was–and is–perhaps the truest poster child for angst. From her novel The Bell Jar, she develops and emerges raw in all her splendid self-consciousness and angst. She describes this condition:

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

And later, she reveals her fears that she would never grow out of this condition and into something less angst-ridden:

But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure at all. How did I know that someday―at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere―the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?

Stewing in my own sour air–this is some good (and really bad) stuff, Sylvia! You nailed it, hit the soft target of angst squarely. And as if all this stewing weren’t awful enough, the prospect that it could, and probably would, descend again? This is surely doubt worthy of an even thicker stew.

In her book, Ariel, Plath writes:

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

As I watch those I love, those who have unwittingly inherited my angst-genes, I find myself living vicariously as they wrestle with this dark thing, its soft feathery turnings, its malignity. Indeed, there is room for two or three in such bell jars. And once there, the sour air grows denser and more poisonous from generational worry.

Still, I take incredible solace in the words of Ernest Hemingway who wrote:

We are all broken. That’s how the light gets in.

It is ironic and sad that both Plath and Hemingway took their own lives, ultimately being unable to bear their brokenness and to tame the dark thing. Blessedly, light did seep through the cracks of their broken lives at times. And when it did, they lived and loved, they wrote stories and poems of enduring beauty and wisdom. They brought light to others even as it waned and was finally extinguished in their own lives.

If our brokenness lets the light in and if that light is wondrous yet sporadic, so be it. In that splendid light, its rays refracted exquisitely through the glass of the bell jar, there is respite from angst.

Walking through the architectural splendors of Italy and France, I turned to my friend and repeated the same words, over and over again. I just don’t understand. I sincerely don’t understand how men could envision and design such structures: the Coliseum, the Vatican, the Church of Santa Maria del Fiore, St. Mark’s Basilica, Notre Dame and Sacre Coeur. For one who is blown away by a stand of Queen Anne’s Lace or an aging Iowa barn, standing in the presence of such splendor was almost more than I could take.

After returning from my European trip, so many people have asked me what my favorite site was. Hard-pressed as I have been to identify a single site, I have to admit that Florence holds a special place in my heart. This city, the birthplace of the Renaissance, is home to the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore (Saint Mary of the Flower), which has been nicknamed the Duomo because of its impressive octagonal dome. Impressive is a pathetic understatement, indeed. This is the largest church in Italy and the third largest in the world.

Construction on the Duomo began in 1386, but it remained domeless until 1436. For more than a century, the east end of the cathedral remained open or was covered with a flat, temporary roof. The problem? No architect or engineer could figure out how to design and build an octagonal dome of that size. Italian architects understood the design of a round dome, like that of the Pantheon in Rome, but such domes were constructed of concrete, and the recipe for concrete had been lost in the Middle Ages. The Parisian Notre Dame–and other Medieval gothic cathdrals–relied upon flying buttresses to support their weight. But Florence had banned the use of buttresses, and the Italian Renaissance architects wanted to return to the clean lines of their Roman past.

And so for a century, one could only imagine the magnificent dome–one destined to be bigger than that of the Pantheon–a dome that was intended to be the crown jewel of the Basilica. That is, until the genius of  Flippo Brunelleschi. 

There are times when genius, a flash in the pan, bursts upon the scene electrifying all in its midst. Other times, however, I believe it is more of an overwhelming, persistent passion to fill a vacuum. A passion that belongs to a man or woman who fails forward, shelving all that is incomplete, inadequate, and ill-conceived. One who wakes each day bent to the task–no to the love that drives and fills each moment.

Imagine Brunelleschi standing before the span of Florentine air that was to be the greatest brick dome the world had ever seen. In Marginalia, Edgar Allan Poe wrote:

The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.

A true genius, Brunelleschi would have abhorred the incompleteness before him. It would have gnawed at his soul. It would have threatened to unravel the core of a deep yearning to complete, a yearning which had come to define him. His genius was multifold: artistic, technical, mathematical, and practical. What his eye could see, his brain could calculate. What his brain could calculate, his understanding of available materials and the human body could compensate. To lift the 4 million bricks needed to complete the dome? Brunelleschi invented a new machine that was capable of hoisting the necessary masonry. To advance and ensure the physical labor of hundreds of masonry workers? He reimagined former labor practices by keeping the workers on the job during breaks, bringing food and drink to them, and keeping them from the exhaustion of going down and up the hundreds of stairs constructed for the project.

Completing the Basilica’s dome, the apse, and the cupola would be the majority of Brunelleschi’s life work. Because a modern understanding of the physical laws and mathematical tools needed for calculating stresses were hundreds of years in the future, Brunelleschi relied primarily on his intuition and what he could learn from building large-scale models. He left behind a single model of his dome–intentionally incomplete to ensure his complete control over the project–and no formal plans or diagrams. There is something inherently genius about a design and construction which remained a mystery for centuries.

American writer and novelist Pearl S. Buck writes:

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

I imagine Brunelleschi to have been most alive when he was creating and overseeing his creation come to life. The fact that this took the majority of his life makes me think he lived fully and deeply, relishing the placement of each row of bricks as his dome reached ever skyward. Some might say that it doesn’t get much better than this.

Others might look at the magnitude of such a project that spanned a lifetime and question if this was genius as much as it was persistence. Michelangelo–a genius in his own right–claimed that genius is eternal patience. The genius behind the Pantheon, the Coliseum, and the great cathedrals of Europe give testament to the role that patience has played. In a world of fast food, quick news, information and entertainment at the touch of a button, it is difficult–if not impossible–to conceive of those who devoted most of their lives to single, magnificent endeavors. But how these geniuses and their creations continue to bless us!

In his essay, On Liberty, English philosopher John Stuart Mill writes:

Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.  

How do we preserve this precious soil? When utility and profit rule the day, what can we do to carve out those necessary plots for geniuses? Clearly, I don’t have the answers. Still, I am convicted that we must encourage this small minority to continue to grace the world with their unimaginable gifts. There must be infinite seasons of genius. Of this, I am certain.

St. Mark’s Square, Venice

The Coliseum, Rome

The sailors of Cinque Terre, five fishing villages on the Italian Riviera coastline, could locate their homes from the sea by their distinctive colors. 

To the Sailors of Cinque Terre

Stacks of houses hold fast

to rocks which fall straight

into the sea.

From your boat,

your eyes move across their graying silhouettes,

which darken, moment by moment,

at dusk.

Until, just as the sun is setting,

a final shaft of light

brings the mountain to pastel life.

Terra cotta, saffron, pistachio and pink

call.

And your eyes fix on the color of your heart

as you steer for home.

Even in the moonlight,

color is your lodestar.

Terra cotta, saffron, pistachio and pink

sing, like a sirens,

beckoning you home.

photo by Collyn Ware

For Griffin, almost five

Three goldfinches sit on a wire.

They punctuate the cornflower sky

like saffron exclamation points.

Look! Look! Look!

Wren-bodied, but mighty,

their golden breasts blaze

in the noonday sun.

These are waifs with heart.

Like you at four-almost-five

with eyes that flash in the spaces between minutes

and hands like hummingbirds

that tease the air.

But you lean into me,

a favorite book between us,

and we linger in the land of words,

in the leisurely way that lines wrap around

and into the next, spilling

onto a new page, extending the story.

Until, fingers aquiver,

you take my hand and pull me out the door.

Look! Look! Look!

Three goldfinches on a wire,

and one boy

who punctuates my life.

With love,

your Grandma

Song of the Cottonwoods

The summer voice of the cottonwoods

lies transparent in baby breaths

on the water.

It floats in faint wisps

in the channels and along the shoreline.

In the evening at the water’s edge,

you can dip your hands into the shallows

and catch a whisper,

a single syllable of promise.

There is sacredness in words unspoken,

in such fragile potential that moves,

as it will,

in the breeze.

And at dawn when the day is a rosy glaze

upon the lake,

there are filaments so fine

that they are lost in the light.

This is the song of the cottonwoods.

Shannon Vesely

June

The mingling of wild honeysuckle and sweet clover

is the fragrance of early summer.

In the morning dew, the presence of its perfume

floats above the green fields like a veil,

behind which is the sunny face of June.

She lingers in a small windowless room

off the sacristy.

Soon, she will take her father’s arm.

Soon she will stand at the altar

in those still white moments of prayer and proclamation.

And then, her veil removed,

she will kiss the brighter face of a bridegroom

whose very heat will singe the top notes

of honeysuckle and columbine,

will smolder in the bass notes of clover

and mown grass.

And later from the bridal bed,

the sweet scent of peony

will be just a memory.

Shannon Vesely

Both the bluebird and the indigo bunting are elusive birds. I hear them in the woods behind our house, I see their dark silhouettes in the tops of the trees at the edge of our timber, but I rarely have the chance to see them close enough to take in their blue splendor. Still, I crane my neck every time I hear their songs and scan the treeline for any flash of blue.

These are private birds, indeed. Except for the cadet blue of the common Blue Jay, brilliant blue is an anomaly here in the Midwest. Each spring, blue birds and buntings could flaunt their colors amidst the browns, russets, and grays of native birds. They could, but they do not. And this is what makes their allure even more precious. Their privacy is a ten-carat sapphire hidden in a pile of limestone and shale.

In his Notebooks 1951-1959, French philosopher and author Albert Camus writes:

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

Opt for privacy and solitude, neither of which make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. The blue birds and the indigo buntings are poster children for privacy and solitude, and we might do well to take a lesson from them. Perhaps our unwillingness to do so stems from a belief (albeit a misguided one) that there may be something more sinister behind that state of privacy. He believes he’s so much better than the rest of us; she is plotting something; he clearly has something to hide, etc. Those who value privacy are too often subject to such criticism. Failing to understand why anyone would opt for privacy, would need to breathe and to be, we look down upon them from social perches of superiority.

Some social media has, in many ways, made a mockery of privacy, choosing instead to air everything publicly, freely, frequently:

John Doe is drinking his first latte at the Starbucks on the corner of  Lattimer and Green! Jane Doe is starting day #7 of a new diet and exercise regimen destined to transform her in every way! John Doe’s son participated in the 25th annual county basketball tournament! Jane Doe’s daughter just befriended a new student who moved from Texas! 

Social media posts are sometimes like those infamous Christmas letters–but on steroids. You know, the ones that make you feel like you and your family are chopped liver? The ones that broadcast a family’s every triumph, every accomplishment, every plan that will make the world a better place. Those letters that get under your skin and cause you to justify your own family’s worth.

And what of these posts in which nothing is private? Are they valuable simply because they are public? Author Gore Vidal writes that Eventually all things are known. And few matter. If so many things are posted so that they may be known, will they ultimately matter?

French author Milan Kundera is less kind:

When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?

A concentration camp? That’s harsh–perhaps much too harsh. Still, he has a point. When what is private–and is generally best kept private–is broadcast, there may be unforeseen consequences: a loss of significance, intimacy, and sadly even integrity. Too much good stuff may dull our senses. Too much celebration may prompt us to turn a blind eye. When discernment is lacking, social media may be more of an assault than a refuge.

In her article, “The Psychology of Social Media” (Psychology Today, Nov. 14, 2016), Dr. Azedah Alai cites research that reveals that “engaging in upward social comparisons on social media is associated with negative outcomes for users such as lower self-esteem, and the potential for depressive and/or anxiety symptoms” (e.g. Vogel et. al., 2014; Vogel & Rose, 2016). In fact, Vogel’s earlier research (2014) reported that people tend to believe that others who use social media actually have better lives than they do. Our compulsion to scour social media in an attempt to keep up with the Joneses is literally making us sick. A healthy dose of privacy could be just what the doctor ordered.

And those who feel compelled to confess publicly? Often these confessions are desperate cries for acknowledgement, for affirmation, for some sort of connection. Certainly, there may be power and value in  connections with others who offer compassion and understanding. Private confessions, however, have the potential for so much more power and value. When you sit knee-to-knee with another human being who is willing and able to listen, it doesn’t get much better than this. In these private and intimate exchanges, we build genuine and lasting relationships that don’t depend on internet availability.

Don’t get me wrong. I use social media regularly and delight in pictures and posts from family, former students, and friends. To an extent, social media has made the world smaller, bringing people and places from far away right into your home. And for this, I am generally grateful. But I am more grateful that I can walk away from my computer and walk into the countryside around me. I am more grateful that I can choose to keep some thoughts, some feelings, and some dreams private. And I am eternally grateful that I can select with whom I will share these. Or not.

The first female Middle Eastern editor-in-chief of an English newspaper, Aysha Taryam claims that And so it is inevitable that the day has come when we write about privacy with such nostalgia, analyzing it as we would some unearthed fossil of a creature our human eyes had never fallen on.

Perhaps the fact that I am writing wistfully about privacy is evidence that we have come to look upon it with nostalgia. I can imagine sitting with my grandchildren and recalling those days when we had no wifi, when we learned to live with our own portion of solitude, when we relished a privacy that had everything to do with simply being and nothing to do with being antisocial. I can imagine explaining how some things are so precious that they need not be shared–or perhaps that they be shared with discernment.

In a few days, my little cabin near the woods will be completed, thanks to my husband’s carpentry skills and willingness to make my dream come to fruition. Even though it is a mere 100 yards from my house, it is far enough and separate enough to provide me with an ample supply of privacy and solitude. This will be my Walden, and like Thoreau, I will go to the woods because I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I will write in this cabin and choose what–if anything–will become public. In truth, I suspect that much of what I think and write will remain–as it should–private.

And if I happen to see a blue bird or an indigo bunting close enough to take in its blueness, I will choose to keep this private, too, reveling in an intimate moment that truly matters.