BREATHE LISTEN NAME

SOUNDS:  I heard my first robin of the spring Monday morning, yesterday morning, and once again today.  Usually it takes a couple days before I see one, but it joys me to know they are there.  Schools are closed, and we can’t do our artistic residency, but yesterday evening, I could hear neighbor children down the block laughing and screaming.  A blessing.

On the other side of sound, my wife Luisa is organizing the thousands of myriads of glass she uses for mosaic.  Yesterday, while I was meditating upstairs, she dropped a box of them on the floor.  It’s happened before, so I wasn’t too alarmed, but it made me think about all that is being broken in our world right now: bodies, families, businesses, our social life.  There will be time and imagination to make beauty out of this brokenness, but first we have to be in the brokenness.

BREATH: Today is the Feast of the Annunciation, nine months before Christmas Day.  It almost always falls in Lent, the time of pilgrimage leading up to the death of Jesus on the cross, and his resurrection.  Angel Gabriel says to young Mary: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you”. In Greek (as in Hebrew), the word for spirit and wind are the same.  I imagine Mary breathing in the spirit of those words of Gabriel, and letting the power of the most high overshadow—from inside her, inside her very guts.  Not just her womb, but her entire body, her whole life becomes the shelter of the holy.  Considering the Greek word is δύναμις, from which we get the word “dynamite”, that must have been quite a breath!

I’ve been practicing a meditation technique the past couple of days, where I take deep breaths. I do that often, but in this practice, you hold your breath (which I think is holding yourself) for awhile after you’ve breathed it all in.  And you hold your breath, your self, for awhile after you have left it all out.  I found that when I hold my breath, myself while I am full of breath, I can feel the pulse in my head and I start to get nervous until I let it out.  When I hold my breath, myself when I have emptied my breath, I feel calm.  There is wisdom in this, wisdom that Mary knew.  Emptying ourselves makes our selves be more open to grace.  I did discover that it helped to open my mouth just a little when my lungs were full of breath.  Maybe that made me—literally—a little less full of myself!

NAMING:  Gabriel also says to Mary: “therefore the child to be born will be holy; will be called Son of God.”  I think you could also translate that (my Greek is very rusty, but I have no qualms about making things up) something like: “because of the Spirit coming upon you and the power overshadowing you, the one who is to come will be holy, will be named Child of God.”

There is a lot we don’t know about what is to come with this virus, the economy, our world.  But I believe we can breathe this word that hung from our baptismal fount in church from Advent until almost Lent:  “All children are holy”.  That was the theme of our Posada this past December, that as we come seeking posada, shelter for Mary, Joseph and the little one who is coming, we come bearing this undeniable peace: that all children are holy, that each life is precious, and that we all have within our bodies, our selves, a remarkable inn, a beautiful and cozy sanctuary in which we can shelter the holy breath.

And that holy breath comes with incredible power to love, even when we are kept apart.

The poem below is from my book “The Devouring Land”, which is NOT on Amazon, but you can purchase from me. 20% of my cut goes to ministries with immigrants, who stand the most to suffer from the economic recession,

Be justice, be mercy, be listening, breathing, naming.

Patrick

THE EGYPT OF MARYS WOMB *

A small town.  A back door.

A young woman at her work

chopping, searing, holding.

A flash, not so much of light, as

the chorus of sight that light trails                 

as it passes by.  A strange

word, an aspiration,

a slight bow of the head,

a warm wrapping of wings.

There will be lions, later.

There will be swords.

But tonight, your flesh

is reed and pitch,

bitumen and straw,

floating on the great river,

eyes open, naming,

one by one, all the stars

of the vast, quaking world.

* Title from a poem by Robert Bly

RANDOM AND NOT SO RANDOM THOUGHTS

RANDOM AND NOT SO RANDOM THOUGHTS

-           I rent a studio at the Loft Literary Center, in the Open Book in downtown Minneapolis.  It is a block from Gold Medal Park and a couple blocks from the Mississippi River. I often walk down there when I take a break.  Over the past few weeks, it has been fun watching the ice recede slowly and then—poof!—disappear almost overnight from the main channel.

-           I usually stop at the memorial to the thirteen people killed and the many injured in the August 1, 2007 collapse of the 35W bridge.  Our daughter’s name is on the wall of survivors, and I rub my fingers over her four names (see the poem at the end of this).  Lately, I’ve been rubbing my fingers over two other names, who were on that bus as young people.  One allegedly took the money he got from the settlement when he turned 18, and went to Syria to fight with ISIS, and was killed.  Another, who had worked as a parole and corrections officer, is sitting in jail, awaiting her trial for a kidnapping that ended in a murder.  It has made me think about what happens to the trauma in us years later. I’m not saying that the bridge trauma caused  the choices these two made (or our Talia, for that matter). There were other traumas in their young lives for sure.  But it does make me wonder. And grieve.

-           On a lighter and more happier note, our older daughter has passed her state certification and now will begin selling insurance.  My wife, especially, helped her study for the test many nights, and she (and a little bit of me) learned a lot about insurance.  It happened that during that time, I turned on the radio in the middle of a commercial, which asked me (and I think you, dear reader, as well): “Is 2020 the year you finally get rid of insurance complacency?”   First of all, I didn’t know I suffered from insurance complacency.  I didn’t even know there was such a thing as insurance complacency.  But now, no doubt with help from our daughter, I plan on making this Election-Leap-Olympic Year a Year of Liberation from all forms of insurance complacency, both domestic and foreign.

-           Yesterday, we received a letter from a funeral home, addressed to “The Hansel Family”.  On the outside of the envelope—repeated in BIG LETTERS on the top of the letter inside—read the following words: We Need Your Help.  My first thought was “What, aren’t there enough people dying for them?”  And then I thought, “What actions would they ask us to do to reverse that trend?”  I mean, the coronavirus is doing its deeds across the world, and opioids and hunger and lack of health care are quite active in Minnesota   Turns out that they need help determining “how members of our community plan for one of the hardest things a family has to face.”  Which means they need help getting me and us as pre-paid customers.  Perhaps I will “help” them out, and then change my phone number.

-           In the bathroom at The Loft, there are new signs urging us to wash our hands, in about 20 languages.  I was pleased to see that most of the languages were from Asia or Africa and one indigenous one from here.   I’m hoping to see election signs in many languages up soon, and only one color: blue.  I’m not excited about Joe Biden, but not voting for him means helping the scourge of this man and his dishonorable party.  We have got to win this.

The poem below is from my book “The Devouring Land” about the 35W bridge memorial. I have a bunch of readings coming up: see my page PatrickPoet on Face Book.

Be justice. Be beauty.  Be washing your hands until they are blue.

Patrick

RUBBINGS

A man stops at the wall

to rub his fingers

over four chiseled names.

He has no brass

or paper, only the skin

of his fingertips,

unique in each loop

and whorl, yet genetically

linked to the smallest insect

that crawls across his hand.

He has rubbed these four

names for years,

not expecting a miracle

or some genie to pop

out and grant wishes—

his daughter, after all,

survived the bus

as it fell with the bridge

down to the riverbank—

but to remember

the shocking joy that

unexpected gratitude             

can bestow after

unsought terror

has been banished.

She is near sixteen now,

delighting and defying,

her memories secreted

in chambers she alone stewards,

and so he touches

her four names—

Talia, the morning dew,

Grace, the ground that sustains

when the very ground is shaken,

Cabello, that wonderful hair,

Hansel, the brother of the girl

who fled cruelty for wickedness

and was saved,

not by water, but by fire—

Oh, child of our hope,

joy of our remembering,

I lift your name

from the rock

with my skin.