Keep adding bits and pieces to my office.  Still have a bit more to go–books coming from my office at church, a keyboard tray that actually works.  Also working on the new rhythms of work.  It is quite lovely to sit and work while Maria visits and plays on her IPad right behind me.  The pieces fit today.

Walking out to put the trash bins out on the street for weekly pickup and seeing the
light of evening against the side of I-95.

Flowers that have brightened my day, every day, for almost a week.

The amazing meals folks have quietly left at the door every day since Sherod got home that allowed us to eat well with a minimum of fuss in the busy past few days. How Sherod relished eating congealed salad and “pineapple-mandarin orange delight” and the DVD’s and popcorn that we will share with the girl Maria tonight.

The notes of encouragement I got this week.

And how each day, Sherod’s steps become more sure, he stands up straighter,
he walks longer, he gets stronger.

Happy Friday, friends, and thank you to everyone who has taken such good care of us this week. You know who you are and we love you.

Over Christmas, Sherod suggested we go see Frozen with Maria.  You could have knocked me over with a feather–the Mallowman and I both are not Disney friends, and even less, of the whole Disney notion of the princess game.  I grudgingly acceded mainly because Maria was delighted.  I figured I could have a nice nap in the cool darkness of the theater.

Wow!  It was compelling, it was funny, it was so completely unexpected, turning the stereotype of the passive princess on its head, giving a whole new meaning to “true love” as the only way to break the spell of darkness. In a sense, Let it Go  is the anthem, even if it is a Disney anthem, for breaking out of imprisoning chains of duty, chains of the dreaded word that still points at some important truths about the messes we get into: codependence, and out chains of fear.  My favorite part of this particular sequence is when Eva finds her way towards the yes of her existence and you see her move into her full incarnate self in a sexy, sassy, lovely way. Spoiler alert: her new found beauty is not in preparation for when that handsome prince finally comes to save her.

I loved this movie.  Go see it you haven’t yet.

Sherod came through the surgery well. It is still hard to believe the Dr wasn’t even in the same room since it was robotic surgery. Holy Cross is perhaps the foremost hospital in this country for hip replacement. That fits considering how many elderly people live here in this area. Skilled, probably brilliant, surgery is followed by mediocre service and nursing. I had to insist that the special air “stockings” that help prevent phlebitis got hooked up and used. When we got to his room, I was handed a menu and told I would call “room service” to order meals for him. Mid afternoon, we called and after 40 minutes on hold and more calls I finally had to go through the system demanding a human voice not voice mail. Food services has been outsourced and it sucks. Though Sherod is in a double room, the other bed is empty. I asked if I could sleep over with him and was told yes, if I wanted to sleep in the chair pictured above. I guess I am going home late tonight instead.

I started to make a fuss about this too and then I stopped. As soon as Sherod got settled in the room and the medical staff had left, he held out his hand and asked me to pull the chair closer. For most of the afternoon, I sat quietly and held hands with him. After this tough year, part of the healing is about lowering our guard, not moving so automatically into warrior mode. I will be attentive and insist he gets the care he needs. The rest I can let go of so I can sit and hold his hand.

Last year, in early January, as I began training for the half marathon walk I participated in with my friend Marsha, folks in my circle of web friendship were finding a word to claim for 2013 and though I had not planned to choose one, I did.  I wrote a post about that word here.  It was way more prescient than I would have wished for.  I am grateful for the endurance that allowed me to walk in that half marathon, I am grateful for an amazing community that made it possible to endure through very hard times at the end of the year.  I am grateful for the enduring love between Sherod and me and what I have learned about endurance with him.

Last night I began my ‘formal training’ for a new half-marathon, this one in Nashville in early March.  There’s all kinds of symmetry happening, since I lived in Nashville and went to Vanderbilt, dropped out and haven’t been back since the late 80’s.  As I walked, not a word so much as a phrase insinuated itself into my thinking:  Cultivate Joy.  Doing my regular etymology schtick, I found all kinds of layers of meaning for this phrase.  Cultivate derives from the Latin cultivare word that means “to till”.  In turn, cultivare is a derivation of cultus–care, labor, reverence, worship.

On Saturday afternoon, I spent some time opening furrows in the planter I gave Sherod and then planted lettuce seeds.  I also have this tray of mini-planters to germinate some of the heirloom tomato seeds as well as some of the more delicate lettuce with names like Jaune Flamme tomato and Freckles Lettuce.  My nails were crusted with dirt, the smell of loam lingered for me and there was that wonderful sense of anticipation and impatience-.  Grow already; let me see what you are going to be!  Cultivate–to grow, to care and labor for, to deepen a capacity for reverence.  It is all so incarnational, so much about effort, commitment, and in the end, gifts and fruit.  I already find myself fantasizing about picking a fresh tomato and coming in to make me a ‘mater sandwich still warmed by the sun.  I used to do that with my friend Carolyn in Dalton  (Ga) and then with Sherod in Alabama and Tennessee.  With company, and a fresh loaf of bread–pure banquet.

So cultivate joy.  That’s my phrase and work for 2014.  I cultivated joy in these past two days in these ways:
–Spending time at a bus stop just trying to pay attention to the people who were waiting for buses or got off of them.  There was one young woman in particular whose features just looked wooden with the burdens of life.  We made eye contact, I smiled and all of a sudden her face lit up and she was so beautiful.
–Talking to members of the discernment committee of the church that had been considering me to be their rector.  Generous, curious, brave, several have reached out to let me know how disappointed they were that I withdrew my name from their process, eager to ask if we could stay in conversation so when Sherod and I get to Alabama there might be a way for me to help them as they try to find a way to welcome Latinos to their community.
–Connecting with my friends Robin, and Joe, knowing how easily I tend to self isolate and what an amazing chance I have with my new work situation to not let that happen.
–Starting my training for that new half marathon on March 8.  It felt like I just zipped down the street, listening to Mason Williams and Lindsey Stirling.  I made good time and grinned remembering what it was like crossing the finish line in B’ham and hugging my friend Marsha.

Joy.  That sounds like this:

My Christmas Gift from Juanita Mallow
Given Soon After Sherod Was Diagnosed with Cancer, December 2000

Today is the annual meeting of the parish of St Ambrose.  Every year across the Episcopal Church, parishes call these meetings to elect new leaders, review the budget for the next year, report on the results of the previous year.  No one is totally thrilled by these meetings and we all know they are necessary and important.

It is something of a miracle that we are having this meeting at St Ambrose.  The year of 2013 will not go down as a wonderful year.  Yes, we became a United Way Agency, successfully planned and held a wonderful Cinco de Mayo Celebration, opened a thrift shop and got a food pantry on its feet.  We have a waiting list of over 40 children whose families would love for their children to participate in our school success programs.  The reading comprehension test results for our literacy summer camp were the strongest ever.  But it was a year of unhealthy drama within our own community and a year of serious and destructive conflict with a part of the leadership team of the “mother ship”/big church that we work with.  For the first time ever, I spent a too much time looking over my shoulder because it was clear that there were some folks who’d set their sights on my staff and me.  In November, the conflict broke wide open at one of the ugliest, most confrontational church meetings anyone would want to be a part of.  For the next few weeks, it was hard to find a way forward that would keep the ministries I so believe in open. My job as I had known it was finito; it made for a very bittersweet Christmas.

I had gone on retreat at Tahoe in October because I was as lost and turned upside down as a person can be and still function.  The conflict, chaos and drama of the past year not only made my work situation difficult but brought enormous pressure to bear on my marriage.  For a while, it seemed like I was going to lose everything that anchored my life and gave it meaning.  Those thirty days of retreat, prayer and reflection reminded me that in fact, it is in losing everything that we find our lives and somehow, I began to lose the fear; the sense of hopelessness and failure I had struggled with all year.

Something else quite lovely happened. While I was at Tahoe, I was approached about two pretty remarkable work opportunities.  One was to become rector of a large, successful parish in Alabama.  The other was to become lead consultant for a church-wide new program that is being launched by the Episcopal Church.  This second job would start part-time and would allow me to be based wherever I chose. There would be travel, including fairly regular trips to NYC, but a lot of flexibility as well.

And that parish job! If you had ever told me I would be seriously considered for rector of a large, established, quite traditional congregation in the South I would have been incredulous.  Yet at each step of the discernment process with them, I experienced a community filled with grace, curiosity, courage and humor.  They are a pretty remarkable bunch of people and it was with real regret that I withdrew my name from their consideration in order to accept the consultant position.  I will never know how far I could have gone in that discernment process and I also have the certainty that I have made a very good decision for myself because I need the flexibility and the ability to craft a new way of working that fits my life now.

One of the results of this decision is that with the help of the diocese,  it looks like we have found a way for me to be able to transition out of my position with St Ambrose much more slowly and carefully than I had thought would be necessary.  One day a week, I will continue to work at St Ambrose, focused on the school success programs that are the heart and portal of our ministry.  I will continue to serve liturgically on Sunday mornings.  There’s no denying that the whole edifice is fragile and vulnerable, but we have endured and persisted and found a way forward for another year.  That is what ministry looks like these days, if you are serving as a member of the Episcopal Church in a community that does not have lots of resources to draw from.

What doesn’t kill you or your marriage makes both stronger too.  Sherod and I found the resources we needed to make our way out of hell—and that really is what our life had become.  Perhaps some day there will be a way to write about the hardship and grace peculiar to a clergy couple, especially a clergy couple who both thrive on risk and find themselves out at the very edges of the church where the ice is thin and the water beneath brutally cold.  I can say this: for longer than I can remember, and because of all the problems with my hip,  I have identified with Jacob, who wrestled a blessing from God and also came out lame as a result.  On Friday of this week, Sherod is having hip replacement surgery, the same surgery on the same side, as I had a few years ago.  It is both of us who have wrestled with God. It is both of us who recognize the brokenness of the human condition and have scars to show for that truth.  We have asked our community to allow me to sit by myself at the hospital on the morning of Sherod’s surgery and to give us some time to ourselves as Sherod begins the process of healing.  I will lean on him and he will lean on me, and together, we will get on with rebuilding our life after a very, very hard year.

My new office space is just about ready.  I am even going to have place to sit and read, knit or sew with good light when the Mallowman wants to watch his football games.  I’ve had to do a heck of a lot of moving things around, sorting and decluttering, and accepting the pieces that don’t quite fit perfectly but are are good enough.  I have a sense now of how the space will work–in fact, I am writing this at my new desk.  My life and vocation, like my office space,are sorting themselves out into a new order and path.   The icing on the cake this evening was dinner with the girl Maria who has navigated the first three days back at school flawlessly–a completely new experience for all of us.  Every single year since she started school in 2002, the first week after Christmas vacation has been a nightmare.  Even if it goes south tomorrow and Friday, the first three days were great.

Earlier this week, I was in touch with Carol, her behavior therapist who has been such a graceful member of “Team Maria”.  She said that at BARC and at school, the rest of the team and she are observing Maria get into her white-hot trigger situations (that is, the situations where she is most likely to loose it) and self restrain successfully.  None of us had dared hope for such a step forward. I know this path and I am grateful for today without projecting what tomorrow may bring.  But still.  Progress.  Real, deeply meaningful progress.  And the sweetest joy imaginable.

I did it–the desk is assembled.  I am almost done with my new desk chair–the last pieces left to assemble are on the desk.  Black and white–about the only parts of my life with that kind of clarity tonight are my new desk and chair-in-process.  And in the complexity and out-n-out confusion of it all, a new kind of sharp too.

This Christmas, Sherod got a beautiful set of Buck pocket knives–and the person who gave them to him said that the smaller one was for me.  Along with a ‘lectric drill, flat head screwdriver and phillips screwdriver, I used a  pocket knife.  Never, ever owned one, never thought I would either.  And now I do. Is that totally cool or what?  New year, new office space, new lots of stuff.

For the last year, I found myself doubting my competence.  Or better said, others claimed I had none and I let the itty bitty sh*&^y little voices of my mind pick up the chant and amplify it more and more in the echo chamber of my fear.  After all, I come from a family system that’s had its fair share of alcoholism and those of us that come from that place easily slide into the shame game.

Part of getting on with life is getting past that foolishness.  Last week, I assembled the raised plant bed and then moved 12 bags (18 cu ft) of potting soil from the Home Depot store to the plant bed.  It took me three days and my muscles were sore, but I did it.  With Sherod immobilized by hip pain, Christmas shopping, decorating, and putting away fell on me.  I got help to put up the Christmas Tree and learned how to do it so I can take care of it next year.  This morning, I hauled the tree out for pickup next week.  My house is neat and clean, Christmas has been put away for another year and in a while, I am going to assemble a new desk for the office space I am carving out for myself now that my work life is in so much transition.

Of course, I understand that none of this is particularly remarkable.  But I remember being a freshman in college, watching my college roommate use all kinds of saws and other woodwork tools.  For Christmas she had decided to make picture frames for her family; I felt like I was watching an alien.  Later, I watched another of my dearest friends, Mary, and her husband Mike, put in a pool in their back yard in Memphis—and do it all themselves, from scratch, with a pool kit they had bought from some crazy outfit out in California, I believe.  This wasn’t a little kiddie pool, either.  This was a fairly large and deep pool.  I can remember seeing my buddy Mary caked in red mud from head to toe, the finernails on her strong beautiful hands dirt stained  and torn.   I marvelled that she had the imagination to see herself as capable of being the co-builder of a pool and the first time she and I went swimming in it, I was in awe.  It is only in the past 2 or 3 years that I learned how to turn on and use a lawn mower.  Until then, if I was accomplished, it was in the more “feminine arts”—sewing, knitting, cooking, batik, cross-stitch—I knew how to do all that and enjoyed myself.  But none of those accomplishments compare with the feeling of a tired and sore body that has been put at the service of a work project like the ones I’ve undertaken because Sherod could no longer do them.

Sherod’s hip replacement surgery is coming up in 13 days.  I hope and pray he will recover and regain his capacity to tinker, take on projects around the house—help put up Christmas lights. I just barely dare allow myself to hope that at least occasionally, he will be able to come along on some of my rambles.  But it has been soul-saving for me to do all this hard work, to do what needed to get done. So those mean voices?  Lalalalala—I am not listening.  I’m too busy being competent—and this “Rosa the Riveter” is here to stay.

Yesterday it was time to celebrate a little after a lot of work and thought during this Advent and Christmas season.  The Mallowman and I had some old friends over for dinner; as usual, we split cooking duties and didn’t do any coordinating with each other. Sherod was in charge of the main part of the meal, I was in charge of some of the appetizers and desert.  He prepared smoked ribs, turnip greens, and black-eyed peas.  I put out bruschettas and grav lax (smoked salmon prepared in the Swedish way) and flambéed Crepes Suzette for desert.  Might have made our guests feel a little schizy but it all tasted good…Happy New Year, y’all!