Extraordinary

Extraordinary

We weren't sure what to expect ten months ago. Would it be pretty/handsome? Would it be ordinary/extraordinary? Would it be a girl--or a boy? Would he-she be a mirror of his/her parents? Or something new?

With relief, we lost the "it" and abandoned the dashes and hyphens and welcomed a girl, on a snowy evening exactly a month ago.

We look at each other
And wonder—
How could we be so lucky?
It’s more than lucky though;
You’re more than luck.
It was dark outside when you came,
When your eyes opened on the world;
But you broke apart the dark
When you opened wide and cried.
We close the door and go away,
And look at each other
In wonder.
The world needed you,
God knew,
So you were born.

She is, as a matter of unbiased fact, extraordinary. What baby opens its eyes wide, wide when first she comes into the world? This girl does: she watches faces, places; she looks and looks. And when she is a little older she will look and see. For now, it is enough for her to note the colour and shape of her surroundings, and the curves in faces she already knows.

Her own face is enchantingly curved, and she has small patterns of behaviour that are hers only. She likes to be warm; she looks beautiful in pink; she smells beautiful. She has a thousand expressions. When she sneezes we gasp. How clever she is already--! And we long for her to open her eyes when she is sleeping--oh wake up already--we want to see your eyes, little one.

And what will she say when she begins to speak? Now, her voice is a small bubbly one, and ocassionally her potential words are lost in spit-ups on our shirts. Spit-ups aside--if her spoken expressions are anything like her unspoken expressions, her words will be as lovely as her eyes.

Happy one-month birthday, dear...

Avocation and vocation

Avocation and vocation

Some have built-in bifocal vision: top half sees colour, bottom half sees old-school black and white. There is no blurry line between--only a cut-glass division between the one and the other, like two facets on a diamond, one reflecting green earth, one grey sky.

It occurs to me today that life is easy to underestimate. Once it is underestimated, it slips right under the red radar of great expectations and lands in a colourless heap of ashes.

Robert Frost:

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.

What is my vocation? The question has haunted this generation, as far as I can see; with ever-more specialized trades splitting the workforce into a multi-faceted, diverse powerhouse, we are faced with a plethora of possible professions whose name descriptions we barely understand, and whose colours are difficult to find under the heavy-lying black type.

I understand that the most colourful profession I can wrap my mind around is Writing, capital W. Yet I've made provisions for the Other, for the black and white security blanket I might have to fall back on, other job descriptions that might not help me see the world in rose, but would keep me in the black.

I've lived all my life in a snow-swept place, feasting my eyes on postcards from hot places and living vicariously through friends and family as they traversed the Great Divide and found their feet in foreign soil. Ici I've lived, ici, within a few hundred kilometers of where I've always lived, protected in the black and white of a comfortable situation that will never change, never, provided I keep out invasive rays of sun, moon, with these familiar shades of grey.

The avocation that Robert Frost speaks of is another word for hobby, from a latin word meaning "call away." Only when your avocation and vocation are one, he says, will you ever really be living.

Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.

I've always longed to get away from the black and white, to find a true vocation that is married to my avocation: the confidence that floods my fingers when I write and the beauty of places I've never seen. Where is the land where my words live? I've been negating the "calls away" for years, believing that to shoot below the mark is the safest route 100% of the time, and rarely, rarely will you ever hit on target if you try.

Today the sun splits my eyelids when I wake. I'm living in a white land under a grey sky. I've never thought it could be possible for me to go where others have gone--or haven't--to the edges of the world. The Ivory Tower is cold and bleak; someday soon I think I'll slip out the window and run away, somewhere green and growing, sunny and scorching, blue and purple and gold and red. It's hard to do in a culture where running away is frowned upon.

Maybe it's only once we've run away from grey dissatisfaction, stale lives of black and white, that we can find courage to enter our vocations with whole hearts. Maybe then the world fills up with colour, and we fill the world with colour, having stopped wishing, started becoming what we were meant to be.

Rest

Rest

He tells his story like someone relating a dream after waking; the images are bright but blurred, run together in odd places, are intensely intimate.

He grew up in Rwanda. Rrr-wunda, he says, as I learned to say three years ago; the name rolls off the tongue and curls around the air with quiet exuberance. Rwanda, lush green paradise, beautiful Rwanda. According to legend, he tells us, God works around the world during the day and returns to Rwanda at night, to rest.

When he was ten his small world imploded, as the world exploded around him; within 100 days almost everyone close to him was dead, and he'd seen more people than he would ever meet in his lifetime lying murdered in the streets. Trust, whom to trust? Run, how to run, after running for so long? Hope, where is hope?

His voice is measured, even, and somehow his dream-story comes to us intact, is not split and shredded by sobs. But his words are spoken tears.

How did such a country lose its innocence? How came so many to die in such a short time? Why do such things happen? We said it would not happen again. Why did it, then? He does not answer these questions. He believes in the power of story to communicate truth. And the only truth he knows is that he was saved for a purpose.

But my mind blazes with these questions, and they somehow roll up into one: how can there be such a difference between his story and mine? Why is such an intimate proliferate connection with death not a part of my life, as it is a part of his? How can I be so privileged? The patchwork of my life is peace. He calls peace a gift; but it is a damned unfair gift. Under his dark skin is a whelm of brutal memories, more than one person should ever be expected to control. But he does; he bears them, and he bears them, and it could be that inside him resides an iron bullet of horror that will never go away.

Why?

There is an imbalance of fear in the world, so that ten-year-olds in certain countries fear death while ten-year-olds in other countries fear unkind nicknames. Unfair, this is an unfair mindset! I run through, again, a mental struggle to not despise peace: peace is what he wants for us. Peace is the natural state of affairs, not war. We must be grateful for peace. I must be grateful for peace.

Somehow war hasn't destroyed him. Perhaps, after all, it isn't an iron bullet of horror inside him, but a seed of joy. Perhaps that is why he doesn't sob, why he is able to tell his story and find a purpose in it. Perhaps it is a mistake to overestimate death and underestimate the strength planted carefully in the core of the human soul. And to underestimate the power of hope, and of love.

Rwanda, some say, is the most beautiful country on earth. What makes it so beautiful?

God goes to Rwanda at night to rest.

What you wish for

What you wish for

I'll have a slice of H.P., please. No--not blueberry. Humble Pie all the way baby.

It's been that kind of week. But it was my fault. I asked for it: "Lawd, teach me humility, please."

My schooling began right away, starting with work:

Act 1, scene 1. Customer orders, gives me cash. I punch it in. He changes his mind, hands me a new bill and some change. "I'll make it easier," he says. My insides twist. Sir, you don't know this and I'm not going to tell you, but I almost failed math in high school. I twiddle my index finger in the cash boxes, muttering, as I break out in a cold sweat. "You owe me a five," he says. I laugh nervously, hand it over. "Now," he says, "what's three plus three?" He smiles indulgently at his little joke. "Six," I say very quietly. He chuckles softly as he walks away. Schooled!

Scene 2. Customer orders, gives me cash. I punch it in, tear the receipt, and hand the cash back to the customer, filing the receipt neatly in my till. "Um..." she says, and I turn fuschia. "Yessss...." I say, taking back the cash. Take that, pride!

Scene 3. Customer orders, placing his large wallet on the counter, laughing about his "murse." I laugh too. He leaves, comes back in a few minutes with well-dressed friends. I laugh about his "murse." He frowns and his friends look at me as if I am insane. I must be insane.

Exeunt Dignity, Poise, Pride.

Humility school is not confined to work; lessons build in myriad miscellaneous situations. I log them away on a mental notepad, growing excited as the numbers rise. This is one heckuva great prayer-request! Who would've expected such instant, plentiful results!

It's really rather marvelous, I muse. What might have been cause for embarrasment has become fodder for something else. Growth, if all goes well. An interesting reputation if nothing else. Slowly, happenings that might have turned my cheeks scarlet are becoming sources of pride.

Wait a second...pride? It's a vicious cycle, clearly. Welcome, Act 2.

(Dear reader, be careful what you wish for.)

Blueberries

Blueberries

This afternoon, as light comes dimly through thick layers of snow-flooded clouds and the frosted window-glass, and the house is quiet, and air is whooshing up through the vent in the floor, and before me lies a philosophy text that I'd rather never have to look at again in my life, all I can think about is blueberries.

Blueberries.

It's the wrong colour, I know; there's nothing more adverse to the red-and-green colour-coded season than bright spanking blue brushed with coal-grey. And it's the wrong flavour: this is chai season, chocolate season, peppermint and cranberry season, Mandarin-orange season, cinnamon and nutmeg and eggnog season. It's not blueberry season, that dim deep sweet just-right splendid blueberry flavour.

It all began when I cracked open a packet of jellybeans and one--glory be!--blue bean rolled out, packed with synthetic flavour that was just reminiscent enough of the real that it made my taste buds jump 'round shouting for more. Enough cinnamon red! They cried. Give us more BLUE! Downstairs the kettle will soon be boiling; blueberry tea will emerge from the overstuffed cupboard; and among the irritable buds peace will ensue.

In the stuffy plaid-papered halls of High Learning somewhere in a distant corner of my brain, my philosophy text sits poker-straight in a high-backed hard chair and taps its pages on a mahogony table. Rat-a-tat-a-tat. Its deadened papery eyes are darkened with warning. If I don't read it, study it, pull an essay out of it with a mighty, vicious tug, it will hide round the corner next Friday at Deadline Time and wallop me, hard, with a curse and a failing grade.

Ignore, ignore. I'm out of blue beans. Pina Colada tastes all wrong. Strawberry? Bleugh. Orange, lemon-lime, cinnamon, pear? No, no, no, no.

I'm thirsty, thirsty for blueberries.