Fruit and Light

This evening, I was heading to a meeting at 13th and Oak Streets from my home in the east end. On I-71, I found myself idling in traffic lingering from a long rush hour. I felt my anxiety grow as the minutes ticked on and the cars merely inched forward. I was facilitating our gathering's opening prayer and reflection, so my late arrival would crunch an already-full agenda. I was regretting not leaving sooner, not somehow anticipating this delay.

Then, like a fresh breeze through the fumes, grace cleared my heart. As I looked into the Louisville skyline, the setting sun cast a gold light over the tall buildings, the metal cars, the crimson trees so that all as far as I could see was touched and illuminated in its mundane splendor. I felt my mind soften; anxiety would serve no one. I felt gratitude well up inside for such a lovely moment and the space to pay attention to it.

I glanced to my left at precisely the right moment to see the next, breath-taking spectacle: a blue heron sailing so near and slowly over the stalled expressway that I could see her elegant legs tucked into her body as she flew directly over my car. Her long beak and gentle wingbeats, her steady and unhurried path through the air, was a wordless message from beyond myself. I looked right and watched her descend into the trees. Only then did the traffic begin to move again.

Twice today, two different friends shared this simple parable with me - the repetition gave me pause to listen with care:

A man was running from a pack of tigers when he suddenly came to a cliff. Quickly, he scurried over the cliff, clinging to some hanging vines to escape. But looking down, he saw more tigers below, looking up at him in anticipation. Then, he noticed a little mouse above him, nibbling the vine to which he clung. Tigers above, tigers below, an insecure perch. Glancing furiously around for an escape, his eyes landed on a vine of wild strawberries hanging within his reach. He then recognized just how beautiful the sunset looked from such a height. He reached over, plucked a strawberry, and savored it with all his will as he gazed into the setting sun.

I know these lessons have come to me because I need them. My straits are not so dire as the fellow clinging to the edge of a cliff - in fact, I am eager to dismiss my struggles because they seem like trivial preoccupations when compared to suffering near and far. There are not tigers immediately above or below me. There are vines and vines of strawberries at my fingertips. Many ache with longing for the faculties and resources to just hold on, like I can by no effort of my own.

But comparison does not change reality, it only undermines my experience of it. Neglecting my own pain is closing the door to awareness of our deeper, common pain. Tending to any pain can consecrate it, can transmute it in service of healing. So can tending to beauty. A wise mentor once said that, by fully savoring and using for good the privileges of my life, I could serve humanity by lending my experience to their utility. If I were to feel too guilty, unworthy, or afraid to use them, I would be squandering them on behalf of all Life.

There are always tigers above and below us. Oppressive systems that operate quietly in plain sight, corrupt leadership that perpetuates games of power, international conflict and gun violence that leave countless dead each day, old ways that keep us from manifesting what is meant to become, new threats that distract us from what it means to be human: these and many others are our common perils. If we are lucky, we cling to each other, waiting, working, hoping.

There are always strawberries and sunsets to savor. The fruit of true relationships, meaningful work, powerful community, deep engagement with the world; the light of gentleness, speaking truth, grounded introspection, compassionate action - these are what we must notice if we are to keep holding in the tension, with intention. Thank goodness we do not just look at the side of a cliff - we can look into each other's eyes and see the mirror of all that is most beautiful, most essential, in our perilous and precious human condition.

Eventually, I alighted off the expressway onto Market Street, due west. The evening air channeled through my open windows as the last strains of an operatic song floated from my car speakers. I looked over to see a festive cook-out happening in an urban park - neighbors laughed and ate while children played in front of graffiti across the lawn. Tables and tables of people and food, lovingly prepared and gathered in celebration on a Tuesday night. Tears sprang to my eyes at the common joy. Smoke rising from the grill caught the golden sun, and smiles all around emitted light. I watched them as long as I could, until they were out of sight.

Loss

On a light day, the fall can feel like bright festivity. Blue skies draw awareness to the crimson tops of trees, cheery in contrast, playful in their varied hues. Busy squirrels and birds tend to nuts and berries and seem to prepare for a cool-weather party. Soft breezes offer gentle refreshment, warmed by the brilliant sun.

In time, the splendor makes way for inevitable decay. Soon, the leaves will brown and curl on the frozen ground. Animals will hide away and hope their storage sustains them through whatever winter brings. The sun will retreat into long, dark nights and gray days. The limbs of the trees will cling to an empty sky.

At times, celebration is clearly an appropriate response to life's beauty - the harvest, worthy of awe and thanks, leads us to effortless reverence and joy. But times when our efforts appear to lay fallow, descend like discarded leaves, or disintegrate into dead earth leave us hollow. How can such loss and letting go yield thanks? Especially when our work has been in attempted service to greater good, the pain can be felt as betrayal.

Both tenderness and decomposition make the fodder for our lives. Each instructs us, if we can receive the movements with malleable hearts, how to become shaped for the times we are given. We can learn to mute our own desires for what is required to receive the gift. We can relinquish old ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing to see the present as it really is. We can shed the hardened skin of ambition to bare our raw, vulnerable humanity.

Through fires and rivers, celebration and sacrifice, we are shown how to see the sacredness of every season; how to treasure what is precious and essential; and how to let go, to be saved.

~*~

"In Blackwater Woods"
by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

Freedom

My husband and I walk along the beach at night, hand-in-hand, guided by the roar of the waves and faint, distant lights. The thick clouds of the day's heavy rains are dissipating; with each step along the sand, another star shimmers through the gray veil. The water gently laps our feet to keep a path ahead smooth and clear.

We find our way to two wooden chairs and recline, taking in the vastness. The rushing waters necessitate an encompassing silence and draw us each into deep reverie and repose. I marvel at the keen twinkle of the stars that make them seem to dance in their firmament. If I was billions of miles closer to them, I could truly see the roiling surface of these monstrous gas spheres. But from such a distance, the stars are brought alive only by illusions of atmosphere and imagination.

I think of the small seed of a baby within me, minuscule and intricate enough to mimic the many lovely shells scattered over the sand. I think of my boy, now asleep not so far away, who earlier tentatively traced patterns in the sand with a scavenged shovel, discerning the appeal of this new matter. Tears catch in my throat as I feel in my spirit the grand possibilities of their lives, the wonder and adventure awaiting them. Will they, too, someday meander along a beach at night, look up at the stars, and feel the power of their finity and smallness? Will they think of their mother and father?

I lay my hand on my husband's arm and speak from my heart into the darkness. I tell him that I need times to rest in wildness and remember then what I am as a human. I long for spaces where I feel the edges of my life, my perpetual closeness to death, and can rekindle love for living. The sky and sand, the water and fire of ocean and stars, hold dominant sway over me - I want to remember and know it.

That which is most transcendent in me rejoices that I have a life to embody, a being in which to experience the holy terror of my lack of separateness. Someday, I will be the foam along the shore. Someday, when Earth has died, I will be mere molecules in a stunning planetary nebula. Tonight, however, I am amazingly human, and I am not afraid. Looking at the sky, I can only cry at the harsh beauty and wish that my children can be free, free, forever.

Our son was the first person in the world to be born an Olivam. Our next child will be the second. My husband and I chose a new name together because we believe in what we can choose to create. We did not choose it because we hope the name will live on for generations, or because we hope to impart some permanent mark on the children who will bear beyond us. All we seek to choose is what we can live for, which we hope will, in all things, be peace - an extended olive branch, fruit that nourishes and heals.

 the first seashell my son intentionally
chose, then gave to me as a gift 

My few hopes for my children I carry like fragile shells in my palm: a delicate prayer that they discover and cherish their hearts' passions against any judgment; a whispered song that their poetry is treasured by others who know them honestly; a silent mantra of promise that they taste bitterness with wonder and savor sweetness with grace. Though their lives, like mine, are ephemeral and granular like shifting sand, they too are wave-emanations of an oceanic cosmos, born to crest and roar and carry something precious before returning to the source. I delight in the mystery that I will never know their journeys fully. I am humbled imagining that I connect to them now, in some unfathomable way, as I gaze at the stars and envision a future in which they will do the same.

After a time, we stand together and begin the walk back home, spoken and unspoken reflections reverberating across the broad, elemental planes. Every step is washed away by the tide coming in; no impression is left except on our own patterns of memory. His warm hand, like the water, brings comfort in the cool night. His gentle grasp tethers me to the path we choose walk; my sinking feet in the sand tell me again the truth of what lasts forever.

A Season of Surrender

Resting my body between warm sheets and cooling my brow with the breeze through the window, I sigh, feeling the ache of a weekend lived well. My belly feels soft and full, the tiny seed of a child noticeable in the center of my awareness.

In the center of my awareness always is the beginning of you. I wonder about all you will be, little one. I marvel that the seasons will pass more quickly than I can imagine until you are welcomed into the world by the blossoms of May. I cannot yet imagine the balance you will invite our family to strike, completing us by offering the fourth element: grounding Earth. To your father's Air, your mother's Fire, your brother's Water, you offer the nurturing soil for roots and stability. Even in your gestation, you are already teaching me differently from your brother.

Your brother rested his body across my lap and slipped suddenly and heavily into slumber this evening. His body curled instinctively into mine, his face lax, his sweet and sleepy breathing as soft as when he was a baby. His trusting surrender reminded me poignantly that he is still my little boy, thank goodness, no matter how tall he looks or independently he moved through the world, who sometimes wants his mama to nurse him to sleep. His hair still smelled like the golden leaves at Cherokee Park.

At Cherokee Park this afternoon, we made an adventure through fields and woods, over bridges and to creeks. Kairi and Roxas, our pit bull puppies, led the way as Oak and his parents followed close behind. Human and canine companions were thick on the path; as Robby guided the dogs and I carried Oak, we received each one as a guest and they received us. Our direction meandered and our pace was erratic...and our eyes delighted in the crispness of leaves just waiting to erupt into color, our lungs in the freshness of air that heralds a new season of surrender.

A new season of surrender is turning in my soul. At The Guest House, we held the question, 'What do I need to sacrifice? What could that new energy bring me?' I want to do everything right for my family, to fulfill my purpose, to make the good choice so as to not squander my life. My striving at times gets in the way of my hope for true freedom. I must let go of the thought that I can decipher the plan. Like the arrival of a second baby in my womb, like each phase of Oak's growth, like the surprise in finding in plain sight the love with whom I could create this beautiful family, like the questions that will remain forever unanswered in me, each gift and guest is right on time.

Right on time, the clouds began to part and the blue sky showed through as the Saturday afternoon wedding ceremony transitioned to a celebratory reception. Children ran through the grass, music wafted across the lake, roses beckoned guests to sit and laugh and delight at long tables around which food and blessing were shared. I looked into my husband's eyes as we held one another close. I thought back to nearly five years ago when we ourselves had pledged to weather all storms, to endure all seasons together. We only knew the edge of what could be our struggle and suffering. We only knew a few dimensions of our particular, ecstatic joy. We only knew a touch of the humility of turning toward each other again and again.

Again and again, in all our unknowing, we have said "Yes" with courage and conviction. A life lived well is not one that is understood but one that is kept close as something to love and tend with all one's heart. As we stood with our oldest child in our arms and our next child between us, the circle contained a small infinity. My love felt as wide as the evening sky.

The evening sky, in its ethereal brilliance, left behind the grays of noon and shone in vivid pinks and blues to remind each onlooker that, before the night guides us home, we will be greeted in mystery and majesty by the grace we have given in this short, magnificent life. The beauty will not evade us. It will flash like a sunset, then sink into eternity's memory to become the colors of a new dawn, which none of us will ever see.

No Separate Shores

The little boy, my son, on his belly and knees with his arms by his side, is gently resting his cheek on sheets, not foreign sand. His eyes are closed in slumber, not death. The sweet ebb and flow of his breathing, like the tides, is a safe, secure rhythm of survival.

I, his mother, watch him through eyes bleary with tears, not sea water. My breath is shallow not because I am fighting for my life, but because I do not have to. We will live tomorrow. We are so safe. Our comfort is decadent. My rage roils in gray waves and retreats under the white foam of despair.

The little boy, OUR son, was carried in waters too shallow to ferry the suffering of his people to the hearts of those who could have saved him. His lifeless body, delivered by the water, was a bottled message from humanity to humanity: "There are no separate shores."

The salty ocean of the world's grief can drown our apathy and wash us anew in compassion. We can respond before another person is thrown overboard without dignity. We can cradle this child in our hearts, his dead mother and brother, his bereaved father, his family left behind, his people - our family left behind, our people.

May this holding keep us from throwing our hands up. May our children, the living, breathe easier tomorrow because we have sent them a fleet of lifeboats. May our children, the dead, forgive us our evils.

The spanses of Earth's water are not walls, but channels. May we seek to traverse the distance with our hearts and walk together on new shores where children play, where they wonder what beauty their lives may hold, where they fall asleep in peace under the stars.

This I Believe - 2008 and 2015

Seven years ago, I wrote and read a "This I Believe" essay at The Rudyard Kipling. Today, I wrote one for tonight's Finding Our Voices event. What has changed in seven years? Only that I continue to know less and less. I can't wait to see what I write (i.e. learn) in another seven years.

The face of my savior is the face of a young girl I met in Haiti when I was fifteen years old. Her eyes were warm and wide-set above a shy, genuine smile, her head crowned with springy dark braids that glistened in the tropical sun. I knew her for only a few days. I cannot remember her name, but I will never forget her shining face, nor the way her voice stirred me as she whispered my name in her beautiful lilting Creole, calling me to a moment of transcendence that revealed to me the deepest truth I’ve come to understand in my short life. As we gazed into one another’s eyes, the barriers of division put in place by the world melted away: we were neither white nor black, poor nor rich, young nor old. We spoke not the same language, except that poetry that now danced between us, the wordless expression of commonality, of shared humanity, of belonging to the world and to one another. She smiled at me, and I smiled back, knowing that we both understood. In that moment, I felt that I could sense every heartbeat on the planet, every pulsation of every creature in the air and the sea, each breath of every tree, the stars swirling in the cosmos. I would feel this way almost exactly a year later as I hugged a homeless man at the St. Vincent de Paul shelter right down the street as he cried that he couldn’t express the gratitude he felt knowing that someone saw him as more than a bum, a nobody. I sensed this as I fed a paraplegic man at Active Day two summers ago and he grasped my hand, looked into my eyes and said, “You are a very beautiful girl,” and I realized he saw his own beauty reflected in our simple act of taking time to be present to one another. I am liberated in the same way as I sit quietly under a canopy of trees or dig my feet into the sand and gaze out across the ocean, recognizing that I and my sisters and brothers of every species belong to this earth, and it is all one.

This I believe: we are here for one another. Dissimilarity is an illusion. We must come to grasp our unity through short lives lived in a world into which we are seemingly born apart; it is our deepest and greatest spiritual challenge. Thomas Merton once said, “In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.” I am ever grateful for the gift my Haiti-sister and savior gave to me: a life of ever-present redemption through relationship, a life lived in reverence of the oneness that connects us all."

- Mandy Zoeller, "This I Believe" Essay         The Rudyard Kipling, 4 June 2008

~*~

The face of my savior looks back at me with my own brown eyes and smiles with his father's chin. He came into the world because his father and I longed to be as close to one another as two humans can be. He originated in mystery; he grew in secret; all the while, I felt him as myself. By stretching the most vulnerable places in me so far I did not think I could hold together, he opened a doorway to the infinite. I did not hold together. His birth caused me to die...and be born anew.

My body and soul expand as he grows. My breasts and belly are carved by a tracery of sacrifice and surrender. My breath, my pulse, my life rhythms no longer belong to me. They never belonged to me; they were given from an ancient lineage of ancestors who hurt and bled and birthed and loved. Now, I give to him. Because I carry my son in my heart, I am reminded each moment that life comes from death comes from life. His arms around my neck, his breathing "Mama" in my ear - an inhale. His little feet carrying him away to some new adventure - an exhale. Every day is an end and a beginning in the story we write on the cosmic tablet of time.

This I believe: only our children, the Life that comes from and continues beyond us, can save us from ourselves. Each beguiled giggle, each sharp tear of knowing pain, each wonder at the complex art of the world unfolding marks a stage in his journey of becoming something I will never know. My son belongs to a world I cannot inhabit and can only cultivate in his tending. I have known no greater teacher, no more humbling master, than the little one who looks at me with my own brown eyes.

The only response to his lessons is to change my life. My being is heavier because I cradle the question: What will his world be like? How can I prepare the way for what he is meant to be? Loving him has compelled me closer to everyone. In such radical intimacy, our collective destinies come together in the simple commandment: Hold on to one another. Walk through the infinite doorway. Give up your life for love.

- Mandy Olivam, "This I Believe" Essay                    The Loft, 28 August 2015

CONNECT - Listen.

Written as a reflection on CONNECT at Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest.

"Listen."

Under the trellis, hung by a string, floated a paper with the image of an ear and this simple invitation written on its visible side. My curiosity piqued, I reached out and turned it over to read more - "What are the closest and farthest sounds you can hear?"

My body responded to the question before I could make a conscious decision to comply. The human chatter from a nearby beer tent; the rattle of insects; distant drumbeats; my little boy's delighted exclamations at the wonder of plants and people all around - these came into sharper focus as my awareness honed to my body's particular portals for Sound. I felt my oft relied-upon sense of vision muted in favor of a different vibration. I closed my eyes.

"Listen." This time, the invitation came near musicians' strong rhythms. The pulsations curved palpably through the air, turning each body and tree into a percussive instrument of attention. As I reflexively received the guidance of the beat and thoughtlessly altered my gait, I wondered what systems the pulse of my heartbeat may direct day-to-day by simply doing its work. I swayed in tune.

"Listen." On a bustling path through the woods, the word spang from the sea of leaves and people curtaining an approaching bridge. The still forest and serene lake startled me with their silence in contrast to the milling crowds. The word lingered there, insistent, drawing me into the paradox. I let go of my distraction and fell into the question. Suddenly, I felt transported into the old trunks and ancient waters, vessels for deep resonance. "It isn't just about identifying what you think you can perceive," they whispered in language beyond what my ears could hear. "Sometimes, it's a matter of noticing what you don't know you can sense."

"Listen." As the day slowly darkened, the shift happened without my help. The sunset colors gave way to the muted shades of moonlight on clouds, and my ears began to ring with insect song. My vision dimmed; with every step, the night seemed to be calling more clearly: listen, listen, listen. Soft lights flickered all around, but the blackness steadily narrowed my focus to my most immediate sphere of connection. Soon, I could not even see my child's face - I could only feel his weight in my arms and hear his sleepy breathing. His ear pressed against my cheek.

Sound transcends barriers to light by allowing communications from what we may not see. The calls of distress or delight from creatures upon which we may never lay naked eyes can become a map for kinship with more diverse Life. As I made to return to my familiar habitat for sleep, I felt that my body carried a heightened sense of all things near to me and a memory of all things far, enabled through a slower wavelength. My cells reverberated with the unique, fresh frequency of being alive and engaged.

"Listen," I heard, as I drove home in quiet.
"Listen," whispered
Woods by the road,
Trees by the highway,
Stars above the city,
River below,
Rabbit in the grass,
Moth in lamplight,
Oak tree over our house,
Boy sleeping in his bed,
Moon shining in the window,
Earth, my cradle,
my heartbeat as I closed my eyes.