To Believe in Miracles

So, how many of us practice the Law of Attraction? Some of us do unwittingly, I think – certainly those a generation or two ahead of me, for whom positive thinking was more a natural thing. They had learned it, I think, through hardship.

For others of us, this frame of mind takes a conscious effort.

Positive thoughts! Ah God, we need them now in January, when our blood is chilled as last July’s margaritas, our car batteries dead, and our bellies cramped with flu-like symptoms.

No! This is not how you do this! (I’m learning about this through my awesome oldest child, who – along with her brothers - was given to me as much for my own enrichment as hers) Okay – rephrase. Positive thoughts are good in January, even though we already have an abundance of lovely, sparkling snow to look at by the light of a full Cold Moon. Even though we already have safe transportation to get to work and we’re not hitching up horse and buggy like our great grandparents. Even though we’re still eating enough left over Christmas candy to give us – yes, flu like symptoms.

Lol! Well, maybe tongue-in-cheek, but better, right?

The law of attraction teaches us that we can manifest anything into our lives just by believing it will come to us. By having continuous, positive thoughts about our needs and desires. Like Santa Claus? Well, I don’t know if you can ask for a pony or not.

But why not? How badly do you want it?

I’m Catholic, and this is one of the self-truths that I hold most closely. Because it allows me to believe in miracles (we believe, after all, in Christ’s presence on the altar every day) and not only that, but to name the miracles. The return of my beloved de-clawed kitty when he’d been wandering lost for days amongst the coyotes and stray dogs. What about the patient who lived when he had no business doing so? The reading glasses that miraculously appeared on the coffee table when I know I had already looked there twice?

Well, maybe I couldn’t see them, right? Tee-hee-hee!

But isn’t it better to believe? To have something to hang onto?

Wallowing in negativity is not only a soul-eater, it is an exercise in futility. It’s impossible to move forward when your mind is spinning with the anxieties of possible bad outcomes, past failures and gloomgloomgloom. At some point, you have to turn the page, and in doing so, you have to discover why it is that you are here, what is your purpose, and what tools you need to fulfill said purpose.

Which is all really deep, I know.

But start simply  - good thoughts to replace bad, gratitude for what you already have. A conscious effort to rearrange your thought patterns, turning the dark ones oh-so-slowly towards the light.

Maybe play “Here Comes the Sun” and dance in the kitchen with your baby.

Maybe name your Law of Attraction “God” and acknowledge that what you’re doing is one part hope and nine parts prayer, and He’s listening.

Maybe start eating jelly bellies waaaaayy before Easter; pick a different color every day.

Or maybe . . . okay beautiful people, close your eyes, manifest . . . Spring! 

It will be here sooner than we think.  

 *Art by Amy Roemer

A Season for Reaching

Okay, here comes Christmas! Life is flying forward in fast motion and it’s time for the tree the gifts the cookies the caroling! If you’re on facebook at all – and I assume you are or you wouldn’t be reading this – I'm sure you've been inundated with holiday posts, everything from the holy rollers to the folks from Walmart.

I know.

I’m going to try to limit my Christmas posts, I promise. But I wanted to share this with you, and, fair warning for those of you who are nonbelievers – this might actually get a tad religious.

I think that belief is more about reaching than anything else, no? That stretch of the mind towards another plateau. This is a good season for reaching. And in doing so I stumbled across the really unique view of Christmas as a subversive holiday.


 (This frame of mind comes to us from the brilliant teachings of Father Barron – he’s all over Youtube, people, and he’s wonderful.)

So, Christmas. Peace, joy, love – subversion, really?

But I love this idea.

Consider this – the Gospel of Luke tells of the shepherds tending their flock by night, how the angels appeared with their message of hope. We tend to think of angels as benign creatures, winged and wreathed in smiles, bathed in light. But no, pay attention. The angel’s first words were “Be not afraid,” which would indicate a real fear on the part of the shepherds. Well, the sky was lit up, strange beings were talking to them. And lets face it, they were simple men, so, perhaps, even “gibbering terror” would be an apt description of their reaction? It gets better! The first angel was then followed by a “host” of angels. Again, we picture song and light. But the Greek word is “stratos” and that word means army. So we have an army of angels. A triumphant army with a message.

The King has come.

I’ve heard it a thousand times. We all have. But this stops me in my tracks. That baby was here with a purpose, and that was, yes, to subvert. The message of love is painful, hard fought for, not easily gained; and it began at that moment with the angels shouting a victory into the boundless night sky over Bethlehem .

We’re meant, I believe, to think about that, at least a little, during the mad rush of the season, in between the Festival of Lights and the cookie bake-offs.

We’re meant to reach. 

November House

Walls and windows. Hardwood floor - scarred by the memory of a child’s roller skates - and a narrow, enclosed stairway. (We painted the steps SpongeBob Blue a dozen years ago, and I have played hell matching that color ever since.)  We've added on, jacked up, mudded and sanded. New roof, new bedroom, foundation repair, windows replaced all around.

Our house has been tucked into the base of Cemetery Hill for so long it is not hard to imagine horse-drawn farm wagons lumbering past, and my children were the third generation of our family to toss maple spinners in the front yard. All of which is to say that our home belongs as much to the past as the present; and that has always felt exactly right.        

            But, particularly in November, the line between seems rather blurred.

November is the month of All Souls, and the seventeenth was my grandfather’s birthday, as well. This late in the season, there is already a bite in the wind, and nightfall comes early, twilight seeping through the blinds and throwing plum colored slats across my living room floor. It’s not hard to envision my younger self sprawled on the carpet with siblings and cousins, chin in hands, while my grandparents showed vacation slides.

            “How are you?” My grandmother’s voice, forever paired in my memory with the music of front door chimes. Short little woman, she wore flowered dresses and round spectacles, and on November seventeenth she would have made a two-layer cake and kept if from our incautious fingers by means of a pink plastic carrier.

            Funny what your mind chooses to keep. I could pick that cake caddy out of a hundred others.    

            But often the smallest retrospection is the one that stays with us the longest. Scent of butter cream frosting, sound of first sleet ticking on windowpanes. Comforting backdrop of adult voices. We keep these things in the whirlpool of memory and forget we even have them until they surface again.

  Usually in the fall, always in November.

(My grandparents were the first family members to own our home. This is their wedding picture, taken in 1929, and I just had to include this picture of Grandma. Wasn't she gorgeous? My sister still has the dress she is wearing here.)

Related Post:  Spring has its own form of nostalgia, in "Frog Song".    

"....The frog song brings the little girl back, and I can see her almost as plainly as I see my own children –  Here in the same yard, beneath the magnolia, and trailing up the hill after lightning bug..."

Frog Song

            Tonight is the night.

I step outside, barefoot on a lawn soft as grave dirt, to inhale the faintly piquant lemon of magnolias and hear the frog song. A thousand chirring, peeping, cheering voices that hold me enthrall, errands forgotten, while all the summers of my life shuttle past, swift and rolling as the downhill rush of a spring-fed creek.

Copyright Steve Polatnick

            “They’re here,” my mother, daughter, grandmother would say – day gentling into evening, a sky the color of tea roses and violets, and through it all, the song. “Summer’s coming.”

            Oh, summer. The languid air in the valley has a presence that is very nearly tangible, and is at least half made-up of memory. My mother played in this yard as a little girl in the years just following the Great Depression. Hair in a smooth Scout Finch bob, neat patches on her cotton dress, fingers blackberry-stained. The frog song brings the little girl back, and I can see her almost as plainly as I see my own children –

            Here in the same yard, beneath the magnolia, and trailing up the hill after lightning bugs, their shouts jubilant enough to puncture the soul, to suck the heart out.

            I think that the happiest moments in our lives are overlaid with the deepest sorrow, as though we need to experience the depth of one in order to feel the other. Time wounds us, always, simply by its forward motion.

            But anyway.

            Who on earth first applied the word “croak” to that sound? And could it be further from the truth?  

Siblings

The hall window in the house where I grew up is at the top of the stairs, immediately upon reaching the thirteenth step, and to your right. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and it occurs to me that after some thirty years, it could be permanently closed. Stuck in the “lock” position or even painted shut.

            But the mind, the memory, provides the opening.

Copyright Ethan Jack Harrington

 It is the summer of 1974, and I’ll be eleven in October, but for now it is hot enough to suck sweat beads from the nape of your neck before you reach the last step. Ours is an old clapboard farmhouse with no air conditioning, low upstairs ceilings and plain board floors warm beneath bare feet.

            The roof is our haven.

            On a clear August night, my siblings and I are camped there by ten o’clock , eschewing beds for the damp evening air. You can straddle the peak of that roof and ride the prairie like Captain Hook in the crow’s nest, with the darkness spread above and below. Yard lights, far away and isolated, glitter like scattered moon beads and the stars are a glory, but otherwise the blackness is complete, thick and heavy.

            We spread blankets on the porch roof and lie down to inhale the bouquet of ripe field corn and wet earth. Farm kids – our noses fail to register the stink of hog manure, gleaning only the riches from the night. My sisters discuss boys and a future shrouded in the mists of unreality while the transistor radio murmurs assurance that the lion sleeps tonight. My older brother can sing like that, but it is rare that he does, and the little brothers are pests that we chase from our domain until we tire and they prevail. Watergate has scandalized our nation and America ’s youth are bleeding in Vietnam , but the distance to that place is mind-boggling; we are insular, contented in our isolation. And I, the happy middle child - frosting in the Oreo - lay back and watch the stars. Sometimes, if you look long enough, they suck you out of yourself until you are floating, impossibly small and insignificant, among them.

            There was a tranquility in that moment that I haven’t touched since.

            We were closer to God on the porch roof, but we wouldn’t know that until we climbed down and grew up.

I don’t remember the last time I was there. In the way of so many life events, the date passed unmarked, and I found myself with a job, a mortgage, children. It was always my intent to show them our spot, but they had places of their own – creek, sidewalk, front porch swing – and on the rooftop they may have seen only faded and peeling shingles, the magic dried up like dew before the sun.

In the end, it seemed that time belonged to only to those of us who had been there, shared and understood – a link best left to siblings alone.