"God in the Yard" Giveaway

I was going to do a giveaway of God in the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us by L.L. Barkat, and then I saw that Kaye over at Mrs. Nespy's Frugal World was doing one. So I hopped on board the giveaway train and am offering a second copy to Kaye's first in the giveaway. Check out the post on it, and you'll find there are a number of ways to be in the random drawing (and multiple times, no less). Don't leave your comment here but instead over at Kay's place.

The giveaway runs until Aug. 24 at 11:59 p.m. (eastern time). The two winners will then be selected.

So drop a comment, tweet or any of the other ways to be selected for a copy of this great book.

It Ends in Hospitality

I’ve reached Chapter 12 and the epilogue of God in the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us by L.L. Barkat.

This last chapter is on hospitality. Barkat describes it as a process of receptivity, reverence and generosity.

Hospitality is not exactly my strong suit. I think I was born with hospitality not being my strong suit. Almost painfully shy as a child, I was always on the outer circle of the neighborhood rambunctiousness. Truth be told, I probably preferred to sit quietly and read. My parents, in fact, would often throw me out of the house to get me away from reading.

This didn’t change much as I grew older. I was the one everyone came to for help with their homework. In college, if I read one paper on either “Barn Burning” by William Faulkner or Young Goodman Brown, I read hundreds. (I’ve never read Young Goodman Brown but I can likely recite anything you want to know about it. I read the Faulkner story in my early 40s. I think I read almost all of Faulkner in my late 30s and early 40s).

I’m still not comfortable in crowds. When I go to conferences where I know virtually no one, I dread the cocktail receptions. I’ve taught myself to make conversation if I’m sitting at a lunch or dinner meeting. Wordsworth said it a long time ago: the child is father of the man.

There’s a cost to this, this “introvertedness,” this aloneness. But perhaps the time has come to stop paying the cost and find another way. Or, as Barkat says in the epilogue, “…you can embrace the life you have before it’s gone.”

Read this book.


The God in the Yard posts linked all in one place:

Introduction: God in the Yard
Week One: Little Woods and Big Woods
Week Two: Life is a Garden
Week Three: Singing in the Wilderness
Week Four: The Grief Makes the Way for the Joy
Week Five: Detachment
Week Six: Lament? What?
Week Seven: Working at the Margins
Week Eight: Sabbath and Verse
Week Nine: Writing Poetry
Week Ten: I Fix Mess
Week Eleven: Submission is Not a Passive Thing
Week Twelve: It Ends in Hospitality

Submission is Not a Passive Thing

I was doing fine reading God in the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us by L.L. Barkat. I even made it through the chapter where I was supposed to lay down in the yard. And then I hit the chapter that’s about that word.

You know the word. It’s one of my most unfavorite words in the English language.

Submission.

I was momentarily encouraged when I read Barkat’s definition: “’Sub’ means ‘under.’ But true submission is more like the art of working with a person or situation, the way the steam from my teacup works with the breeze.” (I should say I was encouraged because of the reference to the teacup. I thought it didn’t apply to me because I drink coffee; then I realized that steam rises from a coffee cup, too.)

“Sub” does indeed mean “under.” And “mission” comes from a Latin verb (after being laundered by the French), mittere, to send or let go. It’s an action. In fact, the whole word describes an action. There is the action of understanding the person or situation, seeing a need in the other person or yourself, and then resolving to do something. There’s nothing passive about submission. It is, as Barkat suggests, a “working with.”

This immediately reminded me of a time when submission and I were strangers, and we shouldn’t have been.

A long time ago, I was caught up in one of those convulsive corporate organizational things, which involved a kind of dividing the sheep from the goats. It was not a foregone conclusion where I would end up, but at some point I must have rubbed someone the wrong way for I found myself assigned to the goats. And working for the worst boss one could imagine: insecure, mean, vindictive, and something less than fully competent. The one positive thing I could attribute to this boss was consistency.

I knew this going into the situation. I resolved to try to make it work. It lasted as long as the boss thought I was useful – about eight months. For those eight months, I thought there had been a fundamental change in the personality. Then it changed. And it changed overnight. Life at work became awful – and what I didn’t know was how actively the boss working behind the scenes. I was walking around with figurative knives all over my back.

I was partially rescued – a friendly executive had me moved to his team. But my work moved with me, and the old boss took that as a slap in the face and redoubled the efforts. Lies, half-truths, smears – the old boss stopped at nothing. It was not a fun time. The old boss eventually succeeded – I found myself being out in a downsizing wave. I found out before the proper time to tell me – my old boss couldn’t resist giving me the message.

However, the old boss had done too good of a job – and got caught in the same downsizing wave.

I would like to say that I submitted to the authority here, that I “came along side.” I did, for a time. And then it became an active effort devoted to self-protection. I stopped being nice. Mediating sessions hosted by HR became opportunities for me to crush the lies, and I did, and I did it ruthlessly, to everyone’s mutual embarrassment and discomfort. Which only made the situation worse. I was truthful; I was candid and straightforward; after all, it was my reputation that was being trashed. No one would have called me submissive, no matter what the definition of the word might be.

What would I do differently now? I don’t know. It was a hard situation and was very, very hard to go through it. It wasn’t a case of being trashed because of my beliefs or faith; it wasn’t what a lot of us might call “persecution” in the sense of one’s faith.

It was more about eliminating a perceived threat, even if it meant negative consequences for one’s team and work.

As if I needed reminding, I did learn that we live in a fallen world, and I’m a part of it.

Related:

Home by Laura Boggess at The Wellspring.

I Fix Mess

My wife and I were talking the other night about some major decisions ahead of us, and I mused a bit about the career I’ve had for 37+ years. The musing took the form of a summary statement.

I fix mess.

This isn’t exactly a recent revelation; I’ve known this for a long time. It’s also easier to say and understand than “dysfunctional organization co-dependent.”

Right after I graduated from college, I worked on the copy desk of a newspaper. Turnover was high; within three months I was #2 on the desk and #1 had a drinking problem, which meant that a 21-year-old kid was essentially responsible for the copy desk for three editions of a newspaper. I held it together.

My next job was working for a large corporation. The first two years were good, and then I got another boss with a drinking problem. I held that together, too.

I didn’t have to deal with bosses’ drinking problems after that, but there came a line of mediocre people expected to do extraordinary things, people making major mistakes, businesses teetering on the brink of disaster, nasty issues, dysfunctional personalities and a few good bosses thrown in for good measure. Even as an independent consultant, who I was for almost four years, my job was almost always to fix the mess. I have a good boss now, and it’s been rare enough that I consider it a special blessing.

But down all the paths my career has followed, there’s been one constant.

I fix mess. Sometimes it’s mess of omission, and sometimes it’s mess of commission. But that’s what has characterized a good chunk of what my career has been about: fixing the mess caused by others.

She doesn’t describe it that way, but that’s what L.L. Barkat has experienced, as she describes it in God in the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us (Week 10: Self-care): “I’d always been the person who tried to play the part of bridge, who tried to hold things together.”

The bridge metaphor is an apt one – the bridge between chaos and safety, or disaster and resolution. It can be a self-imposed metaphor.

She goes on: “Acting as bridge puts a strain on our souls. Always being the one to handle things, neglecting our needs and dreams to stand in some supposed gap…” I didn’t stand in “some supposed gap” in the lives of family or friends; my supposed gap was invariably work.

In the last year, I’ve begun to muse and ponder about this. I’ve also been writing stories and poetry more.

The two are not unconnected.


I didn’t know the man

I didn’t know the man
but I did, because I
knew his father, who
knew me years before,
another lifetime ago.
My father, he said, spoke
of you as a talisman,
a charm, a rabbit’s
foot they couldn’t lose,
but they threw you away.
I didn’t know that, I said,
but I did.


Related:
Chameleon by Laura Boggess at The Wellspring.

Writing Poetry

“Writing poetry can lead us to intimacy and praise; it can also help us begin to listen to ourselves,” writes L.L. Barkat in God in the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us. “It’s a kind of active silence well-suited to the extrovert, wherein we welcome flapping sounds from the burden on our backs and express them in the space of a poem. The confines of limited space ask us to first listen hard, so we can later capture and powerfully communicate elusive truth.”

No one who knows me would call me an extrovert. I’m generally on the quiet side, at least in public. I listen more than I talk; I observe more than I say. Quiet does not mean comatose. People in business tend to gravitate to A-type personalities; I’m not an A-type, although some of the best speeches I’ve written have come from working closely with A-type executives (“A-type” and “executive” are likely redundant).

My worst nightmare: to be thrown into a cocktail party with hundreds of people I don’t know.

And yet I write poetry (Barkat only said that writing poetry was well-suited to extroverts; she didn't say it wasn't for the rest of us). I wrote two poems in the past few days that were born in that active silence she talks about – the active silence of reading a really fine book and the active silence of contemplating a passage in the Gospel of Mark.

I didn’t expect to write the first poem, “Jacob’s Blessing.” But the book I was reading moved me to it. The poem began when I read about the simple gesture of a young man pointing his thumb at his heart and then pointing upward – an indication of his faith. The gesture may not seem remarkable, but the young made had suffered serious brain damage in a near-drowning accident. The telling of that story overwhelmed me; the silence of reading was suddenly infused with the silence of faith.

“Ego or Ego sum?” is the second poem. This poem on ego was well underway – in the silence of writing – when I connected to the passage in Mark, where Jesus says, “Before Abraham was, I AM.” Jesus is actually proclaiming himself to be God here, “I AM” (Hebrew: Yahweh), and it was either a colossal act of ego and blasphemy or it was true. I then moved to rewrite completely what I had been composing.

Why do these things happen in a writer’s or poet’s head? I don’t know, but they happened. The silence facilitated a kind of intimacy with the words in front of me; the active silence meant I was engaged; the result was an act of the heart.

Related:

The Bridge by Laura Boggess at The Wellspring.

Sabbath and Verse

“Sabbath is a weekly invitation to go nowhere, to believe that hiddenness is part of presence,” writes L.L. Barkat in God in the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us.This isn’t so much about the Sabbath being a time to rest so you can be more productive the rest of the week, …”but more in the sense of rhythm that sees nowhere-somewhere, presence-hiddenness, as inextricably linked, with God on both sides of the dance.”

And where she finds the strongest analogy is in her journey with poetry.

Sabbaths, or Sundays, for me are (usually) the slowest day of the week. There’s a routine: church, lunch out somewhere, nap, some writing, working out at the Y (or a bike ride), maybe some yard work like heading back the roses, reading and some more writing. It doesn’t sound slow, but it is. And it’s quiet. Sundays are (usually) the quietest day of the week around our house. But it’s definitely slower-paced than the rest of the week.

And Sunday, for me, is about poetry. Reading it and writing it.

This started more than a year ago. And during the pastor’s sermon, no less. He said some things as I was taking notes, and I saw that my notes began to look something like a poem.Later, I played with it some, and it became a poem.

What’s happened in the interim is that I now firmly connect Sundays, worship and poetry, which I could call “Sabbath and Verse.”

Here’s what I wrote this past Sunday.

Sprinklers on Sunday

I set the sprinklers out because
we needed rain, and
it did. Later
the rain washed the stones
and the colored
panes of polished sand,
cocooning the living hearts
within.

Working at the Margins

It’s one of those commonplaces that you will be reading something, and a statement is made or an idea is expressed that suddenly illuminates an area of your life so directly that you’re stunned you had never realized it before.

That happened to me this past week. I was reading chapter six of L.L. Barkat’s God in the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us (entitled “presence”). She quoted author Wendell Berry speaking about marginal land – land where things don’t easily grow because the soil is poor or eroded or the land doesn’t get much rainfall or is exhausted from overfarming. This is what Berry said:

“It is at the margins that the weaknesses of an enterprise will show first and most dramatically.”

In one of those blinding flashes of the obvious, I realized that my entire career had just been expressed in one simple sentence. And it’s because my career, the work that I have done and do, has been and is spent at the margins of the enterprises I’ve worked for. And those margins are precisely where the organizations’ weaknesses have been the most obvious.

I work in communications – public affairs, public relations, corporate communications; it goes by many names. Specifically, I work in those small spaces between organizations and their various publics and constituencies, with the idea that my job is to help all of the parties involved better understand each other. Yes, one provides my paycheck; I can’t forget that. But that doesn’t mean I can’t represent contrary viewpoints coming from the public to help my organization do things better, improve a situation, correct a mistake, or take a different course.

I don’t “spin.” I have never “spun.” That may be hard to believe of someone who’s spent 35+ years in public relations. But that’s the situation. The reason is simple: my credibility is all I have, all my organization has, to be successful.

But because I’ve operated where the organizations are weakest, it’s no surprise that I have often had to deal with as much suspicion on the “inside” and I have on the “outside.”

And it’s sometimes very wearing. I’ve worked for or consulted for an oil company, two chemical companies, an agricultural company, an urban school district, a mining company, a pork producer (I know what a pig farm smells like), among a lot of others. Controversial organizations in controversial situations dealing with controversial issues. Or, the margins, where the organizations are the weakest. Large organizations are often the most fragile at the margins, where their operations meet the public.

Barkat amplifies and personalizes Wendell Berry’s statement this way: “Without strengthening the enterprise of one’s life, stress can continue to travel inward, encroaching on seemingly fertile land, until the whole plot is eventually decimated.”

The margins are more than important. They’re vital.

Related:

Sabbath Joy by Laura Boggess at The Wellspring.

Lament? What?

In God in the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us, L.L. Barkat writes about the importance of lament. When I read this chapter (entitled “open: prayer”), my first response was – lament? Am I supposed to lament as one form of spiritual practice? I’m an American; Americans don’t lament. We move on; we get on with it; we look forward, not backward. In a way, lament smacks of weakness.

Exactly.

Perhaps that’s what this is really about. To lament is to acknowledge that some things (at least) are beyond your control and influence, that you have blown something and badly, that you have let someone down or hurt someone or made a serious mistake. It means that that you have a sorrow in your soul, and more than that, it has to be articulated in a context of something larger than the sorrow.

One of the exercises suggested by Barkat is to make a list of laments and then to write a psalm, inseritng the laments into the framework of lament/praise to God/lament/praise to God. Just like David did in the psalms he wrote. What emerges is a poem, a kind of song (which is what a psalm is).

My heart is weak, my spirit too sensitive.
Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, and His love endures forever.
I have wasted much time in my life, and what I have left is short.
Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, and His love endures forever.

My tongue is more courageous than my heart.
Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, and His love endures forever.
My arms are weary, my muscles weak.
Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, and His love endures forever.

I fear stupidly, forgetting the creator of the universe.
Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, and His love endures forever.
Too quick to take offense, I crave man’s favor and ignore God’s mercy.
Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, and His love endures forever.

I stand naked before the cross,
all pretence stripped away, and
I am ashamed.
Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, and His love endures forever.

He has cleaned me,
He has scoured me.
He has called me child, His.
He has dressed me in a robe of brilliant white.
He has placed a crown upon my head.
He has touched my cheek with His kiss.
Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, and His love endures forever.


Related:

Hide by Laura Boggess at The Wellspring.

Detachment

It’s Week Five of reading L.L. Barkat’s God in the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us, and I find myself engaged in understanding detachment.

“I heard it through a friend,” Barkat writes. “Someone had said of me, ‘She seems closed in her spirit.’ This was news. I always considered myself to be a fairly open person, thankful for life and its gifts. Still, this seemed to coincide with the cautious observation of another friend, ‘You’re kind of detached.’”

Ah, detachment. Oh, boy.

“Detached” is an attribute – or a description – often applied to me. My wife will not say I’m detached, but she will say “You’re not listening” or “You’re not engaged” or – most dreaded of all – “Tell me what I just said.”

To be honest, detachment is part of who I am, at least part of who I am at least part of the time.

I “learned” detachment in two ways in college journalism. First, it was the idea of objectivity, of trying to be objective and balanced and fair, a modernist concept that is no longer practiced in the journalism of a post-modern society. You were supposed to do your job with some sense of detachment, or you would not be able to do your job properly.

Second, I learned detachment sitting in the newsroom of the college newspaper, first as a copy editor and then as a managing editor. I had to detach myself from the noise and sound around me so that I could focus on writing and editing.

I never unlearned this second kind of detachment. I can block out thunderstorms and fire engine sirens if I need to focus on something.

My family refers to this as “Dad’s checked out.”

What happens – and is hard to explain – is that my mind tends to be constantly “on.” It’s on in the sense of making connections, seeing commonalities in things that seem very different, pulling out themes, seeing similar situations separated by years or even decades, and then playing all of this back, sometimes in a very different context.

What I’m describing, of course, is the mind of a writer. I don’t know if all writers do this, but there is some level of apparent detachment that masks an almost total engagement. It seems, and perhaps is, a contradiction, to be detached and engaged simultaneously. But that’s what happens.


Related:

Lament by Laura Boggess at The Wellspring.

The Grief Makes the Way for the Joy

L.L. Barkat doesn’t ask this exact question in God in the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us, but suggests something very much like it: Can we experience joy without experiencing grief? And if we cut off our capacity for experiencing grief, are we also curtailing our capacity for joy? That’s a thought she cites from poet David Whyte, author of books of poetry like House of Belonging and even business books like The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America. (L.L. and I both like Whyte’s poems and his writings on business.)

To consider grief and joy in the same context, I need to recall no more than the year 1987, one of those watershed years where so much happens that you come out on the other side of it changed forever. It was the year of three deaths and a birth.

On Saturday, March 7, I came home from running errands to find my wife in tears and our next-door neighbor sitting with her. Our then 7-year-old was outside playing. A call had come from New Orleans – my father had suffered a stroke and was unconscious in the hospital. It took two airline flights to get to Louisiana – two late planes, missed connections, finally getting to Baton Rouge and taking a taxi to New Orleans 75 miles away.

He did not recover from the stroke. It was massive. On Sunday, the family gathered at the hospital, talked with the doctors, and decided to remove him from the machines that were keeping his body functioning. He died early the next morning. He left behind a business that was a mess, unpaid bills, troubled relations with one of my brothers, a life insurance policy he had neglected to pay the last premium on, stacks of old traveler’s checks locked in a box under the bed – all kinds of strange and unexpected things. I was the executor of the estate, and made my first priority salvaging enough assets for my mother to live on until Social Security would start the following year.

There was too much to do and no time to grieve. The fact that he was gone would hit me with a huge wallop more than two years later.

Three months after my father’s death, the church where I was elder embarked upon a building program that was misguided and possibly disastrous. I tried to stand in the breach but was mowed down. People were upset with me – elder boards are supposed to vote unanimously. The action went forward and I resigned from the board, which caused another round of upset. Within a few short weeks, events proved me right. Fortunately the program was not far enough along to cause major financial damage, but it could have destroyed the church. It was small comfort to be proven right when relationships had been irrevocably shattered.

Three months after that, work blew up. I had been pouring heart and soul into work, and then a political move happened, an undeserved promotion was made, and an entire department disintegrated. It was a bitter lesson to learn about corporate life – performance, achievement, and results ultimately did not matter as much as being a favorite of a vice president. A job was open in another division – a job no one wanted because it dealt with issues and mess – that I applied for and got it. It looked like a crazy career move – to go from the high-flying division to an old traditional and rather dowdy one.

The year of three deaths – my father, my relationships at church and seemingly my career.

At the end of December came the joy – the birth of our second child, another boy. You can look at the photographs we have of that Christmas (my wife started labor on Christmas Day) and you can see the exhaustion and grief in our faces. It had been a hard year, but it was a year that was ending right, ending joyfully.

The tidal wave of grief that engulfed us that year actually allowed us, and me in particular, to experience the joy.

Related:

Sky Stories by Laura Boggess at The Wellspring.

Singing in the Wilderness

I’ve been reading God in the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us by L.L. Barkat, and one of the suggested exercises is to spend up to an hour in the yard every day for a week, simply sensing the world, perhaps lying on a blanket.

I didn’t do that. I have neighbors.

“Hey, Young! Whatcha up to?”

“I’m lying on a blanket for an hour.”

“I can see that, but why? Getting a suntan?”

“No, I’m sensing the world. Contemplating. Thinking.”

“Oh, doing nothing, huh? Well, you might want to know that the rabbits are chewing right through your zinnias.”

There was one element of this, though, that attracted my eye when I read it. “So let yourself go,” writes Barkat, “the way the Psalmist David probably did all those days and nights in the fields…and in so doing, heard the murmurs of God.”

There it was – a picture, a picture of being like David, out in the valleys, fields and caves, climbing in the mountains and crossing deserts – all to hide from Saul and his men. Hiding for his life. Long periods of isolation and separation, punctuated by short bursts of activity and (occasionally) confrontation.

What struck me as I saw this reference to David was that we know what he did while he wandered those places.

He sang songs.

And he wrote poetry.

We know this because we have the song poems in the Book of Psalms in the Old Testament, 70 of which are identified as “of David” and seven specifically identified as from the time of this “wilderness” period.

His life threatened, living in harsh conditions, exposed to all kinds of weather, chased by Saul and his soldiers, David wrote poetry. Beautiful poetry. Even in English translation from the Hebrew, the beauty of David’s psalms shines through, and has done so for 3,000 years. It’s also entered our collective consciousness with such phrases as “the valley of the shadow of death” (a write would have written “the valley of death;” a poet would write “the valley of the shadow of death”).

That such beauty came from David’s “dark night of the soul” is indeed something to contemplate and wonder.


Related: Celebration by Laura Boggess at The Wellspring.

Life Is a Garden

I’m continuing to follow, read and record from God the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us by L.L. Barkat. For me, it’s week 2: “Rules – The Way,” and I’ve been reading about spiritual practice, considering who’s really in control of my life, and how a pair of cardinals watching over a baby can suggest a lesson about learning to fly.

And there’s this chapter exercise about writing your life as a garden.

The gardens we have at home were originally planned by my wife with a landscape designer; you have to do something when the builder scrapes off the top six feet of dirt – including all the topsoil – and anything green. It was literally a clean slate – a clean clay slate. Missouri clay. We had it analyzed – zero percent organic matter.

Over the years, we’ve added a rather elaborate redwood fence, then replaced it with something similar in plastic when the redwood decided to rot. We built gardens around the perimeter of the house itself and along most of the fence.

As my wife’s knees steadily weakened, the garden fell more and more in my direction. And I’ve gone through phases. The rose phase lasted for several years; at one point we had more than 50 rose bushes. Then rose rosette disease struck and only a handful survived. The perennial phase started big and then slowed. But it never stopped – I still pick up occasional plants each spring at a nearby nursery. The annual phase started about three years ago, when we bought a bunch of zinnias and others to plant under trees, in borders and any place I can find to plant too many purchased plants. There’s also a small bed for tomatoes.

The one consistent planting practice I’ve had is bulbs. I plant a lot of bulbs each year. Lots. And I know exactly why – the Dutch Gardens catalog knows when it’s in the hands of an adult with big eyes – the proverbial kid in the candy store. All kinds of tulips. Irises. Daffodils. Hyacinths. I order by what looks appealing, with only vague thoughts in my head about where they will all go.

When the shipment arrives, usually sometime in mid-October, I’ve forgotten why I ordered so many. I can’t believe how many bulbs are in the box. But I dutifully get out the bulb tool and bulb fertilizer, and away I go. I always end up with aching hands and back and at least two skinned knuckles. It’s totally predictable.

The garden’s structure is provided by river birches, maple trees, magnolia trees, hollies, a viburnum that was only supposed to grow to six feet, not 12, hydrangeas, a dogwood and a crabapple. The front of the house also includes boxwood.

So, if my life is a garden, if my life is this garden, what does it say about me?

I love the beauty of living things, and I’m willing to work to produce them (usually). And the work can be hard and dirty – but that’s what it takes to grow what matters.

It takes a long time to grow a garden, particularly when the soil starts off with zero organic content and you have to add lots of stuff. And you have to keep adding lots of good stuff.

Nothing ever goes exactly to plan. Disease happens. Lack of rain requires watering. Too much rain is a problem, too. (I remember the late spring of 1993, trying to plant two rosebushes and it was as if the rain would never stop; that was the year of the great flood.) And then there are weeds; weak trees (like Bradford pears) that decide to fall down all by themselves; and seedlings spread from the maples (millions of seedlings spread from the maples; millions and millions).

I haven’t even mentioned the grass.

It looks orderly, but the order has little to do with me. In the spring and early summer, it can look spectacular and bring people walking by on the sidewalk to a stop. But there are always things to fix, things to do, things that die and have to be discarded, new things to try.

It does sound a lot like my life.

Related:

Contemplation by Laura Boggess.

Little Woods and Big Woods

I’ve been reading God in the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us by L.L. Barkat, and actually started a journal to record what the 12-week process asks you to record. Things like, “When I was a child, I lived…”

When I was a child, I lived in a suburb of New Orleans, along what is now called the “Metairie Ridge,” some of the highest land in the city. It had been built up over a long period of time by deposits from the Mississippi River. And while it had been “swampy, marshy,” it was still high – which is why my mother’s house has never flooded during a hurricane, including Katrina in 2005.

It was a neighborhood of tract ranch homes, largely populated by people like my family – World War II veterans and their families. The husbands commuted to their jobs in the city (yes, this was the 1950s) although there were some working mothers as well. Not to mention extensive evidence of the Baby Boom. Kids were everywhere.

Behind the houses across the street from my house was a small, shallow drainage ditch, which we kids knew contained “polio water” – some parent (I would bet a mom) had told their child that he (invariably a “he,” since girls had more sense) would get polio if he fell into it. (The Salk vaccine didn’t arrive until 1956 and 1957, and polio was something we all knew about.)

And behind the ditch was – The Woods.

This wasn’t a forest by any stretch of the imagination. It was a small stand of woods – but large enough (say, half-a-block wide and two blocks long) to be a place of magic and adventure to a 6-, 7-, and 8-year-old. A well-worn and narrow trail meandered through it. Somehow, most likely the result of a land title dispute or general disinterest, it had escaped subdivision development.

Where else to play cowboys, war, hide-and-seek? Where else to go hang out? You were far away enough from parental oversight to feel daring but still close enough to feel comfortable. As I got older, and the childhood games stopped, I’d often go walk through the woods, find an old stump or downed tree, and sit. And listen.

It changed from “The Woods” to the “Little Woods” when we discovered the “Big Woods,” a large undeveloped area a few blocks away. This one was several blocks long and wide, few trails and loads of blackberry bushes. It much more resembled “forest primeval” than the Little Woods did. You didn’t play games like hide-and-seek in the Big Woods, because you could easily get lost. Instead, you traveled in groups, looking for blackberries and anything that might smack of mystery and adventure. If you didn’t find adventure, you’d make one up.

Whenever we visit New Orleans, I’ll walk every morning through what had been the Little Woods and the Big Woods. It’s all homes and subdivisions now, and the levee along the big drainage canal is now West Metairie Avenue. (The first time we scaled the levee and looked down at the big canal and across it to undeveloped marshland – we got an inkling of what it must have been like to be explorers on an expedition.)

But I walk it, and I don’t have an ounce of regret that it’s gone. Because it’s not.

Related:

Laura Boggess at The WellSpring is a week ahead of me in reading God in the Yard. See her Parachute: Learning to Fly.

God in the Yard

My wife will tell you that I read a lot of books. (She’ll also tell you I spend too much time online, but that’s another story.) Some I get from the bookstore; some I order from Amazon; and some come in from small booksellers, publishing services and various other sources. I’ve even been known to download ebooks, but I’m still not ready for an electronic reader, at least not yet. So for now, the post office loves me.

Yesterday, I got home after a very long day at work, and there in the pile of mail was what was obviously a book package, small and rather slender, a single book. I knew of a couple of orders coming but not for a while yet and there had been no emailed shipping notice. But there a package was. And it turned out that one order had shipped early.

It was God in the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us by L.L. Barkat.

I had ordered the print version (a Kindle version is also available) but didn’t expect it until sometime in June. But there it was.

I’ve made no secret of how much I enjoyed L.L.’s Stone Crossings, or her InsideOut: Poems. I even have a badge widget for InsideOut on the lower right of this blog. So when I saw that God in the Yard was available, I ordered it.

It’s described (by the author) as a “12-week course in discovery and playing towards God.” It’s readings, meditation and thinking, and writing. Laura Boggess over at The Wellspring started it this week (I suspect she has the Kindle version). L.L. has a post about it at her signature blog, Seedlings in Stone. (The cool cover photo is by Kelly Sauer.)

I’m starting God in the Yard this coming week. I’ll let you know how it goes.