Browsing Category:

Blog Posts

In Blog Posts on
October 18, 2016

The Sanctuary of Juxtaposition

 

Juxtaposition: an act or instance of placing close together or side by side, especially for comparison  or contrast

Photography by Brian Schrack

Gerald Gentleman Station, Nebraska's largest coal-fired generating plant near Sutherland [background]; iron hoops signifying wagon wheels, O'Fallon's Bluff near Sutherland, National Register of Historic Places [foreground]

Gerald Gentleman Station, Nebraska’s largest coal-fired generating plant near Sutherland [background]; iron hoops signifying wagon wheels, O’Fallon’s Bluff near Sutherland, National Register of Historic Places [foreground]

 Mormon and Oregon Trail wagon ruts marked by iron hoops near Sutherland, Nebraska

Mormon and Oregon Trail wagon ruts marked by iron hoops near Sutherland, Nebraska

Gerald Gentleman Station, recognized by Platts Power magazine as the lowest cost coal-fired producer in America [near Sutherland, Nebraska]

Gerald Gentleman Station, recognized by Platts Power magazine as the lowest cost coal-fired producer in America [near Sutherland, Nebraska]

With cell phones in almost every hand or pocket, a photograph is just a point-and-click away. Social media venues host millions of photos daily. It seems that everyone is a photographer.

Of sorts, that is. For the thousands of would-be-photographers out there, there are but a few of the real deal. These are the men and women who use instinctive and learned eyes to see the photograph before they ever pick up their camera. Whereas amateurs glibly proclaim This will be a cute shot, a beautiful shot, a funny shot, the pros are asking What is the message, the memory, the feeling here? And how will I best capture this for others? They approach the view finder with a hushed reverence for light and shadow, shape and form. They kneel at the altars of perspective and balance.

Brian Schrack is the real deal, and his photography testifies to the craft he has honed for decades. This series of photographs he shot near Sutherland, Nebraska is a sublime study in juxtaposition. In the foreground, iron hoops that represent wagon wheels that left lasting ruts along the Oregon and Mormon Trails, a reminder of pioneer perseverance and vision. In the background, a coal-fired energy plant, its stacks rising formidably from the plains, a symbol of all that fuels our modern conveniences. Our eyes fix on the iron hoops and are eventually drawn to the smoke stacks behind. The juxtaposition of old to new is profoundly moving here. The power of the westward vision largely gone, the power of coal takes its place.  And the prairie survives, a persistent and holy ground, housing the remnants of the past and the structures of today.

dscn1660dscn1649

In the Sanctuary of Juxtaposition, we are disturbed and delighted by unlikely pairings, by unusual side-by-sides. And we must thank the artist for such juxtapositions, for our eyes do not often see them. We pass by but fail to deliberately frame the world before us. We look but fail to see.

Minnesota essayist, Philip Connors writes:

I’ve always liked edges, places where one thing becomes another. . . transition zones, boundaries, and borderlands. I like the mixing that happens, the juxtapositions, the collisions and connections. I like the way they help me see the world from a fresh angle.

Amen to that. We all need a little help from our friends, and those who can photograph, paint, and write the juxtapositions, the collisions and connections are, indeed, those who help us see the world from a fresh angle.  Those who live in The Sanctuary of Juxtaposition are fresh angles’ biggest fans.

 In  Les Misérables, Victor Hugo understands the power of fresh angles when he writes:

There were corpses here and there and pools of blood. I remember seeing a butterfly flutter up and down that street. Summer does not abdicate.

Summer does not abdicate its fluttering beauty even to death. The prairie does not abdicate its essence even to coal-fired power plants. Victor Hugo and Brian Schrack bring these messages, these fresh angles to those who have eyes to see.

Haiku writers, in particular, are masters of juxtaposition.  Traditional Japanese haiku juxtapose dissimilar images and use a kireji, or cutting word, to separate them.  English haiku writers may forgo a cutting word for a line break or pause. The effect, however, is the same, as the haiku writer brings two disparate images together, asking readers to take notice. Consider this haiku by poet John Wisdom:

harvest moon –
migrant kids eat the bread
tossed to the crows

In the foreground, the magnificent harvest moon; in the background, hungry migrant children feeding on bread crusts thrown thoughtlessly to the birds. The poet moves us to ask the universal question: How can such want exist amidst such beauty? This is the power in the Sanctuary of Juxtaposition, and haiku is but one evidential, albeit exceptional, form.

I am continually indebted to those who bring the power of juxtaposition to me through image and word. Truthfully, I am better for their fresh angles. The Sanctuary of Juxtaposition is often a challenging one, to be sure, but one we would all do well to enter–willingly and often.

With sincere thanks to Brian Schrack, who graciously granted me permission to use his photographs. 

In Blog Posts on
October 17, 2016

The Sanctuary of Autumn

 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
L. M. Montgomery, Ann of Green Gables

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
Albert Camus, The Misunderstanding [Act II]

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”                                F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I  would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”                George Eliot, Life of George Eliot: As Related in Her Letters and Journals

“Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.”  Robert Browning, Paracelsus

“Autumn…the year’s last, loveliest smile.”
William Cullen Bryant, “Indian Summer”

In mid-October, rural Iowa is awash in gold and green, russet and red, the white gauze of frost that skims the surface of grass and the white steam that rises from the pond in brief translucence at dawn. These are the glory days of autumn. And like Ann of Green Gables, I, too, am so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. 

Today, as the temperature rises to the mid seventies, there is no hint of winter-to-come. The noon sun–almost hot enough to warrant sun screen–convinces us of a second spring when every leaf is a flower.  And even when the dusk brings a crisp chill, you feel as though you might start all over again, you might take on a new name, all burnished with golden possibilities. In the Sanctuary of Autumn, it is like this on most October days. If you were a bird, you would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns, for your heart would swell with October song.

And yet. Something in you feels the tug of time passing much too quickly, of the bittersweet reality that October flashes the year’s last, loveliest smile. The paradox of autumn is just this: glorious life with imminent decay. Robert Browning claims that Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay. Perhaps. In truth, I find myself increasingly sympathetic for its decay. For my decay.

If, as some claim, our lives are like seasons, clearly, at age 61, I am well into the autumn of my life. Spring and summer spent, I walk the leaf strewn paths of autumn, keenly aware of how quickly gold turns brown, crumbling all too soon into dust. After the rain, I smell the dank transformation of leaves into earth. In the Sanctuary of Autumn, sixty-somethings praise and fear all that is October.

For us, golden does have advantages over green. It permits us to speak more freely, act more boldly, and love more deeply than we were able to in our greener years. With the patina of experience and wisdom,  it rubs out the kinks and softens the scars. We settle into it gratefully, prostrating ourselves on its kind hearth.

But just as we marvel in the well-earned autumn of our souls, we lament the autumnal decay of our bodies. When it comes to bodies, green has the clear advantage. Golden is mottled with degeneration of joints and muscles and bones; golden signals the last course, the final curtain call, the end. Golden wisely warns: Don’t jump with abandon into that pile of leaves. Remember that you don’t want to have orthopedic surgery. Again. 

Shakespeare understood this impending twilight. In his Sonnet 73, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold”, he writes:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

In their spring and summer seasons, others can see in me the twilight of such day, the glowing of such fire, the deathbed whereon their youth must inevitably expire. But as inglorious as the impending deathbed may be, the sonneteer breaks from the first three quatrains into glorious couplet. Here, Shakespeare gives me words to live by: when we perceive the reality of our autumnal selves, we can love that well which thou must leave ere long. 

In the Sanctuary of Autumn, there is much to be said about loving well before leaving. Live like you’re dying. Live like there’s no tomorrow. It’s not how long you live but how well you live, etc. Trite and overused as they may be, we may find truth in the cliches of country western songs and greeting card verses, expressions we previously pocketed for “later”. And when “later” arrives on boughs where yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang, we are mostly surprised. When did green turn gold? When did auburn turn grey? When did the sweet songs of summer birds turn into bare ruined choirs?   When did I turn old?

Still, autumn is surprising me daily with golden gifts I could have never imagined in my youth. Gifts of time–for reflection, for play, for reading, for talking and cat-petting, for creating and re-creating. Gifts of love–of family and friends. Gifts of faith–deepened and seasoned now through age and experience. In the Sanctuary of Autumn, these are gifts for unwrapping. I plan to love them all well before they’re gone.

 

 

 

In Blog Posts on
October 12, 2016

The Sanctuary of Open

img_0312

This is the entrance to the Vesely household. In the window to the left of the front door, the sign I bought at the dollar store (as a prop for playing “store” with my grandchildren) now has a permanent spot. Thanks to Gracyn, who explained that this way we will know that you are open for us! The fact that the sign has never been flipped to announce “CLOSED” speaks volumes.

The Sanctuary of Open welcomes visitors with come in, come as you are, come often, and come again. It fries another hamburger–or many–and is never ashamed of paper plates. Its arms are always bigger than one imagines, folding others securely into the deep bosom of home. And, in the Vesely house, its dining room willingly becomes a playroom whose toys are never quite put away and lay partially assembled and ready for the next round of train station, grocery store, doll house, or camper.

Years ago in my Ottumwa church, our adult Sunday School class took a “spiritual gifts inventory.” As we considered the results of our individual surveys, no one was the least bit surprised when a senior member of our class, Ruth Rice, revealed that she had the gift of hospitality. Actually, this was one of those duh-we-could-have-told-you-this moments, for Ruth’s very pores exuded hospitality. Before and long after June Cleaver, there was Ruth: gracious, generous, hospitable, open to any and all. I remember thinking, I hope I can grow up to be a Ruth. 

Still, as good and true as the virtues of generosity and hospitality are, veteran members of the Sanctuary of Open carry discernment in their back pockets. For if Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy appeared at the door, they would not greet him with a plate of freshly baked cookies and a well, for heaven sakes, come in! Even Christ, the consummate model for loving openness, cautioned his disciples to be discerning as they traveled to preach the gospel:

If the home is deserving, let your peace rest on it; if it is not, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet. [Matthew 10: 13-14]

Discernment is the tempering factor in the Sanctuary of Open. Its still small voice whispers: What are the rewards? What are the risks and costs? Are you willing to sacrifice? Your time, yourself, your heart and your life? Some are all too eager to shake the dust off their feet as they quickly abandon people and places, while others struggle to do so, willing themselves to give more time, more effort, and more heart in genuine openness. The Sanctuary of Open may, indeed, be a tricky place to maneuver, even for seasoned veterans.

Today, we live in a country and society that generally purports to value openness. Open communities, open schools, open borders and open minds. For the past five years, I worked in an urban high school that opens its doors and services, daily, to students from all over the world. It is not uncommon for a 17 year old student from Guatemala, Honduras, Ethiopia, or Sudan to enter as a new student in December or March or even May. It is not uncommon for this student to come with little–or no–formal schooling and no English language skills. All come with their parents’ and guardians’ sincere hopes for the better life that American education offers. All come carrying their past experiences, positive or negative as the case may be. And all are expected to graduate, meeting baccalaureate requirements, on pace with their peers.

In American schools, open means inclusion. A typical classroom, then, may host exceptional, proficient, and struggling native and non-native students, as well as students with special needs. In the spirit of inclusiveness, the teacher is charged with meeting the educational and personal needs of each and every student. Open classrooms require differentiation, tailoring instruction and assessment to individual needs. In my high school, this means that every 45 minutes for six periods a day, a new diverse group of 20-24 students arrives. The Sudanese student who has limited English and finished her last formal year of schooling when she was ten years old sits beside the National Merit finalist. The student with a significant reading disability sits beside the student who has just rebuilt his friend’s computer hard drive. And the homeless student who spent the night in his uncle’s car–and who can rarely stay awake for more than a few minutes of class–sits beside the student who is writing and illustrating her own graphic novel. And where is the teacher in this mix? He or she is taking up the gauntlet. Jim, would you wake up and join us? Juan, would you translate this for Ricardo? Please put your phone away, Carrie. Last warning. Amy and Taylor, once again, I need your attention up here. Taking up the gauntlet in the Sanctuary of Open is daunting and unrelenting. Most days, it is downright hard.

And yet, the best teachers open their classrooms, their minds and hearts in spite of the seeming futility of such unrelenting challenges. Graduate a new, previously unschooled, student who now has 18 months to learn the host language, become proficient in mathematics, social sciences, physical and life sciences, and English language arts? In our American system of open public education, the answer must be a resounding yes, knowing that each school will be held accountable for graduate rates and sanctioned if it fails to meet them yearly. 

So where is discretion in such an open educational system? It would seem that discretion would be the compassionate response to such real and individual challenges. Perhaps expecting students with genuine educational deficits, with special needs, and without native language skills to graduate on pace with their peers is neither compassionate nor realistic. Sadly, expecting bureaucrats to fully understand this reality and respond compassionately–for students and teachers alike–appears to be equally unrealistic.

The Sanctuary of Open–open communities, open schools, open homes, open minds and hearts–is a sanctuary for which to aspire. But it necessarily comes with discretionary cautions that must not be misconstrued and labeled as intolerance. Openness tempered with discretion is a more complex, intellectually and emotionally demanding venture. In Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Falstaff proclaims that Discretion is the better part of valor. Indeed it is. It goes without saying that openness often requires a degree of valor, but discretion discourages us from the kind of blind courage that feeds good intentions but may, ironically, leave all unsatisfied and wanting.

My personal wish for our country, our communities and schools? That we move forward–mind, heart, and soul–in discretionary openness. I would really like to see where this might take us.

In Blog Posts on
October 11, 2016

The Sanctuary of Dilemma

dilemma

Dilemma: a difficult decision, a quandary, a predicament

It may seem counterintuitive to laud dilemma, to consider it sanctuary-worthy. Yet, The Sanctuary of Dilemma is alive and worthy of its place among other sanctuaries. For those willing to enter, it offers a full-body workout. Clinched fists and jaws, adrenaline rushes, pacing, trembling, pounding, head-scratching. And that’s just the physical stuff. Pondering, analyzing, fixating, obsessing, wrestling–that’s the mental stuff. Yearning, seeking, tempering, testing, loving and losing. The soul stuff.

Just the other day I reread William Stafford’s poem, “Traveling Through the Dark.” For the past forty years as an English teacher, this poem has been one of my go-to poems. In it, Stafford presents his dilemma:

Traveling Through the Dark
Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.
My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.
The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.
I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.
What to do with the dead doe and her fawn–alive, still, never to be born? In my classrooms, I’ve had indignant students who have insisted that Stafford could have saved the fawn. How? I asked. The responses never ceased to amaze me. Well, he could have taken the deer to the vet. [In the back seat of his car? On his back?] He could have performed a c-section and delivered the fawn. [With what? Fingernail clippers? A pocket knife? Tire iron?]  And there have been equally indignant students who have argued that the entire poem could be reduced to a single line: I found a dead deer and pushed her into the river. The Reader’s Digest condensed version of Stafford’s poem, to be sure.
But I probed, asking students if they had ever had to take a dying pet to the veterinarian to be euthanized. Without fail, most had at some point in their lives. I probed on: And could you reduce your experience to a single statement? My dog was dying, so I had him put down. Incredulous, students insisted that, of course, one statement could never represent such an experience. I continued. But you could have kept your pet alive? Again, most students shook their heads and conceded that they had waited, hoping for a miracle, but in the end, they simply could not–in spite of their own love and desire–bear to watch their pet suffer. So it was a dilemma, I saidSpend a few more weeks, days, moments with your pet or take him to the vet to end his suffering. 
The Sanctuary of Dilemma often comes with great cost. As we wrestle with choices, as we contemplate the consequences of our decisions, we must often lose ourselves to find the better way. Anyone who has faced the dilemma of ending a life–animal or human–knows this all too well. It is not about self-service, and herein lies the rub: we may lose a part of ourselves as we lose someone or something else.
At its core, the Sanctuary of Dilemma is founded on initiation. American author, William Faulkner, initiates his readers through the painful, but necessary, initiations of his protagonists. In his short story, “Barn Burning,” a young Colonel Sartoris Snopes (Sarty) travels with his father, Abner Snopes, his mother and sisters, from farm to farm, in search of work. Abner, a revengeful working man, has a reputation for being a barn burner. In angry response to what he considers wrong-doing and disrepect, he has burned the barns of previous employers. In the opening scene of the story, Sarty accompanies his father to court, where the judge doesn’t have enough evidence and ultimately cannot rule against him, even though it is clear that Abner did, indeed, burn Mr. Harris’ barn. As he sits in court, Sarty knows what his father has done and wrestles with this truth.
Later that evening, Abner confronts Sarty: You were fixing to tell them. You would have told him.  He strikes him with the flat of his hand and says: You’re getting to be a man. You got to learn. You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain’t going to have any blood to stick to you. In the Sanctuary of Dilemma, Sarty must choose between blood and principle. When his father, once again, sets out to burn another employer’s barn, Sarty chooses principle, running to warn the landowner of his father’s intentions and then continuing to run away. Away from his father and family, from blood and home. Faulkner writes:
He [Sarty] went on down the hill, toward the dark woods within which the liquid silver voices of the birds called unceasing – the rapid and urgent beating of the urgent and quiring heart of the late spring night. He did not look back.
Sarty’s initiation from naivety to awareness, from ignorance to truth, from childhood to adulthood is costly but necessary for one who chooses principle over blood. He must run; he must not look back. In the Sanctuary of Dilemma, it may be this way, for initiations push us forward. The consequences of our choices live solidly in the future.
Those who have lived in the Sanctuary of Dilemma know that the landscape is rough and challenging, wholly uninhabitable for those who whose only experience is with preference. Preference is choosing a paint color for your bedroom. Preferring sage to beige is not dilemma-worthy. Some may dramatize their agonizing choices over decor, clothing, vehicles, homes, etc., but, in the end, these are merely dramatized preferences–not dilemmas.
Full-body workouts in the Sanctuary of Dilemma can yield positive results. After thinking hard for all of us, Stafford pushed the deer over the edge into the river. This thinking, this hand-on-the-deer moment, matters deeply. For in this moment, Stafford joins with the deer and natural world, becoming us. In this moment, it is not just about him. And in this moment of poignant connection and contemplation, he gains through loss. Sarty, too, loses his family, but gains a future in which he can live rightly in the clear spring light of his principles and liquid silver voices of the birds.
In the Sanctuary of Dilemma, one may hear these liquid silver voices, knowing that he has chosen well and will, one day, choose well again.
In Blog Posts on
October 10, 2016

The Sanctuary of a Blank Page

blank-page1

Cliches concerning the blank page abound: your life is a blank page, this day is a blank page, etc., etc. And while there is intangible truth in these cliches, there is truth and inestimable worth in the tangible blank page. The new notebook opened to its first clean page, the just-gessoed canvas, eager for new color, the computer screen, its cursor blinking, yearning for release. In its discrete form, the Sanctuary of the Blank Page invites beginning.

As children, my friend, Val, and I spent hours with yards of newsprint. Inch by inch, hour by hour, and room by room, our pencils shaped homes that had germinated only in our dreams. We seldom knew–nor worried about–where our pencils would take us. Commenting on the poet’s craft, Robert Frost claimed, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” In our case, this translated into “No surprise for the creator, no surprise for the beholder.” As children, we understood the magnificent power of the blank page, upon which preferences, prospects and possibilities lay before us as the Promised Land. White was good. White was life-giving. White held infinite surprise.

When my father had to attend the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to complete his doctoral work, my family moved to Lincoln, where I attended a new school. Unlike my Kearney school with a playground as gateway to Harmon Park, Bancroft Elementary had a gravel playground. With no playground equipment, it was literally a blank page. While the boys tossed or kicked balls in the west section of the playground, the girls lost themselves in creation. With the edges of our shoes, we painstakingly scraped the gravel into ridges, creating the outlines of rooms which–through collective effort–grew into houses. If we were lucky enough to find unique rocks, we added fish to the aquariums which graced our rooms. Sticks offered more scraping potential and ultimately became light poles or lamps or whatever. Recess after recess, we put shoes to gravel. When the boys inevitably ran through our homes, scattering neatly-edged gravel and ruining any semblance of rooms, we began again. This time would be better. This time we would add more. This time we would protect our work.

As a child, I understood the joy in the parameters of the blank page. In her book, Juliet Immortal, author Stacey Jay writes:

Seven, ten, fifteen, eighteen years old and still there is nothing finer than a blank sheet of paper, the white promise that the world can be what I make it. A magical place, an adventurous place, a possible place. Erasers take away the mistakes. Another coat of paint to cover them up. Black and red and purple and blue. Always Blue.

The white promise that the world can be what I make it. Exactly. I lived for this white promise, seldom passing up an opportunity to fill a blank page with something. In fifth and sixth grades when we finally were able to use cartridge pens during penmanship class, there was something even grander about this white promise: the loops and whorls, the slant and slight made from a cartridge pen. I could feel the tension of push and restraint as I learned to make the pen move across the page. And it was this tension that began to initiate me into a new realm in the Sanctuary of the Blank Page.

In restraint, I began to learn the power that such pause gives. And with pause came fear. Stephen King warns that you must not come lightly to the blank page. Writer Margaret Atwood writes that blank pages inspire me with terror. English novelist, Virginia Woolf, writes: My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry. Ah yes, like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry. Where yards of newsprint and pages of notebooks once made me giddy, my fingers itching to put pen to paper, now they began to terrify me, leaving me on the bottom step of the page, crying.

In my academic work as a high school and then college student, I came to the blank page with trepidation. A productive day of writing seldom yielded more than a single paragraph of prose. Which had been written, rewritten and then rewritten again, looking and smelling more and more like something decayed, its dry bones sprawled across the page, stripped of their original promise. The more I wrote, the more I had to psyche myself into the sheer act of beginning. For beginning grew to mean inevitable dissatisfaction and failure. Beginning meant coming to Jesus. And beginning meant hours of agonizing reflection and revision in hopes of harvesting something passable. In truth, the Sanctuary of the Blank Page frightened me in ways that nothing else had.

As a graduate student, I spent an entire semester studying the work of the confessional poets, focusing primarily on Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton. Immersed in their lives and their work, I lived through their personal and professional pain, their valiant efforts to save themselves from the depression that consumed their days and nights. Each poem was yet another raw confession of self-doubt, self-loathing, self-denial. Each poem was an assault on the senses. In the Sanctuary of the Blank Page, these women were writing for their very lives, baring their deepest pain line by line, stanza by stanza. Sylvia Plath writes:

I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledging myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may.

Come what may. Ultimately, neither Plath’s nor Sexton’s facing a blank page day after day was enough to save them. Both took their own lives after years of suffering with debilitating depression. Still, had they not committed themselves to filling the blank pages of each day, I am convinced that they would not have lived as long or as well as they did. Or that the world would now have the wealth of their insights and imagery.  Consider Plath’s poem, “Mirror.”

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful ‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

In the Sanctuary of the Blank Page, Plath reflects her image here as faithfully as a mirror. The young girl has drowned, and an old woman–like a terrible fish–replaces her. Here is the terror of the blank page: that looking into its white abyss, we might find a terrible fish instead of something young with promises of delight and beauty.

And yet, in her poem, “Suicide Off Egg Rock,” [from The Colossus and Other Poems] Plath writes of her protagonist: The words in his book wormed off the pages. Everything glittered like blank paper. In spite of its terror, the blank page can glitter. And if that glittering is brief, if it cannot ultimately sustain long life, let it be said that it did, indeed, fill a page and a life.

My father was the best writing instructor I have known and, truthfully, will know. His counsel is one I come back to daily: write yourself into the white space, for there lay the best insights, the real wisdom waiting to be uncovered.  In the Sanctuary of the Blank Page, you must write yourself into the white space. Jack London, American novelist, understood this all too well when he wrote: You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. Each day, artists, photographers, architects, writers, choreographers, composers, and designers of all sorts take up their clubs and go after the white spaces before them, fully expectant that their efforts will fill the page with something gloriously unexpected. These are the heroes in the Sanctuary of the Blank Page, for in giving themselves to the process of creation, they transform blank pages into Handel’s Messiah, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, Julius Reisinger’s and Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Ansel Adams’ Jeffery Pine Sentinel Dome, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesen,  and Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill. 

The Sanctuary of the Blank Page offers the paradoxical promise of delight and terror. Both are instructive and infinitely valuable. If one will but give himself to the page, much is possible.

Watching my granddaughter write on the backs of offering envelopes as she sits beside me in church is testimony to the power of the blank page. In the Sanctuary of the Blank Page, nothing is too small or too utilitarian for wondering and wandering.  Herein lies its invitation: just begin and see where this takes you. 

In Blog Posts on
October 5, 2016

The Sanctuary of Salamanders, etc.

Tiger Salamander

Tiger Salamander

As I was walking this morning, I found not one–but two–dead garter snakes on the road. I actually nudged one with my shoe to see if it was really dead or just warming itself on the pavement. Unconsciously, I suppose I was on the look-out for snakes, having just removed one from my basement stairs a few nights ago. My 24 yr. old son, Quinn, yelled from the basement that there was a snake on the stairs. Sure enough, there it was, all 9 inches of reptile glory. With hot dog tongs and my grandson’s sand pail in hand, I rescued my son who was standing a safe distance away AND the snake who lived to enter our home another day. As the last remnants of fear left my son, genuine admiration took over. Wow, thanks Mom. With my best John-Wayne-aw-shucks voice, I responded Yeah, well I grew up with snakes. I handled my share of them. 

And indeed I did. Summer for the Welch girls signaled the annual trip to my granddad’s biology classroom in Gothenburg, Nebraska. Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry had nothing on my granddad’s classroom. We trembled in anticipation as my granddad fished his school keys from his pocket and unlocked the door. Behind this oak door lay exotic wonders of terror and delight. In a large glass jar on a shelf in the storage room was a two-headed calf, floating eternally in formaldehyde. Another jar housed an albino rattlesnake, killed in the foothills of Nebraska and gifted as a specimen of interest. But these were the dead wonders. We came for the living.

Along the windows were the terrariums and aquariums that held the year’s creatures for biologic study. Turtles, lizards, snakes, fish, and salamanders: glorious, slimy mud puppies in all sizes with a varying number of limbs. Our favorites? The three-legged ones that had yet to regenerate their fourth leg. Salamanders can regrow their legs, our granddad explained, so we have been studying this process called regeneration. For a child, this scientific spectacle defied anything we had ever seen or known. And the fact that we were the soon-to-be proud owners of these three-legged wonders? We could barely contain our glee. Boxes and plastic food containers in hand, our open palms quivered as my granddad reached into the terrarium and plucked out several salamanders that would come to live 60 miles away in our home.

Before diversity was a thing, I lived in a diverse home. Over the years, we hosted snakes, lizards, turtles, frogs, toads, salamanders, sunfish, tapoles, gerbils, hamsters, dazed birds who, blinded by the sun, tried to fly through our picture windows, cats, and, of course, homing pigeons. We were a diverse lot, to be sure. And my sisters and I understood the intent of affirmative action before the term was coined. We deliberated our reptilian and amphibian selections each summer. We didn’t have a snake last summer, so we need this garter snake. Will our swordfish and black mollies be o.k with these sunfish? Well, they’re just going to have to get along. How many salamanders do we really need? We really need a frog or two in this terrarium. And so it went. In the Sanctuary of Salamanders, etc. there is something to be said about equal representation.

This summer sanctuary was not always rosy, though. While carrying the shoe box with a bull snake from the car to our back door, my sister tripped, the box spilling its reptilian contents somewhere in the grass near the pigeon loft. Within seconds, our would-be snake pet had vanished. And within days, my mother’s friends had heard the story and, with regrets, refused to visit.

Once while I was holding my lizard, frightened by the sound of my mother’s Kirby vacuum cleaner, he leapt from my hand and vanished under the whirling head of the Kirby. Stunned, I could only mutter Mom, you sucked up my lizard. To which my mom assured me that he was probably still alive in the vacuum cleaner bag, just a little dusty and scared. When she offered to open the bag, this was more than I could take. No, I said, let’s just say he had a good life and leave it at that. 

In the Sanctuary of Salamanders, etc., there will be unfortunate events. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the turtle tragedy. My sister, Timaree, and I had two small painted turtles in a plastic bowl, outfitted with a circular ramp to a fake palm tree. One morning, as I was coming down for breakfast, I stopped on the landing where, on a window seat, our turtles lived. As I peered groggily into the bowl, I noticed that there was only one turtle–my sister’s– there. She probably took mine out to make me mad. She’s probably hiding it in her room just to freak me out. Emboldened with a sense of rightful possession, I stomped down the steps and burst into the kitchen to confront my sister.

My mother was at the sink, rinsing the night’s dishes, and my grammie was at the table, drinking coffee and eating toast. Before I could tattle to my mom, my grammie shrieked, throwing her toast into the air. I turned to see my youngest sister, Erin, in the doorway. A small green turtle foot dangling from her mouth. I screamed. Then Erin screamed, opening her mouth enough to reveal the turtle lying lifeless in a pool of saliva on her tongue. She killed my turtle!  As my mom instructed my sister to spit it out, my grammie gagged, and I sobbed. The lifeless turtle fell into my mom’s hand, having died–she said–from shock, probably a heart attack. We have never let my sister forget this, and the turtle tragedy lives on, having been told and retold in three states to countless students over four decades. In the Sanctuary of Salamanders, etc., there will be joy, and there will be sorrow.

And the sunfish? Who knew that they would leap to their death, leaving dry fish carcasses scattered on my bedroom carpet? The tadpoles we caught in the park and brought home in a jar? Who knew that they were–according to my dad who closely inspected them–actually leeches? The gerbil who escaped from his cage on the top of our upright piano? Who knew that he didn’t die and would be found living–three months later–in our basement? The Sanctuary of Salamanders, etc. is a place of perpetual surprise.

Truthfully, I continue to fight the compulsion to bring critters home. A few years ago, I bought a gerbil–for Gracyn, I told my family. He was later loosed in the timber near our house to live with the mice and moles. Last summer, Gracyn and I made a terrarium to house the snails we found in and around our woodpile. It was, I must admit, one of the better terrariums I have outfitted, and the snails were living in style. Every time I pass the pet section at Walmart, I find myself transfixed by the rows of aquariums with tropical fish. And then I have to remind myself of the countless aquariums I have had, the maintenance they require, and say to myself: Just walk away. 

Still. If I found a salamander today, my fingers would twitch, my pulse quicken, and I would not be able to help myself. I would make the trip to Walmart to buy yet another terrarium. I would convince myself of its educational value for my grandchildren. And I would, once again, enter the Sanctuary of Salamanders, etc. To borrow–and modify–a line from Robert Frost’s “Birches”: one could do worse than be a lover of salamanders. 

In closing, if you want to experience just a bit of my childhood biology room wonder, check out this article by Lauren Hansen in The Week (March 19, 2013). You will see some two-headed wonders!

http://theweek.com/articles/466505/double-takes-9-curious-images-twoheaded-animals

 

 

 

 

In Blog Posts on
October 4, 2016

The Sanctuary of a Single Raspberry

raspberry1

Ilse, a childhood friend of mine, once found a raspberry in the camp and carried it in her pocket all day to present it to me that night on a leaf. Imagine a world in which your entire possession is one raspberry, and you give it to a friend.                                                                                             Gerda Weissmann Klein, Holocaust Survivor

Ask anyone in my family, and they will tell you that I don’t view television programs or movies. I experience them. We’re talking full-body experience of the often painful sort. I’ve clawed my way through suspense, wounding myself and companions and leaving bloody reminders of climatic scenes on forearms and hands. I’ve tented myself with sweatshirts or jackets, peering through a neck peephole at horror that is predictable (every seven minutes or so–I’ve timed the interludes between hackings) but nonetheless scream-worthy. I’ve outfitted myself with kleenexes and cried at the opening theme songs of Lassie and countless other poignant programs.

When I experienced Schindler’s List for the first time, however, this was both a full-body and out-of-body experience. Even today, having seen the film thirty or more times, within seconds, I am standing behind a barbed wire fence, my hair shorn, my hand clutching my mother’s, awaiting the selection. This film assaults my senses in ways I cannot begin to describe. And yet, it also ushers me into the Sanctuary of a Single Raspberry, that tangible and intangible place in which singularity matters.

Imagine a world in which your entire possession is one raspberry, and you give it to a friend.  Yes, imagine this world of single possessions given willingly to another. In the Sanctuary of a Single Raspberry, one thing, one word, one touch or gesture can save a life and soul. In the final scene of Schindler’s List, Oskar Schindler speaks through tears to a crowd of Jewish survivors, grieving his inability to save more of their families and friends. His accountant, Itzhak Stern, presses a gold ring into his palm, a ring that he and other Jewish survivors created in tribute to the man who gave them work and, as a result, saved their lives. Inscribed on the ring is this Hebrew line from the Talmud: Whoever saves one life saves the world entire. A single life, a single raspberry. In this sanctuary, singularity saves the world entire. 

For there is magic math in the Sanctuary of a Single Raspberry. One word from a sideline coach affirms the efforts of a team, one raised hand, one question opens a room for many voices, and one touch–a hand that covers another–encourages one who sits weeping, solitary in his loss, to touch another, who touches yet another. In Mark 6:41, we read how Jesus fed 5,000:

Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to his disciples to distribute to the people. 

So little fed so many. This is the “new” math in the Sanctuary of a Single Raspberry. It defies numerical logic. Turn your head, blink your eyes, and where there was a base of one, you find the exponent of many has performed its magic.

Don S. was the only fifth grader who was never chosen for a kickball team at recess. He was always the last kid standing in the middle of the field after the two captains had picked their teams. By default, he earned a spot as last man standing. As such, he had never heard his name called until one October recess when I was captain. To my shame, I had never chosen Don, never actually given him much time or thought. Until that recess, when I called his name. First pick. I’m not sure what prompted me to really see him that day. I’d like to think it was the prompting of the Holy Spirit or, at least, a sense of social responsibility, unfamiliar yet urgent. I called his name, and with that, I presented a single raspberry on a leaf to a friend.

Years later, I received a phone call in my college dorm room. Given his one phone call from the county jail, Don called me. I don’t remember what he had done to land himself there, but I do remember his voice, a voice that carried me back to that elementary playground on the day during which both of our lives were changed. In the Sanctuary of a Single Raspberry, one moment in time can forge a bond that spans years.

Truthfully, too much of my life has been defined by the pursuit of many and more. I have chanted more is better when I knew better. More time, more money, more knowledge, more accolades. And at my fingertips? Single moments, single things, single words and ideas that could be–should be–served up lovingly on a bed of leaves.

your-friend

When I was in Nigeria several years ago, I was smitten with this little girl who came out to meet us in the village of Bambur. Before I left Iowa, I had been warned–by family and friends–that I wouldn’t be able to bring any children home. (They know me all too well, I’m afraid.) All I could offer this girl was my hand as we walked the dirt paths of her village. Still, in the Sanctuary of a Single Raspberry, I had felt the power of a single hand and understood that long after I left Africa, I would carry this child with me.

A month after I returned, I thought about Gerda Weissmann Klein’s words and imagined myself in Bambur, a single mango my entire worldly possession. I imagined myself gathering cassava root for drying, working the maize fields, the mango stowed lovingly away until I could return to the village. Until I could give it to my friend.  An ocean away, however, I had to settle for writing my intentions.

To My Friend

In the dry season when little grows,

everything is edible:

bark from breadfruit trees,

termites, even goat dung.

When land and skin turn ashen,

you feast on the memory of mango,

now a shimering specter

in the noonday sun.

In the absence of sweet meat and juice

that once stained your fingers and chin,

you drool dust.

.

In a world gone dormant,

how can your loveliness live?

If there were one ripe mango in your village,

I would carry it in my pocket

all day.

And tonight when you lie outside your mud hut—

one perfect piece

in a quilt of small, sleeping children–

imagine me kneeling,

then placing my gift on a leaf

near your face.                                                                                                                                                                            .

Imagine me your friend.

The Sanctuary of a Single Raspberry opens up before us daily. I’m training myself to do the “new math” and present single gifts for multiplying. For if a single raspberry or soul can save the world entire, then I can think of no greater singularity to steer my course.

In Blog Posts on
October 3, 2016

The Sanctuary of a Park

lighthouse-harman

Lighthouse, Harmon Park

In the Sanctuary of a Park, you can have Disney Land in your backyard. Or nearly your backyard. Two blocks from my childhood home is Harmon Park, 6 1/2 city blocks of bliss. In 1924, having received a Harmon Foundation grant, the city of Kearney, Nebraska purchased land, designated as Harmon Field, for a playground. A plaque in the park reads:

This playground was made ours through the assistance of the Harmon Foundation, 1924, dedicated forever to the plays of children, the development of youth and the recreation of all. “The gift of land is the gift eternal.”                       Wm. E. Harmon

lighthouse-kearney-hub

Lighthouse, Harmon Park, circa 1936

And what a gift eternal it is. From the window of Park Elementary School, the magic kingdom spread out before me as far as I could see. Once these acres held chautauquas, pony rides, and a petting zoo complete with monkeys. But for me, my sisters and friends, they held something better: the promise of what could be. In the Sanctuary of a Park, if you can imagine it, it will be.

Just outside the Youth Center, a WWII tank found a permanent home on a concrete slab. Wars were fought on and around this tank. Dares were made. Can you shimmy out to the end of the gun and drop to the ground? Can you stand on one foot on the top of the tank? And lunches were eaten on its fenders, while the stories of wars and war strategies continued through pb & j and baggies of crushed potato chips.

The Sonotorium, an open-air Art Deco theater, was constructed in 1938. Home to concerts, dramas, graduations, and community gatherings, the Sonotorium hosted our childhood pageants and plays, performed for park squirrels and neighborhood dogs.

But the real magic was found in the Rock Garden at the northern edge of the park. Initiated in 1936, the Kearney Daily Hub reported that if all Kearney residents who travel to mountain country, the Rockies or elsewhere, …will pick out just one or two odd-shaped rocks or stones and bring them back to Kearney, the park would soon have a very good start toward its proposed rock garden. A rock pyramid near the entrance of the Rock Garden testifies to the fact that residents did, indeed, contribute rocks–from every state–to the project. Still, the Works Progress Administration did the majority of the construction during the Depression years, creating a paradise from rock.

And the rock came in. Union Pacific flatcars brought stones from Wyoming, Utah, North and South Dakota, Kansas and Nebraska. WPA workers unloaded them and moved them to their final destinations. According to personal interviews with Kearney residents and records from the Kearney Daily Hub, this was no small task:

The story is told of one huge rock weighing 8,400 pounds being moved on a sled through the park and while crossing the stream the rock rolled off blocking the water. It was too heavy to move so workmen dug under it to let the water flow. The rock stayed where it fell and can be seen today. 

In the Sanctuary of a Park, something as common as rock becomes the stuff that dreams are made of. The Rock Garden was not professionally designed–no blueprints for its design exist–but rock by rock, the garden took its shape organically, perfectly, until the whole became so much greater than its mineral parts. At the northern end of the park on its highest point, the headwaters of the Rock Garden flows from its largest waterfall down through a series of streams and small pools, around islands, through more waterfalls, and finally to the larger pools at the foot of a magnificent stone lighthouse with a curved exterior staircase. From the balcony of the lighthouse, you can look out upon a grotto, carved in the eastern hillside, and over lily pads that color the summer pools below. There are eleven stone bridges; some are wide slabs of rough rock, others are narrow cuts of smooth stone, but all lead to adventure for those of us who grew up in the park.

For who can boast that they owned an island before they were 12 years old? My sisters and I laid claim to an island near the lighthouse, having chosen it carefully from a host of other islands and christened it TES Island (Timaree-Erin-Shannon Island). We spent hours on and around this island, spinning stories of love and loss, venturing into less familiar Rock Garden territory, and grounding ourselves in the other-worldliness of this place that was, remarkably, so close to home and so accessible.

img_0276

TES Island, Harmon Park

In the Sanctuary of a Park, there is a willing suspension of disbelief. Legend had it that a disgruntled fiancee threw her diamond engagement ring into the pool, an angry flash of brilliance cast into the mossy water below the falls. I can see us still: a cozy clutch of children, huddled beneath the big cottonwood tree at the base of Diamond Ring Falls, whispering the legendary words that held us all, spell-bound, in the magic of the moment. We would find the diamond ring. Who else but us, those who loved and haunted the Rock Garden most, should be the beneficiaries of this treasure? We would willingly suspend our disbelief, refuting the obvious: that the pool’s 18 inches of water was drained in late October, that if–and this is a BIG if–there really had been a diamond ring thrust into the shallows, it is more than likely that some park worker would have found it as they prepped the park for winter. Summer after summer, we spoke the legend into life, searching the water for some hint of the gem we carried in our hearts and dreams.

img_0269

Diamond Ring Falls, Harmon Park

And we were willing to suspend our disbelief as we climbed the winding stairs to the top of the lighthouse, where we stood in front of the grafittied and padlocked black door. In truth, behind this door lay park workers’ tools. For us? Behind this door lay glorious possibilities. Kidnapped children (the ones who stole lunch money and cut in lunch lines, the ones we hoped would someday vanish)? Treasure (bags of gold, neatly stacked in circular rows inside the belly of the lighthouse)? Skeletons (of old people–the scary kind who invite you into their homes BEFORE they will give you candy on Halloween)? And what were these words scratched into our line of sight? Clues to mysteries long unsolvedCautionary words to STAY OUT, to BEWARE, to WATCH YOUR BACK? Never mind that closer, more critical looks would reveal the work of vandals, drunks, and lovers. Never mind that the door was repainted yearly to remove the remnants of adolescent mischief. Just never mind. We could willing suspend our disbelief, fueling our adventures another summer.

img_0265img_0264

In the Sanctuary of a Park, you can find magic when you need it. Even as I grew and understood, all too well, the workings of the real world–the world in which you do not make cheerleader even though you desperately want to, the world in which you remain ordinary even though you yearn to be extraordinary–the Rock Garden in Harmon Park remained a temporary stay against confusion, a Neverland, a refuge. In the small pool at the top of the waterfall we called Wishing Well Falls, I lovingly placed coins that I hoped would bring me luck and love. It was there that unspoken words of hope found their voice. It was there that prayer found me, sustained and chastened me. And it was there that, 1/4 mile from my high school, I could be utterly alone, cocooned in rocks and leaves, the songs of water over rock as familiar choruses, and the vista of the Rock Garden ever before me.

img_0280

Wishing Well Falls, headwaters, Harmon Park

While many dream of people and plots, I dream in places. Though I rarely recognize or remember the people or stories of my dreams, I am fixed in the places of my dreams. I return to them, each time more familiar than the last. I know their nooks and crannies, I feel their colors and shapes.

Harmon Park is a place I return to–in dream and in person–time after time. This is a place for time-travel. This is a place for unraveling the best stories, those tightly wound balls of narrative twine, unconsciously or subconsciously hidden from the world. This is a place for gathering, a cloud of witnesses from days of swinging, climbing, frog-hunting, and adventuring who hold your hands and your dreams. And this is a place for children and grandchildren whose stories might also find the magic of water and rock and sky.

stream-rock-garden

 

In Blog Posts on
September 29, 2016

The Sanctuary of a Book

 

51vtqo51fkl-_sx326_bo1204203200_                                                                                                    The author of a book is a voice with a new body.                                                               Don Welch

As a girl, I lived in and through my books. I read and reread both the Judy Bolton and Nancy Drew series. Even today, I carry Carolyn Keene’s voice with me: Nancy Drew, smartly dressed in a navy suit, white pumps, and a patent leather clutch bag. . .  I understood, all too well, that Nancy never went anywhere until–and unless–she was smartly dressed. Carolyn Keene’s and Margaret Sutton’s voices took on new bodies as they narrated the Nancy Drew and Judy Bolton mysteries. These voices in their new bodies became essential characters through which I grew to love Nancy and Judy. I flew through pages, eager to solve the mystery but always grieving the inevitable final page. My only solace was the fact that these were series, and I could begin a new book the very moment I finished one.

In the Sanctuary of a Book, voices do, indeed, take on new bodies. And these bodies become companions and confidantes. Although they are birthed through words, through images and rhythms, through dialogue and rhymes, they live and breathe as tangibly as your best friend, your next-door neighbor, your mail carrier. They sit beside you at the dinner table, whispering in your ear: Tell them about. . .  In the moments before sleep, they kneel beside your bed, and the breath of their prayers rustles the bed covers. And when you wake, they take your hands, pull you from your dreams and say: Come. 

Last weekend, I had the privilege to participate in a book launch event for my father’s final collection of poetry, Homing. In the midst of family, friends, colleagues, and fellow poets, my father’s book became a voice with a new body. As we read his words, giving our best voices to his voice, from beyond the grave his new body, a palpable presence, filled the room.

In the Sanctuary of a Book, there is this kind of transfiguration. On the mountaintops of our rooms, the author’s voice, bathed in searing white light, takes his place alongside the likes of William Butler Yeats and Nathaniel Hawthorne. This voice takes on a new body with arms that turn the pages of a lifetime and with eyes that fix you–helplessly, blessedly–in the moment. And then, a cloud wraps you into the translucence of consonance and assonance, and you have ears to hear: This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him. 

One of the world’s leading New Testament scholars, N. T. Wright, asserts that bodily resurrection distinguishes Christianity from other faiths and beliefs. In his book, Surprised By Hope, he writes:

According to the early Christians, the purpose of this new body will be to rule wisely over God’s new world. Forget those images about lounging around playing harps. There will be work to do and we shall relish doing it. All the skills and talents we have put to God’s service in this present life–and perhaps too the interests and likings we gave up because they conflicted with our vocation–will be enhanced and ennobled and given back to us to be exercised to his glory. 

There will be work to do and we shall relish doing it. My father walked the streets of my hometown daily, finding his rhythm and his voice as he moved through the alleys and down the sidewalks of Kearney. And then he wrote. Sometimes he would stop to record images and lines in small notebooks he carried in his pocket; other times he would carry the images and lines in his head until he returned home. This was his greatest work, and he relished–and continues to relish–doing it. For my father’s new body and voice are enhanced and ennobled through the pages of his books. They live more urgently today than ever. Such is the glory in the Sanctuary of a Book.

In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis asks us to consider resurrection bodies that are more solid, more real, and more substantial than our earthly bodies. Through the poems in my father’s books, I hear his voice still. I would recognize its timbre, its cadence and inflection, in a room of a thousand voices. For me, like many others, this voice has, indeed, taken on a bodily presence that comforts, instructs, and inspires–a presence that is more solid, more real, and more substantial with each reading and rereading of each poem in each book.

The voices of so many great authors have taken on new bodies for me over the years. I have had tea with Kate Chopin, walked with Henry David Thoreau, cried with Elie Wiesel, sung with e. e. cummings, raged with Richard Wright, wondered with Toni Morrison, and grieved with Sylvia Plath. In my four bedroom home in rural Iowa, I have housed untold authors.

In the Sanctuary of a Book,  you can leave the light on and the door unlocked because you always have room for more new bodies. And as you welcome them in and their voices resonate, expanding to the very corners of your home and your soul, you know that it does not get much better than this.

 

In Blog Posts on
September 23, 2016

The Sanctuary of Color

6c1e797325df545c79a82ab3bfa87897      color-fish-pin_2359350

My name is Shannon, and I am a color addict. The fact that I looked through endless images of color, searching for just the right ones and losing myself in my obsession with the next image, and then the next, is testament to my ongoing addiction. I drool as I near the paint section of home improvement stores, hiding my predilection for color from my husband as I desperately sneak paint swatches into my purse. We are not painting anything in our home or even planning to paint anything. Still, when there are perfectly good paint swatches with glorious colors to ponder? And they are free for the taking? In the Sanctuary of Color, fellow addicts understand that it is impossible to pass up those small cardstock squares of color in all their shades and tints and wonder.

And then there are the names of colors. In the Sanctuary of Color, there is legitimate sensuality reserved for color names. When one speaks mauve, amber, aquamarine, azure, cyan, cinnebar, orchid, saffron, emerald, fuschia, indigo, jade, taupe or topaz, the consonants and vowels should be rolled around the mouth, languidly like fine wine, before they emerge into the spoken air. Color addicts, like me, will always saturate their language with indigo and azure. Never just blue, which marks even the most enthusiastic color initiate as simple-minded and downright uncouth.

In the Sanctuary of Color, the newly commercialized adult coloring fad is neither new nor a fad. I will concede that because so many adults have embraced coloring, this has made it more socially acceptable for me and has–on many occasions–saved me from my granddaughter’s scrutiny and concern as I mindlessly filled up the pages of her Dora the Explorer and Disney Princesses’ coloring books with my own careful coloring. The moment when Gracyn turned to me and said, Grandma, you need to stop coloring. I mean it–you just have to stop, was the moment I knew I had a coloring problem. It is humbling, indeed, to be confronted by a six-year-old who has staged an intervention, hiding your newly purchased box of crayons who-knows-where. . .

Those who live in the Sanctuary of Color scoff at the displays of 12 count crayon and colored pencil packages. Twelve? What a joke! Twenty-four? Seriously! Seventy-two? Now, you’re talking. More is definitely better. It doesn’t get much better than spreading your colors out before you, a panoply of such marvelous pigments, all yearning for white space.

Color obsession has not been contained only to the confines of my home. No, it has reared its ugly head as I have created power point presentations for instruction and professional development. This is not a great color scheme, I would think as I created. No, this will never do. I’m going to try this combination. And given the multitude of colors and combinations from which to choose, I would create, recreate, and recreate, looking for the perfect colors. Minutes would pass–sometimes a half hour–and I would be bent over my computer, trying on better-still color combos. Who does this? Sadly, the type of color addict who also has to limit herself to looking at five (not six, and certainly not seven!) wallpaper books lest she enter an alternate color universe never to return again.

Claude Monet, perhaps the most influential Impressionist, wrote: Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. Monet has a permanent seat in the throne room in the Sanctuary of Color. He gets it. The obsession that skips along the line between joy and torment, flirting with bliss–at one moment–and with suffering at the next. In his later years, Monet’s sense of color took on a characteristic reddish tone, a common result of cataracts. For a self-professed color addict/aficionado, I cannot begin to imagine the sense of loss he must have felt when he realized that he was not seeing color as it really was. Some have wondered if he could actually see ultraviolet wavelengths of light–wavelengths that most cannot normally see–after he finally had cataract surgery. They propose that he may have perceived colors differently after surgery, for he returned to earlier paintings, imbuing his water lilies with even bluer pigments.

By Wikipedia Loves Art participant "shooting_brooklyn" - Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8947762

By Wikipedia Loves Art participant “shooting_brooklyn” – Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8947762

I like to imagine Monet with his new set of eyes, sans cataracts, sitting on a veranda, his easel before him, as the best morning light washes over his canvas. I like to think that he, like me, would be so enraptured with the marriage of light and color, that he would speak to the canvas and to himself. More cobalt. And more opaque here–use the full force of the pigment, Claude. Make it right. Make it true. In the Sanctuary of Color, those like Monet would never tire at looking critically at color, finding its truest hues. This is the sacred work they were called to, and all else pales, pitifully, in comparison.

In contrast to the Impressionist’s juxtaposition of color to color, dabs of maize alongside dabs of saffron, I have seen the meticulous work of single-haired brushes that unload the smallest bits of color on the wings of mallards and other water fowl. Watching my husband paint this way, his eyes and hands extensions of the drake’s wing, minutes becoming hours, and color unfolding slowly but surely from the breast to the wing to the tail, I have understood how inclusive the Sanctuary of Color truly is. Paul knows the anatomy of a mallard in ways that only an artist and a life-long hunter can. Each brush stroke, each color comes from a primeval and wholly personal place. For him, like other artists, color matters greatly. Neither technique, subject, nor style matter as much.  The noble pursuit of color makes all welcome in the Sanctuary of Color. If you can talk color, if you live and breathe color, you’re in.

When I visited Yellowstone Park, I remember standing in something close to rapture at the edge of Morning Glory Pool. While others were snapping photos, the names of colors were rushing through my mind. It was a kind of Rolodex-of-color moment, and it was essential for me to name what I saw before me. I would like to say that after collecting thousands of paint swatches, buying yearly big boxes of new, pointy crayons, and studying color palettes for decades that I would have been able to name the colors of the Morning Glory Pool. But I could not. These were colors yet to be named, colors that defied naming and yet longed for it. I decided that it was more than enough to have seen these colors and to have pocketed them, as only a color enthusiast can, in my soul’s treasure chest.

Morning Glory Pool, Yellowstone National Park

Morning Glory Pool, Yellowstone National Park

Those who live in the Sanctuary of Color understand that they can return to their treasure chests and admire a lifetime of colors.  Meticulously packed and sorted, one can remove them, love them, and speak their names. Crimson, cerulean, cerise, and celadon .  .  .