This is WooHoo Day:

Some months ago, my boys and I came up with the idea that they could each have one totally free, school-skippin' day a year.  WooHoo Day, we called it.  This past Wednesday, waking to a glorious sunny spring day, they cashed in on this promise.  After dropping Birtie at her little morning preschool, the boys and I went to breakfast.  We drank honeybush tea and ate fried eggs and bacon at a little downtown cafe.  We went to the creek and threw dandelions in the water, racing them down the rapids, watching their little sunny heads pop up beneath the foam.  The boys climbed a steep rock face and slid down a dirt bank, huge puffs of dust billowing behind them.  While I was watching them scale this thirty-foot rock wall for the fifth time, I realized that, at that moment, Corin's class was sitting down to their MAPs testing - Measures of Academic Progress standardized tests.   "Well, OOPS!," I thought, "I didn't plan that well."  But then I shrugged.  There's always another standardized test around the corner, but there's not always a spring day like this.  "WooHoo Day 2014!" I shouted up to them.  "WooHoo Day!" they yelled back.  "WooHoo Day is a learning day for the heart," I called back, putting my signature mom veneer on their experiences and trying to shake off my lingering guilt about the MAPS test.  They didn't answer but kept climbing toward the cliff top where a patch of yellow arrow-leaf balsam-roots sunnily leaned over the rock face, exhorting them on.     

    
So let's talk about this for a moment -- it's a great example of an ambivalence that plagues me.  I don't know what I think about school for my boys.  Or let me rephrase that, I think many conflicting things about school for my boys.

First let me start with some important background facts: I love school.  I came from a family of educators, devoted to the life of the mind, the opportunity for education, and the importance of working to keep a robust public sphere.  That's my "on-the-one-hand."  On the other hand, my boys are dyslexic.  Often, they write their bs like ds, they spell completely phonetically, they approximate words as they read and rely heavily on context clues, they regularly get directions wrong because they aren't able to read them closely enough, and, consistently, they under-perform on standardized tests.  I don't know about your public schools, but in ours, standardized tests seem to have a kudzu-like vigor.  They're popping up everywhere.  There's MAPS and Dibels and Smarter-Balanced Testing.  And they come around again and again.  At our parent-teacher conferences, Tim and I are shown graphs of each boy's MAPS and Dibels tests, and each trimester we're told how close they were to making bench-mark this time.  Well, shoot, he's almost there.  "But," they invariably tell us, "your son is very bright, his comprehension is amazing.  He's thinking on a different level than so many of his classmates."  

Now, I mean no sleight on the very fine teachers who my boys have been blessed to have.  These teachers are working within the parameters they are given.  And those parameters just happen to include lots of measurements.  I'm not advocating that there shouldn't be such testing, I'm agnostic on all that.  Despite being raised by a gifted public education crusader, I really don't have a reformatory bone in my body.  What I am, is a mom with two boys for whom the right schooling answer isn't obvious.

So, while Corin's classmates bent over their keyboards to answer their MAPS tests, here's what my boys did:
Throw rocks in the creek
Catch a snake
Get incredibly dirty
Talk about Quest Narratives, walking arm-in-arm with their mother
Hear hundreds of bird calls
Look for an American Kestrel
Feel the breeze on their faces, ditto the sunlight
Cross the creek on a log
Send scores of dandelion blooms downstream
Smell the cottonwood bud-bursts 

Though I believe whole-heartedly in their value, it's hard to measure what these things add to our lives.  I hold fast to the idea that through the dialectic of experience and thinking, our ways of knowing gain in nuance and texture.  I want to raise life-long learners who are curious about the world around them.  I want to raise children that see with the eyes of their hearts - to use a Pauline phrase - more than I want to raise children that can add fractions (though of course I'd like them to be able to add fractions as well, and spell "phonetically" without beginning it with an f).  The lesson plan for that first kind of learning is far more challenging than the one for the latter.     

Education is a gift and a privilege and many, many children don't have the schooling opportunities I am so blithely letting my children cast aside in order to WooHoo.  But I also believe that education takes many forms.  And just as factual knowledge furnishes our minds with certain ways of knowing, there's a whole world of truth that is not comprised in fact.  That's the sort of truth that one approaches by listening to bird calls and throwing rocks in the creek and watching dandelions spin in the current.  It's the sort of truth that rustles in the grass when one releases a snake back among the blades.  It's the sort of truth that makes one's heart thrill while discussing quest narratives and walking arm-in-arm beneath the bursting cottonwoods with your mother. 

Corin, no doubt, will have to make up his MAPS testing.  And when we get his end-of-trimester report, that little data set will tell us something we're supposed to hail as a measure of his learning.  No doubt it will be a hair below benchmark, but, shoot, so close.  As always, I will try to take the long view when we get this little graph.  Afterall, I'm raising life long learners, curious and imaginative, who know how to see with the eyes of their hearts - not an ability that will ever be measurable by MAPS or Dibels or Smarter-Balanced Testing.  Can I get a  WooHoo?

 

Last fall, after listening to this fantastic TED talk, Tim and I sat down with our kids and brainstormed a list of our family values.  Who are we as a family?  What are we about?  What does it mean to be a Joss-Iudicello?  What things do we want to foster in ourselves, our family, and by extension, our world?  We threw a lot of words up onto a whiteboard and over the next few days, I took the words we had generated and tried to shape them into a few coherent statements.  We posted these statements on our wall for reference and reminder, to enjoin and encourage.

As with many worthwhile things in life, my relationship to these values is not straightforward.  I wish I could say that upon posting them, I magically transformed into their model practitioner.  Not so.  However, having them always before me has helped orient me to what I intend to be about and the ways I mean to live.

Of late, our first value has been much on my mind.  It reads:
As followers of God's Spirit, we are healthy - mindful of what we put in our body, heart, and head and how we use these things.

body
For the past two years our family has been eating things our species genetic code expects: real foods like healthy fats, grass-fed meats, wild-caught fish, vegetables, some fruit.  We work at being omnivorous nutrient-seekers because, as homo sapiens, we are biological beings built this way.  As much as possible, we eat within our species blueprint, paying attention to what is fit and right for us as human animals.  

Because of this practice, we often find ourselves at variance with the standard American diet (you don't eat bread?) and a culture which seems to celebrate every event with feeding our children food-mimicking substances (Easter, Valentine's, Halloween, birthdays, snacks at the park and treats for everyday consumption are all opportunities for gluten, high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils & dye).  Though our choices prompt discussions, awkward moments, and some tough choices for our kids, we persist because we feel passionate about being homo sapiens (which means, in part, being thoughtful hosts to the 100 trillion [that's trillion with a T!] microorganisms that live in our gut and thus regulate the health of our whole system).   

heart & head
While eating this way has had its difficulties, being mindful about what we put in our bodies has been the easy part of our value statement.  Food and beverage intake is obvious and concrete.  Far more challenging, is being mindful about what we put in our hearts and heads.  Like building strong physical selves, tender hearts and thoughtful minds need nourishment - they need to be filled with good, real material, the spiritual equivalent of nutrient-dense foods.  And just as our bodies become ill, distended, out of optimal health, from being fed outside our species blueprint, so too these less concrete parts of our makeup. 

In college, I had a philosophy professor who spoke about our species' drive for meaning.  As humans, we are verbivorous - that is, we consume words, we need them for life (the sapiens part of our species profile).  My philosophy professor was not alone in characterizing this human trait; long before him, the Torah proclaimed, "..one does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord."  We depend on good language (and art and music) for our spiritual fitness as much as the body depends on good food for physical fitness.  What we fill ourselves with is a matter of consequence.  You are what you eat, body and soul.

Being thoughtful about how we fill ourselves is hard work.  And it becomes harder every day!  The pace at which we receive information has ramped up immeasurably, while our attention spans are dwindling - thank you social media.  My discernment about what is valuable to put in my mind often lapses.  It is so much easier to take in the cheap and the processed and the quick (that facebook post, that youtube clip, that talking-head news report - mental equivalents of candy or pasta or soda) though they seldom provide much nourishment for my heart or mind, rarely giving me the building blocks to extend myself in compassion, love, wisdom, kindness, joy, peace, patience, self-control.

Health is rather a thin word.  To this verbivore, it doesn't nearly approximate all that I want from it.  But I do feel better about the extended definition from our family values, which encompasses the whole person: We are healthy - mindful of what we put in our body, heart, and head and how we use these things.  I do not live by bread alone.  Actually, I don't live by bread at all.  But nor do I live by broth alone (though it has been in the slow cooker for 24 hours and is full of bio-available calcium, phosphorous, magnesium, glycine, proline, collagen...).  My health is also dependent on words I ingest, things I see, what materials I give my heart and mind. This is nutrient-seeking for the verbivore.  The closing lines of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself remind me of this continuous process of feeding ourselves in this way, of feeling our way towards things that are truly good for us:

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I should be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

It is not always obvious why watching that magpie dip through the air, or why reading Winnie the Pooh (Milne's not Disney's!) to Birtie, or why turning off every gadget to sit in silence does a body good (as the milk commercials used to claim, however dubiously).  But nevertheless these things are good health, filtering and fibre-ing our blood, as Whitman writes.  And the great news is, though we may fail to fetch them here and there (as I do - and often), the world is not scant on good things.  They are around, just waiting for our attention to turn their way.

Lastly, fellow verbivore, while I have you, here are some nutrient-dense words for you to chew on:
Wonder.
Imagine.
Think. 
Look.
Listen.
Watch.
Ask.
Search.
Explore.
Ponder.
Treasure.

   
   

There are lots of calendars I keep.  There's the one on my phone with its buzzing reminders that order and regulate my daily life: Corin to the gym, Seth to soccer, Birtie's friend here on Wednesday. There's the seasonal calendar I keep by watching the world outside: the meadowlarks are back, the vinca is greening by the door, the trees have not yet budded out.  The moon is its own calendar.  So too, the light in this season, creeping a little earlier into each morning, stretching a bit further into every evening.

And then there's the calendar of the liturgical year.  By the reckoning of this calendar it is Holy Week.

Holy Week.  The words alone, make me want to set aside everything - the appointment with Corin's teacher, the man coming to inspect our furnace, the grocery shopping that must be done if my children are to have lunch, the mountain of plastic eggs that need to be filled for the neighborhood egg hunt - and choose activities that center on the sacred.

In the liturgical year, Holy Week is the annual invitation to explore the most sacred, painful, hopeful, bruising, beautiful, texts in our cannon.  Over the course of these eight days (Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday), we recount the central story of our faith: Jesus' death and resurrection; darkness' inability to overcome light.

It's a eucatastrophic story - the eucatastrophic story - to use a word of Tolkien's coinage.  Eucatastrophe (eu from the Greek "good") is a story in which victory arrives unlooked for out of certain defeat.  The eucatastrophic is the point in the story when somehow, beyond all imagining, things come right.  It is a story where all has been given up for loss, where bitter defeat is certain, and yet, somehow a better, higher, more complete victory breaks forth like sunrise.  As Tolkien writes, the eucatastrophic is "the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears...a sudden glimpse of Truth."  In an essay, he further explains:
 ...it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

Joy beyond the walls of the world.  Isn't this exactly where Easter takes us?  Not, of course, the Easter of eggs and candy and ham dinners, the Easter on my civic calendar.  The eucatastrophic is only in the Easter of Holy Week - the Easter that follows the week's recounting of betrayal, rejection, abandonment and death, the week where all the evidence is on the side of utter defeat.  If we don't journey through the dark drama of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, then we're unprepared for the radical surprise and dawning joy of being met Sunday morning at that darkest door with the question: why do you look for the living among the dead?

That's the joyous turn, the privileged glimpse into a world where nothing is lost, nothing is abandoned, where love has the last word - where love is the last word.  And this glimpse, beyond the walls of the world we usually inhabit, is Holy Week's invitation.  It's an invitation to the sacred center, to meeting the rising sun.   

I just checked out a book from my library: A Book of Luminous Things.  This great title grabbed me as I was passing it by on my way to the fourth installment of the Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place for my boys.  The Incorrigible children for my boys.  Richard Scarry's Busy, Busy Day for my daughter.  Lumionus things for me.  Aren't libraries the best?

A Book of Luminous Things, it turns out, is an anthology of poetry collected by Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz.  I have long had a Milosz quote written on the back of an index card:
One murky island with its barking seals
Or a parched desert is enough
To make us say: yes, oui, si.
'Even asleep we partake in the becoming of the world.'

I dug out the card with this excerpt from the poem "A Magic Mountain" after I came home from the library with A Book of Luminous Things under my arm. There's a box in the back of my closet with things I have gathered over the years: slips of paper with quotes; a picture of my grandma on her wedding day, her nose scrunched in the smile we all inherited from her; a print of a VanGogh self portrait and one of a field in Arles; a sepia picture of Mount Jumbo in the 1930s; a card with a quote from Antoine Saint Exupery that reads: "you become responsible for what you have tamed"; a score of creek rocks.  And though I seldom peek into this box, if a fire were to ravage my house, it would be one of the first things I grab after my children were safely secured.

It's funny isn't it?  These odds and ends can have no significance for anyone, but remain treasures to me.  Magpie-like, I have lined my nest with glinting bits of this and that.  But here's the thing about this box: when I open it, I know who I am.  I am clear about what I value.  I see (as plainly as we ever get to in this world) my heart and mind.  Matthew's gospel records Jesus as issuing a general warning about what type of treasure we gather.  Do not gather up treasure on earth, he says, where moth and rust destroy, where thieves break in and steal.  But gather up treasure in heaven, where these forces of decay can pose no threat. This wisdom contains the oft-quoted: "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

I am thinking about this quote as I consider the box in the back of my closet.  Perhaps my heart is tucked in cardboard beneath the pile of clothing donations to the goodwill.  Perhaps.  But more likely, it is here and there in these bits of heaven that I have found - Milosz's murky island with its barking seals, VanGogh's self portrait, my grandmother's wedding day grin, rocks softened by Rattlesnake creek.

And these are luminous things indeed.

Milosz closes his anthology's formidable introduction (free-ranging from Cezanne to Schopenhauer to Goethe to Buddha), with this light and lovely statement:  "Yet, since I am obviously interested in the visible world, again and again unveiling itself and offering itself to the eye, I would have nothing against calling my anthology a book of enchantments."

And that is what I have in the back of my closet, I guess, a box of enchantments -- a record of things luminous that have unveiled themselves, even momentarily, and studded my life with their beauty.

I opened Rilke's Letters on Cezanne today.  For some reason these letters have been on my mind as spring begins its slow forward creep.  Later spring will come bounding and rushing, moving boulders in the creek bed, spreading an abundance of blossoms.  But now, at the beginning, it progresses by "littles": stretching light a bit further into each evening, dropping calves in the field, lifting tiny, fragile shoots of green underfoot.

In this season, my mind is on Rilke's letters because they are luminous, making every best idea in me want to stretch and send up exultant green shoots.  In 1907, Rilke wrote to his wife about a visit to an exhibition of Cezanne paintings:

Today I went to see the pictures again;  it's remarkable what a surrounding they create.  Without looking at a particular one, standing in the middle between the two rooms, one feels their presence drawing together into a colossal reality.  As if these colors could heal one of indecision once and for all.  The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness, it educates you; and if you stand among them as ready as possible, you get the impression that they are doing something for you.

Phew... did you get that?  Did you feel that spring breeze lift your hair?  Rilke is saying that standing receptive among these Cezanne paintings gave him the impression that he was being changed.  Isn't that exactly how it feels being among these first outlays of spring? The first vanilla scent of ponderosa sap or the morning lilt of the meadowlark or that iridescent flash from a passing mountain bluebird, these are all doing something for me.  The simple truthfulness of these sights, sounds and smells, educate me.  But in what? There's no syllabus, no course notes, no test, no way to measure how I've changed or even that I'm changing.  This is a province that resists proofs.  It's a territory navigable only by intimations, suggestions, best guesses, hopes.  

I know that the meadowlark sings its song for its mate, or its territory, or because the sun is up and it is such a day.  Its singing has nothing to do with me - it is not for me.  And yet, it works on me.  The other day, on a run in the hills, the trail took me from one meadowlark to the next. With each thrilling song, I felt myself lift right up and nearly sail over the grass.  The songs felt like "the knot in the rosary at which ... life says a prayer" (Rilke again).  How good that we don't have to search up and down and haul ourselves over barren miles to find a teacher.  Already, our education is all about us, in sounds and sights and smells, underfoot and overhead.        

Today is Ash Wednesday.  If you're not familiar with the tradition, Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, the period of forty days leading to Easter.  These days, if Lent is thought of at all, it's often portrayed as a time of self-denial (giving up dessert, or wine, or coffee, or some other of life's small pleasures) and sometimes as a time of guilt.

This is all wrong.  Lent isn't about giving up things, but gaining them.  Lent isn't guilt, it's awareness.  And mostly, Lent is opportunity.  Sometimes at the beginning of a yoga class, a teacher invites participants to set an intention for their practice.  This is something like the invitation of Lent, but instead of holding that intention for forty-five minutes, you get to be in it for forty days.

And Ash Wednesday is that invitation.  It's an invitation to hold before you this one important fact - a fact, that typically, I (and possibly you) spend considerable energy keeping out of daily consciousness: You are dust, and to dust you will return.

Dust.  That's it.  That's the end game.  And it's the starting point.

This past Friday, our kids had a snow day.  Windy and cold, the weather kept us from venturing past the end of our street.   My boys, joining the battalion of neighborhood kids, turned snow piles into fortresses.  In the afternoon, I pulled Birtie on a sled to a friend's down the block.  My friend and I sipped tea and ate chicken soup and commented on the coziness of sheltering in place during our crazy few days of weather. Then my phone lit up with a text and our day changed.  My cousin, who lives a few miles down the thin finger that is our Rattlesnake Valley, sent me these words.  "Avalanche in the Lower Rattlesnake.  Don't let your kids go out and sled."   I called him immediately.  He had been driving home right after the slide had occurred and was stopped in the few cars backed up where snow had piled all the way down onto our main drive.  Then he added these words, "There's a child buried and about thirty people out digging already.  It doesn't look good."

A child buried.  I had just been eating chicken soup, enjoying the cozy fun of a snow day and now there was tragedy in our community, just right down the way, and my heart was in my feet.  I went and rounded up my boys, still busy extending their snow fort.  "Don't go sled." I hugged them, eyeing the hill just beyond our street, the foothills of the mountain where the slide had just happened.  "Don't go anywhere."

In the next few hours, we learned the child, an eight year old, had been dug out, miraculously alive, though in condition unknown.  Then the news came that owners of a house utterly destroyed by the avalanche had been inside when it hit.  Somewhere, beneath all the rubble and the snowfield, they were buried.   Again, miraculously, after hours of work by scores of first responders and volunteers, both were found alive, having landed in air pockets within the snow.  Tragically, in the following days, the woman, who had spent more than three hours beneath that freezing slide, died from complications.

This has been on the mind of everyone I've talked with in recent days.  Who would have thought it possible?, we all ask.  We think about where our houses are situated and eye the pitch of the slope behind us.  Not very steep where we live, I reassure myself.  But mostly what we think about and talk about is the mom, who saw her son swept away under the snow and spent an hour in terror and hell waiting for him to be dug out.  And we think about the couple who were spending the same cozy day at home as we all were, when the snow unloaded.

Dust.  It's not a concept that I want to look squarely in the face - in the face in the mirror that is, or in the faces around my evening dinner table.  But that's exactly the reality Ash Wednesday invokes.  When I lean into awareness of this arc - from dust, to dust - rather than try to dispel it, I understand that a certain wisdom comes from this orientation.  A wisdom, namely, that we, for all our knowledge and science and big brains, are creatures.  And like all creatures, we will crumple at the last, but, to the last, we live as well.

And that's what we gain in Lent, the opportunity to live-- really, fully, wisely.  The opportunity to ask questions of ourselves: to what do I turn for Nourishment?  Joy?  Love?  How do I contribute (wittingly and unwittingly) to injustice in the world?  How do I better align myself with justice and peace and mercy, with the beautiful, with all the things of God?

Today, with ashes on my forehead, I live in the awareness that I only have so long as animate dust.  May I spend the time well, treasure it well, give it well, keep it well, release it well.
     

Today, after several days of winter throwing its weight around, the sun came gloriously out.  We are entrenched in our house, behind heaps and battlements of snow.  The plow, with its gaping maw has not come yet to dig us out and our road is a nearly impassable latticework of furrows, trenches and hummocks.  But this morning, out with my shovel for the sixth day in a row, I was pleased to hear birds twittering, waxwings and chickadees alternating between branches of an aspen and a nearby chokecherry.  Later, a small V of geese went honking overhead, and I rested on my shovel, squinting upward to watch them on their way.

But the real wonder of the morning (no doubt for me and the chattering birds) was the sunshine.  As I worked the east side of my drive, throwing shovelfuls toward the curb, the breeze caught, and caught again, bits of flying snow, tossing it right back at me.  Then, as it blew around, the sunshine goldened each flake so that I stood in the midst of galaxies that were made, had their being, and vanished all in the blink of an eye. It was dazzling, really - these tiny gilded moments, meted out by the shovelful.  There's always things to see.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, patron saint of the nature essay, Annie Dillard writes, "I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.  It is possible, in deep space to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go.  The secret to seeing is to sail on solar wind.  Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff."

I love this.

Life is, of course, always casting us opportunities to whet our spirits.  I miss most of them, no doubt. (Suddenly, ridiculously, I am reminded of that classic I Love Lucy clip where Lucy and Ethel take jobs in a chocolate factory.  They're tasked with wrapping chocolates from a conveyor belt which far out paces their abilities.  Hi-jinks follow and chocolates fly everywhere).  But life is always sending us things to see, more gently perhaps than Lucy's chocolate conveyor.  We miss one, ten, a hundred?   It is no matter. Happily, another may be already at our elbow.  I caught the light while shoveling today.  Standing among the minuscule, momentary, flying galaxies, I felt glad, my life luffing and illuminated like the wind-driven snow.