A little f, a, i, t, h, if you please

What would Sonya do with these?

A friend of mine once told me that though she works teaching part-time, she'd love to be a full-time stay-at-home mom:  I'd read poetry, she said, and then get up to eat lunch, then be there to welcome the kids when they came home. . . .I told her, Maybe we could switch places.

Truth is, I've been feeling a bit like an untethered boat out at sea.  I am not any good at this.  I like to be moored, despite my grumblings about being tied down and wanting to live free, I long for an island to call my own, where I can make a life for myself, a shelter made of palm leaves and a waterfall in which to bathe.  A bunch of bananas for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Let me have a plan of my own choosing and I will muster the energy to fulfill it.

If I bullet-point my discomfort, it follows thus (and such are the bullet points, I expect, of so many of us who were uprooted by the disastrous events in PA just over a year ago):

*  lack of tightly-knit community
*  lack of meaningful position in that community
*  lack of job (s)
* lack of sense of personal purpose

Like a good spouse and partner, I rah-rahed Martin through these troubling waters last year, putting my own sense of encroaching panic at bay.  I love that he goes to a job that he enjoys and that the children are settled and happy and full of hope for the future.

I, on the other hand, have felt increasingly, as the summer wanes, that I am teetering on the edge of an abyss, an abyss of not-knowing.  I finally found the time to articulate what that dread meant: I am suddenly, after a year of merrily writing and being with Martin on our 'gap year,' completely without a strong sense of vocation.

In Pennsylvania, seven years of involvement and dumb luck and hard work had given me that sense of vocation, from the fruit trees that we planted in our rambling garden to the people who came through my door and filled my kitchen chairs to my jobs as a writer.  I had a solid sense of what my life meant, who it touched, and why it was meaningful.

To make matters worse, summertime 'needs-must' means that my contemplative life, my centering disciplines of writing everyday, my confidence that the books I wade into every day must be finished--all has been shaken and I derailed.

And what would she make with these, my dears?

"Our hearts are restless until they find their home in thee."  This verse has been clunking around somewhere in my mind for a while--or not clunking, sort of weaving silently in the background.  It sounds good, to find a place of peace in God, but it is so hard.  I requires the sort of work I have not been doing lately.  Keeping the children alive is good work, mind you, and must be done.  But centering takes some silence.  And that is exactly what I have now--well, thirty more minutes of it, anyway.

Too, I've always encountered God most powerfully in the fabric of my life and the world: in my writing, in story, in music, in art, in relationships, in something as banal as plums simmering on the stove.  (Wait, did I say that was banal?  I meant magical.)  My most powerful prayers have been embodied in the potatoes, onions, spices, I chop into a soup for a sick friend; or in the act of sweeping someone's floor, praying blessings and grace into each flick of the broom, in the sudden order I work to bring into someone else's chaos. 

What I am saying?  I like God in the concrete, in the tangible, in the people I touch, the dirt under my fingernails.  Take away these daily sacraments and I begin to flounder.

Once I wrote a poem that Martin thought was not very good.  Oh, actually, I've done that a thousand times.  Well, in this poem I recounted how we freed our Pennsylvania garden from the horrid things the owners before us had inflicted upon it.  As we dug in the sorry, neglected beds, we found a dirty little statue.  St. Joseph, buried upside down with the earthworms.  Do ye not ken St. Joseph?  Well, he's the patron saint of house-selling.  Property a little sluggish on the market, is it?  Well, then bury St. Joseph, my dears, and all will be sold in the nick of time.

Poor St. Joseph, buried by those plebeians who had closeted every room with permanent storm-windows and dark shades, who had put up awful wall paper and a junky above-ground pool outside.  We looked at him and felt that he was in cahoots with us.  He knew what his house had needed: Us!  And he had brought us into free poor Wazoo Farm from the tyranny of careless people.  (I feel as if the ghost knew that, too, and that's why he was so friendly toward us, but that's of course, a different story altogether!) 

Oh, goodness, where was I going with all of this?

Yep.  Okay, so the line in question read: St. Joseph knows that all saints must have dirt under their fingernails.

Poetry is not my first medium, after all.

But saints DO need dirt under their fingernails, spilling out of their pockets.  That's why Charley ('Brother Dog') and I love St. Francis so much.  And when we leave the dirt--or the gardens--where we grow the best, the peace that passes all understanding is much harder to find.

So we must take the soil we can with us--in my case, my writing, the love gathered from every dear friendship--and plant a new garden elsewhere.  Anyone feel how much work this is?  If you are a gardener, or if you have ever transitioned to the brand new from the comfort of the familiar--that is, if you are human--you get me.  Can I get an Amen?

Why did this hit me so late, a year after we moved?  Last year was exactly a Gap Year, and as such, it was not reality.  Though it was tinged by worry toward the end, it was a deeply satisfying, happy time, and I knew even then I would always remember it as such.

But, oh, Sal, I'd be lying if I said I haven't been making jam.

Some months ago I remembered to be brave, and to start planting a new garden, though it is with a weariness that follows much gardening instead of the bright, rose-colored optimism that accompanies your first plot, when you feel as though you could easily grow anything.  And then a deer eats all your rose-buds, and you realize. . .well, we won't get cynical here.  Cynicism, in the end, is for the non-gardeners.  Faith in the unseen: now, that's what makes a brilliant gardener.  Give me a little of that, oh Master and Commander.

(No time to proof-read, alas.  I have been late dropping off the little girls TWO DAYS IN A ROW.  And how many days have they been in school?  Um, two.  So here's faith that if I leave to pick up Bea in time, my rough draft will be perfect as-is.  Of course faith is being able to believe in the unseen, not the definite (that I will have scattered type-os).  Thanks for your patience, peeps.)