An Offering of Flowers

Earlier this week, I walked around our gardens just before sunset. I noticed the exquisite intricacy of petals and leaves, the way the evening light made the colors pop.

I had come out into the backyard feeling horrified by the news from Charlottesville and sickened by the response from the White House. I had already been on edge from the escalation of tension with North Korea the week before.  

Walking around the gardens, my shoulders relaxed, my footsteps slowed. For a moment, the larger world receded, and I felt comforted and strengthened.

We are going to need comfort and strength in the days ahead, so that we can keep speaking up, keep keeping on. I offer you these flowers. May they bring you peace, too. 

Spectacular Prairie Skies

A recent evening storm that came literally out of the blue reminded me again why I love the prairie skies and Meadowbrook Park. As Marilyn and I began our walk around the prairie, I exclaimed at the blue-violet sky in the west. I wanted to gather the blue-violet in my arms and offer it to Amy, my beloved friend, whom I miss so much. She loved that color. On that evening, with the sky changing and the wind picking up, the thought of gathering the sky in my arms and handing it to Amy made me smile. I imagined her up in the sky like I used to imagine a white-bearded, smiling god when I was a child.

As Marilyn and I rounded the curve, stopping to photograph the western sky, a woman and two children joined us on the path. They had been heading home through the prairie to the nearby neighborhood.

"We had to turn around and come back to the park when we saw the sky," the woman said, laughing.

The sky was becoming more dramatic by the minute, and then the wind picked up in a way I had only experienced at sunset at Lake Michigan. There the waves became bigger and faster; here, the wind became louder and stronger.

I looked up.

"That's not a tornado coming, is it?" I asked Marilyn, the native Midwesterner, the one I have to urge to shelter during a tornado warning.

"No. It's not green," she said, not sounding as certain as I would have liked, as I noticed a twist of grey in the orange sky. Our car was on the other side of the park; turning back wouldn't be any faster than moving forward, so we kept going, walking, laughing at the wind and then the rain, stopping to watch a deer and her baby, and being greeted by a rainbow when we finally got to the car.

I felt like I'd been to another planet and back again.

The Space Between

My tattered bumper sticker reminds me each day: Change is inevitable. Growth is optional. Below is a reflection about change and growth that I delivered on June 3^rd at the coffee house to bid farewell to Rev. Joanne Giannino, interim minister, Unitarian Universalist Church of Urbana-Champaign (UUCUC).

The backstory:

Change has felt very present recently—in my personal life, in our national life, and in the life of my spiritual home, UUCUC. At our UU church, after our minister of nineteen years moved to the west coast—his new church is about a mile from the Pacific Ocean--I served on the Transition Team of our first interim minister, Rev. Janet Newman, for a year and then, after careful thought, I accepted a nomination to a seven-member search committee, which worked for thirteen months and put in hundreds of hours to find our next settled minister. That committee became like a family to me, and I am sure I exchanged more emails with them than I have with anyone else in a one-year span. During our search process and this second year of transition and self-examination, our church was guided by our second interim minister, Rev. Joanne Giannino, whom we will say goodbye to at the end of this month.

Here is the piece I delivered at the coffee house:

Recently in an article in Lion’s Roar magazine, I learned about the Buddhist concept of “bardo”—spelled B A R D O—and it made me think of the past two years at our church. Our church has experienced many moments of “bardo” recently—maybe we have even been in one, long bardo. “Bardo,” the article tells us, “is the Tibetan term for the intermediate state or gap we experience between death and our next rebirth…. More generally, the word bardo refers to the gap or space we experience between any two states.” The article goes on to say, “We actually experience bardos throughout our day”—for instance, when I finish reading this piece to you and before the next one begins, there will be a moment of bardo—“a tiny gap following the end of one activity and preceding the start of another. If you notice them, these bardos of everyday life are places of potential transformation.”

            The article adds, “Bardos are spaces of potential creativity and innovation, because they create breaks in our familiar routines and patterns. In that momentary space of freedom, the fresh perspective of something new and awake may suddenly arise.”

            A break in our familiar routines and patterns, new spaces of creativity and innovation, the fresh perspective of something new and awake—all of these describe our two years of transition as a church and especially our interim year under the gentle, steady, clear guidance offered by Joanne.  She has nudged us when needed, comforted us often—especially in the difficult weeks after November 8—and accompanied us as we have taken action, including at the women’s marches and in our work for racial justice.

As one of the members of your Ministerial Search Committee looking for a settled minister to lead us into the future, I knew we faced a tough task because I heard very often, “I wish Joanne could stay on,” “I’ll miss Joanne so much,” or “How will we find someone as wonderful as Joanne?” (FYI: UUA guidelines do not allow the interim minister to continue on as the settled minister). When our committee shared these comments with Joanne, her advice was characteristic of her: she put our needs as a congregation first—it wasn’t about her. She said, “What do you think they are responding to when they say that? You can use that as a guide in your search.”

            We followed Joanne’s advice and found someone wonderful in her own way. The unanimous vote on May 7 suggests you all approve of our choice. But there is only one Rev. Joanne Giannino, and I feel very fortunate and grateful to have had you, Joanne, to lead us in this bardo, this time of potential transformation.

            I’ll end with a poem by Alberto Rios, a poem about giving and receiving and about how those actions change us. We have received much from you this past year, Joanne, and have been transformed by it.

“When Giving isAll We Have” by Alberto Rios [Please click the title for text of the poem I read at the coffee house; you will also find a recording of Rios reading the poem.]

Thank you, Joanne, for all you have given us and for what we have made together.

Retreat

This drawing--a souvenir of an afternoon alone to catch up with myself, time to take a long walk, to ignore the clock, then to retreat to my study with a withered tulip in a blue, glass vase and to play with pastels, enjoying the freedom of not knowing how to use pastels well, knowing only that I want the satisfaction of making marks on paper, of messy hands, of being lost in a process, of looking up, eventually, to find the delightful illusion of three dimensions on flat paper. 

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How do you slow down and catch up with yourself? 

Signs of the Times – at the Women’s March in Chicago

Ten days have passed since the Women’s March, and the exuberance I felt then—briefly—has been replaced by worry and dread, alternating with fierce determination and only the faintest glimmer of hope. Still, every time I look at my photos from that day in Chicago, I smile a little and feel held and lifted up by that crowd, a crowd so dense we had to move slowly when we moved at all.

The sun came out in Chicago that Saturday. The evening before, as Marilyn and I arrived in the city, heading north on Lake Shore Drive, the fog was so thick, our usual view of the skyline was completely hidden. The day after the march was grey and colder.  But that Saturday morning of the march, the sun shone on us and warmed us; we shed coats, but the pink hats with cat ears stayed on. All the aerial photos of the marches around the country show a rose-tinted crowd.

Though the organizers cancelled the official march in Chicago because the crowd was too big for the route, some of us marched anyway—slowly, cheerfully, stopping right in the middle of Michigan Avenue when needed.  As we moved across Michigan and down Jackson, walking the one block to Wabash, we chanted now and then: “THIS is what democracy looks like,” we responded to “TELL me what democracy looks like.” Or we repeated, “Black Lives Matter.” The chants moved through the crowd like waves.

Every time a train passed on the L tracks further west of us, we would cheer loudly, holding up and waving our signs. The people on the train would wave back at us, some of them holding up signs, too. Marching behind Marilyn and me was a family: grandparents, parents, and a baby girl, who was nine months old that day her mother told me.  Every time the crowd around her cheered for an L train, the baby smiled and clapped her hands, her palms sometimes slipping past each other; clapping was still new to her.  She never seem startled by our cheers; rather, she seemed to understand the rhythm of the marchers and to respond to it. The baby’s grandmother told me her other daughter was marching in D.C., that her family was represented at marches. This baby will probably hear stories of the marches from her family. But I imagine she will have some memories of her own, too, settling somewhere in her body and her mind.

Last week, I read an article about professors and librarians at Northeastern University (where I got my Master’s in 1990) who collected up signs that were discarded after the Boston Women’s March and will catalog them as important cultural and historical artifacts. Many of us who were at Women’s Marches took photos of the signs, our efforts at recording this historic moment and movement. I’m including some of those photos here. May they remind us and inspire us to keep on keeping on.

We are going to be protesting for a while; we’ll need more signs and more inspiration. If you have slogans or stories you would like to share, please leave them in the comments. I’d love to read them.

That's Marilyn holding her sign (which we got from Emily's List) and the flowers a stranger gave her. 

I love this photo of the crowd--even if the crowd meant we could not find the friends we were to meet from our UU church until later, when they left the crowd and when we could send and receive texts again.

As we walked from the rally site to the Trump Hotel, we saw these little girls marching down a closed-off Michigan Avenue with signs they had made.

Near the river, we were astonished to run into friends who live in Chicago and whom we had planned to try to see later in the day.  How we found each other in a quarter million people--entirely by chance--is beyond me!

These teens were hanging out right in the middle of Wacker Drive and were happy to have their photo taken. 

I just had to add this photo.  We were waiting in the crowd, and I could see a gap over people's heads; I asked someone why there was open space that we weren't spreading into, even though we were packed so tight as we waited to start marching. Was it fenced off?  "Oh, no it's not fenced off. That's the grass. We were asked not to go on the grass." "Oh," I replied, and we both laughed and said, "Midwest nice!"  I then held up my camera to get a photo of the grass.