YOKED

Fresh The scent of a baby Clings to a sweater, A shoulder, Arms, lucky enough to have held His sweetly swaddled body, If only for a while. And there is a freshness found There, In the fragrant folds Of newborn skin Fresh,   Like the smell of clouds Ready to burst with Tiny drops of   enormous life. The sweat of heaven Pours forth from my God-baby’s skin And all I can think - Or deeply remember- Is that Jesus came In this way And in this skin That we might know Freshness once more. I cannot help but cling to a scent like that.     Christmas 2009

“ I remember exasperating my piano teacher(s) as a child by flying through Chopin at breakneck speed, ignoring rests and fermatas in furious pursuit of fini.   I knew the notes but they never sounded very musical when I finished them.   I learned later from a maestro counseling his orchestra, “The music is in between the notes.”   Faith, like music, needs rest. After all it started in a womb, and there is no such thing as instant incubation.   Americans have pronounced a pox on waiting.   Yet Sabbaths punctuate the Godbearing life.   Godbearers live through Advents and dark nights of the soul in which Jesus tells us: “Sit here while I pray.”” (Kenda Creasy Dean; The Godbearing Life ) Do you know what it is like to wake in the middle of the night, cheeks flushed from the perfect dream, to a room filled with silence? You are suspended between your multicolored dream and the opaque moonlight falling across the sheets.   It is then, in that oddly lucid moment that you have to decide wh...

Today I volunteered at Loaves & Fishes, a soup kitchen in Santa Ana that serves a number of homeless men and woman, struggling families and a diverse group of people that could be classified as the “working poor.” After serving a number of nacho and bean plates, I found myself at a shaded lunch table, across from a woman who appeared to be eating alone.   Her name was Gloria – or around those parts, “Outspoken Gloria” as I would shortly find out.   She was open enough to conversing with a total stranger, and we began talking about her working union and the medical benefits she was hoping would be extended throughout her retirement.   This led her to the point that she spent many a conversations making: young people, such as myself, do not understand the world and what is worth fighting for.   Gloria protested the war, she grew up with Kennedy’s hopeful voice booming from the television, she knows what it means to take a stand in defense of life’s most precious goods.   “You...

It is a humid summer day and I am on my way to visit my Dad.  He lives in an apartment complex where people stick miniature flamingoes and spinning windstars in their planters.  A few kids splash around the community pool in floaties and ruffly swim suits, as their parents turn up the mariachi station on a handheld radio.  Approaching his patio steps, I notice how much his once modest array of plants has sprawled into a lavishly overgrown garden.  I enter the antechamber of hanging plants and wild shoots and part a ripened curtain of tomato vines that dangles from the surrounding lattice. The amount of green here is astounding.  It catches my eye from all different angles and when it meets the light, bursts into the color it was destined for.  I remember when my Dad first began planting his patio garden.  It started out looking very potted and contained- a rose bush in the corner, a few spongy leaves, and the exotic stalks I would have to ask him to name. But now all that has ch...

Needles.   There is little else that terrifies me like needles.   I am not sure how or why the phobia began in my life, only that from an early age I have been hysterically fearful of white lab coats, the quick dab of a wet sterilizing pad, tourniquets, and the idea of anything sharper than a pencil nearing me. Before entering sixth grade I was required to complete another dreaded round of childhood immunizations.   My mom knew what an ordeal this could be, how it would take forty minutes to coerce me from the car, and another twenty to pry my white-knuckled hands from the wooden trim running along the walls of the office corridor.   With the hope of avoiding such a scene and relieving me of these anticipatory tears, she simply stopped telling me where we were going.   Or she’d make something else up.   A ‘sale at the neighboring shopping mall’ always seemed to do the trick. Sometimes she would inch me in with little half lies.   “Yes, we are at the doctor, Maggi, but all you h...

I am crazy about this city.   Like an ecstatic love affair, I cannot begin to explain the reasons I am drawn to it, or why I am called to stand amidst its daily ebb and flow.   But I can say this much:   The sound of a taxi blowing its horn revives me.   The constant hum of city traffic soothes my wearied head like a grown-up’s lullaby. There are little Christmas lights everywhere, no matter the season.   They scallop across the Bay Bridge at night and make me feel as though life were a constant holiday. Which, it is. The tall buildings stand like gentle giants around me and under such towering heights I feel safe.   They are a magnificent testament to the achievements of human engineering, yet they remind me of God. I peddle hard on my stationary bicycle, but it is not until I watch an old trolley car roll past that my heart really begins to pound.   It beats with an aching life and feels like a nostalgia that I am knowing for the first time. There is so much to take in here...

It’s happening again.   One of my good friends is on the other end of a telephone call, holding back tears as she recounts the details of her recent break-up. She is a strong, fiercely independent woman, who has counseled and coached the rest of us through the emotional train wreck of many collective break-ups.   Two years ago, she told me, “Maggi, when you end a relationship, you find yourself waking up every morning to a dull heart-ache perched upon your chest and you really, really believe your world is over.”   You roll yourself out of bed anyway. You make the route cup of coffee.   You stumble into the shower and let the steam swell around you.   If you’re feeling especially lifeless, you drape your hair over your ears, so that the cascade of hot water makes a deep rushing sound, like being swept beneath the sea to a powerfully calm, fetal state of being, where the roar of running water drowns out all the piercing thoughts in your head.   You...

The two of them sit together, pouring over a shared notepad, thinking intently about whatever question is written there.   He in a fleecy-looking blue sweatshirt, she in an equally roomy grey one.   A dainty pair of glasses slides down the slope of her nose and tuck behind locks of frizzy brown hair.   She is plain and unremarkable, unlike the slew of sorority girls gathering across the street, decked in ultra stylish dresses, synched with flattering waistlines. His elbow leans lightly upon her shoulder, draped in some expression of love and friendship.   In their unassuming comfort with each other, love is flaunted best.   I do not know if what they are gazing upon is a physics equation, or a crossword puzzle, but I do think that the rest of us should notice them, in their quiet ways. I do not doubt that he loves her body or her face or any of her feminine attributes.   They all congeal together to make her the dynamic person she is.   But he does not isolate the parts of her, c...

Whenever I attempt to describe my commitments as a JV, to things like simple living, spirituality, social justice and community, most of my Berkeley neighbors nod their dreads and reply, “ Oh, so like a commune?”   And as a child born in the eighties, I must confess that I have no idea whether JVC truly resembles a hippie commune or anything else people might randomly associate with my newly adopted lifestyle.   And while I find the four iconographic tenets of JVC to be helpful signposts for the journey, they do not fully capture the spirit that seems to animate our experiences thus far.   In just our first few months of living together, I cannot tell you the number of times my casamates and I have asked each other, in total bewilderment,   “Ohhh, so that’s what you mean be simple living?   That was not my understanding of it.” “You want to fast for what?   And what good does that accomplish?   How is any difference affected or justice accomplished by your fasting from food, or...

There are four white candles glowing on top of the cabinet and for tonight their golden sways wash the room in romance.   We lit  them because one half of our house goes without electricity.   It is one of the many challenges that have come with moving into our charming 1920’s white and cream colored home.   When Damon stumbled into his morning shower he did not realize that the hot and cold pipes were opposite of what the red and blue label suggested and so he bathed in a numbing mountain glacier stream.   While sudsing along its maiden voyage, the dishwater began to overflow with bubbles that ran steadily across the kitchen floor.   It was more comical than anything.   We have just come to accept the fact that we are living with imperfections, some of which may be fixed (like the electricity) and some that we must simply accommodate. The whole house has electricity now, which means we no longer have to chase light around the house.   Yet, I light the four candles anyway and turn of...