Emily Dickinson

We grow accustomed to the Dark--
 When Light is put away --
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye--

A Moment--We uncertain step
For newness of the night--
Then--fit our Vision to the Dark--
And meet the Road--erect--

And so of larger--Darknesses--
Those Evenings of the Brain--
When not a Moon disclose a sign--
Or Star--come out--within--

The Bravest--grope a little--
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead--
But as they learn to see--

Either the Darkness alters--
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight--
And Life steps almost straight.

Why I Write

Me and Hemingway

   Hemingway sharpened twenty pencils before beginning his writing each day.    I require Uniball Vision Elite pens which I buy in bulk at Cosco.  They feel right in my hand when I commit my personal narratives about life to a hardback 8 x 12 inch journal.  Beginning at age 30, I have written about my personal experiences, frustrations and inspirations, now a collection of almost 40 bound books in my own script.

   Unlike Hemingway, I don’t write fiction.   I have developed a lifetime habit of recording events and my reaction to them.   I write to the headlines, to snatches of overheard conversations, bits of Sunday messages, lines of hymns.  Beautiful fall weather, joyous family occasions, the loss of dear friends, reminiscences of times past.   Middle of the night despair and anxiety sends me to my pen and paper to write out prayers.   Then I sleep.

       As I see it, writing for me has never been a vocation on any scale of measure.  I simply am compelled to record my thoughts  and reflect on my realities.   It is the very way I interact with life.

    My earliest memory of writing is in the third grade at Jester School.   In my notebook, I wrote down things my teacher said that seemed interesting to me and also funny things one or another of the kids said during the school day.   I had an abundance of time as there were eight grades in the room and I was the only one in my class.  When I read my jottings to my mother, I think she found it horrifying as she was a former teacher and she gave me to understand that this was not the way to be a good student.   So I went back to coloring pictures of Lassie in my free time.

    Hemingway ran with the bulls in Spain.   I spent a lot of time with cows as a child in Mid-Missouri.   I admired their serenity and their meadow routine. . .mornings by the pond, afternoons lying in the shade.  Often I joined the herd.  They were so used to me that they didn’t move or stop chewing their cud.   I made up songs about nature and animals and sang to them.   As well these compositions did not survive as the lyrics were quite childish.

   Once I found some index cards in a desk drawer and I was inspired to invent characters of an entire town that dwelled under trees and along hollows in the barn pasture.   The plot strangely resembled the Western movies I saw on Saturday afternoons.   Surely I deserved an A for effort in this endeavor, but when I told my teacher, my mother and school friends about my creation , they just looked at me with an odd expression  and said, “Hmph!”   That ended my flirtation with fiction.

      As an adult, I have become fascinated with personal stories.  As a psychiatric nurse therapist, I was privileged to fall deeply into the personal lives of hundreds of individuals.   I learned from every person with whom I engaged.    Professionally, I published in nursing journals two or three times, and I contributed to a textbook on dealing with children after  disasters which was published by Johns Hopkin Press after 9/11.  But my most satisfying project has been a collection of life stories of people born before 1940, self published in 2007.  Writing a memoir for my family was another rewarding self-published venture.   In the Missouri Historical Society Biographical papers room, I am proud to say that “Along the Hedge Row” by Carol Raynor is shelved right beside the memoir of Sally Rand, well-known stripper from Sedalia, Missouri.  

     To be called an “author” is an embarrassment to me, a false distinction.    I write because I simply have to write.   I am hopeful that someday a future descendant will search for and appreciate my complete works.

    Hemingway experienced a turbulent life as a successful writer; strong drink wreaked havoc.    My drink of choice as an adult has been double strength iced coffee.   Here ends my parallel with the famous man.    I have had a steady, contented existence as an unknown and undiscovered talent.   

Conversation

From the Kansas City Star during the Pope's recent visit to the USA:
. . .The Jesuit way of proceeding in conversation consists of five principles:  being slow to speak; listening attentively; seeking the truth  in what others are saying: disagreeing humbly and thoughtfully; and allowing the conversation the time it needs.

I’m Too Old for This

by DOMINIQUE BROWNING AUG. 8, 2015  New York Times

There is a lot that is annoying, and even terrible, about aging. The creakiness of the body; the drifting of the memory; the reprising of personal history ad nauseam, with only yourself to listen.

But there is also something profoundly liberating about aging: an attitude, one that comes hard won. Only when you hit 60 can you begin to say, with great aplomb: “I’m too old for this.”

This line is about to become my personal mantra. I have been rehearsing it vigorously, amazed at how amply I now shrug off annoyances that once would have knocked me off my perch.

A younger woman advised me that “old” may be the wrong word, that I should consider I’m too wise for this, or too smart. But old is the word I want. I’ve earned it.

And let’s just start with being an older woman, shall we? Let others feel bad about their chicken wings — and their bottoms, their necks and their multitude of creases and wrinkles. I’m too old for this. I spent years, starting before I was a teenager, feeling insecure about my looks.

No feature was spared. My hairline: Why did I have to have a widow’s peak, at 10? My toes: too short. My entire body: too fat, and once, even, in the depths of heartbreak, much too thin. Nothing felt right. Well, O.K., I appreciated my ankles. But that’s about it.

What torture we inflict upon ourselves. If we don’t whip ourselves into loathing, then mean girls, hidden like trolls under every one of life’s bridges, will do it for us.

Even the vogue for strange-looking models is little comfort; those women look perfectly, beautifully strange, in a way that no one else does. Otherwise we would all be modeling.

One day recently I emptied out an old trunk. It had been locked for years; I had lost the key and forgotten what was in there. But, curiosity getting the best of me on a rainy afternoon, I managed to pry it open with a screwdriver.

It was full of photographs. There I was, ages 4 to 40. And I saw for the first time that even when I was in the depths of despair about my looks, I had been beautiful.

And there were all my friends; girls and women with whom I had commiserated countless times about hair, weight, all of it, doling out sympathy and praise, just as I expected it heaped upon me: beautiful, too. We were, we are, all beautiful. Just like our mothers told us, or should have. (Ahem.)

Those smiles, radiant with youth, twinkled out of the past, reminding me of the smiles I know today, radiant with strength.

Young(er) women, take this to heart: Why waste time and energy on insecurity? I have no doubt that when I’m 80 I’ll look at pictures of myself when I was 60 and think how young I was then, how filled with joy and beauty.

I’m happy to have a body that is healthy, that gets me where I want to go, that maybe sags and complains, but hangs in there. So maybe I’m too old for skintight jeans, too old for six-inch stilettos, too old for tattoos and too old for green hair.

Weight gain? Simply move to the looser end of the wardrobe, and stop hanging with Ben and Jerry. No big deal. Nothing to lose sleep over. Anyway, I’m too old for sleep, or so it seems most nights.

Which leaves me a bit cranky in the daytime, so it is a good thing I can now work from home. Office politics? Sexism? I’ve seen it all. Watching men make more money, doing less work. Reading the tea leaves as positions shuffle, listening to the kowtow and mumble of stifled resentment.

I want to tell my younger colleagues that it doesn’t matter. Except the sexism, which, like poison ivy, is deep-rooted: You weed the rampant stuff, but it pops up again.

What matters most is the work. Does it give you pleasure, or hope? Does it sustain your soul? My work as a climate activist is the hardest and most fascinating I’ve ever done. I’m too old for the dark forces, for hopelessness and despair. If everyone just kept their eyes on the ball, and followed through each swing, we’d all be more productive, and not just on the golf course.

The key to life is resilience, and I’m old enough to make such a bald statement. We will always be knocked down. It’s the getting up that counts. By the time you reach upper middle age, you have started over, and over again.

And, I might add, resilience is the key to feeling 15 again. Which is actually how I feel most of the time.

But I am too old to try to change people. By now I’ve learned, the very hard way, that what you see in someone at the beginning is what you get forevermore. Most of us are receptive to a bit of behavior modification. But through decades of listening to people complain about marriages or lovers, I hear the same refrains.

I have come to realize that there is comfort in the predictability, even the ritualization, of relationship problems. They become a dance step; each partner can twirl through familiar moves, and do-si-do until the music stops.

Toxic people? Sour, spoiled people? I’m simply walking away; I have little fight left in me. It’s easier all around to accept that friendships have ebbs and flows, and indeed, there’s something quite beautiful about the organic nature of love.

I used to think that one didn’t make friends as one got older, but I’ve learned that the opposite happens. Sometimes, unaccountably, a new person walks into your life, and you find you are never too old to love again. And again. (See resilience.)

One is never too old for desire. Having entered the twilight of my dating years, I can tell you it is much easier to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of anticipation and disappointment when you’ve had plenty of experience with the shoals and eddies of shallow waters. Emphasis on shallow. By now, we know deep.

Take a pass on bad manners, on thoughtlessness, on unreliability, on carelessness and on all the other ways people distinguish themselves as unappealing specimens. Take a pass on your own unappealing behavior, too: the pining, yearning, longing and otherwise frittering away of valuable brainwaves that could be spent on Sudoku, or at least a jigsaw puzzle, if not that Beethoven sonata you loved so well in college.

My new mantra is liberating. At least once a week I encounter a situation that in the old (young) days would have knocked me to my knees or otherwise spun my life off center.

Now I can spot trouble 10 feet away (believe me, this is a big improvement), and I can say to myself: Too old for this. I spare myself a great deal of suffering, and as we all know, there is plenty of that to be had without looking for more.

If there can be such a thing as a best-selling app like Yo, which satisfies so many urges to boldly announce ourselves, I want one called 2old4this. A signature kiss-off to all that was once vexatious. A goodbye to all that has done nothing but hold us back. That would be an app worth having. But, thankfully, I’m too old to need such a thing.

Dominique Browning is the senior director of Moms Clean Air Force. She blogs at slowlovelife.com.

How They Do Live On

A reading from the funeral of a friend, Kathryn Knipchild. . .

How They Do Live On 

HOW THEY DO LIVE on, those giants of our childhood, and how well they manage to take even death in their stride because although death can put an end to them right enough, it can never put an end to our relationship with them. Wherever or however else they may have come to life since, it is beyond a doubt that they live still in us. Memory is more than a looking back to a time that is no longer; it is a looking out into another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still. The people we loved. The people who loved us. The people who, for good or ill , taught us things. Dead and gone though they may be, as we come to understand them in new ways, it is as though they come to understand us—and through them we come to understand ourselves—in new ways too. Who knows what "the communion of saints" means, but surely it means more than just that we are all of us haunted by ghosts because they are not ghosts, these people we once knew, not just echoes of voices that have years since ceased to speak, but saints in the sense that through them something of the power and richness of life itself not only touched us once long ago, but continues to touch us. They have their own business to get on with now, I assume—"increasing in knowledge and love of Thee," says the Book of Common Prayer, and moving "from strength to strength," which sounds like business enough for anybody— and one imagines all of us on this shore fading for them as they journey ahead toward whatever new shore may await them; but it is as if they carry something of us on their way as we assuredly carry something of them on ours. That is perhaps why to think of them is a matter not only of remembering them as they used to be but of seeing and hearing them as in some sense they are now. If they had things to say to us then, they have things to say to us now too, nor are they by any means always things we expect or the same things.    Frederick Buechner The Sacred Journey 

A List

I love words.  Especially these words.   I looked them up in the on line thesaurus.   It seems to me they represent our brand as Christians.   Or perhaps they are my grocery shopping list.

Hope                           Compassion                   Love                               Faith
Inspiration                   Goodwill                       Tenderness                     Peace
Worship                       Concern                         Passion                          Understanding
Prayer                          Kindness                        Loyalty                          Unity
Grace                           Empathy                        Communication              Kinship
Inspiration                   Tolerance                       Relationship                   Harmony
Blessing                       Mercy                            Caring                             Shalom

Connection with an Older Generation

Luke Haug, 17 years old, sitting on an Allis Chalmers tractor

like the one his great-grandfather, William Leeper Mallman, drove in the 1940s.