getting ready

One of the classes I’m teaching this quarter is a Creative Writing elective. Hardly a day goes by that one of the students declares he or she is unable to write anything because of “writer’s block.” My response is generally one of amusement, since they appear to have plenty of ideas to talk about. And I also look at my writing for the last couple of months and find I have not put many words on the page. It is May 22nd and I have made four entries for the entire month.

I’m an not without ideas and have ample time, I suppose. I am also reading more these days and giving a good deal of energy to all that is involved with moving Ginger’s parents here to Durham to live with us. Yet the words don’t feel ripe, somehow.

Somewhere along the way, in a book on writing, I remember the author quashing the idea of writer’s block, or at least the inclination to feel guilty because the words weren’t making it to the page. A writer, the author continued, is either writing or getting ready to write; both take time and energy. I continue to turn those words over in my mind. These are days of preparation for, attending to, and listening.

I’m getting ready.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: prep work

I’m not sure how much preparing
food for five hundred is like
preparing the way of the Lord,
but I’ve had morning, afternoon,
and evening to think about it.

The best division of labor was
to choose and do one thing:
I grilled vegetables – squash,
actually – for an hour or two.
It was not the featured food,

but it was my part in getting
ready, my contribution as a
member of the company of
cooks assigned to prepare the
meal on this (almost) wintry night.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: a circle of friends

Time is a living thing.

We talk about it as something that ticks by or slips away, something we make or take or keep or lose, but it is a force, a dimension, an entity on its own terms. Though we often talk about telling time, we do better to listen to what it is saying, or revealing. Chet Raymo talks about looking out into the night sky as a venture back in time, the light in the sky coming from different stars and galaxies, all different light years away. What we see in the present moment, standing underneath Orion, are layers of time all arriving at once; tonight I am found anew by words from a few old friends.

Paging through an old book, particularly one I’ve read several times before, is much the same experience. Madeleine L’Engle published A Circle of Quiet in 1972; she was past fifty and I was closing in on sixteen and preparing to move back to the States for good, leaving Africa behind. I finished high school, college, seminary, chaplaincy, and was working as a youth minister when, Blair, a friend from Baylor Hospital days gave me the book for Christmas. I was thirty-two. Seeing the name written on the inside cover took me back to conversations long since buried under all that collects in life like the dust that buries ancient civilizations. I can tell from my margin notes that I’ve been though the book at least three times, not counting this Advent. Some of the comments I can calendar easier than others. I have names written in the margins next to lines that remind me of someone, or something someone said. Others are distinguishable because of the different colors of ink.

This time around, I’m reading the book at about the same age that Madeleine wrote it and I picture her being my age for the first time in our literary friendship. I am getting to know her when she was my age. And I smiled when I read this paragraph:

Jung disagreed with Freud that the decisive period in our lives is the first years. Instead, Jung felt that the decisive period is that in which my husband and I are now, the period of our middle years, when we have passed through childhood with its dependency on our parents; when we’ve weathered the storms of adolescence and the first probings into the ultimate questions; when we’ve gone through early adulthood with its problems of career and marriage and bringing up our babies; and for the first time in our lives find ourselves alone before the crucial problem of ho, after all these years, we are. All the protective covering of the first three stages is gone, and we are suddenly alone with ourselves and have to look directly at the great and unique problem of the meaning of our own particular existence in this particular universe. (113)

My twenty-year old margin note reads: “hope for growing old.”

In certain moments, the years feel as though they flow by like a river; in others, they stack up like altar stones. Either way, the more of them I live through, the more I find myself thankful to be here, and to be. Madeleine died a little over two years ago. My father-in-law is here, but disappearing in his Alzheimer’s. I went to Texas several weeks back because I thought my mother was not going to recover from surgery (she’s still here and doing fine). I am a couple of days away from turning fifty-three, perhaps the same way a farmer turns the soil in preparation for planting. I suppose I could think of turning, as in turning a car down a different road, or the way a horse turns toward the clubhouse; then there’s turning, as in repentance, and the turning of the leaves, blazing their way to death. Maybe all of those.

Everything in the universe shares the same arc of being, if you will, moving from where we entered the story to where we exit, stage left. We are both essential and temporary. At the bottom of Page 99, Madeleine wrote:

Paradox again: to take ourselves seriously enough to take ourselves lightly. If every hair of my head is counted, then in the very scheme of the cosmos I matter; I am created by a power who cares about the sparrow, and the rabbit in the snare, and the people in the crowded streets; who calls the stars by name. And you. And me.

My twenty-year old margin note reads: “Living with a sense of appropriate significance.”

Fifteen years after that note, my friend Burt called one day and asked me to write a poem about the value of daily work for worship at his church, and I sent him this.

daily work

In the crush of afternoon traffic I sit
in an unending queue of cars, staring
at the stoplight; from my driver’s seat
I can see the beckoning billboard:
“Come visit the New Planetarium
You Tiny Insignificant Speck in the Universe.”

When the signal changes, I cross the bridge
over river and railroad yard, turn left
past the donut shop, and park in front
of my house. Only my schnauzers notice
because they have been home alone.

I have been hard at work in my daily orbit,
but I stopped no wars, saved no lives,
and I forgot to pick up the dry cleaning;
today would be a good day to be Jimmy Stewart:
to have some angel show me I matter.

As I walk the puppies down to the river,
I wonder how many times have I come to the water
hoping to hear, “You are my beloved child.”
Instead, I stand in life’s rising current only to admit,
“I am not the one you were looking for.”

I stand in the stream of my existence,
between the banks of blessing and despair,
convinced that only messiahs matter,
that I have been called to change the world
and I have not done my job.

Yet, if I stack up the details of my life
like stones for an altar, I see I am
one In the line of humanity,
in the river of love: I am a speck,
in God’s eyes, of some significance:
so say, also, the schnauzers
every time I come home.

However the years stack up, I have spent more days than I can count going to the river or the altar or out under the stars to be reminded (convinced?) that I matter, even as I know I am only passing through. I lean into Madeleine one more time:

So my hope, each day as I grow older, is that this will never be simply chronological aging – which is a nuisance and frequently a bore -- the old ‘bod’ at over half a century has had hard use; it won’t take what it did a few years ago – but that I will also grow into maturity, where the experience which can be acquired only through chronology will teach me how to be more aware, open, unafraid to be vulnerable, involved, committed, to accept disagreement without feeling threatened (repeat and underline this one), to understand that I cannot take myself seriously until I stop taking myself seriously – to be, in fact, a true adult. (132)

And one more twenty-year old margin note, quoting another friend, Reed: “We stop doing things that prepare us way too early.”

For all that has been, thanks. For all that will be, yes.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- There's a new recipe.

lenten journal: mise en place

I don't come by organization easily.

I've never been one to know exactly where a particular piece of paper is, nor one who naturally finds a way to categorize life and collect things in an ordered fashion. I suppose I could compliment myself somehow by saying I'm a more organic organizer, but the truth is it takes me a long time to figure it out. We have lived in our house here in Durham for almost a year and the kitchen is just now beginning to make sense to me; I am just now beginning to figure out where things go. And I've chosen a profession that thrives on organization.

Go figure.

I've been working at the restaurant at Duke about a month and a half longer than we've owned our house, so I suppose it's no surprise that I'm finally figuring out a system there as well. You see, when you go into a restaurant and order a dish, whatever time it takes them to prepare and serve it is dwarfed by the amount of time it took to prepare to be able to cook the dish to order. If we want to serve our Brown Sugar-Dijon glazed salmon to you in a reasonable time frame (and we do), long before you begin to make your way to our dining room, we have cleaned and portioned the salmon, prepared the glaze, cut and roasted the seasonal vegetables (tonight’s were roasted zucchini, carrots, yellow squash, and radishes), and made the sweet potato polenta far enough in advance for it to set and then cut it into sticks to fry. All of those things are in containers and cold drawers, waiting for the ticket to come through that will call them into service and us into action.

And we have a term for it all: mise en place, which translated means, “to put in place.”

My work day at the restaurant right now runs from eleven in the morning to nine at night. Of those ten hours, six of them are spent getting ready. Sometimes six and a half, when there is a lot to prepare. The prep list is driven by the menu, each dish requiring six or seven tasks to get them in place for cooking. If we prepare well, the evening generally goes well, regardless of how many customers come in. Our well stocked mise en place means we are ready for the unexpected. Then there are the nights when we let ourselves believe we are well stocked when we know better, leaving one or two things a little short and, of course, by some strange intuition the first ten customers come in and order the thing we have nine of, sending us into a spin, trying to do that which we are no longer prepared to do.

And we know what the menu is.

Mise en place struck me as an appropriate Lenten metaphor a week or two ago because Lent is a season of preparation. When I sat down to write tonight, I began to ask, “Preparing for what?”

Yes, I know we are walking to the Cross with Jesus. Yes, I know we are getting ready for those dark days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Yet, as moving as Maundy Thursday services are for me and as palpable as the grief can be, we live on the business side of the Resurrection. Christ is risen. If I’m getting ready for something is it not something more than acting out the obvious? Perhaps, then, Lent is mise en place without a menu: getting ready for what we do not know.

If I have done my prep work well at the restaurant, I don’t have to worry about the small stuff and can concentrate on the bigger picture, if you will: on making sure the plates are excellent, my communication with the staff is clear, and that I have time to go out into the dining room to meet some of our customers. I’m preparing to free myself to see more than slicing and dicing, to see the whole instead of the parts.

When I am at my most distracted or disorganized is when life descends into details. Though it alliterates nicely, it sucks to live out. During January and February of this year, I wrote fewer blog posts than I have any months in the three years I’ve been writing, other than a couple of months when my depression had the best of me. For the first winter in almost a decade, I have not been depressed; in fact, I have felt more hopeful. My struggle, I think, is related to organization: I’m trying to figure out how to put things in place to be who I want to be. Many of the nights I have chosen not to write because I wanted time with Ginger (which is at a premium on our current schedule), or I chose to sleep (which is a health issue). I have worked hard to see a bigger picture and not be legalistic. My goal when I started writing was to write two-hundred and fifty posts a year, mostly because I wanted to develop the discipline of a writer. I am still committed to that discipline and I want to see a larger grace that allows for time to lay fallow, to do something other than keep up production.

And I knew Lent was coming when I would keep my yearly promise to write a thousand words everyday. I knew I was getting ready to, well, get ready: to put things in place. The menu I’m working with includes doing a job I love that has grown to be larger and more demanding of my time, investing in my marriage in a way that offers Ginger more than the dregs of my existence, writing this blog and some other things I want to be on paper, cultivating friendships both old and new, and growing to be more faithful in my life. This is the season for me to make my prep lists and do what I need to do to get ready for life beyond the Resurrection, for living out those days we call Ordinary Time with flavor and intention.

I’m grateful for the time to prepare.

Peace,
Milton