Another poem

Yesterday morning, I read this post at Segullah. It knocked me over.

The whole post is beautiful, so read it, but the poem...oh, the poem...

So here it is. (And I promise that my next few posts will be less heavy. My life is full of light and fun and spring rebirth and music and teenagers rolling their eyes at me and so much laughing...it's not all philosophy and pain. Really, it's not.)

A Brief for the Defense

by Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

The Gift of Darkness

I recently found this lovely Mary Oliver poem. It's been rattling around in my head ever since I read it first:
 

The Uses of Sorrow
 
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
 
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

As I've worked on becoming more grateful, I've had to confront some bitterness I've kept close, cherished even. (Note to future self: Keeping bitterness close? Super bad idea.)

Facing the ugliness wasn't easy. I've nursed and polished the hurt, noticing every little facet of it, allowing it to take up so much more head and heartspace than I ever intended. Since I'm on this journey of gratitude, I decided to turn what I'm learning to this very hard task. I started talking about why I was grateful for the pain itself, why I was grateful for the givers of pain. I started thanking Heavenly Father for the experiences I was enduring. I prayed to love those who had hurt me and to find more about them to appreciate. I prayed that they would have peace and happiness in their lives.

Guess what? It's working.

And it's a gift.

The experiences?

Gifts.

And those who gave me these experiences?

Gifts, too.

When is it easiest to sense the truth in Oliver's poem? When I'm emotionally healthy, when I'm sleeping enough, when I'm studying scriptures, when I'm communicating with the divine. At those times, I see that opposition in all things is a true principle: I won't become the woman I can be if I hold all my pain too close. Frankly, I can't hold on to pain and hold on to peace at the same time. So I'm opening my heart, letting go my desire for control or revenge or whatever else wants to tuck itself close and feed like a parasite. And that space I'm freeing up? I'm accepting new tenants: Peace. Happiness. Love. And hope...it's so great to have hope back.

And...She's Back(?)

Oh, how I love these people. (And can Ben NEVER make a normal face in a picture?)

Don't you love those blog posts that say, "It's been SO LONG since I've written!"

This is one of those blog posts.

This blog post is to inform you, delightful readers, that my intention is to return to our regularly scheduled posts, more for my own sake than for yours, of course. I just need to keep track of this messy, beautiful life for me and for these five people you see pictured. If you'd like to come along for the ride, come along! The more the merrier!

I can give you lots of reasons to explain why in 2010 I posted 359 times, 2011 I posted 45 times, and this year I have posted 2. I'm sure some of those reasons will be discussed in future posts. Some of them will never be discussed. I will say that being refined is a ridiculously hard process, harder than I ever imagined, and sometimes public discussion is not appropriate to some of the refining processes.

And yet here I am; here WE are. On the other side of the nastiness? I sincerely hope so, at least on the other side of THIS part of the refining. My experiences have taught me, however, that there will be more refining to come, that this life is full of refining times, and that trying to avoid them has never done me any good. They will come when they will, and I can only attempt to handle them more gracefully in the future.

So here's to happiness ahead...and a few more posts in the future!

Life Lessons from Val #1 (and #2)

My mom is a wise woman.

When she reads this, she will say that that is not true.

Those of you who know her well will agree with me, though. She's not one to often give advice, despite raising nine children. She doesn't think she has all the answers. But she is kind, loving, and non-judgmental (sometimes to a fault) and people love her: from the dry cleaning lady to the checkers at her grocery store, she is a friend to everyone she meets. Obviously she has some wisdom that should be collected.

The lesson I'm going to share with you today is to memorize and use this phrase:

"You might be right."

She taught me this during the last year while I was dealing with an (some?) obnoxious child (children?) who wanted to find fault with each other constantly. This led to me wanting to find fault with them constantly. Mom suggested we use that phrase whenever someone said something we just KNEW was wrong so that we didn't have to correct them (and become even more obnoxious.)

We said it over and over to each other that day as a joke. It was kind of brilliant on a couple of levels. On the surface, it's brilliant because while we are saying "You might be right," we're thinking "But you're not..." so it satisfies the natural man's desire to stick it to our opponents.

But the deeper lesson I learned? Whenever I say "Hmm. You might be right," I'm actually allowing myself to back away from my position. And sometimes (just sometimes) I find that my opponent may actually (a little bit) be right.

Of course, now if you hear me say "You might be right," you'll know what I could be thinking, but I guarantee it goes down easier than saying "You're flat out wrong and let me tell you why."

And Life Lesson from Val #2?

Dance whenever possible. And wherever possible:

Ben's New Year's Resolution

"Don't put ZhuZhu pets in you's hair."

It's a Christmas Miracle!

I finished my 2010 taxes!

Gratitude

I know, you're thinking I missed the boat and am once again playing catch up. After all, Thanksgiving was LAST month.

Yes, indeedy it was. But no, this isn't a catch up post. Rather, it's a public declaration of a private decision: to search for peace.

Thanks to the chaos of the last couple of years, I've lived with less peace in my heart than I would like. More confusion, less clarity. More doubt, less faith. More fear, less hope. I've certainly had periods of great comfort and times of crystal clear direction, but as a rule, I have had to work excessively hard for them.

As I've continued to pray for understanding, for direction, for peace, for joy, I've had lots of pushing of the Spirit to one place:

Gratitude.

I'm stubborn. I admit it. It's taken a lot of shoving and a lot of reminding, and I'm finally paying attention.  The key for me seems to be in opening up my eyes and my heart to the beauty in my life, in the good and even in the bad. And in order to train my mind and heart to be grateful, I'm starting a gratitude journal. I think I'll see God's hand more clearly as I record his tender mercies to me. I'll recognize the little things that add up to big things. I'll enjoy small moments more and help my family enjoy them, too.

And maybe in the process, I'll begin to shed this tougher skin that feels so alien to me. Being tender feels dangerous. I've armored up, trying to avoid further pain. But, as Amber so eloquently reminded me months ago: "Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something." Life is pain, but life isn't all pain. By protecting myself so carefully from it, I've hidden away some of my ability for joy.

Eric used a magnificent C.S. Lewis quote at Brent's funeral:

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

Ingratitude is a sort of Hell, I think. It turns us to selfishness, to pessimism, to seeing other people as obstacles to our happiness.

I'm sort of done with that. It's time to take back my faith in the world, in humanity, in hope for a good outcome in a bad situation. I'm ready to be the glass-half-full girl again: maybe not as naive in my optimism as I once was, but a wiser optimist is a better optimist anyway, right?

Some of my encouragement to start being more grateful has come as I've been following Catherine on her journey of gratitude. As a result of her posts, I have also been reading Ann Voskamp's lovely lovely blog. I love the idea of working towards recording a thousand gifts (and beyond).

I could wait weeks before I crafted the right kind of post, with the right words, the right pictures, to start my recording. But I won't. I'm casting aside my desire for perfection that hobbles me day after day and just starting with these things for which I am truly, deeply grateful:

1. Women of God, of hope, whose lives demonstrate with their light what God can do with each of us if we are willing to shine, even just a little.

2. Temple worship, for seeing myself more clearly when inside, and for the ability I'm given to see others more clearly when I leave.

3. Music. Today, specifically, this song.

4. Another chance (thanks to Christ and His Atonement) to remake myself. A chance to try again, again, again, and even once more.

5. Hot chocolate.

6. Finally having the Christmas decorations up.

It's a beautiful day. I'm going to go enjoy it.