Unexpected Gratitude

in /by

Living in the desert it is my morning ritual to begin each day with a large, bubble glass full of black iced tea. The bubble glasses were a long-ago wedding present, and since they are party glasses, it makes me joyful to drink my tea from them.

Five years ago, Steve had business in Japan. Usually, I don’t’ sign on to his trips, but this was pre-COVID, and he promised we would attend a tea ceremony. That snagged my interest.

After hours on a plane and a short train ride, we arrived in the futuristic glass train station of Kyoto. The train station proved to be a stark contrast to the tiny historic streets of Kyoto lined with old Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines as well as restaurants that make an art of ancient Japanese cuisine.

On our third day we visited the tea house on one of these cobblestoned streets. We waited outside in alternating drizzle and rain until the appointed time.  Then the door to the tea house slid open and a charming young woman in a pale green kimono dotted with red and white cherry blossoms peeked out at us. She pointed to a faucet near the door. “Please wash hands,” she said in a childlike singsong. Following her direction, we left our shoes outside the house, and ducked to enter a new world of tea.

Wordlessly, the girl ushered us into the tearoom with a huge cast iron pot in the center. Steve sat at the head of the mat with me by his side across from our host. We were taught to kneel, sitting on our legs, and to bow toward each other in a gesture of greeting.  An older woman dressed in a dark formal kimono appeared from behind a silk-sheeted door and bustled into the room, placing candies wrapped in white papers in front of us.

We shared our names. Stephen. Sandra. Then the girl pointed to the older woman, “Mother,” she explained. We nodded in deference. Then the girl placed her palm on her own chest and said, “Hana.” She spoke it like a song.

“Hana,” we repeated.

I tried to nibble at the candy which tasted like iced sugar cubes. “Do we have to eat it?” Steve whispered. I nodded at him. Then I tried to smile as the sugar cube caught in my throat and made me choke. I had swallowed it almost whole. The older woman’s face froze as if I had violated the official tea protocol.

Steve tried to cover for me declaring, “Good. Very good.” And the poor man who hates sweets was rewarded with a second candy that he munched with inauthentic joy. Peace was restored in the tearoom.

The mother had slipped behind the silk-sheeted door and returned with a tray containing small cups, tea bowls, and a whisk. She placed them in front of Hana who ceremoniously wiped them and began to mix and mash the tea.  “Matcha.  Green tea.  It is like gold. Expensive.” The words lit up her face.

Then she passed the tea to her mother for approval. Carefully the mother examined the tea, sniffed it, and then formally nodded.

“Now you must approve the tea,” Hana explained to us. Then the mother lifted the teacup and while I could not detect exactly what happened, it appeared in passing the teacup to Steve it got caught in the sleeve of her kimono and flipped over. The precious matcha powder lay scattered across the mat. The women’s faces took on the haze of the dark clouds outside, and I thought the mother might cry.

“It’s okay,” I said catching the mother’s eye. But her humiliation was painted across her face as she lowered her head and swept up the tea.

“It’s okay,” Steve repeated. But their silence clouded the room.

I wanted to tell them stories of my many goof-ups. How I fell off a pommel horse in fourth grade PE and landed on my head with my neon red dress tossed over my head and my cotton underwear on full display for my classmates. Or about last year when I turned around during the celebration of my son and ran directly into a huge and ornate birthday cake. Not only did I disfigure the cake, but my white blouse also looked like a Pollack painting smeared with buttercream icing and chocolate.

While I wanted to break the tension with my stories, I sensed this was not the place. A deep-seated awkwardness hung in the air as Hana mixed the new tea. Then her mother passed the cup to Steve. He sipped it and nodded with genuine pleasure. Then the women turned their gaze to me as I was handed my cup. I drank it slowly. Carefully. The tea smelled like the fresh grass in May, but it tasted like bitter greens followed with a kick of licorice. I willed myself to like it.

“Wonderful!” I exclaimed as I lowered my cup. “Good! Very good!”  The mother sighed with relief and Hana’s smile returned. It was a dark, rain spattered day but suddenly it felt like a ray of sun had cut a path into the room.

The Story You Need to Tell Japanese Green Tea Ceremony

 

A thousand years ago Zen Buddhists sipped tea as way of staying awake during meditation. As we sipped our tea together this day, Hana explained how the ceremony had evolved as a way of bringing people together to honor the Japanese traditions of seeking calm, tranquility, and of sharing harmony and respect.  At the end of our time together, Hana turned unexpectedly to us. “You have honored us,” she said. She added a heartfelt, “Thank you.”

Looking back, I am grateful for the opportunity to travel, for being able to experience a world so different from mine, to see the perspective of Hana, her mother, and so many others.  But I came home with a greater appreciation, a most unexpected appreciation, of my own world:  the hummingbird who visits me daily, the black tea I sip from bubble glasses, the quiet writing time, and the stories I share with you and with friends.  It may not be an exotic world, but it is one that fills me with gratitude.

Large or small, what are you thankful for?

The Guest House

in /by

Nine years ago, after my first writing class for cancer patients at Piper Cancer Center, Chloe inched shyly forward. She wanted to give me a gift. A poem. Rumi wrote,

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

I was moved by the idea of the gift, and before COVID, I hugged students, and I am certain I hugged sweet Chloe. But when I read the poem later, I stuffed it in my jacket pocket. Something about the words irritated me. Then I forgot about it.

Ten years ago in the same building, I had waited for an unwanted guest. I shivered as the door of the box-like office swung open. A chalk-white radiologist strode in and motioned me to sit back. It seemed as if we were trapped in a black-and-white 16mm film of my life, a scary, surreal film — the kind of strange avant–garde ones Andy Warhol used to make in the ‘60s. There was no sound but the ghostly doctor distinctly mouthed the words, You have cancer.   

An hour later I was curled up in the fetal position on the cold tile of my kitchen floor, rocking back and forth and feeling caught in the undertow of my mind. Unprepared. Thoughts swirling out of control. Jolted by surprise, I had joined the 250,000 women in the United States who each year learn they have breast cancer. I did not want this visitor.

The next morning, I drove to Changing Hands Bookstore where I often find solace not only in the space but in the pages of books. On this day I found a bright red journal and even before I went through the line to pay for it, I had scribbled my name in it and dubbed it, My Cancer Journal. These pages would hold my questions, my fears, and my heartfelt memories of test after test, physician after physician, and surgery after surgery in the coming year. In that time, I would see my mother’s scars from losing her breasts. In that time, I would lose both my breasts. In that time, I would cry and struggle to find my way forward. But I did. Cancer changed me, and my writing in the bright red journal was a huge part of this.

Today, as I finished teaching book club to a group of twelve sage women, many of them cancer patients or survivors, I realized it has been almost ten years since my diagnosis. At the end of class, one participant asked to read a poem that had helped her traverse her husband’s death to colon cancer and her own struggle with breast cancer. Vicki closed our class by reading these words,

The Guest House by Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

This poem cut deep into my being as it had nine years ago.  Oh, yes, I remembered the pain of these words as I first read them and stuffed them into my pocket. Then I was struggling to open the door to my own cancer. Struggling with an unwanted guest.  I could not welcome and certainly not honor cancer. But now, all these years later, these words were lyrical and beautiful to me. As Vicki read them, I embraced them. For now, I could finally be grateful for my cancer. I could finally understand how it helped me become more of the person I needed to be.

As we all face this pandemic, another unwanted guest, I am trying to relearn the lesson Rumi’s poem held for me. I hope you will join me in allowing ourselves to sit with this difficult experience. Learn to accept it. Most of all, let us find a way to learn and grow from these unexpected challenges.

Seeking Calm

in /by

Words have always calmed me. It is why I sit here writing. As I write with rain tapping on my sunroof, these words of Langston Hughes come to me–

“Let the rain kiss you.

Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.

Let the rain sing you a lullaby.”

I opened the patio door so I could hear the rain hit the pavement. Not only does writing calm me, so does the staccato sound of the raindrops torpedoing the patio tiles and splashing. I recall being a child and discovering that my bright red galoshes were perfect for splashing in the rain puddles and walking along ditches where I could dig for crawdads who fled the drains during a downpour. One of my favorite photos is a two-year-old me dancing in the rain. Although it is black and white, I vividly remember the red galoshes and red and white polka dot umbrella. In the photo the umbrella is tossed aside on the ground, and I am reaching up to the sky with joy as I dance in the rain.

Oh, there were years when I grew weary of rain. Especially when I lived in a coal-mining village in England as a child. I would shiver as the rain blew in my 3A classroom window and landed on my carefully inked essays, smudging them. Later when I first taught high school in Indiana, I had to drive thirty miles in frequent thunderstorms and snowstorms to my first teaching job. One night as I drove home in the dark of winter, and my Chevy II slid across the ice into a snowbank, I decided I would leave rain and snow country. Forever.

Ironically when I moved to the desert, I quickly came to see rain as the possibility of hope, new beginnings, and of course, rainbows. Like the tears a young child cries to wash away the pain of a scraped knee, the rain washes away the scorched pain of the desert. Slowly I have learned this. Slowly I have come to love the sounds, the smells, and the art the rain paints on the surface of the arid earth.

Last week as I drove to Sedona for a small event, I marveled at the fields filled with six-foot-tall wild sunflowers and yellow poppies growing in the highway medians and across the hills and valleys.  It was still August, but it was cool, and I rolled my windows down to breathe in the earthy smell of the creosote plants. Just this fragrance fills me with complete calm.

Late that night I sat outside on the patio of a dear friend talking about her move from Phoenix to the red rock canyons. Errant raindrops were falling around us. “It was an easy change,” Linda explained. “I didn’t realize that being around nature would give me more energy, but it does. It literally calms me down.” I understood.

When I said I was still learning how to listen to nature, especially the rain, Linda laughed and said, “This gentle rain reminds me of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.” Within minutes the wind began to bang the wooden gate to the yard and whistled violently through the junipers. “Perhaps now we are enjoying Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony?” I chided.

Then for a long time we sat in wonder, watching and listening as the storm performed its magical dance around us. As the thunder clapped like cymbals, the lightning set the night canyon aglow, illuminating the reds and oranges of Cathedral Rock in split second flashes. It was as stunning as any painting I have ever seen by Chagall or Matisse.

To write. To dance in the rain like a child. To breathe in the fresh air deeply. To spend time with a friend. To be one with a nature and rain–and to be fully present in these moments. To really see them, calms me. In these times, I will try to embrace more of these moments—and I will wish the same for you.