Celebrating Wishgiving

     The table was set, new candles waited in the brass candlesticks, and outside the turkey was turning on a spit over the grill's charcoal-and-applewood coals. In the living room, three people sat huddled over pieces of paper, sometimes emitting a sigh of angst, sometimes crumpling a piece of paper and starting over.  Thanksgiving preparations were coming to a close, and it was nearly time to gather around the table.
    "I don't know what to wish!" complained one of my children. 
     Exactly. 
     This year, we asked everyone coming to the Thanksgiving table to bring one simple wish, written on a piece of paper, for every other person at the table. Usually we go around the table and say something we're thankful for. It's a good thing to do. But I also think it's a first step. You are standing in your own shoes examining the blessings that affect your life. Even if you're grateful that someone who was very, very sick has recovered -- it's still your own gratitude that is responding.
     To make a wish for someone else means you have to take the next step: to think about her, you need to get out of your shoes and try standing in hers for a minute. What does she need or want? What is he up to in his life? What is important? It's not a pop quiz; we told everyone a week ahead that we would be doing this. Even the out-of-town guests had a couple of days to discover a thing or two about the others who would be at the Thanksgiving table. So why the angst in the living room?
     Many of us are not in the habit of actively listening to each other. In our family, a lot of our conversations are about what happened that day, or what needs to happen. To be wish-givers, we have to exercise new muscles by asking more curiosity questions and listening between the lines. We have to be givers instead of receivers. And do this across generations.
     So there we were, eight people, each with a motley pile of paper next to our plate of heaping food. We ate and laughed and talked and listened, and when we finally slowed down, surreptitious nervous glances at the little piles signaled it was time to start.
     My brother-in-law volunteered to be first.  He read a wish for Anna, and gave it to her. That was easy. Then she picked up one of her wishes, and read it to her grandmother, who loved it. Gammy then read one to my sister, who then read one to me, and then I read one to Andrew... each followed by handing the paper wish across the table to that person. There were murmurs of surprise and appreciation, empathy and love. 

By the end, we all had a new motley pile of paper next to our plates, but in each pile were seven distinct wishes conceived, expressed and given personally to us. It was a wealth of wishes. And we were a family woven a little tighter, connected by the intimacy of wishing specific goodness for each other, out loud, in the presence of all at the table. 

     I think this is more than a new Thanksgiving tradition. Wishgiving can happen any time: at a Sunday night dinner, when a book group wraps up, on Christmas or New Year's Day, when a child is about to depart for college. As someone at our table said while looking through her pile of wishes: "I really felt heard." That's something to be thankful for.
 

Seeing through her eyes

     The letter from camp was two full hand-written pages (including a mini-route map she'd drawn) about their 42 day, 1100 mile canoe trip to Hudson Bay. Nina talked about bone-chilling cold and rain and the sunny see-forever days; the moose, bears, eagles... and clouds of mosquitoes; she described running big rapids, portaging canoes over boulders and through mud, and playing softball in the native Ojibway communities where they made friends. They fished, sang Grateful Dead songs, and slept hard every night. Bob and I drank in her stories with the thirst born of her long absence.
     Then came this paragraph:

     "Lastly, thank you for sending me here. I'm so incredibly lucky to see what I see and to do what I do. I wish you could see my views sometimes, and feel what I feel. It is an experience like no other, and I know that for my entire life I will value what my years at Wabun have given me."
     I sucked in my breath.
     "I wish you could see my views sometimes, and feel what I feel..."

*               *               *               *               *               *

     The girl that came home was strong and radiant. Nina had everything she needed to move confidently ahead with her life. And this fall, that would be dominated by changing schools as a high school junior.

      Like a canoe at the top of a set of rapids, she was lined up perfectly to shoot the Vs: pre-season soccer was the first chute she would enter, followed by four days camping with a small group in the school's “Outdoor Experience” program, and then finally the first academic day and the first soccer game. It started off well. She made the varsity team, came home talking about the girls she was meeting, and was eager to use her camping skills among new classmates.
      It was when she came back from visiting a friend over Labor Day weekend that it all blew up.
      “Mom, I had searing headaches on the drive. They were so bad I almost had to stop.”
      In hindsight, her concussion likely came from several impacts the preceding week during soccer: a header, a ball kicked at short range into her head, maybe others. Bob and I were blindsided; Nina hadn't even seen it herself.
     Concussion is not a measurable thing. No thermometer or x-ray or even color of mucus can report its status. No cough or limp betrays the inner illness. Even self-perception is unreliable, since it's asking the injured brain to assess itself.
      And then in Nina's case, add the unacceptable barrier a concussion would be for her smooth entry into a new school. It became nearly impossible for any of us to perceive her level of injury.
      While Nina's new friends were on the soccer field jelling as a team and her Outdoor Experience group was kayaking on Casco Bay, I sat by her bed and read to her from the book she needed to finish for summer reading. She was determined to heal, and her drive to get better worked – until after returning to school we realized that she couldn't remember what classes she'd gone to, and couldn't complete her homework.
      I felt like I was trying to see inside her head. What was her pain level? Was she dizzy at all? Did the light bother her? Was she just adjusting to low levels of these symptoms, or was she hiding them from us? I was also trying to see her world through her eyes. Did she have any friends to eat lunch with? Was she getting too far behind in Physics? And especially I tried to see the future: was there any way to return to soccer without a risk to her head? 
      Ultimately I just had to see it all clearly through my own eyes, and be honest about my filters of both empathy and fear that battled for the upper hand.
      Bob, the best partner in the world, was doing the same thing. Together we chose a path through the concussive fog. No more soccer. Go to bed early even if your homework isn't finished. After school come home and rest. Stay home if you're tired.

      Six weeks later, after she had been declared “healed”, Nina wrote about her concussion in an essay called “Hard Headed” for English class. Like her letter from Wabun, she shared with us her view of it all through her eyes. In it she wrote:
      "I was indeed healed, but I was vulnerable — too vulnerable. To my parents and the doctor, playing soccer for the rest of the season would not be worth the risk of missing a junior year of high school. Crushed, my narrow mindedness had lead me to blindly believe that my fragile cranium was ready to take on anything, yet in an attempt to convince myself that I was better, I had only made the truth more devastating.
      "As school progressed, I found the ambiguity and uncertainty of my present situation nearly as frustrating as the concussion itself. My role on the team had changed for good, and I was faced with the choice of determining how I could approach the school individually, team-less. To suffer or discover? I asked myself frequently. Refusing the former, I took an internal deep breath and began searching for ways to compromise my setback."

     And now, through my eyes:
      Nina, you are still the girl who has seen deep beauty, and you have a strength derived from overcoming challenges in the wilderness. That is in you. Your ability to look back on the wilderness of your concussion and see it honestly comes from that same core. It takes courage to see what is, instead of what you want to see. There will be other rivers, other rapids, and other wildernesses ahead. You'll make it through, like you made it to Hudson Bay. See the rapids you are in with clarity for what they are, and hold on to who you are, the girl of the northern rivers, the one who chooses to discover, instead of suffer.

The Democracy of Pie - postscript a year later

     Last October, I posted a recipe for really easy pie crust. While getting the post's URL to send to a friend who wants the recipe, I re-read it. In the last paragraph, amid a plea to eat home-cooked family dinners together (and not be afraid of pie crusts), I suggest "In fact, let's teach our sons to make – and share – pie."

     This is the pie Andrew made last night, his first using his grandmother's recipe. Apparently he volunteered to make and bring a pie for his advisory's Thanksgiving lunch on Tuesday. I love this coincidence, and especially love that he's making pies now!
     Happy Thanksgiving! May it be filled with sweet and savory pies.
    

The View from the Top

     Here within the 43rd parallel, summer pauses right about now.
     It's like being at the top of a Ferris wheel, Bob says.  

     Ever since the first birds arrived this spring, the garden sprouted seedlings, and lacrosse playoff games were played and finished, the wheel began turning with the glorious cycles of the onset of summer.  Then the children left for camp, the spinach bolted, and the Fourth of July washed out as Hurricane Arthur passed by.  Nonetheless, strawberries are now made into jam, monarch butterflies have returned (yes! I've seen them!), and the mailman brings letters from camp.  Up and down, ever in motion, summer spins along to this peak, and then, it pauses.

     Here at the top, the view is breath-taking.  I can see lush hayfields green with the second growth of grass.  The undulating horizon of forest canopy is now the darker, mature green of summer.  In the gardens, the yellows of spring have passed, replaced by the hot-month colors of crimson roses, orange day lilies and scarlet bee-balm. The Eastern Wood Peewee sings it's name from the forest edge with the sing-song of  summer's laziness.
     This is a sweet moment.  It's a time to just be.  Smell the earth after a thunderstorm.  Eat lettuce from a garden and taste the tenderness of home.  Listen: the spring birdsong is quieting, but the late summer insects are not yet scraping their "ch-ch" out of the fields, so listen in this pause.  Feel the length of the days while we have them.  Take in the view.

     The wheel will start to turn again soon enough.  Don't miss this moment. 

Parallel journeys

     And just like that they're gone.

     The alarm at 4:30 signaled the beginning of the thirty minute flurry: I, in my pajamas, in the kitchen making cinnamon toast and cutting up melon; they, in their bedrooms, putting on sweatshirts, hiking shoes and passport wallets; Bob, in the driveway, stowing duffels in the van, the porchlight waning as the skies lighten.  The dogs, excited and nervous at this unusual activity, wag their tails and stand hopefully by their bowls.

     The other travelers arrive, the bags are stowed, Anna and Andrew kiss me goodbye (twice!) – and they're gone. For them, this is the first leg of their glorious summer trip. They will drive to Boston, fly to Toronto, bus to Temagami, barge to Garden Island, and tonight eat dinner in the rustic great hall of Camp Wabun, built in the 1930s, with some of their best friends who they haven't seen for eleven months.

      Within three days, Anna will begin a 42-day canoe trip on the other side of the Arctic Divide, where the rivers flow north to Hudson Bay. This is the trip of a lifetime for her: at sixteen, she will paddle lakes and whitewater, portage around waterfalls, see eagles, moose, possibly wolves and bear, and finish at a First Nation village on the shores of the Bay. This is her ultimate trip as a camper, and she and her section will return to Wabun in August on paddle-in day with the confidence and quiet authority of Those Who Have Been Tested. The younger campers and parents alike will watch them with some measure of awe.

      I'm left here with the dogs and their dog bowls, empty juice glasses and plates with traces of cinnamon sugar by the sink, and the silence. Bob will be back later this morning, and our own six-week odyssey of temporary empty-nesting will begin.

      Right now, though, my heart is split, half here in the quiet, half in the van amidst the noisy excitement. We will not hear from them but once – possibly twice from Andrew – as there are no post offices or cell phone towers where they are going. This is good, for them and for us, even though it is at times hard. But as they discover who they are and what they are made of, I remember who I am and what I am made of.  I am also on a journey this summer.  And it starts now.

My Whip-poor-will

     I woke up before dawn, eyes wide open, with a start.  Through the open windows came a sound that I don't ever remember hearing here, but I recognized it instantly.  I was thrilled to hear an Eastern Whip-poor-will -- at least for awhile.

     Whip-poor-wills are medium-sized birds with some notoriety: they startlingly "appear" with a really loud, long, repetitive song, often after dark or just before dawn, but no one ever sees them.  Nocturnal habits and camouflage coloration are their invisibility cloak.  Overall fairly common, the population is beginning to erode to the point of disappearing at the edge of its range.  In Maine, they are drifting away like ghosts. 

     I have been trying to start and end my days with a conscious thought of gratitude. So when I turn out the light at night, I let the good things of the day drift through my fading awareness and I form the thought-words “thank you” in response. In the morning, when I first return to consciousness – but before my mind puts a name on the day or a list in my head – I form the thought-words to thank the birds that are singing or my bed for being soft or my house for its snugness. 

     Tuesday morning, the Whip-poor-will woke me. I didn't need to evoke gratitude; it surged with the excitement of hearing this increasingly rare bird. 

     The bird sounded like it was in the tree right outside our window. If you've never experienced a Whip-poor-will singing, the thing to understand is that it is incessant. 
     I have heard, and have come to believe, that when essentially the same thing keeps happening to you, somewhere in that is a lesson that you need to learn, a life lesson. For example, when people are continually attracted to others who aren't good for them, there might be something to learn about self-worth or trust. Recently I learned a lesson about stress and sickness, and the necessity of conscious breathing (see Breathe). 

     As I lay in bed listening to that Whip-poor-will before dawn last week, after awhile my gratitude began to ebb as annoyance flowed in. I realized that if I was going to be able to sleep, I would have to let go of the annoyance, and just let the presence of these disappearing birds, reincarnated momentarily in one singer outside my window, be a gift. 

     Eventually I did fall back asleep. And I realized the Whip-poor-will's gift was not just his appearance, but the lesson that I need to learn – want to learn – from his song: to voice my own gratitude, every day, unwaveringly. 

     The Whip-poor-will did not return the next pre-dawn morning, nor the next. But I've been keeping up with my silent thank-yous. It's not hard to do, but if I get lazy, the practice could erode over time. Maybe the Whip-poor-will will come back again if I need to be reminded. 

     I guess that would be a true mixed blessing.

Breathe

     I've been sick.  I hate saying that, because I think of myself as a healthy person.  Robust, even.  But the fact is that I have asthma, and insidiously, like a slowly leaking tire over a period of weeks, my ability to breathe ebbed away.

     In hindsight, I see that the most debilitating aspect of not getting enough air with each breath was stress.  I didn't now how sick I was.  But I knew that everyone in my family was demanding too much of me, dammit.  I knew that I should exercise more because my wheezing meant I was out of shape, that I should get back to meditation but I didn't have time, and why didn't someone else cook dinner for once, why couldn't I get this business plan under way, and how did a one-hour snow tire changeover turn into a three-hour several-hundred-dollar brake job?

     Stress kept me sick. Its shrapnel wounded others close to me, yet I kept detonating even as I knew I wanted love and understanding instead. In a way, stress kept me in a cycle of hurting myself, through action and inaction. I was stuck.

      Now that I am better, I've been wondering: Can a whole culture be stuck in the vicious cycle of stress and compromised breathing?

      I thought about the horrendous air pollution in China that Andrew used as a case study for a school project. I thought about the U.S. Lung Association's 2014 State of the Air report data grading Washington DC with an F for ozone pollution and a D for 24-hour particle pollution. I thought about corporations located in largely polluted urban areas (Wichita, where Koch Industries is headquartered, also got an F for ozone pollution).

      Is it possible that the powerful people in our global government and financial structures are literally sick with stress because they can't breath well? Like me, they don't recognize how sick they are, but they show the same symptoms of righteous self-absorption and blaming others for their failures. And because it is a vicious cycle, they can't take action to halt the CO2 emissions causing climate chaos, which worsens their – and all of our – ability to breathe.

      Stop. Inhale. Exhale. There is a reason that so many wisdom traditions stress the breath: Ruach – the Hebrew word for spirit also means wind and breath. From the Hindu: yoga. Buddhist meditation. Hymn singing on Sunday mornings.

      We know what to do. We have to breathe to heal ourselves. And this is not a bumper sticker solution. This is real. A culture is built of individuals with shared characteristics. And so we need to find a way, each of us as individuals, to start breathing more slowly, more deeply, for a little while each day, in order to change our culture.

      Somehow I still have hope. I was losing it when I was sick. I'm breathing again now. Let's make it contagious.