I haven’t written about synchronicity yet, but this first paragraph is a good example of it. Today I got this email telling me registration is open now for winter Continuing Studies courses at Stanford. Among the courses highlighted was one on quantum physics, and more specifically quantum entanglement. All the physics I know is based on books that were only somewhat new back in 2001 and 2002, which means the research in them was even older than that. So I’m feeling totally out of the know, now, since apparently, to the uttter shock of all, I’m sure, while I haven’t been looking, new discoveries have continued getting made. Consequently, I’ve just been swimming around online in things like quantum entanglement and teleportation and Bell’s Theorum. I guess none of these are new to the last decade, but I somehow managed never to have heard of them before now, and certainly not the most recent experimentations with them. Because of them, my ideas for a next post have all been turned on their heads.

Here’s what I was going to write about this time: I was going to talk about clairvoyance, and my own experiences with it, and try to theorize how tiny particles could travel distances, instantaneously, between people. I kept getting stalled up on the whys involved in this theorized process, though, like why, for instance, would those of us who seem to recieve these theorized particles recieve them only from certain people, and not everyone, since theoretically everyone is emitting particles all the time. What would determine the “stations” that our “radios” are tuned into, so to speak? (I will say that I have on a couple of occasions felt my dial break, and signals from everyone flood into my brain, and that these have been among the most alarming and disturbing experiences of my life.)

But! Then I read about quantum teleportation, and my mind is now spinning a whole different way. I have to begin what I want to say now by telling you what I’ve just been learning of quantum teleportation. (here is where any physicists reading this blog might need to roll their eyes or make very squeemish, contorted faces and wish I would just stick to fiction writing. And here is where I guess I’d have to say that…well…maybe I am. I think fiction is more deeply true than anything else sometimes.).

So. To explain what I’ve gleaned on quantum teleportation so far, I have to start with quantum entanglement. Apparently, very tiny systems–quantum particles, we might call them–can sometimes get entangled. What entangled means is that something happens to them, some special kind of thing, such that when they get separated, the two systems aren’t distinct entities anymore. They’ve taken on one another’s characteristics so much that now they act almost entirely as one. They’re spatially separate, but not in reality, if that makes sense. I’ve known a few couples like this. And some people with their dogs.

The guy who coined the term “entanglement” says it this way:

When two systems, of which we know the states by their respective representatives, enter into temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them, and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described in the same way as before, viz. by endowing each of them with a representative of its own. I would not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought. By the interaction the two representatives [the quantum states] have become entangled. (Shrodinger, 1935)

Quantum teleportation, then, refers to the nearly simultaneous “communication” that happens between entangled systems. When something happens to one of them, it’s mirrored precisely in the other. Like the other is a copy of the first. And it doesn’t matter how far apart these systems are! Miles, inches: same dif. It’s as if space between them does not exist.

I know I’m still an embryo when it comes to understanding these things, but for the sake of having fun, and maybe actually stumbling into something true, I’m going to let my imagination fly.

What if clairvoyance is nothing more than entangled particles doing their thing? We’ve all heard stories of people knowing things about their loved ones–deaths, injuries, etc.–before they’d have any known reason to know such things. What if there simply are parts of these pairs (each pair being the person “knowing” and the person actually dying or being injured) that are quantumly entangled, so that nothing actually has to cross time or space for the two to experience whatever is being experienced? In effect, at least partially, or on a certain kind of level, the two people aren’t two people. They’re one.

These kinds of experiences seem like they’re reported most often by people who love each other. Maybe love is a quantum entangler. I wonder if love will ever become a variable in physicists’ experiments.

But here is where my mind goes next: What if everyone is quantumly entangled with everything? What if we’re all made from the same stuff, all rooted in some common seed, such that when Buddhists and sages from many traditions, and now the priests of science, no less, speak of oneness, they don’t mean only metaphorically, and they don’t mean only by cause-and-effect ripples that spread infinitely out from every act? What if they mean literally?

Einstein called the very notion of entanglement “spooky action at a distance” and didn’t want to believe it. And the individualism of the Enlightenment and of much in Christendom today wouldn’t want to believe it either. But what if it’s true? What if we are all one, and it’s only the distances we keep believing exist that actually keep us from reading each other’s minds? What if clairvoyance really is what its French roots imply: clear seeing, and this clarity of sight is awakeness to our own limbs, our own bodies, our own minds and extensions that just so happen not to be anywhere nearby?

This is disturbing stuff, at least to me, and I aim to talk more, next time, about how I’ve dealt with my own clairvoyant experiences, and the choice I made a couple years ago to turn my “radio” off.

In the meantime, I would love any book suggestions–related to physics or otherwise, religious or otherwise–that deal with this idea of oneness. I’d like to explore this some more.

A couple of years back my father-in-law forwarded me an article about neutrinos. Knowing I was into physics, he thought I might be interested. Was I ever! I’ve just tried to find the article and can’t, and so have spent the last half hour surfing websites, trying to get my bearings again. What I have concluded is that a) I need to get a masters in physics to understand most of what I’ve just read and b) OMG! This is crazy shit! (In the most respectful, awestruck use of the term, of course.)

Here is my laywoman definition of a neutrino: a very, very small particle. So small that any mass at all could not be detected for decades worth of testing. So small, and so amazingly constructed, that it can move through matter practically unhindered. Wikipedia says it would take a light-year of lead to block half of the neutrinos produced by the sun.

The article I first read about them talked about them moving so fast, and so unobstructed, that an explosion in space, some light years away (if I remember correctly) sent neutrinos to a detection tank, on the other side of the earth from where the explosion actually occured, instantaneously. They went through the earth, is what I’m saying. Instantly. From very, very far away.

This may not knock your socks off, but the first time I heard it, my feet were dern naked. Instantly.

Why, you ask?

Well, here’s the thing. If there are particles this small and this free of limitations…and this difficult to detect with all our most fancy neoneopostpostmodern trillions-of-dollars-worth scientific techniques–particles we’re only beginning to understand, and that challenge us to speculate on other sorts of undetectable “things”–then it seems plausible to me that some of the psi phenomenon that people observe and experience (clairvoyance, esp, psychokinesis, etc.), and that scientists have so far been unable to conclusively prove, are actually the result of matter like this. Little tiny particles traveling between people. What if we are all emitting particles, all the time, and it is these that are resposible for people knowing, for example, from a distance that a loved one has died or been injured, like right when it happened? What if the phenomenon of discoveries happening nearly simultaneously across the globe–like in science or math, for example–could be explained, in part, by actual particles traveling instantly outward from their sources (i.e. the people making them), enlightening others in the field in a subconscious way?

What if all the phenomenon that people have for centuries attributed to a spiritual realm, are really all part of the material universe? What if physical and spiritual are really the same exact thing??

I’m going to write more on this topic next time, but let this intro suffice: I totally get off on this sort of thing.

Wow.

I want to pick up on this money theme again soon, but have to say my mind is running a hundred other directions now. Among other things, I’ve been thinking about Christmas, and how tired I am of spending energy year by year feeling a) annoyed and grieved by my country’s consumerism and b) annoyed and grieved by what feels like the idolizing of Jesus. Idolizing anyone feels like a distraction from actually seeing and learning from how they live/d. In the case of Jesus, it seems like a great way to get distance from the revolutionary, irreligious, de-idolizing words the gospels have him speak.

But none of that is the point of this post.

The point I want to make is that I’m tired of giving energy to these grievances, and am actually excited about the prospect of spending this advent differently. So, in honor of the mysteries that infuse our world with things like Jesus, and Buddha, and the towering pine trees next door, I’m going to spend my posts in the next four weeks exploring things that fill me up with wonder, and get me all sparkly inside with the miracle and mystery that is life in this world…things that do the very opposite of some the ways I’ve spent energy in advents past.  I’ll consider this a spiritual discipline.
Here is a small list of potentials:

- synchronicity
- neutrinos
- string theory
- energy fields
- clairvoyance
- fourth, fifth and sixth dimensions
- the relativity of space and time

Since about the middle of September, Elijah and I have been part of a play group (beyond the impromtu one we have each day at the park). This group meets every Monday afternoon at various parks in the area (there–I’ve already said “park” now twice–okay thrice–in one paragraph, so you can only imagine how much more it gets said in our household these days). Elijah seems to enjoy the other kids, and I’m enjoying getting to know the moms. They’re easy to connect with, friendly, good conversationalists–and this despite the challenges posed to our talks by wobbling toddlers and play structures.

Two weeks ago we joined a spin-off of this group. A couple of the moms with experience in preschool education decided to spearhead what’s turned into our own little preschool, complete with planned educational activities, songs, snacktime, etc. And the cost? Free! Having no extra money for things like this these days, I feel like I’ve struck gold.

Last week was our first week attending, and our first time seeing the home in which the group gathered. It’s in downtown Palo Alto, and if that doesn’t mean anything to you, let’s just say small shacks there probably cost more than a million these days. This particular one was of a more…expansive size.

So I was silenced, to be honest, while walking to the door. The woman who owns it was the same warm, easy-going self that I’ve gotten to know and enjoy at the parks, and everyone inside seemed well at ease. But I found myself internally goggle-eyed. I’ve never been up close to so much wealth.

This week my experience was similar. We met at a mansion in the hills of Los Altos. The rooms in which the kids were free to roam could each hold most of our apartment. The toys available for play made our collection look like one you might fit, in its entirety, into one of those plastic eggs you buy from the gumball machines. Elijah went nuts for the first hour, running everywhere, playing with everyone and everything, and then finally stopped in the middle of it all, overwhelmed. He turned a few slow circles, taking in all the options, and then started to cry.

I left there quiet.

Wealth is such a relative thing. By most of the world’s standards–indeed, much of our own country’s–I’m more than rich. At times I have felt awkward, since moving here, to see our home become more posh than ever it’s been before this. Our couches, lamps, lamp table, area rugs, curtains, artwork, dining set–all of this is less than two years old. This, after having furnished our place ten years ago with fifty bucks, spent at a handful of yardsales.

But our standard of living compared with those of many in our playgroup is pittance. From toys to vacations to clothes to dwelling to the food we buy to eat, there are significant differences.

What do I do with these disparities? And the ones between me and those who have far less? What does it mean that some kids will always have everything money can buy? What are their advantages? What are mine?

I want to say everything is equal; everyone comes from different places, has such different stories, that to put a moral value on any standard of living–high or low–is unfair. We’re just people, right? Doing what we know to do?

But something inside of me says that’s not the route I want to take. Not exactly. It’s the part of me that knows globalization means knowledge, at least on most of our peripheries, of what consumerism is doing to our planet, of the growing gap between haves and have nots, of the interconnectedness of people on both sides of borders and jailbars and oceans and tracks. It takes all of us to make our systems what they are. We’re all to be lauded and blamed.

In light of this, however, ascetisism isn’t a route I want to take either. Or guilt, or self-righteous indignation. Any of these sucks life clear out of me, and no doubt from those within my reach. I’m interested in something more…inspiring to fill my thoughts about bank.

I’m inspired by people who are wealthy in things like compassion, mindfulness, involvement in public life, at whatever level. I’m inspired by people who have learned to be content with little, and not because they’re obsessed with levels of consumption, or looking down noses on those with much, but because contentment and gratitude are things they genuinely want to have. By people who are curious, people filled with wonder, people awake to the interconnectedness of us all. People who feel privileged to know you, and you, and you, no matter who you are, how much you own, or how pleasing you are to look at. I think this sense of privilege goes along with being inherently curious. And jolly.

My list could go on, but it seems like everything on it doesn’t have to be correlated with a particular income bracket. My guess is that wealth and poverty and the entire middle class all carry inherent challenges for cultivating the kind of wealth for which I long. Life does.

But this, too, feels like a conversation cop-out.

I want to think more on this topic, and reflect on it here. But I’d love to hear what any of you think. How do you feel about having what you own? About the amount of money you make, and the challenges and opportunities made available because of it? Have you found a way of sidestepping such questions altogether in pursuit of something better?

A few weeks ago I got an invitation from The Triad Institute, via Adam Walker Cleaveland, to read and review David James Duncan’s latest book. I didn’t read the invitation closely enough, however, to see that the book was called God Laughs and Plays, and had both “sermons” and “fundamentalist right” in the subtitle. I thought I was signing up to read a novel. Since Christians and I don’t generally use “God” to refer to the same thing, and since sermons and fundamentalists continue to be things I mostly try to avoid, you can imagine my horror, some days later, when the book arrives and I see the cover alone contains all three! Ack!

Luckily I looked closer this time. The real title reads God Laughs and Plays: Churchless Sermons In Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right.

Now, we can argue about whether the title accurately sums up the book, or whether I will ever get totally comfortable with it, but we can’t about this: I just sat here weeping after reading the whole thing through. I cried the kind of tears you only do when some deep, deep need you didn’t even know existed in you gets offered to you gently, lovingly, on the very platter that the grandma you’ve only ever dreamed of having owns—the one on which your imaginative matriarch of all-will-be-well serves you up cobbler and roast beef and sweet rolls and every kind of homemade Christmas treat. The one the mere glimpse of which reminds you, despite all evidence to the contrary, that you’ve always belonged somewhere, nestled deep into a clan, and that words like slick and posh and edgy and cool don’t apply here, never have, and therefore cannot touch your sense of being fine and loved and safe and known, all the way to your core. Normal, even.

He served me up these things, this David Duncan, middle-aged, writer-activist-comic-mystic-angler that apparently he is.

God Laughs and Plays is a collection of essays. It’s taken from talks, interviews and writings from Duncan’s recent past, and together is a kind of No! to any worldview—fundamentalist or otherwise—that would flatten or feign capable of stuffing our world into known and owned and heavily controlled commodities, things separate from holy, and therefore freely trampleable and disposable and looked past for finding God. It’s a Yes! to anything that expands wonder, which is to say love. Duncan writes:

Wonder is my second favorite condition to be in, after love—and I sometimes wonder whether there’s even a difference: maybe love is just wonder aimed at a beloved. Wonder is like grace, in that it’s not a condition we grasp: wonder grasps us. We do have the freedom to elude wonder’s grasp. We have the freedom to do all sorts of stupid things. By deploying cynicism, rationalism, fear, arrogance, judgmentalism, we can evade wonder nonstop, all our lives. I’m not too fond of that gnarly old word, sin, but the deliberate evasion of wonder does bring it to mind. It may not be biblically sinful to evade wonder, but it is artistically and spiritually sinful. (8)

So it’s a love letter to Life, you could say, in the deepest, all-encompassing sense of the word Life, and a mama-bear growl toward anything that would defame Her…that would defame God.

Lest you fear an embittered tirade of equal, though left-handed, barb to the kinds of rants the fundamentalist right can make, however, listen to what he says early on:

There is a self-righteous knot in me that finds zealotry so repugnant it wants to sit on the sidelines with the like-minded, plaster my car with bumper stickers that say MEAN PEOPLE SUCK and NO BILLIONAIRE LEFT BEHIND and WHO WOULD JESUS BOMB?, and leave it at that. But I can’t. My sense of this life as pure gift—my sense of a grace operative in this world despite, and even amid, its hurts and terrors—propels me to allow life to open my heart still wider, even if this openness comes by breaking. For I have seen the whole world fall into a few hearts, and nothing has ever struck me as more beautiful. (xxv)

This is the kind of heart you will find beating behind and inside of all the teeth this book can bare.

So what about this heart, and the brains and words and quirks attached to it? How did it serve me up such grounding, grandmotherly kindness?

Though my past might say otherwise, I am not religious. I am not a churchgoer. I confess that most religious people and places do little by way of opening my heart to God. They don’t expand my sense of wonder, to put it Duncanly. I am, however, deeply hungry to sense my (our) union with God. And I’m seized by this—by wonder, by love—as I ponder so many things: people, trees, planets, stars, nutrinos, animals, carpentry, music, color, the texture of almost anything I touch. I see things, too, with a deep, inner eye. Visions, if you want to call them that.

So I am a mystic, even as I’m hopelessly tethered to my rational, knowledge-based side.

And in all of this, in this crazy mix of rational and irrational…metarational; in my love of all things known and unknown and my thirst for ever more of them flowing into me; in the kinds of feelings and images evoked when they do; in the echoes of wisdom and truth I see and study across religious traditions, and my chafing at claims to the contrary, I have felt alien. There’s a stamp in the shape of woowoo spiritist and a stamp in the shape of religious adherent and a stamp in the shape of rational ponderer or crazy right-brained mystic, but none of these alone has ever fit my forehead well.

But along comes Duncan, whose book I blindly and then resistantly and then with gusto stumble into, and he’s speaking my language! He’s talking my talk! Were I born twenty years earlier, and in Montana, and raised by fundamentalist Seventh Day Adventists, I’ve no doubt I would be his best friend. Maybe sister. I swear I’d know how to fish.

So he normalized me, is what I’m trying to say. And in having lived that much longer, pondered that much more, engaged that much more actively in resisting religious and political wonder-kill machines, he has blazed a kind of trail for aliens like me. Like us. Or lifted up the veil that’s hidden the existing paths surrounding us thus far.

So what does the trail he’s blazed by this book look like?

Real, for one. With or without intention, the essays of this book outline a man who feels rage and fear and pride and grief and indignation, but likewise joy and mirth and hope and gratitude and humility. He toots his own horn, but in the next breath, or essay, disappears into a kind of egoless sage, connecting with the best in all of us. I’m drawn to his aliveness to all of these parts of being human, and to the way his activist hat, and tragic/comic masks, and aged teacher of youth voice, and philosopher’s pipe, and wild prophet hairdo, and scientist’s coat, and druid’s staff, and mystic’s eyes, and any other garb or sound for any of the roles he owns aren’t glued on permanently tight. He dances, at least in this collection, within a full range of humanness. He feels real, in the very best sense of the word. And he’s funny, too.

Surely this is a trail we aliens would do well to follow.

But his trail is more than real. It winds an almost impossible path of attentiveness to detail—to place, to land, to people, and even the smallest grain of sand—but stretches that attention out beyond the scope of any single person’s sight. Politics—again local, but also national and international—get his trail’s time. Religion, of course. And cosmic things, too. One feels the pan in reading this of an intoxicated-with-life cinematographer, whose alternate delight and alarm at the interconnectedness of everything—galaxies all the way down to fundamentalists and writers and dying dogs and salmon—has his camera swinging ever out and in. But the swing is elegant, and unhurried, so by the time you reach the climax, all you can do is…all I can do is…weep. The very best, most fulfilled kind of tears.

If every book with God and fundamentalist and sermon in the title were like this one, I suspect aliens would feel alien no more. Our world would be inhabited and inhabitable by far less war, on every level, and far more kindness, far less senseless death and dying and far more life that stretches through and beyond both things. Wonder would be more like the air we all breathe.

[edited to turn off comments; getting lots of spam on this post for some reason]

I’m sitting in my living room, the sparseness somewhat jarring. An hour ago a truck rumbled off with our piano. Our closets are overflowing with other kinds of friends, books boxed suffocatingly “out of sight”, but the time finally came when we had to choose between them (and all the others scattered on every surface in the house), and this mammoth Lovely, who has languished in our living room virtually silent for over a year. I can’t play while Elijah is present (true, duets are possible, but E’s taste in sound is startlingly, jarringly different than my own), and I’m never here without him either in the room, or sleeping ten feet away.

So…not 48 hours ago I posted a picture on Craigslist, and within minutes had good as sold the thing. The buyer came hours later, paid for it, and arranged for movers to come the next day.

I’m shell-shocked, to be honest. I walked to the park when the buyer left, tearing up the whole way. What have I done? What have I done?

Al, the granddad there each day, was kind, and listened to my woe. We talked about instruments and music. He has a guittar he likes to play. I told him on my list of things to do before I die is learn to play the cello. But, mind you, I said, that diminishes nothing of my love for pianos.

I love pianos. To me they are like ancient trees; they soothe me, ground me. I started lessons at age 4, I think, and played my heart out daily until high school sports and a boyfriend took all my attention away. But I mean that part about my heart. Somehow, through all those years of practice, my heart got wound into all those strings. Maybe pressed into the pedals, the benches, the keys. And not just of only one piano. It’s all of them. The one that just got lugged down our steps walked with me through some very dark times. She gave and gave and gave when I had no words for what I was feeling–only notes.

I still have dreams of more composition, dreams of playing the blues, dreams of finishing the instrumentation for this song.

But…I have a toddler now, and I live in a paper-thin apartment, and even if there were no toddler involved, I would feel strange barging with music into all my neighbors’ homes uninvited.

So I’m sitting in my empty living room, imagining a wall full of books, trying to be happy that I get to see them all again.

As the truck drove off, and Elijah busied himself in the dust from where she stood, as I gazed nostalgically out the window and the smoke from the movers’ cigarettes wafted toward the sky, I thought, “Go well, dear friend. Go well.”

Living in a culture where face-to-face community sometimes feels as accessible and ready-made as homemade bread, my feelers are up high for where to find it. Having spent the majority of my life in the church, I entered the out-of-church world wondering (wandering), genuinely, how people out here find it. Who brings you casseroles when you have a baby, for example? Who fills in as surrogate family when your own lives miles away? And how do you have meaningful conversation, about politics or spirituality or ethics or the mysteries of quantum physics, for that matter, if the most informal conversation you have in a week happens in line at the grocery store?

The main thing I’ve learned in recent years is there are as many answers to such questions as there are people.

For the last two months I have been going with Elijah to a neighborhood park each morning. We spend about an hour there, eating sand, testing the doneness of bark chips, drying the slides with our butts. What has happened, though, in spite of or because of these things, is community has formed around a little crew of us who gather there each day. There’s the Swedish nanny whose family is mostly scattered across Europe, and who misses them dearly. There’s the Chinese caregiver who is teaching me, laughingly, her language, while I teach her mine. There’s the granddad who is full-time watcher of grandbaby, Ben, and who loves ham radios and biking and Nova. Yvette, who loves to travel, and whose Liam has the best manners of any 20-month-old I know. John, whose Sarah eats only humus and guacamole and who serenades us constantly (Sarah–not John). We talk together, almost daily, in the relaxed, come-and-go way that can only happen in a place that’s built for play.

We like each other. We look forward to being there. In a world of so much anonymity, it feels great to be greeted warmly by name, to have a place, to be missed when illness keeps us away.

Here’s four of the little guys who are forming friendships of their own, at our feet. Elijah is on the far right, next to Sarah, Liam, and Ben. I think he might be receiving some kind of revelation about Sarah’s elbow.

This is one of the ways that I’ve found connection and conversation in a life season and occupation that aren’t particularly people full. But how about you? How have you done it? Any stories of unlikely groups or connections?

You must go read. All the way to the end. De-lightful, and just what I needed to jumpstart my session at this screen today.

I’ve just begun Paulo Coelho’s latest novel, The Devil and Miss Prym, and was surprised to be confronted in its preface with a belief I thoroughly own. The surprise wasn’t in the belief itself, since on tons of levels I resonate with Coelho’s thought, but rather in realizing it totally contradicts, at least on first blush, another of my convictions. So I want to explore this contradiction and see if it really exists.

Here’s the quote:

Each of the three books [in Coelho’s trilogy And on the Seventh Day] is concerned with a week in the life of ordinary people, all of who find themselves suddenly confronted by love, death and power. I have always believed that in the lives of individuals, just as in society at large, the profoundest changes take place within a very reduced time frame. When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready.

The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny.

My view of destiny is broad, and is more about a pulse inside of us than any pre-ordained script, so maybe don’t get caught up on that part. The idea I’m most intrigued by is this one that “the profoundest changes take place within a very reduced time frame,” and “a week is more than enough time” for such changes to take place.

I think Coelho’s right. Totally. For all the apparent slowness of progress–inside ourselves, in the world around us–big things often happen in an instant. Big ideas get born, equations get solved, accidents kill, decisions get made, yeildedness happens to an inner voice, or to some person that we love, but haven’t been able to reconcile with. These things happen quickly, don’t they?

Or do they?

One of my biggest frustrations with certain brands of Christianity is the way conversion is understood in them. In such places, conversion is seen as the moment when a person magically transforms from something they’ve always been into something totally new. Bam! No process, no recovery, no counseling or hard work. A single prayer and the person is, or should be, if they were sincere, a happy, joyful God-child. Forever.

I have many problems with this, but for now I’ll focus on one: that person who prayed that special prayer? They won’t be happy all the time. They won’t always have joy. And odds are the same patterns that got them yearning for salvation in the first place are still, moments and even weeks or years after conversion, just that. Patterns. Anyone who has broken a pattern knows, with a few remarkable exceptions, that patterns take lots and lots of practice to break.

The transformations I’ve experienced thus far have taken terribly much time to happen, or at least I experience their unfolding that way, and the happiness and joy that I experience now, in far greater abundance than ever I experienced in any orthodox fold, have been won by terribly much work. Hundreds of hours of journaling and pondering and reading and talking and sleeping and waiting and sighing and crying and laughing and going to therapy. I’m an evangelical believer in healing and transformation and redemption and change. But I’m an angry mama bear at the suggestion that such things should happen quickly, or easily, or in response to some pre-scripted prayer.

But–and this is where the yieldedness I mentioned earlier comes in–I do believe in tipping points. I believe processes, for all their infinite unfolding, contain moments like Coelho talks about, choices that confront us, and on which mountains of things, whole worlds of things, depend.

So here’s my conclusion: I believe in conversion (religious and not), and that a choice in a moment, experienced as a turning from old to new, can make all the difference in the world. I believe a week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destinies, and also that our destinies are far more tenacious than to let us go if our choice, in such a week or moment (or weak moment), is against them.

My first brush with death happened on a Wednesday night in 1987. I was eleven years old, and I know it was Wednesday because my sister was at youth group. I’m not sure where my mom was, but when I answered the phone and heard my aunt ask to speak with my dad, I knew by her voice that something was wrong.

There are very few memories etched as deeply in my mind as the moments that followed her question. I sat in the dark of our dining room, watching my dad in florescent kitchen light take in the news of his mother’s imminent and unanticipated death. I didn’t know what he was hearing, but I saw his shoulders curl forward, his hand cover his face, and the tears of one who was loving and grieving deeply fall. I hadn’t ever seen him cry before that day.

My grandmother was tall and beautiful. She had snow white hair and “laughing hazel eyes,” as was written of her in some paper in her youth, and quoted often by our family. Her kitchen was constantly filled with the smells of her marvelous meals.

My two most vivid memories of her are both filled with light. I’m five or six, and my sister three years older. It’s morning, and my grandpa has already been up for hours. We’re snuggled, the three of us girls, in my grandparents’ bed, morning sunshine filtering through gauze curtains to dance on the bedspread and the familiar picture frames adorning their walls and bureau tops. We’re laughing and talking and warm, and if love were light, the room would have dazzled with it. The room did dazzle with it.

My second memory is in my house–the house of my youth. Again I’m quite young, and grandma is putting me to bed. It’s summer, so the room is still light, and grandma is rubbing my back softly and singing. The memory is soft, like her touch, and cool whites and grays–her hair, the fading light, my pillow on my cheek. I feel safe and loved and the relief from desert heat that only desert-dwellers know.

I loved my grandma, and love her still. I knew her for eleven years, but that was long enough for her love to get inside of me and stay there, to be a kind of spring I still return to. I feel held in the web of my ancestry by her and by my grandpa, their kindnesses an encircling softness that joins with other loves to challenge my fears that life is dark and rough and lonely and cold. I love it that she lives inside of me, too–in my genes, in my memories, in the habits and phrases that got passed down to me from her.

In 1987 I began a lesson that will surely last a lifetime, of learning how light changes when someone you love dies. How their light can feel completely gone, like my eleven-year-old self sitting in all that darkness, watching a different light than I had ever known reveal the world in harsher hues. Death is a fluorescent bulb sometimes, chasing away the subtleties, the filters, the mists that often hide the things we don’t want to see: unanticipated darknesses, dads weeping, beloved things getting taken away.

But time, and the persistence of a love that does not die along with death, have been teaching me a different way to see. They’ve been teaching me that grandma’s light isn’t gone. It’s with me always. It shines in my memories, my body, her children, my son. It shines as I remember her this day, along this path.

To continue along this grid blog path of remembrances, click here. To read my initial post describing what a grid blog is, click here.