Daughter:Detroit

“Why does it have to be in downtown Detroit?” I thought, as my husband and I drove down the Lodge Expressway in a small U-Haul carrying a bed, a futon, and three hand-me-down bar stools. Our 20-year-old daughter was somewhere on the road ahead of us in her second-hand station wagon, loaded with clothes and books to last her six months. It was a cold, gray day in February, and we were moving her into an apartment in downtown Detroit for an internship.

My husband had grown up in a suburb of Detroit in the 1970s. One of his favorite childhood stories involves his brother watching out an upstairs window as his Dodge Dart was getting stolen out of their driveway. (“A Dodge Dart,” he always says, incredulous.) Detroit was a little scary. Over the next few decades, it got a lot worse.

In 2012, Forbes named it America’s Most Dangerous City—for the fourth year in a row. Its crime rate, which was more than five times the national average, had a ripple effect. People and businesses moved out, eventually leaving 78,000 abandoned buildings.

In 2013, it became the largest city in U.S. history to file for bankruptcy. For a while, it looked like the city would sell off some of the art in the Detroit Institute of Art to help pay its debts. In the 2013 book Detroit: An American Autopsy, Charlie LeDuff wrote, “It is the country’s illiteracy and dropout capital, where children must leave their books at school and bring toilet paper from home. . . There are firemen with no boots, cops with no cars, teachers with no pencils, city council members with telephones tapped by the FBI, and too many grandmothers with no tears left to give.”

I knew that Detroit had been slowly improving since then. I had heard about Quicken Loans founder and Detroit native Dan Gilbert and Detroit Tigers and Red Wings owner Mike Illitch pouring millions into redevelopment. Still, as we pulled off Exit 2B, it was my old notions of the city that I held onto. People had tried to revitalize Detroit before—most notably in 1976, with the Renaissance Center—and had failed. Out my side of the U-haul, I saw new shops and restaurants, renovated buildings, and an outdoor rink filled with young skaters, but I was unconvinced.

As I helped unpack the flotsam and jetsam that makes up my daughter’s world—a half-knitted scarf, succulents she named Maeve, Calvin, Mini Stanley and Mega Stanley, and a poster “It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are”—in her new apartment, I still had no idea how I could bring myself to drive away, leaving her without what I consider to be the basics—friends, life skills, and an alarm she doesn’t sleep through.

I watched her hang up a photo of herself the first time she’d been on a horse. She still looks the same, mostly. When she was a baby, she had a heart defect. I rocked her to sleep every night, willing the small hole in her heart to close. She had a fighting spirit even then. Her hole went away; the fight stayed. She punched me in the nose when she was three, ran away regularly when she was six, and started jumping horses—and falling off them, and getting back on them—when she was nine.

In high school, her struggle with anxiety and panic attacks began. I recently asked her what the hardest thing she ever did was. She thought for a moment, then said, “The hardest thing I ever did happens every time I have a panic attack.” In spite of that, she hasn’t let anxiety get between her and living.

When an entire class of students who had been her friends shunned her during every class for a semester, refusing to sit at her table even when all the seats at the other tables in the room were taken, she could have dropped the class. She didn’t. She went to every class, sat alone, participated in the discussions, completed group projects by herself, and aced the class.

There’s a famous Chrysler car commercial that aired during the Super Bowl in 2011, called “Imported from Detroit.” Maybe you remember it. It starred Eminem and shows scenes from around Detroit, not all of them pretty. In one part, the voice-over says, “What does a town that’s been to hell and back know? More than most. It’s the hottest fires that make the hardest steel.”

As my daughter lifted her arms to hug me goodbye at the door of her new apartment, on the doorstep of her new life, I caught a glimpse of the nautilus tattoo on her left bicep. She got it last spring, at the end of a particularly difficult year. I cried when she got it—cried at the permanence of the ink on her tender, alabaster skin. But now the tattoo strikes me as the mark life has literally left on her. She has taken all comers, living and learning faster than her peers, and she’s still standing.

And that’s why she has to be in Detroit. Because every day she will see its grit, its perseverance, its fire in the belly. She will see herself, and she will remember that she already has everything she needs.–Christine MacLean

How to Say Goodbye to Your First True Love

First, when a mutual friend calls you out of the blue and says it’s time, are you coming, say yes. Cancel all your meetings and appointments except your haircut. Hate yourself for caring about looks at a time like this. Cancel the haircut.

Tell your husband of 30 years where you’re going. Try to explain why. When he nods, mentally give him 100 points on the running tab you keep of your marriage.

Turn the house upside down looking for a specific photo—the black and white one you took from the audience when he was playing first chair in the orchestra. The one that shows off his cheekbones. Give up after two hours. Settle for the one you took of him cradling his dog like a baby. Hope it will make him smile.

Think about what you will say to him. Time will be short. He can’t focus for long. Never has it felt so important to be concise. Eloquence would be nice, but clarity is job one. You decide on “I came because I wanted to say thank you. You made a difference in my life.” Write it down. You will be nervous and might forget.

Think about what you will say to his young adult children. They likely have never heard your name until today. You decide on “I have to be honest. I feel awkward being here and I’m afraid I will say the wrong thing. Thank you for letting me come so I could tell your dad he made a difference in my life.” Write it down.

Forget to think about what you will say to his girlfriend.

Take food. It’s what people do. Bagels are good. They can be frozen for later. You buy a dozen bagels, fresh, and cream cheese.

On the drive to his house, get lost in the fog. Not just turned around, but so lost that you can’t find north. Think of how it’s a metaphor. Pull over and try to learn the car’s navigation system. Curse technology. Set the route. Get back on the road.

To calm yourself, take deep breaths and recite Nessun Dorma. When you get to the last two lines—“Until I say my real name on your mouth/Let all lights shine and no man sleep”—let yourself weep, but only for two miles. After two miles, allow for another 20 miles. Better to get the ugly stuff out of the way now. Wonder why, exactly, you are sobbing. For him? For your long-lost youth? For the loss of possibility?

Ignore the navigation system when, five miles from his house, it says, “You have reached the end of your charted route. No more information on your destination is available.” Acknowledge that you are off the map in more ways than one.

After you park, give yourself a pep talk. You can do this. It’s important. Forget to review your notes lying on the passenger seat.

Go inside. Introduce yourself—just your name. Don’t take off your coat. You’re not staying long. Thrust the plastic bag of bagels into his daughter’s arms. Silently berate yourself for not thinking to put them in a nicer container. Say, “Nice to meet you. Thank you for letting me come.” Forget everything else.

When things cannot possibly get any more awkward, make your way to the hospital bed set up in the living room. Find a fifth gear somewhere inside yourself. Do not show you are alarmed by how small he has become. Even though his eyes are closed, his children and girlfriend are watching. Be cool. By all means, do not think of the shape of his arms when you knew him, sculpted from wielding a planer all day. Touch his hand and say, “It’s me, Chris,” even though you go by Christine now, because that is what he called you back then.

Say, “I came to say thank you. You made a huge difference in my life.”

When he arches his eyebrows and answers with genuine surprise, “I have?” don’t panic as everything that was the you and the him together comes rushing back at the sound of his voice, which you had forgotten, the distinctive way he shapes his vowels. In a heartbeat, it will level you.

Regroup. Do not let all that is in you come pouring out. Do not tell him how often over the years he has shown up in your dreams, not as a lover but as a priest of creativity. Too complicated. Stick to the plan.

Smile so that even though his eyes are still closed, he can hear the smile in your voice. Say, “Yes. You showed me a different path—art and music—that a creative life was possible. You changed the direction of my life.”

Don’t be disappointed when he doesn’t respond. You have done what you came to do. Squeeze his hand. Say, “Rest well.”

Make small talk with his children. Say, “I knew him when I was just 18 and it changed everything.” Leave it at that. As you are walking out the door, remember the picture of him looking down at his dog. Hand it to his son. When it makes him smile, give yourself over to gratitude—for this, for everything.–Christine MacLean

Things I wish I had

A butterfly bush in the front yard.
A clothesline in the back,
so I could feel the sun
and virtuous at the same time.
The thing with feathers.
A ride on the swing
with my daughter
when she was four,
her legs wrapped around my waist,
her face backlit
at the height of our arc.
Courage.
My sister-in-law,
back from the dead,
doing her impression of a stewardess–
a staple at Thanksgiving–
pointing with two fingers
towards the exit.
Or even
the sharp memory of her laugh,
which is feathering
just three years,
three months,
and one day
into forever.

–Christine MacLean

Lucky

Making my oatmeal this morning,
I saw two ants
through the plastic Domino bag
Staggering along a beach of brown sugar
In a stupor
Over their good fortune.
I dumped the bag down the drain,
Without feeling sorry one bit.
Those ants went to heaven
Then died.
We should be so lucky.

–Christine MacLean

For Madeline, at 17

When I lifted you
at three
onto Keyline’s broad back,
you clasped the pommel
like a scepter
and eyed the reins
in my hand.
Leading him at a walk (nothing more),
me on one side,
the rail on the other,
I didn’t see
the flint strike
your steely core,
the spark of fear,
your own North Star,
that would guide you through
high school’s fun house—
not in a straight line, but still—
draw you toward the jump
into your two-point,
finding your balance,
eyes up, trained
beyond the oxer,
on the vertical,
hands soft on the reins,
already practiced in the art
of release.

*After Linda Pastan

Working Physics: How Changing Space Alters Time

Time passes differently in an office. As a freelancer, I work at home or the coffee shop or the library, but sometimes it makes sense to work onsite with a client for a few months. That’s when I notice the movement of time. It’s not that it goes faster or slower in an office or that it’s better or worse. It just goes differently. Sideways, maybe.

When my mom was in the hospital overnight, I spent the day with her. Mostly we were waiting—waiting for tests, for medication, for the doctor. The doctors and nurses were busy and efficient and I knew they were getting things done. But what happens in there isn’t life, or at least not normal life. Normal life is what happens outside the hospital walls. You can see it from the window. Two nurses taking a walk during lunch, a man unloading groceries from his trunk, a group of teenage girls sitting on the lawn, heads bent over their phones.

That’s the best comparison I can make to how I experience time in an office. I feel like I’m alongside life. I’m not unhappy. I just feel that something is missing, or that I’m missing something. After a few days in the office, the feeling starts to dissipate. After a few weeks, it’s almost gone.

It’s easy to understand why time moves differently for me inside an office. On my own, I have total control over my time and my days are varied. I’m used to moving directly from folding a load of laundry to interviewing a source to walking the dog. By comparison, a day in the office feels pretty monotone.

What’s more intriguing to me is why time stops moving differently, and quite quickly. It’s possible that I get used to it. People are adaptable, and you can get used to anything. (This is why college students raised in tidy homes adjust to dorm living.) Maybe being able to adjust is just nature’s way of helping out. But that answer seemed partial at best.

I was still thinking about it last week when I got an e-mail from the client. The team I’m doing work for was going out for lunch, she said. Would I like to join them? Sure, I said. While at lunch, I heard about children’s sports-related injuries, Halloween plans, and career paths. A few days later, in honor of all the people with October birthdays, donuts, bagels, and sliced apples magically appeared atop a bank of filing cabinets not far from my desk. All day people stopped to snack and chat.It’s an open office, so I overheard conversations about work, upcoming college visits, recipes. I remembered one of the best parts of working at an office: People.

And I think somewhere in there is the answer to why time begins to feel normal again. The more time I spend onsite, the better I get to know the people who work there. Then—not surprisingly, I know; none of this is rocket science—I feel connected and that’s when the shift occurs. That’s when time inside the office stops feeling like it’s operating alongside life and starts feeling like a part of life.

Or it could be the food. But that’s just six of one, half dozen of another. —Christine MacLean

Greater Depth of Field

A few weeks ago we celebrated Father’s Day early at my sister’s house.  “Here,” she said, handing me our dad’s camera after lunch. “Would you take some pictures for Dad?” My dad is 80 and the tremors that come with his Parkinson’s disease make it difficult for him to hold the camera steady.

I was glad to do it, taking pictures of the family members gathered around the table and of Dad opening his presents. I documented the facts of the event. I assumed that’s what he wanted.

My father is a practical man, hard-working and smart as a whip, to use one of his expressions. On the farm when the hay baler broke down, he could fix it with a few tools, some spare parts he had on hand, and ingenuity.  His solution wasn’t always typical, but it always got the job done.

I didn’t think of him as particularly creative; back then my definition of that word was narrower than it is now. My mother was the one with artistic sensibilities. She loved her flower garden and regularly pointed out nature’s beauty—the red wing blackbird’s song, the sunlight filtering through the morning mist, the smattering of Dutchman’s britches in the woods. She noticed beauty everywhere and frequently pointed it out to us.

My father noticed work everywhere and frequently pointed it out to us. He then issued a directive to us to do that work. Working three jobs himself, he hardly had time to sleep, let alone ponder life’s beauty and mystery.  He was all about getting things done. The garden got planted. The beans got picked. The hay got baled. The cow got milked. Dinner got made. And, in good time, because all those things and many more got done day after day, year after year, his children got fed, clothed, and educated. My dad showed his love by providing for us and teaching us to provide for ourselves. Love was spelled W-O-R-K because it led to a better life for us. Other things—things like beauty, longing, the landscapes of his children’s inner lives—were superfluous and not worthy of his time and attention.

Or so I thought.

When my parents moved to a retirement village, my brother-in-law put hundreds of the pictures Dad had taken over the years onto a CD. Knowing an overwhelming job when he sees one, my brother-in-law didn’t try to organize the slides, so a picture of my sister’s second birthday in 1961 is followed by a picture of the trailer my mom lived in in 1954 while Dad was in the Air Force, which is followed by a picture of a hometown parade from 1968.

I was clicking through that CD, looking for a photo of my father as a young man to post in honor of Father’s Day. And in that visual mash-up of my dad’s days I saw that my dad—a retired farmer, roofer, and proud U.S. Postal worker—is also a photographer, taking the time to frame the shot so it tells a story. He intuitively grasps depth of field, light, and the elements of composition and, before Parkinson’s, he used them to great effect. In moments stolen from getting things done, he didn’t just tend to life’s logistics and practicalities. He attended to life’s moments of beauty and grace.

Most astounding of all to me, he attended to us and captured something of who we were at that moment. My parents had six children in nine years and we lived on a working farm. I knew I was loved. But life was busy. I felt not so much invisible as not seen. But it was my father who wasn’t seen, at least not in his entirety. I didn’t have much depth of field when I looked at him.

I wish I had figured all this out before Father’s Day, before I took his camera in hand and trained the lens on him. I wish I had been more mindful so, although I don’t have his skill or his eye, I could have at least tried for the kind of photo he would have taken—the kind that’s a distillation of life and not merely a record of the event. It would have been a much better way to honor the whole man than posting an old photo of him to Facebook.

I got it all wrong. But my dad got some things all right. –Christine MacLean

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Prophylactic Poetry

This morning I straightened the shoes in the front hall and said to the dog, the most attentive member of the family, “I’d do it all again–/marry the man, carry the sons. I’d eat/ the whole McIntosh, seeds and all.”* She sighed and sank to the floor, waiting for the rest of the poem or perhaps completing it herself in dog-speak. Surely she could. She’s heard it and half a dozen others often enough as I struggled to memorize them.

A month ago, I couldn’t recite any poetry. I didn’t even read poetry, and I didn’t particularly want to. Then I got my first smartphone.

I’ve held out on buying one for a long time, and even in the store I was ambivalent. I’m in a service industry, and I know a smartphone will help me provide better service to clients. But I don’t like carrying the whole world and an entertainment center around with me. It’s too much connection, too many choices (Pandora, Netflix, or Facebook while waiting to pick up carpool?), too much doing, all on a tiny screen, and not enough reflecting. I’m not a Luddite; I just think enough is enough.

In his book Hamlet’s Blackberry, William Powers talks about the importance of the gap between times of technology use. He uses the example of calling his mother from his cell phone to tell her he’ll be late. After he hangs up, he continues to think of his mother, visualizing some happy times they’ve shared. This simple call reminds him of their deep connection—but only because of the gap after the call. If he’d immediately made another call, it wouldn’t have held meaning beyond conveying information.

“The gap is the essential link between the utilitarian side of the digital experience and the ‘vital significance’ side. And it’s a link that’s completely overlooked in current thinking about technology, with its unexamined faith in nonstop connectedness,” he writes. “To share time and space with others in the fullest sense, you have to disconnect from the global crowd. You have to create one of those gaps where thoughts, feelings, and relationships take root.”

That idea of creating space away from technology isn’t new to me. It’s one of the reasons I have a little garden and why I don’t much mind washing dishes by hand. The phone, though, raised the stakes.

So I was thinking about those gaps as I drove to book club. For the first time, our book club had chosen to read and discuss two books of poetry, one by Jack Ridl  and the other by Debra Wierenga, both of whom were going to be there.

To be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to it. Poetry intimidates me. I don’t get it. And it’s embarrassing to be a writer who doesn’t get words in a creative form. But that night at book club the poets said poetry is about being, not about meaning. It’s meant to be experienced, they said, like music, because a good deal of poetry’s power comes from the rhythm and rhyme of the words. Even though I don’t know much about music, I enjoy it, and on the drive home, I allowed for the possibility that poetry is something I might like, after all.

In my favorite movie of all time, Shakespeare in Love, Viola De Lesseps puts the importance of poetry right up there with adventure and love. She’s adamant when she says, “I will have poetry in my life,” and she risks plenty to get it. To her, poetry is integral to a life fully lived.

She gets poetry and a life fully lived; I get technology and, if I don’t draw some boundaries, a life barely lived. There are fewer and fewer gaps because the more you can do with technology, the more you think of to do with it. It’s like not needing anything until you go shopping and suddenly you realize how much you need. Except that you really don’t. And you buy things and then you have to figure out how to fit them into your life.

So I’ve taken up prophylactic poetry. I’m memorizing poems to keep technology from propagating and to protect the gaps. No one is more surprised by this than I am. If for book club we’d read a book on kickboxing, I’d probably be doing that instead. But we read poetry.

I haven’t been at all methodical in choosing the poems. I started with Tennyson’s “The Eagle,” because it was short and I’d learned it for sixth grade. Thanks to this scene in “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues” was next, then a few others.

So far, the effort is paying off.  I’ve found it impossible to memorize a poem without reflecting on the poet’s word choices and placement. Sometimes, reflection even gives way to meaning. I memorized “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” by Robert Frost, in early May–just the right time to fully appreciate “Nature’s first green is gold/Her hardest hue to hold” (and capture it with my smartphone’s camera). 

It has also shortened my 3:00 a.m. spells of insomnia. Like a toy can distract an anxious child, poetry distracts my mind from the usual worries just enough—ooh! Look how pretty!—to let me sink back into sleep.  I think my concentration is improving, too. It had been a very long time since I’d had to memorize anything, even a phone number. With a smartphone, there’s even less reason to; everything is at your fingertips. It’s reassuring to see that I still can memorize something.

I’ve always thought that, whatever losses and indignities old age might bring, my quality of life would be good enough as long as I could read or listen to books. I assumed I’d always be able to—until a friend mentioned that her mother, an avid reader, can no longer follow a plot because of her Alzheimer’s disease. By the time she reads a new page, she’s forgotten what happened on the previous one.

And so I memorize these words that poets have so carefully strung together and hope that poetry will be prophylactic in this final sense, protecting the words and their order, so even if their meaning is lost, I’ll still be able to experience them.  For a writer, the only thing worse than not understanding words is not having any words at all. –Christine MacLean

* From “Self Portrait as Eve,” by Debra Wierenga in her chapbook Marriage and Other Infidelities.

No Story Here

 Photos courtesy of Mary Hilldore Photography

I bought fresh tulips ($7.99) at the grocery store the other day. They weren’t bad, but they are nothing like the 300,000 that will bloom in a few days here—20,000 in my neighborhood alone—courtesy of the City of Holland, Michigan. They’ll line my Historic District walking route, braving gale-force winds, withering heat, or snow, and sometimes all three in their short lives.

Together, the tulips create a riot of color. Individually, each is a floral temptress dressed to kill and experienced in the art of the come-on. “Pick me.  No one will see,” whispers the Ollioules. “There are so very many of us! A few won’t be missed,” wheedles the Double Orange Emperor. “Go ahead and pick one,” coaxes the Black Parrot. “You know you want to.”

I do want to. I picture them in vases, gracing rooms throughout my house: on my back porch, on my nightstand and, most decadent of all, in my bathroom. But day after day I resist.

And so does everyone else.

In my town, with temptation at every turn, no one picks the city’s tulips—not the descendants of the Dutch who settled here, and not anyone who is a member of one of several ethnic groups that make up almost 30% of the population today.

Why?

You might think it’s because of the “per stem” fine imposed by the city, which, when I first moved here 20 years ago, I heard was $50/stem and recently heard was $150/stem. Except that the “per stem” fine is Holland’s own little urban legend, apparently. I checked the city ordinances and I didn’t see one that was tulip-specific. (The city can fine a tulip picker for violating Sec. 22-5: Mutilating, etc., public property; molesting etc., birds, animals, fish, etc.; all those etceteras offer quite a range of applicability.)

“It’s not that they are worried about the fine, anyway,” says my friend Debra, who lives near downtown. “It’s that they worry about what the neighbors will think.” It’s true.  My walking partner and I sometimes see a tulip that’s been downed by natural causes. Neither of us dares carry it home (although it must be a crime of a different sort to abandon beauty where it’s sure to be trampled). For better or for worse, the community’s norms are strong.

“A person would have to be a real low-life to pick someone else’s tulips,” says my neighbor David Myers, author of a bajillion psychology books, including the one you probably had to read in college. “And, although there are such low-lifes,” he adds, “they are usually not the ones doing flower-arranging in their homes. My additional conjecture is that flower-lovers are at low risk for misdemeanor criminality.”

Residents who don’t love flowers have to at least tolerate them. In Holland, tulips literally come with the territory. If you live on any of several designated “Tulip Lane”s, curb-side tulips are not optional. The city plants them as a matter of course.

Figuratively speaking, respect for them also comes with the territory. “When you grow up in Holland, you just know that you don’t pick the tulips,” says my teenage son. “You’re socialized that way.”

The annual Tulip Time Festival plays a key role in that, and the festival’s Kinder Parade—a seemingly endless stream of costumed elementary students from the area schools—is a good example. Students are expected to march with their schools in the parade, regardless of ethnicity (or enthusiasm, for that matter). Schools typically make sure the children have costumes and provide busing to the staging area where the parade begins. The students smile and wave through the first mile, but visibly start to wilt during the second, especially when it’s hot.

The students’ extended families, who get up at 5:30 a.m. to get a prime spot on the parade route (but dutifully wait until 6:00 a.m., at the request of the city, to actually spread out their blankets and set up their chairs) watch them with adoring eyes. But the children must feel eyes of the broader community are upon them, too, sending the message “This is an important part of who we—and you—are.”

Finally, most people understand the tulips’ importance to the local economy. Tulip Time brings about $10 million in business to the area every year and without tulips, there is no Tulip Time. “The fact that there’s considerable public funding going into the tulip planting and maintaining means that there are many folks who watch out for the well-being of the tulips,” says Don Luidens, professor of sociology at Hope College in Holland.

I spoke to the city’s former police captain, in case I was just not hearing about crimes against tulips. He easily recalled the times the tulips had been truly vandalized—all three of them. In 20 years. “There’s no story here,” he told me. “There’s nothing here to write about.”

It’s hard to find examples of integrity these days. Daily we read about CEOs and elected officials lying with abandon and athletes cheating on and off the field. It happens here, too, occasionally. But when it comes to tulips, we stay on the straight and narrow. The Dutch Calvinist settlers here believed in total depravity, which includes the idea that, because of original sin, “all are inclined by nature to serve their own will and desires.” But I think we also have an innate longing for beauty and  connection to nature, and to do the right thing. Maybe the real reason we don’t pick the tulips is that, for three weeks every spring, they satisfying those longings.

Whatever the reason, the fact remains that we don’t, and that’s remarkable to me. It doesn’t, however, seem to occur to residents that it could be any different.  Or maybe it occurs to them but, like the police captain, they think there’s no story here. And that may be the most remarkable thing of all. –Christine MacLean

Act Lit

One of the many things I worry about: Bedbugs. (Photo courtesy of WebMD.com)

I once heard Lauren Winner suggest to a group of readers and writers that we give up reading for Lent. Inconceivable, I thought. Every Lent since then I’ve wondered if that’s precisely why I should give up reading.

I revisited it again this year, aloud, with Lois. She pointed me to Spirithome.com, which suggests giving up “anything which most relates to behaviors that are particularly sticky for you.” Reading qualifies. It would take a Herculean effort for me not to read for 40 days and nights, but I could do it. It would be a dazzling display of my willpower. That’s what bothers me. I would make it into something that’s all about me and what I can do, once I set my mind to it. This is not my understanding of what  Lent is all about. As of last night, I still hadn’t settled on what to give up.

This morning I thought, We are five days into Lent. It may be a lost cause. I may be a lost cause.

I went to church because that is what I do on most Sunday mornings. The sermon was on trust, i.e., trusting that God knows what is best for us. And there it was–the thing more sticky for me than reading and more difficult to give up. Worry. I worry about everything with great skill. It takes up too much space in my life, crowding out other things, better things, like love, abundance, and joy. It was what I needed to give up for Lent. I basked in the peace that comes from making a good choice.

Thirty seconds later the worry set in.  How? Short of serious self-medicating, how does someone like me stop worrying? It’s not like I haven’t tried it in the past. At best, I’ve been able to keep it at bay for a while. But that’s not what I wanted this time. I wanted to let it go, not hold it back.

It was between the end of the sermon and the benediction that I remembered something that would be the beginning of a breadcrumb trail for me. A therapist friend recently told me about acceptance commitment therapy (ACT). One part of ACT is labeling a thought as a thought instead of seeing it as reality. For example, one worry I have is that I won’t have enough money to retire. Using ACT, I’d think “There’s a thought” and then I’d let the thought float away. Thinking something does not make the thought real or true.

The breadcrumb trail continued when I remembered a discussion Lois and I had about the difference between faith and denial (or delusion). This is the kind of thing that I can ponder for a long time without reaching any conclusions, but I made some progress this time. For me, denial is “Everything will be okay,” while faith is “No matter what happens, I will be okay.” I don’t need to worry about things; I need only to remember that, whatever comes my way, I will be able to deal with it, accept it, get past it. And I don’t have to do it alone. (Lois’s thoughtful conclusion was “love more.”)

Mary Karr’s Lit, which we discussed at length, is also part of the trail. On page 234, Karr recounts a schizophrenic friend’s advice to her when she was struggling with believing in God’s existence:

“Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself…Let go…Surrender, Mary…Yield up what scares you. Yield up what makes you want to scream and cry. Enter into that quiet. It’s a cathedral. It’s an empty football stadium with all the lights on. And pray to be an instrument of peace.”

Like Lauren Winner’s idea to not read during Lent and like my friend’s explanation of ACT, this passage stayed with me. That any of these things stayed with me is pretty amazing, considering about how much information skips across my brain without ever sinking in. That these ideas also lined themselves up and fell like dominoes this morning is remarkable.

Writing this post as a way of making sense of worrry and trust is the final crumb in the trail, or at least the final one for today. I might find another tomorrow. Maybe that’s how I can trust–by knowing that there will always be a breadcrumb trail left for me through friends, books, music, nature, and experience. Trust more. Worry less. “Act lit.” That’s my plan.

For the next 35 days (better late than never), I am yielding up what scares me—the Tea Party, global warming, texting drivers, my teenage son’s bathroom, bed bugs—and making room for something better. Come, Holy Spirit. –Christine MacLean