Tag: connection

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Make of your life a practice –

Mary Elyn Bahlert

IMG_0792  Practice seeing, seeing the first blossoms of spring

How can I live my life as a practice, a practice of whole-ness, a practice of connecting with the infinite, the Holy, the Universe?

There is only this: practice, practice, practice…

The sages of all traditions knew this.  the Mother knows this, the monks in their cells in the hidden corners of the earth know this.  It may be that the person in the next cubicle knows this.  And you know it, too.  There is only practice, from one moment to the next, from one day to the next.

What is your practice, today?  In my life, my practice has often changed.  For a time, I spent hours every day in my car, driving from small town to small town in rural Wisconsin.  Then, I began this practice, this practice that has become my life.  I talked to God.  I talked out loud to God, crying sometimes, laughing, sometimes, and sometimes shaking my fist at God.  And I began to observe my life in its unfolding, as if I was looking at my life from another perspective.

Sure, I have had to make the choices we all make.  I have had to decide whether or not to go on to school, where to live, what to do on Friday night, whether or not this person was my friend – or not.  All of the external choices have been the same.  On another level, though, I have discovered that life is a constant of only this:  practice.

Practice is only my own way of connecting the Divine, to the Holy that is in me and is in you.  I have not been limited by my practice; rather, my practice has broadened my life, my experience, and even my mind.  Through my practice, I have learned to question everything I have been taught is true or real.  There are no limits to my practice.  Like the sea, which rolls onto the beach and roils into the deepest depths, my limits are limit-less.  Through my practice, I have questioned my deepest beliefs, and I have discarded some, and still question others, continuing to wonder what is true, what holds to be true not only for me, but for all of humanity, and all of creation.

I have learned that the Holy can hold all this, all my faltering practices, all my failures, all my ignorance, all my less-than-loving self.

I have prayed, an ever-changing, evolving prayer.  I have meditated, and I still do, two times a day, most days.  I have walked my prayers.  I have talked to the grass and the trees, and to my cat.  I have cried.  I have laughed.   I have nodded into a sky that does not answer, and yet is shouting  to me.  I have sniffed the sweet, wet earth, and smelled the sweet fragrance of lilacs and rosemary and lavendar, riches.  I have visited holy places.  I have worshiped in unfamiliar places, and I have honored those whose practice I have been privileged to encounter, although theirs might not be my own.  I nod to their Holy One, who may seem different than my own, but is not.  I honor that Holy One, by whatever name.  I have visited dark places, and I have arrived into another morning, giving thanks for nothing in particular, but for it all.

I have not only “tried” many ways to stay connected to All; I have practiced many ways to stay connected.  Some of the ways I carry with me now, like a bag filled with spiritual practices instead of groceries.  I reach into the bag and take out the one I need, now.  In any day, I use my practices to stay connected to Something More, Something Whole, Something Holy – something that is in me, that is me, and that is greater than I am.

Through my practice I have learned this:  I do not have to be good.  I do not have to do things perfectly.  I do not have to work to be worthy.  I do not have to know what is right or correct in any or all situations.  I do not have to understand to accept.  I am complete, here and now, just as I am.  This is what I have learned, what I am learning.

When I remember, I can still feel my little girl’s body on the seat of my first two-wheeled bicycle.  I can feel the strength of my Dad behind me, holding onto the seat, pushing me along the sidewalk, pushing me, holding on, and then, in some moment, letting go, until I felt the freedom of that ride, that long ride that has taken me to this time, to this moment, to this day.  Then, I was practicing.  Then, I had the safety of Dad’s strength and love and joy until I took off on my own.

As we get older, what we face is different than what we faced when we were younger.  What I have faced in my life – the choices, the decisions, the moments, the sadness, the losses, the small and great griefs – is changing.  It has always been changing, although now I am more poignantly aware that my choices are changing.  And I can honestly say that the only thing that has gotten me through, the ever-changing practices I have gathered and practiced and discarded, and even those I continue today, are the cornerstone, and the one constant.

Make of your life a practice.

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Imagination, a key

Mary Elyn Bahlert

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In my experience, imagination is one portal into the spiritual journey.  As a child, the idea of Jesus captured my imagination, and I held onto that idea as I slogged my way through fundamentalist confirmation classes.  When I had been confirmed and had the time and the inclination to question what I had been taught, I realized that those narrow beliefs (add your own adjective) did not jive with the Jesus who had captured my imagination.

And I will say, also, that my inclination to question has not ended – it is as alive as it ever has been!

A few years later, I was lonely.  I often pray for the lonely, because I have known loneliness, a deep, tearing loneliness. Alone in my small apartment, I spent many evenings turning the pages of my address book to find a friend to call.  I wanted someone to relieve my loneliness, but that loneliness still tore at me.   I soon discovered that a friend could not relieve that loneliness.  Now, I see that even my loneliness has become a gift.

During those times, I began to search, and I looked to the Bible – since that was my own tradition – as a place to search.   I read, again and again, the words of the Sermon on the Mount.  We don’t know what words Jesus really spoke as he taught the crowds who were following him, in the story.  We don’t know for sure whether he spoke those words at all.  We are not even certain that anything written about Jesus is true or ever happened. We do know it’s a darn good story, and stories – including our own – have power, simply by being stories.  There is more power in the story than in its historical fact, or not.

As I read those words, those blessings, again and again, Jesus re-captured my imagination.  Now, he was there, with me, present with me.  Jesus was there, present to my loneliness.  I didn’t see him in the room with me, but I knew his presence, the beginning of a long walk with Jesus.  This is not the Jesus who judges those who do not follow, no, this is the Jesus who loves, loves simply and completely.  I knew that as a child, I know it now.

What has captured your imagination, what has lived just outside the limits of your conscious awareness?  What lives, now?

A few months ago, I re-connected with a a friend who knew me in the years that followed.  She reminded that I had spoken to her often about “jogging with Jesus.”  The one who captured my imagination was with me, in the most ordinary moments of my life.

Maybe you are imagining a life different from the one you have.  Maybe you are lonely, and your imagination takes you over long paths that magically bring an end to your loneliness.  And when you take those long paths, you find out, again and again, that you are still lonely.  Maybe your imagination cannot conjure up what life, what different life, you’d like to have.  All you know is this:  you are lonely.  You are here.  You don’t want to be here, but if not here, then where – and when?

A dear friend of mine told me that she married her high school sweetheart when they were both 20.  Within a few years, they had a home together, and life was unfolding as it was meant to unfold.  As it was meant to unfold, except for the days my friend spent in her kitchen, tears running down her face, something in her knowing that this was not the life she was meant to live.  Something else was capturing her imagination, although she couldn’t name it, wouldn’t name it until years later.  She did not know it until she lived it.

What captures your imagination, now, here, at this moment?  What flickers on the edge of your awareness, what lights up deep inside you?  Who – or what – fascinates you?  Who comes to you, not with answers, but with complete acceptance of your questions?  Who?  What?  What comes to you, not with answers, but with complete acceptance of your questions?

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,                                                                                                       the world offers itself to your imagination,                                                                                                     calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – ”   – Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

How interesting, that loneliness and imagination should so often walk together.

I can say this now:  it is good that I had my loneliness.  I call it mine; it was/is mine, mine to be named, mine to be felt, mine to be feared – and mine to be known, even to be loved.  It is good that I had – and have -my loneliness.  My loneliness allowed me to fall into the truth of who I was, of what life I had, and my loneliness allowed me to imagine, to imagine someone or something that could carry me out of that loneliness, even if I wasn’t sure where I was being led.

I still think that something that Jesus said may be exactly what the world needs.  I still think that other prophets who spoke to peace, who speak to peace, are what is needed. What they say sounds so simple, too simple. Who are the prophets now, while wars rage, while refugees walk in search of a safe place, while children are dying, without food, in our cities and in far-off places?  Who is speaking truth, simple, profound truth, now?

That which speaks to peace spoke also, to my loneliness, and to my imagination.  It speaks to yours, also.

I still long for a just world, for all people – a safe place to live, food, for everyone, not a world where justice means getting what we want, but in the old, old, old sense, the dream of enough, for all.   The possibility that  there is enough captures my imagination, although everything else shouts that there is not enough to go around. Still, that possibility captures my imagination.

 

 

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“Houseplants,” a poem by Mary Elyn Bahlert

Mary Elyn Bahlert

IMG_0525My little friends,
yellow and brown and purple and green,
I treasure you,
my hands among your leaves,
my fingers at your roots.

My little friends,
there is so little I am good at in this world:
my children want for what they cannot have –
I have only these hands among your leaves
and a few places of sunlight in the house.

My little friends,
my eyes drop tear-less on your stalks;
I protect you from the cold in this place.
I touch you with these worthless hands
and you flourish.

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I wrote “Houseplants”  as part of a series of poems that belong to my grandmother, Feodosia.  For these poems are the story of her life, told through me over the course of a year or two in the late 1980’s.  Surely our connection to the ancestors goes deeper than we know – or than we are taught to cherish, in our culture.  The magic my Grandma – a bent-over babushka in a long black coat walking through the slush of Milwaukee’s narrow alleys – must surely have come through me, the magic of our connection told through the words I recorded.

Enjoy.

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“Time passes much too quickly, when we’re together laughing…” Chicago, “Beginnings

Mary Elyn Bahlert

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When I was a girl, my father would say from time to time: “my life has gone by so quickly.” I would look at him, just little, and wonder what he meant, and how that could be. I could not relate. Some people say that time goes more slowly for the young, when all the years stretch out beyond, when growing up is something to be yearned for and in the yearning, of course, time passes slowly. But my memory is of that question or wondering that was in me when I heard my father reflect. Later, he would quote again and again, this verse: “A thousand years is but a day in the eyes of the Lord.” Apparently, my beloved dad did not stop thinking about the passage of time.

Just last evening, I was telling a new friend about some of the favorite days of my life.  Those days were on my visits to Milwaukee to see my mother, after I had moved to the Bay Area of California.  My mother lived in a small upper floor apartment on a busy street close to the center of Milwaukee, and I would stay in the cramped second bedroom, the noise of the busy thoroughfare keeping me awake nights.

Both mom and I were “Milwaukee girls.”  We had grown up in the flats that line the streets of poor and working class neighborhoods of the North Side.  Those flats are there, still.

We knew the streets, the bus lines, the parks, and we knew the sense of small town-ness that Milwaukee cherished for a long time.  We knew the particular kind of diversity of that place – the streets where Eastern European communities lived, the place where the Italians built their church, now a Cathedral to welcome the Bishop from Rome.  We knew the part of town where people from Mexico came to live among others who spoke their native language.  We knew how to navigate to new places, too, in that city laid out in a grid.  I have never understood how to find new places in new places, new cities.  How can addresses not make sense, like they do in Chicago and Milwaukee, a small Chicago?

On my visits to see Mom, before the dementia took her away from me, we set aside a day to “do Milwaukee.”  After coffee and breakfast, we backed her car out of the garage and onto the busy street.   We had no particular plan, except to explore some new places, to make our way to the Milwaukee Art Center at some point, to have lunch out, and maybe to do a bit of shopping along the way.  I loved those small adventures.  I loved the fun we had together:  “that’s the fun of it!” was one of my mother’s expressions.

On one adventure, we discovered again a small section of town filled with Ukrainian immigrants.  My mother’s first language was Ukrainian, and so we ventured into a small bakery, a store-front, and she stumbled to say a few words to the man behind the counter.  He understood, all right, and soon we found ourselves in another cramped space, the family’s living room, complete with an altar adorning a corner.  They were Ukrainian Catholics, and a candle burned in that corner, lighting up the features of the Virgin Mary, her eyes cast down, her blue gown ending at her bare feet, on a sphere covered with stars.

On another adventure, I gazed at my mother as she gazed at one of her favorite paintings in the Milwaukee Art Museum, The Wood Gatherer, by Jules Bastien-Lepage.  Later, Mom told me her wonderings about the scene that painting depicted, her own story fleshing out the art.   I still own a print of that painting.

One day at lunch we found ourselves in an old Italian neighborhood for an Italian lunch, another at a Jewish deli across from a synagogue.

As the years passed, it was harder and harder for mom to enjoy those days, until the last time we set out.  Of course, we did not know it was the last time, but something had changed.  We returned home to her apartment right after lunch.  Soon enough, I’d have to move Mom out of her apartment and into assisted living in the Bay Area, a move which she made bravely and with great trust.

I suppose some part of me thought those adventures would go on forever, that those times when we laughed and remembered and noticed would not end.  But all times end.  Now, those days are distant memories, and I continue to cherish them as some of my favorite times.

Here, I find myself years later, remembering those small adventures, remembering the tilt of Mom’s head as she laughed, remembering the narrow streets we knew so well, remembering driving her blue Tercel all over the city we loved.  I’m in the memory time for so many people I have loved, so many experiences, so many grievances that had filled my life over the years.    All of those beloved people, all of those rich days are a memory, now.

 

 

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Always learning

Mary Elyn Bahlert

 

IMG_0685Mom used to say: “You learn something new every day.”

Like a mantra, I have lived those words.

My mother did not graduate from high school, although she received her GED while I was in university.  I know for certain she did that so that I would graduate with a degree, since I was wavering, and had taken a semester off during my senior year at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.  She didn’t tell me her purposes, but I knew.  When she received her certificate, I sent her a spring bouquet.

Mom quit school early to work.  She married young, also, and had a son within a year – Ronn, my brother.  Mom was bright.  Now, when Mom comes up in conversation, I tell folks that she should have been a teacher – a kindergarten or first-grade teacher.  The daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who lived in flats in neighborhoods of poor folks, it was enough that she learned to read and write.  She taught her father to read English when she was a girl.  In my mind’s eye, I can see her, bright and determined, her feet wrapped around the rungs of a wooden chair in a cramped Milwaukee flat, as her father, Vlas, concentrated and paced, determined, also.  He was smart, although uneducated in his native language.  He made that long trip across the ocean, left the familiar village of his homeland so that his children could learn to read and to write.

So Mom knew the value of education, although she could not see to get a degree herself.  Life, the life of a working class woman, intervened.  She was married and divorced by the age of 22.  She worked hard at Cutler-Hammer in Milwaukee, where her employers noticed the bright, hard-working young woman.  She quit her job when she married my father.  That’s what working class women did in the 1940’s.  The truth is, she had greater earning potential than my father.  But that’s how things were done.  A woman married, a woman quit working in the outside world, a woman kept house and raised the children.

When I was girl, I walked 3 blocks to the Center Street Library – on 27th and Center – with Mom, every week.  She must have read all of the books  in the “mystery” section of that library.  It was in those days that I learned to love the smell of libraries.  In a library, it seems we can smell the riches of what is carried in the aisles.  Twice in my life I have worked in a library – in high school, and again in seminary.  For awhile as an undergraduate, I even flirted with the idea of becoming a librarian. Books would save me, many times, during my life.

When Mom and I left the Center Street Library  to walk home, we each carried two or three books to read for the week ahead.  I see now that Mom was living her mantra:  “you learn something new every day.”  She modeled that for me in concrete ways.  I was not able to see that for many years, but now, in my own learning, I understand.

Mom taught me how a woman washes clothes, too.  During the summers when I was a young girl, my babushka-d Mom would take me down three flights of stairs to the shared basement of our flat to show me how to wash clothes.  I remember the smell there, too, the damp and soapy smell of the basement, the hot, steaming water of the wringer washer.  Into the first load went whites – sheets, pillow cases, underwear.  Into the second load of the same water went towels and colored clothing.  Into the last load went Dad’s work clothes.  See, Mom?  – I have not forgotten!  I know the smell,  I can see the beautiful wooden stick Mom used to lift the clothes from the washer into the first rinse water, and then into the final rinse before the clothes were taken in the large wooden basket into the yard to dry in the humid air.  As I write, I can smell the air, too.

If I could have one item of Mom’s, it would be that wooden stick, smooth, smelling of soapy water, imprinted with Mom’s hands, her weeping and her worries.  Where did that stick go?

I see Mom’s broad, strong peasant hands, hands that in later years would be crooked with arthritis.  She was a worker, teaching a little girl whose work is ideas and books and the fabric of words.   “You learn something new every day.”  I took those words into myself, and I made them my own.

The path I have taken through life has been the path of learning, too, not always from books.  But I am keeping your mantra, Mom:  I keep it, still.