rooted & reaching.

i am a sunflower: rooted & reaching.

have you ever watched a sunflower reach its full potential? watched its seed break through the ground with its green fist opening only for the sun? observe as it studies its namesake, following it from east to west each day as it grows? and then finally felt its yellow lean over you, standing tall and firm in its full glory?

a sunflower can be massive and bright, reaching toward the sun and bringing joy and delight that feels bigger than life. and all the while it's grounded. rooted. deeply clinging to the earth, to its foundation.

i wonder how its stem feels in the tension of the in-between. how much work does it have to do to reach passionately both ways? or does it just come naturally? is this kind of stretching the only way it knows how to truly survive?

we are created too magnificently to only play it small. life naturally calls us to posture ourselves towards beauty and growth and light and love. and not in small ways alone; we are called to reach and stretch and live fully into our amazing potential.

and every step of this journey towards fully being our magnificent selves requires us to cling to our foundation. to remember that we are not great on our own. to know we are created too modestly to only play it big. a tiny seed, a tiny embryo. just as we are called to be great, we are also called to posture ourselves toward great humility, gratitude, groundedness. to point to our Creator in all things.

we are rooted. we are reaching. we are resting in the tension between being lifted and grounded, making neither greatness nor lowliness our goal. we are simply sunflowers, practicing life the only way we can truly survive.

may we all be beautiful sunflowers. rooted & reaching.

Sunflowers
Originally uploaded by cris.e

Forgive!!

My friend invited me to teach Vacation Bible School (VBS) at her church 10 years ago when I lived just outside of Baltimore. I had worked in youth ministry during college, so I naturally volunteered to help with the youth. She laughed and said, "No way. I'm putting you with the 4-year-olds."

The 4-year-olds?!?!

"There's no way you'll be able to handle the youth. They're from the streets," she said.

Now, I wasn't completely naive to the realities of urban living. I knew the youth and I would have very little in common. I definitely grew up in South Carolina's suburbia with kids calling me OREO because of my voice, my interests and my neighborhood. And The Wire wasn't even on television back then, so she was right that I had no real frame of reference for life on the streets. But these are church youth, I thought. How bad can it be?

But she refused to budge, so I reached into my Old MacDonald bag-o-tricks and tried to remember every delightful e-i-e-i-oh from my childhood. I put on my happy face and read through the lesson plans to prepare for the cute little tots. We were going to be talking about forgiveness, using the story of the prodigal son returning home.

The kids were sweet. We had games and music and plenty of Hi-C and animal crackers, so they were happy. I started a little rhythmic call-and-response with them after learning the lesson:

"When your brother or sister hits you, what do you do?"

"Forgive!" we all shouted together.

"When another kid calls you a name, what do you do?"

"Forgive!!"

"When someone takes something from you, what do you do?"

"Forgive!"

That's when a sweet little girl jumped up-and-down raising her hand.

"And what about when someone drives by your house shooting at your window?" she asked.

Silence.

I sat there staring at this sweet child in pink with barrettes dangling from her braided head. This sweet child whose only knowledge of anything driving by should be the delightful melody of "Pop Goes the Weasel" announcing that a van filled with ice cream is just around the corner. This sweet child who was waiting for my cue so that we could all shout out "forgive" together.

And I was silent. All of a sudden the easy answer wrapped up so politely in this VBS lesson plan seemed so hard to say.

Forgive.

As a group, we all talked a bit more about the drive-by shootings. The kids shared how they would drop to the floor, wait for their parents to crawl towards them and all huddle together. They had their drive-by plan down to a stop, drop and roll kind of science. In just four years.

+++

Bishop Desmond Tutu says there is “no future without forgiveness.” It is truth. But just like so many other truths, it's easier to say than it is to embody. It's easier to shout in a sing-song way with 4-year-olds than it is to toss back at gang-bangers as bullets fly through your window.

It must be practiced. Daily. Practiced until it is our way of living. Practiced until it's natural. Practiced in the face of great difficulty until it's easier.

I write about a trip to Uganda in my book and share the stories of some of the most beautiful young women I've ever met.

I asked one girl for her prayer request, and she asked me to pray that she might forgive the LRA soldier who raped her.

Forgive.

I go on to write in the book:

I don’t want to paint a pretty picture of forgiveness—especially in a war-torn place. I think even the simple declarations of forgiveness and prayers for forgiveness that we heard in Gulu were steps on a very long road. This road will probably be filled with a lot of painful debris—memories that will embitter and frustrate once again. There are likely many hardships and unexpected bumps that may make the course of forgiveness seem frightening at times. This process may take longer than any of the forgivers imagined when they first chose forgiveness.

In the end, though, it’s the most beautiful road if you choose to take it. And the first sign of beauty begins in the choosing.

May we choose to practice forgiveness. Not the easy, polite church school answer kind of forgiveness, either. May we choose the messy hard road of forgiveness and release.

peace.

Memory Bank

Patrick and I have a memory jar. We started recently recalling memories from our days, writing them on slips of paper and tossing them in our little jar. I love this ritual of ours. Some days they are memories of fun things like winning the Wicked national tour cast basket at their special cabaret for CARES, and some days we store memories of everyday things like the way Fival the cat curls into a little ball and stretches his paw to cover his eyelids.

Last night as we recalled memories from the day, I remembered meeting an amazing woman named Clare in Sacramento this past July. She is delightful! Clare runs the Sacramento Art Complex, which is a cool gallery collective of local artists. Clare told me that she realizes everyone has a memory bank, and often these banks are filled with negative, difficult and sometimes traumatic memories. She says that each day she asks God to help her deposit a good memory in someone's bank.

This is Clare helping a little girl add to a mural on the wall outside of the Art Complex--certainly depositing into that girl's memory bank. On that very day, Clare also deposited into my memory bank by letting me paint a poem on the same wall!

I love it! What if lovers loved with that goal in mind? What if parents parented with that goal in mind? What if kids at school treated each other with that goal in mind instead of bullying? What if strangers met each other with that goal in mind? What if instead of only trying to create a beautiful life for ourselves, we were to think of how to help create beauty in someone else's life each and every day? What a wonderful world it might be . . . And I bet that Clare has an overflowing bank of memories from how she has inspired and delighted others! What a wonderful life she must live!

May you have a beautiful day and take some time to intentionally deposit delight into someone's memory bank. Today and every day.

peace.

a little about me

Occasionally I blog for the Devo'Zine youth worker blog "In the Habit," and they invited me to write a bio for an upcoming blog post I wrote for youth workers to explore photography and other creative faith expressions with their youngin's. So I decided to use photography in my bio and thought it might be fun to share here and reintroduce myself to all of you.

So let the fun begin, eh?!?!

My name is

Made in the image of our Creator, all of us were born to

So that’s what I live to do each day of my life. I

for a living, and writing is my heartsong. And I work at

(pronounced lulu + lemon like the fruit, by the way).

Both of my jobs push me and inspire me in more ways than I could have ever imagined.

I love dancing, reading, cupcaking and practicing

I’m a firm believer that we should

& so I do. Occasionally I bring out my camera and take photographs or find myself with a canvas and a paintbrush just to try something new.

May you all tap into the

and the

that God has planted deep within each of our hearts, and shine! That is the joy of life, and life is meant to be lived joyfully.

namaste.

Crazy Things . . .

Several people have commented to me (in person) about my poem Do the Crazy Thing that I posted here a couple of months ago. It has a special story to it, so I thought I'd share it here.

In May I took a visual poetry class at Art & Soul taught by the wonderful Kelly Falzone (who will be featured next week on my new site Just a Footnote!). It's a class where poetry interacts with visual art; we made art to fit our words, we crafted words to complement our art, we shaped our poetry, we were inspired by images and paintings and one another. It was a lovely course.

In one particular class, Kelly pulled out an old box filled with black & white postcards. She turned them over so that we could not see the images and fanned them in her hands, asking us to select two postcards like she was a magician starting a card trick. We were told not to look at the cards but to simply think of someone who was no longer in our lives--either because their breath had expired or because life situations had taken us away from each other (break-ups, moves, graduations, etc.). Kelly told us that this person we were thinking of had a message for us and they wanted to send on a postcard. Once we turned the cards over, she said, we would know which card this person would send and what the message was. Our exercise was to write down the message.

So I selected two cards, as instructed. I immediately thought of my dear Teri who died unexpectedly in 2003. The heft of her death sits near me still. I flipped the cards over and saw two images: one was a man standing on a bridge in Chicago with a tall well-windowed building behind him, the other was of a man with one knee on the ground who was balancing a sword on his nose. Just as Kelly promised, I knew Teri would send the sword-balancing card, and so I started writing.

"Do the Crazy Thing" is Teri's beautiful message to me, and it came at just the most amazing time. Just days before I had mentioned to my besties Beth (my Bethstie!) and my sister that I was going to just go ahead and leave my job, start writing again and trust that all would work out as it was to be. I had done that before in 2005, and I was ready to do it again, I told them. They both thought that maybe I wasn't making the most rational of decisions.

But this exercise reminded me that sometimes the most rational of decisions keeps us from doing things of wonder. And this exercise reminded me that Teri inspired me so much in her living because she did wonder-filled things! And this exercise gave me a gift I've missed for almost 8 long years: sitting down and telling Teri my secrets and hearing her crazy-wonderful advice!

I highly recommend an exercise like this if you have someone who's missing from your life. It's magical.

p.s.--and just so you know, I did leave my job just two or three weeks after writing this poem and started writing again! I also work at the Nashville lululemon, and love my work every day. And the fabulous Alessia at the lululemon headquarters put some graphics to this poem in October, and voila!

New web site

"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote." - Yevgeny Yevtushenko



I have a new web site coming, and I'm excited about it!

I’m launching a new site all about poets in June: JustAFootnote.com. It’s a place where I will talk about writerly things—the writing process, exercises that interest and challenge me as a poet and, most importantly, the stories of other poets whose narrations of life inspire me. Inspired by Yevtushenko’s quotation, I fully realize that snippets of a poet’s life are simply footnotes of a greater story that his or her poetry tells. Still, I hope we will all connect more deeply with poetry because of the inspiring lives of poets I know and share with readers of Just a Footnote.

Each week I’ll spend time with a different poet, and on Mondays I will feature a new poet on the site. Readers will get snippets of our conversations, photographs of the poet in his or her element, and a brief introduction to their work. I’ve got some amazing Nashville poets lined up and some fun contests, so make sure you check it out and come back often!

I’ll keep you posted when we launch.

In the meantime, love well . . .

Like my facebook page or follow me on Twitter for further updates!

do the crazy thing

Image of the amazing Melina of Daughters of Rhea, used with her permission. Check her out: www.daughtersofrhea.com. Photo by Dav Rue for Goddess Motion



do the crazy thing
the hard-to-imagine-but-somehow-you-did thing
the brings-you-to-your-knees thing
the no-one-would-ever-do-it-that-way-thing
the safety-net-would-not-even-matter thing
the it-could-kill-you-but-not-trying-is-another-kind-of-death thing
the thing on your heart
do it
and let them gasp
right before they call it a thing of wonder


05.2011



love your dreams well, friends!

namaste.