For those of us who need Good News…

May 3, 2012 By michaboyett 6 Comments

On Fridays I usually post a poem that I’ve read that week or that has moved me in same way. (It’s my effort to force you all to read poetry and like it! You’re allowed to roll your eyes now.)

But today, instead of a poem, I’m posting a video I discovered this week through Seth Haines‘ tumblr. I watched it on Tuesday afternoon and cried. Then I watched it with my husband on Tuesday night and cried. Then I played it again on Wednesday morning and August watched it with me and I cried. He said: “That’s a good video, Mom.” I can’t stop watching it because all I want is to hear Manning’s sweet voice asking me again: “Do you believe that God loves without condition or reservation and loves you this moment as you are and not as you should be?” Such words.

So, take this gift: a brief glimpse into the teaching of Brennan Manning, who, when I read him my senior year of high school, was the first person to whisper the deep, boundless love of God to my tired, striving, good girl heart. I love Brennan Manning for giving me Ragamuffin Gospel. And, even if you don’t know him or his teaching, you will want to after you watch this.

 

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His memoir All is Grace is next on my reading list. I promise to write about it when I’m finished…

 

Filed Under: Books, the Praying Life Tagged With: , , , 6 Comments

Time, Anxiety, Caffeine and Making Space

May 3, 2012 By michaboyett 36 Comments

http://www.flickr.com/photos/estetiskaa/ via Pinterest

 

I’ve been living on caffeine. I’m talking two cups of coffee in the morning, a shot of espresso to get me through the afternoon and a nighttime cup so I can write till midnight.

I’m not saying this to brag or to complain. I’m saying it’s not healthy. I’m not healthy.

There’s this thing I’ve learned about myself: I have a terrible pattern in my life. Left to my own devices, my ENFP brain and I would do something different every day. I would wake at whatever time felt right. I would run into friends on my walk to the not-very-important-meeting and let them convince me we should play hooky all morning and sit at the park. And I would be enormously happy. Until nighttime. Then I would cry that I’d done nothing with my day and all I want is to accomplish something important with my life. I would cry that I just want a schedule and someone to help me.

Thankfully, life has forced me to not be left to my own devices. For instance, I once had a job (more than one! outside of the home! shocker!) and I set an alarm and I got dressed at a reasonable hour and went to important meetings on time.

Then, I had kids. And I didn’t need to set an alarm anymore. They forced me into a schedule no matter how hard my personality fought it. Kids were good for my sanity. (I mean that in the most literal of ways.)

My point is that I need organization. I need help to manage time. And if I let that intentionality slide from my life, I find myself emotionally spent. It doesn’t take long.

Last fall I began some really great habits. I started running. I started simplifying my life in terms of relationships and food and possessions. I had the opportunity to hire a babysitter for a few hours a week so I could work hard when it was time to write (as opposed to letting my kids zombie-stare at the TV for thirty more minutes so I could finish a post). I felt like I was learning and growing and living refreshed.

But here’s the thing: I ran less and less during February, and even less during March. And by April, it barely felt like it mattered. I’d convinced myself that I didn’t really need it. Who knew? I guess it hadn’t been doing anything for me after all.

The past two weeks I’ve been staying up till midnight or one and getting up at six, all in the name of writing more. I’ve got so much going on in my head! I have deadlines! So I’ve been drinking coffee and needing more coffee and sleeping less and not exercising. And (again, this is a shocker), I’ve been more anxious.

Chris was married to Panic Attack Micha for a long time. Grateful, Surrendered Micha has been a newer thing around here. And though I’ve always known that my spiritual life must be pursued intentionally, I hadn’t realized how much it is wrapped up in the health of my physical, relational, emotional life. I’ve been a tearful mess this week.

I talk about creating sacred space and I know that space has to be fought for. Every thing around me is willing to sneak that space away. And, at least for me, every need seems legitimate. Last night, after coming home at 10:30 from the co-op preschool meeting and stomping around the house in a humph and then near-hyperventilating while trying to convince Chris how hard my life is, I had a moment of insight: I am fearing time the same way I was before I began this journey with the Benedictines. These past two weeks I have been living stretched and ungrateful; I’ve missed out on the joy of wholeheartedness.

I probably should have figured that out sooner (what with all the contemplative posts I’ve been churning out!) but it takes space to see yourself, right? I needed to have a good cry in the kitchen while I should have been writing to take a look at what’s been missing in my spirit. And what’s been missing is the willingness to pay attention, the joy of being grateful, the goodness of seeing time as a friend and not my enemy.

I know I don’t want to be some online persona who spews wisdom around here and then misses it in her own life. I want to be kind. I want to live out the grace of Jesus.

But we can’t live out the grace of Jesus if we’re not constantly reminded of how much we need that grace. I can’t tell you how important it is to make space in your heart for God to speak and not recognize how little space I’ve made in my own heart.

So, yesterday morning, I woke up with my early rising baby, who nursed then jumped from my lap at 6:30 and started dancing to music in his own head in the dawn-gray light of his room. And I let my husband sleep a little late. He needed it, what with having to stay up late consoling me and helping me fix my organizational disaster of a mind. I pulled out my morning prayer book, but mostly Brooksie moved around me, trying to climb into my lap on the couch, falling and bonking his chin on the coffee table, losing his ball under the bookshelf. And then at 7:15, the rest of our world woke: August entered the living room with sleepy eyes and his blanket held tight. He sleep-stumbled straight into my lap and I scooped him up and sniffed his hair for as long as I could before Brooksie wedged his way in. Then the three of us scooted into the bedroom and woke Chris with snuggles and baby wrestling.

You know what I did? I put on my running clothes and told my husband I’d be back soon. I walked past an orange tabby cat pouncing the birds and hopping away satisfied at the play of it. I looked hard at the lady and her two dogs. I sighed at the weight of the air and goodness of the breeze. And I listened to music. I listened to Lori Chaffer‘s voice on Waterdeep’s newest album and I ran to the beat of “Call it a Dance.” She was singing:

We can change
It’s not like we can’t pick our feet up off the floor
It takes a certain kind of brave
To believe you can leave the road you’ve always walked before
We can face
Ourselves in the mirror we can look real hard
At all those things that are not nice

When you move to the left, move to the right
Call it dance and your feet feel light
Carry that weight, hold your head up high
Cause you move to the left, move to the right
In the middle of the day, in the middle of the night
Don’t be afraid, it’s never too late to try

Sometimes the gray clouds are low but they’re shading the burn of the sun. Sometimes what feels sharp in the wind is really a soft breeze when you lean into it. My anxiety is always selfish. It is always fearful and gratitude does not coexist with fear.

I ran in my usual awkward-asthmatic pace. But as soon as my heart said “Hello Lord,” the world opened up and I remembered: I can live in the prison of my mind or I can gasp at the wide-open world. I can fear the lists and the crushing clock cutting into the few hours I’ve been given in this day-long spin of the earth, or I stare into the opening of the day and say: These hours are enough because God has given them and God is enough.

Sometimes life bears down with the weight of a hundred suns
And then you find that the strain of carrying everything is never done
Funny thing but you know when you go to the edge of what you can bear
You have a strength and you know why…

 


Filed Under: the Praying Life, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , 36 Comments

Dishes and Litany and all that Beauty

April 26, 2012 By Micha Boyett Hohorst 37 Comments

keepcalmgallery.com via Pinterest

I live in the litany of the putting away. The clean dishes go onto shelves, forks and knives and cups and bowls. And the boys are waiting for their food, always waiting for food. I move from fridge to stove to sink to table, little circles.

Sometimes it’s morning. I listen to the news in my pajamas. Oatmeal for one child. Cereal for another. I’m slicing an apple. I’m pouring a cup of milk. I’m cleaning up a spill. I’m reminding Brooksie that “our food does not go on the floor, little babes.” I’m sipping coffee as I move around that room. I’m not frantic. But I know what needs to get done and my gut is begging me to feed it as well. Take bites. My mom always stood during breakfast too.

Sometimes it’s lunch and the quesadilla has two sides: one swiped with spinach puree for the baby who doesn’t notice green things yet. One plain for the boy who notices everything. “What vegetable would you like today?” I’m saying. He’d like to just once get away with no vegetable. Not in my kitchen! My head sings. And, it’s true: I own this room.

Later, during naptime, there are dishes to wash and floors to sweep and counters to wipe or, possibly, to be left till later. Because, seriously, I need to get on Twitter.

And dinner, and after dinner: All those dishes. All those pans. When we were first married and living on my tiny fellowship in grad school, freezing in Syracuse winter with our heat set to 62, Chris and I stood together in the kitchen washing pans and drying them, washing plates and drying them. That next apartment in Philly had a dishwasher. It was a slice of glory. We filled it with wonder in our eyes. How easily I can forget that.

The other day, I was putting away a glass bowl: the kind that has held salad and cookie dough, a baking soda volcano and playdough mix and I thought: This is it. This is my life.

Granted, sometimes I can have that thought in the kind of way that leads me to cry in my pillow and take a long bath and rewatch the saddest scene in Little Women (you guys know what I’m talking about). But, sometimes, I have that thought and the light shines in through the window and the bowl sparkles and I think: Thank you, bowl, for the volcano and the endless supply of salads. Thank you for the chocolate pudding August and I made in our second apartment in San Francisco and the way he couldn’t quite pronounce “choquate” then. Thank you for the endless circles I’ve scrubbed around you in every home Chris and I have shared for almost eight years. Thank you for the putting away and the getting out and the hope that I can always clean you.

And in those moments when the bowl is good and the litany is good, I realize that my life is this in its most simplest form: these circles I’m moving in around the kitchen and around my day–from breakfast to play time to errands to the kitchen to nap time and writing time and play time and the sun shining down on us outside and back to the kitchen and food and my husband being home and the boys wrestling in the living room and bathing the boys and clean shiny skin and combing their wet hair down and pajamas and teeth brushed and stories read and bodies tucked in and moments with my husband on the couch and our own books and bedtime. And we do it over and over and over. And this is the shocker: That circle is good.

Because this is what I’m realizing: every night as I lay my baby down in his crib and sing the words, “I know that moons rise and time flies and sweet little boys get older…” I see him changing. Some moments I can stop the circling long enough to notice: the way he’s smiling today, the joke he’s trying to play on me, the love he’s inheriting for books. And when I notice, that’s when I remember to pray.

It’s always about paying attention, I was thinking yesterday afternoon, stacking plates on top of one another, hoping not to wake the light-sleeping baby whose room shares a wall with the dishes. And that makes the circle more of a spiral, doesn’t it? We’re always circling, yes. But it turns out in all this doing and putting away and creating and consuming, we’ve been spiraling toward something all along.

And that spiral leads toward a glorious center, the place where God is making all the plain things beautiful and all the sad things untrue.

Filed Under: the Praying Life Tagged With: , , , , 37 Comments

Walk slow and notice

April 23, 2012 By michaboyett 24 Comments

The plane lands and you have a connection to make in a city you’ve never see the ground of. Two or three times your body has hovered close here: once in a suburb, twice at this airport where you taxi now toward the bulding. A bell chimes and all at once, as if a symphony, you all unclick seat belts, reach forward for purses and backpacks, stand to feet with heads bents, eyes facing down under short ceilings, waiting.

How strange it is for you to be alone. Always those boys are attached to you. Always you are the one gathering misplaced playmobile pieces, always cars in the row behind you. Always a baby in a carrier, a child holding onto your hand. Always three bags and plans for the next destination: how to move forward. Always someone is hungry, thirsty, always dirty hands, diapers or quick hustles to the potty.

And here you are. The emptiness around your arms is softer than you have words for. You think, What did I do, once, when my arms were free and I stood alone among strangers? You think: Music. And there on that plane, you pull the wires through fingers, place buds in the your ears. The music shocks you. You’ve heard it before, but lately, so diluted. Watered by voices and calendars and doings. And here, the older woman in her hand-knitted purple shawl looks into your eyes, as if she knows: Oh, her face says, you are alone. Beautifully alone. You smile back. Yes, your eyes answer. Yes.

There are signs of who you’ve become. Perhaps if strangers looked close enough, they’d recognize the extra skin that folds your belly, the tired eyes, the good ache that comes from giving yourself to children. But here, as one by one the people lift their heads, set eyes toward their destination, walk the open path, you know you don’t know what they carry. They don’t know what you are lightened by.

Then, your turn to move. You step into an aisle. How many asles have you walked in your life, sweet Baptist girl? Always walking aisles toward a calling. Always coming forward pulled by grace. And here, you step into this space, arms empty, one bag, a book, this music. You turn it up louder than comfortable. You want it to burn a little.

You move off the plane into the long tunnel and the warm air rushes at you, past you, light skimming your surface on every side. And you are alone in that tunnel, illuminated.

You walk into the maze of spaces and people, all of it moving toward you.

Walk slow, the Voice whispers.

Walk slow and notice.

And every place you step is shimmering, every face is the image of God.

Filed Under: the Praying Life Tagged With: , , 24 Comments
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