"a river so long..."

"It's coming on Christmas,
they're cuttin' down trees
They're puttin' up reindeer
and singing songs of joy and peace.
I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

"Oh, I wish I had a river so long
I could teach my feet to fly
Oh, I wish I had a river,
I could skate away on…"

Joni's original version of "River" always speaks to a place in me that hungers for mercy. But it is James Taylor's recording of "River" that I turn to when sorrow rattles the window casings. His voice wraps mercy around my shoulders like a heavy wool blanket on a cold winter night.

Tonight, like a skater gliding backwards -- with my face forward -- I am hoping to gather in the fading light of the past, a perspective on a story which I pray might help someone else.

It was decades ago, but I will never forget the lessons learned.  I'd been struggling with a gathering cloud of depression for months. But that winter, its pall lowered -- cold and dark. It screeched through my bones like a bitter wind.  It threatened to rend my heart. A heart that already felt so brittle, it might shatter at the slightest touch of human warmth.

I was sad and empty. I felt a dead silence within. Not even the sweetest strains of Christmas music could penetrate that vacuum of feeling.

It didn't make sense. I should have been happy. But I couldn't shake the dull edge of depression's cold knife cutting me off from everything I loved and cared about. It was a feeling akin to being disconnected from myself. And there were time when I wondered if I'd actually passed on, and was somehow just observing myself from a place outside of my body. It was a vast detachment, and it seemed to leave me beyond the reach of kindness.

Nothing seemed to matter -- and everything hurt.

I'd been praying for so long -- just to feel something, anything. I was absolutely drowning in hopelessness. And I felt helpless as I wondered if I would ever be able to find even a glimmer of hope, again.

Depression is a strange hollowness. It holds nothing. Whatever love is given, seems to seep through through its black emptiness and get lost in the void.

I remember loved ones urging me to "just be happy," to
"recall all the things you have to be grateful for," and eventually, to "just snap out of it." But I couldn't. It wasn't that I didn't want to. I just couldn't remember what any of those things felt like.

I went through the motions. I prayed, studied, made gratitude lists, sang hymns, carols, lullabies, songs. But it was as if I was doing it all under water. I could hear the words, I could pray the prayers, sing hymn-after-hymn, and make notes in the margins of inspirational texts about inspiring "revelations," but I couldn't actually feel anything. It wasn't just that I couldn't feel joy. I couldn't feel anything.

But this song, "River," seemed to have an odd effect on me. When I heard it -- even just the sound of it, I somehow knew that Joni understood what I was feeling.

It was as if she were stretching a mittened hand out to me -- where I sat on a log at the edge of the frozen Raritan River -- calling me to skate with her. I could almost hear her whispering: "yes, you can do this -- just a little further."

And I'd think, "perhaps I can."  I could take her hands, close my eyes, let myself glide out onto the ice, and allow my heart, my mind, my spirit to feel the silence of a frozen river.

I wanted to hear the simple scratching sound of my skate blades scoring the rippled ice. I longed to feel the bitter cold bite at my cheeks.  I ached to hear the crackle of branches as the wind rocked the bare arms of marsh willows at the river's edge -- back and forth  -- like keening mourners in blackened shrouds.

Day-after-day I would play "River." And day-after-day, I would let her take my hands in hers. Till one day, I began to feel.

At first the feelings were grief, and cold, and loneliness. But there was also the warmth of a mittened hand in mine. And there was the sweet voice of my friend, Joni. She was whispering a song about "wishing" and being "weak in the knees" with love.

Eventually I began to feel the tingle of living, like fingers coming back to life in front of a bonfire. Tears started to fall and burned in my throat like the hot chocolate I sipped - as a girl - from the stainless steel cup of my old plaid thermos. The feeling that she understood me -- that anyone understood what I was going through -- warmed me to the core.

Through her music Joni was taking my hand and skating me forward into feeling alive again.  She was skating me into spring, where my heart began to thaw.  It saved my life that winter.

By mid-April, Mind and Soul -- the spiritual sources of all true knowing and feeling -- had become synonymous again to me. What I knew (or could think of) I could actually feel (in my heart) again.

This was a different kind of healing for me.

For some reason, I needed to be met where I was. I couldn't seem to move from the edge of that frozen river -- cold, sad, and numb -- without the help of her mittened hand.

Her music quietly led me out onto the ice. And before long, I began to make my way forward -- pushing off on Love-angled blades, one against the other. Realizing that I was feeling something, anything -- no matter how painful -- sliced through the lie that I was living in a void.

I was so grateful to discover that I had never stopped feeling. Even my awareness of the vacuum was a feeling to be grateful for. I was alive to my own simple desire to feel. And since I could feel, I wanted to feel God, good.

Joni, pulling me onto the ice with her words -- words which made me realize that I was not alone in my sadness.  Words that woke me up. And although it may have started out as a bone-numbing cold, turning into a painful tingling as I slowly woke up to the full warmth of my living -- I was feeling again. And it was enough.

It was enough to keep me coming back to the river's edge each day for the tender warmth of her now-husky voice. It was enough to keep me leaning towards the soft angora of her mittened hand. She was reaching out to gently pull me forward.  And I was reaching out for life again.

There is an old song from our hymnbook that says,

"Sometimes 
a light surprises
the Christian while he sings..."  

And sometimes what surprises me is the way a song can come "with healing in its wings." It pours the balm of understanding on a cold heart, and warm it back to life.

Mary Baker Eddy promises in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures that:

"Whatever inspires with wisdom, Truth, or Love 
— be it song, sermon, or Science —
blesses the human family
with crumbs of comfort from Christ's table,
feeding the hungry
and giving living waters to the thirsty."  

By Spring I was feeling again. I was feeling joy -- genuine, palpable, break-into-song, dance-in-the-streets, do backflips in the park, laugh-like-a-child, sleep-like-a-baby -- joy.

The trees began to bud and flower. The river languorously carried apple blossoms from our yard, past the old mill down river, under the covered bridge, around the bend, through the state park and eventually out to sea. And I was singing "songs of joy and peace."

I'd found a river I could skate away - and back - on. Again, and again. 

No matter how deeply sorrow had carved it's name on my heart, I could never, be made to believe that I was unable to feel again. And if I could start with the fact -- that I was feeling -- I could let those icy feelings swell the space in my heart and expand my capacity for compassion until all the world fell in.

Just like water. When it finds a small fissure in a rock - that in extreme cold turns to ice -- expanding and causing the space to grow -- so my sorrow could only expand the space in my heart, making me more open to the needs of others.  Making it more understanding, more compassionate, more alert to someone else who might be sitting on the edge of the ice.  Now, it is my hands that are mittened.

 Thanks Joni. I will always be grateful. always...

Kate

"forged by fire, tempered by water..."

"Oh sisters,
let's go down,
come on down,
don't you want to go down,
down in the river to pray..."

I love this scene from "O Brother Where Art Thou," and especially Alison Krauss' Down in the River to Pray." But it was last week's Bible study on baptism, that led me to some new spiritual imagery. It came as a memory. One I hadn't thought of for a long time. We'd taken a trip to an historic village where participants re-enacted the lives of 18th century tradesmen, farmers, and families. A bustling community with thatched cottages and kitchen gardens.

I was most fascinated, at the time, by the blacksmith. Strong and silent, he forged lumps of molten metal into horseshoes, hinges for doors, farm implements, and tools. It all seemed like magic to me. Watching him submerge his quarry, first into the fire...in order to soften, bend and shape it, then into a large vessel of cold water...to harden it so that he could test it's shape, and further hone it's sharpness, was like a dance of heat and steam.

So, when our Bible lesson last week, referred back and forth to baptism by fire, then baptism by water...it was this blacksmith imagery that set me thinking about the spiritual essence of these elements as they relate to "sacrament," which Webster defines as "an outward and spiritual sign, of an inward and spiritual grace."

Mary Baker Eddy, in particular, references water and fire over-and-over again in her writings, but I loved thinking them in the context of "smithing," particularly with statements like:

"The furnace separates the gold from the dross that the precious metal may be graven with the image of God.”

"Millions of unprejudiced minds -- simple seekers for Truth, weary wanderers, athirst in the desert -- are waiting and watching for rest and drink. Give them a cup of cold water in Christ's name, and never fear the consequences."

I know it may seem like a bit of a stretch, but to me, this is what Jesus' life is a model of...being softened in the fire of God's love...for bending and shaping, molding and exalting, and then being "set" by the cool waters of spiritual refreshment....the silence that comes in the quietness of prayer. Again, Mary Baker Eddy gives such a lovely sense of this spiritual refreshment when she states:

"Jesus prayed, he withdrew from the material senses to refresh his heart with brighter, with spiritual views."

Perhaps his tempering, with the cold water of spiritual stillness, came from within...from deep draughts of prayer. The cup of cold water that set the shape of his heart.

I was thinking about this heating and cooling as I considered the way a goldsmith works. He heats up lump, and the impurities, or dross, fall away from the ingot of gold. But this heating, this baptism of fire, also softens the gold so that it can be graven with the image he wishes to set, as his seal, his signet in the gold. Once the image is right, he submerges the same piece in the cold water to set that image in place.

Isn't this what Jesus' life...and ours, if we truly follow him...is all about. Surrendering to those experiences that forge a new compassion in us. A compassion that is not just soft enough to envelope the world's hurts, but graven with the power of the Word, and set with a holy purpose. We don't have to look beyond the gospels to find an example of this kind of self-surrender.

Jesus lived it from Bethlehem to Calvary. Back and forth he goes from the furnace to the cup. Exalted as a babe, rebuked at twelve, anointed at Jordan, tempted in the wilderness, revered by thousands, betrayed by loved ones...crucified, resurrected...back and forth...fires that soften his heart with compassion and understanding, waters that refresh him with the "bright and imperishable views" of his calling. And always, baptized with the deep draughts of Principle-based spiritual law.

I think it's like that for us, too. I know it has been for me. It is out of those furnace experiences...which at the time seem more like self-imposed "trials by fire"...that I've seen the dross of "judging others" fall away, had my view of the situation soften with compassion, and watched my willingness to extend that cup of cold water - in Christ's name - refreshed with a holy sense of purpose and affection.

Fire and water, fire and water, fire and water....

Isn't this, in fact, the last image we have of him...a fire on the beach, next to the sea, with his disciples.


I often have to ask myself, "Do I think a life of lavender-scented bathwater; gentle, soft-fingered tracings; and fires that I only have to come close enough to warm my hands by, but not so close that I am in danger of self-immolation, is better for some reason than the furnace and the cup?" Is that what I really want?

No....I want his purifying fire. I want to feel my hard-heartedness melt into "the form of the forth." I want to feel the point of a diamond, and the pen of an angel, engraving the Truth on my consciousness. And, I want to be set in place...and in purpose...by the law of Love. I want to be forged and tempered by His hand.

There's more that Love is unfolding to my heart about His "smithing" in my life -- but for now...

with Love,

Kate

In this context, I am enjoying re-reading this post, from last Spring, aboutWhat Water Can Do," as Johnny Diaz sings.

"What water can do..."

"Isn't it amazing
Isn't it amazing it's true
Isn't it amazing,
what water can do.."

I hope you enjoy Johnny Diaz' song, "What Water Can Do," his tribute to the courage and generosity of the Nashville community in reaching out to flood victims, and his reflection on the power of baptism in the lives of Christians.

I love thinking about the nature, and power, of water.  To lift a ship off of its moorings, to inspire neighbors to service and sacrifice...to cleanse, refresh, nourish, and buoy us.

One of my favorite quotes is by the late celtic poet, John O'Donohue.  He writes:

"I would love to live like a river flows,
carried by the surprise of its own unfolding."

This is my deepest desire tonight.  To be like a river of water.  To let love flow, so unconditionally, so gently...over, and around, all that would  obstruct its only purpose...to reach the sea...that its touch only softens and hones all the sharp edges in the world. 

I long to live in the space of the question...to know nothing "for sure" but that: "I AM that I am"...and to still (never the less) be at peace.  I yearn to have only one reason for being...to flow in such deep stillness that it doesn't matter what is thrown in my path...I am still me...and I can still love.

So what does water do.  It just is. It refreshes the thirsty, and inspires the photographer.  It is breath to the fish, and nourishment to the plant.   It brings the dry savanna to life, and cleanses the feet of the Master.  It baptizes, and christens, and weeps, and purifies.  It carries cargo across the sea, holds aircraft carriers aloft, and safe, and, as Mary Baker Eddy reminds us, "yields to the touch of a finger..."

It softens shards of broken glass, and hones boulders with the tenderness of a mother's tear.  It reshapes fields, carves new paths through mountains, and sets boundaries for tribes.  It is home to the sea turtle, and fills a mother's womb.  It sits on the petal of a rose, and falls from a canyon wall with a thunderous roar.  It powers cities, and drives mills, it dilutes, and moistens, and sweeps the plains with healing rain.

I want to be like water.  To just show up each moment in the elemental balance of my spiritual identity...the complete and undiluted reflection of God's Allness-in-all.  And to flow.  To just flow in stillness, in the never-the-lessness of who I am, wherever I am sent. To love all that I see, and come in contact with, on my journey towards the sea...towards a greater understanding of the unity and wholenss of divine Being.  To be, as Eddy suggests,  "a drop of water, that is one with the ocean."

To be like water...

to be love...to just be love -- moment-by-moment, drop-by-drop,

Kate
Kate Robertson, CS

"And she brought forth..."

"Now I'm not one to second guess
what angels have to say,
but this is such a strange way
to save the world..."

Once again, a friend's sharing of a video gave birth to this post on a night when I didn't know what He wanted me to write about...thank you. 

"A Strange Way to Save the World," by Michael Card is the perfect soundtrack for the space my heart has been in since last night's candlelight service at our sweet little storefront church. 

The readings from Scripture -- and from the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, were all based on the timelessness of the Christmas story.  And were sparked by the realization that the phrase "brought forth" also means (according to Webster) "to attract; to draw towards oneself" as in "to bring forward, to accept".  For me, this definition has given new life to such familiar, and much loved, statements like:

"And the earth brought forth...."  [Genesis]

"And she [Mary] brought forth her first born son..."  [Luke]

"The illumination of Mary's spiritual sense put to silence material law and its order of generation, and brought forth her child by the revelation of Truth, demonstrating God as the Father of men."  [Science and Health]


"Soul is the divine Mind, - for Soul cannot be formed or brought forth by human thought, - and must proceed from God; hence it must be sinless, and destitute of self-created or derived capacity to sin."  [Miscellaneous Writings]

For me, it makes conception, gestation, and birth one fluid, beautiful motion.  A graceful acceptance of the spiritual substance of those things that are flowing/radiating from God within us, the cherishing of them within our heart, and then an immediate flowing outward of their coincidental form, beauty, outline, and purpose.  It is a divinely choreographed movement that reminds me of a river's flow from it's Source, eddying for the briefest of moments within the crook of the river's womb, yet continuing to flow towards the broader waters of the sea.


But I digress...back to our candlelight service.   

As I sat there, I couldn't help but think of these images.  And after the readings were shared, we prayed in silence, and a hymn was sung, the meeting was opened for testimonies of healing and inspiration.

There were so many lovely thoughts "brought forth."  But it was during my friend, Amanda's, remarks that something broke open inside of me about this beautiful and timeless Christmas story. 

Amanda was saying that she had been led to cherish the concept of "expectation" and "expectancy" all that day, asking herself questions like, "What am I expecting?" and "How large is my expectation of God's love and care?"

As she was speaking, so earnestly from the heart, I heard the question - within me, "Do you remember when you were an expectant mother?   Well, think of it...you weren't empty, waiting to be filled, but right in that time of "expectancy" you were already full. You were cherishing what was already alive and growing within you...you were pregnant with the promise and its fulfillment."  

I could see that the time in my tummy, was only an eddying, not a creating or a waiting to be.   The waters of my child's true substance were always flowing from their divine Source, and were continuing to flow freely forward towards the broader ocean of God's purpose for her.  She was never "mine."  I could never contain her, any more that the river is being contained while it eddies in a lovely cove or inlet along its course. 

It was like a light turning on in my soul. 

I could suddenly see that when we are led to cherish an expectation...it is not in anticipation of its possible fulfillment, but the celebration of what already is present and living in, and around, and through us.

I love thinking of expectant father, Joseph, as the humble receptacle of a divine covenant.  Much the way a riverbed holds the waters of the river.  While at the same time, those same waters gently carve out a newness to its outline.  It begs the question, what is defining the shape of the river, the earthen banks...rocks, mud, trees, or the flowing of the water...or both?  

Joseph begins our story as the perplexed, but trusting, fiance' of a young girl, and the Christ  carves out in him a timeless place in history as a fully vested father, the purest of manservants to the Lord's promised "peace on earth, good will to man." 

An obscure village, this simple carpenter, a rough hewn stable, an unmarried girl, a babe - "beloved, replete, by flesh embound"...all filled with a divine purpose. 

A strange way to save a world...maybe. 

But what is it that you are expectant with tonight?  What is it that you think can't possibly "make sense?"  What will you take into the quiet manger for a star to reveal, for wisemen to worship, for kings to bring gifts to the feet of, and for shepherds to bow before?

What will you "bring forth" from the fullness of your heart...from the quiet sanctuary of your earnest longings, already pregnant with promise...and fulfillment?

sitting with you in expectancy, and with a heart full of love on this holy night...
Kate
Kate Robertson, CS

[quotes above are from the Bible and the writings of Mary Baker Eddy]

"Even dynamite can purr..."

"When you hear the sound from
far enough away
even dynamite can purr..."
-     David Wilcox

Those who know me, know that I love quotes.  I love the feeling of relationship/friendship I find in a shared love for ideas...and for that writer's succinct articulation of those ideas.

I also love the connections, the synapses made between seemingly disparate ideas when they move through the corridors of my heart.  That happened for me today on a number of fronts. 

It started when I came upon a tiny scrippity scrap of notebook paper on which I'd written the following quote one wintery afternoon, a couple of years ago. 

"She liked unfinished.  She liked process.
She liked moving things -- rivers, clouds, heartbeats."
-  Alice Hoffman  (The Third Angel)

The quote struck me immediately the first time I read it...and it did again this morning when I found my scribblings, in the leaves of Hoffman's book. It resonates with how I feel about things.  I like process...I am not at all eager for things to be "done."  I like the feeling of Life (vitality, creation, surprise) flowing through our lives like a river...changing and shifting its outline and form moment-by-moment. 

And by reciprocity, the river has a transformative effect on the landscape.  The "ground" which gives the river its surprisingly beautiful undulating and meandering boundaries, is changed by the river's course.  It alters those same banks...molecule-by-molecule... moment-by-moment as it carves and sculpts its host landscape.  There is something so organic and alive about things that are pulsing with process.  There is a relationship that cannot be one-sided. 

So, this morning, as I was reading this quote, I started thinking about rivers and couldn't help but start humming, "Just Around The River Bend," from Disney's Pocahontas. 

"What I love most about rivers is
You can't step in the same river twice
The water's always changing
always flowing..."

"Yes," I thought, "it all fits."  That serendipitous sense of Life in which we allow one moment to flow into another.  When we surrender to a divine surprise.  When we are more in love with the process, than a product. 

And then I caught my friend Randall's posting of a David Wilcox house concert performance of his song, "Dynamite in the Distance" on Facebook. 

In his opening remarks David gives words to what I feel, in my heart, about the process of writing, praying, living.  He says:

"I have loved the process of writing for a long time...not the product, so much, but the process.  It's my way of finding the elements of my story that I don't want to miss, before it's too late.  

"It's about finding places in my heart that have been covered and buried, and locked in storage, and getting them back so I can be more alive. 

"So, it is bewildering for people who come, when I teach songwriting, because they are expecting me to tell them how to make a song sound like a song, how it ought to sound...how to fill out the form.  

"But I don't want to fill out the form,
I want to be informed.

"I want the song to tell me what it knows, I don't want to make it do anything.  If I start out with a guitar riff, or a little phrase, and it moves me, I trust that it moves me because it's coming from a place that I am going.

"And my heart catches a point of view as if it's a vista that I haven't even hiked to yet.  But it's a way of seeing.  It's almost as if I could see from the point of view of who I could become.  Wow...now that saved my life.

"I need music.  I need it to remind me."

"Wow," I thought, "just wow..."

Then I remembered the writings of the late Celtic sage - poet, philosopher, and spiritual luminary - John O'Donahue.  I have been swimming, floating, drowning in his words for the past few weeks. His quotes have been the thoughts I've wrapped myself up in...like the old quilts hanging on walls, and folded in piles and cupboards throughout our home.  Here are two, that are like snipped pieces of fabric from favorite old dresses.   They are so softened by wear that I often find myself stroking them whenever I am snuggled under the weight of his words:

"As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free may you be about who you become."

"I would love to live like a river flows,
carried by the surprise of its own unfolding."

So, I don't know that this post has a punchline.  Tonight there really is no clear "message" or "product."  Just some thoughts to let flow through the landscape of your heart.  If they carve a new bank, or just eddy for a while...wonderful.  I hope you enjoy the sound of this river's song...

with Love,
Kate
Kate Robertson, CS

"The Sea refuses no river..."

"...I have seen a trace of strain
In other's eyes not spoken...
Now's the time
when we decide what freedom is
and turn water into wine

For the sea refuses no river
We're polluted now
but in our hearts still clean
The sea refuses no river...
We're washed over stones
But the sea won't refuse this muddy river
Nor deny the sulfurous stream..."
Pete Townsend

Okay...
So, confession time.   This won't come as much of a shock, but I have never really been a big Pete Townsend, or the Who, fan.  In fact, I found their music confusing and unsettling, sometimes, "back in the day." And to be honest, even the song I've used to keynote this piece did not really strike me as "all that," when I first heard it years ago.   But over the last decade, I have become somewhat obsessed with the spiritual symbology of all things water and stone...the sea, rivers, tears, baptism, brooks, streams, stones, rocks, boulders, pebbles...and the interaction between those two elements.

So, when I was reminded of its song title, "The Sea Refuses No River," after seeing it posted on friend's Facebook page, I had to give it another listen.  And when I read the lyrics, especially to some of the later verses, I was smitten.  It shifted my poet's heart into overdrive. 

John Donahue once wrote:

"I would love to live
like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding."

And Mary Baker Eddy, in referring to the balance of strength and peace, found in every drop of water, said:

This strength is like the ocean, able to carry navies, yet yielding to the touch of a finger. This peace is spiritual; never selfish, stony, nor stormy, but generous, reliable, helpful, and always at hand."

and elsewhere she says:

"'What if the little rain should say,
"'So small a drop as I
Can ne'er refresh a drooping earth,
I'll tarry in the sky.'"

Is not a man metaphysically and mathematically number one, a unit, and therefore whole number, governed and protected by his divine Principle, God?  You have simply to preserve a scientific, positive sense of unity with your divine source, and daily demonstrate this.  Then you will find that one is as important a factor as duodecillions in being and doing right, and thus demonstrating deific Principle.  A dewdrop reflects the sun.  Each of Christ's little ones reflects the infinite One, and therefore is the seer's declaration true, that 'one on God's side is a majority.'

A single drop of water may help to hide the stars, or crown the tree with blossoms."
         
I love thinking of myself, metaphorically, as a drop of water...pure, unadulterated H2O.  Nothing more...and nothing less.  A perfectly balanced combination of two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule...or in the case of man - me, or any of us...an infinite quantity of Principle, Mind, Soul, Spirit, Life, Truth, and Love "molecules" as our elemental makeup...just like God. 

If we see you, and I, and the rest of humanity...in fact, all right ideas...as constantly uniting, merging into a river with only one destination...God (the Sea)...how beautiful this song becomes.  No matter what we go through, no matter what seems to bind itself to us, violate our purity, interfere with our clarity, muck up our vision...the sea never rejects the river....it never rejects or refuses even one drop of what constitutes its own makeup...pure, universal humanity. 

Here is the poem that poured from my heart as I listened to Pete singing this very powerful lyric.  And I wonder if,  perhaps...some forty years later than my peers,...even I can become a Pete Townsend fan...you never know...

We drop down
from on high
sent
as
gentle rain,
torrential showers,
as a monsoon
flooding rice paddies in
Thailand,
or a drainage ditch
washing through a Brazilian
slum,
a stream meandering between
cottages and cabins in
a mountain hamlet,
soft showers
upon
the tender herbs
growing alongside
tomatoes and
marigolds for
a cook's garden in
Maine.

We find our way
through the
prairie,
under a bridge,
swelling up from the
groundwater,
through the sewer ditches of
a life broken
and shattered by shame,
along the
walls of a grand
canyon
mansions full of
parties and
privilege

we swirl
and turn and
and carve and
carry
navies and pebbles,
bits of garbage and
restored tall ships
christened with
champagne and caviar

but the Sea
doesn't know
what we've borne
as burdens,
where we've been,
the boulders we've diverted by,
who we've touched, or
how we've flown from mountain top
to where the
river
meets the salty tears of
a parent
Sea...
waiting for
her return...

The Sea
refuses no river...

not
any river
or stream,
not any single drop of
water,
on her way
home

the Sea
receives
the river...
She accepts
her into
the
folds of of Her
giving,
generous salt-drenched
love
and
each drop
discovers
she is
one with her
Source
she is
home...

thanks Scott for encouraging me, thorugh your post, to listen again...
Kate
Kate Robertson, CS

"Down to the river to pray..."

"As I went down in the river to pray,
Studying about that good old way,
And who shall wear the starry crown,
Good Lord, show me the way.

O sisters let's go down,
Let's go down, come on down,
O sisters let's go down, 
Down in the river to pray..."
- traditional gospel performed by Alison Krauss

I have loved going "Down in the River to Pray"over, and over again, this week. I've allowed myself to return to Fresh Pond, our little estuary just north of Cape Cod, and live in the space of Tuesday's post "so like still water" when I've been able to carve out moments for silent reflection.   And since past, present and future coalesce in the beauty of  an eternally infinite now, I've been listening for how I can discover from the classroom of yesterday, the lessons of today.  And how, through the simple lens of humility, I can let the ego dissolve in ashes of Love's strange, refining fires, and allow another self to evolve towards an "advancing thought", as Mary Baker Eddy suggests in one of my favorite passages from the first page of Miscellaneous Writings 1883 - 1896, and recently shared by two very dear friends:

"Humility is the stepping stone to a higher recognition of Diety. The mounting sense gathers fresh forms and strange fire from the ashes of dissolving self, and drops the world. Meekness heightens immortal attributes only by removing the dust that dims them. Goodness reveals another scene and another self seemingly rolled up in shades, but brought to light by the evolutions of advancing thought, whereby we discern the power of Truth and Love to heal the sick."

[Thanks S. and J. - for your wonderful reminders about this statement...it so perfectly describes exactly how I felt revisiting the pond. ]

One of my favorite spiritual practices for listening, and learning, at the feet of divine Love, is "dictation."  Just sitting with pen in hand...poised over the pages of a journal or legal pad...heart open, listening for more love-lessons from the voice of the Great Teacher....and then writing whatever comes.

This week I have returned to Her classroom at the water's edge.  It wasn't long before I realized, while writing "...so like still water..." that the lesson, from a rainy morning two dozen years ago, may not have been finished just because I was ready to get back to the house and begin putting into practice some  of the threads and strands of practical wisdom I'd been able to glean from that morning's curriculum on stillness.

So this week,  I slipped into the back row of Her lecture hall on the shoreline, into that space of stillness, and asked the Teacher for more.  And She didn't leave me hungry.  One afternoon I listened to Her speak on the subject of "simplicity" and its critical role in my usefulness to Her.  Simplicity is something I have been striving to live, with more purpose and practicality, over the course of the last few years.  So her subject-matter was timely and meaningful.  I now have pages and pages of class notes to ponder, but one recent dictation was so arresting, that I can't help but let it sing me forward on a river of prayer, and share it here with you:

"I am here.  I have shown up in this moment, on purpose, to listen and to learn.  How important is simplicity to my purpose in serving you?

Simplicity in purpose is not just important to Me, it is essential.  Water (H2O) is a simple chemical equation.  It is made up of two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule.  In this simplicity is the profound breadth of its function and usefulness to Me.  A drop of water doesn't seek out elemental change.  It doesn't try to be something it is not.  It just shows up, simply and authentically, as H2O and therein is its genius.  It is always ready for whatever I need it to be.  It doesn't decide to be refreshing water, it doesn't try to be clear water, or seek a degree in buoyancy, or get credentialed in purification.  It just is what it is...H2O.  So it shows up as water.

And since you've asked, an even simpler element is Oxygen.  One oxygen molecule is critical to life, but only in its pure simplicity.  It is silent, invisible, vital...there is not a breath taken, not a sound made, not a leaf moves without its presence.  Hmmm...that sounds like Me, Spirit, doesn't it? 

You are my daughter.  You are enough. You don't need to be something more, have something more, get something more, want something more.  The more purely and simply you just show up as you...in your truth, the more useful you are to me in serving my creation in an infinite number of ways.  The more you try to be something, inhabit a role, take on an office, or make a name, the less ready you are for whatever I need you to be at a moment's notice.

You are most useful to me in your simplest "form"...that effortless consciousness of your worth as the reflection of  Me, the one and only I AM that is...in all my Allness...in all.   The less you drag around with you...names, histories, resumes, degrees, expertise, credentials...the less roles you try to occupy, the more vital, valuable, and useful you are to me.  If you will just show up each moment ready to be anything I need you to be, based on the elemental balance of PMSSLTL (Principle, Mind, Soul, Spirit, Life, Truth, Love) to the infinite degree or measure - your one real truth,  the more ways I can give you as a covenant...a promise of my Love..."

So, I am just showing up in the river to pray, studying about that good old way, not caring about "who shall wear the starry crown," but each moment asking, "O Lord, show me the way...."

your student...
Kate
Kate Robertson, CS

"...a river so long..."

"It's coming on Christmas,
they're cuttin' down trees
They're puttin' up reindeer
and singing songs of joy and peace.
I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

"Oh, I wish I had a river so long
I could teach my feet to fly
Oh, I wish I had a river,
I could skate away on…"
-     Joni Mitchell

I linked to Joni's version of "River" in a post about a Christmas spent far from home and family, called, "I Wish I had a river..." on this blog in 2007, but it is this recording of "River" by James Taylor, that has a gentle, but firm, grasp on my heart tonight.

Sitting in my office at 4 in the morning I'm going back, I've skated away from the "things" of 2009, and am gliding backwards...with my face forward in hopes that going back to gather the story will help someone in their own darkness...to a winter some years ago.  I'd been struggling with a gathering pall of depression for months, and this winter day it lowered cold and dark, screeching through my bones like a bitter wind threatening to make my heart so brittle that it would shatter at the slightest touch of human warmth.

I was sad and cold and felt a dead silence inside that not even the sweetest strains of Christmas music could penetrate.   It didn't make sense.  I should have been happy. But I couldn't shake the dull edge of depression's cold knife cutting me off from all I loved and cared about.  It was a feeling of being so disconnected from myself that I wondered at times if I'd actually passed on and was observing myself from a space outside my body, however close it seemed to be.

Nothing mattered...and everything hurt. 

I'd been praying for so long,  just to feel something...anything...that my hopelessness in finding help, was turning to helplessness that I would ever find even a glimmer of hope again.

Depression is a strange hollowness.  It holds nothing.  Whatever is given, seeps through through the black emptiness and is lost in the void.   I remember loved ones urging me to "just be happy", "recall all the things you have to be grateful for", and eventually, to "snap out of it".  I couldn't.  I prayed, studied, made gratitude lists, sang hymns, carols, lullabies, songs.  It was as if I was doing it all under water.  I could hear the words, I could pray the prayers, sing each hymn and make notes in margins about inspiring "revelations", but I couldn't actually feel anything.  It wasn't that I just couldn't feel  joy...I couldn't feel anything. 

But this song, "River" seemed to have an odd effect on me.  When I heard it...even just the sound of it, I somehow knew that Joni understood what I was feeling.  She was stretching a mittened hand out to me where I sat on a log at the edge of the frozen Raritan River calling me to skate with her, whispering: "yes, you can do it...just a little further.".  To take her hands, close my eyes, glide out onto the ice, and let my heart, my mind, my spirit feel the silence of a frozen river, hear only the scratching sound of my skate blades coursing through the rippled ice, feel the bitter cold bite at my cheeks, and listen to the crackle of leafless branches as the wind rocked trees back and forth like keening mourners in blackened shrouds.

Day after day I would play "River". Day after day I would let her take my hands in hers.  And I began to feel.  At first the feelings were grief and cold and loneliness...but they were also the warmth of a mittened hand in mine, the sweet lowing of my friend humming a song about "wishing" and being "weak in the knees" with love.  And I began to feel the tingle of fingers coming back to life in front of a bonfire, and the burning in my throat as hot chocolate from the stainless steel cup on my old plaid thermos, warmed me to the core.

Skating with Joni, knowing that she understood, and that through her music she was taking my hand and skating me forward into feeling alive again...into Spring, and the thawing of my heart, saved my life that winter.

By April, Mind and Soul...the Sources of knowing and feeling...were synonymous again to me.  What I knew, or could think of...intellectually, I could now actually feel in my heart. 

For some reason I had to start where I was...on the edge of a frozen river, cold, sad, and numb...and have her mittened hand, quietly lead me out onto the ice, before I could begin feeling my way forward...pushing off on Love-angled blades, one against the other, indirect reminders that sliced through  my icy heart and poured in the warmth of remembering that I could feel something, anything right in that moment.  In fact, I was feeling...it may have started out as a bone-numbing cold, that turned into a painful tingling as I slowly woke to the full warmth of living love....but I was feeling.  And it was enough.

Enough to keep me coming back to the river's edge each day for the tender warmth of her now-husky voice, the soft angora of her mittened hand reaching out to take my life in her own and gently pull me forward. 

There is an old song from our hymnbook that says,

"Sometimes a light surprises
The Christian while he sings..."

And sometimes what surprises me is the way a song can come "with healing in its wings" to pour its balm of understanding on a cold heart and warm it back to life.

Or as Mary Baker Eddy promises in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:

"Whatever inspires with wisdom, Truth, or Love
— be it song, sermon, or Science —
blesses the human family with crumbs of comfort from Christ's table,
feeding the hungry and giving living waters to the thirsty."

By Spring I was feeling again...and what I was feeling was joy...genuine, palpable, break-into-song, dance-in-the-streets, do backflips in the park, laugh-like-a-child, sleep-like-a-baby joy. 

And as the trees began to bud and bloom, and the river languorously carried apple blossoms from our yard, past the old mill down river, under the covered bridge, around the bend, through the state park and eventually out to sea, I was singing "songs of joy and peace"  I'd found a river I could skate away, and back again, on. And it was "the river of His pleasures"...calm, constant, fresh, and new each day...flowing in my own heart.

Thanks Joni...I love you...
Kate
Kate Robertson, CS

"...just around the river bend..."

"What I love most about rivers is
you can't step in the same river twice.
The water's always changing,
always flowing
But people I guess can't live like that
They all must pay a price
To be safe we lose our chance
of ever knowing

What's around the river bend
Waiting just around the river bend
I look once more just around the river bend
Beyond the shore where the gulls fly free
Don't know what for
What I dream the day might send
just around the river bend
For me, coming for me...."
-     Alan Menken
"Just Around the River Bend"
(click on the title above for a link to the video)

She was 6 years old and fully aware of her own "promise" as she stood there that bright, hot summer afternoon in 1994.  It was the end-of-season performance for her summer arts camp, and she was Pocahontas. Together we had created her costume out of chamois (soft, pliable natural leather sold for polishing cars) we bought in ragged pieces at the local auto supply store.  She and I had worked tirelessly cutting fringe and sewing on small, colorful glass beads.  Her long hair was braided, tied with thin strips of the same chamois, and woven with flowers.  She looked every bit the strong, self-assured Indian princess.

As she threw her arms out for those final words..."Just around the river bend..." my heart caught in my throat and the moment was captured forever in memory as a moment I didn't want to ever forget. 

This is still one of my favorite mental pictures of our strong, beautiful daughter who has just finished her matric exams in South Africa.  And yes, I do believe that the Dream-giver still waits for her...and for all of us.

Recently my husband accepted an assignment in another city - work that is "on purpose" with his sense of mission and honors our vision and values as a family.  As soon as we knew that this was the right thing for him, the organization he is working with, and our family, I wanted to know "What does this mean for us...down the road? What's next?"

My husband gave me a great gift.  He said, "you don't have to know that right now."  He went on to explain that today we know everything we need to know.  We knew that our youngest children are happy in their school.  We knew that his housing was being taken care of where he was going.  We knew that if there was a need he could be home on a flight in a matter of hours.  We knew that I love what I do, and that I love where I am privileged to be working.  We knew that our older children were happy and at peace in the cities they lived in, the friends they were surrounded by, the schools they attended, and the jobs they held.  We...I really didn't need to know anything more at that moment.  I was at peace.

As I look back at the ensuing months, I realize that -- for the most part -- I have held that peace.  There have been very few moments where I have felt panicky about "not knowing." But when people have asked me "what's next," I have been completely confident in saying, "we don't know anything more than that we are all in our right place, doing what we love, and happy...today."

I know that when we need to know more...we will.  I know that whether this "chapter" is brief, or whether it lasts for years, we are fine.  We love eachother.  We are doing work we love and having opportunities to bless that we would not have otherwise. 

For the most part, I am at peace "not knowing" what's around the river bend.  Perhaps I've learned something from that little Pocahontas of mine.  Perhaps she has taught me that I too have promise and that I can trust that the God who blessed me with promise, will bring it to pass.

Mary Baker Eddy says that,

"Security for the claims of harmonious and eternal being
is found only in divine science." 

This is a statement worth resting my hopes, dreams...and yes, promise...on.  In this divine Science where God, good is All-in-all,  Love is the only law-giver, and I am secure and safe. In this kingdom, the province of the heart,  there is but one supreme, beneficent Sovereign who loves me, and mine, and all.  Anything that dwells there...dreams, hopes, vision..are under His divine control and I can trust His wise oversight to know where, when, and how to bring it all to pass. 

I can always feel the presence of the great Dream-giver assuring me of His presence, and I can trust...just trust...

Perhaps you, too, can feel it....  

"...I feel it there beyond those trees
Or right behind these waterfalls
Can I ignore that sound
of distant drumming?

Should I choose the smoothest course
steady as the beating drum...
...Is all my dreaming at an end?
Or do you still wait for me, Dream-giver,
just around the river bend...?

with Love...
River Song
Kate Robertson, CS

"Show me the river that leads to my home..."

"...Show me the river that leads to my home
back to the one that I love
show me the wind that constantly blows
and I will fly away, fly away home..."
- EastMountainSouth "Show Me the River"*

For the most part, when I have wandered off course it has always been in a way that, to a casual onlooker, might go unnoticed.  And although to someone glancing in my direction it may seem as if I am still sitting in my normal place...in the chair by the window...I'm sometimes quite alone and far away  My wanderings sometimes take me so far away from "home" that I am left shivering inside like an abandoned pioneer child on the windswept edges of a barren winter prairie...grasses beige with cold and the sky steely and lowering with a gathering storm in the East.

This "space" of desolation was where I found myself bedded down one night a few years back.  Long after my family was fast asleep under heavy quilts...dreaming with heads upon soft downy pillows, I was tossing and turning on the hard frozen ground of a Kansas prairie...or so it felt.   I finally realized that I'd mentally left my warm bed, when I found I was shivering, arms wrapped around me, as if I were grasping a threadbare shawl about my shoulders in order to stay warm.  It was this very clutching of "my tatters close about me" that wakened me from the aimless mental wandering and stopped me in my tracks, and allowed the words from East Mountain South's "Show Me the River" to penetrate through a deep-seated cold, bringing the much-needed inspiration that would begin to wing me "homeward".

I love rivers.  I love the spiritual metaphors they evoke, the visual inspiration I find while sitting on their banks, the realization that a congregation of individual drops of water when flowing in a single direction can carve canyons out of mountains and buoy a fleet of schooners down the Nile, the Amazon, or the St. Lawrence.  But mostly, I love Mary Baker Eddy's definition of "River" in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: 

" Channel of thought. When smooth and unobstructed,
it typifies the course of Truth; but muddy, foaming,
and dashing, it is a type of error."

It was this definition, following EastMountainSouth's wake-up call to me while I lay cold and shivering on that barren stretch of mental prairie, that pointed me in the direction that would lead "home".   I could imagine lowering myself into the calm waters of a warm river, a channel of thoughts...smooth and unobstructed. When rocks or debris crossed my path, the river would either flow around them...dismissing them as inconsequential...or calmly and persistently dissolve the hardness of those suggestions with an unrelenting spiritual confidence.  Any rigidity in my thinking, any suggestion that I should be afraid, doubt the "supremacy of Spirit" or ever think that my life...or the life of anyone...was out of His control, was washed away in the affluence of God's abiding Love.

Having reached new mental shores I could rise up out of the river's arms, be dried by the warm sunshine of Soul's ever-reminding evidence of beauty, love, and peace surrounding me and calling to me from every direction...the gentleness of my daughter's touch, the precise placement of the stars hanging above me in the cloudless winter sky, the constancy of Life proven in every leaf that falls and bud that bursts from the rich Spring soil...then allow myself to be lifted and carried by the winds of Spirit towards the familiar landscapes of peace, faith, and grace-filled moments of trust in His care.

"Wind" is my other favorite spiritual "element." a term that Eddy, in part, defines as:

"That which indicates the might of omnipotence
and the movements of God's spiritual government,
encompassing all things."

I like thinking of myself (and others) as God-blown, God-carried, God-choreographed, God-sent, God-breathed...as a blessing upon the earth.   Not one of my movements is self-determined or "born of a woman"...even myself...but borne on the wings of God's divine breath.

As I let myself be carried from the cold barren landscape of fear and doubt by a river of trust and faith, around the inconsequential obstacles of confusion and the boulders of self-doubt,  dissolving the bleak suggestions of "remember when" and "what if"....I could feel the constancy of His deep, low song, "I am All, I am here"...singing me all the way home.

Finding my way onto the shores of His kingdom within...I could finally rest in His arms...I was home.

If you find yourself far from home in the middle of a dark night of doubt, or even in the glaring light of a busy day, lower yourself into the river of God's presence, surrender to the constant flow of His peace-filled thoughts, be carried towards new landscapes of opportunity for blessing others, then rising and rising on the winds of His breath... let yourself be God-blown towards home.

with Love,
Kate

*this is the only video I could find with the soundtrack of this song...if you don't like superman, I'm sorry...please feel free to just listen to the music.