Of Caterpillars and Chrysalises

Two weeks into the school year and I find myself surrounded by teenaged souls in various stages of formation.  Already, I've worked with more than 20 classes of these kids, and, while it has at times felt like running downhill, I've really enjoyed the hubbub. Yesterday, as the big hand of the clock inched towards 3, I turned to Helen and said "The library feels really happy this year, doesn't it?"  She agreed.

East is as full as it has been in many, many years, with 1,900 young caterpillars, chrysalises and butterflies slogging,  sitting and flying through this space each weekday.  We adults in the building--ourselves in various stages of transformation--are expected to meet the kids where they are.  As I've said many times before, working in a school is not for sissies.

Earlier this week, an English class was sitting before me, in the library to choose personal-reading books.  I shared my recipe for finding a good book, pointed them to our collections, and wandered with them as they decided which ones to choose.    One girl, lovely and olive-skinned, quietly asked if we had any books about Syria.  When I pulled out the one fiction book set in Syria that we had, she teared up and said 'That's Arabic on the cover."  Nodding, I was feeling pretty good about myself, until she followed up with "I don't want anyone to know that I speak Arabic."

Sometimes, caterpillars feed on hatred.

Helen and I quickly conferred in my office, deciding to tear the cover off the book.  I handed her a plain, red book and she left.  And then, we got to work looking for other fiction books we could buy that were set in a country so far away from my own.

The next afternoon, the girl returned.  I had no idea what to expect.  She smiled shyly, held up the book and said "I love it!  I have been to many of these places!"

Sometimes, butterflies emerge from desolation.

Wednesday morning, this same student came into the library before school.  She printed a poem she'd written and handed me a copy.  There, in those sparse words, was her own arc, a timeline filled with bullets and fear, hope and heaps of courage.

Sometimes, young butterflies inspire 54-year-old caterpillars to be transformed once again.

Four Little Words By My Doorstep

Beloved.
Be loved.
Be. 
Love.

Those words--just four in all--landed on my shoulders during my walk the other morning.  I found myself playing with them for the rest of that walk, chewing on them, moving the emphasis from one syllable to another,  applying them to what I was seeing and feeling.

I don't know why this meditation found me, but I'm mighty glad that it did.

Turns out that those four unique words--ingredients, if you will--are just about everything I need to live well in this world.  They are the perfect recipe for a grateful, grounded life.

Beloved.
A lifelong lover of lists, I'm glad that this was the first word to alight on my shoulders.  It is a word that pulls me out of myself and shines a warm light on everything and everyone else.  Beloved dog. Beloved neighbor.  Beloved tree.  Beloved sky.

Be loved.
I am taken aback when I realize just how many people have my back.  And when I open myself up to their love, I am a better version of me.

Be.
Of all the crazy summers in life, this one has felt like the wildest.  Unbearable heat, ridiculous news, heartbreaking violence, dwindling lives.  The what ifs too often nudged out the moment.  Be reminds me that being present is a sacred duty that can help us manage or put aside all those what ifs.

Love.
Boy, this one is the silver lining, the ultimate transformative ingredient.  A verb that requires repeating.  As Lin-Manuel Miranda uttered at the Grammys, "Love is love is love is love is love."

For someone who is a lousy pray-er and whose memory bottoms out more and more these days, these four little words that landed on my doorstep seem like a tonic. A mantra.  A meditation for me and a mediation for living in this world.  And I will do my best to lean into them each day and see what it is that they have to show me.

Pretty in Pink

Last night before bed, I told Mark that I was going to sleep until 9. I have never in my life slept until 9, but because I made the claim with some forcefulness, I was a little disappointed when the clock read 5:34 this morning.  My disappointment evaporated 45 minutes later, though, when the eastern sky oozed pink.

I'm not a runner, but Finn and I nearly ran out the door when I saw that sky, bolting to Woods Park for a clearer view of a beautiful start to a new day.  --Isn't that what we all crave--a clearer view of a beautiful start to a new day?

As we entered Woods Park, just in front of the cowboy statue, we were given a bonus--half a rainbow arcing its way downward to meet us.  I don't use the word blessed very often, but that's how I felt.  Blessed and grateful that I didn't sleep until 9, because, as any sky-gawking Nebraskan knows, rainbows and pink clouds and perfect lighting are all so fleeting.

We wended our way through the park twice this morning, filling up on everything, imagining that the churr of crickets was actually the sound of satellites whizzing through the universe above our heads.  Or at least that's what I was imagining.  Finn was probably thinking about bunnies lurking in the uncut grass along the perimeter.    And by the time we found ourselves at the cowboy statue again, I realized that the half rainbow had grown into two rainbows,  giddy cousins trying to show each other up.

My morning walks feel like air to me--utterly necessary to my continuation upon this earth.  They center and calm and fill and energize me.  These walks jolt stories and concerns, joy and to-do lists out of me and remind me that--despite all the hard news of this life--there is always a softness to this world, a gentleness and rhythm that are immensely comforting.

I feel bad for all those folks still slumbering this morning.  Already, they have missed so much--the call of the great-horned owl that woke me, the pretty-in-pink sky, the rainbows, the sprinkles that were like gold flecks falling through the morning light.

All that goodness, and it's only 7:21.

Two Truths and At Least One Lie

No one has ever asked me what it's like to be white.  Or a woman.  Like anyone would expect me to speak for someone else.

True, several people have asked me how it is I can be 54 and yet have never carried a purse. But I think their curiosity rests more in where I put things rather than in what I am.

Believe me when I say that, in the past couple of weeks, I've had to practically sit on my hands to resist the urge to ask a black person to guide or inform me, even though I know the absurdity of asking someone to somehow be a larger group.  Thank God I've got a place for those fidgety hands of mine.

These are choppy waters we find ourselves in these days.  But I am encouraged that so many of us are still wading in them.  There are, I think, all kinds of people right now who really want to know how to do things differently.  Sure, many of us, like first-time surfers, will lose our footing, fall into the waves and make fools of ourselves, over and over and over again.  This learning process--or un-learning process, as it may be--is a messy business.  But we need to keep getting back on the boards, because the waves are not going away.

Maybe I should have been carrying a purse all these years.  Now, when I really need to open up and see what it is I have been lugging along with me,  I don't have the convenience of rifling through my Kate Spade to get to the truth of things.  Instead, I have to hunt down scraps of paper, tarnished mementos and handfuls of loose change, each tucked away in various pockets or atop my desk or in the console of my car, and lay them out like pieces of a treasure map, and try to make sense of it all.

I know I've used too many metaphors in this post, moving from purses to surfboards with seemingly no regard for good taste or readability.  It's probably just another delay tactic, offering up a few more distractions to keep me from starting to do the hard work of learning and unlearning.  Or maybe they represent something more substantive,  like clunky signs of my dis-ease.

For today, at least, they'll have to do.  And I'll have to trust that by putting them down here, by writing them out for others to see, I will be held accountable.  I will be asked to share what I know and what I've learned about what it means to be a human living on this earth right now.

As the World Turns

1,040 miles per hour.  That's how fast the earth is spinning right now.  And you wondered why you're feeling a little dizzy these days.  I think it's worth reminding ourselves that the earth has always been spinning at an astounding clip, yet, thanks to gravity, we've seldom taken notice.    

So why is it that we feel like our feet have left the ground these days?  Certainly, there's no shortage of gravitas.  And maybe--ironically--that's part of the reason we feel imbalanced.  Shootings. Politics.  Oppressive heat.  So much heavy stuff to take in. No wonder we are disoriented.

On Christmas Eve in 1968, I was poking at gifts under the tree, unable to contain my seven-year-old enthusiasm for the what ifs that lay under wraps.  At that same time, the Apollo 8 astronauts were getting their first look (actually, anyone's first look) at Earth from the surface of the Moon.   Pilot Jim Lovell, upon taking it all in, said this about the sight: "The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth."

Neil Degrasse Tyson talks about the transmission of that first image of earth as being the very moment when the environmental movement was born.  Taken aback by the beauty of their planet, humans were overwhelmed by a deep desire to tend to that lovely home.

And so, I stare at the image above.  Look at it long and hard.  And my heart softens again, its pace slowing down.  I stare at that image and let my head fill with wonder, amazed that so many beautiful things--people and plants and animals and micro-organisms and, yes, I realize I'm starting to sound like a song by that cheesy 70s band, America--are held together upon its surface by equal and equally invisible forces of gravity and love and hope and desire.

The more I stare at this image, the more ground I feel below my feet.  I notice a sloughing of both fear and its unwelcomed cousin, hopelessness. Hidden in this image, I start to realize, is a powerful antidote to a summer filled with so many hard and furious things.  I stare at my home, this single thing holding a trillion other things in its wide and capable arms, whispering to us that our feet are, in fact, on the ground, and we are, in fact, still together, holding fast against the odds.

And I realize, once again, "just what I have back here on Earth."And that it's most certainly worth fighting for.

A Societal Case of Teen Angst

For large swaths of my life, the camera has not been kind to me.  Then again, it could have something to do with my fashion "sense."  Consider the photo on the left.  I'm the boyish one in the middle, all denim and swag.  Really, my only saving grace was that I was a teen and didn't know any better.

. . . kind of like our country right now.

Countries, like dogs, age differently than humans.  If I double the typical dog-to-human equation, then it takes 15 years of being a country to equal one year of human life.  That means the United States is knee deep in adolescence.  Heck, using that equation, we've only been able to drive for a little over a year and we still can't vote.

Hyped up on testosterone, its brain not fully formed, the United States is the wild-eyed teen driving too fast, staying up too late,  eating too poorly, blindly fighting itself and others for reasons both real and imagined.  Acned and ill-proportioned, our country's youth looks strange on us.

Like many teens, the United States is angsty and adrift, hungry to find its identity and certain that it's older than it really is.  Our elders--China, Japan, Ethiopia and Egypt, as well as much of Europe--have every right to roll their eyes at us.  They, who have known foreign wars on their own soil, they who have lurched and belched and stretched and grieved through millennia, must think us fools at times.

Not all is lost in this adolescence, though.  It is there, in those youthful days, after all, where wild, hope-filled dreams take root and our eyes and minds begin to imagine a tomorrow that is somehow different.  Something that is not. . . this.  

Fortunately, we are all experts at this, having survived our own adolescence.  Surely, then, we can figure out a way to work together and nudge our country through these rough years, remembering always that what we feed is what will grow.

Below the too-loud music is a deep river, a thrum that suggests real change. We would do well to heed its call.

The Breakup Letter

Dear Fourth,
We're done.

Yeah, I know.  It's lame of me to write you a letter, but, frankly, after the way you behaved last night, I just didn't have it in me to do this over coffee.  That and the fact that I don't drink coffee.

Oh, it's true--I loved you for a long time.  It's true you used to make my eyes light up and my heart go pitter patter.  Not to mention what you could do to my old Barbies and army men.  But those halcyon days of dancing butterflies and silver fountains are faint memories now.  Just like my neighbor's plastic garbage can.

As for last night?  My God, you were so full of yourself.  All red, white and BOOM!  And the more the girls screamed, the more you went off.  It was like I was reading a Viagra warning, and all I could think was "eight more hours of this?!"

So, this is it.  You are no longer da bomb. My love for you has fizzled.  Now that I have seen you for what you really are--a crazy cracker--I will no longer be your lady finger.

Sincerely,
Jane