Mr. Wright

It's a photo of a photo I took when I was sixteen, I think. Maybe seventeen. I keep in on my prayer desk, in a frame that lines the photo with a quote from Thoreau, "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined."

His name was Ray Wright, and she is Ann, his wife. We were standing around the campfire, and I was so glad she showed up in the photo with him, given how dark it was. She meant the world to him, and I knew that simply by being in his English class. I wonder if any man ever loved his wife as deeply as he loved her.

And I wonder if any student ever loved her English teacher as deeply as I loved him. I met him when I was not yet his student. For some reason, I went to him after school and asked for his feedback on something I had written. (Now I can hardly believe I had the courage to do that, I was so shy back then. Must have been an unusual day.) He looked over whatever it was and said he looked forward to having me in his class the next year.

He taught me literature and grammar and vocabulary and writing skills, for which I will always be grateful. But more than that, he became my friend and taught me how to live. He was a very wise man, with a mind and heart that to me seemed bottomless. I could talk to him about anything, and did whenever I got the chance.

When I left for college, and he left for his PhD, we exchanged letters. The excerpt from one below gives you some idea of his wisdom. I realize now, though I did not then, that probably not many PhD students would take the time he did to respond to my letters with letters of two and three handwritten, single-spaced pages. This one was written in response to my struggling with the expectations I had absorbed from being a scholarship-financed student with multiple areas of ability, not knowing how to say "no" to anyone or anything, and consequently almost literally falling apart my freshman year:

Potential is such a deceptive term. There is always a degree of theoretical excellence that a person could achieve, but the product, potential, is the result of many factors which must include weariness, pleasure-seeking, lack of interest, and such things, all of which are a part of being human. When we say, "If I weren't so lazy, I could...," we aren't talking about potential; we are talking about utopian daydreams. What I ought to be must include consideration of my tendencies to be less...Get your rest. Decide what you can do without in your life, and simplify. Pray for wisdom. Look for everlastingness and cling to it. Be thankful for simple pleasures.

In another letter, he wrote about singing in the Ole Miss chorus at the Kennedy Center, the thrill of being in the place, and the beauty of Samuel Barber's setting of the Prayers of Kierkegaard.

He wrote about how he detested some of his classes and professors and the pomp and pride he witnessed in the world of academia, the lack of love for the literature and the lack of love among faculty, the competition and disregard for students. He didn't exactly discourage my ideas about heading for the Ivy League for graduate work, but he certainly opened my eyes to what it might actually look like.

He wrote about how much he missed his wife while away at school, and about marriage. He wrote about faith, and God, and how to have hope in this world by treasuring the small things, the simple things.

He could, I am certain, have gone to the Ivy League, if he'd wanted to. Or he could have sung or acted often in Kennedy Center or similar places, if he'd wanted to. He was very gifted as a writer, a teacher, a singer, and an actor.

But he wanted more than anything to be with his family and to make a difference in ways that actually mattered to people's lives. So he stayed in a small town at a small school that shared his values. He lived a quiet, simple life. In his later years, he took up golf and from what I heard surpassed people who had been playing for decades.

Then he got cancer, endured its horrific pain and the treatments for a few years, and then he died. On November 14, 2002. Seven years ago today. He had gone into a coma a few days earlier, and I actually drove to Searcy on the 14th in hopes of seeing him, but it turned out that I was driving to attend his memorial service.

The last time I saw him was at church in Searcy, in the hallway. We talked as we walked, he limping from pain, as the cancer had moved into his bones. He had been working on a sonnet, his last, and he stopped to recite it to me:

[Sonnet: Meditations on Dying]

It’s such an inconvenient thing to die,
To sink away from all we’ve known of love.
It feels so final when we say goodbye,
For only faith has seen those realms above.
The fading soul cries out for light, for breath,
More days to laugh, to love, to think, to be,
While pain-wracked nerve-ends plead for numbing death
And quiet rest for all eternity.
How shall we know, then, which of these to choose?
We hardly know what is, what merely seems.
Then give us, Lord, what we can never lose
When what we’ve known as life has turned to dreams.
Thus, self, and thought, and love will never die,
And we, in Him, shall never say good bye.

That memory is a precious gift.

I always felt that I was given another kind of gift, in that less than two weeks before that, while singing Morten Lauridsen's Lux Aeterna with our chorus, he came into my mind. He was ill then, but I had no idea he was so close to a coma or to death. We were just singing that gorgeous music, and I thought, "Mr. Wright would have loved this," and for most of the piece I just had him there in my heart, imagining him enjoying the music.

It was my last time to "be" with him during his life. And, coincidentally, our singing that night with Mr. Lauridsen himself present, led to our singing his music not in the Kennedy Center, but in Carnegie Hall, which then again became a connecting place with memories of Mr. Wright. A couple of years later we also sang Barber's Prayers of Kierkegaard, which was another gift.

He was himself such a gift, and he left a wonderful gift behind, a poem that he wrote back when I was his young English student. I remember him talking way back then about the trip to the Grand Canyon that inspired the poem. And I will never forget hearing Dennis Organ, one of my college English professors, reading the poem at the memorial service, at the request of Mr. Wright's beloved wife. Here it is:

Perspective (Posthumous)

Once in Arizona, dearest love, looking down,
We stood hand in hand
And watched mules, tourists, guides,
And even airplanes (looking down!)
Diminish beyond our sight
Into the vastness of a canyon bright
We called—truly called, for such it was—
Grand.
How many selves the size of us,
We guessed,
Would needs be multiplied
(Our life space being, more or less,
Infinitesimal—
Though to us, all)
To fill such emptiness?

Set down in such a splendid place,
We seemed of such a puny race.
Yet would we not, in God’s good time,
We guessed,
When we were one with Him
Who fills all space
Think back (looking down)
Upon such “grandness”
And smile at our presumption?

And now, my dearest love,
You stand (looking down)
Before the canyon of your grief,
Vast beyond belief,
For I, who filled the splendor of your life,
Am gone.
I know, for you to me were all.

And I, my puny self at last set free
To fill, with God, His infinite space,
Can say to you that we,
You and I—and He
(Looking down) will one day stand
And smile
To see that this chasm which you call
(Truly call, for such it seems)
Grand
Is really, when we escape our finite dreams,
An almost invisible scratch
On an infinitesimal table top
On an insignificant patch
Of an earth diminishing,
Diminishing,
To a stop.

--Ray A. Wright

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine:
et lux perpetua luceat eis.

My Home Is Not for Sale

Ever since we moved back to America, it has bothered me that I see signs saying, "Home for Sale." When I first saw that phrase, I thought naively, "Oh, that's ridiculous. It's a house for sale, not a home. Whoever made those signs will get some feedback and stop printing them that way."

Boy, was I wrong! I can't even remember the last time I saw a "House for Sale" sign, but I see "Home for Sale" everywhere these days. Especially these days, as we are looking at the possibility of moving.

My guess is that it was someone's attempt to make a house sound cozier, more personal, or something. No doubt marketing was behind the change in words.

Or is there more to it than that? Is it possible that in our culture of broken homes, of jobs moving people all over the nation, of TV shows that make you wonder if there is such thing as a normal set of family relationships, that some people really don't know the difference between a house and a home? That the word home has no meaning for them beyond the walls that house a person or group of people? I wonder if houses being treated like investments is part of the picture, too.

I don't know. I just know that the signs have bothered me ever since I began seeing them.

When I hear "home for sale," I think of someone willing to give more time at the office than they are at home, giving up home life to make more money. Or "home for sale" could mean that someone is willing to trade commitment to their wedding vows for attention from another person and a distorted fulfillment of some emotional, or other, desire.

The phrase just gets me. I realize it's a technicality, that the dicionary on my desk does list "house" as one definition of home.

But if home is where your heart is, then how can your home ever be for sale?

As we are looking at houses and considering moving, I feel a great resistance to the process. I hate moving. Not just because of the hard work of packing and unpacking and making all the adjustments--but because this house has become my home. Our time and energy and love and memories have gone into this particular house, and when we leave it, the next house won't have those. Not yet.

But those things are also not for sale. The person who moves into this house next time will not share those memories. They may paint over all our chosen colors and the faux finish that took me night after night to complete. They won't know how long I spent thinking about the kitchen redo, or the hours it took to pull up all the pachysandra in the front yard. They won't know that I got the bricks for the flowerbed from our neighbor's dismantled chimney, and they won't remember the hours Drazen and I spent setting them in place, and they won't know that two of the bricks came from Grandmother's yard.

The memories will go with us, even though the flowerbed cannot. And in the next house, we will choose colors and paint walls and arrange our furniture. We will cook meals and sit together at the table night after night. We'll have friends and family over. We'll laugh and cry and share life, day after day. And that house will become a home. I have to remind myself of this in order to be able to make the move, if indeed we go through with it.

So, my home is not for sale. The house is, for now. But the home will be where our hearts are.

You can imagine that I was happy a few months ago, listening as Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio interviewed two professors who are teaching Wendell Berry to their college students. In a conversation about the importance of community in Berry's writing, one of them quoted him as saying, "If it's for sale, it's not a home."

Apparently I'm not the only one who noticed the signs and was bothered.

Ginkgo

It must have been in college, I think. I was reading an issue of National Geographic. The place I most often read those was at Grandmother's house.

Back in high school I harbored the dream of one day traveling the world, writing and photographing for the magazine. That was back when I actually printed pictures in a dark room and experienced photography as a real adventure. (Not that it isn't now, but it certainly doesn't have the same challenge appeal for me anymore. Or maybe it just fed my ego then, since it was much harder back then to take good pictures?) It was also before I realized how taxing continual travel is to me as a person.

Anyway, I used to read National Geographic passionately, and at some point in those years I came across an article on ginkgo trees.

As far as I know, I had never seen a ginkgo tree at that time in my life; small-town Searcy didn't have much beyond the native tress, I don't think.

So I read this article about these ancient trees, thought to be the most primitive tree still alive today, possibly around back with the dinosaurs. And I saw photos of shimmering gold, fan-shaped leaves, and I wondered if I would ever get to see such a tree.

So you can imagine my delight here in Memphis, where we have at least two ginkgos on our very street, one around the corner, a couple at church, four in a row on a street near our neighborhood, and four in a row at my new counseling office. I see ginkgos daily!

And they never disappoint.



They're beautiful even on the ground, scatterings of fallen gold.



Blue sky is their best backdrop.



Blue tablecloth is nice, too. I always have to bring a little bit of ginkgo home.

New York Public Library

Just for fun, and because it's late and I just remembered I needed to do this!

This is from our trip to New York a few years ago, when my chorus got to sing at Carnegie Hall. Both of us managed to forget to bring the camera, so I decided to do some sketches along the way, just so we had something to remember the trip by.

So, here is Drazen in front of the library. When I finished it, I realized that he looked rather lionish. Do you see it, too?

Tuesday for Tuesday

Even though I already wrote today, that was for yesterday. So I'll feel better if I post again just for today, being the recovering legalist that I am.

Tonight I'd like to share a quote that I came across recently while reading Kay Redfield Jamison's book Exuberance. She is quoting from Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows, who wrote the line for the character Toad, who is nothing if not exuberant.

I hope it will mean as much to you as it has to me.

"O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!"

Oops and Order

Oops!

Is it possible that at 7am here, it is still November 9 somewhere else?

I completely forgot to do anything here yesterday

I remember in college hearing Mike Cope say something in a sermon that has stuck with me these 20 or so years. Note that this is not the only thing he said that stayed with me--there were also more profound things.

In this case, I don't even remember what the point of the sermon was. I just remember that on his way to the point, he said something like, "You know how you have certain ways of doing things, and you have to do those things in a certain order? And if that order gets messed up somehow, it just doesn't feel right, and you feel kind of messed up the rest of the day?" He related it to a toothbrushing routine, as I recall.

What I remember vividly is that when I heard that, I thought, "No. No, I'm not like that. I have almost no order to the way I do things. I used to, but coming to college and living in the dorm changed everything, and I lost my abilitly to do things in order." I even began to wonder if something might be wrong with me!

Well, now I know that order is important in ways I couldn't have guessed back then. One of my main emphases in working with severely depressed people or people with bipolar disorder, is to help get order and routine back into their lives. There's even a name for this and a book about it.

Our memories lean heavily on order and routine. Our biorhythms depend on the steadfastness of light and dark, and eating at more or less the same times each 24-hour period.

And my life has not had much order or routine since January, when I lost my job with Christ Community. I've done what I can to create routine for myself, but without the pegs of similarity among days, I haven't been terribly successful. And when each day is different from the others, and there is not even a lot of similarity from week to week, it just makes it even harder when plans that I have been counting on and framing my thinking around, get changed at the last minute, as happened with three planned events yesterday.

So, congratulations to me for surviving this rather chaotic time period. I'm not gonna worry too much about missing a blog post.

And maybe another time I'll share about the things Mike Cope said that he may have actually hoped would stay in his listeners' minds!

A Beautiful Yesterday

Yesterday we went for a walk.


It was simply too splendid a day to stay inside too much.


I almost consider it sinful to stay in on a beautiful blue-sky day,


the sin of ingratitude being taken quite seriously by saints and poets alike,
and sin meaning to miss the mark--which certainly happens when a day or a moment like this goes unappreciated.


At any rate, yesterday was a day to be thankful,


and it was wonder-full,




and wonderful being with my husband,


and wonderful being in the woods,


and wonderful simply being.

Christmas in November

Celebrating the birthday of my grandmother, Mildred Evans Christmas, beautiful both to see and to know. Born into this world 93 years ago, she stayed here 87 years, and lives on forever in my heart and in those of many others.

And as beautiful as she was, I never saw this picture of her until after her death.

I celebrated her today by getting outside for a morning walk, drinking hot tea, reading from a good book, and sending someone else a birthday card. I've never looked much like her, but I want to be like her in ways that matter more.

NaBloPoMo

National Blog Posting Month entered my universe last year via my friend Lucy's blog, Box Elder , and I can assure you that a rich feast awaits you if you read her blog this month.

I can't promise the same here at Folk, Flocks, and Flowers.

That said, however, something just got into me and I think it would be good for me to try making myself write on a daily basis. I don't know what I'll write about, which makes this a great time to start, since the month of November has no theme for NaBloPoMo-ers to concern themselves with.

So I'm really doing this more for myself than for my readers, and I think it fair to warn you of that in advance. Not that I've ever set out to be a terribly audience-focused blogger. Not that I ever really even expected to have an audience beyond family and close friends.

Which brings to mind the strange fact that according to Blogger, my profile page has had circa 2,000 views (I guess at some point Blogger got tired of keeping specific numbers?) since I started the blog. While I realize that that number is nothing compared a bunch of blogs out there in the -osphere, it did kind of startle me when I saw it the other day.

Why on earth have anything close to 2,000 people looked at my profile page? Who are they? How did they come across it? Are they mostly people who know me? Or mostly people who don't? What did they hope to learn by looking at it? What did they think after looking at it?

The main feedback I get from anyone who has seen it and given feedback, is that my photo doesn't show me enough, so why did I choose that photo? Maybe I'll write about that one day this month.

And the (sad to me, in a way) truth is that I doubt anyone who has looked at it has given it much more than a moment's thought. And the reason I say this is that most people who are looking at blog profiles have probably looked at lots of blog profiles, and will probably look at many more. And the human mind can only manage a certain amount of information, which is what a blog profile gives you.

And that's the sad part to me, that in a way, a blog profile reduces real people to images and little lists on a "page" that is really not a page like a page in a yearbook, or a photo album, something you can pick up and touch and keep on your shelf and treasure.

No, by having a blog I have put myself out there in this impersonal space that I can't even begin to define or explain....this "page" is not touchable, or smellable as the pages of a book are. (I love the smell of old paper.) It's just a visual image that appears on a screen and disppears with the click of a mouse. (Which is not really a mouse at all, either.)

But for better or for worse, I'm out there, and now I'm making this daily commitment, and maybe on December 5 I will have reached some amazing insight because of it--or maybe I'll just be relieved to write that final daily post! We'll see.

In any case, I'm thankful to those of you who have told me that sometimes what I write strikes a chord, or even makes a difference. When I started this blog, I so did not want it become an exercise in vanity. If it ever becomes that, my intention is to end it.

Until then, here's to sending thoughts into intangible space for unknown readers!

C.S. Lewis weighs in

"Don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion," he wrote in A Grief Observed, "or I shall suspect that you don't understand."

(I just read this in an article on life after death and had to share it.)