Rest for the Weary

I bumped into discouragement this morning. It was not a friendly meeting. I fell down in it for awhile, rolled around in it. I tried for awhile to get away, but for some reason, discouragement just did not want to let me go happily about my day.

I took a shower, thinking that might help wash away the discouragement that seemed to want to cling to me, and while I was standing in the hot water, letting it pour down the back of my neck and over my shoulders,  it suddenly came to me that I needed to listen to the Chaplet of Divine Mercy in Song. This morning. Now. As soon as possible.

I continued to think about it as I dried off and got dressed, although my mind kept trying to convince me that I should do other things. My mind, small little thing that it is, and very focused on it's own motives, wanted me to do something that looked more like work, more productive than sitting around listening to people sing "For the sake of your sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world" over and over again. My mind did not like this idea. My mind tried to convince me that this was dumb: Yes, Divine Mercy! I know what that is! I know the concept. Please, can we move on now? Let's do something else today, ok? What other new things can we think about?

But I did it. I listened to my heart, pulled it up on my iphone and pressed play (you can listen to it here). About 42 seconds into the song, I started to cry. And I cried. And I kept crying for the duration of the song (18 minutes, 15 seconds), which is a really long time to cry. I would call that a "good cry". I would call that "productive". And I would call it "work", because I had to show up and pay attention, and focus, and be present.

When all the tears that needed to be shed were gone, I read some scripture verses to help bring me hope and ease my discouragment. And then I wrote the poem below, based partially on these verses from John 15:

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love.  I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.  My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.  You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.  You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other.


John 15

It is too cold in this winter
to plant, yet the orchid blooms on the windowsill
and the evergreen outside spreads wide branches in defiance
of death. Eternal, say the outspread arms, an invitation to the weary
of heart, to all who stumble the path of frozen travels in firm steps
searching for the everlasting. Yesterday, today, tomorrow
it says, I will be
here
air
and green
and breathing

and life. So there is something in that
tree that says forever
that says not fear
something that holds us
as the wind does its changing
dance. Still,

there is soil
and roots
while the ground turns its cold shoulder
to seeds and sprouting, to the upward pushing
potential of flowers, to the garden's abundance
and vines hung heavy with creation's

fruit: the thing that comes
from labor, from the vision
of something new
to sustain us, love
harvested.



Other verses to help with discouragement:


Deuteronomy 33:27 – The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.

Psalm 126:5 – Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.

Psalm 37:23-24 – If the Lord delights in a man’s way, he makes his steps firm; though he stumbles, he will not fall, for the Lord upholds him with his hand.

Throw Back Thursday

 This is a poem I wrote when I was 6 years old in first grade. My teacher, Sr. Ann Jerome, kept this in her desk drawer for 15 years. When she retired, she gave it to my mom and my mom framed it. Before anything else, before I knew anything of what is to be found in school and books and learning, in the deepest parts of my heart and soul, I am a poet. Oh yes, yes, yes, yes.

Stressed? Worried? Confused about life?

Find an angel. I did. Here is what mine looks like:

 

 

She reminds me of what is important:

 

And she leaves messages on my pillow letting me know I am not alone:

Life in the Divine Parade

Strange what you remember in the turning of tragic: the detail of flip-flops
On feet running from the car, past the arrival of the paramedics walking
In long strides clasping medical bags to the scene of the horseback accident:
A pasture alive with early Ohio Spring at the turn of evening in lengthening daylight
And your daughter lying in it, in green grass and blood,
How it must have been warm that April day to be wearing flip-flops
When you rode the long siren sound down Broadway of your hometown
The street of parades, driven in cars, in carriages, on floats, waving
Always waving and smiling, while the fire engines and ambulances sounded
Their sirens and horns in joyous celebration. And now

The ambulance sounds the siren of tragic and you ride unwaving and unsmiling
In the front seat of uncertainty, turning the tragic parade with your prayers:
Praising the existence of paramedics and ambulance
Praising the place you go for sewing and mending
Praising the giving of morphine, the ease of rolling beds
Praising rubber and steel and plastic
Praising doors that open without effort
Praising hands, the hands of many:
Hands that drive
and write
and type
and carry
and clean
and bandage
and find the small vein
Hands of angels reaching from beyond
And the blessed moment in time of the recording of the Memorare
Inspired through heart and mind and mortal hand of
Someone who wants you to know Blessed Mother's protection and help
For you to know in this moment of perfect failure, in the complete humanity of your fear,
That she
Blessed She
Virgin of virgins
Our Mother wants the better for you.

 

What's in a Name?

Good question, Shakespeare. Why did I name this blog "love, hands, poetry"? One answer to that question is because when I write, I feel like love flows through my hands to create something poetic. And another answer is that I feel the same way when I do healing touch work: love flows through me to my hands and brings a healing experience to another person (and me in return), which is a poetic moment, if you ask me.

In writing, I write from my heart in order to connect with my readers, with whatever eyes or ears happens upon my words and feels something in them that stirs a memory of their soul's home, the place we came from before, what I call God. In the act of creating with words, I reach deep into myself to find the Word, from where all words flow. And then I let them flow...in gratitude for being given the gift of hearing them and knowing them, for the gift of a loving creator who made us to be creative, and the gift of my body and hands which allow me to give expression to those words and touch the hearts and minds and souls of others.

In healing work it feels very much the same to me, but looks different.  I connect to Divine Love, the source of all healing, then heart connect with the person I am working with, and let whatever good is in the heart of the Divine for that person at that moment to flow through me. If you take the commas out of my blog title, it reads "love hands poetry", which is another way of saying "God gives healing". Mother Teresa said, "Where there is love, there is God." And that is where the love comes from that I bring to my writing and to my healing work, not from me, but from God in Me.

Mother Teresa is one of my inspirations, not because she was some great and talented person, but because of her humility in allowing God's love to flow through her. To do this, she spent time every day in silence and contemplation to fill herself with this presence, this healing energy, which is pure love, and then she let that love flow from her to others in need of it. In slums of Calcutta, in a place almost completely lacking in the idea of human dignity, she brought to people the idea that they are loved and valued by caring for them, tending to their sickness and wounds, feeding them, giving them a bed to sleep in.

That is love. That is using her hands for healing. That is a poetic life. Love, hands, poetry. Would a blog by any other name retain that dear perfection which it owes that title? Perhaps so. But I'm calling it perfect.

God Bless Leeches

It all began with leeches. Those slimy little bloodsuckers, how I love them! They suck, of course, but it is precisely because of how much they suck that I love them so much. Because of leeches, my entire worldview, my entire universe, shifted in just a short period of time. That short period of time was precisely 9 days, which was the amount of time it took for my daughter to fall of her horse, sever her ear (like, seriously...almost completely. ripped. off.) have emergency plastic surgery in the middle of the night (that's a new one, huh? Did you even think plastic surgeons worked nights?) and then spend several days in the ICU with leeches sucking on her ear around the clock.

It is times like these when you learn that all of God's creatures are important. I mean really learn it. In your heart, learn it. Not like it was in Bible School when you sang that song about "If I were a butterfly, I'd thank you God that I could fly." Because there were no verses about fleas or bedbugs, none about vampire bats or mosquitoes, and definitely none about leeches (If I were a lee-ee-eech, I'd thank you God that I could SUCK). No, none like that. So, although the verdict is still a little out for me on those other gross blood-sucking creatures, I am thankful for leeches. I love those slimy little guys. They saved my daughter's ear and brought her back to wholeness. And to me, in my heart and soul, bringing a person back to wholeness is doing God's work.

What leeches did for my daughter's ear was to do their little bloodsucking thing, which did the job of pulling blood from her body through her ear, which allowed a flow of blood into what was, at that point, a dead body part. The tiny capillaries that allow the normal flow of blood in and out had been severed, and the plastic surgeon lacked the ability to re-attach such tiny little veins, so our only hope for her to re-claim her ear was through leeches and their God-given hunger for blood.

You never think about these things, how at one crucial moment your life will come down to depending on leeches. Truly, every single moment of our life is like this, dependent on the tiniest of details, but it is in those blown up, bigger-than-life moments of trauma that you SEE it. You see it so clearly it astounds you.

I remember in the surreal trauma-filled haze of the following day after her accident and surgery, we waited for those leeches. We waited for them like the Israelites waited for God in the desert, both hoping and giving up, uncertain of exactly what the future was for us, or whether this mysterious promised package was really going to save us.  The leeches were being flown in from New York, these special "sterile" leeches, raised for medical use, but they were detained at CVG because they were "questionable". Perhaps there were rumors of a terrorist leech attack. We are not sure, but we waited for excruciating hours for the leeches to come and relieve the purple-black swolleness of our daughter's ear.

And arrive they did. At the darkest hour, they came, the nurses and doctors working quickly to attach the leeches to her ear. Within seconds seconds of attaching them, the leeches worked their sucking magic, draining the purple-black blood from her ear. Within seconds, her ear turned to pink. To see it was absolutely astounding and amazing and made me want to bow down in worship to those leeches, to worship the fact of their bloodsucking, to worship the fact of God in them.

That was the moment of my life when I began to have the courage in my heart to really believe that the power to heal exists in every atom of the universe, and in every part of each one of us.  All of us, down to the smallest part of our being, are made with the impulse to heal and to help one another. We are all pushing, pulling, sucking one another toward the light, toward wholeness and oneness.  We are all leeches, and although on some days we may feel as if the people in our world are annoyed with us for spoiling their dip in the lake, the truth is, the fact of who we are may one day be our saving grace.