Did You Get the Chance to Dance Along the Light of Day?

The earth is full; there is enough and to spare.

I'm walking on Sunday evening, into a beautiful spring sunset with blossoms exploding around us, with Friend. She wants to know what to do that will make her happy. To be more particular, she wants somebody to tell her what will make her happy. She proclaims to the pink-tinged sky: "Just tell me what to do, and I'll do it. Just tell me what to do. I'm very obedient. It will be done in an instant." I start laughing, "I wish it worked like that. Somebody comes and tells us what to do that makes us happy."

She's at that point we all get to, those of us who are very good box-checkers, those of us who love to fill in forms. (Mine might have been the first census form to have been filled out, but I waited until April 1, so that I could accurately report who actually stayed in the house that day. Wouldn't want to file a false document with the federal government). Graduate from high school with honors. Check. Attend best college you can, preferably on scholarship and in another country. Check. Get graduate degree. Check. Get married to athlete who makes you laugh. Check. Have children. Check. Pottytrain children. Check. Get children to first grade where day becomes your own again. Check. Option A: Develop career and get lots of awards. Check. Option B: Remain at home and create brilliant pianists, soccer players, singers and prayers out of said children, plus master art of digital scrapbooking. Option C: Options A and B. Check, check, check.

Then, one day, about fifteen years down the road, you wake up one morning and think, "Is this it? Is this it for the rest of my life? Is this what I get to do, everyday for the rest of my life?" You look at the body sleeping next to you, in its slack, morning-eyed sleepiness, and think, "Are you it for the rest of my life?" It's round about this point that some women have another baby, because that's another venture to start on, something that breaks up the monotony. Men, I've noticed, buy younger models—of either sports cars or wives, or both.

Friend—who doesn't want another baby and can't afford a sports car and can't marry a wife in this state—breaks out in a frustrated utterance, "I didn't realize that 'endure to the end' was going to be fifty years long. Somehow I feel robbed. Like I worked really hard to get here and I'm not anywhere. I just want to be told what to do next. And there is no next." I'm laughing as we head down the hill: "Well, there is a next. But there are no more boxes. So, now, scary as it may seem, you get to decide what's next. It's utterly and completely your choice." She wails, "But I want to be told what to do next. I'm very good at that. I don't want to have to work it out. That's frightening. "

____________________________

Exodus 32 is normally boiled down to silly children of Israel lose their heads while Moses is gone and go on idol-making rampage which results in Moses and the Lord getting really upset. Moral of story is obviously that we should not make "golden calves" in our own lives. (Just received change of assignment in church which means I now have to teach Old Testament to adults. Bear with me on the OT references while I settle in). But, I'm not so sure about this obvious message. Again, the "why" gets lost in the "what."

Here's another way to look at it: A people, in slavery for 470 years, are liberated. There's a certain psychological comfort, or at least certainty, in slavery. You don't have to decide what to do, what to wear, when to work, what to eat, and when to sleep. While you might chafe against the restrictions, there is also no opportunity to go horribly wrong of your own free will and choice. So, imagine the "growing up" that needs to go on in a person's mind to be able to go from "slave" or "child" to independent, free thinking adult. As I read through Exodus, I appreciated how the children of Israel are tutored in steps by a patient, understanding parent God.

First, he requires them to work out how much manna it is they really need, each "according to his eating." This is a little bit of independent thinking. "And no, don't hoard it. If you do, it will stink. Okay, now it's stinking. So, work out a better amount tomorrow." After a few days, they get it. They understand that this manna will appear in the morning, and melt in the hot afternoon sun. And, if there's any left over by night, it will turn rancid and wormy in the morning. They understand that their responsibility is to gather it and correctly calculate the amount. Even still, a few, myself included, not willing to trust that there will be nothing on the seventh day, or perhaps wanting fresh manna instead of baked, go out on the Sabbath morning, and there's none. Our appearance to look for manna when we've been told there won't be any gets a warning. So, they're learning to figure out how to be obedient without the immediate consequence of a lash or a deprivation.

Then Moses learns how to lead. The only leader of any weight that Moses has seen is Pharaoh, a centralized, powerful figure to whom the entire Egyptian people look. So, when it comes time to fight Amalek, Moses becomes just that kind of leader. He parks himself at the top of a hill and raises his arms. As long as Moses raises his arms, the battle goes in their favor. When he gets tired and lowers his arms, the battle turns against them. Why didn't Moses choose to hold up a flag on a stick? Far easier to hold and to handle. Perhaps because he thought he had to be the center of his people's focus. (Or maybe to provide us with an easily packaged moral imperative about the necessity of supporting your leaders.) But, with the aid of his trusty lieutenants holding up his weary arms, the Israelites win the battle. Still, Moses is the central figure and they look to a leader to give them confidence and direction. Their leader, however, needs to learn that he cannot take everything upon himself and so Jethro wisely tells him to cut out the all-day answering of questions and concerns. Delegate to capable leaders and take yourself out of the middle of things.

Together, the children of Israel and Moses develop small steps of independence. God, in chapter 19, decides to make them his covenant people. He asks them to purify themselves in anticipation of the making of the covenant. They take three days to purify, and then, in return, they get lightning, thunder, fire and clouds as the Lord reveals himself to Moses and makes the covenant with the him and his people. Once again, they interact with their God through their leader and they get instant reward in the form of visible signs of divine power. Then they get instructions for living, in the form of the tablets of stone and they get instructions for worship, in the form of how to build the Tabernacle. They promise, the entire audience, "All that the Lord has said we will do, and be obedient."

So, fast forward to the crucial moments before the making of the golden calf. Moses has left to talk again with the Lord. Aaron is left in charge of the camp. Their leader, to whom they have looked for manna, for water, for battle commands, for divine law, for intercession with the Lord, has gone. There is no-one to look to. There's no smoke, no fire, no thunder or lightning. It's almost as if God and Moses conspired to leave these children alone for a time to see what they will do in the absence of power and authority. What steps will they take on their own?

What do they do in the space provided by the Lord in which to prove themselves? They panic. They return to their default setting. I know they have all they need to see them through this time of separation—tablets of Commandments, lists of worship instructions, and a personal commitment to carry these out. But sometimes those don't feel like enough. Sometimes, you want your hand held. Moses' absence was too much to bear, the space and silence created by his leaving too much to contemplate. So, "when they saw that Moses was delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron and said unto him, 'Up, make us gods which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, . . . we wot not what is become of him."

To a people so used to being led, to being shown, to being provided for, to having their manna and quail set out before them, they found themselves unaccountably, horribly alone. There was no one to tell them what to do, no one to tell them just exactly how to be happy. So, they make a leader for themselves, out of gold, in the shape of a calf. It comforts them—at least until Moses gets back into camp and reads them the riot act. I suppose it was then the penny dropped that perhaps the golden calf was exactly the kind of graven image prohibited by their new set of life rules. That was something they probably hadn't realized. It was one of those ideas that look better on paper than in execution. After all, all they wanted was a god to lead them, just like they had always had. They didn't realize that those really detailed instructions they had been given over the past months/years were designed for exactly this moment, to allow them to lead themselves.

I feel for the children of Israel. I recognize their good impulses. They don't suddenly get a wild hair and decide, "Yes, Moses is gone. Let's play." They actually want to worship something. They want a visible leader, somebody they can turn to. And, in their fledgling faith, they do just about everything right: they approach Aaron, the leader in Moses' absence, and ask for a visible god; the women offer up their golden jewelry, sacrificing their own belongings; their leader makes the calf for them and proclaims a feast day unto the Lord; they build an altar of earth in front of it, just as instructed in Exodus 20:24; they come early in the day and offer up their burnt offerings and bring their peace offerings. Just about everything is done right, except for the one prohibition that they were told three times: don't make any graven images, in particular, don't make any golden or silver images. Just don't. And they still do.

Why is it that they couldn't remember this one small detail?

Because when we are left alone for the first time to actually choose for ourselves the life we will lead, sometimes we freeze. We don't actually know how to choose for ourselves. We don't know what to choose. We're used to that undercurrent of authority showing us what our choices "should" be. It's hard to choose something when there are no more boxes telling us what to chose. When there is no obvious "should" i.e., when there's just space and time to fill, we flounder. Into this space, sometimes we pour more boxes of our own making, perhaps a golden calf or two, just because we're used to boxes. That this tends to lead to a life lived under the pressure of false imperatives is problematic. But, the familiarity of that approach can be comfortably numbing. At some point though, just like the children of Israel, there will come a time when we are left alone, with the Lord's devices, to fashion a life of our own choosing, a life that is of our own free will and choice.

____________________________

My lovely Friend has all the education, career, husband and children she needs. What now? This was the question she asked herself and her husband during one of those frankly honest, even-toned, perspective-altering, kitchen table conversations a few weeks ago. Start again? Because in ten years, if she threw this set of husband, children, and kitchen table in, she would be back in the same position she is in now, with a new husband, new children, and a new kitchen table. And, in all honesty, it was this particular man she wanted to share the journey with and these particular children she would like to see through to the end.

Which brought us at the middle of the walk, as we rounded the irrigation canal, to the nature of this journey and the massive space between the last box and the last breath. I asked her, "What story do you want to tell? In twenty years, what is your story going to be?"

In my particular space, I told her I would like to hike the Appalachian trail (even better if Bill Bryson were chugging along with me); learn how to drive a big rig; oil paint; live in New York City or London or Sydney or Florence; spend every afternoon I possibly could watching my children play sports; see how tall the trees I'm going to plant next month in our new orchard will grow; go to Scotland with my beautiful sisters to find my presently unknown but I am sure equally short-legged, well-endowed second cousins in Firth; take my children to live where they are the theological and perhaps racial and linguistic minority; hike the Grand Canyon and ride the Colorado River out; attend the U.S. Open in New York in September and the next World Cup; buy a kayak and use it during the summers on the mountain reservoirs; track down an ocean and plonk myself next to it for as long as I can every year; earn my lifelong membership in the Fancy Skirt Tennis Club, and have that mentioned in my obituary along with the Lovely Ladies Luncheon Book Club; go to every funeral I can for those people I've shared this journey with; notice need and find ways to fill it; sit in grey-haired, raucous conversation with my brothers and sisters as often as we can and hopefully belt out Christmas carols every year at the top of our slightly off-key voices (mine the worst), Paul on the piano, Laura on the guitar, Angus on the drums; see the magic of my children and my brothers' and sisters' children unfold before my teary eyes; continue to love this man I've lain next to for nigh on twenty years; maybe write a book if I can muster up the energy; and the list goes on.

"But, what if that doesn't happen? What if you can't find a publisher for your book? What if you get mugged on the trail? Or shot in the New York subway like Brian Watkins?"

"I don't care. It's my story. I get to try writing it. It's my space. I get to try filling it. I start by thinking about what I would like to go in it."

Title: From "Drops of Jupiter" by Train.

I Really Need You Tonight

There is really nothing more to say--except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye.

The traditional teaching of chastity to our teenagers goes something like, "Sex outside of marriage is wrong." Then, it's followed by a laundry list of things one mustn't do so that you couldn't possibly have sex before marriage: touch any area covered by a swimming suit, be alone with a boy in the basement watching movies, be alone with a girl in a car with a bench seat, look at pornography on the Internet, and (this is my personal one) listen to and see any Shakira videos (Have you see the She-wolf video? It's depraved. And I'm desensitized). The repercussions of such activities are dread: Illegitimate children, sexual disease, immorality, loss of virginity. All those things that might possibly happen and which would spell the end of life as you know it. And so, sexual intimacy is run through with a thread of fear, colored with the forbidden, and becomes a place to either run from or to peer around the edge at with the morbid curiosity of children, forbidden to eat sugar, looking into the pantry of their friend, whose mother apparently owns stock in General Mills.

But then our children notice images, sounds, lyrics, dialogue that portrays sex generally--inside and outside of marriage--as really rather fun. During their first forays into sexual intimacy, the feelings that accompany their exploration are exhilarating. Those feelings don't feel wrong, in and of themselves. How does something supposed to be so wrong feel so good? There's a disconnect between what they hear at church and possibly at home and what they feel within themselves.

For the sake of my children, of my almost-adult Julia, and my three boys who are charging into sexual maturity and therefore sexual interest, there must be a better way to teach the principle that sexual purity, even waiting until marriage to engage in sexual intercourse, is a better way. Not the only way, we have to recognize, but a better way than the satisfying of an appetite that is commonly portrayed. And, teaching a better way must center on principles, not laundry lists of what actions are wrong, until you both say “Yes,” and then the whole smorgasbord is open for business (Because that in and of itself is a little confusing; at least it was for me).

What reason is there for reserving physical intimacy for marriage, besides, the Lord forbade it? In all honesty, the logical reasons that WERE given for maintaining moral purity aren't as convincing anymore.

Traditionally, I would think, the concern for children born outside of marriage and their accounting for in the legal system drove much of the proscriptions against extra-marital sex. However, given the development of science and technology, some of the traditional reasons for abstaining from sex until marriage don't apply anymore. Birth control prevents the conception of unwanted children. Thus, careful people (adults and teenagers) can engage in sex 99.5 percent of the time without getting pregnant.

If birth control should fail (real birth control, taken regularly, every day at the same time, not like the 7 out of 10 pills I took before our July 7 wedding which method resulted in Julia Rose due April 8 of the next year) and a child is conceived and delivered, then science can now take care of prickly legal issues. The fetus can now be aborted in relative physical safety to the mother--one option. Or the child can be delivered and adopted out--another option. Or, the child can be kept without many of the legal and social ramifications that used to haunt "illegitimate" or "bastard" children.

Blood and DNA testing allows one to establish paternity even if the parents are not married to each other. This allows children born outside of a marriage to lay claim to inheritances, land, and other benefits of identifying their biological father. This also allows the mother to lay claim on support for the child from the biological father.

If, as we read in law school, a wife, married to a husband, should have sex with a man outside of her marriage that results in a child, prior to DNA testing, the law recognized the child as the husband's, even though he didn't contribute any DNA to the child. The law still does recognize that child as legally his. But, if that frisky sire was really rich, then, today, the child could establish the identity of its biological father through DNA testing and lay legal claim to a share of its rightful inheritance. Or, as in the case of Anna Nicole’s child, if the child turns out to be really rich, the father could use DNA to establish it was his contribution that spawned the child and so get at the family jewels that way.

So, children born without the legal identity of a father can now inherit. Women who give birth without the financial protection of a husband can now lay claim for support. Sex does not generally end in pregnancy. Sexual diseases can be treated, although not entirely cured so one doesn't have to watch one's nose rot off as used to be the case with syphilis. But, the prohibition remains: no sex outside of marriage.

Traditional science would have us believe that actions of the body are separate actions. Descartes theorized that the world was like a clock, made of separate parts, and all science/philosophy had to do to understand existence was to break apart the pieces. In his theory of dualism, the mind and the body were distinct entities. The mind exists apart from the body, and does not exist in space. Likewise, the body exists but does not think. In a theory like this, one could, I suppose, engage in repeated sexual acts without them having an effect on the mind or the soul.

In the middle of the century, quantum mechanics challenged the theory of separation. Quantum mechanics views the world as being in constant dynamic interaction; nothing, no event nor action, is independent of all others and exists in and of itself. In a world interpreted by quantum mechanics, separate events are not really separate. All events are interconnected and interdependent. Every part of the body knows what the other parts of the body are doing and responds accordingly. Every part of the soul is aware of what the body is doing, and responds accordingly.

Given that, I believe that our body and spirit respond in kind to when the body and heart move toward intimacy. A heart that begins to love will move the body to press forward. A body that becomes intimate will inspire a heart to long for sustained, emotional intimacy. When one happens without the other, the physical and spiritual pathways get confused and work against each other.

Remember Julia Roberts as Vivian in Pretty Woman? Her rule was she did not kiss on the lips. She could do all other sexual acts, but kissing on the lips, requires an intimacy and an honesty that disturbed her. Kissing requires face time; it's a moment of truth: the moment in which you smell him, taste his breath, his skin, and you look into his eyes. The moments where you find out, in a precursor, whether you fit together. I imagine Vivian thought that if she did not kiss, then she did not have to engage in the soul-seeking and -identifying behavior that accompanies kissing. Because, in a very real way, a kiss is always a question: Who are you? Will you? Can I? Under the influence of the kiss, the body and soul, working in awareness of each other, respond according to design.

I realize that not all cultures kiss like Western cultures do; but there must be some other method of intimacy that precedes intercourse itself and that serves as a gateway to the assessment of whether this body fits with my body, and thus this soul with my soul. Eskimos stand nose to nose. Still she breathes him in. Other cultures press forehead to forehead. Another moment to stop, to breathe, to smell and to wait for him to register, like a bolt sliding home, or a lock tumbling open.

Like kissing, physical intimacy is the portent of a promise. When a woman opens herself to a man and takes him into her body, she opens the center of herself to him. The opening of her body mirrors the opening of a soul. I know there's sex when the grocery list is running through your head, but, then there are other times. Those times when your eyes are wide open, and you can see, as you can feel, through his and through him to the very center, not just of your own union, but almost to the meaning of us all.

In traditional Episcopalian wedding ceremonies, the bride and groom vow: “with my body I thee worship.” This language of betrothal promises that each party will use their body to reverence the other. In this vow, physical intimacy becomes, in a very real way, the reverencing of your spouse. The use of “worship” also suggests that physical intimacy is more than just a linking of bodies, but is instead an activity of both body and soul. When joined, the bodies become the physical evidence of the emotional and spiritual commitment. It's this act, fittingly, that has the potential to give rise to another human being.

Some try to characterize sexual intimacy as just the fulfilling of a bodily appetite, like urination or hunger. The teaching of sex as an appetite, and talking about it as “having” ignores the interconnected body/spirit reality in which we live. This thinking returns us to the Cartesian duality of a separate body and mind. In my life, spirit, blood, and muscle are all connected. I cannot promise with my body and renege with my spirit without causing an effect in my life, in the life of the person I join with, and in the lives of those who follow me and him. The lie at the center of that impatient act colors everything.

How many times can one open one’s very center to another person and another person and another person without being torn apart? The incongruency between the intimate body and the uncommitted heart and mind would lead, I am convinced, to a broken idealism. Each encounter of bodily intimacy would call out to a wary heart, begging it to follow, promising, like the boy who cried “Wolf,” that this time it’s for real. If that were me, and I’m speaking only for me, I would fracture under the duplicit hopefulness of it all.

Because it is tied, at the heart of its function, to the creation of another human being, and to the clothing of a soul, sex is more than just appetite. Because it has the capacity to open worlds, and to allow men and women to participate in the creation of another world, sex is more than just biology. Because physical intimacy, not even sex, can leave you feeling discarded and utterly bereft, it's better entered into body and soul. Because I have been there and been part of it when it has taken me to the very center of myself, and my husband, I recognize and will teach that sex is always about the body and the soul—mine, his and the ones that will be.

For me, physical intimacy is, literally, about “making love”; it’s about giving and about receiving. It’s not about “having” sex, like having a drink of water or a swig of condensed milk. It’s an act of building, of repromising, and of closing the gap. It can be worship of the most poignant, tender kind that fills body and soul with wonder. Those moments are more likely to be found with the one with whom you fit, whose breath and smell you know and love, whom you have vowed to stand by and to support and to whom you have returned time and time again.

For all these reason, I will teach my children it’s better to wait.

From: Bonnie Tyler, "Total Eclipse of the Heart"

All Things Well Made

Musings from Mexico I

My sister and I and our children just spent a week in Mexico for spring break. Not Cabo San Lucas, Puerto Vallarta, all-you-eat-cruise-ship-Mexico with palm trees. More bring-your-own solar panels and generator and bottled water, and we'll supply the tortillas. Mexico not-so-grande. But, in return for the fifteen-hour drive on roads and through places I didn't know existed (and still wonder why they do; take Vidal, California, for example), we got the Sea of Cortez, thirty kilometers south of San Felipe on the Mexico side of the Baja Peninsula. On a still morning, it is literally Katherine Bates's "shining sea" as the sun rises out of the ocean in a ribbon of pink and orange. It's strange to see the sun rising out of the ocean on the west coast; wonderfully disorienting, as we're used to seeing it set off the California coast.

The Sea of Cortez is a shallow, fertile oceanic nursery formed by a 700-mile finger of land stretching along the western edge of mainland Mexico. From the second-story deck of our home on a little bay, I could see flocks of pelicans, gulls, sea terns, ducks and geese, and solitary herons stalking the shallows. From the sea, I could see fish jumping at manic intervals throughout the day. From the rock pools, which were uncovered in a stunning, hundreds of feet, retreat of the sea from the high tide mark, Adam and his cousins pulled octopus, crab, urchins, anemones, clams, mussels, shrimp, and "silver fish"(their technical term for the miniature sardine-like fish that swarm in thousands on the surface of the ocean).

Underneath the ocean, well, apparently, there are stingrays, that hang in the sandy benches behind the tidal rocks that are exposed at low tide. Mostly they just float with the tide, but, National Geographic says that "when they are inclined to move," they undulate their flat bodies like a wave. We were told to do the Baja shuffle when walking in the ocean, which attempts to alert any stingrays in the sand that a large creature is coming at them from the side. Footsteps from above aiming for the head of a stingray are almost certain to get stung.

Christian says he was standing still when he was stung, although stung is a euphemism really. Imagine a bone trident wielded by an irate, Smurf-size, basketball referee with little man syndrome. That's about what it felt like to him when the stingray hit him in the bone of his heel. The poison spread so rapidly that by the time he got up to the house, I could see lines of red stretching up both sides of his ankle into his calf muscle, with blood trailing out of the hole in the back of his heel. Laura, who had been bitten two years earlier but waited for a few hours until the pain got "worse than childbirth" before she went to the local doctor for a Novocain shot, bundled him into the car and we took off. The pain of the poison was so fiery Christian didn't know that the doctor's wife (el doctor was out) plunged a wide needle up to the hilt into his heel, and he was still waiting to feel the bite of the needle while she manipulated said thick needle in and out of his heel at various angles (seemingly the same motion the dentist uses during a root canal to reach all three roots). When she was done, he was still waiting for it all to start.

That put a damper on Christian's day. He retired to the sun chair on the deck, and his twelve-year-old cousin Jenny and her friend Brit, played nursemaid to him for the rest of the evening, including making up one-act plays reinventing new endings for Christian's social life and dilemmas with Star Wars Galactic Heroes figures.

On the ocean the next morning, kayaking across our own personal sea of glass, I wondered "Why a stingray?" Why, at a very simple level of necessity, does a sting ray exist? Laura offered a biological developmental theory: these creatures were put into play and evolution over the centuries has created mechanisms in them that allow them to survive in their environment. I wasn't looking for a Darwinian explanation. On other days, it might have worked, but I was on a more "Why did God start this?" train of thought. I didn't know then that ancient Greek dentists used to use the poison in the spine of the ray as an anesthetic—which perhaps slightly justifies a stingray's existence on a usefulness level.

But, I couldn't find an initial reason for the stingray. None of the criteria for justifying an existence really came into play: wasn't useful, wasn't necessary, wasn't beautiful, wasn't kind (like drowning sailor rescuing dolphins), wasn't comic relief, wasn't redemptive, wasn't a foil for some larger creature, wasn't an integral part of the food chain, wasn't a symbol of larger meaning (like the sand dollar husk). Stingrays just are. They are.

I felt a truth knock in me as I watched the pelicans with their clumsy heads sweep low over the blue surface. They were watched by a heron, standing so elegant in his knock-kneed slim silhouette, at the shore. "Each in its own sphere," came to mind. I thought about the human tendency to rank and to assign a value to a thing's existence based on criteria of need, beauty, power, and conformity or whatever comparison-based scale gives the ranker more power, rather than allowing each creature to stand unassailed in its own sphere. I thought of the uselessness of comparison in the natural kingdom. After all, how does one compare a lion with a sea cucumber? Better to just let them both be.

I thought about the word "variety." When the gods created (using whatever creative mechanism you prefer—six days, six creative periods, geologic eras, shifting planets, whatever) the life on this earth, a stated goal was "to give variety" to the earth. The variety standard necessarily denotes that difference and discrepancy will always exist. Designing for variety means that "sameness," variety's antonym, is and will remain, despite our best effort's to induce conformity, an impossibility. Variety means there will always be multiple ways of being, of moving, of looking, of making noise, of thinking, of eating, of protecting. At its heart, variety means that existing is justification enough for being.

That morning, as I contemplated the stingray, I came to see its purpose: to be a stingray. To float with the tide, to burrow into the sand, to move "when they are inclined" in sinuous waves of its wings across the ocean floor, and to sting, when threatened, with a spiny, poisonous tail. Because the stingray is, I cannot say that land and forward-looking eyes and a warning voice are the only, or even a better way of existing. When I look at nature's variety, I must conclude that water, land and air are equally suitable spheres in which to live, and that wings, bellies, legs, and suction cups are all effective methods of moving from place to place. I must allow for hide, skin, scales, jelly and shell as coverings. Orange, black, blue, brown, grey and green become equally suitable colors in which to live out one's life.

As I paddled through that Mexican morning, I found thinking these things and praying for the same equanimity of gaze that I saw in the solitary heron as it watched the flocks of bulbous, brown pelicans fly across its horizon.

Title: from "All Things Bright and Beautiful" by Cecil F. Alexander (1848).

She Looks Good, She Looks Fine

Last weekend, we were coming out of The Palazzo in Las Vegas after seeing a brilliant performance of Jersey Boys. The night was cold, the lines for the valet were backed up, and right at the top of the escalators was one of the hottest night clubs on the Strip. I stood there with Kevin in my Buckle jeans, Anthropologie top, and Eddie Bauer sweater, which, after watching the women prance out of the hotel, I realized were so NOT what everybody was wearing for a night out on the Strip.

Judging from the outfits, I believe that the outfit de nuit was a bodyhugging, sleeveless, mini-dress with platform, gladiator sandals—the kind with four bondage-looking straps across the foot and a hideous ankle strap that make anybody wearing them if not proportioned like Kate Moss look as if they have cankles. The great thing about this dress was that it was, virtually, a uniform for the under thirty set. Just about every woman I saw was dressed similarly. (This is not a discussion of the fashion industry, so withhold judgment for a second.) Doesn't matter her shape, her size, the winter-pale of her thighs and arms, the fact that some could hardly walk in their gladiator platforms and clomped forward like a parody of Frankenstein. Here they came, down the escalator, hair pomaded into shape, lips glossy, and eyes bright — fancy flocks of women out for a night on the town.

In particular, I remember a group of women (girls really), in their early twenties, none of which, bar an Asian woman, had to be under 200 pounds. Never you mind. One had on a grey-and-pink large horizontally striped mini dress which clung around her really ample middle and didn't quite cover her dimpled thighs. Her friend, shaped like those bodies that look really skinny side-on and then when they turn front-on, the hips are a foot wider on each side than the knees, wore a black, leather mini-skirt with a white tank-top and a wide, silver-buckled belt. Her pointy high-heels reminded me of Ducky in Pretty in Pink. Together with about five other friends, they came down the escalator—owners of the night.

I couldn't help but smile at their excitement, at their struts, at the stumble one to took as she got off the escalator and then clung to her friend's arm, the two of them laughing at both the stumble and the realization that she was not going to be able to walk on her own in those shoes up and down the Vegas Strip.

As I watched them leave the hotel, shivering as the wind met them through the portico doors, I wanted to raise my right arm in the air, pump my fist, and bark that woof! that seems to mean "You go girls!" I marveled at their enthusiasm and their whole-bodied embrace of the mini-dress (or is it the other way around, the mini-dresses gallant embrace of their whole bodies?). I wondered if they looked in the mirror when they went out and actually thought, "Dang girl, I look good!" I hoped so. Because they were just so vibrant and so alive that they deserved to feel as if they were just as good as they hoped they were.

As I was sinking into this reverie about how great it was that there were women out there who didn't listen to what society told them about who got to dress fashionably, one of my friends turned to us, shaking his head at the feathered ladies and said, "What is the world coming to?" I looked at his facial expression. It was a mixture between amusement, disapproval and disbelief. I thought of a passage in a book I had just read, about an injured WW2 soldier in a hospital who received a magazine with the famous picture of Rita Heyworth kneeling on her bed. In his amazement, he shook his head and either he or the narrator commented, "What is the world coming to?"

I looked at this friend of mine, and thought about the contrast between our two reactions. Why had he looked at these women with a mixture of disdain and amusement? Yes, none of those women was conventionally beautiful. They were neither skinny nor pretty. They weren't even really physically attractive. There was maybe a nice nose, a set of collar bones, some bouncy hair between the five of them, but none all on one person. (They all had great smiles, though.) They were just women. Was it the bare flesh? (Which if it had been 125-pound bare flesh would not, I'm convinced, have evoked such a comment.) Was this flesh somehow unseemly or improper? If not, then why would a group of women dressed for a night out signify a threat to the stability of the world's order?

I sat in a Sunday School lesson about the law of chastity a few months ago. What could have been an insightful discussion about what it means to lust, what it means to cleave, what it means to go after in your heart, and why the verses contained language that was gender specific, such as "if a man looketh up on a woman . . ." ended up in a discussion of how we should cover up our little girls in one-piece bathing suits and skirts below the knees. How a principle of emotional and physical self-control and discipline which needs to be mastered by adult men and women to help create a strong union devolved into a list consisting of one-piece bathing suits, no sleeveless tops and stockings on Sundays for our female children, I don't know. Well, I do, but the discussion shouldn't have ended up there.

I do remember that the question that sparked the list was "How can we teach the law of chastity to our children?" I thought perhaps a really frank discussion of how men and women get turned on, and what works for women and what works for men. Maybe teaching your teenage boys that when you hold a girl's hand, it means far more to the girl than just holding hands. It means, for most girls, an emotional commitment. It means that she thinks the boy really likes her. It does NOT mean that she knows that you just want to hold her hand right now, and that if you feel like kissing her later, you might try to do that, and then when that gets boring, you'll go home to make yourself a turkey sandwich and play NBA Live. I would tell my sons this, and then say, "So, when you reach out, my boy, reach out gently, and honestly." If my boys know how girls work, then they can operate within appropriate boundaries without making promises they don't intend to keep.

I would tell my girl that her body is hers and hers only. That it is a beautiful, strong machine. It can do whatever she pleases it to do. It can hit home runs; it can shoot three-pointers and go up strong for rebounds; it can stride out across red rocks to the top of the canyon rim; it can make love and bear children. It can double-back handspring, and pirouette. It can do all these things without having to have breasts and buttocks a certain size, and it can do it virtuously in tank top and sports bra.

It can go, if it wants, out on the town in a pink-and-gray striped mini-dress hugging thighs that would be great behind home plate because they can generate enough power to thrust up out of the squat and throw out the runner at second base. This body is hers, and it is beautiful without needing a man or a male society to approve it. That is what I would tell my girl about her body.

Then I would give her as many opportunities as possible to find out just what her body can do, no matter its size. Knowing that, she would begin to feel that she controls what her body does and how it is perceived. She would, hopefully, begin to sense that her body is far more than what it looks like, that it is valuable for what it can do, and that she and it are partners (not enemies) in her journey.

I would also tell her that if she wants to kiss a boy, then to go ahead and kiss him. But, to remember, that to her a kiss is more than a kiss, and to him (generally) a kiss is just a kiss. I would tell her that boys are visual, that boys get out of the starting blocks going 60 mph, that boys are pretty simple to keep happy. Knowing that, she is better able to make wise decisions about herself, her feelings and her body.

But, if you're not going to have those kinds of discussions about sexuality, which is the root of chastity, then I guess the best we can do is cover her up. She will probably feel, in some unarticulated place in her soul, that there is something wrong with her body, that it contains feelings and urges and sights that are untrustworthy, even dangerous, but that's what happens when you hang the preservation of our society's moral values on the length of a skirt.

Title: from Manfred Mann, "Do Wah Diddy Diddy."

Asleep in Perfect Blue Buildings

I love Tim Coates. More particularly, I love Tim Coates's English teeth. They remind me that life at lived at 72 degrees Fahrenheit is not normal.

I'm sitting in the dentist's chair this afternoon while he's pounding away at No. 14, an upper molar that had a root canal and now needs a crown. The television screen in the ceiling is turned to National Geographic (only because Fox Soccer Channel's friendly between Brazil and Ireland had its signal blocked). The first program was The Dog Whisperer. The second turned out to be an expose of the Crop Circles that tend to show up in late summer in Wiltshire, an English county home to Stonehenge and other various covens and societies. So, this program is trying to figure out whether these crop circles could actually have been made by humans. Enter Tim Coates, mathematician at Imperial College, London, who has designed an intricate geometric design which will be given to the Crop Makers (They use capital letters to describe themselves) to duplicate in a field of rye one summer night. As he's explaining the geometry involved in creating the design, he smiles, and I burst out laughing, just about skewering my tongue on the drill. His teeth are brilliant. One front tooth crossed slightly over the other. A leaning picket fence occupies the bottom front six spaces on his mouth, as if a horse has leaned against it, and the slats gave way under the pressure. What a wonderful, delightful set of English teeth.

I always know where a film has been made by looking at the extras. Say, for example, there's a medieval battle scene, with badger-fur clad Picts dashing across supposed Scottish moors, faces painted blue and hair strung with chains of bones and bits. For a few seconds, there'll be close-ups of the hordes. If I see in the mouth of extra no. 25 stage left of Celtic general a set of perfectly matched ceramic veneers, all ivory-colored and each fit together with the precision of an Italian stonemason working in granite on the Cathedral of Siena, then I know the movie's actually being shot in Canada, or some Pennsylvanian countryside. If, on the other hand, I see in the mouth of extra no.25 stage left of Celtic general, a gap between the front two teeth, with one yellowed incisor and one chipped, and a lower set that includes at least two out of alignment, then I know these Picts are running across bona fide English, or at the very least, European moors. One doesn't ship in American extras; maybe American leads, but not extras.

You see, I have the same set of teeth as bona fide European extra no. 25 and mathematician Tim Coates. The top row is near to perfect, with a little graying on one bicuspid from something I took to the face a few years ago. But, color variances aside, they are as perfectly straight a row of teeth as you hope to find in any American high school year book. On the other hand, the bottom row has one tooth which, as Seth said one day when he was about three and was taking a close look at my mouth, "Mom, that tooth's got no parking place." He's right. It's squished backwards at a slant, just like Steve Buscemi's top row, only it's my bottom. A boyfriend once said to me, in his good-natured Australian bluntness, "Your teeth are strange. The top is perfect and the bottom is all crooked." And just what do you say to that? Thank you? I hadn't noticed? My parents were too poor to afford orthodontia? Which they weren't. We just lived in a different aesthetic, one where a little crooked didn't spoil perfectly healthy, functional teeth.

_______________

I'm sitting in the balcony of our town's Tabernacle, in a church meeting of multiple congregations. Luckily, my sister Laura is sitting next to me. Ever since some ecclesiastical gerrymandering a few years ago, we no longer attend the same congregation even though I can see her bedroom window through the field when I sit in my office chair. But at regional meetings, our families find each other on the south balcony one row from the railing. Laura and I spend a good portion of the two hours talking out of the side of our mouths, eyes on the pulpit, shoulders pressed together, heads cocked toward the other so we can hear our conversation better.

This particular meeting, I'm counting lights in the ceiling and then wondering why the dust pattern in the air conditioning vents in the ceiling of this nineteenth-century beauty arranges itself in such consistent patterns, like a valance, down the center of each panel on each four-sided vent. Soon I will move onto examining the stained glass windows. The noise level is amusing, even threatening, and watching the congregation is like watching the seals at La Jolla Cove. There's never a still moment, always somebody up, walking, rolling, stretching, child running, mother sidling with reverently folded arms after the culprit who's making a break for the spiral staircase in the corner towers. Laura asks me why my head is tilted back at such an angle. I tell her "I'm counting, and soon I will try to calculate how many sermons these stained glass windows have heard."

Just then we hear the speaker talking about happiness being the beginning and end all of our existence. I make some comment about the problem with thinking that this life is supposed to be one long bout of happiness is that then you need uppers and downers to keep you consistently happy. Laura wants to make sure the description about being a plan of happiness is actually correct. We turn to the scriptural texts sitting on the pews. We find one reference to the "great plan of happiness." More often and consistently, whenever a plan is referenced, it is called "a plan of redemption" or a "plan of mercy." In other words, a saving plan, one in which we turn from wrong to right, and do it over and over again. At the center of the plan sits a Redeemer, one who buys us back from our wrongs. Underneath his presence lies the assumption that we will, despite our best intentions, get it wrong. We sit and think about the implications of casting this as a "plan of happiness" or even a malapropistic "plan of great happiness."

Our conversation goes something like this: "You know, there doesn't seem to be this great emphasis on happiness in the early generations." "Yeah well, they didn't expect to be happy. They were cold all the time, and if they tried to get warm, they got smoked out. They lost all their teeth, and some of their children, and died before age forty. And then the king took the harvest and threw them a bone." "So, I suppose when there was a good harvest or a child who lives past their first birthday, the party's on." "Yes, we'll dance, we'll eat, we'll worship the sun, and we'll lay gifts at the altars of the gods for the good fortune." "The problem with living now is that we don't even know what season it is. If you don't go outside, you would think that the temperature is 72 degrees all year round. That's normal. That's what you would expect . . . 72 degrees all year round in your life. No days, months, years where things are just rough . . . even bad."

We sit for a while thinking about what your life would have to be in an expectation of constant happiness. "Straight teeth . . . ha!" We both stick out our bottom jaw to show our crooked ones. "No children would ever fail out of middle school because their homework's stuffed into the bottom of their locker." "All my chickens would still be alive instead of eaten by the neighborhood dog." "Adam would never shout, 'I hate you; everybody in this house hates you.'" "Our boobs wouldn't be down around our waist. No drooping upper eye-lid." "I wouldn't have to have a pacemaker right after I turned 40 and ran a marathon." "No miscarriages." "No bulldogs that pee on my carpets every winter." "No flooded basements." "Our kids would get asked to every dance by the cutest kids." "No dirt bikers on the hill behind the house for hours every spring afternoon." "No PMS." "No birth defects." Or, if you're Tina Fey, screenwriter and Oscar announcer, you'd get virtual actors who can be digitally manipulated on a computer screen without ever having to interact with them in the flesh. In other words, "No hurricanes, no earthquakes, no tsunamis. Just 72 degrees, balmy with a slight breeze. . . . And a pool boy."

We start laughing. The idea seems ludicrous. That you could expect to live your life at 72 degrees every day, that it would contain all of the good and none of the bad. How would you know then that the good is good, if there is no bad? What if, just to throw you for a loop in your air-conditioned life, you encountered really rough, just really, really rough? Sort of like Matthew's rain that falls on the just and the unjust. You'd have to medicate to get that 72 degrees feeling because you'd feel like your life is seriously, egregiously, God's not keeping his promises, out-of-whack.

_______________

In an artistic composition, the contrast between values serves to focus a viewer's attention. (Value is the whiteness or blackness of a color). Our eyes perceive the world via values. If there is no contrast, there is no picture. Contrast is most evident when black is next to white. On a painting, the area where the darkest dark and the lightest light come closest together is the most visually attractive. The greater the difference, the more attention the area attracts. In life, just like in art, the most interesting part is the part where dark meets light. That's the place where the eye begins its journey around the piece. That's the intersection where our eyes and hearts linger, where our minds mull, where we know the light, looking out or back to or even from the dark.

We're sprawled in the living room reading at seven in the morning. It's a verse I've read and heard many times before, only I thought it said "there must needs be opposition in all things." I've thought that to mean that in every encounter there's a good versus bad dichotomy, or, if there is no easily identifiable good and bad, there's another choice that serves as the opposition to the path you choose. But, I notice this morning that it actually reads, "There must needs be an opposition in all things." The language strikes me differently that morning: "an opposition" present in all things, something against which my experiences can lean so that I can see the difference. Experience that allows me to know good from evil, dark from light, joy from sorrow, pain from peace. Without the opposition, or contrast, I don't have a way to know that I know. If there is no dark, there is no way to know light. If there is no sorrow, there is no way to know and appreciate joy. If there is no heartbreak, there is no way to recognize and sink into peace.

_______________

There is nothing more beautiful to me than a perfectly calm spring day in the Rockies spent at a noon soccer game. In the background, the mountains are still covered with snow, which is brilliant white against the blue. The grass is spring green. The sun warms my shoulders through my long sleeve t-shirt. The boys are eager to play from the off-season and we've trained hard for this game. We do the cheer in the huddle, their fists clenched, their gap-toothed grins looking up at me. "Play hard, Play clean, Pride." They sprint onto the field. During the game, Niles manages to execute the ball fake he's tried over and over again at training to perfect; from center back Grayson distributes the ball up the right wing and the left wing rotates to cover as Grayson provides the drop. Adam sprints away from his defender into the open space of the corner to which Josiah has sent the ball. Cross back to center, Jake's running in, finds the ball in the air and delivers a strike that is . . . stopped by the goalie. Perfect. Great ball movement, great attack, great defense. Just perfect. It doesn't get much better than that.

How do I know? Because just yesterday, I sat huddled underneath the suggestion of an umbrella on ice cold bleachers clad in everything I could find in the car, including a really ugly Denver Broncos beanie and one glove, in a freezing, driving sleet storm, watching Christian play. There is nothing worse than spring soccer in the Rockies when winter decides to reappear. Those days are bad, just downright bad. They're "one of those good, miserable, days" that I know will be mine because we live where we live and our boys play soccer. But, the whistle blows after 90 minutes, and after a few hours, we're warm again.

So, when that perfect spring soccer day shows its face, I know. And the knowing is all the sweeter, knowing what it could have been and still might be.

Title: Counting Crows, "Perfect Blue Buildings."

Replaying It Over and Over Again

The Ballad of Delroy High Basketball

(or your approach to raising your fourth child;

or marriage after fifteen years;

or devotion after four decades)

I've spent the past four months in the bleachers watching a basketball season. All three sons play on basketball teams; some play on multiple teams. So I have watched, between the five leagues and the local college team, on average, about ten games a week since October. That's a lot of bruised-butt bleacher time. I've come to the conclusion that, as much as I would like to think that my children are spending time with stellar individuals, that coaches are, for the most part, quite ordinary, even mediocre.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing, as most of us are really just average in most areas of our lives, and down right disastrous in others. There's a certain strength and patience that can be developed by being coached/led/taught/parented by the average and the bad. And, an important realization that hopefully dawns somewhere along the line that sometimes my best is actually bad compared to what somebody else could do. I would do well to extend that Average One the patience and tolerance I would hope from others in the moments where even my best is not good enough.

But that's not the most significant realization of the season. This season I have seen play out in my children's lives and the lives of their teammates the consequences of interacting with adults who, for so long, have made no changes to their life and the way they operate. Because they have run practice a certain way for twenty years, that's the way practice should be run. It can be run no other way. Because they use an inside game that takes time to set up the big man, there can be no transition basketball. They walk the ball up the court, even if there is no defense set up at the other end. Every possession takes 90 seconds.

Because the varsity runs a high-low post scheme, the junior varsity, which has no big men, and consists of eight greyhounds (and a couple arthritic bulldogs) who can run the court like a racetrack, must play the high-low charade. Ball in, ball swatted away; ball waiting to go in, three second call while smallish big guy tries to establish position; ball on the wing wide open, no shot because our school plays the inside game. Then, in the fourth quarter, when we're down 15 with four minutes to go, the coach lets loose the dogs. "Push it, push it," we can hear coming from the bench. They run, they cut, they penetrate, the defense has to collapse to protect the basket, the ball gets dished outside, three pointer. They get the ball up the court in two dribbles and a long bounce pass, lay up. The boys pull to within 2 points, but time runs out. They lose.

Parents and players are left to wonder why "push it" shows up only in the waning minutes of the fourth quarter. If it had showed up at the tip off, the opposing team could not have kept up. But no! Transition basketball is not Delroy High basketball. So, we do not play it, even though the only players available to play on this particular team are six-foot tall sprinters, jumpers and cutters. We're left with yet another game where the players are told in the locker room that they "just didn't want it bad enough," where the blame for the loss is placed on their inability to "get it to the post"--never mind the post player is only 6' 4" and should be playing three-man. In part, or in whole, the loss should be placed squarely on the coaching staff, for their refusal to look down the bend and actually "see" their personnel, for their inability to change their plan and to coach the game that needed to be coached with the players that were available.

I sat on Friday evening watching our school lose in the state tournament semi-final game, a game Delroy had no business losing. On the team was the state player of the year from last year and most likely again this year--a man amongst boys. Unstoppable unless, of course, he's the only person shooting and the defense can afford to sag four in the key to stop his penetration. The other team, Lakeshore, was anchored by a 6'10" tower, slow but with a great shooting touch who could make his free throws. One would think, in a rational world, that if the player giving your team the biggest fit and preventing you from scoring the way you like to score is clogging up the key, you would try to score without him there. In other words, you would push, use your speed, get your guards out on the wing, fill the lanes, and make the Tower huff his 260 pounds up the court to catch you.

But, no. Delroy basketball, for the past 25 years, has always been about slow, controlled possession, a minute for every shot, reduce the risk, reduce the errors. Score in the 30s. Play tenacious defense to take the other team out of their rhythm. So, last Friday afternoon, they walk the ball up the court, let the Tower set up in the key, pass the ball around the perimeter while our skinny big tries to post up against Him. Pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, don't you dare dribble or penetrate the key to break down the defense; and don't set a screen to spring your shooters free. This approach works if you have a big guy who's really strong, really big. This works if the other coach doesn't have a plan to break down your defense, and to shut down your inside game. This works only if you have guards who can get open for the shot on their own, and the opposing team hasn't scouted you to know your patterns. But, if you don't, and if they do and if they have . . . this doesn't work.

Watching this season was like watching the fifth Mexican restaurant open up in the very same place that four others have failed in. It didn't work last year, and it didn't work this year; and it won't work next year, unless a 6 foot 8 inch center with soft hands and an unstoppable up-and-under "transfers" into the boundaries.

A coach's responsibility, particularly a high school coach who cannot recruit the kind of players he would prefer, is to find what will work with what he has. And, if, during the second quarter, the game plan doesn't seem to be working, the coach's responsibility is to adapt, to adjust, to try something else. This year, something else would have worked really well, something different than what's been done in the past. But no, that's not how Delroy does basketball. And so, like the ANZAC mates in Gallipoli, those poor boys go down, coach's ego and tradition blazing, in a cloud of fouls as the players do exhausting battle with the Tower and his supporting guards.

_________________

One of the greatest lies is that "there is no other way." Language like "it's always been that way," "this is tradition," "our system's been successful in the past" is language that assumes no other way. Programs based on these unyielding, unchanging assumptions will fail just as regularly as they succeed--unless the tradition itself is centered on change and adaptation, and on timeless principles like moral character, respect, hard work, smart work, and paying the price. Sooner or later, about every four years as players cycle through the system, there won't be the same combination of players, of characters or personalities, and opponents that created the successful seasons of 1989 and 1998 and 2004. What then?

Well then Coach, you look down your roster, you see what you have and you devise a new plan (patterned after the old one in a way perhaps) that makes these boys with their particular talents and skills (and their just as eager and willing hearts) as capable of success as the players you wish you had. That's work, yes. Hard work, but it's the price of greatness. It's not a price most are willing to pay. Like the woman who always buys her husband a tie for Father's Day, most settle for what worked, once upon a time.

Title: From Tim McGraw, "Over and Over Again."

I Used To Rule the World

Be pretty if you are;

Be witty if you can;

Be cheerful if it kills you

--from the plaque on Tom and Katie's chimney

I'm unemployed for the first time in twenty years. There've been some rough moments. I'm waking up in the morning and thinking, "Hmmm . . . what do I do today?" And I cannot think of anything that is on a deadline, nothing that absolutely needs to be done. It's a completely new way to think about time and about my necessariness. Just Tuesday morning I cleaned the kitchen and living room until it sparkled. (Confession: it takes me about as long to do that as to draft a memo on potential claims). Yesterday (Wednesday), I looked at the kitchen in the evening, sink filled with dishes from the day and the evening meal prep and thought: Surely not again. I just did that yesterday. I know the 9 am -12 noon line up on TNT because that's when I go to the gym. Sometimes, I just stay there, on the treadmill for two, two and a half hours, watching an episode of Vegas and then a whole basketball game on ESPN2 or a soccer game on FSN. I also find myself in the middle of the day wondering what to do with the three hours until the kids come home from school. My children's success has become mine, their homework my homework (It's unnerving for them, this intense maternal interest). I've read 38 books since October 21, and am working on three more simultaneously, one for each toilet I use and one for the car. In the back of my head, there's a little voice that makes occasional comments about the uselessness of my life and mumbles something that sounds like mighty and falling. It's louder on some days than others; I can't hear it very well, but it's definitely there.

A few weeks ago, I sat crying in my car in a church parking lot. (I admit I cry easily. The commercial by Proctor & Gamble running right now during the Olympics that shows the little kids all suiting up to ski, skate and jump that ends with, "To their moms, they'll always be kids." That makes me cry. The one about "the best picture I ever saw was the one that allowed us to know my wife's breast cancer was treatable"? There's me weeping at the kitchen counter while I read the sports page. But, normally, I don't cry about me. I don't let the other side see me blink. Just last week I drove up and over Boulder Mountain in a whiteout; road completely covered; drop off to the canyon floor on my left; mother, two sisters and two very cute nephews behind me. Looking at my face, you would think I was driving to Home Depot to pick up track lighting.) But, that day in the parking lot, I sat crying about me.

It was late afternoon—that lag time between 4.30 and 6 when you want to eat chocolate or bread. I was driving up the hill to our driveway. I knew waiting at home for me was Julia with a paper, maybe Adam with his homework, or maybe they didn't need me at all, a dinner to make, and socks, always socks. Suddenly, I burst into tears, those tears that come accompanied by a groan from the pit and a shudder that ends in the shoulders. Truth be told, I didn't want to go home. In that moment, I wanted to go somewhere I could order off the menu while wearing clothes that need to be drycleaned and talking to people who don't need me to be patient and kind, just clever and competent.

I didn't want the kids to see me crying, so I pulled into the church parking lot down the hill. I sat there, in the rain, with the windshield wipers on, Bono singing, "Stuck in a moment you can't get out of . . . ." I tried to call Kevin, but he wasn't answering. I could have got really angry with him for being so insensitive to me in my time of need (of which he knew nothing but that doesn't excuse him). In fact, I started to. I called him three, four times. His phone went straight to voicemail. I didn't want to sit alone with those feelings; I needed somebody to roll around in them with me. Tears rolling down my face, head thrown back against the headrest, still moaning, I seemed to drift into the eye of the storm—a momentary calm. To my mind came the words of an article I read at my mother's house a few days before:

"Self-reliance means using all of our blessings from Heavenly Father to care for ourselves and our families and to find solutions for our own problems. Each of us has a responsibility to try to avoid problems before they happen and to learn to overcome challenges when they occur. . . . How do we become self-reliant? We become self-reliant through obtaining sufficient knowledge, education, and literacy; by managing money and resources wisely, being spiritually strong, preparing for emergencies and eventualities; and by having physical health and social and emotional well-being." I had stopped at those words "emotional well-being" when reading that paragraph and thought, then and later, about the concept of emotional self-reliance.

I'm familiar with the notion of economic self-reliance. For me, it means that Kevin and I work for what we earn and we pay for those we spawn. We try not to make others pay for us or our children. We built up a reservoir to draw on when work is scarce and money isn't coming in. But the notion of emotional self-reliance was an interesting one. If I were to frame it in the same language as financial and educational self-reliance, it would go something like this: it's my responsibility to generate or develop emotions that allow me to exist in a state of well-being. In just the same way that I must become financial stable and self-reliant, it would do me (and my family) well if I developed emotional self-reliance. Being emotionally self-reliant means I am able to return myself to a state of well-being during those moments/days/weeks when emotions dip low or out of control. In other words, I find solutions to my own emotional problems.

Back to the parking lot: I sat there, hidden by the retaining wall, replaying Track 12: "You've got to get yourself together; you've got stuck in a moment and now you can't get out of it." If there were chocolate in the car, or a can of condensed milk, I swear I would have downed them both without even chewing. Then I noticed—on about the fourth time through—that the song also said, "But darling, look at you; you gotta stand up straight, carry your own weight. These tears are going nowhere, baby . . ." By this time, I'm getting a little tired of the crying, or at least the tears have stopped their constant flow; they're just a trickle and I don't think they're going to start up again. Breathing's back to normal. But I'm still punching numbers on my cell phone trying to find a companion for my misery (Remember, I don't let the other side see me blink. There aren't many numbers to call). Nobody's answering--luckily.

A very calm voice comes to my mind: "This is your deal. You have to work through this. This is not Kevin's deal. This is not anybody else's deal but yours. Figure out why you feel this way. Figure out what you want. Sit in this silence, this mess for a while. Let it come to you. But don't look for solutions or try to attach blame for this crying fit outside of yourself." Well, okay then. I sat for a few more minutes, and then went home. I walked in the door and spilled the beans to Julia, "I just sat in the church parking lot crying my eyes out."

"Ah, Momma . . . Let me give you a hug!"

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Because of this experience and my brooding about emotional self-reliance, I've come to the conclusion that Kevin cannot make me happy. He would like to, and if I can articulate for him what I want, he will work to make it possible for me. Heaven's knows, he likes a happy wife. But, he cannot make me happy. That's my work. It's part of developing self-reliance, part of that really important emotional work of choosing to live in a stable place, and not allowing events, low blood sugar, or memories of past lives in dry clean only suits to throw me completely off track. Emotional self-reliance is choosing to live with less doubt, less fear, and more believing. Part of emotional self-reliance is not allowing voices that whisper of impending doom or negligible self-worth to take up residence in my mind. Just because the thought enters doesn't mean it deserves to stay. Just because it flits through does not mean what I have conjured up will come true, or that what I fear will come to pass. Being able to sift through thoughts and thus control emotions is "learn[ing] to overcome challenges when they occur." By so doing, I create within myself the emotional resiliency to weather storms like those that hit me driving up the hill to my own home.

From: Coldplay, "Viva La Vida."