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Travels

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I love the tech-y stuff that allows me to write my words to you and then to pack my suitcase and take off for a few weeks. At the end of this month and the beginning of next, we’ll be traveling to Europe to visit Christmas markets in various cities. A couple of years before COVID, I was privileged to travel to Vienna in the weeks before Christmas, where I took part in a winter retreat led by Christine Valters-Paintner (abbeyofthearts.com), a retreat leader, Benedictine Oblate, and prolific poet and writer. There, I met other travelers from all over the United States who gathered to retreat together and to enjoy Vienna by day and night.

One of the best Christmas Markets in all of Europe – the taxi driver who had delivered me to the retreat house from the airport told me so – materialized in the square right outside the window of my room in an old monastery, whose monks now have day jobs and who returned to the retreat center every evening. Several new friends and I walked all over Vienna to see the other markets in our free time, and daily we walked a few blocks away to a cafe that had been frequented by Sigmund Freud before he and his family fled to London during World War II – we were told.

After dinner, I would walk from a restaurant where all retreat members had had dinner, back to the retreat center, and I’d go to my own room where I prepared for the night. As the darkness fell, the shutters of the portable stalls in the square below my windows opened to reveal hidden treasures – clothes, food, and drink – winter drinks. I’d hear the voices of the shop keepers and the folks who shopped for Christmas delights, and the sound of folks in revelry, enjoying the dark evening with the lights and music filling the night. The smell of alcohol rose from the street below and filled my room.

At ten o-clock PM, something happened. All at once, the street was silent. When I looked out the window, I saw the booths that had been alive with people and activity were shuttered, the street dark and quiet. “I’m definitely not in the U.S.,” I thought.

After I returned home from the retreat in Vienna, I told Jeff often about the beauty of the place. That telling ignited a longing in him, too, to see the Christmas markets in Europe. I expect that as you read this, he and I will be enjoying new friends, fellow travelers, as we visit several cities of Europe, as we see the Christmas Markets. This year, we’ll leave on the trip after Thanksgiving, so we’ve been preparing by making sure we have enough warm clothes for the chilly days and longer nights there. We’ve even packed wool hats and long underwear – a memorial to our days growing up in Wisconsin.

For us, the Christmas Markets, full of laughter and wonder and crowds enjoying the colder nights, will mark the holiday time this year.

***

When I travel, as I prepare to travel, and when I return home and mention without thinking much about it where I’ve been, I remember. I remember the way I grew up, the life in my family. I remember that my mother and father wanted something more for me: “you will be a teacher,” my father said, more than once. I’m surprised by the life of privilege I have had, a life so distant from my people that they could not have envisioned it. “I have not forgotten you,” – I say to the ancestors. I remember where I come from. As I navigate the world – the world of privilege – I am always grateful, and I am astounded when I reflect on my life. The dreams of the ancestors come with me to these places, they walk with me, they see and they listen, they smell the fragrance of hot mulled cider drifting to my window.

***

As I travel, I’ll be thinking of home, where the trees are preparing for winter, too. – Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 10/2024

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Thanksgiving

Mary Elyn Bahlert

The holiday season is quickly approaching, the end of the year when the season of lights – that time when darkness slowly darkens and gives way to the light at the winter solstice – arrives, day by day. In the Bay Area, I often have to work hard to give myself a winter-cozy experience in this season. But this year, the heavens are in tune with the season, days of rain welcoming us to the longer nights.

When I sat to write this piece, I was thinking that I am not one given to focusing on giving thanks. Over the years, I’ve studied with healers and shamans, and teachers of all kinds – many of whom would say that a grateful heart, a grateful attitude, is a good thing. Necessary, even. But in my own temperamental way, giving thanks does not come easily. If I’m to fill the journals I’ve started over the years (Oprah says that if I write down 5 things I’m grateful for every single day, my life will change…), I’ll have to be more disciplined about the practice of giving thanks. All change begins with practice, in my experience. Practice, practice, practice.

But today I’m grateful for the beautiful tree that accompanies me here in the house on View Place – the birch has been a faithful companion as long as I’ve lived here, and I’m grateful for a cozy house as the season of holidays approaches. A quiet house, a place of comfort in a world that is often crazy-making. Today we’ll welcome a 4 year old and her parents to join us for a week, and the house will not be quiet, but filled with laughter and fun – and tears, I’m sure. The cat has taken to sitting with me on the sofa where I have my morning coffee and chat with Jeff. She seems to live a grateful life.

On Thanksgiving Day, we’ll join a bunch of Bahlerts at their little house on Potrero Hill in San Francisco, where the sound of little ones running past us will fill us up as much as the lavish meal. I’ll bring the pies: cherry – two this year, by special request – apple, and pumpkin. I remembered to buy whipped cream before the store runs out.

And if I remember, if I stop all the busy-ness that’s inside of me for a few moments, I can be grateful, too, in honor of the holiday.

Happy Thanksgiving week, everyone!

Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, View Place, November, 2024

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In sha’ Allah

Mary Elyn Bahlert

“In sha’allah,” I like to say. “God willing,” or “if God wills it.”

These simple words have come into my consciousness – and my vocabulary – in later years. Before our cultural lens widened to include the people and the practice of Islam as their faith, I had not heard this expression.

But I like to say it now – often. Sometimes I say the words quietly, to myself, and sometimes, I say the words so that someone hears them. Either way, the beautiful words serve as a reminder: so much in life is, very simply, out of our control.

There’s a simple beauty in the Arabic words, “In sha’ allah,” and simple truth, as well. And there’s a simple truth about life, about life’s uncertainty. From day to day, we are in control of so little – the weather, the actions of others, the politics of our time, how other people act – or don’t act, what my spouse chooses to do – or not do, and even the outcome of my own actions.

To me, surrender forms the center of a life. We can act – we must act – and then we surrender to what happens, to what is, and to what will be. “In sha’ allah.”

“In sha’ Allah“, photo of window at Bethany United Methodist Church,
San Francisco, CA, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 11/17/2024

memories, reflecting, remembering, Uncategorized

Night now

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Bedtime comes earlier in our house now than it did at the beginning of the COVID sheltering that started in March of 2020. As the sheltering began and as we all adjusted ourselves – our schedules, our social activities, most of our activities – Jeff and I adjusted our daily schedule, as well. Some of the adjustments were in response to the sheltering – but most not. We simply shuffled into the time of sheltering – “for how long?” we might have wondered – and our daily routine shuffled itself into something new.

We both woke to the alarm at 5:30 AM and started the day sitting together in the living room of our beautiful Craftsman house, talking, looking at the news articles online, checking our emails. And the day started with a nice cup of coffee, made fresh, cup by cup. After a while, Jeff would leave the front room where I still sat to cross the yard behind our house to his studio, where he’d spend the early morning. Each day had its own rhythm, broken only by online classes and meals together, a ZOOM call with a friend, walks in our neighborhood, and in our case, friendship time in the backyard. A few of us would sit in a circle – sometimes wearing warm coats and with scarves tied around our necks – with a small group of friends who had ventured out for some face to face time with other human beings. “We’re still alive,” we seemed to be saying to one another by our presence. In the early evenings, often, Jeff and I would get into his car and drive somewhere, a local place. Over the months, as COVID sheltering went on – did we ever think we’d be sheltering for months and months and months??? – we drove in the early evening, as the sun set, into many neighborhoods in Oakland, finding and exploring places we’d never been before, although Oakland had already been our home for many years.

Were the days long? As I piece together my memories of that time, it’s hard to remember whether time seemed to go slowing, and it’s hard to understand how we did it, those days and weeks of early sheltering dragging on, month after month. Every day, we listened to the NPR News Hour as the losses of COVID were numbered and sometimes named. Every Friday, Judy Woodruff honored five of the week’s dead by recounting the stories of their lives in a few sentences. Things were tough in Italy, in New York City, in China, we learned. After a time – when the sheltering went on and on and on – she stopped the practice of telling life stories of victims.

All along, Jeff and I went to bed early, often chatting before we fell asleep, and as often as we could as we lay awake, saying our good night to one another: “Night now.”

Another long and strange day had ended with those simple words.

*

Over the years, those simple and gentle words have guided us to sleep. When our nephew Rainier came to live with us when he was a student at San Francisco State University, he listened and watched us carefully. His folks had divorced when he was a child, and he had grown up without some of the simple joys of witnessing a couple. And so, while he observed us, he too, took on some of our simple traditions. “Night, now,” he’d say to us.

When we visit Rainier and his family in Seattle now, he makes sure to end our days together: “Night now.”

“Night now” comes as a comfort to us, even now.

Birch at Sunset, 4454 photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 11/2024