Sharpness & Beauty

For my birthday two years ago, my dear friend, Crystal, gave me a pair of crampons. Like I do with all gifts I don’t already have a sense of need for, I tucked them into the back of my closet where they sat until this winter. After getting back into running shape last summer, discouragement (that our first snow had turned the trails in my neighborhood slippery) sent me rummaging through my closet.

The first time I used my crampons I was amazed. Twenty dollar, elastic rubber slippers that fit over my running shoes were a game changer! I remember taking them off after my first trial run and looking at the bottoms in awe that such small, sharp metal triangles could steady my steps, allowing me to look up at the mountains instead of down at the trail.

So today, when I woke up to three inches of snow on the ground, bluebird skies and a sunny, 25-degree air temp (see picture above), I grabbed my crampons and headed out.

It wasn’t until I had parked and started down a favorite trail that I realized how gorgeous the morning would be.

In Colorado, we have fall snow and spring snow.

Fall snow is powdery and light-effortless to shovel.

Spring snow is wet and heavy—shoveling a foot of it off a small driveway will leave you sore for days.

But spring snow has the added bonus of outlining bare tree branches in a way fall snow does not. Today was our first spring snow, piled high on even the thinnest of surfaces, its flakes resolutely sticking together. Gratitude for the access I had to beauty because of the sharp metal triangles of my crampons meant I went a few miles further than I had planned.

As we approach, in this final week of February, the anniversary of March 2020 (when COVID19 became a visceral part of our lives) I’m watching myself brace for what will surface. What I thought was merely an “extended spring break” will likely become by this March 1st, a death toll of half a million. I’m nervous for myself and our communities about how we will all handle the body memories that will resurface.

What will keep us both steady without slipping and present in the reality of this time marker?

Sharpness will help us through the treacherous terrain of memory.

For each of the next four weeks I’ll be sharing a practice that will help you through this month. They won’t be easy—they will invite you to sit with the sharp pain that rises up as we look back and let all that has happened sink in a bit deeper. But I also believe this sharpness can gives us access to a beauty we won’t experience if we spend the month waiting for a full melting of all that has accumulated.

This week do one simple thing—notice how you respond to the word March.

• When you flip your calendar’s month tab over, what happens in your stomach?

• When your kids ask how many weeks til spring break, what goes through your mind?

• When you hear the word, what does your heart feel?

Just notice what you instinctively do in anticipation of this anniversary. We can’t care for what we don’t see. To be continued…

Destruction as Salvation

In his book, Love is the Way, Bishop Michael Curry tells the story of a 1993 fire that incerated the roof of his St. James parish in West Baltimore.

He writes:

The roof was blazing when the fire chief walked up to me. ‘We’ve got a decision to make. If you don’t create another source of oxygen, the gas inside is going to build up, and it could blow out all the windows, maybe even the entire building.’ He pointed to the largest and most beautiful of all the windows, a rose stained-glass window that decorate the front of the church. ‘I need to break that window to let in the air. Do I have your permission?’ They did and it was the beginning of the end of the fire. The roof was gone, but destroying that window saved the building.

Though a decision like Curry’s is never one I want to be faced with, this vivid picture is a balm for the ways I wrestle with my own intentions. It invites me to look at the things I’ve dismantled or broken in hopes of saving something greater, and strengthens me against accusations (from within and without) that I’ve ruined things rather than fought to save them.

Whether you seen a shattering act as cruelty or kindness depends on how wide your camera angle is—are you looking at merely the beauty of the stained glass window or at an entire building being ravaged by fire?

What are you fighting to save?

What are you willing to lose in order to win?

What needs to be broken to preserve something greater?

What permission do you need to give others?

Who sees your actions as kind instead of cruel? Do you?

The Task of 2021: See the System

THE single most courageous moment in our search for freedom is when we begin to reframe our story not around a person who caused us suffering, but the landscape, the backdrop, the soil of our life that gave harm access.

In his book, Love is the Way, Bishop Michael Curry writes:

“Gandhi used militaristic language for those who engaged in the work for nonviolence because you are struggling against something but not against people. You are struggling against systems and ways of being and ways of living and of organizing a society. You seek to convert the people—to transform not only oppressed but oppressor as well.”

After the week our nation has endured, violence is clearly an entity greater than any one person—it’s a network. We collectively suffer when we refuse to see the interconnected root system under trauma.

The eyes to see societal systems and the courage to change them are forged in the fires of our own story.

• Have we done the work to see the system we grew up in?

• Do we understand the network of forces that were operating underground during key moments in our lives?

• Will we look beyond the person that embodies hurt and see the stage on which our story unfolded?

In 2021, my membership program, Between Touches, will use movies and memoirs as springboards for opportunities to write and share our stories.

This month, we’ll look at the ordinariness of harm in our lives through the movie Boyhood (2014). We’ll discover the everyday stories we need to explore in the coming months to see the foundational system that ungirds our past and still guides our present. Join us!

Nests From Scraps

Sharon Beals' "House Finch Carpodacus mexicanus frontalis"

This past week, I’ve struggled to tap my typical 4-ish, new-year-reflective, anticipatory-of-the-future self. Just the thought of looking back over journal entries since March makes my stomach churn.

I have felt afraid to set a goal, choose a guiding word, make a bucket list or even pray for change. The loss, devastation, unraveling, exposure, diminishing and reducing has made hoping for anything new feel dangerous. As a trauma survivor I don’t like being surprised (or any event I didn’t plan and orchestrate myself for that matter) so 2020 was my own private version of purgatory.

Perfectly in sync with this past year, Jan Richardson’s poetry, from her book The Cure for Sorrow, has guided me forwarded. Instead of my usual list of wishes, plans, goals and intentions, her words have given me a picture—a simple image—of how I want to turn towards this coming year.

From “Blessing the Fragments”:

Look into the hollows of your hands and ask what wants to be gathered there, what abundance waits among the scraps that come to you, what feast will offer itself from the pieces that remain.

“Blessing That Holds A Nest in Its Branches”:

The emptiness that you have been holding for such a long season now, the ache in your chest that goes with you night and day in your sleeping, your rising—think of this not as a mere hollow, the void left from the life that has leached out of you. Think of it like this: as the space being prepared…your heart making ready to welcome the nest your branches will hold.

What if all the scraps and broken, dead twigs that have fallen around me this past year could be gathered to make a nest—not the picture-perfect kind that’s factory made and sold in antique-esque decorating stores but the kind only held together by spit and grime?

What if these scraps were woven together so tightly they could actually hold things—not just soft, light, gentle finches but huge birds of prey that swoop down and almost suffocate you with how much space they inhabit?

What if this nest could become a refuge—not just just a lean-to made by a stranded hiker waiting for morning but a shelter for things that suddenly land, making themselves comfortable and staying for God only knows how long?

What if this nest could bear weight—not the inconsequential kind but a weight that far exceeds it own,

What if this weight, that plops down unannounced and without warning, could be held—not as an attack, restriction or failure but as a weary creature in need of rest?

What if I went beyond making a nest for whatever 2021 will hold and instead became one?

What if we all did?