A Room Called Remember

“The time is ripe for looking back...and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.” 
― Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces

I'm quiet here. Afraid of saying too much. I feel the weight of all that's left unsaid. I know you know. We always heard each other best in the silence. I don't make this place my home - I want you to know that. There are other rooms filled with light and sound called Here and Now and Present where I'm busy, happy and content most of the time. Most of the time. This room called Remember - it's where I used to live, we used to live, in another life. I see your shadow on the wall sometimes - a ghost drifting through. You write your name in the dust on the hearth - one that makes my heart sing: friend.

Believing in the promise

It was long ago. The wind rattled the windows and the rain spat against the panes of  glass of a little chapel by the sea. It was wild out but it was quiet within. I wasn't sure what I was doing there except he'd asked me to go with him so I had. He was looking for answers, trying to find some peace in his heart about the future and where he was headed. Mine was broken. I wasn't looking for anything except a way out and in more ways than one. Someone was singing and it was haunting and beautiful and I understood it more than I ever could the preaching and the prayers. Deep called to deep in the roar of the waterfall where it all turned to water and I ducked my head to hide the tears. When I looked up again there was a man standing right in front of me. I didn't know who he was, he was a complete stranger but he had a kind face and when he spoke his voice was gentle. He said that Heaven had a plan for me but he couldn't tell me what it was because I would say it wasn't for me, that I would run from it. Instead he told me about a pair of old balance scales he'd seen in a dream. They were blackened and disused but before his eyes they were polished up and made like new.
Over twenty years have come and gone since then and I still don't know if his words were true, if his vision has come to pass. I'm still waiting on my Daniel. I've tried interpreting it myself many times but maybe it's not about me understanding the promise but believing it.
The friend I was with that night, the moments of his life were swiftly running out although neither of us knew it then. A few days later we took a walk along an old railway track and decided to untangle our lives from each other's. It was a relief to both of us. The sun was setting behind and the whole sky above was aflame. He stopped to take a picture and I took one in my mind's eye- his dark silhouette against the bright falling day. When I turned to walk on, I sensed his journey was almost done and he would not follow. A few years later he called just before my wedding to wish me well and to say he was sorry he couldn't be there but a bone marrow transplant was a little more pressing. I promised I'd visit him soon. On return from my honeymoon I got the news that he'd died.
He had so many dreams and aspirations and was just four months married himself when death came. I don't understand why and I sometimes get lost in that. He had an unshakeable faith in promise and was forever trying to dispel my unbelief. There was a song by Marc Cohn he would play me again and again as if he knew I would need to carry it down through the years...

Let's go down to the sound tonight
Tide is low and we can walk on water
Reel me in under that starry light
Just like a fisherman's daughter

Baby when the bands and the barkers go home
They say that Venus she rises from out of the foam
She dances on air and laughs at the moon
And watches young lovers in fiery dunes

So are you willing to wait for the miracle
Willing to wait it through
Are you willing to wait for the miracle
Or don't you believe they're true?

There's an old man sitting by the side of the pier
He's got his cross and his camera and his bottle of beer
He just sits all day and all through the night
Praying for a vision or a Heavenly light

'Cause he's willing to wait for the miracle
Willing to wait it through
He's willing to wait for the miracle
What else is he gonna do?
What else is he gonna do yeah?
Now me I don't need no Heavenly sign

'Cause I got the water and the wine

But baby please let your love light shine
'Cause we're all gonna meet our maker sometime

That's why I'm willing to wait for the miracles
Willing to wait them through
I'm willing to wait for the miracles
But I just can't wait for you

Just can't wait for you
Let's go on down to the sound tonight
And walk on water, walk on water
Walk on water, walk on water, walk on water

 

PROMISE

I don't have much faith when it comes to Promise - either in the assurance or expectation kind. Has it always been that way or has it been a slow ebbing away over time? I'm not sure if  I know the answer.  
The word rattles me somehow.  It wasn't what I was expecting for my One Word for 2014. She tumbled in all bright and shiny and I was enthusiastic and acceptant at first. Then I started to eye her with suspicion, past grievances came to mind and soon I was prickling with doubt and cynicism. I tried to push her aside, asked for another word - it came back swiftly: WRITE.
Promise - she isn't going away. She's here to make something or break everything.

The Last Days

December has swept by in a blur.  It always does with two children's birthdays and Christmas all within ten days. The house has been full and busy and happy. There's not been much time for quiet. We stole away the day after Christmas for a walk along the beach. I didn't know how much I needed it until we were there - wide blue sky above, the pale winter sun dancing off the water and the sand beneath my feet stretching on and on...
This year's word for me was free. It's been true. There by the river spilling out into the sea I finally understood it. It's not shirking responsibility, abandon, recklessness, selfishness...I've wrestled out from under the weight of those misconceptions...it's knowing who I am beyond the titles of wife, mother, daughter, sister, teacher, friend. It's knowing what it is that makes me come alive and being brave enough to make a leap of faith towards it. Walking along the shore-line, climbing over and ducking under trees brought down in recent storms, I looked back and saw how far we'd come - the place where we started just a dot on the horizon. I looked ahead to a rocky outcrop, a bend I couldn't see around but I knew the open sea and all possibilities lay that way. I keep walking from this year into the next and the promise of good things to come.

"Do I matter? Did the hands that formed my existence do it intentionally? Was it purposed? Carefully crafted? If so, what was the point? Why are we so different, unique in our ways of loving and giving and living?"
Such questions stir our soul's deepest parts, with a faint flicker of hope that more waits to be discovered. This undercurrent longs to surface and capsize our lives in order to reorder them. It bubbles and gurgles and finally washes over us like an early morning wave against the rocks. and we let it. We surrender to it, because something in it wakes us up.

                                                                           From "Freefall to Fly" by REBEKAH LYONS

We've been away far from here, a place lost in the hills where water tumbling over rocks is the loudest sound and the only light at night spills down from the stars. In a place like that I feel small and questions about who I am and why I'm here overwhelm me. What if there are more days behind me than up ahead? What will be the sum of it all? Will it add up to anything worthwhile?

Walking home one day across the fields, just the two of us, with the leaves flying around he took my hand and told me how lucky we were. It stilled the wildness in me. The word "free" shares roots with the word "friend", someone beloved or held dear. I never feel more free than I do when I feel loved. The fear leaves me then and I feel I could do anything.

There was a picture in the room we were staying in. I didn't notice it until the last day. It was of a bird flying high above a cornfield in the bluest sky.

Day 29: Taking the Leap

"She took the leap and built her wings on the way down."
                                                                    KOBI YAMADA

I remembered what it was that made me come alive, the things I loved to do as a child. I knew more about who I was then than I do now.  I loved to make things - paper, string, beads, buttons, needles and yarn - I wove them into some kind of usefulness. I loved words - I wove them too in the quiet places where I felt most at home. I also knew that I had a heart that was bent towards melancholy rather than merriment, that in a crowd it was the sad faces I was drawn to, the ones not laughing with their eyes. I ached for those who had to make impossible choices, who felt stuck between a rock and a hard place and whichever way they turned the losses were going to outweigh the gains.
Then I chose a career where I was the centre and tiny planets spun around me in a blur of light and noise. It wasn't wrong but it wasn't right either. I stepped away from it earlier this year. It all slowed down and I saw where I wanted most to be. Here at home with time for the ones I love and the weaving I used to do. And there, in a quiet room overlooking a garden where women come in with all the broken pieces of their hearts falling from their hands and I sit with them while they slowly piece them back together again.

Day 28: Measuring the Gulf

"My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels-
Its wings are almost free, its home, its harbour, found;
Measuring the gulf it stoops and dares the final bound!"

                                                                                         EMILY BRONTË

Driving home from the clinic, she asks me if there's something wrong with her.  We've spent the morning with a paediatric occupational health therapist assessing her difficulties with co-ordination.  Simple tasks like writing, cutting with scissors and using a knife and fork are a huge challenge for her.  She's only seven years old but already she's being made to feel she doesn't measure up, that what is expected of her and what she can do are too far apart. I don't want her to feel that she isn't enough just the way she is. She has taught me more about being free than anyone.  She hasn't wasted one moment of her life being somebody she was never made to be. She has dared always from the moment she fell into this world, believing everything was possible even in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. She dared her first breath when none was to be had.

"No," I tell her, "There is nothing wrong with you. You are wonderful. You just have to work hard to be able to do some of the things the rest of us find easy and we have to work hard to do the things that you find easy."
"Like what?" she asks.
"Like flying!" I think out loud and she laughs.