Preparation

Mornings have turned colder here in the desert, and what we call winter has at last arrived. Time for sweatpants and a robe when I get up, and in the evening, even if the temperature still climbs into the mid-70s and even into the 80s now and then.

I grow sluggish when the weather turns cold, when the sun isn't there to pull me out of bed on early mornings. I still wake up, partly from habit and partly because I'm passing into that age when I don't seem to be able to sleep late anymore; if I'm still in bed at 7:30, that's "sleeping in." But partly the season slows me down--the holiday season, I mean. My childhood memories of this time of year aren't exactly Norman Rockwell, but even more than that what people do now with the holidays discourages me.

This is my cue to go on about commercialism, the spirit of Christmas, blah, blah, blah. But I don't have anything to say that you can't get from "A Charlie Brown Christmas," and there you get to watch Pigpen and his trademark cloud of dust. So I'll spare everyone my self-righteousness.

Since I can't personally transform the holiday season, I've decided that winter might not be a bad time to work on transforming myself. I've always been a believer in rituals as something that defines who we are. Maybe it's the former altar boy in me. Who am I kidding? Of course it's the former altar boy in me. I don't mean the big rituals or ceremonies, like graduation or marriage or family getting together at Thanksgiving, though those are important if the spirit behind them is real.

But the really important rituals, I think, occupy the small corners of our daily lives. Like the arrival of the Maryknoll missionary magazine my mother used get when I was a boy. I supposed they did as much as anything to shape my spirituality. Or, in a negative sense, the automatic way I've gotten into of turning on my television as soon as I get home. Those little rituals make a path--or a rut--bit by bit: smoothing the grass here, pushing back the branches there, evening the dirt with each footfall.

I've been silent on the blog during the past few weeks, in a funk, in a slump. About a week ago, I decided I need to get deliberate. So I'm meditating each morning, setting a goal of some exercise each day, getting to bed by 10:30, proscribing time in front of the computer or my notebook or a blank pad--not time that I'll necessary write, but time when I won't do anything else. I'm trying, through these small, repeated acts, to get ready for something.

Actually, that's what the season is supposed to be about. In the deepening winter (at least in the northern hemisphere; we forget that for many people in the world, Christmas comes at midsummer or in tropical heat), the Advent rituals of my Catholic childhood were about hope. They were about preparation for the time when more would be possible. So I'm trying to get ready, in all the small ways that matter most. Trying to ready my heart and mind and body for where I'm supposed to turn next.

Drift

Living in the desert, I miss two places the most. Or I should say I miss the sensation of standing in those places.

The first is the prairie, where I passed from the edge of childhood through adolescence into a tumultous early adulthood. If you have ever stood on the border of a field with the vista of nothing before you but grass or better yet waist-high wheat, each stalk crowned by a clump of grain, a sky clear and vacant or ominous with blue-black clouds, then you know the sensation I mean. The wind blows not by you or over you but through you, renders you air-permeable, the blustery sound of it filling your ears, the power of it rubbing its forearm over the surface of the earth, completely unconcerned by you. It will blow for days like this, jerking and snapping (sometimes ragged) the laundry on the line. Gusts rumble and rattle the windows at night; wind chimes ring like a city telephone. The steady pressure and sound of it lean into the house, and the house talks back, especially in the dark, in groans.

More than a thousand miles away, standing on the edge of the Carolina coast, I have experienced the same sense of submission. In the face of this blue-gray-green (depending on the sky and the angles of light) creature moment by moment rising up to bite at the land I stand on, I can only stare. Water moves incessantly, thumps at the sand, then hisses its way back. I've never understood the need to build amusement parks or shopping centers or spas or, god help me, pools at the oceanside. I never felt the need to *do* anything in the face of the ocean. All I really want to do at the shore is look, just be still. I sink into the sleep and then the tingling of the pulse, of being invaded and sometimes even overwhelmed by the force of all that unsteady restless water. It used to consume me, sometimes even terrify me standing on the beach at night with the sea and sky melding into unison in the darkness. It was like standing on the edge of a roaring emptiness that I knew was more than emptiness. It made me wonder how prehistoric people--before they had boats to journey far on it--ever made sense of the sea.

These two experiences come to mind now as I have been struggling with my writing lately. I feel myself confronted by forces I can't see--or that my eye can't completely encompass. I feel the energy there, and in a way I feel myself rendered insignificant by it and that frightens me. It's as though I were in that field or at the ocean side and had closed my eyes and plugged my ears, intimidated by where I stood. The impulse moves through me just the same. It scares me because I want to shape it and turn it and switch it off and on when I want to, but it carries me. I'm like driftwood; I have no business trying to steer or paddle. The current knows far more than I do, and my job is to learn to listen. I suppose my struggle *with* writing is really always more of a struggle *against* it. It will have its way or I will stay in that place with closed eyes, covered ears, and a hum straining inside of me.

Green

In the place where I live, in the desert, some people find beauty hard to come by. No tall oaks or elms or maples line the boulevards the way they do in the East, where I used to live, or in the Midwest, where I spent my youth.

The desert has it's trees, though with their scratchy bark and spiked and thorned branches, you climb them at your own risk. No, mainly it's the ground that startles the eye. When you look at the earth here, what you see is earth. There's no grass , not the deep greens of North Carolina or Kentucky, or even the pale, sun-scorched yellow of the Kansas plains in mid-summer. And this isn't the dark soil you find in turned farm fields of a place like Iowa, deep brown to black.

Here there's only dirt, light brown, cracked, clay-like earth when it hasn't rained for a time. Clods of dirt, or sandy soil, or dirt ground fine enough to look and feel like powder. Fissures and gullies line the bare ground like age lines. They have been carved by the rains that do come suddenly, sending water racing over the earth and cutting deeply into it, and then leave the ground open to be baked by a dry sun.

No, you don't find the desert bathed in green as you do other landscapes. But the green is here. It surprises me, like the palo verde, a plant so hungry to gather every scrap of life that the very bark on the tree is a bright green, from trunk to limb. There is green on the varieties of cactus: the tall saguaros with their arms reaching straight up to the sky, the rounded prickly pear with flat ping-pong paddle surfaces, or the stubby barrel cactus always leaning to the south and often topped with bright yellow fruit.

What lives in the desert seizes life and clings to it tenaciously, ingenously. It grabs hold of the sides of mountains that shoot up precipitiously from the desert floor. And over everything, the sky stretches itself like a wide, pale sheet, like a canvas giving shape and tint to everything that lives beneath it.

Some people, as I said, struggle to find the beauty in this landscape. They bring the East with them, laying thick pallets of grass over the dirt and flooding it with irrigation. Some subdivisions require that homeowners keep a green lawn, even in the face of high water bills and drought. They plant trees and shrubs and put up vines to creep up the sides of their homes. I've lived in rain forest and loved it, and on the prairie and spent time by the ocean and loved them too. But something about a landscape that seems so stripped bare yet holds so much life keeps me in its thrall.

Sometimes beauty looks so little like what you'd expect, maybe always. Maybe surprise is part of what makes beauty--real beauty--and part of what keeps you looking again and again. In the middle of summer, when the temperature has gone over 100 for the twentieth consecutive day, when I'm thinking about October or December, I turn a curve along the belly of the mountains north of town and I see it. I see the desert again.

Small Joys, Everywhere

A story in an article I read about Fred Rogers--that's The Mr. Rogers--talked about his reaction to one of the school shootings a few years ago. He had heard that the two students who engaged in the shootings told friends and acquaintances they were going to do "something big," that "something big was about to happen."

And Mr. Rogers, being Mr. Rogers and able to invert things and look at them upside down and sideways and inside out, wondered how things might have turned out differently if the two boys had focused on doing something little.

For some reason, that story came to mind when I talked to my wife last night about this weblog. I had received responses recently from several people about the sadness and melancholy of its tone. I don't take those responses--and I don't think they were intended--as criticism; I've thought about the issue myself. Do I think too much about the sadness and suffering in the world? Do I pay too much attention to pain?

In a way, I think the answer is yes, but not because sadness is all I see. I have always had a contrary tendency to look at the things that make other people want to look away, and to turn my head from the things that everyone points to and shouts about. I refuse to rubberneck at accidents, and for years I avoided seeing E.T. because everyone talked about how wonderful it was.

In part that comes from being a black American and Catholic, which means having to develop a kind of counter-history. For example, when people talk about "the good old days," I always had to ask myself who they were good for. In part it comes from being a younger sibling in a family in turmoil, in which hard truths about things were never faced and talked about.

But also, I think it comes from living in a culture that doesn't seem to understand the relative values of big and little, that doesn't understand the difference between joy and happiness. We seem to pursue Happiness as though it were a big prize, to be purchased like a new SUV or won like a lottery jackpot. I engage in this too much myself. I think about the amount of money I'd like to make, the work I'd like to do, the house I'd like to have, and I can easily trick myself into believing that possession of those things will make me Happy. I can start to imagine that merely living in the presence of those things will give my spirit ease.

Joy, though, involves looking at life in a different way. It emerges in the small, daily bits of experience that remind me I'm alive. I feel it when I open myself to wonder.

I can look out my sliding glass doors right now, turn my head, and see tall trees and shadowed mountains and the sky getting lighter just before sunrise. I can pick up the pocket color wheel I bought a couple of weeks ago at a craft store going-out-of-business sale, see the magic of the colors blending and playing off of each other. I can see the wood grain of my desk, or the cool white of a large blank piece of paper. Or I can look at photographs of my sons over the years, see the changing shapes of their faces and yet observe how they remain in some sense the same. Or I can, as I will in a few minutes, turn off the lamp and the computer and go back to bed and lie with my wife and hold her for a few minutes before we get up and the busy-ness of our day begins.

That's joy. And as long as I'm alive, I can experience those wonders. But only, I believe, so far as I'm also willing to experience everything else, to honestly open myself to the whole range of emotions. To wonder at experience means wondering at the loss as well as the gain, it means swallowing the universe whole, not picking my way through.

Happiness is large, and we seek those big moments when it makes its appearance. Joy is small but sprinkled everywhere. I need to remember, as much as anyone, to look; I need to remember to name it when I see it.