Bethlehem

just a cool, cool breath
stirs about the heart

the ice night
pure
is
Light

lighter than day

Swelling
Swelling
Swelling

it breaks the sky

it breaks the soul

the Hope
lies
cries

sighs

dies

just a cool, cool breath
stirs about the heart

Arise

The Standardization of the Soul

Sometimes it's hard to be a teacher.

Oh, I love my kids. I love it when they talk to me about their lives, when they think, when they grapple with a skill or a concept and finally wrestle it into submission, even when they break my heart with the parts of themselves they let slip while I'm watching.

But being entrenched in a system that--as a general rule--cares about the brain and not the soul sometimes drains the life out of me. Sure, all schools are different, and not all teachers fall prey to the whims of a state education department whose solution to all educational ills oftentimes seems to be nothing more than numbers and data and graphs and figures, one more black mark on a sea of white. I try to be one of these renegades, I really do. But sometimes my inability to reach my own expectations for what great teaching looks like couples with my disillusionment at being a cog in a wheel, and I feel utterly helpless.

Right now I'm working on an end-of-the-semester culminating research project for my first Master's class at Binghamton University. My research is predicated on the belief that in order to learn, kids must be engaged. They must be motivated. They must be driven from the inside. In order to be motivated--particularly in the areas of reading and writing--kids need to see that literacy is about communication, about stepping into the madness, the ugly-beauty, that is humanity and becoming a thinking, living, acting part of it. As I read article after article about student motivation, I find myself pronouncing unspoken "Amen's" to much of it. The issue is that as I find myself taking a step back to look at my vocation and to name it Good, Beautiful even, I also catch a glimpse of myself and feel incapable of holding up my end of the bargain. I want to help my students see life writ large, but how? When a student walks through my classroom door and my mind is swirling with his IEP goals and how in the world I can help him pass the subjects he is falling so miserably behind in and when I feel like my 24-hour days need to swell to 48 before I can get everything done, when his mind is swirling with his Grandpa who works until 6 and his increasingly senile Grandma and his mother who--thank God--is no longer incarcerated, and the fact that he can hardly tell which way is up, whether the cloud ever has a silver lining, or why he's even in school... when this is life for both of us, tell me how can I be what I want to be to this boy? How can I help him see what life is in the 35 minutes we have together each day?

At times like this, the only thing I can think to do is love him. Simply love him and hope for the best. Love him as Christ loves him, and trust that somehow life will fill in its own outlines with each of his passing years and that I can--just by being there--help him have the courage to look at it and perhaps one day, if God sees fit, pronounce it worth the living.

Incarnation

ache beneath bones
bruise beneath flesh
dove come down
dwells in wilderness

with salve for the blue
and balm for the black
bottled breath breathes
blessed hurt bleeds
goodness is fed to grasping lack

dust turned to body
hope turned to soul
naught turned to all
shard turned to whole

If The Thought of a New School Year Is Daunting

just ignore it for a while. Here's what to do instead:

1. Just so happen to have a nice teacher friend who is part of a kayak group and has an extra kayak she gladly loans out to friends.

2. Wait for a blue moon. Hey--you just missed this one, but your turn will come in three more years, never fear.

3. Meet up with all the kayak fanatics aforesaid teacher friend likes to hang out with at a place called Long Pond out in the middle of nowhere (where all the best places are). Eat lots of food. Enjoy the bonfire the jolly elderly man three seats down made. Be generally merry.

4. As the moon comes up, its orange glow slowly fading into silver, stare at it for a good long time through the steady stream of sparks floating up from the flames.

5. When it's as dark as it gets by moonlight, put your kayak in the water. Do it early so you have the water to yourself for a bit.

6. Paddle slowly, gliding down the moonpath toward who knows where.

7. Be quiet. Very, very quiet. Listen.

8. When the stillness is broken by the friendly murmurings of other kayakers who have finally caught up, join the babble in an undertone for a few minutes.

9. Paddle back, perhaps not quite so slowly now that most of the magic has been memorized and the quiet is not so thick as it once was.

10. Leave the water. Sit at the fire for a good 15 minutes longer. Don't talk much. Pack up and head out, bidding farewell to all of the new, strange, and wonderful people whose faces are still lit up by the fire. Drive home slowly. Clamber up the steps to your apartment. Sleep deep.

From an Unbaptized Girl

I sit in heavy air tonight. It hangs thick around my ears and in my hair and out the screen door where the lightning bugs are beginning to flicker for one more dance in the dark. The fan is doing its darndest to be an air conditioner, but it can't change its nature. It can only swirl the hot air around languidly from one room to the next before it makes its way back again to the kitchen table where I sit clacking keys.

I've been thinking an awful lot lately--about living alone, about the feeling of having finished my first year of teaching, about church. About writing another blog post after what feels like months of finishing one thing only to be caught up in the next. About what it takes to slow down and breathe in the middle of day-to-day craziness...slowing down to notice the smell of watermelon in the park or to pick up a bluejay feather, slowing down to give thanks. About what it means to be baptized after years of thinking and doubting and wondering and being won.

Thinking, too, about what it means to feel a peace that hangs as thick and heavy as the air around me. I don't always feel it, but only having felt it once one learns to know the taste. Even when faced with failure, with one's own state of brokenness, the memory of this peace sticks in the soul like honey and slowly fills up the cracks and sweetens shame with grace.

________________________________________________


I don't have a whole lot of space in my apartment, but I've tried to fill it with things that matter. Some of my dearest possessions (and I kid not...) have been my plants. When I first moved here last August, my best friend from high school and her other-best-friend-boyfriend-nice-boy-Kevin came to visit. We went to a plant and produce stand called Frog Pond (which I was disappointed to learn had neither frogs nor a pond) where we wandered the greenhouses admiring plants. Kevin, who is altogether too generous for his own good, slyly bought me pretty much all of the plants I took a liking to as a housewarming gift. They started out this fall small and spindly. They brought life to the apartment, though, and gave me something to take care of. I felt a kinship with them as they put roots down and grew accustomed to being somewhere outside the greenhouse. I walked into my apartment after school every afternoon to plants that were growing greener and friendlier and bigger by the day. When my African violet burst into bloom, I felt like a proud mother crooning over her first child.

_________________________________________________


I don't know what I'm going to say when I'm baptized this Sunday. Baptism is public, and it feels like I'll be dragging some of the deepest parts of myself out into full view for others to look at. What does one say at such a time? I'm not sure yet. What I am sure of, though, is that this is something I want despite the discomfort of public proclamation.

And oddly enough?

 I think it has something to do with the African violet sitting by my window.

Apogee Perigee Big Full Moon Here Ye Be

I'm setting my alarm.

Super Moon

In Honor of Nothing

I truly have nothing to say tonight. It seems that there are so many profound and mundane and in-between things in the world that one should always have something to say. But tonight the well is dry.

So much has been said already, after all. Who am I to clutter the world with a meaningless blog post like this one when some people really do have things to say? Let them speak. Let them ink their words onto the blogosphere.

But I, being puny and human and alone in a small apartment at 9:45 pm, still feel the urge to make my voice heard. The keys click and clack under my fingertips, and I suddenly feel neither puny nor human--well, yes, I guess I still feel human--nor alone any longer. For I, Deborah Anne, have voiced my Nothing into the great expanse.

This one's for you.

After 5 Girls...

...Sister Abigail had a man-child! Honeybuckle is a boy!

Baby Ezekiel and his mama:

Going solo:

I went to visit them both in the hospital yesterday, and he is soft and sweet-smelling and utterly delectable. You should be jealous.

Rambling Man [Or Girl. Or Dog...Or Just Girl and Dog Without the Man]

Easter break afforded me at least one good, long ramble. Sleep is sneaking up on me, but I want to write one more post before I head off to bed. Because my brain is only semi-conscious, this post will be heavy on pictures and light on words.

The dilapidated Johnson barn and barbed wire.

Watching.

Moss is one of my favorite things. I wish I could have a whole bed made out of it. Or I suppose I could just sleep on a rotting log like this one...

Blossoms.

I followed the gulley slicing through our woods until I reached Nanticoke Creek and could follow it upstream. The hoarfrost was still on the lamb's ears and the shadows on the water.

My faithful Huckleberry was a constantly-moving companion. His nose didn't stop twitching the whole time, poor hound. He doesn't go on rambles enough now that I'm in Bainbridge instead of Nanticoke.

It's a dog's life.

This is an awful picture, but this section of creek was stunning. The water was pure magic.

Up and Out.

And Up some more.

Foxes [and other mystery creatures] have holes...

...and birds of the air have nests...

And Debbies? Well, they have Nanticokes. 

Easter (And Fashionably Late, Too)

When we were young, Easter was a conglomeration of family and feasting and Easter basket-hiding and egg-coloring and candy-consuming and remembering--although probably not enough of the last. These past few years have become tinged with less sugar (well, okay...you've got me there...still a lot of sugar...) and a more healthy dose of remembering. Now that I have entered the realm of Adulthood, Easter has become a time for homey joys and quiet thoughts that are often pondered but not shared.

We do, however, still enjoy an Easter feast. This feast has become more sumptuous now that my sister Abigail has a still-new nest of her own, made lovely by her instinctive artistic tastes and clever fingers. This is where a [sadly-small this year] Johnson gathering congregated to celebrate the Christ with good conversation and joyful children and pleasantly full bellies.

The hustle and bustle of a before-Easter-feast kitchen, all hands big and little pitching in.

Our hostess, the beautiful [and very pregnant] Abigail. Baby Honeybuckle has not yet joined us in the Out Here but is sure to come soon, God willing.

Abigail's handiwork. Isn't it lovely? Seeing the picture after the fact makes me want to melt right into the photograph. Funny how making a room into a piece of art can do that.

Centerpiece. We had finished eating by this time and were contentedly lounging on couches and in chairs, talking and reading stories to Abby's gaggle of little girls.

And so another Easter has come and gone. The years go by quickly, and I'm only twenty-two. I wonder how quickly they'll pass a few decades from now...

Little Boxes, Little Boxes

How in the name of Pete can people say it's a small world?

(Granted, I've been caught saying that myself on more than one occasion...)

As I pass house after house, green ones and pink ones and blue ones and yellow ones--with the occasional brick ones and stone ones with ivy climbing up their walls--I sometimes become overwhelmed thinking about the lives that have been lived inside each of them. How homes have been made, and how they have been un-made. 

Perhaps it's the fact that I just started living on my own in August and have my very own space that I've tried to cozy up. It's tiny, but it's lived-in and has started, I think, to borrow my personality. Pictures of faces I love on the fridge, brightly-colored art from the little ones in my life on the walls (as well as from the big ones), plants peeping out the windows, a jar full of marbles on top of a shelf chock full of books, a crazy quilt on the bed... it's become an extension of who I am, in a sense. I've become comfortable here. 

When I think about this, even my street can become a Big World and ample space for imaginings. It makes me want to see inside each house frame, pick it apart. Get to know the people inside. 

Globalization, my foot. Technology has its place, and fingers on keyboards and voices on radio waves and faces on televisions may argue in a thousand ways for a world in which isolation is impossible. 

But I want to know who lives in the house next door.

And Then the Sky Cracks

Woman in the kitchen,
sweeping dust over
and over
and through the open
door
until it scatters
in a puff of breeze.

Child on the roadside,
kicking stones on
and on
and through the colored
crowd
until they hit
ankles tense and taut.

Man on the hilltop,
staring down
and down
and through the parched
earth
until it yawns
and swallows him whole.

And then the sky cracks,
tears,

And dust
and stones
and eyes
meet, mingle

As light slices
like a blade,
boggles, blinds

leaving only mouths

and words.

"Kyrie eleison"
become a cry

And "Hosanna"
become its echo.

Patience

Sometimes words are futile, and the hand that grasps the pen is weak. Sometimes language wears thin, wears old, wears out.

Grab-Bag

Today was a smattering of everything. A half day of teaching, a half day of professional development, a walk, an exploration of the next town over, and a bit more Frederick Buechner over a solitary dinner at a hole-in-the-wall pizza place called Two Doughboys.

I'm nothing if not consistent. Patchwork day, patchwork blog post. Here's a scrambled-up offering of the Life of Debbie over the past few days.

The faithful jalopy, Blue Bess, and I, off to see the sights:

The sights:

Growing things:

And lastly, some words. Not mine, but part of the truth I live. 

"...I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition--that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are--even if we tell it only to ourselves--because  otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. [...] I suspect that it is by entering that deep place inside us where our secrets are kept that we come perhaps closer than we do anywhere else to the One who, whether we realize it or not, is of all our secrets the most telling and the most precious we have to tell."

                 

                                                                                   - Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets

And So We Are Kindred, You and I

Some ruthlessly torn-out-of-context quotes. Read the book, friends.

"Little by little he began to feel that he was catching at least an occasional glimpse of what all the shouting was about. It was something utterly out of reach up there in the sky where they were all rushing about in the street pointing at it, and yet it was apparently near enough to have set them on fire. It was something even more outlandish than they were who had fallen in love with it and yet it was at the same time so full of stillness and loveliness and ultimate sanity that to live blind to its existence, the way he always had, struck him as more outlandish still. He began to believe that it might even be worth burning your face off for if you became convinced that it was somehow your face that kept you from it."

"...occasionally to hear as plainly as though they were being whispered into his ear the words, 'I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart" as he stood in the shuffling line to receive the Eucharist from the hands of a priest as gorgeously gotten up as Sarastro in the temple of Isis and Osiris."

                                                                               - Frederick Buechner, The Storm

When Life Is Too Much...

...get your walking shoes on.

Walk and walk and walk until your legs ache from going uphill. Drink in the view. Rejoice at the sound of the first peepers of the spring. Listen to the mourning of the whippoorwill. Find winter and spring intermingling, death and dryness joined to life and newness.

At the top of the hill, happen to meet an old, old farmer named Edie, whose ingenuity is as deep as the wrinkles around her eyes.

What else would you do with an old bathtub, pray tell?

"Come back anytime," she says.

Soak in the trees and the light and the sky and the hills until dusk falls and the colors fade.

Cross the tracks and go home, boneweary and heavy with peace.