Things I Learned this Winter 2020-2021.

The turning of the seasons seems to turn something inside me like a doorknob to a closed room, the pilot light of a dream, or the key to wind a clock forwards or back.

As we stand between winter and spring, it’s a good time to reflect in the turning on what we learned last season, or better yet are still in the process of learning. Since I thrive when get things down on the page, I have to write it all down. As C.S. Lewis says,“Ink is the great cure for all human ills as I found out long ago.”

At first, it seems capturing my lessons are just for me, but certain ones rise to find common ground between what is helping me and what might be of use to you. So, culling from my scribbly journal and the photos in my phone, I usually land on a few that seem as though they need remembering for our community.

These are a few of my lessons from Winter.

May you find something that blesses you, challenges you, or makes you laugh.

1.    Theme Days are wobbly and working.

After much resistance, I finally decided to try organizing my week into theme days, a kind of bucket to throw work into by assigning days of the week to a particular work theme. Currently, my days are: M = Spiritual Direction, T = Class/Newsletter, W = Writing, Th = Writing, F = Planning/Organizing/Finishing.

I want to tell you it has been a wobbly start, and that is A-OK. Life and work do not fit easily into such buckets, but we don’t toss the buckets.

For example, I meet with people in spiritual direction on several days of the week. However, a steady, focused attention to different areas of my work on particular days is beginning to pay off. Each day when I wake up, I know what area I am working on. In addition, I can relax. Every demanding thought can simply simmer down, because I know another area that might be elbowing me for attention will get it’s day.  

And even on those topsy-turvy days when someone I love needs me or nothing goes as planned, when I finally get any pockets of time, I know where to focus my attention. It might be wobbly, but it feels as though my work habits are finding solid ground. I am actually getting around to some of those pesky I’ll-get-around-to-it-one-day projects. 

2.    Mild irritants can be put to good use say the Malcolms.

I have enjoyed listening to two Malcolms in my life.

I heard poet, priest, and Harley rider, Malcolm Guite say that he often takes public transit as a way to intentionally build the discipline of waiting into his life. It kept ringing in my ears for days.

I don’t know about you, but I avoid waiting at all costs. Whenever I can, I generally avoid the post office, the DMV, and doctor’s offices. I buy groceries when there are no lines, and if I cannot do that, I am always on the hunt for the shortest line.

Malcolm Gladwell  says, “For good writing, you need conflict or at least a mild irritant.”

I’m not talking about the destructive kind of conflict that we see so often on social media, in win-at-all-costs competition, or currently in politics. But more as in the making of a pearl where the nacre covers the irritant to make something beautiful. The tension of bringing two ideas together to create something new in writing or in life can make for honesty and an ignition for our imaginations.

The Malcolms have me considering the value of things I avoid like waiting and conflict. What of the parts of those that might yield goodness in me or for the benefit of others?

I’ve been noticing how God waits on us and thinking how kind and good and merciful he is.

Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you,
and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you.
For the Lord is a God of justice;
blessed are all those who wait for him.

Isaiah 30:18

Maybe if God can wait on me, I might learn a thing or two by the practice of waiting in my life - not only unavoidable waiting, but intentional waiting. all in all, God only asks us to do smaller versions of things he already does for us.

Here’s to the Malcolms and little places to wait in line.

3.    Making bread is formational.

When Covid began, we ran looking for toilet paper and returning to activities that made them savor slowing down and enjoying home and family, like board games, family bike rides, and baking bread. Apparently, so many started baking bread that yeast sales rose 647%. (pun intended)

We were right in there with the trend. Our grocery stores could not keep yeast on the shelves. When we found it online, we shared it throughout our family and happily dusted our counters with organic flour and rising dough.

As Covid slid into 2021, our oldest daughter, Kate, decided to grow her own sourdough starter. When that failed, her friend gave her a well-established starter and she began baking loaves that had us standing around the oven with our mouths watering. Not a single chunk was left by dinnertime.

When Kate and her family spend a few nights with us during the crazy ice storm of February 2021, she gave me my own starter. Baking sourdough bread takes paying attention to all of my senses: the earthy beer smell of the starter, how the dough feels in my hands, the sound of my knock on the back of a baked loaf, the sight of the brown crust opening at the cut I made to let out some steam, where the warm spot is in my kitchen.  

I am finding new rhythms of feeding my starter and making room for a baking day. So far, it is part of my Sabbath ritual, kneading dough Saturday night with an overnight rise and a Sunday bake. Master-baker, Apolliana Poilane says, “When we feed today’s sourdough, we are creating tomorrows loaf.”

It might have been Covid-trendy to bake bread, but I am finding spiritual growth in the steps of bread-making. I am growing faithfulness, attentiveness, patience, generosity, hospitality, and hope in my kitchen as well as my soul. You could find so many ways to embody your spiritual growth: gardening, painting, parenting, pottery, laundry, hiking, knitting, writing, and more. Really, making of all kinds.

4.    Making a list of my losses feels weirdly wholehearted.

On several separate occasions, I made a list of my losses during Covid. It was simply a bullet list of things that are breaking my heart – days I have missed with the Wonders, my parents, and dear friends. We have missed so much togetherness, chances to say goodbye, the start of kindergarten, graduation ceremonies, and worshiping in-person with church family. Then there are the trips to celebrate anniversaries, graduations, weddings, birthdays and baby showers. Instead, we have borne the alone trips - both my daughters went alone to all OB appointments throughout their pregnancies.

I’m slowly learning before jumping to silver linings, just to name my griefs as they pinch or rise or linger. It helps to bring it all out of hiding and let some light shine on it. It makes me feel clear-eyed. Rested.

The list-making helped me realize what I’ve been carrying around on my insides which have been weighing me down. Only then can I grieve and say some goodbyes that need saying, if only to my expectations. Any form of lament can bring “healing from the mob within”. This is one way we build resilience, something I am always after.

David O. Taylor writes in his book, “Open and Unafraid” of the power and truth of lament,

What we find in these psalms of lament, it is important to stress is never mere sadness. We find instead sadness before the face of God. For there is never mere complaint; here there is complaint brought to God, rather than kept from God . . . Here there is wholly honest reckoning of pain withing the community of those who seek to be fully human, as hard as that may be, wrestling with God, not apart form God.

Facing my losses also reveals what I long for – togetherness, friendship, hallelujahs in community, marking the passages of seasons and thresholds into new futures, and being deeply known. 

Poet, David Whyte says “The antidote to exhaustion isn’t rest. It’s wholeheartedness.” Which is not to say we don’t need rest, but feeling our joy and our sorrow and letting them become companions means we’ve stopped running and can truly rest.

5.    Newborn babies make you tired, but deeply, truly hopeful.

Both of my daughters had baby boys in February with only a day between births. If they had been at the same hospital, they would have seen each other in the hallways. We were gobsmacked and a little bewildered. There were no hospital visits with balloons or flowers or siblings. We prayed and waited.

It felt weird and wonky to be standing in the aisles of a Michael’s buying glitter for Sweet Pea to make cards for her mama and new baby brother when I got the news of my youngest daughter’s baby being born. I was standing between the rubber stamps and the scrapbooks, crying happy astonished tears into my mask when I thought, ‘you can’t be all the places at once, but neither are you anywhere you thought you’d be at this moment’.

Not that being in a hospital waiting room means I’m are any more help to my laboring child, but there is some comfort in the illusion that I’m closer if needed. but this was a time to not just say I trust my children to God, but truly practice it.

We have added two more boys to our family that we hold all kinds of hopes and dreams for, even in the middle of a worldwide pandemic.

For all of the strange weariness that Covid has brought one full year in, one thing hasn’t changed. The way people smile, stop, and comment over freshly made babies. On an walk with her newborn snuggled in a baby wrap and only his gingery head peeping out, she was blessed with so many ooohs and ahhs, how precious!, and and how old? that she was lifted in her sleepless soul to how God is making all things new. And we all seem to delight in that kind of Making.

It reminds me of something theologian Walter Brueggemann wrote in his Lenten book “A Way Other than Our Own”, “We ache for a chance to start again, but it costs so much.”

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