self-portrait in the wilderness

Taking a self-portrait is a popular thing to do, and lots of my friends have done it with great success, but whenever I try to do the same, I only achieve a worried-looking aspect of myself. Maybe I'm worried about how the portrait will turn out, since it is difficult to get a flattering shot when all you have is the strength and length of one arm to work with. Certainly part of the problem is that I am incapable of launching a cornball smile at a camera held by my own hand, so I cynically resort to a frown instead.

We are in Tennessee, and while Esme napped under the watch of her grandparents yesterday, I took a drive out into the country by myself with my camera, just looking. It was foggy and mild, grey and green, a good day for the still unfrozen winter fields of the south, lined by still-green trees and the painted broadsides of weathered barns, whether wood or metal. I directed my car up a narrow gravel driveway into a farm property that was for sale. Shrubs brushed up against the underside of my car and the tires spun in the soft ground just a bit. The farm was quiet, abandoned, with old machinery and grass tufts. It felt clean with rain-soaked clay, leaning fences. Many busy robins populated the eaves and empty stables. I was wearing a grey sweater; my complexion seemed to be having calm, even sort of day.

Perhaps motivated by an unconscious desire to be one of those natural-looking women of the celtic variety who you might see modeling fair isle sweaters in knitting books, the idea to make my own portrait came to me while circling the property. I tried multiple times, standing in front of old fences and what not, but reflexively hit the delete button upon viewing each one. The results I was getting were not suitable for personal consumption, much less fit to fling into the public domain, where all criteria for beauty and self-flattery become even more confounded.

Given the discouraging odds, I decided that either the self-portraiture project should be abandoned, or else, perhaps, I should relax my criteria and settle for the odd and ugly views of myself, along with the ocassional view that meets my approval. It occured to me that the portraits I was deleting may be the very views of myself that others see most often. The way I would like to portray myself is not be the way I actually look to others. When other people look at me, I have no idea what they see, and to no extent can I control this. But even though I can somewhat accept this state of affairs, I cannot imagine abandoning all of the many, many ways that I try to control the image of myself I present, even though I know that if I could only get free from that concern, then perhaps I could pour my energies into becoming holy, or an artist, or both. It will never happen, except perhaps via the senility of old age.

Perhaps then I'll begin my career as a holy fool. I'll finally let my hair do the large, wild, and curly things that it has always wanted to do, and my head will become a symbol of spiritual and artistic freedom par excellence. I will wear animal skin and eat locusts and wild honey; I will become a voice crying in the wildernness.

sane considerations

I know this sudden impulse to vocalize my distress at Christmas consumerism is almost cliche, but I think that I'm going to have to express some disgust, because frankly, it's disgusting out there. Last night I went to Toys R' Us in search of a specific item, which they didn't have, but what I saw had a depressing effect. It was a maze of high metal shelves beneath the glare of flourescent lights, stocked with grotesquely packaged, molded plastic things on hormones--lots of them pink, purple, and glittery for girls. Even the baby dolls looked creepy and strange to me, with their bulkily packaged, cheaply made accessories, not charming in the least--nevermind the toys designed to appeal to little boys. Parents shuffled along in the shadow of their portable cardboard box mountain-of-a-shopping-cart. Good thing that the parking lot contained plenty of souped up trucks and SUVs.

I think what bothers me most about the spending habits at large is that no one ever, ever, asks the question: where will this item be in ten years? Well the obvious answer is: a dumping ground. If everyone asked that question before they bought everything, well, I can't imagine how things would be different. I'm not really one to speak because I don't always ask this question, and I'm too often lured in by cuteness accompanied by low price. Perhaps our economy would come to a halt if everyone asked this question. Or maybe it would just have to adapt to an ethic of less--but higher quality-- stuff. I know that our apartment would be less cluttered, but more full of meaningful, important things, whose presence I would not wind up resenting.

This is not something I would have known before I had a child, but I think there really are only a few little companies that produce quality wooden toys--the kind you might consider saving for the child of your child. The rest are peddling a lot of plastic bulk that no one is going to want to keep around in storage after it's reached the faded, dingy, permanently sticky, and possibly busted stage. And can I just say that I really hate the company that goes by the name "Baby Einstein." Can the conspiracy against the good intentions of parents be any more obvious?

Before last night, I hadn't really done any Christmas shopping besides one trip to Ten Thousand Villages, which is probably my favorite store. It was crowded and crazy there, yes, but somehow it didn't bother me in that context. I felt a kinship, not a competition or annoyance with the other customers; it felt like a Christmas party was going on. Everything there is fair trade, which makes me feel a sense of confidence and dignity that I don't usually feel when standing in front of a cash register. All the workers are volunteers, and each thing they sell--from the little wooden bird whistles to the large clay vases-- embody a little spark of human will and creativity. These things weren't designed by market analysts for a target consumer group, and you can feel the difference.

I have been listening to NPR this morning and learned about how the limit on the hourly shift of truck drivers is interfering with their ability to deliver all the goods that people want, when they want them. Everyone is trying to get stuff by a deadline, the Deadline that Is Christmas. So, there is a push to extend the hours that truckers are allowed to drive, despite the fact that these extended hours are shown to be unsafe and produce more fatalities on the highway. Somehow the image of all of those trucks barreling through the highways of America seems like an apt metaphor for the way Americans do Christmas--preoccupation and obsession with having things a certain way--a childish fantasy of Christmas--all the more grotesque because it makes its home in the minds of adults-- that refuses to entertain any interfering, sane considerations.

a wintry imagination

This December, so far, has been permeated by the spirit of winter endurance rather than Christmas. Jeff's schedule has the frightful power to convert Saturdays and Sundays into faux weekdays. Home by myself with Esme so often, I feel the confines of our tiny apartment much more intensely. When we go to Christmas parties at the homes of friends or professors, I feel as if I'm in a royal palace-- so solid, colorful, and generous are the walls, ceilings, and floors of these houses. In houses, there are sensible mud rooms for dropping off coats, scarves, and soggy shoes. The furniture is not from Ikea. There are basements for storing things.

Not so in our apartment. All who enter must tumble directly into the kitchen with their mud and slush and throw their coats and shoes where ever they may; our assemble-yourself bookshelves wobble; our closets are bricked in with storage boxes for lack of space; our improperly installed (by me) curtain rods are chewing into the patched over dry wall and have begun sagging; the bathroom grout is permanently gray from the decades of graduate families who preceded us in this seventies-built structure. I am ever-aware of each foot thudding, laundry spinning, pot banging, and how it all must sound to our downstairs neighbors, who I imagine must hate us by now.

The entire day with a toddler feels much longer when you remove playgrounds and stroller rides from the list of afternoon options. Mornings are o.k. There is coffee, there is momentum. Afternoons stretch and darken and drag.

Today was one of those endurance days. We woke up to nearly a foot of bright and beautiful snow, which prevented us from attempting the drive to church. Jeff delayed his exit much longer than usual, but eventually had to go to the library to work on an impending paper-- another weekend day degraded into a travesty of a Monday. It can't be helped.

I have been observing something interesting in Esme and how she can adapt to these winter days. She inevitably reaches a fussy, clingy point, in which it would be very tempting to put her in front of a DVD just to make a quick end to her boredom. But if I wait and let her push past it, she usually finds a way out on her own. One day she found a zippered toiletry pouch and began putting small objects in and out, in and out, for a long time. Today, she stayed occupied by climbing on and off the futon, holding a cluster of animal magnets, spreading them out, looking, picking them up again, then repeating the sequence. She was making lots of happy sounds all the while. I'm not sure what was so interesting about all of this, but I could tell by peeking in on her that she was somehow absorbed in it on the level of imagination. As small as she is, she will sometimes revert to her board books too. When this happens, I can look at her and tell that she has reached some mental plateau-- her mind is plugged in somewhere, engaged and self-propelled.

Maybe this is just her personality. I know that some toddlers are simply more raucous. But there might be something basically human in this. It must be possible, however difficult, to push past the anger and languishing brought on by a winter day, and achieve meaningful engagement with the overlooked world.

God in the stairwell

Today I helped host a baby shower for my friend Sarah. There were baby blankets, little leather shoes, a tiny handmade sweater. There were peppermint brownies, holiday cut-out cookies with sprinkles and red hots, spinach dip with crackers, a gum drop tree, spiced cider, cheese, and more. We played shower games, and also hung ornaments on a tree, each with a word of encouragement for the new parents. We used permanent markers to write funny messages on diapers for the newborn. Outside a snowstorm began and gained momentum, looking beautiful but icy, and at the end, after all the guests had left and taken their party favors, Kim and I helped load Sarah's trunk with the abundance of baby things consolidated into large pastel gift bags, then quickly ushered Sarah to her car and brushed all of the snow off so that she-- in her large pregnant state-- didn't have to. I drove home extra carefully on slippery, white-coated roads. When I got home, Jeff was holding Esme in front of the window and both were smiling and waving.

One mother that came to the shower with her four month-old girl was not able to participate because the baby was upset and crying the entire time, so she was in another room trying to soothe her baby. There were also several grandmothers present.

The shower went well but there were moments leading up to it when I wondered if I would be able to hold up my half of the preparations. I didn't do any of my baking the night before and planned to begin first thing this morning when I woke up. I began my brownies from scratch and somehow, while Jeff and I were jostling in our tiny kitchen around Esme in her high chair at breakfast time, I elbowed the mixing bowl precariously positioned and all of its batter flipped downward into the sink. I watched the last of the sugar and butter I had in my pantry ooze down the garbage disposal and looked at the clock. I didn't have time for this. Jeff, in the midst of his end-of-semester crunch, had to go to the library, so I was on my own with Esme. In the end, I threw her coat on over her footie pajamas and lugged her with me to the store. I snagged two boxes of brownie mix off the shelf, ran home, and threw the two batches together while simultaneously finagling the spinach dip and cookie cutters tied together with curling ribbon--one cluster per guest. Esme ran wilder and freer than usual, and as long as she was entertaining herself, I didn't monitor her too closely, which explains why one of Jeff's socks was later to be found in the toilet. I was flustered this morning, and, I admit, a little short. I was annoyed with myself for being better at crisis management than regular old management. Why can't I just plan logically and with organized foresight?

Esme produced a very muddy (cloth) diaper somewhere in the middle of my brownie batter and curling ribbon, and as I was setting this formidable package on top of the diaper pail to deal with later, I remembered that it was December first, and that there was something else happening today besides this baby shower. A friend had written the day before to tell me to pray on December first. Her sister-in-law, who was pregnant and had been due in January, discovered late in her pregnancy that her baby was not developing normally and would live scarcely two days outside the womb. Later, just last week, in fact, she learned that the baby's heart had stopped beating. She was to be induced this evening, to give birth to a stillborn baby. It would take place after sundown as the attending doctor is Jewish.

This remembrance came to me while I was standing in front of the dryer, by Esme's diaper pail. I thought about all of the details that I had been attending to, rushing around to stores to find ornaments, cookie cutters, paper cups with Christmas trees on them, doing frantic searches on allrecipes.com. I thought about all of the things that had annoyed me that morning-- the overturned batter and the fact that Esme had somehow run off with the kitchen timer and I couldn't find it, then the sock I had to fish out of the toilet. I thought about the healthy baby boy to be born of Sarah, due right after Christmas, and the joy that people take in welcoming a baby into the world. I thought about how obsessed I am with myself and my life, and ideas about where my life is going, and what I want to do and create. I stood leaning on the dryer, thinking about the two things I had obligated myself to today-- to help throw a baby shower, and also to pray for a mother whose baby had died just days ago in the womb. I wrote back to my friend and told her I would pray.

While putting Esme to sleep tonight, she didn't go down easily as she usually does, and required some extra rocking and songs-- probably because I had been gone all afternoon at the shower. I kept thinking about the mother who would have already been grieving the loss of her baby now for days, and the fear of such an unusual labor, such a contradiction in the order of life. I sang lines from the lamentations of Holy Friday over and over and over again while rocking Esme to sleep.

Today He who hung he earth upon the waters
is hung upon a tree.

Today...He who wraps the heaven in clouds
is wrapped in the purple of mockery.

After putting Esme down and closing the door to her dark room I opened up the Lenten Triodion hungry for more of this poetry we sing on the week leading up to Christ's crucifixion, death, and burial, the week before Easter. Over and over again, the hymns talk of the "strange wonder" of God, the source of life, being laid in the tomb. All of creation stands in fear and trembling, witnessing this strange phenomena of life itself submitting to death and burial, the judge of all, submitting himself to be judged by Pilate, the Word who spoke the earth into existence being buried beneath the earth.

God who has adorned the whole earth with flowers,
is crowned with thorns.


While at the shower, I was happy for Sarah and felt the anticipation of her little boy's arrival, sure to be tall, smart, resourceful, capable, and good looking like his parents. Another part of me, underneath, was thinking about the mother who would labor to give birth to her stillborn child this evening. It was strange to be thinking about both, and strange to be living in a world that manages to contain both within its perimeters.

I feel strongly that if there is a God, it can only be the God of both.

Shortly after September 11, 2001, I read something that I think about often-- a specific phrase. Fr Thomas Hopko was answering the question: Where was God on September 11? He said that God was in the airplane with the people who went down; God was in the stairwell of the collapsing towers, with the people who were trying to get out. This phrase, "God was in the stairwell," lodged inside of me as a summation, an ultimate explanation.

Everyone at the baby shower joined in a prayer for Sarah and her baby at the shower today, so I hope that God was at the baby shower--the God who adorns the whole earth with flowers. I think that God was also in the womb with the baby whose heart stopped beating last week, the God who is crowned with thorns.