Light in Stone

Who buys a lamp he cannot read by?

What could be the intention of someone walking alone through a Portland, Maine, gift shop on a summer afternoon, setting his sights on a lamp when he has no obvious room in which it can cast its muted light?

Some light is the light of hope and wonder, and the steps I was taking a year ago this summer were steps of hope and wonder as I focused on creating a new home. No, I did not expect to read by the light of the luminaire lamp. Its stone etching suggested sunlight through the trees of a forest, like the Sanctuary Trail at nearby Prouts Neck. I expected something would happen by that light, but it was not what I could talk about with any confidence or logical rigor. It involved an act of faith, and I was not accustomed to acting out of faith in myself or my dreams.

I am honoring this time of anniversary by turning that lamp on each evening, knowing that I will not do anything by that light that bears comment or commands attention from others. I am willing to let a light shine, though, through a room that did not know twelve months ago what I might be attempting within its walls each night, the ease and the re-creation that sleep can bring to someone starting a life over.

Image of lithophane lamp from The Porcelain Garden

A Claim on My Life

There are certain delights that you plan and others that seem almost to waylay you.

The drive north along the Connecticut River this past Saturday morning was matching turn for turn the route prepared by Google maps. The last time I had headed to the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, NH, I was approaching south from a summer workshop at Dartmouth College. The online itinerary was instrumental this past weekend in helping me find once again the beautiful nineteenth-century home of Augustus Saint-Gaudens with its surrounding gardens and studios.

A friend had recently viewed a PBS documentary about the American sculptor and the Cornish Art Colony that had sprung up around him after he settled in this corner of New Hampshire. Familiar with other sites maintained by the National Park Service, I was prepared to be delighted by the visit. I was not disappointed. In fact, I ended up taking pleasure even in the antique smell of the rooms of the eighteenth-century inn that Saint-Gaudens had transformed into his home. How many visitors leave a home like this with a similar longing to return and smell again one day that deep presence of the years?

There’s another moment to record, though, from the day. Most travelers driving north would have been completely focused on the property that the online itinerary suggested was only four minutes away. Nothing should have distracted a driver intent on locating the signs for the turn-off on Route 12A that would lead to his destination.

But there was a white clapboard church. And an old cemetery. A bend in the state road should have swept travelers past both of them. But within seconds the car was parked, the camera retrieved, the roadway leading to the reconstructed Trinity Church followed in the sunny morning stillness.

At another time in my life I would not have stopped here, would not have delayed an arrival that had been the focus of a morning’s efforts, would not have believed that anyone else could have entered the mood of that sudden roadside apparition. With each step, though, I knew that this was right. I might have planned another venture, but this one was waiting for me, for my history, for my heart. This one said, “Yes, someone knew you were coming. Welcome.”

My eyes stayed alert, intent on taking it all in. I was being given a gift, and I would not miss any of it. Looking up, looking in, walking along, walking behind – I felt a space was opening up around me that felt fine with my being there.

Stepping among the old gravestones in the churchyard, I read inscriptions, one after another. The activity was familiar, comforting, quieting. Absorbed, I did not expect what I would see when I turned around at one point, but suddenly there was Mount Ascutney. A deep, long vista leading to the Vermont mountain and the clouds behind it seemed to open up. Lifting my camera, I hoped the steadiness of my aim would do justice to the moment.

I could have stayed there a long time. Aware of the attentiveness to beauty that had made this sudden, unplanned stop, I was ready to let it lay claim to my life.

I learned something afresh about my heart that morning.

Pentecost Among the Mountains

I will miss the incense on Pentecost morning.

I will miss the white-robed thurifer advancing steadily down the center aisle at the head of the procession.

I will miss the mounting harmonies of the opening hymn, the choir’s voices reaching higher and higher with each verse, the brass joining the organ at a particular point.

I will miss a centuries-old liturgy, carefully orchestrated and beautifully choreographed, designed to celebrate the action of God’s Spirit in making the unimaginable a distinct possibility in human hearts.

I will be in my car this Sunday morning, having just left an inn built in the eighteenth century along the Connecticut River. When 9:30 services for Pentecost Sunday begin in my parish, I will be driving home from a weekend in an area I have visited before.

I will be fresh from two days of long walks and long dinners, musings about how the unimaginable has become a distinct possibility in my life and in the lives of people I know.

Within rooms that speak of history, I will review my own history.

Within sight of the mountains, I will consider the paths my life can take in the months and years ahead.

Most importantly, I will heed the Spirit’s call. I will trust that something better always lies before me.

Summer Porches

I love porches in the summer.

Bringing a library book onto the front porch of the house where I grew up was quintessential summer pleasure. As a child, I did not expect a summer full of fun; I knew fun usually meant what other people enjoyed and made time for and accommodated in family schedules. I had my own ideas of the best ways to move through slow morning hours and stave off the lethargy of a Louisiana afternoon and await the arrival of evening.

On the porch in summer, I paged through the latest books that I had borrowed from the local library. The air through the screens that enclosed the porch was thick with outdoor smells: the sharp fragrance of moist, shaded soil; the dry, green smell of arbor vitae and lugustrum and crepe myrtle. Meanwhile, I inhaled another aroma when I put my nose up to the leathery pages of a borrowed book, a smell as foreign and strangely welcoming as anything arising from the flower beds along the sides of our New Orleans home.

I did not know what adults did with summer -- at least what the adults in my house did that was any different from the other months of the year. My father still put on a starched white shirt each day to go downtown to work; my mother still ironed her shirtwaist dress before Sunday morning Mass. It was long years before my parents could manage anything that might count as vacation in the way that that phenomenon was depicted in the books I selected to read from the library stacks.

Yes, strange to say, my consolation was to read about summer.

My favorite summer pasttime became a way of visiting those long, quiet summer hours in other families' lives. To Kill a Mockingbird was only one of the books that got me onto the porches that belonged to those other people. In getting there, however, I caught glimpses of how my life might have been if I had been born into another home.

Maybe a father would have fallen asleep in a rocking chair and let me wake him before dinner.

Maybe a grandmother would have climbed down the backdoor steps and herded visiting cousins around her.

Maybe aunts and uncles would have arranged themselves on a wide gallery and smiled into a camera.

Vintage photographs that I have purchased over the past several years do often, it turns out, manage to convey a feel of summer quiet. The moment captured within the white borders of each picture feels something worth keeping in focus, worth remembering, worth honoring. They each tell the kind of story we might tell when we are not concerned about our lives sounding more interesting than they are.

That kind of story seems important.

Retreat Night

This past Saturday night I was in a place where I always feel myself.

It is a place along the rocky coastline of the northern Atlantic.

It is a place far from city lights and city noises.

It is a place filled with the sound of waves pulling far off into the darkness and crashing back onto the shore.

It is a place of moist winds coming in off nighttime waters.

After spending my early years in New Orleans, I am always startled to find myself standing alone there by the Atlantic. Accustomed as a child to thick, sweet night air in the month of May, I am thrilled to be trusted by myself in a place like this. There seem to be questions in the night air and a wild, sovereign freedom from easy answers.

The walkways along which I move in checkered darkness are familiar with the sound of my voice. I talk to God there. I talk to my heart. I am usually trying to get them to talk to one another. And there are times when they do. With such frequency and regularity and predictability, in fact, that I am no longer surprised by the stillness and silence that open up around me at times along that road.

I trust what I say there. I trust it more than what I say in my home or what I say in a church. I trust it infinitely more than anything I might ever have said at a dinner party on a Saturday night.

I marvel sometimes that so few people have ever walked with me there, even in the daytime. How can I have kept this place all to myself? How can I claim to be known through and through if this nighttime walk is still one that no one has taken alongside me?

Thirty years of retreats, and this promise of a nighttime God ready to listen to me and my heart is still kept.

To my relief.

To my healing.

Image of waves from bluesherpa

Want the Change

A friend and I are having conversations these days that had not seemed possible a short while back. Surprises occur when things don't have to look the same.

Sonnets To Orpheus, Part Two, XII
By Rainer Maria Rilke

Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
Where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.

A Book about Retreats

I wish there were a particular book about retreats that I could read tonight.

Late Friday afternoon I will get into my car and drive out to a retreat house here in New England. I last made a retreat there almost three years ago. It is a place to which I am eager to return for I love the setting, its walkways and its silences. I love its thirty-year history in my life. I love the message that comes to me with each visit: What do you want?

I want a book about retreats, but a book that no one else would know how to read. It would be a book that could link these upcoming three days away with the three days I spent with a group last October at a seaside house in another part of New England. I cannot make this weekend’s retreat except as someone who was changed by that fall landscape, that fall rhythm of reflection, that sowing of seeds in the autumn ground.

I want a book that does not presume yet to know what lies in wait for me this springtime weekend away. It will be a book full of the ordinary hopes and eager longing that this particular location always calls up in me. And it will be a book respectful of the tears that I know I need to expect on those walkways. They always show up in this location, and part of the invitation each retreat is not to avoid them, not to fear them, but rather to welcome the way they summon to a new, unsuspected peace.

I emerge from each challenge of this past year filled with gratitude for my life and all I continue to experience as solid care and unflagging support.

Pray that the Spirit – yet once more – takes us all where life awaits, where love awaits, where the special message we each need to hear this weekend awaits hopeful hearts.

Photo from Country Living

Quai de Brumes (1938)

You don't need to understand French to understand the beauty of this one-minute scene from Marcel Carné's 1938 classic Quai de Brumes. Wait for the famous line of Jean Gabin's: "T'as de beaux yeux, tu sais."

Friday Hyacinths

I was approaching the entrance of my building late Friday afternoon, two Whole Foods shopping bags in hand.

In twenty-four hours I had reached the end of my ground coffee, my carton of half-and-half, a box of Kashi cereal, any fruit for the cereal, and a container of Kefir – each of them a breakfast staple. For a few days I had also been without cheese, nuts, bananas, or granola bars in the house. If I wanted a dinner other than pasta and prepared sauce or an omelette with dried spices, I had to visit the fish and meat cases of a grocery store and find something fresh to cook that evening. Or go out for dinner.

But I had felt like being home this Friday evening. After two evenings eating out – once with a friend after a church function, once with colleagues before an evening work event – I didn’t want to do anything more than settle in at home and maybe watch my Netflix copy of Moontide (1942) with French actor Jean Gabin.

My shopping had been quick and purposeful and practical. All right, I treated myself to hyacinths from the flower aisle. I intended the whole evening, as a matter of fact, to be something of a treat.

As I balanced the two shopping bags, one in each hand, near the entrance of my building, a friend who lived nearby and who was walking across the parking lot stopped to chat. Spotting the flowers sticking out of the top of one of the two bags, my friend gave me a knowing glance: “I see we have company tonight.”

I smiled at the crafty if inaccurate surmise on his part.

“Can’t someone just go to Whole Foods and treat himself to a good dinner and flowers?” I asked.

My friend started laughing: “All right, all right, whatever…”

I knew he suspected me of being cagey, and I was flattered by the credit he gave me for being ready to wine and dine someone I might want to hide from him.

It turned out to be a lovely evening here in my rooms. Flounder fillets dredged in corn meal and pan-fried, a mesclun salad with Manchego and an aged sherry vinaigrette, and a martini – what was there to want beyond that and the black-and-white magic of Forties’ Hollywood?

The next day I told another friend about the evening and about the conversation I had had on the steps outside my residence. I turned to him at a certain point and asked my question again: “Don’t people just go to Whole Foods sometimes and treat themselves to a good Friday dinner with flowers?”

I expected support from this kindred spirit, but he suddenly chortled and laughed: “No! Not likely!”

I was taken aback. I didn’t want to be accused of being humorless, but I felt at that moment left out there with what must be an idiosyncratic idea of a lovely Friday evening.

It took me some time to find the framework in which I could understand my urge. What had appealed to me about my Friday evening was something akin to the tradition of Shabbat – that conscious letting go of the week and the deliberate settling into the familiar walls of home. Nothing would have been wrong about going to an opera or a movie or a good restaurant. I recall, though, several months earlier talking with someone – like me, not born into a Jewish family or raised in the Jewish faith – who admitted that he loved the idea of keeping something like Shabbat in his home in years to come. We discussed what a Friday evening at home might mean for someone if the choice were made deliberately to draw the blinds once a week and nurture life at home.

I like to think that what happened in my home this past Friday evening captured some of that spirit of Shabbat. I can watch the hyacinths again today as I re-read these lines from a favorite author:

“Home. What can people have in mind who do not prefer it to any other place? Home: one’s own life, one’s innermost, ultimate concern, the center from which alone one can radiate effectively and mean anything to anybody. Home.”
Winterwise (1927) by Zephine Humphrey

Photo of hyacinths from Doug Green's Flower-garden-bulbs

Startled into Pleasure

The Saturday that you raise the storm windows and let a breeze move your curtains for the first time in six months, you realize that you sometimes just forget to be happy.

It can feel so easy to be happy sometimes, you wonder if you simply lose the knack at other times.

In my case this year, there can often be an agenda that seems very, very important – something about which I need to get clear, or an area in my life in which I need to make progress, or some way of seeing myself that I need to name and – if possible – repair. I can burrow in and stay focused or anxious or angry for a while.

And then I stumble across something I forgot that I enjoy.

Last week it happened twice.

It was early Sunday morning, and I did not need to leave for church for another two hours. On a whim I went to a campus near where I live. I had the landscaped walkways to myself. The air was kind, and the pace at which I walked brought on the meditative mood of a morning on retreat. It felt as though I had somehow managed to get this quiet world all to myself, and I wondered why I had not made such a walk a more regular part of my Sunday mornings long ago. The moment suited me – that was evident. Part of the happiness came from that awareness that I had returned to a kind of activity that makes me feel content.

A second moment of being startled into pleasure came in a library on that campus. With time on my hands, I had headed one day into the library, found the section with the literature titles, and parked myself in a red leather chair along the paneled wall. It was going to be just a comfortable chair in which to bide the time until I was expected elsewhere. I let my eyes travel the stacks. Although the 700-page biography of Emily Dickinson that I soon had in hand was unfamiliar, I began reading an introduction that simply would not let me go. Conveyed within the author’s style was a scholar’s voice that I found I wanted to hear, to follow, to savor for its intelligence and nuance and grace. Reading in that chair, surrounded by all those other volumes, I felt a little bit the scholar going about a scholar’s day. I recognized a John who has been happy in that setting before.

It can be easy to forget to be happy. And it can be easy to be reminded.

In the middle of the afternoon yesterday, I was on a moving train. I was returning home from a workshop near New York City. At a point earlier in the day, I had been among people invited to close their eyes and withdraw in imagination to a place where they had experienced happiness in the past. A goal of the exercise was to awaken people to the lively and lasting power of the positive emotions associated with those places and experiences. For sheer joy, the tenderness of the memory I relived brought me to tears. Familiar with the exercise from earlier workshops, I recall wondering then why I kept delaying making such practices a more habitual behavior in my life. Why was it still so easy some days to let others’ decisions determine the quality of the happiness I got to pursue and expect?

The Saturday that you raise the storm windows and let a breeze move your curtains for the first time in six months, you realize that sometimes you just forget to be happy.

Photo uploaded on Flickr by **Mary**