Category Archives: Writing from the heart

Common sense.

My grandparents were farmers who, when we visited, involved us in the process of planting and harvesting. They were practical people, with a solid understanding of nature and the folly of rigid expectations.  They planted, made sure they had done their best work, and accepted whatever results nature provided.  Their common sense fed scores of relatives for decades.

Fast forward to their granddaughter—that would be me—as I sat in my own vegetable garden in Oakland, California, dreamily pulling weeds.  With each clump of dandelion or grass, I felt like I was letting go of some unresolved issue. I like to think of it as my Zen moment of gardening.  Inhale, pull a clump, and exhale; inhale, pull a clump and exhale.  By the end of an evening of weeding, I would be—excuse the pun—grounded.  But I didn’t have my grandparents’ wisdom:  whatever grows in the garden, after I have given it my all, is perfectly what is meant to be.  When I think about it, that perspective is a metaphor for living.  But back to vegetables.

In my neighborhood, there were a lot of folks who had gardens overflowing with vegetables and fruit.  One of my best friend’s garden was a cornucopia of kale, peas, asparagus, potatoes (red, white, and blue), squash, green peppers, tomatoes, and corn.  She and her husband had spent years putting in the time and hard work to make their garden organic.  Blackberries and raspberries circled their entire yard.  And, oh yes, the apples really did hang low on the tree.

A few years before learning from my friend about gardening, I had decided to grow some vegetables.  In addition to the peas, tomatoes and lettuce, I thought I’d try some broccoli.  Broccoli, in my mind anyway, is a vegetable of perfection. It’s sweeter than leafy green vegetables and is easy to adapt for recipes.  Little bites of the crown can be dipped in a variety of sauces. The whole stalk can be creamed for broccoli and cheddar cheese soup.  Then there are the salads and–my all time favorite–tempura.

I hoed, raked, and tilled.  I mulched and fertilized.  The vegetables grew strong and basically healthy, and the broccoli was dark green with stalks an inch thick.  I purchased lots of ladybugs to eat the aphids in the garden.  I planted garlic and onions (didn’t have a clue what I was doing).  It rained, and I checked for bugs.  Obsessively.

I found holes on the leaves, signs of critters that ate their veggies.  But I had declared a no-worm manifesto, and I was determined to win.  You know where this is going, right?

One cool evening, I went to the garden and cut some stalks for dinner.  The veggies were beautiful.  Green, shiny and strong.  I checked, washed, and placed the broccoli in a steamer.   About camouflage…

When the time came to serve—I had invited friends over—I opened the pot and screamed. There, fully steamed and swollen like a green hot dog on the top of my beautiful broccoli, was a humongous green worm.  My friends laughed and encouraged me to toss the worm and eat the broccoli.  I couldn’t, but I was told by those who did, that the vegetable was perfection.

Plant, make sure I’ve done my best, and accept the results of whatever nature provides.  Common sense for a great and anxiety free life.

Happy Monday!

“Thank you, God, for allowing me to serve.”

It wasn’t so much the words that were strange.  It was that it was four in the morning, and these were the first words in my day, floating up from my subconscious dreamy state.  I suppose I could call it a prayer.

I’m no stranger to service.  I got my father’s DNA.  His life, from community councils to volunteer fire departments to the National Guard, was a perfect model of service.  Since high school when I was a “candy striper” in a local hospital, I’ve volunteered for neighborhood cleanups, helped teenage moms, taught elderly people to read, and participated in scores of projects throughout my adulthood.  But this prayer was a surprise.  Some subconscious part of me was so moved that it was expressing gratitude.

The evening before, my trio had performed.  As I looked out into the audience I saw that people were having a real good time.  This was not a drunken bar audience.  A couple of people told me later that they had been moved to tears.  Others laughed and clapped.  Happiness reigned.  Once again I realized the power—and, for me, the purpose—of performance art.  One of my brothers calls it the “human to human” connection.  It’s also, I think, the magic of service.  Happiness reigns.

What if it’s true?  What if our real purpose for being born is to serve?  What if—whether we believe it or not, whether it fits our spiritual and political beliefs or not—we are here only to take care of each other, to nurture each other, to make the world a better place moment by moment?

What does it mean to serve?  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said about service:

“Everybody can be great… because anybody can serve.  You don’t have to have a college degree to serve.  You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve.  You only need a heart full of grace.  A soul generated by love.”

I was driving a shuttle between a hotel and a retreat site where I spent a lot of my time.  This was my service, and my task was simple:  pick people up at the hotel and take them to the retreat site.  Folks were arriving from all over the world.  Some spoke English well, while others struggled to make themselves understood.  Some seemed perfectly at ease, and others seemed hesitant; they had come very far for a new experience, but weren’t sure what to expect.

Everyone was connected to his or her own story.  I was focused on my task, ensuring the comfort and safety of passengers, but I had stopped smiling.  I felt disconnected and sad.  I felt like I was using up precious air, taking up valuable space on earth.  Looking back, I can see that I felt unworthy of the task of greeting so many people from so far away.  I had always loved volunteering, but I felt my anger and impatience growing with the chattering adults and noisy children.

At some point, a beautiful woman from Hawaii climbed into the van with her two children.  She sat beside me in the front and began to talk and ask questions about the retreat site.  She’d brought the Hawaiian sun with her smile, and her laugh literally filled the van.  Throughout the ride she talked about her life, her children, and why she was so happy to be at the retreat.  Her joy was contagious.  I looked around and saw that other folks were drawn in and were feeling at ease.

When we arrived at the retreat, she said goodbye and lifted her children from the van.  She started down the sidewalk, but suddenly stopped and came back to the van.  Looking me in the eye, she said, “I’m so glad you’re here.”  She smiled and was off.

I began to cry.  Hers was the heart full of grace.  Hers was the true service, and her kindness brought me back to the reason I was driving that van in the first darn place.  To serve.

The task doesn’t matter.  It can be driving, performing, painting a school wall, mowing a lawn, or reading to an elderly person in a nursing home.  Tasks are endless.  What matters is how I serve.  True service is a matter of the heart.  True service leaves love behind when the server herself has left the scene.

This world is full of pie (as opposed to what some other folks would say the world is full of, and it’s not a pleasant word).  The world is saturated with a dizzying rainbow of crusty confections with meat, nuts, vegetables, and fruit. Who could turn down a slice of color in the form of cherry, blueberry, lemon meringue, or lime pie with a dollop of rich vanilla ice cream on top?  Admit it.  You love pie.

There have been moments when I allow myself the fantasy of peace through people taking time out of their busy days to join a friend and make a pie.  What a lovely thought.  I imagine a world where people settle conflicts by getting together to bake pies.  How can a person fire a weapon when her hands are covered with dough, his face is dripping with peach juice, and there are peach pits in the middle of their tongues?  Peace In Eating.  Pie.

As a young girl, I learned to bake good pies after discovering that I was horrible at baking cakes.  Those three-layered or square-shaped dough concoctions were too unpredictable; like people, you couldn’t control them.  It didn’t matter if they were pound or angel or chocolate layered, my cakes inevitably fell in the middle or broke in half as I iced them.  Worse yet, I would go to read a book and smell burned cake, a pitiful result because the cake would be inedible and Mom would be furious.  My cakes and biscuits met the same fate.  The biscuits were embarrassingly hard little pieces of rock that could kill a chicken with one throw. It was sad.  After all, I was born to a legacy of cooks who could probably make rock soup taste like a five-star menu item.

But pie was different.  I don’t know if it was the concentration and rhythm of fluting the crust, the sensuality of juicy fruit in my hands, or the smell of cinnamon, nutmeg and other haunting spices.  There was some mystery about pie that calmed me down, made me feel, um, competent.  Maybe it was because in learning to bake pie, I learned focus and patience.  I learned how to follow directions.  I learned to measure, to take my time.  Of course, I haven’t always fallen back on the things I learned.  My life might be very different if I had.

Mom was specific about measurements.  Too much flour?  Put it back.  Too much shortening?  Take it out.  Work with the dough until the flour and shortening looked like uniform grains of sand.  Add water.

“No, not that much!”

Take it out quickly before you have to throw the whole lot away.  Learn how to salvage the good, to manage mistakes before they become disasters (relationships).  The ingredients (like relationships) were as precious as gold. Nothing could be wasted.  But taking the patience to add water, drop by drop, until the dough was ready to knead was another lesson. It takes time to do something really well.  Of course, I haven’t always use this lesson either.  I’ve wanted things to be resolved, fixed, changed, or transformed NOW.  Remembering patience, moment to moment, is a skill that must be practiced again and again–like baking pie.

Depending on the fruit–pears, apples, or peaches–I would peel the skins slowly, watching the skins form those little Shirley Temple ringlets that became the main ingredient for homemade jelly.  Peach pie was my favorite.  With the juice flowing between my fingers, I used precious moments to suck on the pits. Making a pie was focused work.  Sucking on peach pits was my reward.

Today, I still love to bake pies and, somewhere along the years, I have learned to bake decent cakes.  Cakes require the same focus and patience.  I’ve added a variation to my baking.  I have learned to bake vegan, and I do not add dairy or eggs to my cakes.  I no longer use shortening in my pies, and I’ve added fruits that we didn’t use when I was growing up.  Mango gives me larger and juicier seeds to suck on.  But the lessons remain.  There is still a mystery in baking. Time stands still.  I can live in the moment.  I can learn patience.

The other day a friend and I got into a fight.  I was very upset.  I felt like I wasn’t being heard, and my friend felt attacked.  It was ugly.  After spreading fury through my apartment, I asked myself the usual question.  What could I have done differently?  I talked to a couple of close friends and my sister.  After all the guidance (and evidence of my impatience) was gathered, I sat down to write about it.  I came up with the understanding that I was wrong.  I apologized.

Now, I am on my way to the kitchen to bake a vegetable pot pie.  Have a marvelous week.  Words, like pies, have delicious color.

I’m late with this week’s post.   I wish I could say that it was because of a blizzard that took out the DSL connection, but that’s not true.  I got nothin’.

Winter has been light this year.   Mid-Atlantic winters, like folks, are highly unpredictable; sometimes dramatic, sometimes heavy and aggressive, sometimes light.  This year, temperatures have been warmer than usual, and we’ve had few of the bitterly cold days and nights that we experienced over the past three years.  The two bags of rock salt, 25 pound bag of sand, and my shovel have been tucked away in the trunk of my car for over three months.  I’ve found myself using my thermal undershirts to protect my skin when I dye my hair.  No one will see the brown spots.  It’s an under shirt.

Last week’s ten minute snow gale was one of the strangest winter shows I’ve seen: blizzard for ten minutes, then sunshine.

“It’s too warm for it to stick,” said a woman standing next to me.

She was absolutely right.  But I was caught up in the “woe is me” of bad snow memories:  the D.C. winter when my toes went numb while waiting for a bus, a day that became the motivation for moving to California; my car buried in four-foot drifts–I could only find it because of the tips of the wipers black against the snow pile.  Then there was the day when my tires were spinning in the ice and snow at the curb, and men walked by as I poured sand and struggled with a shovel against the wind.  “How can this be?” I asked myself.  They were laughing as they walked.  I hope they were enjoying the snow.

I enjoyed snow once.  I remember Mom making ice cream out of fresh snow; those were the days before soot covered the window sills within two hours.  And I remember Daddy picking us up from school before a blizzard was in full swing.  There was my 16th birthday party–my only party–when my friends got snowed in at our apartment and their parents came to pick them up.  I remember watching the snow against the light of street lamps while midnight bells welcomed Christmas morning.  There were some good times with snow.

But then, there is the danger of snow.  On my first continental train ride from California to D.C., the train made its way through the Rockies with the cars creaking and moaning up the Colorado hills.  It felt as though we were moving at 10 miles per hour, the train carefully scaling the ice-covered tracks.  Inside the cars, there was total silence.  We all held a collective breath as we listened to the brakes screeching against the ice and gusty winds.  The cars started and stopped; started and stopped.  In my car, people stared out the windows.  No one read a magazine.  No one drank a beer.  Nobody slept.

We’d passed a field where two cows, seemingly lost, chewed slowly in the wind, kneeling and apparently unaware of the fact that they were freezing to death.  They could not see the train.  They were already in a place far beyond the icicles hanging from their frozen coats.  As the train reached the peak and began its increasingly rapid descent, we exhaled, picked up our food and drinks, and resumed our conversations.  Laughter–much too loud–accompanied the powerful collective thought– one could die in the snow.

So, it’s winter.  Sometimes harsh, sometimes mild.  This, thankfully, has been mild.  When I lived in California, I longed for the drama of robust autumn colors and brittle winds.  But, now that I’m here, I’ve been indulging in mental flailing about.  And that is today’s post–a mental flailing about with snow.

Have a great week.  Spring is on the horizon.

I was walking with a friend through a Berkeley park.  Park walking is a good time for telling the truth.  There is, after all, sooooo much to talk about.  I asked how a mutual acquaintance, Renee, was doing and, all of a sudden, it was on.

“She’s going out with Jennifer’s husband,” said my friend.  I was stunned.  I literally stopped in mid-stride, my leg in the air.

“What?”  I asked.

“Everybody knows it.” 

Well, I didn’t know it; from everything I knew about the woman, it did not ring true.  There was absolutely nothing to back it up.  I was very annoyed. 

“That’s not my experience of Renee,”  I said coldly.  The way I answered surprised us both.  We looked at each other.  “She does not poach other women’s husbands or boyfriends, ” I said.   And with that, I turned and walked away.

When we were children, we were taught that “the truth will set you free.” 

Truth-telling is a healing experience.  Hearing the truth is equally valuable.  Truth can heal a broken heart, derail the train to infidelity, and stop gossip in its tracks.  I’m betting that truth can even prevent wars.  There is this moment of relief when the truth is stated out loud, a quietness in the heart.  A person can “let go” in its presence. 

Truth is absolute.  For instance, everyone that is born into a physical body will die a physical death.  That is the truth.  It levels the human playing field, makes all people equal, and makes the political fear mongering and religious posturing that we see today even more ridiculous. 

Here’s another truth:  fear and love cannot exist within the heart at the same time.  If, in any moment, the heart is filled with fear and anxiety, there will be no room for the tenderness of love.

I  remember the only private conversation I ever had with my paternal grandfather. It was the last time I saw him, and I was around 19 or 20.  We were in the sitting room of his home in South Carolina.  I was a tempestuous young woman, one who always questioned things in a way that seemed  to easily irritate adults around me. 

So I was experiencing a bit of fear as Granddaddy leaned back in his rocker.  He was elegant and dignified, and the filtered sunlight at his back outlined his tall, muscular frame.  He looked like an African chieftain or a god, and the moment seemed like a rite of passage somehow.  But I did not ask any questions that day.  I listened.  As we sat together, just Granddaddy and me, he would talk, then take long pauses and sips of lemonade. 

He talked about being a Black parent in the south during the time of struggle, and how he had to be hard on his children to keep them alive.  He also talked about how rebellious my father was.  He took a sip of his lemonade; I gulped mine–silently I hoped.

“You do things as a parent to protect your children, and at the time, the children think you’re being mean to them.”  He took another long sip.  I sipped from my own glass.  (Truth:  there is nothing as refreshing and comforting as homemade lemonade in the southern heat.)

I recognized my own rebellious tendencies, and it is true that I felt as if people were hard on me.  I have never been an advocate of the status quo, and I experienced great trouble in expressing my thoughts evenly to others.  My ideas sounded rebellious, but truthfully, I just saw the world a different way–I still do sometimes.   

“Your daddy always wanted to try new things,” Granddaddy said, and I was grateful that he kept the focus on my father.  I felt like he saw in me the same exploratory quality, and that he had decided this was a good thing.  I felt like he was trying to make it easy for me somehow.

“Sometimes, as a parent, you just learn not to worry.  You  may not like the decisions your children make, but you know it will come out right.  I’m real proud of your daddy.  I am glad that he became who he became.”

 Granddaddy took another pause and as he did that, I felt peace.  I experienced that moment of relief, that all engulfing stillness that comes with the truth.  That day, fear was pushed out of my heart and love came in to take its place.  I could let go of worry because, at least for the moment, I knew I had his unconditional love.  He had shared the truth with me.

And that’s when I came to this conclusion:  Absolute truth is love, and love will set us free.

I am sad today.  I feel as if I lost a relative, a close personal friend.   Her music filled me up.  Her voice gave me hope.  Her sound healed my heart. 

Along with sorrow, Death brings, perhaps, a little insight.  This week the topic of addiction is on the minds and in the hearts of people all over the world.  Whitney Houston’s public struggle with her addictions should force us—all of us—to open our hearts to the inner battle that is so fierce and real for each and every person. Not a single one of us can sit in sanctified judgment.  Every one of us has a demon, an addiction that is not necessarily a chemical dependency.

Over the years, I have seen many good folks succumb first to despair, and then to chemical addiction.  The sociologists and psychologists and folks think they have all the answers, and perhaps they do.  They talk about treatment and intervention and go on and on.  But with all their knowledge, addiction doesn’t go away. 

Drugs, alcohol, sex, food, and relationship cravings can push a seemingly invincible warrior into the abyss.  Only one person can win the battle.  Families can’t do it.  Friends can’t do it.  Preachers can’t do it.  Laws can’t do it.    

Now, let’s get this straight.  A chemical addiction is just one way that deeper issues manifest.  Let’s talk about the craving for relationship. Women and men around the world are familiar with relationship addictions that are just as troubling as any chemical craving.  In fact, sometimes relationships will lead to chemical addictions.  The craving to be with people—and it is a real craving–even when they are bad for us is our response to terror.  We are afraid to be alone with our own thoughts.  We are running from our own sorrow, shame and heartache.  But we are also running from our own beauty.  Cravings are the attempt to still the belief that we are not good enough as we are. 

Women hear over and over again the age-old myth that it’s better to be with any man or partner than to live one’s life alone.  Stop the lie.  This craving for relationship, no matter the cost, is filled with the same “highs” and “lows” of any other addiction.  How many of us surround ourselves with people who reflect back to us our own self-dislike, self-doubt, and low self-esteem rather than surround ourselves with people who reflect our true greatness and light? 

Acknowledging a relationship addiction is harder than calling out a chemical dependence.   If we could understand on a deep, deep level; if we could shine a light into our hearts and marvel at what we see, there would be no addiction.  The very breath and fiber of our being is filled with the holy essence of God, and once we consider that as even the possibility, then we’ve put a leg higher up on the ladder of life. 

Battling addiction is about erasing our own feelings of unworthiness.  Knowing this doesn’t make fighting our demons necessarily easier, but if we just accept, once again I say, the possibility of that truth—that the spirit of God is our very breath—perhaps, no guarantees, but perhaps, we can win the war. 

I once had an unstable manager.  She would give a person flowers and a thank you note one day, then scream at the person the next day.  Although her behavior was erratic (and I imagined chemically induced), the responsibility for eliminating my addiction to unstable personalities was my problem, not hers.  I know about being addicted to persons who are unpredictable and unstable.  I know the battle of fighting the addiction to people who do not lift me up. 

So, I am sad today.  I didn’t know Whitney Houston personally, but her struggle is every person’s struggle as we continue to fight to see our own best self through our own hearts and eyes.  To surround ourselves with greatness and to live in the light of our own inner greatness is the battle.  We will win it.

My prayers are for Whitney Houston’s daughter, her mother, and her whole family.

I’m on a rant.    Try as hard as I might, words get misinterpreted or misheard; somebody thinks somebody else is ignorant because of the way they turned a phrase or used a word.  Judgments are made about a person’s intelligence because of words.  I’m not talking about words of hate, fear, anger, or despair.  I’m just talking about regular words.  Folks don’t hear each other.   

“Hey, Britt.  How ya doin?”

“Did you just call me a bitch?”

Okay.  I’m exaggerating a little.  But not by much.  We don’t listen, and as a result we don’t really hear.

American English is not an easy language.  I have a lot of compassion for people who are trying to learn American English as a second language.  Where else can a word that sounds the same be spelled in two or three different ways?  Hear and here.  They’re, their, and there. 

Folks will also use the same word to mean completely different things depending on their geographic or cultural background.  The word “fresh” is a great example.

1.     “Don’t get fresh with me!” says the parent.

Translation:  don’t be disrespectful and try to make yourself an equal to the adult.

2.    “That girl is just fresh.” 

Translation:  The girl is sexually provocative and acting older than she should at her age.

3.    “These eggs smell fresh.” 

Translation:  The eggs smell bad.  They aren’t safe to eat.

4.    “The milk is fresh.”  “The flowers smell fresh and sweet.”

Translation:  The milk is okay to drink.  The flowers smell good.

5.    “It’s fresh, exciting…” sings the song.

Translation:  It’s new and innovative.

FIVE different contexts.  Is there any wonder that it’s hard to hear what someone is saying?

So given the contextual complexities of the language, why don’t we try to listen harder?  I understand that there are circumstances where the language of the broader culture makes one more easily understood.  Still, isn’t it rather unforgiving to put all the responsibility on the speaker.  As my sister says, “it takes two for relationship.”    

Okay, so about “fresh.”  Regional and cultural contexts matter.  I have personally heard fresh used in all five contexts.  Within the context of culture, who can judge what’s right or wrong?  We can talk about the need for the use of a word in the context of the larger culture, but we cannot strike the use of the word in all of its contexts.  That would be a serious linguistic bias.

The word fresh will have a different meaning depending on whether a person is from the northern or southeastern United States; whether a person is 75 or 15; or whether a person is from a rural or an urban area.  It also matters whether a person is Caucasian or non-Caucasian.  This being the case, I say that we need to learn to listen more deeply.

Now, clearly there are people who won’t agree with me.  That’s okay.  This is my blog.  A woman once told me that my contribution to a discussion didn’t matter because I was from the “country.”  I was shocked.  I had shared an anecdotal story about my grandparents’ farms in the south.  I shared it with a lot of love, and I guess something in what I said led her to believe that I’d been raised in the rural south.  I was not raised in the rural south.  At all.  She had stopped listening and made an intellectual judgment based on racial and linguistic bias. The pity, really, was for her, but I will never know what led to her judgment, and I will never know if she ever learned to really listen.  She died last year.

Lesson?   We’ve got a lotta listening to do–a lot to learn about  hearing what people are really saying when they say what they say.  We don’t really have a choice. 

We can do it.