A Prayer of Giving

(A prayer for my next breath)

God of infinite compassion,
Creator of Light
and Breath:

Grant me Give.

Teach me to bend
before I break,
And find the
softness
hidden in the hard lines
and straight edges
that cut
and draw blood:
Sometimes mine.
Often yours.
Messy either way.

There is kindness
I think,
And grace,
that can gentle
the right angles
that guard my heart
and my fear,
And there,
in that linear
bisection
of slopes and slants,
I might remember
that we all fight
fierce dragons,
On a narrow,
rock-strewn,
unbending
road.

Grant me give, God,
and in that gentle giving
I can breathe
and let go.

Humility is a Blue Flame - for the counting of the Omer

Humility is a blue flame,
dipping into indigo
and edged in black,
It is cool water
that flows in small
ripples and puddles
at my feet.
It is balm
for a weary soul,
and a heart that
cannot find its
rhythm, that is
lost a bit,
that is chipped
a bit.

It is blue flame,

And when I stand
too close to that flame,
and the waters rise
like a torrent,
and I am battered
and beaten
in the wake of
my weakness,
compassion comes,
a grace of blessing,
lifting me from
my humiliation
to stand

near the blue flames
and cool waters;
the balm of humility,
the breath of compassion,
Whole.

Soft Landing

Somewhere in my first year of sobriety, I went through a rough patch. It may be more accurate to say that "somewhere in my first year of sobriety, I found a few seconds of joy and breathless freedom." Those seconds were very few and very far between. The rough and stumbly, broken and prickly moments stretched into days, into weeks, into months. I (still) feel so much more at home in those spaces. I understand the rules there. There may be more pain in that place, but I get its ebb and flow, understand its motion and oddly circuitous paths. 

This time, of all those myriad times, was really pretty rough. Trust me: I know rough.

Now, what they don't tell you, those omnipotent and aloof They who haunt the smoky rooms and dingy halls of recovery, what They don't tell you is just how raw, just how naked, just how vulnerable you can feel when you finally start feeling, and there's nothing standing between you and the rest of the world except you. 

It's just you. And the pain. And the fear.  And the fire that burns inside your head because you just can't stop thinking and you can't stop feeling and the world keeps spinning and you just want to yell "Stop!" or maybe "Wait!" or maybe just hide. Just crawl under the covers and lie in the cool and shadowy dark for a few thousand years, until It's all gone, until you can't even remember what It was to begin with.

I was consumed by that fire. Those flames licked up one side and down the other, dancing along every inch of my skin without cease. Scorched earth policy (or whatever equivalent fits). I held my breath, held it all in, waiting for it to end, for the burning to stop, for the manicky, panicky beating of my heart to quiet. I held myself breathlessly still, hopelessly folded in on myself. 

It was right about then that a friend gave me a card. It was not your typical Hallmark card, replete with hearts and flowers and ooey-gooey sentiment. Nor did it highlight wise, sarcastic characters who made pithy little  remarks that you thought were amusing and yet couldn't recall thirty-seven seconds later. In fact, this card had a cartoon-like (think Keith Harrington-esque rather than Boynton-y) picture of a big city skyline, a suspension bridge in the foreground, and a sunshine yellow taxi clearly falling (at breakneck speed, I imagine) off the edge of the bridge to the depths of whatever it was below, flames shooting out the taxi's windows, and some person, some stick-figure of a person, waited inside, clearly obeying the laws of gravity and motion, clearly at a loss.

The future did not look bright for the taxi or its rider.

On the inside, to the left, were words. Many, many words. Great gobs of words that told the story of how the taxi, and the person inside of it came to be flying off that particular bridge at that particular time. Or maybe, the words told the story of the thoughts and feelings pf that lone and lonely inhabitant as he (or she) plummeted to some cataclysmic crash. Might have been some spiritual allegory. I don't remember. Frankly, I don't really care.

What I remember was the echo I felt of  that figure's resignation and absolute acceptance of the act of free falling in an endless and elegant arc that could only end in-- not death; that would be too clean, too neat-- but more pain. That certainty that this would not end in a bottom but with a trap door.

That was the left-hand side. The right side held a wish. Bold black letters on a blanket of bright white:

I wish for you a soft landing

And at that exact moment, everything started up again. Until that very instant, everything about me had been held in suspended animation, frozen in some weird danse macabre, or a game of statues-- nothing moved, nothing changed, except the fire in my head and the freely-falling bottoming out that I could only watch from 30,000 feet and feel with intimate agony.

A wish. A hope. A prayer that buckled my knees and filled me with breathless wonder. A desperately needed lesson in compassion and love from a friend who knew my heart and cherished my soul (even when I could only find tattered bits (when I bothered to look at all)). She understood that compassion has nothing to do with healing me or changing me. It was not advice or wisdom. Comfort didn't really fit either. I was falling, and nothing she could do would stop the descent.

She didn't watch from a great and safe distance, shielding herself from the the certain wreckage I was about to cause. She didn't demand that I stop and pull myself together, nor did she coddle me and feed me the casual niceties so easily said (and so blithely become merely pleasant noise). 

All she could do was love me and wish for me a soft landing.

These days, my rough patches are not so rough. What seemed so bleak and attenuated now has softly blurred edges and rounded corners. I don't seem to cut myself on my life too often anymore. My head catches fire with stories and words rather than panic and paralysis. Still, I have my moments, and get caught off guard, not by the rawness and the nakedness, but more by despair or grief. Life changes. God, does life change! Thank God that it does, and me along with it.

But for all that it changes, for all that I have been changed, still, one of the dearest prayers I know remains: I wish for you-- for me-- for us all-- a soft landing. No matter our strength or faith or goodness or grace; for all our mended brokenness and razor-edged faults, we all fall sometimes. We all sit in the back of a taxi, hurtling off the bridge at a million miles an hour, falling into forever. 

And as we fall, as we plummet to the surety of a trap door bottom, we can still wish for a soft place to land. And in that landing, that soft and gentle landing, may we find a place to breathe, a spot of rest in the palm of God's hand.

To my dearest Kaelyn-- wishing for you the softest of places to land. xoxo

20 Elul 5773: Judge

When I was a teenager, I had a close friend who would call me Madame DeFarge-- the villain of A Tale of Two Cities.  He claimed I would sit on the sidelines of life, quietly knitting away, all the while playing judge, jury and executioner with anyone who happened to wander into my path.

 “Off with their heads!” That was the verdict, every time. There was very little give in me. No one was exempt from my judgment—mainly because everyone was guilty. No one managed to succeed in the arduous but necessary task of saving me from myself.

Off with their heads, indeed.

I liked watching life from the edges back then. I stood on the borders, waiting, watching. Judging. It was safe. It was comfortable. And the verdict was always the same, so how could I be hurt? How could I be disappointed?

How could I ever not be disappointed? I lived in an endless loop of disconnection and separation. I set everyone up to be my God, then cried “Guilty!” with every failure. I judged the world, and found the world wanting. 

I'm happy to report that I don't do that so much these days. Over the years, I learned to temper my judgment with mercy and kindness. Mostly. Sure-- there are times, when I'm hungry, angry, lonely, tired-- lost in the the inimitable maze of HALT (an acronym I learned in early sobriety, and which has stood me in good stead). It is always useful, as a way to keep me in check, to curb my natural instinct for judgment and cynicism and biting sarcasm. It's a challenge, but one that can be subdued (not conquered quite, but I'm practicing progress, not perfection)-- when I can stop for a minute or three, and breathe, and get out of my own way.

Ahhhhhhh. I allow you to be you, in all your glory, free of my judgment and drama. 

One small kink in this rosy scene. When I'm being honest, and open and diving that extra few inches in honor of Elul, there is (of course) a hitch. When it comes to the fine and laser-sharp art of judging, the kind that draws blood and wreaks some amount of havoc in its jagged-edged wake, there is one person who falls outside the bounds of my compassion-- who has always fallen outside those walls, and lives in the constant shadow of Mme. DuFarge's harshness.

Me.

While I may have learned, over the years, to let you off the hook of my judgment, I haven't yet learned-- with any consistency-- to find that respite for myself. I often judge my insides by your outsides. You look happy and shiny and thin and popular and successful and smart and together and competent. So you must be, right? And I? I know what goes on in my head. I know those voices quite well, the ones that whisper in sibilant snatches that I am less than and unwanted and weak.They are the same voices that tell me I cannot be forgiven, I will not be redeemed. They are the voices that declare me wanting, again and again and again.

I have no idea (for the most part) if the stories I tell myself in the dark, have anything to do with reality. I have no idea if you are, in fact, happy and shiny and popular and successful, and all those other ands. You may be. Thing is, it doesn't really matter. 

You get to be who you are, in all your glory. And that is enough. One day, if I practice enough, if I ask for help enough, if I stop and breathe and get out of my own way enough, I will finally put down the knitting needles and allow myself to be me, in all my glory. I will temper my judgment with mercy and compassion and love.

And I will be enough.