Dust thou Art: Death, Dearth, and Discernment

The priest smudged ashes on my forehead, in the shape of a cross, saying, "Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return."  It sounds a little heavy to tell this to a seven year old.  But he told all the congregation, before and after me, the same, so I didn't take it personally.  It was Ash Wednesday in the 1980's at my Episcopal church.  Instead of lining up to receive the "body of Christ, the cup of salvation", as we did every Sunday, we had gotten out of school and lined up to hear a poetic equivalent of the child's rhyme

The worms crawl in

The worms crawl out

The worms play pinocle

On your snout.

I don't remember how my younger sister felt about it, but, being melancholic children, my older sister and I ate up the misery of Lent the way we ate communion.   It was food for our souls.  On Wednesday afternoons, we walked the two blocks from our downtown school to our downtown church for choir practice.  The wind blew old leaves from Autumn around.  Spring seemed a world away.  The cold grey weather knew no season.  In the choir house, we slouched in folding chairs, and practiced Lenten anthems:

O come and mourn with me awhile

While soldiers scoff and foes deride

Upon the cross he feels the pain

The Lord of life is crucified   

Last night I went to a Mardi Gras party with my fellow West Philly Quakers.  Tonight we'll celebrate Ash Wednesday too.  I've been blessed to find a group of seekers who, like me, look to the seasons for ways to God.  Most Quakers couldn't be bothered to notice these things.  They are too busy helping African children and creating world peace, and more power to them, I say.  (Of course, the other day, when a bunch of us stood protesting outside Colosimo's gun store in 18 degrees below zero weather [slight exaggeration], the season was pretty hard to ignore.)  But I and my companions find meaning in marking our journeys by the annual journeys that nature (God's world) takes.  Noticing the subtle changes in the earth brings me down to earth.  The seasons articulate a path for us, show us we are going somewhere, at nature's pace; slow and steady.

The primitive people we once were relied directly on nature for their sustenance.  The time of Lent, for subsistence farmers, was a time of scraping the barrel.  Last year's crops were gone or needed to be eaten before they spoiled in the warming weather.  This year's crops were not yet ready.   Eggs needed to be left alone to become hens for next year.  Without an awareness that this period was temporary, it would have felt like the end of the world; a little like our current recession, but happening every year.  It was important, in order to keep going, to think of the Easter to come.  It was a good time to strip life down to the basics, to think about what really matters.  If we remove the heavy-handed "Christian" imprint on the season, about guilt, punishment and sin, we find instead a healthy catharsis.  A fallow field.

As a modern child in Louisville, Ky, I found this season bleak.  Christmas was over (although our Christmas tree sometimes remained up well into February!).  Spring Break was a dream, Summer another planet.  We seldom got snow, so it was just grey, brown, and cold for weeks.  Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays offered short, secular reprieves from school.  Without lent, without an acknowledgement of that bleakness, it would have felt like the end of the world to me.  Children are indeed our connection to our primitive, subsistence past.  They show us how much we need ritual.

 Students of Rudolf Steiner work with a biographical map he gave.  In the context of this essay, we could say that a person's whole life is a macrocosm of a year.  We are born in summer, out of cosmic light and love and oneness.  We "fall" through Fall, growing colder and more awake, until we reach Winter, the low point of midlife.  Around my age, in the 30's, we stand at rock bottom.  We feel alone, stripped bare like the leafless trees.  Unlike the Spring nature gives us, we must, in our lives, create that upward swing to resurrection and new life, in our maturity.  Then we may live in the abundant warmth and wealth that is spirit, once more.  I have just been rereading The Human Life by George and Gisela O'Neill.  It seems that I am only at the beginning of this lenten period of life.  At times, it feels bleak.  I can no longer rest on my laurels.  For various reasons I must stand apart from all the communities to which I feel an affinity.  I hope that this isolation is temporary.  On the other hand, it's only in the absence of a community that I would ever find the focus to write a novel.  And that one thing, that I am doing (mostly) alone, is the one thing which seems to be working.  Perhaps out of this individual work, connection to community may one day grow.  

In the same way, I think our current economic crisis is what it took for us to wise up and elect a good man for president.  Unless we were uncomfortable, we would never have been shaken out of our complacency.

I'm glad that every year, Spring shows me what flowering looks like.  Without this constant reminder that the "winters of our discontent" are temporary. I would probably go jump off a bridge.  Even in February, buds appear at the tips of bare trees.  If you look at them once a week, you'll see that they are swelling.  

They will open, by and by.  And so will I.

So I will offer a mirror picture to the Episcopal priest's words.  Yes, we are dust.  Stardust.  In the words of Joni Mitchell

We are stardust 

We are golden

We are caught in the devil's bargain

And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.

The Sled

It was my first real snow in Philadelphia.  Fat flakes scurried down the sky, all day and night, covering everything.  The next day, I followed my inner directive.  It said, "Buy a sled."

I got out of bed, skipped most of my usual morning routine, and got on the phone with K-mart, Target, even Walmart!  None of them had sleds.  At last, I tried Toys R Us.  "We've got three kinds left, honey."  The manager told me.  The store was in South Philly, an hour away by bus! As the hours passed, I slowly swerved away from the urgency of my inner directive.  Since I'm skipping all that time-consuming stuff I usually do in the morning, I told myself, I could get a lot done!  I may as well pay some bills...  As the morning wore on, the inner grown up slowly nudged aside the inner child. By the time I got to South Philly, I was starving for lunch.  Two blocks short of Toys R Us, I stopped into a diner and had a grilled cheese.

I paid the check, crossed the enormous parking lot and entered Toys R Us.  I looked around on every aisle.  I saw everything but sleds.  Finally, I asked the lone sales clerk in the front of the deserted store.  "We're all out." she replied.  What?  Of course!  The first real snow in two winters and a snow day.  Children had bought out the sleds since that morning.  It just hadn't occurred to me.  

"Do you think you'll order more?" I asked

"Probably not."  she answered.  Duh.  Not exactly a seller you can count on in this economy, in this climate.

 

I huffed out of the place, exasperated.  The Universe was supposed to reward you for making effort on behalf of your inner child.  I felt unreasonably let down.  And embarrassed.  How would I ever get over it?  And how would I explain such a frivolous disappointment at the Quaker friends meeting at our house that night?  We'd be praying for things like world peace, a healthy environment,  a better world.  But then I thought, why not be upset?  In a better world, I wouldn't have to truck all over town to buy a simple toy.  A hollowed out thing you could sit in and slide down a snowy hill.  In a better world, this thing would not have to be fashioned from petroleum mined in Iraq, manufactured in China, shipped to the United States, and trucked thousands of mile to a store near me.  In a better world, I or my neighbor, or at least a neighborhood blacksmith, would know how to make one.  They did in Winter Holiday, by Arthur Ransom, the Swallows and Amazons book from 1920's England which my husband and I had just finished.

I thought back to my two years teaching in the Frozen North.  Snow came early and often.  I had forked out over a hundred dollars of my own money to buy a bunch of plastic sleds for my class.  I'd carefully written "Ms. McConnell" in magic marker on every one of the dozen red or purple crafts.  Every recess, twice a day, they'd get geared up in snowpants, gloves, boots, hats and coats, like little multicolored eskimos, and carry the sleds to the little slope outside the school.  Children from other classes begged to borrow these sleds.  No other teacher had placed fun number one on their list of priorities for her class's education.  You see, I had to.  I wasn't having any fun myself.  The best I could do was to offer it to them.  I worked long hours preparing to teach.  I denied myself meals and adequate rest, and any personal recreation.  I remember one weekend, taking one of the sleds to my Mom's house in nearby Massachusetts.  "It's my last chance to have fun for six weeks."  I had said, insisting we head for the slopes.  

At the end of the second year, I left the class in a hurry, in distress, and had left behind most of the nice things I had bought for the class with my own money.  That is a story for another day.  Walking away from Toys R Us, I cursed my foolishness.  Why hadn't I even bothered to take one sled with me.  For my own enjoyment?  At that time in my life, my own enjoyment did not even make the long list, much less the short one.  It was a castle in the air. Something I'd get around to in retirement.

Six years and one major disaster later, I have changed.  I have learned that if I make time for my own fun, I am different.  Rather than running around like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to fix everyone else, and failing; rather than carrying a grumpy irritable undercurrent with me most of the time, full of resentment when anyone asks for anything; rather, if I make time for my own fun, I am the "Ms. Nice Guy" I always wanted to be.  I genuinely have more to give.  I get interested in what other people are doing, in things that have nothing to do with my agenda.  I am no longer a workaholic.

The day after the sled disappointment, I went into the Waldorf School to substitute in the Kindergarten.  I spent the day as I once had, before the job up north, kneading bread dough and cheerfully engaging in domestic work for children to imitate.  It was great.  They were so sweet and played together so well.  I remembered watching my class make up games with elaborate rules and resulting in amazing improvements to their social skills.  More than ever, I admired play.  I headed home for the day, exhausted, like a tube of toothpaste all squeezed out. I felt pleasant and satisfied.  To an extent.  But the white slopes loomed, untasted.  

As I walked toward the door,  I turned around to look at a bulletin board with flyers.  There, next to the board, leaning against the wall, was a pile of plastic sleds.  There was no one around, inside or out.  I picked one up, took it outside, and walked to the top of a slope.  My heart was pounding.  I sat down in the sled, grabbed the rope, and scootched off the flat place.  "Wheeeeeeee," I screamed, as trees flew past me.  The world sped by, and I was free.  

Yes, I do believe the Universe answers our prayers.  Not always the way we want, and not always right away.  But on the train home, I found my exhaustion replaced by a sense of peace.