. . . and i’m a mormon

“So I have a question for you,” my good friend and neighbor said to me.  She’d come up the hill to help me plant a box of baby fir trees on the steep slope of pasture we were trying to reclaim as forest.

“Okay?” I grin up at her as she puts into my muddy hand the next little tree, my other hand holding open the hole in the dirt I’d just dug.

“Well, I don’t know how to say this,” she begins and then all in a rush, “why don’t you choose a religion that fits you better?”

Though I’m taken aback, her question is not entirely out of the blue.  Among every other topic under the sun, we’ve also talked religion — or rather spirituality, because she isn’t much  for organized religion.  But faith we both know.  And the inner quietness that brings clarity.  We both know what it means to try and try to treat others with the respect and kindness we both hope to receive — even when we don’t receive it.  And how easy it is to stumble and do what we wish we wouldn’t and not do what we wish we would.

So how do I answer her?

“What do you mean?” I ask, thinking what am I but bred in the bone, sinew upon sinew shaped by a lifetime of belief?

“I mean,” she explains, “if you want a church, why not choose one a little more . . . progressive?”

She has told me I am the only Mormon she has ever actually known.

Where has she gotten her idea of what Mormons are if not from what I am?

I don’t think there is a single aspect she’d identify as progressive that I wouldn’t trace back to the core beliefs that shape me.

What could be more revolutionary — honestly? — than Turn the other cheek? or This is pure religion and undefiled, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction? 

I’ve lived my life within congregations that I did not shop for, congregations that are geographically set, that purposely pull from both sides of the track in the towns I’ve lived in. I’ve visited monthly in homes of real want and real wealth, talking in both places of some of the same kinds of struggles and small joys — but seeing the differences, too, and understanding some of those struggles on a more personal level because the people suffering are friends I respect and love.

In my congregation, English is not the only language spoken and our skin tones are more varied than proportionally dictated by my town’s  given variety.  I’ve sat under the lessons and sermons of people with no education beyond high school and they’ve sat under my lessons and sermons.  I’ve served side by side with PhDs teaching three-year olds. I’ve set up tables and served punch and cookies with hairstylists, social workers, and physicians.  I’ve served on committees with nurses and lumbermen and truckers, with soldiers and accountants and a former night club dancer, with farmers and special ed teachers and the perpetually underemployed. What’s more, the accountant was not male, the nurse was not female — neither was the special ed teacher, and the trucker was the head of the committee. What could be a more radical turning on its head of our social divisions and the caste system we have turned our careers into?

It is in this environment that I’ve learned more than anywhere else to see my town as a unit, a whole organism, whose least members matter as much as any other and whose needs and dreams need to be part of the real solution to the problems we all face.  That is the real root of my progressive-ness.

Because what idea has as much power to change our relation to one another as the knowledge that every human body who walks the earth is God’s dear child — every human body — that whatever you do to any other body — even the most different, the most lowly, the most arrogant, the least admirable, the least likable, the least in agreement with you — you are doing to God?

Do I tell her my involvement with causes she calls progressive is the natural outgrowth of my belief that Jesus will most certainly return to this world He made and loves with a love deeper than I can comprehend?  That  I am only responding to His call to prepare the way?

That I believe in the deepest core of my soul that He is the one who sets us all — believers and as-yet-unbelievers — on this path, calling each of us inwardly in words only we can hear and understand — no matter what groups we belong to, no matter whether we acknowledge it or not — to build His everlasting kingdom of peace and balance and thrifty abundance and worldwide equality?  That He is forever taking up in His mighty hand all our best (though puny) efforts at peace and abundance and turning them truer than we knew.

Would she understand that I want to be found by Him standing among those who helped the good work forward, rather than those who stood in the way?

How can I tell her that I am every day re-encouraged when I remember that I am living within the triumphant arc of a story that ends with vileness failing and goodness prevailing.  That I am enheartened to keep doing the small good things I know to do socially, environmentally, politically, because I wholeheartedly believe that by small and simple things are great things brought to pass?

What she has called a quiet embracing of others is what I have seen as the example of Christ, the path He beckons us all to walk with Him.

And the fact that not all Mormons see things exactly the way I do is just one of the things I love about my religion.  I love that I have to gather every week with people from whom I would be too completely divided (by politics, by interests, by education, by socioeconomics, by so many things) if we didn’t share the same hope in Christ.

I love it that I am called each week to come sit beside them, among them, sharing the hymnbook between us, clasping hands, listening to each other’s struggles and woes of the week, the small celebrations.

I cannot imagine a world at peace that does not begin with me building peace with the closest neighbors I disagree with.  That they can love me and I can love them is for me a small and recurrent gift of grace.

I sit back on my heels, hands on my hips.  The wind blows my friend’s hair around her head standing there above me.   What I have to say is so huge, how can I ever say it and be heard?

another new premise

What is the premise of your story? Describe it using the what-if formula by replacing the parentheses with details from your story: “What if a (flawed) (protagonist) (encountered some problem) and had to (overcome the flaw) to (solve the problem)?”

Steve Alcorn, Write Fiction Like a Pro 

What if a ( stubbornly but inconsistently persistent/ easily distracted/ overly pessimistic/ unrealistically optimistic/ only theoretical/ short-tempered/ self-doubting/ continually reinvented) (writer/ gardener/ bicyclist/ beekeeper someday/ city planner/ personified city/ nation as a whole)  (crashed in the stock market/ suffered colony collapse/ had her garden destroyed/ saw her family scatter/ lost her way/ lost her cool/ lost her marbles/ lost her car keys) and had to (get focused/ give up/ persist/ get busy/ speak out/ count to ten/ push ahead/ stick with what she’s got/ tighten her belt) in order to (save the day/ save the date/ balance the budget/ revive the local economy/ rebuild the garden walkway/ build the city on the hill/ feed the family/ finish up this blasted bottle-necking book)?

How’s that for a promising new premise?

By the way, have I ever mentioned that my house has no front door?

The door that looks like a front door, acts like a front door, is called the Front Door, is in fact on the back of the house.

It’s the door closest to the kitchen — furthest from the driveway — what in any reasonable house would be the Back Door.

Before I realized what was so nigglingly wrong with this house — i.e. that there was no real front to it, that it was always turning its back on you no matter how you circled to approach it — before I took steps to more clearly signal — by fiat if not in facto — which door was “Front Door” — people never knew where to come.  They’d knock at the laundry door or come to the sliding glass door downstairs instead.

Are we surprised that I live in a backward and resistant house?

Though it galls to admit, I must have chosen this unreasonable, refusal-to-face roundaboutedness because it felt so terribly familiar.

I always come in the back door.

I’m happiest living halfway up, halfway down the hill.

Coming at things indirectly is the way I feel most at home.

Maybe next week  I’ll get back to straightforward Small Town Revival – which series I am (usually, most days) burning to explore and for which I have posts sketched out from here to October.

This week however, I’m spending my mornings taking my first fearful-of-breaking-eggshells-abandoned-out-of-cowardice-plus-my-own-inability-to-structure-it novel through an online writing course focusing on Structuring the Long Form — which is embarrassing — true literature ought to just come on wings, not be written by numbers — but I’ve got to get this thing out of the nest and winging away from me.

While my afternoons are all pick-axing clay, toting rock and gravel, and dumping wheelbarrows — sweating it out while my lemon-scented Mexican marigolds and beautiful cabbage grow steadily, fearlessly, and unself-consciously (despite deer and moles).  And are beautiful as well as useful.

And the excavated, re-assembled garden path begins to reclaim its rightful road.

Whatever else it might be, this garden-making, garden-remaking is so wonderfully comforting that . . . if you don’t mind, I think I’ll get back to it now . . .

Future Cycle: Small Town Revival (of 24 : 5) The Heart of the Matter

1. Discouraged = to lose heart, to be disheartened
2. Courage = “of the heart”
3. Suggesting the brave-hearted core of courage beats also in the warm-hearted core of cordiality.
4. Suggesting that in seeking the cordial warmth of other human voices we may find our hearts once more beating bravely where they should be.
5. Suggesting that what we love feeds our courage.

I am talking myself through a kind of verbal yoga, a little acrobatic act of optimism.  The kind of thing we wordies do to say we had some discouraging doubts, we did, about this project.

And these doubts put me on hold a little while I asked myself:

Am I just making pie-in-the-sky and rosy-eyed fairy embroideries on the subject of Our Town where I should have maintained a grim silence?

–

Are the problems here the kind that need something more explosive than the pen (or keyboard) to begin to address them?

–

Is there less to celebrate than to lament in this town?

Eating my heart out a little.

I could have left this disheartening hesitation out of the planned 24 posts on revitalizing a town –  pushing it aside as too personal and therefore irrelevant to the project of bringing a town back to full and vibrant life.

But I believe it is the power of what we believe in our hearts that really makes or breaks whatever we try to do — wherever we are living.  It is the powerful sway of what we tell ourselves, and tell each other, about our efforts here and our believable possibilities  that actually shapes our town, our nation, our individual lives.  The stories we tell ourselves shapes not just our perceptions of it — but our actions in it.

It’s not just because I’m such a wordie that I believe telling stories is a political act.

Do we know what stories we need in order to imagine a clearer future?

Trusting that I could warm my chilled heart in the cordiality of my neighbors, I turned to other people in town and asked them –

 Why do you live here?  why did you come? why do you stay? what were you hoping you would find here?  how has that hope been realized? what disappointment?

And then, if they were willing, I asked two further questions: (1) What one thing would you like to have change about our town?  (2) What one thing do you hope never changes about where we live?

The answers that came back delighted me.  I am not the only one with a passion to find a good place to live, to make this a better place to live.  I was not the only one who saw some problems here and many strengths.  More exciting was to see aspects I had missed of this picture I’m in the process of sketching of our town.  Parts of a dream of what our town could be that I hadn’t dreamed yet.

I received many great answers with specific examples and I’ll be drawing from them throughout the rest of this project.  A few responders even took time to write thoughtful and even inspiring evocations of what this town is to them, what it has been, what it could be – those I think I will showcase in separate posts of their own.

And then – seemingly out of the blue — a wise older woman, unprompted leaned over the brown eggs she was handing me and said, “It doesn’t matter, you know, if we can’t reach our dreams.  We’re just leaning on the fence, slowly breaking it down.  We’re making it easier for our children to come after.”

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading Smart Swarm (how understanding flocks, schools, and colonies can make us better at communicating, decision making, and getting things done) by Peter Miller who quotes in turn from Scott Page, an economist at the University of Michigan:

When people see a problem the same way, they’re likely all to get stuck at the same solutions.

As Miller concludes, “But when people with diverse problem-solving skills put their heads together, they often outperform groups of the smartest individuals.  Diversity, in short, trumps ability.”  For as he quotes Page as saying,

there is no mystery here.  Mistakes cancel one another out, and correct answers, like cream, rise to the surface.

Here’s hoping for cream.

what MAKES it | BREAKS it

• + diversity of backgrounds in this town 

• – trash-talking our town

• + diversity of talents

• – defeatism beating some of us before we even begin

• + people who already are trying to change things
•  + the buoyancy of hope

a fiction: Straight Answers

Q:

Your blog is confusing me.

I am not smart enough to hear what you
are saying.

For a few seconds, I feel relief,
like maybe your life is driving you mad, too.

But then I convince myself that your
life is wonderful, and all the hard stuff you write is fiction.

That’s it.

I can’t tell with you, what is real and what is not.

–

A:   Yes.

locust

Q:

I can’t remember now if I put the children down to bed first, or not.  Not, I think.  Then I think, but I must have.  Nobody was crying when I left for one thing.  I told him, “I might come back.”  It was dark already.  There was no moon.  Only one car stopped, two guys in baseball caps, “Need some help?”

I shook my head, gestured toward the porch just up ahead, angling toward it, stooping halfway to move the sprinkler, stood at the corner of the porch until they were long past and then walked on.

A: Walking through the lawns of strangers like I live here.

locust

Q:

Anyways, I did something crazy this weekend, and maybe you want to stick it in a book somewhere.  Make up a crazy character.

I drove myself all the way to PDX. Had the duffel bag and $2k in cash all
ready to go.  To where? That’s the best part……………….where ever the planes were going.  After sitting there for a while, the guilt got to me (like it ALWAYS does) and I slowly climbed back in my car and drove home.

I greet everyone with smiles and say the studying went well.

A: They have no idea I almost started a new life in Mumbai.

locust

Q:

Along the road down by the horse pond and the pastures the locust trees were all in bloom.  Their scent spilling – actually, yes, spilling down through the air.  In the dark, trespassing right in front of the sign, I broke off sprays and sprays of blossom, tucked them into my collar, wreathed them around my hair.  Then kept walking, now in an aura of moony fragrance, a full-body halo of perfume.  2 miles, 3 miles.  It never got any darker.  It never got any lighter.  Sought relief in a stand of silver birch.  3 miles, 4 miles. Until a corner where I finally turned and then turned again and turned and turned until it was again my own road home.

Halfway up the hill, I was too tired to go on.  I just sank into the tall yellow grass and lay there.

Scheduled for hay, my neighbor had said yesterday, the mowers would be up next week sometime. Mountain lion, she’d told me, too, tracks and claw sharpenings up and down the trunks of trees down by the creek. I didn’t care, but lay down and slept in the bending grass, on a locust blossom pillow beneath cloudy stars until I got too cold.

I’d never felt so rested, climbing up the rest of the way home.  Smear of light smudging up over the eastern hills.

A:  I kept the locust spray beneath my pillow a long time afterwards.

locust

Q:

So I just turned right around and walked back out, climbed into the barely emptied car. Opened wide the windows to lose the smell of three days of teenagers cooped up inside. I could hear them calling to each other from their rooms as I backed out. They sounded happy to be home, all unbeknowing. He had probably gone back already to his article revisions.

Which we’d interrupted, coming home. His week of quiet shattered with all our noise and baggage. Maybe he would notice I had gone some time tomorrow.

I drove. Past little houses with lighted windows, fields and white-flowered lawns, thinking what am I doing in this rust-blasted bomb again so soon?  And where in great-granny’s knickers do I think I’m going?

I could go back the three-days’ travel I’d just come?  –Too many explanations.

I could head downriver until I hit the first Help Wanted sign. Diner waitress, burger flipper, file clerk, night security, gas station attendant.

I hadn’t known I’d been looking for it, but came to a corner and knew I’d passed it.  Couldn’t say which one it had been,  but I knew suddenly that somewhere back there had been a happy kitchen.

A man had been leaning back against the kitchen counter with some metal workings in his hands, a little gray curling around his ears, smile lines like sunbursts at the corners of his eyes, dirt inked into his fingertips.  And a woman with her back to him, smiling down onto her hands, peeling peaches maybe, and then laughing.  Thin, of course, and beautiful in a worn and quiet way.  Good with horses, probably. Gentle.

A couple as unlike us in every way.

She turns to him and her slender hand cups the side of his face.

When I got back home he was waiting at the door, “Do you need help bringing in the bags?”

“No bags.”

“I thought maybe you went to the grocery store.”

“No.”

“When you just left I thought maybe you’d forgotten something.”

A:  “I did.  But then I remembered it and came back home.”

Love-in-a-mist

I like evry-boudy. The End.

Carrying on a dislike is like carrying around a rusty axe-head in my pocket.  That bare wedge of iron.  Without a handle.

It’s heavy.  I ignore it.

It bangs bruisingly against my thigh when I want to jump up, when I turn suddenly, when jostled into motion.

But if I reach in, rooting around to bring it to light, I cut my fingers on its sharpened edge.

I keep sharpening the edge.

Is the problem the sharpness of the axe-head or that it has no handle? And getting a handle on it, what would that do?

Wreaking , or clearing?

Swinging wide and away:  A wider swathe of damage?  Or an opened path?

Who am I anymore?

. . . and the Oma?

Do you dream in black and white?

Or in full color?

Maybe some dreams do come true.