Seeking Calm

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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.

Unexpected Kindness

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In 1982 writer Anne Herbert scrawled a few words on a placemat in a Sausalito, California restaurant. “Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.” Eventually her words set off a chain reaction of kindness. Just this morning the guy in front of me at the Wildflower café bought my coffee. I could not stop thinking how thoughtful this was as I headed back to my study to dig through my old files.

Today I awoke on a mission. I want to find my words. I am trying to thread together pieces that might form my next book. I have had a couple of false starts. It is a long and tedious task. Sometimes I feel like I am scaling Mount Everest, but if I get it right, my current scrawls will become a book. Writing helps me find meaning. Find wholeness. Explore my unique voice. Learn. The work gives me purpose, and I know I am driven to do it for others—not simply me. But I am unclear why I must tirelessly tunnel through mounds of old papers to do it .

Maybe I need to control the space around me? Maybe I need a sense of order?  But I realize that I simply need space to hold my new ideas when I am not tinkering with them or shuffling them into a different pattern or plan. I need a home for this creation as it evolves.

When I open the top drawer of my file cabinet, I find stacks of old tax papers that show how little money a writer can accrue in whole years. The first file drawer empties with ease as I stuff this papery mass into a plastic garbage bag that becomes so stretched it begins to split.

In the second drawer I discover the draft of an adolescent novel that I had titled Outcast. It is the story of a boy in high school trying to find himself while struggling with his obsessive-compulsive disorder. My friend Margot had quilted a potholder to celebrate the birth of this book. It frames all things writerly—paperclips, manuscripts, coffee cups, pens, and a huge sign that holds my mantra, “YOU CAN” —for she believed in the book even before I did. While my son would talk me out of publishing it because he feared it was his story, I would publish a truncated version of it later.  I hug the trivet to my heart knowing it is another kindness. I will put it to use in my kitchen!

In the bottom drawer I find two oil paintings that I had planned to hang. When the pandemic hit, my neighbor Candy could no longer volunteer to care and rock the babies in the nearby hospital’s NICU, and she decided to learn to paint.  Then a small tissue wrapped oil-painting of a green and pink-bellied hummingbird showed up at my doorstep.  After my mother’s death, I had told Candy that a hummingbird often seems to pause at my window where I write. In the note accompanying her painting, Candy  wrote, “Many believe when a hummingbird visits, it is a visit from a loved one who has passed.” The painting is small and delicate. Like the bird who visits me. I position it on my windowsill overlooking my garden because I will be able to see at least one hummingbird each morning.

But all the while I kept thinking of one word.: Kindness. One study from Emory University shows us that when you are kind to others, you raise the level of feel-good hormones created in your brain. In other words when you act altruistically toward others, you are rewarded with what is called a “helper’s high.”

Perhaps even more important is that when others are kind to us, we will be inspired to do kindnesses, too.  There seems to be a ripple effect that comes with kindness. That is why Anne Herbert’s beautiful words scribbled on a napkin have echoed back to us through the years. This is why after I received the hummingbird painting, I gave my neighbor a copy of my book, The Story You Need to Tell. To reciprocate.

Weeks later I found a larger painting wrapped in tissue in a box by my front door. I unwrapped it to discover another oil painting. Etched on the canvas was a small vase with bright colored roses made vivid with shadowing and positioned on a nightstand by Candy’s bed. Beneath the flowers, my friend had carefully painted a stack of three books– Notes to Myself by Hugh Prather, Joyful by Ingrid Fetell Lee, and The Story You Need to Tell.  For my friend to read my book was a kindness, but to honor it in her work was truly moving for me.

As I finished shoving old notes from books-past into garbage bags and hauling them outside to the recycle bin, I paused for a break and in that moment, it hit me that I find writing a book is a long, hard endeavor. Like climbing that mountain or competing in the Olympics. But I will go back to my study because there are moments of powerful insight and revelation and moments of what I have come to know as the miracles of words. When Anne Herbert wrote “practice random acts of kindness” she experienced this. Her words have echoed through the decades and danced through my mind yet again this morning and as I write this blog.

In the end what matters more than waving the older lady with very few groceries ahead of you in the grocery line or taking dinner to a friend who has lost a loved one or simply helping a child retrieve a lost toy tossed from a highchair at a restaurant?  Today and every day I am going to work a little harder to appreciate the moments of unexpected kindnesses–a cup of coffee, a handmade potholder, or heartfelt oil paintings. Those wonderful moments come ripe with encouragement. With hope. With friendship. With joy—and with the gratitude that is now spilling onto this page. Let’s continue to surprise each other with unexpected kindnesses. It makes all the difference.

 

 

 

 

 

Small, Wet Miracles

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Last week at the beach five-year-old Harper gave me a purple clam shell. And then another. Within minutes she had collected a dozen shells from the shore. Each shell was more beautiful than the last one. We spread them out and studied them. In the sunshine they glistened with the purple hues of amethysts and the white shine of pearls. In the background we heard the surf and when it surged close in surprise, Harper shrieked with glee, and bounded back toward the waves with delight. I sat awe-struck and as I thumbed through the bounty of her shells, I also thumbed through my memories.

When I was the same age as Harper, I took my first family trip to the East Coast. When I returned home, I kept envisioning the “nine-foot waves” hovering over me. I did not yet know that waves ten times that size existed. For days I labored to tell my dearest, oldest, best friend Jan about the ocean. “The ocean has more water than all the bathtubs in the world,” I explained. Then I threw my five-year-old arms into the air. “It has arms made of water that stretch up nine feet high, and when they crash down, they can knock you over.” Jan’s eyes grew wider than the gum balls we chewed. She had not yet been to a beach, but she understood. The ocean is another world and filled with inexplicable mystery.

Perhaps because the Earth began as a hot molten rock that formed oceans as it cooled, or perhaps because life sprang from the oceans, or maybe because the early life that migrated from the water to the land was initially drawn back to the sea, I still feel called to the water. My dad loved the ocean, and perhaps the pull is genetic–and ages old. Existential questions have always surfaced when I sit by the sea.

By the time I was seven or eight the beach had become threaded into my family life as a ritual and a way to see our cousins who all lived a thousand miles from my Indiana home. Each summer we loaded up the station wagon with a beach ball, suitcases, and a cooler packed with sandwiches so my dad could drive like a maniac for fourteen hours across four states until we landed in Ocean City or Virginia Beach. There we met up with my dad’s entire family and rented neighboring bungalows. In the days that followed we created some of the best memories of my life–telling jokes, riding of rafts on the ocean waves, covering my brother in a body cast of sand, and collecting an array of shells, especially sand dollars. I still have a jar of these treasures.

Years later when I read Rachel Carson’s writings on the sea, I realized that I was not the only one to have been awestruck by the wonder of the ocean. Her work undulates with a soft cadence of miracle after miracle found beneath the surface of the water. Before her poetic words I did not understand that the deep and dark depths of the sea are not silent but much like symphony. I discovered the seaweed and microscopic algae use energy from the sunlight to build living tissue and that tiny animals such as clams eat this and are eventually eaten by larger fish—and so begins the food chain that gives us our life.

On one of those beach trips many years ago, I suspect I posed my first existential questions. After a grand day of splashing in the waves and collecting shells, gorging on hot dogs dripping with mustard, and playing Monopoly with my cousins, we sat on the beach looking up at the dark night sky with billions of stars. I remember that moment because I was sitting by my dad, eating a chocolate ice cream cone, and I asked him, “How did all of those stars get there?”

I remember my dad saying, “We don’t really know.”

“How did I get here—on Earth?”

“That’s an equally puzzling question,” my dad said and laughed.

I am not sure how old I was. But I recall the moment because it startled me. I had come to the beach thinking my dad knew almost everything, but it was here I realized that he didn’t. That perhaps no one did.

At the ocean I would spend hours studying sand crabs, sand pipers, seaweed, and all kinds of small wet miracles. I studied the undulating waves that seemed to come relentlessly onto the beach, whispering to me all the while.  It was here I learned to listen to the water and the Earth. It was here that I learned to respect something much larger than I was. Something that connected it all. Transcended it all.

The ocean has taught me that the surf grounds rocks into sand and the shoreline is everchanging. Like the tide we slip into this miracle of life and like the tide we flow out. Like the waves we rise up, and we fall down. Suddenly, amid my beach reverie, a child in a mermaid swimsuit runs toward me waving her arms joyfully with a golden-striped cone shell. Life is as fluid as the seas and equally filled with small, wet miracles.