Call from Beyond

The recorded voice announces:

We are taking a 30 second survey on the nation’s debt crisis.

For participating, you will be offered a free 3 DAY CRUISE IN THE BAHAMAS.

Port charges may apply.

Get rich quick by commenting on economic collapse.

Hang up.

Walk in the sun of Seattle. Warm enough.

One Icon Fits All?

In Hawaii, they have a different take on Universal Man and Universal Woman. (This is for you, Omar.)

There, even the restrooms have island spirit.

The summer’s trip to the Pacific is a warm memory, as we pull up the covers in the dark season in the Northwest.

You think I’d remember what it takes to get through the 4pm sunsets.  But every year, it takes me a few weeks before I can welcome the darkness. Then I finally remember: this is the time to open the box of crayons, concoct a new recipe, sit in the opalescent fog and meditate on a text. This week I’ve been chewing on how to “open the gates with thanksgiving”.

A perfect time of year to return to the psalms. I am SO looking forward to this weekend’s workshop. It’s a new one. And there are crayon-friendly activities.  Rumor has it that we have a group that will go deep.  I look forward to seeing their unique imprints on the  “universal” images of the psalms.

Thoughts while flying first class

I don’t do this very often. It’s kinda weird. Kinda cool. Thanks to my sister’s  frequent flyer miles,  I get to see Mom and sip free wine on the way.

Look! They’ve added a new icon to the ole regulars (Seat Belt Action Required, Universal Man, Universal Woman,  and the smouldering cigarette that is firmly barred). The new addition is a cell phone icon.

Of course! This is the new pervasive behaviour that needs to be monitored. Funny it doesn’t have a bar over it.

Oh. Wait. Maybe that’s a part of the restroom icon — a mirror and sink between Universal Man and Universal Woman. Never seen it before. In first class, even the icons have more amenities.

Skyscraper Light

We live next to downtown Seattle. There’s no sparkling view of Puget Sound, but a fine landscape of skyscrapers. An urban naturalist can observe the elements playing with these buildings as much as any mountain or prairie vista. At times the WA MU Tower’s penthouse summit is hidden in fog while its midriff can clearly be seen. (Despite the company’s horrific self-destruction, they built a damn fine building.)

And then there’s skyscraper light, the sun rays that reflect off mirrored/glass surfaces and dart across the city. This morning the curved 76-story Columbia Tower, with its hundreds of facets, sparkles into our living room, giving us morning light from a westward window. Some times other buildings do the honors. There’s something about this reflected light that makes every detail of a shadow laser crisp. Once we put a pineapple in the window to ripen. Its magnified shadow showed every curve, every button, every leaf in aching detail, the clarity that you long to possess in a landmark moment: God, please let me remember it all — the smell-sight-color-temperature-feeling-hope-beauty-warmth-fragility. Oh let me at least capture its reflection with the perfection of pineapple-skyscraper light. Reflected glory.

Always, the brightness moves on. With the sun’s changing position through the seasons, the angle and arrival of skyscraper light changes daily, hourly. Light moves, bounces, and lands again.

This week I’m leaving a position I’ve held for three years, doing development work for a Shakespeare company and moving to an ecumenical group that brings churches together for social justice and service. The light moves from the prism of Shakespeare’s stories illuminating the human soul to the solar panels of programs that house the homeless and intensify the warmth of compassion into practical heat. I long to capture the time with my Shakespearean compadres in the amber clarity of skyscraper light. I await the next burst, God’s gift arriving from an unknown direction.

Garden Envy

My mom is a prowler.

For as long as I can remember, she has staked out particular homes with what some might call obsessive interest, driving past them as often as possible, slowing to the pace of a toddler on a tricycle so everyone in the car could practice the Art of Appreciation: My how tall the tulips are! I like how the layers of foliage compose a picture. See the little statue tucked in the back? Oh! there’s a Jack-in-the-Pulpit — reminds me of my childhood.

The simplest possible landscaping surrounded our family home for many years, a sheet of grass leading up to a few evergreen bushes. You could just hear them soothingly croon, “Trust us. We’ll make this easy on you. Don’t worry yourself one little bit.”  Mom worked full-time while raising four kids and a step-family. She had time for drive-by gardening, but not the demands of maintaining any more complex landscape.

Seasons change. As we grew up she was able to add in a brick patio, a bed of zinnias,  then a garden gazebo,  more beds,  layers of canopy,  her own charming statuary.  She bought a chipper together with a neighbor and the two ladies sparkled as they  bragged of making their own mulch and held their own with the good ole boys at the hardware store.

At age 82, Mom has the yard she longed for her entire life. It is a micro habitat of mid-American forest floor,  prairie flowers,  and tulip fields. A local legend, gardening friend and arborist  Greg Smith, helps her out, bringing unusual trillium or may apple from his own collection and stopping in several times a week to perform many small tasks needed to keep the progression of beauty throughout the seasons.

Last week as I visited Mom, we watched a stranger drive past,  slow down, stop,  get out of her car with a professional camera and snap shots of Mom’s yard.

Some dreams take your whole life to come true.

Science Fair meets Lenten Practice

This week I performed Emma Darwin for a science fair at Marshall Middle School in Olympia. It was totally impressive! 8th graders designing experiments and reporting the results on three narrow display panels. Among the many delicious investigations,  a young man tested the old wives’ tale that coffee grounds were a good fertilizer. He compared coffee-compost with a commercial nitrogen fertilizer and control plants that received no extra help.

It turns out that coffee grounds accelerated growth as effectively as the store-bought fertilizer.  Those old wives know what they’re talking about.

In medieval times, I’m told, ashes were spread across fields to fertilize them. I wonder how soot would compare to Starbucks in a science fair show-down?

Every Ash Wednesday, I remember this bit of archaic wisdom, as my faith community stands waiting the imposition of ashes. The season of Lent invites me to prune away unneeded shoots of expectation, resentment, hyper-responsibility. Toss them aside to compost or be burned. There’s good health to be found in releasing the elemental components of that which no longer serves. Return them to the ground from which they came, to feed growth of stronger, fresher habits.

Every student I spoke with at the fair told me that it was “hard work” to design and follow through with their experiments.  Why is it so apparent after the fact that the hard work is worthwhile, but in the midst of the process, most of us  resist?

I’m right there in the trenches with the 8th graders, wondering if my Lenten experiment will ever come together into something that could be posted proudly for the whole school to see. I sigh at the mess of releasing my habits.  I pray that something grows magnificently in their smelly rot. Somehow, I have faith that there’s value in this process of releasing the old and awaiting what might grow, a permaculture cycle for the soul.

Hifalutin thoughts. But now I’m off to find the old wives and get the low down on tea grounds as fertilizer.

Report from the Rumi Zone

A tale from last week’s Rumi performance:

Patrick (my co-presenter, the  musical counter-point to words) and I reach the love poetry section, a bouquet of short pieces. Turning to him I begin, “I would love to kiss you.” A bearded guy in the second row calls out, “We’d love to see it!”  The whole room guffaws.

Rumi supplies the come-back in his next line, “The price of kissing is your life.” It hits me anew, “The price of kissing is your life, ” I repeat. Bearded guy nods his head and grunts an acknowledgement. Being dissolved in love is dangerous business. Do we really want to see that? It’s an embarrassing painful mess as well as sublime pleasure. I see the face of my beloved, stripped of pretense, asking the most difficult questions. Our life together is a crucible of purification as we pay the price of kissing.

Breathe. Turn to Patrick who also knows what it is to be dissolved in love, whose beloved sits in the front row. Finish the poem:

I would love to kiss you.

The price of kissing is your life.

Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,

What a bargain, let’s buy it!

What a bargain for purification. Thanks Rumi.  Thanks beloved.

On Sharing Rumi

“Poems are rough notations for the music we are.”

writes the guy who, arguably, wrote more poetry than almost anyone in the history of the world, tens of thousands of lines. Why listen to him? Why have I spent months & hours preparing for tomorrow’s event, where we’ll sit together and join our imaginations with this odd duck from 900 years ago?

After searching for my deepest truth, reviewing my intentions from the launch of the project, the answer is strangely simple: I like him. And I think you would too.  Everything else is icing.

OK. I gotta catch a train to see a guy about a camel.

End Times & Election Season

“Now I know we’re going to hell in a handbasket,”

“Finally, things are turning around.”

I wade through the swamp of rhetoric daily, climb onto a small island of time, and listen to Rumi. He lived in a time of true sea change — as the middle east was swept by the Mongols, the crusaders, and disease. His family fled their home during war. And still, he writes of rebirth, of sheer joy, of compassion. “I go into the Muslim mosque and the Jewish synagogue and the Christian church and I see one altar.”

When I leave the island of rehearsal, he comes with me: Rumi does not fear mucking about in the swamp. After speaking his words and inhabiting his trickster stories, he climbs into my daily interactions. I find myself more able to flip a joke back to my husband, more likely to seek out the fussy baby to see what’s needed, more open to seeing the sky on a busy day, more able to hear the yearning in my frustrated friends of all political stripes. I want to prescribe this 13th century poet to our country: take two poems before bed and call me in the morning.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

Enticements, Frames, & Melancholy Danes

It’s my new game: telling friends about Hamlet,  Seattle Shakespeare Company‘s next play, and experimenting to see what brightens their eyes:

• If you think you ever want to see Hamlet in your lifetime, catch this one.
• Do you know about our $10 rush ticket club? Best deal in town.
• It’s a great night out.  Dress up. Go for dessert. (This, courtesy of my co-worker Thea who includes cocktails, a favorite girl friend, and a study guide in the game-plan.)
• Shakespeare is a cultural treasure. This company unlocks that treasure chest for everyone to enjoy.
• It’s a great gift to give your kids.

Each of these pitches builds a different frame for viewing the company’s work: fun times,  astounding artistry,  effective  education,  cultural literacy, bargain hunting.

We each have our own preferred frames. I happen to love the company’s egalitarian service to all ages and income levels. Our artistic director makes your synapses zing as she demonstrates how Shakespeare plumbs the soul and provokes the mind. Yet one frame is rarely enough. If your listener doesn’t happen to share your frame, then they won’t catch your enthusiasm.

It’s a useful exercise to list all the arguments used to entice involvement in your project and then name the frames they represent. What’s missing? Are you addressing both sides of the brain? Which ones most easily pop out of your mouth? Great! Now which frames will be powerful allies to your favorite? Yes, it’s essential we convey the quality of our productions, but the fact we operate in the black can be critical for a foundation or a donor.

The concept of framing is not new, but it’s been elevated in the work of Matthew Nisbet, Associate Professor in the School of Communication at American University.  Nisbet studies the impacts of framing in popular responses to science. I’ve found a corollary in arts, education and social service: it’s easy to assume all listeners share our passion. Open another window. Find a new perspective. Add a frame to your collection.