Risky Business

As I wrap up my job as a high-school newspaper adviser (a gig that--90 percent of the time--has been golden), I love that the editors have chosen "risk" as the theme for the final issue of the year.  And I am especially glad that their staff editorial will explore the risk-averse tendencies of this young generation.

Sure, there's still plenty of risky business in the lives of today's American teens (sex, drugs and rock and roll come to mind), but countering all that counterculture are big doses of resume-padding, parent-pleasing, consequence-dodging decisions that many young people are making each day.  And, often, with society's stamp of approval.

True, we should want young people to know how to make thoughtful decisions--ones that consider both risks and benefits--but I'm not sure that all that helicopter parenting and Harvard hoop jumping has served this generation so well.  I'm afraid that our national obsession with outward appearances has devalued experiential education to the detriment of our youth.   Too often, the message is "avoid the mess and fall in line."  And, too often, our young folks do just that.

How, exactly, does a person develop grit or resilience without occasionally entering the wrestling ring?

And, frankly, the anonymity of social media doesn't help.  When even mainstream journalism outlets such as the Lincoln Journal Star allow readers to leave vitriolic online comments using stupid pseudonyms rather than the writer's real name, how on earth can we be surprised that personal responsibility has fallen victim to faceless finger pointing?  No good can come when we don't even have to own our own opinions.

What's missing here is a clearheaded "tight/loose" model of living, one in which our young people are encouraged to explore their worlds and get muddy along the way, while also owning the results of those explorations.  Such benevolent neglect, coupled with both encouragement and education, would do wonders for today's teens.  And I can think of a lot of older folks who would benefit from such practice, as well.

. . .  the thing is, a move in this direction would require some risk, and I'm not sure the adults in the room are ready to take it.  And that fact may just be the biggest disappointment of all.

Keeper of the Memories

"Show me a day when the world wasn't new."
 --Sister Barbara Hance

Last Saturday morning, I gathered up a few clothes, a book and a half-finished crossword puzzle, tucking them into an overnight bag.  I also made sure I had my map, although I hadn't studied it very much.  I just knew that we were heading North.  Oddly, that one vague fact was enough for me.  What happened the rest of the weekend would unfold in its own time, its own way.

The good news for Nebraska travelers going North is that you cannot get there on the interstate.  It was the blue highways, then--those winding, narrow, scenic roads--that took Allison and me to Niobrara, Nebraska, the tiny town where the Niobrara River spills its life into a wild stretch of the Missouri.

What unraveled in those 30 hours of "away" time was something deep, quiet, beautiful.

In Niobrara, we had found a place where cell service fell silent and restaurants struggled to stay open.  After some minor adjustments on our part, neither of us fretted those details again.  Like the two rivers that held us, we just went with the flow.

Our afternoon held many surprises, each of them unwrapped and revealed to us by our most patient host, Larry Wright Senior, Ponca Keeper of the Buffalo.  This tall, quiet man spent the first half hour of our visit patiently answering Allison's questions about the role of buffalo in the life of the Ponca.  His answers spanned the range--from the practical to the spiritual--and Larry proved unflappable, even after Allison's camera temporarily shut down, midway through one of his most moving stories.

Following the interview, the three of us hopped into his truck and headed to the pastures, where the Ponca's buffalo live.  It is an awesome and important thing, to sit quietly among such immense beings and to be reminded of our humble place in the grander order of things.  I'm a big fan of such bubble-popping mind shifts, so often delivered in an outdoor setting.

Later, Larry took us to his home, which could easily be mistaken for a museum, except that the artifacts, photos, feathers and skulls possessed too much personal significance for items that one finds in a public space.  It would be an understatement to say that Allison and I were humbled by this time in his home.

This is how the entire trip went--two unknowing people led through a meandering string of wonders and experiences, all held loosely together by a place that is both rugged and revealing.  During it all, I was glad to be there with Allison, caddying her film equipment, driving us to and through new places, sharing food and stories with daughter and strangers alike.  Feeling the restorative effects of two rivers running through us.

It is no accident that the words "wonder" and "wander" share so many letters.

CSI: Lincoln

Early this morning, I found evidence that son Eric made it home last night, despite my not waking to greet him.  On the otherwise clean kitchen counter sat a half-rinsed bowl with a spoon in it, and inside the fridge, the foil that covered last night's leftovers gave up its secrets in crumpled, torn whispers.

Twice in the past week, I've found odd comfort in these leftover trails, signs of a son whose current trajectory is shrinking the size of our concentric circles.

This is as it should be, of course, and all the more reason, I suppose, that our intersections--even those mundane ones outlined in dried spaghetti and tomato sauce--have taken on a deeper meaning for me.

If we parents do the job we are intended to do--training our troops to need us less while encouraging them to explore the larger world even more--then we'd better retrain ourselves to learn to read the detritus that our children's paths leave behind.  Some days, these signs--dirty bowls next to the sink, bikes leaning against the fence, half-zipped backpacks tossed by the back door--are all the proof we have that we did, in fact, give birth to someone once, and that that person still walks the earth.

I'm starting to think that parenting also gave birth to the humble expression "Throw me a bone."  Give me something--anything-- that proves you are still here and that we are made of the same stuff.

To some, this word "detritus" may seem like the wrong word for me to use.  After all, in CSI terms, it means "dead organic material."  But to a geologist (or a parent), it also means "the loose material that comes from disintegration."  Dis-integration.  The act of moving away from something, or someone.


One of the strangest stages of parenting--so far, at least--has been this process of standing back as my kids move into their own lives.  Sure, I could say that our house would be cleaner without them, but--really--the good that comes from them leaving their nest is the act of stretching their wings and building their own lives. It's not that I want them to move away so much as I want them to move towards--towards their own futures, even as those futures may spin ever further from me, like distance planets no longer held by my gravitational pull.

Goodnight, Moon

"Whoever you are: some evening take a step out of your house, which you know so well.  Enormous space is near." --Rainer Maria Rilke

When 8:30 means "bedtime"--and has for several years--a person could start to believe that great heaps of the 24-hour cycle either don't exist or are carrying out the last act of an elaborate play, despite your absence.  The thing is, there is another end to that argument.  A person who tends towards "early to bed" also knows "early to rise," a time that is equally steeped in darkness and even less populated by people.

My friend Victoria loaned me a jewel of a book last week--Barbara Brown Taylor's "Learning to Walk in the Dark."  I've read a handful of Brown Taylor's books and already knew that I liked her voice.  Her exploration of the dark, then, intrigued me, not only because I miss out on so much of it, but also because I was certain that she had something important to say on the subject.

Her chapters, which follow the phases of the moon, are held together by a profound thread that argues that we cheat ourselves by dividing our lives into dark and light, body and spirit, good and evil;   and that the associations we make with "darkness" are downright libelous. Brown Taylor, a minister by training, argues that Christian churches shortchange people by "teaching us, over and over again, that we [have] two natures, two sets of loyalties, two homes--and that only one [is] close to God."

I have grown to appreciate the messy in-between of life.  It seems more honest and--always--more interesting than the sanitized hard lines we so often like to draw between things.  Reading Brown Taylor's book, then, has reminded me of the good things I have taken away from the darkness:

Going Bats
--When we moved to this neighborhood 10 years ago, we quickly learned that people weren't the only beings who were drawn to this area.  Come spring, hundreds of local brown bats shake off their doldrums and squeeze through the cracks in our homes--cracks we were certain we'd filled last summer--emerging into a world of wide-open spaces and airborn insects.  It was in our first summer here that we learned from the neighbor kids the trick of tossing a pair of socks into the mid-evening sky, hoping to draw the attention of a bat's radar.  Never before has a pair of socks brought so much joy to me, as I hold my breath, secretly hoping the bat won't follow them all the way to the ground, where I stand, my mouth agape.

Going Bananas
--Many summers ago, I was inspired by a Pioneers Park naturalist, who told me how to attract Luna moths.  Her formula for attracting these elusive, magical moths?  Smear an old bedsheet with overripe bananas, hang it outside at night and wait.  And so, I held a luna-moth party that started at the scandalous hour of 10 p.m., serving up banana cake in honor of the trap's main ingredient.  Surprisingly, a dozen or so friends showed up, as much for the cake, I suppose, as for the spectacle.  Around 10:30, we headed out my back door to inspect the sheet.  Turns out that roaches and ants and beetles enjoy a good banana as much as the still-elusive Luna moth does.  Despite their absence, I would not have changed a thing about that night, going to bed knowing that--somewhere--a whole flock of these magical moths was enjoying a banana split,  just not here.

Going Undercover
--After college, my roommate Matt--an unusual, earthy Big Thinker--took me to Nine Mile Prairie for an evening of discovery.  By the time the sun was a memory, he positioned us in a clearing next to some woods.  And he told me that our job was to stand perfectly still and simply observe what happens next.  "Next" took a while, but, eventually, the rest of the world--the part that perks up when the sun falls--started finding its rhythm.  By the time we finally called "Uncle" and moved our stiff limbs, we'd watched possums and deer and even a coyote cross near us, focused more on their nightly routines than on the pesky human invaders nearby.  It was one of the best evenings of my life, fading into the woodwork of a local copse, while the overnight shift gave me a peek into their world.

How many early mornings have I awakened in the dark, feeling for my slippers and sweatshirt, then sneaking into the still-dark air on my back patio? Always, I look upward to find the stars' familiar patterns in the night sky, comforted by their reminder that I am smaller than I think, my problems more manageable, my joys still sweet enough to fill me.

"To know the darkness, go dark.  Go without sight and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings." --Wendell Barry

Burn, Baby, Burn

Sometimes, things just seem to find us and we wonder to ourselves if we'd been sending up flares all along. 

I'm thinking that's the case with this Tuesday, when I'll head into the Bohemian Alps to help a stranger with a controlled burn of the prairie.  It's something I wanted to do a year ago at Pioneers Park, but burning a prairie is kind of like hot-air ballooning--very persnickety, weather-wise.  And if you aren't able to drop everything and come right away, then the prairie burns without you.

Not this time, though.  Not with a week of Spring Break stretching out before me. 

And I'll be honest with you.  I could use a little burning.  In fact, I'm thinking of it as more of a "Phoenix rising" event than a prescribed burn.

I just hope my Phoenix feels like getting up from the ashes.

Maybe it's because we're knee deep in Lent, but these days I seem to have ashes on my mind, if not actually on my forehead.  I don't even really do anything for Lent, except fail.  Even when I was a devout Catholic, I was lousy at the practice of transforming myself for a few days. Give up candy and it's all I could think of.  And cram in my mouth, one after another.

But, while walking with Finn around Holmes Lake this morning, I realized that Tuesday's prescribed burn was just what the doctor ordered.

Every day, I'm surrounded by people who are deeply generous, riotously funny, and all-around inspiring.  And, while I occasionally have such moments myself, I feel like I need a Phoenix moment, a chance to shake off the doldrums and reinvent myself.  I'm thinking Jane 2.0 could kick it up a notch and stretch a bit more.  Be more present.  More giving.  Just more Jane. 

So, come Tuesday morning, after I've laced up my 1983 hiking boots, pulled up the jeans, buttoned a shirt and found a hat to wear, I'll head just west of Garland to meet a group of people who are there to burn up some prairie to give it a kick start.  And I'll let them think I'm there to help the prairie, too.

But I'll have my own little truth tucked away in my jeans, a yen to burn off some of my own overgrowth and start over again.

And then, I'll walk towards the fire line, and let the heat lick my skin.