For better or worse, when you have a child, you have to redefine who you are. My wife and I used to go to movies and restaurants all the time before the birth of our daughter. We were an incredibly social couple, always planning get-togethers with family and friends. However, after our kids came along, I was no longer just “Saint Marty” or “Teacher Marty” or “Poet Marty.” My new title carried more weight: “Father Marty” (not in the Catholic priest sense). Parenthood makes you redefine everything you believed about yourself, including life goals and hopes and dreams.
Marie Howe writes about a life-redefining experience . . .
Encounter
by: Marie Howe
First, the little cuts, then the bigger ones,
the biggest, the burns. This is what God did
when he wanted to love you.
She didn’t expect to meet him on the stairway
no on used but she did, because she was
afraid of the elevator, the locked room.
She didn't expect him to look like that, to be
so patient, first the little ones, then
the big ones. Everything
in due time, he said, I’ve got all the time
in the world. She didn’t imagine it would take
so long, the breaking.
He did it three times before he did it. Love?
She had imagined it differently, something
coming home to her,
an end to waiting. And she did stop, when
the big cuts came. It was all there was,
the burning, and that’s what God was
everywhere at once. Someone had already
told her that, not only in his voice. He was
inside her now—
the bigger ones, then the burning—and gone,
then back again. This was termite, when
nothing happened that wasn’t
already happening. She couldn’t remember.
After the burning, even the light went quiet.
She didn’t think God would be so
specific, so delicate—inside her elbow, under
her arm, the back of her neck,
and her knees.
It’s true, she struggled at first until after
the breaking. Then God was with her, and she
was with him.
Every spring, something miraculous happens in my backyard. Quite a few years ago, I noticed one or two trillium blossoms growing at the base of some lilac bushes. Now, calm down. I know trillium are endangered, and just picking one can cost a person up to $1000 or 90 days in jail. Let me be clear: I did not troop into the forest in the middle of the night to hunt down trillium like the toothless Chris Cooper hunting down Ghost Orchids in the movie Adaptation.
I don’t know how those trillium got into my backyard. Perhaps the former owner of my house did the whole Chris Cooper thing. Or maybe the house was built on top of bulldozed field of trillium before they were endangered. Or, maybe, like in Howe’s poem, God just walked by one day and left a God-fragment behind for me to encounter.
Whatever origin story is true, the miracle of my backyard trillium happened again this year, and, in the almost quarter century we’ve lived in this house, these ghostly trinities have multiplied. Where once there was only two or three blossoms, now an entire host of whiteness materializes in May, blazes for a few weeks, and then vanishes until the following spring. My hope is that, eventually, trillium will redefine the landscape of my entire backyard like a low-hanging fog bank.
You’re probably thinking to yourself: what do trillium have to do with Saint Marty’s son graduating from high school? Well, we’re all trillium, struggling to hang on and flourish in a world that’s seems determined to endanger or extinct us. The only way to survive is to give ourselves permission to evolve and germinate. Cling to the wonder that brought us into existence in the first place.
That’s what I’m trying to do right now, and that’s what I’m encouraging you, faithful disciples, to do, as well: enjoy this year’s season of trillium (the sun on its petals, mud in its roots). Stop and really take in that miraculous patch of beauty. Don’t worry about the hard winter we’ve just endured, or the wildfires of the coming summer. To paraphrase a really old cliché: stop and smell the trillium. The redefining will come soon enough.
Saint Marty wrote a poem about another cliché today . . .
Ignorance is Bliss
by: Martin Achatz
Across the street, the new neighbors
(an older man and younger woman)
hang wind chimes on their front porch.
When I get home, the chimes chime
like a teenage girl’s jewelry box,
a plastic ballerina twirling
to “Waltz of the Flowers” slower
and slower and slower until it stops
mid-spin, becomes a Degas pastel.
I stand in dusky light, imagine
the older man and younger woman
cooking naked in their kitchen, him
lifting a spoon to her lips, her sipping
its sauce, telling him to add more salt.
I may learn their names tomorrow, or
that they’re actually brother and sister, or
she had miscarriage last year, or
he is in the middle of chemo for lung cancer.
But for now, just let me have this stupid joy:
the older man and younger woman
holding each other tight as the pasta boils
and chimes chime in the evening breeze.
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