Regeneration

Nature's healing

Maybe you have heard, as I have, that starfish are remarkable creatures, and that if one is cut into pieces, each piece will grow a whole new starfish. There is science to support that (as long as each piece has some of the central disk attached), according to Google. I was lucky enough to come across this resilient starfish during a recent walk on the beach. He had clearly lost an arm at some point, and according to what I read, it can take up to a year to generate a new one. But this little guy had done it! A brand new arm, almost as long as the others, bore witness to his healing. And somewhere out in the ocean, there may be a whole new starfish grown from that missing limb. It made me reflect on my own brokenness, and the good it can do. Priest and author Henri Nouwen encouraged people to come face to face with their own damaged nature in his book, The Wounded Healer. "Our wounds," he wrote, "allow us to enter into a deep solidarity with our wounded brothers and sisters." We all have scars, some easier to hide than others. But when we stop trying to hide them, and embrace them as an important part of who we are, then amazing new things can result.

                                                                                                        *SS*

There’s nothing quite like a summer thunderstorm. I cracked my bedroom window the other night, even though the AC was on, just to hear the rain fall. I half woke in the middle of the night, the pattering intensifying, the night pitch dark, and it felt as if my bed floated on a cloud, my dreams drifting with the rain. I was a young girl again, and the night seemed endless, the morning free of appointments or obligations. I don’t know how rain has the power to do this, to unhinge me so, dissolve me into a mist, but it does. Rain, unless in a flooded downtown Charleston, makes me inordinately happy. I read the Mary Oliver poem "Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me" and thought, ah, another person whom rain makes crazy happy. Here’s the first part of her poem:


“Last night
the rain 
spoke to me
slowly, saying,
what joy
to come falling
out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again
in a new way
on the earth!
That’s what it said
as it dropped,
smelling of iron,
and vanished
like a dream of the ocean
into the branches
and the grass below.”

What a lovely image - rain vanishing like a dream of the ocean, soaking roots, renourishing life.
                                                                                                       *DB*   

Summertime...

     I need the ocean. I'm not sure how I survived most of my life without being able to stand with my feet licked by waves anytime I needed it. And I feel the need for it often. When my own loneliness or the stresses of life or the emotional toll of my job get too heavy, I need the weightlessness of seawater. Even if I can't submerge my body, lose myself in a sort of re-baptism as I sometimes want to, even wading is enough. 

     The water reminds me how small and finite and fragile I am, but that I am a unique character in a grand story much longer than my lifetime. A friend wondered as we walked the beach one day whether these waters could have been drops of the Red Sea parted by Moses. And I laughed when I heard a child another day tell an adult, "Some of this ocean probably used to be dinosaur pee!" Mother Teresa said that all the good we can do is just a drop in the ocean, but without it the ocean would be less. I think about that quote often as I take walks on the beach after a long night at the hospital. Those are the times when I most need the ocean to remind me. And it's always there.

SS

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View under the Congress Avenue Bridge (bat bridge), Austin, TX

     14 days.  10 states.  Four plane flights. 1760+ miles by car. Two graduations. One exploratory grad school trip.
     It's been a busy two weeks. From the bat bridge in Austin, TX to the silver arch in St. Louis, MO, from the dusty reds and browns of the desert southwest to yellow and green midwestern squares, it's been two weeks of wandering and wondering through the natural beauty of this country.  Each place carries a different charm and offers another piece of the story of our intertwined lives.
     So much of travel is simply being where you are.  Sitting in a plane on the runway listening to the different voices around you.  Trying to remember some college Spanish in a restaurant in Texas.  Watching bats emerge from under a bridge.  Trying to take a picture of an arch in Missouri that doesn't fit in your camera frame.  Checking out different fruits and vegetables in the local grocery. Watching oil pump from a well in Indiana.  If you pay attention, travel opens you up to new perspectives and unexpected beauty. It knocks you off balance, out of your narrow routines and prejudices, and opens the window to a fresh view of life.  
     And then, at the end of the journey, there's the grace and blessing of your own pillow at home.  Ahh. 
  

AF

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Stolen Moment

    I sit for a moment and watch it rain, the air heavy with salt and marsh and earthy ozone. The subtle switch to summer settles into the sinuous channels dividing the marsh, water rushing to the ocean, like seniors after the last school bell. Fragments of the song, 'Summertime" and the livin is easy' drift through my mind. I notice mimosas have joined the landscape, their frilly, pink hats like a page torn from a Seuss book. Rivulets of rain make channels down the windshield, some coming through my cracked windows, cold drops plopping. All is quiet, even the trill of the red-winged blackbird absent from the expanse of the marsh.

    I love summer, with its ease and lightness of being, with its late afternoon thunderstorms. It makes me believe there's time. TIme to put off chores, sleep in a lounge chair, watch a caterpillar crawl. Mary Oliver in her poem Summer Day describes how she takes the whole day to stroll through the fields, being idle and blessed. 

"Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?"

      This, of course, is so true.

      So I sit in the rain where the livin's easy, being blessed.

DB

Life is good.

“Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” 

― Mary Oliver

Good Mistakes

      My son David recently landed a solo part in The Young Americans show that came to his school.  Interestingly, his group was told: If you mess up, mess up big.  I had to laugh -what great advice.  Own your mistakes.  Even revel in them.  It takes the pressure off.  There is a story about a pottery class where the teacher told one group to make their best pot in a given time.  The other group was to produce as many pots as they could.  the group that did the most imaginative work was the one that focused on quantity, not perfection.  Process not outcome.       

     My new philosophy in life is to jump in and live - see mistakes as life lessons.  My favorite writing expression is:  You can't edit a blank page.  When I get stuck on story leads, I'll just start typing random ideas.  I see what rises to the top.  Eventually something always does, though the process may be messier than I would have liked.  Sort of like a well-lived life.

DB

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     I always cry at weddings. There's something so enchanting and hopeful and holy about two people making lifelong promises to love one another. I am a romantic at heart. But I couldn't cry at this wedding, because I was the one standing up front with the couple, talking about love, asking them if they vowed those vows. I even got to pronounce the magic words that officially made them husband and wife. It was even more special because these were my friends Mary and Paul. I've known Mary for years, and have gotten to know Paul over the nearly three years they've been together. I know their story, at least a lot of it, know what they value, what they love, and so the service I wrote for them was very personal. During the benediction in particular I loved watching Mary's face light up, and a delighted "Ah!" escaped her lips. 
      This was the Lowcountry blessing I wrote for my friends:

May God fill your life with

The hope of a sunrise over the marsh,

The strength of the live oaks,

The joy of dolphins at play in the harbor,

The beauty of springtime azaleas.

Amen

     

SS

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Azaleas at Providence Baptist Church on Daniel Island

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it... People think pleasing God is all God care about.  But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.  

Alice Walker, The Color Purple  

     More often than I wish,  I have to remind myself to slow down and notice the beauty that surrounds us.  But not in these early days of spring.  Every time I turn a corner, I am surprised by another bank of pale pinks, soft whites, fiery reds or rich purples.  The azaleas are putting on a show this year.  I pause in my rush through the day and let myself be dazzled.  I find myself more present to the world, finding the bloom in each moment.  Sometimes, life is just beautiful.

AF