Blog - Laurie Klein, Scribe

Change: Brought to You Today by the Letter “R”

Two vases, cast off
by their owners,
stand side by side
in my greenhouse window.

My Jack Sprat-and-wife of the pottery world.

Both came from yard sales, several years apart, and I enjoy them every day. But this morning … I see them a-fresh.

Last year, you could say my life resembled the tall vase: shapely and capacious, with an easy, upward outlook. Familiar, much-loved dimensions.

Then I got scary sick.

Talk about crushing. It was like being squashed into the squat, bulbous vase: squeezed, compressed, diminished. My personal soundtrack underwent change, too, from carefree humming to yelps, groans, the occasional whimper.

In the words of Jeremiah the prophet, I was being emptied from vessel to vessel.

Without my permission.

“The people of Moab,” Jeremiah said, “are like wine left to settle; they have never been emptied from one jar to another.”

Dregs are so repulsive.

And no one wants to be forced into shape-shifting change. So we pray, rebel, scout silver linings. We whine, rage, then pray some more.

Panicky at being out of control, we pursue compulsions. (Why yes, I did solve 31 jigsaw puzzles and 413 crosswords.)

Sometimes we make lists: Things I Can Still Do.

We binge. Then pay. Grieve. Pray harder.

And all the while, friends—like you!—keep showing up. You pray, send cards, emails, puzzles, and gifts. You prepare healing foods and assist with errands.

The goodness of God shown through loving, practical grace has kept me hopeful, tensile. Malleable.

Little by little, I’ve found peace in the awkward new shape of my days.

“Through love all pain will turn to medicine” (Rumi).

Friends, after five long months my new favorite word begins with the letter “R.” I am officially in Remission. End. Of. Siege. No more Abominable Abdominal C. diff!

Now begins the slow, stretching efforts of trial-and-error diet, to heal the interior damage.

Perhaps I need a third vase.

Have you been disrupted, too? Emptied from vessel to vessel?

I would love to pray for you.

You might also like Kissing — Actual, Metaphorical — Changes All

Thank you to Cris DiNoto for Railroad Crossing photo (on Unsplash)

Please Pass the Salt

by Laurie Klein 25 Chiming In

Today I drink bone broth straight
from the white mug
a friend gave me, years ago,
inscribed with lyrics, in red:
“I Love You, Lord” . . .
(and I lift my mug).

No kidding. Someone made a mug of my song.

Is it soup yet?

Four months of daily chicken soup translates to gallons. I’m a leaky vessel, swamped in broth. Still sick.

And still curious. How can I make this taste better?

Varying fresh herbs and aromatic veges subtly alters the taste. Chicken and rice enrich nutrition and texture. Peas add a jolt of green.

But it’s salt—cheap, elemental salt—that unlocks all the hidden flavors.

My mother once read me a tale built around an insecure father’s question, and his youngest daughter’s unforgettable answer.

“How much do you love me?” he asked.

“As meat loves salt, ” she replied.

Years passed before he finally understood what she meant.

Even longer ago, Jesus told his followers, “You are the salt of the earth.”

In a long season short on answers I understand this as never before. Salt offers a foretaste of heaven.

Salt mingles. It balances unwanted sweetness; it also suppresses bitterness. Too much kills.

The right amount evokes nuance and satisfaction.

Blah, bland, blashly

For 60-some years I’ve disliked broth. Too boring. In a word, blashly.

Go back 200 years and you’ll find blashly describes overcooked veges and thin soup.

However.

Sometimes what heals us … at first, repels us

“If you arrive at a place in life that is miserable,” Anne Lamott writes,
“it will change, and something else about it will also be true.”

Who knew a mess of used bones
plus the right herbs and aromatics
would (eventually)
generate healthy craving?

Refilling my mug, I give thanks for curiosity—seemingly hard-wired into our psyches.

And there’s this: Salt plus sound displays singular, hidden magic.

Curious?

Click here to watch this brief video: Using a tone generator, the experimenter shakes table salt over a vibrating metal plate. As the pitch rises, the salt granules form new, increasingly complex patterns, for each tone, a different design.

Here’s to the hidden dance of salt.

You only get one life.

Please. Be the salt.

Photo: Dan Michael Sinadjan on Unsplash

Cymatics Demo

Read “As Meat Loves Salt” (also known as Cap O’ Rushes)

More about the marvels of salt, by Margaret Feinberg

Stitches, by Anne Lamott

You might also like “Learn to Sing out on a Limb”

Reset: Notes from a Backward Sabbatical

by Laurie Klein 50 Chiming In

Reset: A fresh start. A return to zero.

We humans reset our clocks & lottery jackpots,
bowling pins & broken bones,
odometers, iPhones & circuit breakers,
alarms, passwords & user names,
devices & diamonds & letterpress type.

I’ve been sick for 100 days. I am undergoing a reset. Disease has streamlined my life. Food, elimination, exercise, rest—I feel pared down to the basics. Vulnerable as a newborn.

Painfully aware of Self.

Self-interest
Self-pity
Self-deception

To name a few.

God seems to be tinkering with my innermost clockwork.

A God who is beyond great, must, by definition, work in ways that are beyond our understanding.

So says Ann Voskamp.

I believe I’ll recover—perhaps with a new normal. But for now grace meets me, again and again, despite my ailing body’s fussy demands and dismal, unending commentary. Grace inches open a door.

Like the evening I’m ladling out soup. Yet another bowl of bone broth. And the phone rings. My friend Robert must rush his wife to E.R. It’s 3:00 a.m. in England and all their friends are asleep. Will I pray?

Love and compassion ignite. Purpose courses through me. I’m needed—by someone a continent away. God moves in their lives and in mine as well. Hope shimmers, a devotional reset.

O I could tell you so many 100-day stories!

Instead, fresh off the altar, here’s a new song, fitting for resurrection week. My gifted friend Bryan Bogue composed the music, and I wrote the lyrics.

NO MORE SORROW

Another night is gone, and nothing like the dawn seems to be breaking.
You lie in bed and pray, just aching for that final day of waking
light years from here, beyond all fear.
Faith used to be so clear; now it’s elusive as a cure.
Nothing feels sure.

When clouds look like a bruise, and early morning news inflames your spirit,
the steep and winding Way feels more remote each day, and still you choose it.
Bodies grow frail, and memories fail.
Passions wax cold and stale. Ready your mind, your soul, your core.
Here’s what’s in store . . .

No more sorrow. No If onlys. Lonely nights will cease.
No more weeping. Grieving wanes as pain gives way to peace.

The world looks on and jeers, the fleeting gift of years can be deceiving.
Our pipe dreams run aground and don’t always rebound. We stop believing.
Vanities pall, as empires sprawl,
prey on the weak and small.
Call to mind promises foretold. Rise and take hold . . .

No more sorrow. No If onlys. Lonely nights will cease.
No more weeping. Grieving wanes as pain gives way to peace.

No more sorrow. No tomorrow cancels grace today.
God will stroke each lifted face and wipe each tear away.

No more sorrow, Solace calls. Lift your face as mercy falls . . .

Clockworks photo: Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash
Watch reset photo: Luke Chesser on Unsplash
Song credits: Bryan Bogue (keyboard, composer/arranger/conductor), Scotty Ingersoll (lead vocal), Gage Homburg (back-up vocals), Ted Swenson (bass), Tana Bachman-Bland (violin, viola), Cheryl Carney (cello), and Keith Thomas (oboe)

Leaven, Longing, and the Infinitesimal

by Laurie Klein 18 Chiming In

Leaven — even packaged, it’s alive.

(Just dormant, at present.)

Like most of us, yeast needs

a little warmth
some food
and room to grow

Because I’m using dry yeast, I “proof it”:

Sprinkle yeast over lukewarm water
Stir in sugar

Dance for 10 minutes

While set aside, the leaven starts “budding.” Who else in early March wouldn’t welcome a small domestic sign of Spring— aside from the annual cleaning list?

Yeast cells are bona fide (“in good faith”) fungi, one of earth’s oldest microorganisms.

I’m feeling somewhat aged, myself, by virulent infection. I long to see something rise.

And today, it does.

I make a well in the dry ingredients, pour in the bubbling foam.

Unanswered health questions clamor. I knead them right into the dough.

Why this, why now?
How much longer?
When will you answer, God?

Audible

We smell leaven, see its effect, savor its taste and texture. While my dough rises, I research yeast.

In 2001, nanotechnology leader Jim Gimzewski wondered if live yeast cells might pulsate, producing detectable sound.

Using an atomic force microscope, he and assistant Andrew Pelling measured vibrations at roughly 1,000 times per second. They fixed the microscope’s delicate probe in place like a record needle, resting atop the cell’s membrane.

When they amplified the sound, ethereal notes (C-sharp to D above middle C) filled the laboratory.

Journalists have compared the subcellular tones of yeast to the eerie whistling of whales.

How like the Creator to hardwire music into eccentric locations.

In my kitchen, I lean over the bread bowl, lower my ear, hold my breath …

Today, tomorrow, and yesterday

Because yeast cells with genetic mutations make slightly different sounds, researchers hope doctors might one day be able to eavesdrop on our cells, perhaps heading off disease before symptoms arise.

Thank you, Jim Gimzewski and Andrew Pelling. Years from now, someone battling the superbug, C. diff, as I am, might experience swift intervention.

The idea raises my spirits. So does that warm, yeasty smell in my kitchen.

Thank you, ancient Egypt,
for your unearthed
blueprints of bakeries—
4,000 years old—your hearty
loaves, shaped like birds
and fish of the Nile.

Thank you, Master Leeuwenhoek,
first man to view yeast
under a DIY microscope,
and Louis Pasteur, for explaining
how yeast works, and
dear Fleischmann’s®, supplying
our great-grandparents with leaven,
and decades of recipes, passed down.

Such a simple, sensory way to join hundreds of thousands who’ve waited, and prayed, and baked, and waited some more, for hope’s leaven to work.

And thank you, “O Thou who, in the fullness of time, didst raise up our Lord …”*

“… we rise up and stand firm …”

until, at last, we too are golden.

Blessed. Broken. Passed around.

Health Update: I’m on a new 3-week round of medication. I see an Infectious Diseases specialist in one month. Thank you for your ongoing concern and prayers! By next post, I hope to report the long siege is over!

You might also like Longing: What it Wants, Where it Points

Read more about Sonocytology (the study of cell sounds) here

*A Diary of Private Prayer, John Baillie

Loaf photo, Monica Grabkowska on Unsplash

Fleischmann’s® Yeast website (includes recipes)

In the Dark: 1 Old Bird Learns a Few New Licks

by Laurie Klein 44 Chiming In

No one would choose this.

Enforced seclusion
for the past month (with recurring
C. Diff, a vile intestinal bug)
resembles—viewed hopefully—
a dubious Gift: unwanted,
yet potent as incubation.

And not only pathogenically.

C. Diff is highly contagious. For now, I can’t leave home.

Like embryonic birds trapped inside eggs 24-7, I face confinement.

Waiting in the dark for something to change, the psyche squirms. And, like those chicks, slowly, surely, the soul stretches. And develops.

Emotionally and spiritually, some days there’s not a heck-of-a-lot of light.

How cautiously, then—choice-by-choice—the soul met by grace befriends isolation. Limitation. The ambient darkness.

Good thing I’m not alone.

A process built right into creation

In a landmark 2016 study, ecologists in Australia staked out the nests of superb fairywrens and red-backed fairywrens. Concerned about their predation rates, researchers concealed a microphone beneath each nest. They hoped to record 24-7 avian alarm calls, warning each other of predators.

Later, they replayed the recordings. Parents engaged in lively duets called to their eggs.

And the nestlings, unhatched, called back—from inside their shells!

Learning to sing in the dark

Almost a century before the Australian study, Oswald Chambers wrote about songbirds being taught, over time, to sing in the dark.

Are you in the dark just now in your circumstances, Chambers asked, or in your life with God?

[W]e are put into the shadow of God’s hand, he adds, until we learn to hear Him.

Chops, Riffs & Licks

Songbirds, like humans (and bats), learn to make sounds by imitation. Further Aussie recordings replay fairywren hatchlings mimicking the song of their father.

Tirelessly, the father repeats his signature song. He drills his chicks on introductory notes—even slows them down.

He spaces out phrases, clarifies syllables. Mastery requires a lifetime of practice.

For everything, there is a season: a time to listen. A time to sing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCFwRh4tEkw

What time is it in your life?

As for me. I’m learning a lot. I’m calling my voluntary seclusion Laurie’s Backward Sabbatical. I read, work puzzles, color, and enjoy books-on-tape. I’m perfecting Klein’s Killer chicken broth.

I spend more time than usual in silence, listening for God. Sometimes improvised songs arise (It’s been years since this happened!).

Currently on a two-month tapering regimen of a Big Bucks Medication, I am (mostly) grateful for this cloistered season, and completely thankful for your prayers.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: Learn to Sing out on a Limb

Learn more here. And here.

Many thanks to Susan Cowger for pointing me toward Oswald Chambers’ thoughts.