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Open Sesame

by Laurie Klein 21 Chiming In

Open Sesame . . .

Open, noun and verb

Hand your children a treasure hunt clue — to open last — on Christmas Day:

Find the one space in our house
you’ve never discovered;
the next clue is waiting,
under the covers.

Off they run, room to room, upstairs and down . . .

Seeking

that hidden, under-the-eaves place
behind their bedroom wall, where
you knelt, while they were at school,
nailing plywood to joists,
unrolling the red oriental rug
to cushion their small bare feet — that open
space, where you crowned the vent pipe
with twisted, brown-paper limbs
and colored leaves that
tremble, each time the door opens.

Natural light, Yearning's door

 

 

 

A secret room.
With posters for windows.
With a cupboard brimming with books. Wooden houses that nest like Russian dolls. Repainted toys.

Year-round peace, goodwill to all who stoop to enter.

This year I imagine telling our grandkids, again, about no room in the inn.

“But where did the room go?” “Did somebody take it?” “Why didn’t they share? (We always have to.)”

Christmas approaches. I want them to experience hiddenness. Marvel. Creative spaciousness, born of spirit.

So, I’m starting early, by savoring stories, essays, poems, and secret rooms you may not have thought about.

“It takes childlike faith to believe in a reality beyond the grim one we know so well,” Philip Yancey writes, “and to keep celebrating regardless.”

Do you believe we can recover innocence? If so, how do we begin? Can it be sustained? Shared?
Ideas?

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P.S. Daniel Taylor says, “A story that still bothers you sixty years after it happened might be a story to pay attention to.”

Friends, thank you for praying! My new poetry collection, House of 49 Doors: entries in a life, will be published by The Poeima Poetry Series, in 2024! Within these linked poems, a family secret—stifled for six decades—unfurls: relived by my preteen self, named Larkin, and revisited in the present-day by Eldergirl. Amid vivid memories of my eccentric childhood home (and the wild creatures living nearby), long overdue healing and gratitude finally rise.

Which reminds me: Happy Thanksgiving!

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P.S. About that Advent book I’ve been savoring. Here’s the link.

A Radiant Birth: Advent Readings for a Bright Season. It’s a Christmas treasury and it includes both quotes above. Morning by morning, the pages beckon me toward discovery. Entries read like clues. I step into a fresh dimension, thoughtfully arranged for a seeker, revealing aspects of alternate worlds within our familiar one.

A Radiant Birth: Advent Readings for a Bright Season

Photo by Leyre Labarga on Unsplash

From the archives: Sometimes the Gift Tears You Open

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Filed Under: Immersions Tagged With: A Radiant Birth, chamber, childlike belief, Gift, innocence, making room, no room in the inn, open, secret room November 14, 2023

Sometimes, the Gift Tears You Open

by Laurie Klein 32 Chiming In

Gift? Or Riddle?

Joseph wakes her, by lantern-light. “We have to go. It’s not safe here.”

Their rickety donkey snuffles. Joseph carefully settles Mary behind those elderly, twitching ears. Hands up the child.

Does she look back? Perhaps a kindly local woman supervised the swaddling, nursing, burping.

“Best to leave quietly,” Joseph murmurs. “Avoid questions about our destination.”

It’s cold. Mary misses her mother. Over the stony ground they plod, under uncountable stars—Mary’s longest night yet.

Riddle

Where will they live?
Can she trust a Gentile doctor?
Will Joseph find work?

She shifts her son, easing her cramped arms. Daily trips to a new village well will demand safely balancing him and the water jar.

Can she do this?

Gift

You carry God’s gift wherever you must — Mary might say to us — each small goodness divinely implanted, whether within your arms,  your mind, or deep in your belly.

Over nine months, Mary has apprenticed her soul to the quiet arts: nurturing hope, pondering Mystery, carrying on.

The gift tears you open, she might add. There will be scars.

Mary’s endurance instructs me, as Dreamer and I continue seeking medical answers.

Cherish each moment. Every good gift starts leaving your care long before you feel ready.

Perhaps we never fully comprehend what God births within and through us. Child or brainchild, creation is God-breathed. Offer yourself and your work to this world, believing God will reanimate a fraction of its lost hope.

Head into the unknown, step-by-step.

“Living into the mystery of things helps us to release our hold on needing to know the answers.”*

https://lauriekleinscribe.com/wp-content/uploads/What-Child-is-This.mp3

“What Child Is This?” —acoustic guitar, Bill (Dreamer) Klein

We wish you all a wildly fruitful, delectable New Year!

*Final quote: Christine Valters-Paintner, from her marvelous New Year’s Eve post

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Filed Under: Small Wonders Tagged With: answers, Gift, mystery, scars December 31, 2018

Threshold Times—Yours, Mine—Crossing Safely

by Laurie Klein 24 Chiming In

A threshold awaits.

threshold: water and stone

Once Dreamer’s quintuple bypass surgery is scheduled, we spend an anxious week teetering on this sobering, irreversible borderline.

“Open heart surgery,” a former O.R. nurse tells us, “is a death experience.”

To mend his heart, they will stop his heart.

I’m facing my biggest fear: losing my husband of almost 44 years. A line we never imagined has been drawn. Will we cross over safely?

“We dodder through our days as if they [are] our surest belongings,” John O’Donohue writes. “No day belongs to us. Each day is a gift.”

Ready to drop

“A threshold,” O’Donohue continues, “is not an accidental line. It is an intense frontier . . . a dividing line between the past and the future.”

Crossing over, you’re changed.

As in: braving that new job. Surviving a church split. A move. Failure of projects, or friendships. Unwanted divorce.

Some thresholds are forced upon us. Some, we seek. Always, we choose.

I recently gave Dreamer this card, designed by Adrienne Hedger.

boy on the threshold

A threshold can be exciting, a gateway to a new destination. You lay plans, gather maps, pack yourself snacks.

A threshold can feel like a threat. Something must die, or be left behind.

“Courage and trust” help us cross over the “. . . shoreline of an unknown realm,” O’Donohue says.

To which I would add, the earnest prayers of others—like yourselves—which, pre-surgery, have helped us sleep at night, and reel in our dread, by day.

A threshold also acts as an invitation. A glimpse of fresh terrain: physical, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual.

beach threshold

As I write this, memory dredges up a watery scene from my youth:

“Your lake’s kinda small,” the popular, blue-eyed blond said.

Dismay rounded my pre-teen shoulders. I’d been hoping she’d stay the night.

My dad looked up from steering our boat. “Have you heard of shoreline stretcher?” he asked.

“Um . . . no-o-o-o,” she said. “How does it work?”

She had peaked his Gullibility Meter. Tongue-in-cheek, Dad described a coarse powder that homeowners sprinkled along the shore, at dusk.

“Wow! Can we take another boat ride tomorrow, Mr. B?”

Thus the Cool Girl decided to sleep over.

Next morning we went wading.

Beachcomber wading onshore

Not only was she a good sport about Dad’s practical joke, she became my good friend. A small threshold was crossed together, eased by laughter.

Now, post-surgery, our daily landscape looks different. There is pain. The walker. The siege of fatigue.

There’s also laughter. (see “Check Out Day”Caring Bridge.)

Having crossed our threshold safely, now as never before we know life is a gift. We are changed. Our shores have been stretched.

We want to live these days consciously, attuned to O’Donohue’s “undertow of possibility, always at work.”

Did I mention Dreamer is already planning our next trip?

water to air, the threshold of risk

“A life that continues to remain on the safe side of its own habits and repetitions, that never engages with the risk of its own possibility, remains an unlived life” (O’Donohue).

Are you facing a sea change? Friends, wherever you stand, however you proceed, may you cross over safely.

As for us, your ongoing prayers and presence, cards and donated meals, continue to guard, heal, and nourish our spirits. Providential. And practical.

Like a helmet. And a tiny shopping cart.

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What threshold is presenting itself to you, or someone you love?

Filed Under: Immersions Tagged With: Gift, prayer, shoreline, threshold, undertow of possibility March 16, 2017

Amazing Grace: Cyber-refresh

by Laurie Klein 22 Chiming In

Amazing grace . . .

Most parents I know occasionally second-guess the way they raised (or are raising) their kids. I still do.

Or we regret career decisions. Broken relationships. There’s wreckage‚ despite our best intentions. Damage is done.

I once was lost but now am found

When we experience God’s amazing grace, it becomes easier to extend grace to others. And to ourselves.

Sometimes, though, I forget how lost I once was—and how transformed I am now, by comparison.

Recently, I had the chance to co-create something special with my adult daughter, Kristin—for each of us, a newly amazing grace.

What we did

Last week Kristin and I collaborated on a music/movement/spoken-word piece, then shared it at her church, Liferoads.

We blended verses from Psalm 88 (The Message) with two poems I adapted for the occasion from my book, Where the Sky Opens, and the moving song, “Grace Flows Down,” by Christy Nockels.

Kristin’s friend, Laura Fodey, joined us on violin. Thanks to Laura’s quick-thinking husband and his cell phone, along with Troy masterminding sound, we can offer you this casual capture here.

 

 

https://youtu.be/g2JRpQ9Rzek

Grace, as gift, multiplies, then keeps on giving each time we receive it from God, and each time we extend grace to others, as well as ourselves.

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Here’s the text, for anyone interested.

Amazing Grace . . . I once was lost, and now am found.
What does it mean, being “lost?” Do you remember?
Psalm 88 says it this way:

God, you’re my last chance of the day . . .
Put me on your salvation agenda,
take notes on the trouble I’m in.
I’m camped on the edge of hell,
written off as a lost cause,
one more statistic, a hopeless case.
Abandoned as one already dead
and not so much as a gravestone—
I’m a black hole in oblivion.
I call to you, God; all day I call.
Why . . .
why do you make yourself scarce?
The only friend I have left is Darkness.    

                                    —Psalm 88, The Message

Amazing! Grace covers me . . .

What might being “found” by God look like, feel like, sound like? Pretty hard to put into words.

Perhaps a poem and some body language gives us a glimpse:

The lone dove at dusk echoes
every day’s hope,

each note a psalm of a self,
a white blossom

where rests fall between sounds
like petals. See the way God

cups each face that he loves, and
his light strikes the hollow

curve of each throat, leaving us
speechless.

And having been lost,
and now, so amazingly found,
how then shall we live?

I am going to start living
larger, looser—
stripped down
to my sapling self, leaning,
leaning toward
that leafless tree Messiah loved
enough to die on.

Because Grace flows down
and covers me,
my knee goes down.
My brow touches earth until,
moved by hosannas, echoing
deep inside stones,
I rise. Forgiven. Free.
Then the tight turn,
lifting fingers and limbs,
my soul like a white blossom—
all the thorns, delicately removed.

Then the wide turn,
leaning toward the next sapling self,
lost, leafless, filled with longing.
Maybe it’s you, or you, or you.

                —Adapted from “She Can Only Try to Compose Herself” and “Yes,” from Where the Sky Opens
my soul like a white blossom
my soul like a white blossom

 

Filed Under: Immersions Tagged With: amazing grace, found, Gift, lost October 26, 2016

Butterflies Worth Befriending

by Laurie Klein 6 Chiming In

So much depends on the angle of light, and the way you squint.
—Margaret Atwood


Butterflies, for instance . . .

big for their britches butterflies

How would you caption this photo?

Little bug, big attitude? Walk softly, and cast a long shadow? Dracu-fly wannabe with serious Cape Envy?

I almost missed this miniature drama at my feet. Dreamer noticed the lone butterfly. I chose where I would stand in relation to the light (a mindset I hope to keep cultivating).

Photo-ops surround us, waiting to be absorbed. Received, rather than taken.

Even for rookies, like me. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Immersions Tagged With: butterflies, Gift, nerves, Risk September 27, 2016

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House of 49 Doors: Entries in a Life

House of 49 Doors: Entries in a Life
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House of 49 Doors: Entries in a Life
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Where the Sky Opens, a Partial Cosmography

Where the Sky Opens, a Partial Cosmography
Buy This Book Online
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Where the Sky Opens, a Partial Cosmography
Buy now!

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