In which I give thanks and remember

For basil plants growing on my windowsills despite the cold outside;
for a well-stocked and orderly bookshelf;
for the amarillys on my counter, with four glorious red blossoms open:

I give thanks.

For summer at Berkeley four years ago,
sleeping on my friend K.'s tile floor and baking peach & plum pie;
for a midnight walk and a young stag that bounded across the sidewalk and the street,
into another garden--

For the Linguistics Institute, three weeks of glutting myself on ideas;
for dozens of papers read and learned from,
for classrooms full of linguists (students and professors)
from all over the country, gathered in one place--

For naps on the lush green lawn in the golden sun, between classes:

I give thanks.

That I can remember so clearly, that I can remember at all--

I give thanks.

For pumpkin pie and knowing how to make it, confidently;
for my mother's expertise in the kitchen
and her persistence in passing it on to me:

I give thanks.

For my own kitchen, and a house to myself,
shared with O. and the bunnies and no one else;
for O.,
for rabbits--

For friends we shared the house with
and for friendship surviving ten weeks of sharing
one bathroom and one refrigerator--

For a marriage that is so much easier and happier this Thanksgiving
than it was a year ago:

I give thanks.

For two casserole dishes of borscht in the refrigerator, and a huge pot of turkey juk,
so that I won't have to cook for days;

For Pastor T. who invited us to his Thanksgiving,
and for all the church friends there (especially the vibrant single people),
and for the scrumptious turkey and potatoes and carrots and even parsnip we ate;
for the turkey skin and bones and scraps of meat that T. did not want,
which I brought home and boiled into juk;

For the telephone that let me call my father and mother to ask for the juk recipe;
for my mother, for my father:

I give thanks.

* * *

I feel the abundance in my life today, and felt it yesterday, and will feel it tomorrow. The season is turning. It will be a strange season, but it is familiar this year. I remember the leaves changing last year, I remember the furnace we struggled to ignite. I remember learning to sleep in the same bed as O., how to regulate my body temperature so I wouldn't wake up drenched in sweat as I first did when I wore the warm pajamas I depended on during all the winters before. I remember Thanksgiving on the east coast, far from my old friends and the places I called home. Now I call this place home, too, though in my dreams I am always in California.

I remember, not so long ago, when I organized my own life without consulting anyone about my schedule. I remember feeling my life was my own. I remember watching my money carefully because there wasn't any coming in. That season has come back. Wednesday was O.'s last day of work and now we are living off of savings and my small income. Suddenly the money I bring in babysitting and working for the church really counts, and suddenly I feel so much more confident of my place in the household economy, more entitled to my opinion and my decisions. The season of confidence and independence is returning, and I am grateful (though I know something is off in my emotional logic).

Also I remember, not long ago at all, writing essays, emailing professors, impressing people. I remember understanding, teaching, explaining, leading. That season is coming back, too. I am writing my statement of purpose and remembering I've done lots of awesome things and I really am qualified, and I'm scanning and uploading my transcript and noticing with pleasure how monotonously perfect the grades are (marred only by one A-, the semester I started dating O.). I'm corresponding with my favorite professors and feeling their love. This is strange and it is familiar, and it is a promise of things to come. I do want to go to grad school. Learning is what I was made for.

The leaves have changed and they are beautiful. Soon they will fall, but when they do, I will be grateful for that beauty, too, and I will remember that the season will change again, and spring will come. It is already on its way.

Songs

Friday's question at Ten Thousand Questions:

In your memories, what song is inextricably tied to a particular group of people or an activity that you participated in years ago?

This song by Death Cab for Cutie:

--and this song (and every other by Postal Service), reminding me of a boy years ago who was so proud of his musical tastes, telling me he liked Postal Service and indie bands and hated pop, telling me he felt so vindicated when he visited a friend at Berklee and found the music students all liked the same music he did:

He quoted from the first song to me--

Sorrow drips into your heart
from a pinhole
just like a faucet that leaks
and there is comfort in the sound

--and I said I didn't understand. How could sorrow be comforting? It can get addictive, he said. I was eighteen, and innocent. That was February. At the end of May, with regret and shame leaking through pinholes into me, I understood.

That summer, interning in children's ministries at my church at home, I cried on the stairs before work, after the worship services before putting on a costume to lead Sunday school, at home on my bed when my sister wasn't in the room. In the fall, back at school where I might run into him, I stared around me into the shifting crowds, hoping for and dreading a glimpse of him. Every navy-blue jacket, every tall slumped dark-haired figure--I would stare, blink, run away.

Listening to those songs, I am right back there sitting in the cafeteria with him as he mocks me over pizza and makes innuendos that I am unwilling to understand. I am back under the low ceiling in the other room of the cafeteria as he tells me he never talks about his relationship with his mother, how she's an actress and so dramatic. I am back in my darkened dorm room reading his instant messages on a glowing screen.

I wonder if he is still as sad and mistrustful as he was in those days. It is four and a half years later and the songs he listened to still fill me with melancholy. When I hear Postal Service I pray for change in his life. I hope it has come.

As for me, I am happy and grateful where I am now, as I was then before I met him, and I never seek out Postal Service.

Remember, remember [an eclectic post]

I write this with a lap snuggled full of rabbit and a belly laden with pumpkin gnocchi. I made the gnocchi from scratch following this genius recipe and they were delicious! and easy to make though a bit time-consuming.

The rabbit is here because he was chewing on the filing cabinet.

O. separated the egg for the gnocchi for me, and then decided to make meringues with the whites. They are still in the oven because they are supposed to bake for three hours.

We were planning to re-watch "V for Vendetta" tonight (it is the fifth), but it has been postponed due to pumpkin deliciousness.

We were remembering, over dinner, where we were a year ago: living in a small, moldy apartment--misunderstanding each other all the time--just getting over a brief pregnancy scare--my sinuses chronically infected. We still have a long way to go, marriage-wise, but we have learned so much in a year. Thank God.

O. washed the dishes while I was cooking dinner, without being asked. That, more than anything, feels like a sign of change to me.

I am reading Anatomy of the Soul, wherein the Christian neuroscientist author discusses remembering at length. I had one of those "aha!" moments, reading the chapter "Remembering the Future," because he cited Psalms and discussed the moral dimensions of remembering--which is something I've been thinking about for a while. I even blogged about it (posts months in the tweaking). And then he goes beyond everything I had thought about and talks about the neurological consequences for remembering, and it's awesome. I will write about it sometime soon.

Memory and Gratitude (2)

This post expands on the third point in my previous post on the importance of memory.

A few months ago, I was reading Ps. 105-106, and because I had memory on my mind, I noticed both psalms are about remembering. God remembers and Israel does not. Also, the Psalmist exhorts both Israel and God to remember. Some examples:

• "Remember the wonders he has done, his miracles, and the judgments he pronounced" (105:5), the psalm declares, and proceeds to recount those wonders, miracles and judgments.
• "He remembers his covenant forever; the word he commanded, for a thousand generations" (8). God is praised for remembering his promises.
• "For he remembered his holy promise given to his servant Abraham" (42).
• "Remember me, O Lord, when you show favor to your people, come to my aid when you save them" (106:4).
• "They did not remember your many kindnesses, and they rebelled by the sea, the Red Sea" (7). In contrast to God's faithfulness as seen through his remembering, Israel forgets God, which leads to rebellion.
• "They soon forgot what he had done and did not wait for his counsel. In the desert they gave in to their craving; in the wasteland they put God to the test." (13-14) Forgetting begets impatience, mistrust, greed, short-sightedness.
• "They forgot the God who saved them, who had done great things in Egypt, miracles in the land of Ham and awesome deeds by the Red Sea" (21-22).
• "But he took note of their distress when he heard their cry; for their sake he remembered his covenant and out of his great love he relented" (44-45). God's rescue of his people is directly connected to his remembering.

A search of BibleGateway for verses containing "remember" brings up many commands to Israel to remember (especially in Deuteronomy), many pleas to God to remember his covenant or his servants (especially in Psalms and in Nehemiah), and many promises from God that He does remember (everywhere). Remembering was vitally important to Israel, because their lives depended on God remembering his covenant, and on them remembering God's commands. Thus the dozens of commands to remember: "Remember the Sabbath (Exodus 20:8), "Remember the day you stood before the Lord at Horeb" (Deut. 4:10), "Remember that you were slaves in Egypt" (Deut. 5:15), "Do not be afraid of them; remember well what the Lord your God did to Pharoah and all of Egypt" (Deut. 7:18), etc.

How often do churches today exhort their congregations to remember? I can't remember a lesson on memory in all my years in church and Sunday school. Memory is all about information these days; you need to remember things in school but rarely in church. In church when you are supposed to remember something, it's a memory verse, word for word, not a story or a history, not a truth, not a person.

Why? Is it because, as Zimbardo says, we are future-oriented Protestants with a bent toward trying to justify ourselves through diligence and success? I don't know, but it's something to think and pray about.

Memory and Gratitude (1)

I've been thinking about the role of memory in daily life and mood for a while, ever since I realized that O. just isn't as naturally inclined as I am to spend time thinking about the past. So I've been pondering what remembering accomplishes, and that's what this post is about. I'm pulling together several ideas:

1. The way you remember (or don't) shapes your time orientation.
2. The way you remember affects your mood, enabling gratitude and happiness.
3. The way you remember can be a virtue; failing to remember can be a moral failure.

1. Remembering shapes your time orientation.
This video introduced me to the idea of people living in "different time zones." Watch it, it's only 10 minutes long but it's really interesting!

Zimbardo in the video lists six "time zones" that people live in:

• Past, Positive and Negative
• Present, Hedonist and Fatalist*
• Future, Immediate and Distant

*He only names the first three of them so I made up my own names for the others, based on his explanations.

People with a Past Positive orientation enjoy remembering the good old days; people with a Past Negative orientation always remember the things they regret. On the other end, people with a Future orientation don't do much remembering, particularly if they have a Distant Future orientation wherein the present and certainly the past don't matter much, because Real Life is going to begin much, much later--in the afterlife or, in a more tech-y twist, when the technological singularity arrives.

Your time orientation has important consequences for how you live your life.  Zimbardo says, for instance, that "most of us are here [at the seminar] because we are [immediate] future-oriented," that future oriented people make plans and progress while present oriented people mostly don't, that a past-positive orientation can make you happy but a past negative orientation is filled with regrets, and that "all addictions are addictions of present hedonism."

O. for a long time was future-oriented in a way that elevated the glorious Future and devalued the flawed Present: i.e., Future Distant, Singularitarian style. This future-orientation hindered him in enjoying the present (because it could always be better) and planning for the immediate future (like getting homework done). In the past several years, O. has been changing time-zones, giving more value to remembering the past.

C.S. Lewis discusses in The Screwtape Letters how enticing a person to focus on the future is the best way to make that person unhappy and cut off from God. A person who thinks of the past may remember a time when God helped him, and turn to God in the present to pray; a person who thinks of the present can experience God's presence first hand; but a person who thinks only of the future can be lost forever in a morass of dreams and fears. I am glad that O. is remembering more, because it means he is turning less toward the future.

2. Remembering enables gratitude.
Generally speaking, grateful people are happy, while ungrateful people are dissatisfied. I'd rather be grateful and happy than ungrateful and unhappy, and I wish the same for my loved ones. Gratitude is largely enabled by memory. If you live exclusively in the present, then in a pleasant present you can be grateful and happy, but when a moment of pain comes, you will be overwhelmed because pain is all you have. On the other hand, if you remember past good things and bring those memories with you into the present, you can be grateful for those past events for years and years. Present suffering can be ameliorated by memories of past pleasures, as in Zimbardo's "Past Positive" orientation. Present despair can be broken by memories of past redemptions, as Lewis says.

Note: Of course there are also things that a person could legitimately need to forget or never think about. e.g. the case of anyone with PTSD.

3. Remembering is a prerequisite to virtue
Morality is connected to intentional behavior, so we don't normally think of forgetting as immoral since it's (typically) not deliberate. Likewise we don't think of remembering as virtuous. But memory isn't not all unintentional or uncontrollable. Consider: how often do you forget that you owe someone money vs. that someone owes you money? (Maybe you remember it more when you owe money because of the potency of guilt or obligation.) We forget selectively; we forget the things we don't want to think about or don't value. Likewise, we remember selectively; if the emotional weight isn't great enough to guarantee remembering, we can choose to write things down (in a calendar or a journal). In that sense, it seems reasonable to hold a person accountable for forgetting something. Memory has a moral dimension.

Having a good memory doesn't necessarily make you a good person, but it does enable you to do good in ways that a person who does not remember simply can't. Virtues like loyalty, gratitude, and keeping promises rely directly on memory. Others, like hope and love, are made a lot easier through memory (it's easier to love a person who is being cruel to you when you remember times in the past when they treated you kindly). For both kinds, remembering is a virtue.

To be responsible, you have to remember your commitments. If you don't, you will let people down. To be truthful, you have to to remember the past accurately. If you don't, you'll misrepresent what happened according to how you felt about it. To keep your promises, you have to remember making them. If you don't remember, you'll hurt and disappoint people. To be loyal, you have to remember your relationships. If you forget, you'll betray people. To live virtuously, you have to remember things. Forgetting makes you hurt people and break promises.

More on the virtue of remembering as seen in the Bible next post.

Silence and Light

It is that too-transient time of day, when the clouds are lavender and the horizon blushes. Standing in the kitchen, adjusting the temperature of the oven as a quiche bakes, I catch my breath when I turn and see the light. The sun has poured itself in through the front windows, through the living room where the rabbits are sleeping, and through the kitchen, to wash up against the closed bedroom door. Its white paint glows. It is gold, honey, amber, then briefly pumpkin. And then it is gone.

Sunset comes later and later, and I write less and less. When summer comes, I shrink from the computer, from my notebooks. The grass is green in the park, the tomatoes are sprouting in the garden, and I feel as wordless as a plant. I just want to soak up the sun and store it away under my skin, turn it into food for a future winter.

Could it be my reluctance to write stems from a fear of contemplating meanings and committing myself to a position? a fear of exposure? (Writing is so hard right now. I started this post at sunset two weeks ago, got too uncomfortable, and left it languishing until today.)

A few weeks ago, I spent seven days in the Adirondacks at an Intervarsity camp. Being there without O. for a week, I found myself to be a person I'd forgotten: still needing my sleep and my solitude, but steady in those needs, not oscillating, and willing and able to meet new people, form friendships, be useful, serve, pray, lead. Confident, as I'd forgotten how to be. As I'd forgotten I used to be.

(Ironic that lately I've been pondering the necessity, indeed the virtue, of remembering. And here I had forgotten something so fundamental (though so complex) as who I am, how it feels to be me.)

At camp I also realized that somehow, sometime in the past 11 months, I swore off exposing myself to O. in so many of the ways that count. I got hurt doing things, and then I promised myself I wouldn't get hurt that way again. What that meant was that I stopped singing when I thought O. was listening; I stopped telling him what I think Bible passages mean; I stopped praying out loud with him. Deep down, I took a vow of silence. I will not speak, I said. I said, I refuse to be exposed.

The Highly Sensitive Person In Love, my most helpful relationship guide, catalogs the fears that can create fear of intimacy. Fear of exposure and rejection, fear of angry attacks, fear of abandonment, fear of losing control, fear of your destructive impulses, fear of engulfment, fear of commitment... The fear of exposure is by far my greatest fear in any relationship. It's always easier for me to be the listening ear and the comforting shoulder, lovingly caring for the exposure of someone else's pain and weakness, than for me to be the crying eye and the naked heart. I would rather listen than speak, I would rather be silent than be true.

 So I have been silent.

But "when I kept silent, my bones wasted away." And now, finally understanding what I have been doing, I am trying to remember, and I am trying to speak.

Starting here.

Writing, I break my silence.
Speaking, I expose myself.
Here I am. I am here.

IJ

Once upon a time, we sat by the window in the third floor of the library and watched a hawk chasing a swallow. We were young, and I was unbroken. Later, night fell. You came for me, and I could not drive you away, and I could not dip and soar like the swallow to escape. Your hair was the color of night. I should have known the sun would leave me, and like the silent owl, you would arrive.


You left. You left me, broken; you left me broken. You left my space, my time, my thoughts, but I could not leave you. I keep finding you, a splinter in my heart. You are still exactly the same as when we soared over the island and the waves diminished into minute wrinkles below us, and between us the silence roared so I could scarcely hear the music that still calls up your ghost for me, when I hear it, these long years later.

It is November, a season I never saw you in. Yet I find you living in my memories, as you have lived with me since that single rainstorm.


In a few hours, my husband will come home, and I will live again, in the beautiful present. In a few years, these memories will be buried under more strata, starting with the autumn leaves of today. When I die, they will die with me. And when I live again, there will be no more tears, no more secrets, no more death, no more night.

Interior Decorating

I am addicted to comfort, and afraid of hope. I quash my imaginings, fold them up neatly and layer them in the bottom of an empty drawer. Occasionally one wakes up and batters itself against the inside of the dresser so the drawer clunks back and forth. The shaking rouses all the other visions and dreams, too. They flap and flutter, and at least one escapes into the open air. It follows me around, getting in my eyes, casting flitting shadows that distract me from whatever I'm looking at. Every time I put something down, I'm afraid I'm about to squish it into a stain on my book or bag or butt. I don't want to smash those dreams, really. I want to have them around. I just don't want them as a real part of my life. They're too dangerous. Following a butterfly will get me lost in the woods.

Instead of gazing at my dreams, I pore over memories. I sort through filing cabinets and pull out my favorites. Those hang on the wall to constantly remind me: those good times are real. They happened once, so they can happen again. But my imagination is too stunted from being kept in the drawer, too afraid of being shoved back into that small orthogonal space, to take any risks in envisioning the repetition of a good moment. My imagination doesn't dare translate a situation to a new cast of people or a novel location. It keeps the plots tethered to their characters and setting. My imagination plays slide-shows of memory's photographs, instead of painting pictures of its own.

I live in a house wall-papered with memories, with the curtains shut to keep out the brilliant light of the future.