scale

I am linking up today with dear Amber Haines and the concrete to abstract crew. Join us here.

I don’t have the kind of scale that measures our mass. I have a house full of teenage girls, all beautiful, all athletes, all with bodies strong and sure and able to run miles beyond me. Sometimes, worry crosses their minds – they wonder if they are gaining weight that does not behoove them in their pursuits. I see them hesitate over good healthy food and I rush to cut off such foolishness. I have been that route…had it consume me in fear and later console me in some feigned sense of control. I will not let it take up with them.

So, I keep no scale about. I offer them no option to let it number and name them. We choose health and exercise and good food. And so far, that has served their bodies and minds well. They press away ridiculous amounts of sugar and fats and fully embrace the good for them meals we cook together. And that brings all kinds of relief to me, especially on the cooking front.

I hope they measure the joy in their life from being able to do as they wish as they run hard and jump high. I hope they never measure themselves with some number which does not connote health or strength. I hope they love their bodies enough to care well for them rather than being consumed by them and some silly number on some scale.

sweater

Linking up with the beauty at The Runamuck today. Check out Amber Haines latest offering in our Concrete to Abstraction series. It has been a joy to read so many fabulous pieces linked there. Check them out as well. And submit your own. We’d love the company. This week our word is SWEATER.

I kept it. You said it looked better on me, tossed it over to me, warm and wool.  Our clime did not warrant it. But, I loved it…as it was yours, who covered and kept all my secrets, warmed my still cold soul.  For years, I wore it anytime the wind blew hard, threatened to swallow me.

It seemed too much, as if it would  be scratchy, but it was not so. I first wore it in pictures, winter ones, before we all left out for our other homes. It is in my closet, near the one the little Peruvian lady mailed to Rob, the Christmas after he paid to tow her stranded car, in a city that was not his, and then paid to fix it,  with a sum she and her teenage son, Han, could not understand, a man they did not know, assuming. That Christmas they sent us sweaters she had made, softer than silk, Alpaca, deep greens…and a Christmas card in hesitate, yet beautiful English. The cards continued for years. Always signed, “Han’s mother.”

Both are too warm for wearing in Alabama, both speak of a love, too much…  more than enough to cover and keep. So I store them high in my closet, not cloistered away in cedar…to remind me of love, too much.

Shout out for Rachel! Hurray!

I certainly don’t have the readership of Sarah Bessey has nor can I  toast as eloquently as did dear Preston at Deeper Story.  But, I want to say something today as Rachel’s new book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood,  releases. Allow me to at least lift a glass and utter my, “amen.”

I am just a mama, wife, teacher and youth leader, working perhaps too quietly, in the town where Rachel Held Evans grew up. As such, I won’t attempt to comment on the breadth of her influence…huge as it is.  But, I would like to share the depth, the generational impact her heart and words are having, even here, in this town, which is tough on the message she is suggesting we reexamine.  What I read, the young women I mentor usually read themselves or get in some successful trickled down format. At 47, her words are freeing to me, they echo the questions I cannot so well articulate. At 17, 18, 19 and 20 her words are springboards…

The finest natural theologians to ever cross my path here in Alabama are young women. The most talented preachers and the most gifted pastoral hearts among our youth group of 250 are girls. The youth pastor and I realize what God has released to our care. We make room for it, encourage it, strengthen it with skill and exposure and most importantly, OPPORTUNITY!

When we are absent, away or just tired, they preach, they teach. Jeremy, our youth pastor, explains he is making up for 2000 years of inequality, so they get the slots. And be sure, they rock it when they do…

I just want to say to Rachel, thanks for leading the way, blocking a bit for those who come after…they are coming! They are right on your heels, girl! I know that makes you smile.

So, thank you from Birmingham! I am sure Tennessee and Dayton claim you now, but so do we, and we always will.

Congratulations!….to “a mother in Israel.” – Judges 5: 7

Kim Sullivan

This post is part of a synchroblog hosted by J. R. Goudeau thanking Rachel for being a woman of valor who speaks for so many of us. Read some other posts at J. R.’s blog.

horses

I’m linking up with Amber Haines  for her weekly Concrete to Abstract writing assignment. As usual, her piece is stunning and the others linked to hers are excellent as well. Please go check them out and join up with us if you like.

My girls love horses. They have friends who let them ride. A dear family friend closed a betrothal deal with my youngest gal and his least fella, with a horse. Molly loves that horse. The fella, she said, “suits her fine.”  My girls have always begged to ride, to take lessons and they have been graciously offered many such experiences. They so love the horses.

Number One Son and I have a little different view of the sometimes still wild beasts.

It started for me when I went to work.  A sweet family let me stay half way with them many days on my longish commute to and from the college where I worked. I had their daughter in a class. She liked me and they adopted me, and well, I stayed at their farm many dark, cold nights.

They had horses. Not, slow-moving trail horses, the kind used to transport kiddos and old folks. HORSES. The daughter, 19, was a national champion barrel racer. Their horses didn’t look or run like any horses I had ever been near. They were Maserati’s on legs. They had two speeds: GO! and STOP! I only rode them once or twice with her. When I would go watch her race, I never stopped praying – they churned the ground they ran upon, it flew high as their backs. She, my student, nearly flew off them on every turn. The race of seconds felt an eternity.

Horses became wildness and fury and strength that might be pled a direction, if it seemed  good to the horse.

In Costa Rica, we flew above birds and monkeys in the tree-tops and bounced down rapid rivers that we would rate higher here. We explored volcanoed paths and slept nearly uncovered in dark, deep jungles. I roared laughter and delight in all of it, until our little jaunt on the horses. Here, my intrepid son and I broke ranks with adventure. Our trail ride was 3 hours, 3 hours of knee-deep mud and then rocky climbs, now made muddy as well. Our steeds were small and sure-footed and forever fond of the trot. They beat us and then for sport had us clinging to their manes to stay somehow aboard as we climbed. I might have uttered a few French words at the little Spanish speakers. I thought that trip would never end, we would never return to the relative safety of the jungle.

Those horses did as they pleased, well. Unfortunately, their pleasure and ours seemed worlds apart.  Their bodies made for those places and spaces, constantly pulled at us – trying to slow them to a gentle walk, to let them on out, away. They tossed their heads and pulled through our reigning in. It seemed a battle where they were stronger and wiser and we weak and full of fear.

Horses became the strength and certitude of One who would not explain, but would deliver us, if beaten and bruised, anyway.

For my mother’s 70th birthday, she took us, don’t you love that? to Cumberland Island, the largest and least populated isle off the Georgia Coast. A few families hold it, now in trust, as it has been ceded back to the state and ultimately all of us in these states, united. To say people hardy populate it is an understatement…I stood several times on a beach nearly twenty miles in length, not one other soul upon those soft sands.  It is primal and pristine. The oldest sons of the isle are not the Carnegie Clan whose granddaughters authored the Trust. The oldest line are the horses the Spanish brought as early as 1500. They have the run of their station and they take such seriously. They: browns, grays, whites and dappled, appear from nowhere: rush through a thicket, careen around the corners of the few homesteads and houses we visitors stay within. They look tranquil as they graze a far off on the moon and star lit dunes, but they fly at will and never cease to surprise in their nearness, their sudden appearing.

Horse became the Inheritor, always near, even if obscured… always ready to charge, bursting forth, coming quickly, not at our bidding, but in pursuit of  his own purpose.

How powerfully horses speak to our persons.  I have not seen them as a pet to parade or an always gentle beast, but I have come to love them, too.

inside, OUT

I live in a very conservative,  constrictive, state. One can barely stretch, much less move. Often, dialogue and discovery are not encouraged, exploration is portrayed as an Enemy to be corralled, even eviscerated.

I love dialogue and discovery. I love learning, pressing paradigms, considering alternative options and better, innovative, new ones.  My kids are like me, my natural ones and my spiritual ones. They like the tension and the questions and the freedom of exploration.

Yesterday, while we sat before my fire, eating our down-home butter beans and squash casserole,  some of my kids and I looked at photos from a famous photographer…many of the shots taken at festivals in the Pacific Northwest. My son, the wanderer want to be, keeps begging me to take him there…my daughter, not naturally, pulled these shots for us to see. We stared at the foreignness that does not frighten them AT ALL: the glorious landscapes and the free-falling, high-flying folks.

“Take us,” they whispered.

I nodded gently, yes.

We are surreptitious in the way we wind in thoughts and images and mindsets more free. We play the music that calls such from us, we paint and write and dream.

My son presently wears his hair longer than mine. My adopted daughter, who helped us design costume yesterday, wrapped her hair in tartan plaid and bore it about all day as if she were a proud Kenyan or guru in India.

Some folks look strangely at these two…truth is, they are brave and strong enough to be – on the outside all they are within.

Dang, I admire them.

taken to the trail

I’ve taken to the trail again. The season is perfect for woodland walks.

I  leave out about 4pm, the sun shining slightly yellow and filtering through the fading green leaves still clinging tight.

I say I am back training for greater journeys. I say it is about the exercise and stretching my body…but I come more for this kinship, and the resurrection of my nine-year old soul.

My path begins on zoysia and dives down into a draw. There the beauty of waist-high grasses, still supporting blue and crimson blooms, slows, but does not hinder me. I press through them and climbe upon a small ledge anchored and carpeted by pines whose scent sends me back to wood romps and straw sweep-ups in our yard. I run/slide down a little worn away trail and into a deep vale – where wet and sanded soil is blanketed by violets. They mush under my feet and buoy me along. An arch of green welcomes and I duck under sweet shrub, at once I am toddling  in my Nana’s yard…then chasing around corners and beneath hedges.  The ground grows hard where it has been driven over, parked upon and ornamentals rise before me, long too large for their once appointed station. Now the ground is graying, and my steps feel Georgian, middle, centipede grass grows scarcely and pine straw is strewn within its fingers. The scent of Camelia falls from the now great tree, I am eight and walking up from the lake.

The trail disappears back into the woods where once supple summer plants stand spidery and crisp. They reach out at me, the hands which one held their flowers, stand stark and grab gently. The temperature falls as does the elevation…the creek is not far beyond. As I near, I can see reflection. Summer’s shoals are sunken. The water is dark, deep and still, full of all the colors above: blue and golds and greens. I end my sojourn, turn my eyes and see sky  through the arms stretching to touch and connect with all brothers. I spin ’round under the canopy that covers and behold breathtaking beauty in every direction. How could I ever improve what surrounds me?

chain

Today, I’m linking up with the voice of southern exposure, Amber Haines  for her Concrete to Abstraction series. My friend, Ashley Markin is hosting today in Amber’s absence. The piece she offers is pristinely powerful. Read it. This is not the me I usually traipse about as here. These girls push me to reveal one of my more interesting, if not beautiful, personas.

“Chain” –  I see the semi-rectangular links that held my swing at Nana’s under me and to the strong, iron cross-bar. Great heavy links which my Daddy used to pull down oaks follow. I see the charm bracelets which anyone who had the word mama in a name I called wore about their wrist. And then they are the hanging baskets suspended by a bit of chain in our backyard. Chain was not a dark or dreary word in my vocabulary. Chains held and did good work. Until…

Now the word makes me think of a song, a band whose rise to destruction also began by their testimony, in Birmingham. Now, the word “chain” gives rise in me to Stevie’s tortured vocals and Lindsay’s torturing ones. Now it’s all I hear, think about at the word.

I am secured to this place with chains of DNA and debts yet paid and some other oil and exhaust covered thing that feels the way my Daddy’s heavy pulls looked, but I never noticed, as they brought me near to him and warmth into my home. Here it leaves me cold and marred and broken by its weight, though the soul separating power no longer employes it to stretch my frame in twain.

We hammer steel here, no longer under big smokestacks, but in small artisan studios. The big dangers like the old gargantuan iron workings of Birmingham have largely moved abroad to torture elsewhere: racism and class warfare. But, tiny cauldrons still fume and ours was one of them.

The church we so very hesitantly planted was supposed to be a small work of grace. I know now it was neither in his mind – ever. It was to his thinking all his and nothing if it did not grow large and powerful and connected to everyone else so. Our leader was family, by marriage, and he was nearly my death, if not all of ours. I worked for him, wrote some of his stuff. I thought I liked those handling the oversight of our work. Until they didn’t.

It was a classic case of egomania which moved on to more…a deadly infection which cost him his life and all of us everything but ours. It’s been a long time; he has long been as cold in the ground as that chain.

But, when you learn to shoulder such a weight and know its oily feel upon your skin that stains into the mind’s every crevice and all cracking places of your soul… When the smell of such is no secret but a like sentry sound, it is easy to know a brother, another so inclined.  Just such and I have recently locked eyes. And I am wondering is freedom mine to force anew?