Hope......

Curious thing today.

But I was in the car a lot. Tax quarter again so doing the rounds of all my clients.’

It was hot today. Wind dropped and the cold disappeared with it. And it has been hot and very, very dry. The sky is white. I wondered why this is always my favourite time of year.

I get it. Suddenly I get it…………It is the season of unreasonable hope.

Hope when it is dry and hot and the last drop of moisture is being sucked out of every plant.

Yet the tababouya’s are blooming bright daffodil yellow, the jacaranda’s are nearly in full bloom, the bougainvilleas are magnificently magenta, acacia’s are bright green with the flush of new leaf. All with not a hint of rain, not even any humidity. We all know that it’ll still be weeks before the rains come. Yet all around me are signs of life. The plants believe that the world is a good place. And they trust that it will rain in due time. So they flower and leaf and do what they do, well before there is any proof that it will. Rain that is.

Hope when there is no good reason for it to exist.

And I guess that is faith.

So I love this season.

Birthdays

August is a month of birthdays in our household. There are sons and daughters and nieces and nephews and cousins and friends and relations all who have birthdays this month. So we leap from birthday to birthday with barely a day in between sometimes. In many ways it is a lot of fun and I have learned to begin gift buying months in advance or the budget gets a little strained.

But as I have gotten older some sadness has crept in.

Today for instance is my Dad's birthday. He and I had a tricky relationship so sometimes I am ambivalent about him but today I simply miss his hearty enjoyment of the celebration of his birthday. He was a big noisy man who loved to party and it is very strange to be still and quiet this evening. He and I were so close in so many ways and in recent years my mother allowed me to cook his birthday dinner. I am thinking this evening that we would have been at the planning of the menu for weeks. He would have changed his mind a dozen times and oh we would have laughed our way through the process of choosing a menu. A path that lay between what I could cook for however many were invited and what he wanted.

This month I am also looking forward to Vetboy's twenty first birthday on the 19th. Again it is a day that is a little strained and has been since his younger sister was stillborn on the same day when he was two. Always I wonder on this day, what would she have been like? Would she be a tomboy or a girlie girl (in which case she surely would have picked the wrong mother)? Would she have liked books or horses or dancing? Yet I have a living, breathing son who equally deserves to have this day celebrated. Sometimes it is very hard to deal with the joy and the grief all together.

Other birthdays are mercifully easier and simpler.

So here's to the birthday boys and girls. Have a very good year all of you.

I met an angel today......

Today I met a woman who had been terribly burned. The burns are long healed but they had reshaped her face and ear and arm and hand (and I should imagine much more hidden by her blouse). I grinned at her because despite only having stumps for fingers and thumb she continued to use her left hand, not withstanding the damage to it, when it might have been easier to learn to use her undamaged right hand. I commented, as I often do, that all the best people are left handed and she laughed outright – relief, I realised in that instant. She said, holding up her damaged hand, that God and Fire had shaped her this way, different from most but she was still as she had been made. Left handed. We talked, two strangers, about intimate damage and maiming. Mine not so visible but present none the less and obvious, seemingly, to her. She said it was not the surgery's, not the pain, not the rebuilding and reshaping of her face and body that had been truly hard but the daily living with the changes unwillingly wrought upon her.

She said her scarred skin would need extra care for the rest of her life, that she would always need to stretch what remained of her maimed muscle or it would seize completely, that she would always be vulnerable to certain "looks" (pity, disgust, horror and others) from strangers, and even friends, that she still fell prey sometimes to despair and depression. Mostly, she said, knew now how to deal with these two, but she didn't tell me how.

In a flash this angel woman revealed to me what I have seen so hazily at best and mostly not at all. This is what healing is. This is what health is. Maimed she might be, for the rest of her life, her soul and mind and spirit and body reshaped by the fire. But it is being able to live with the maiming, being able to live with the consequences of this crippling, productively, constructively, in peace, and contentment. In happiness even.

She did not tell me what I most desperately want to know - the how you live with maiming and the demons of depression that lurk on the fringes of ones mind but she did show my what the direction was.....

Grace from Grace

I am not good with little girls, even less with teenaged girls.

I know that some of my difficulty arises from my own childhood, and even more from the death of my full term daughter in the womb. A still born child who is horribly deformed is a peculiar kind of grief, such a mixture of feelings. Ever since I find myself wondering what my daughter would have been like at five or ten or fifteen, wondering what books and colours and movies she would have liked and the grief spills, fresh and new. Over and over.

Recently one of my husband's oldest friends remarried, acquired a five year old daughter called Grace and returned home.

We met at Mass one fine but quite ordinary Sunday morning. Grace and I.

It was not love at first sight, not on my part, yet Grace took no notice of my lack of enthusiasm.

I discovered that even if I did not know how to be with her, she most certainly knew how to be with me. Gradually over the last four months we have become friends. She loves Winnie the Pooh and laughs hysterically at the stories of A A Milne, rolling on the floor with delight. I have learned a great deal about Barbie and Ken, about the giant purple dinosaur Barney, about playing in the rain, about laughing, about playing hide and seek, about sitting peacefully with a dozing five year old on my lap, about other ways of sadness and loss.

The thing about Grace is that she draws others into her magical circle that takes no account of years lived, being as she is, fully and seriously concerned with living vibrantly. She sometimes looks at me with sadness and asks how I never learned to play but brightens with the thought that she will teach me.

And teach me she does. In her lessons I find my raw grief for my own small daughter is transmuted in a way that I do not understand into something I do not recognise but which I receive with gratitude.

Grace from Grace indeed.

Morning Prayer .... once more

I am a "morning" person, the only one, as it happens, in my household. I have savoured this silent quiet time when there are no immediate demands on me since my sons were big enough to sleep the night through. Despite the growing cold I had a urgent, childish need to be outside this morning.

And when I got out and lifted my eyes to the East there, rising above the first faint amber blush of dawn, were Venus and Mercury almost chasing each other ahead of the sun with Mars and Jupiter close by. All the other stars had faded leaving these four bright on the horizon. As I gazed in wonder at this rare sight, a robin opened the dawn chorus just above my head and the Crested Snake Eagle flew down to perch on an electricity pole. My small grey cat pranced delicately while the mad Valentine and Spot the dalmatian danced delighted at the prospect of  an outing.

And the Psalmists prayers of wonder and praise came to mind.

Particularly this morning Psalm 19

     The heavens tell out the glory of God
      the vault of heaven reveals his handiwork.
      One days speaks to another,
       night with night shares its knowledge
      and this without speech or language or
      sound of any voice;
      Their music goes out through all the earth
      their words reach the end of the world.
      In them a tent is fixed for the sun,
      who comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy
      rejoicing like a strong man to run his race.
      His rising is at one end of the heavens
      his circuit touches their farthest ends,
      and nothing is hidden from his heat.


      The law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul.
      The Lord's instruction never fails,
       and makes the simple wise.
       the precepts of the Lord are right and rejoice the heart.
       The commandments of the Lord shines clear
       and gives light to the eyes.
       The fear of the Lord is pure and abides forever.
       The Lord's decrees are true and righteous every one,
       more to be desired than gold, pure gold in plenty,
       sweeter than syrup or honey from the comb.
       It is these that gives thy servant warning, 
       and he who keeps them wins a great reward.


      Who is aware of his secret sins?
      Cleanse me of any secret fault.
      Hold back thy servant also from sins of self will,
       lest they get the better of me.
     Then I shall be blameless
      and innocent of any great transgression.


      May all that I say and think be acceptable to Thee,
      O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

This is my prayer today.