Useless Old Tree

River gonna take me
Sing me sweet and sleepy
Sing me sweet and sleepy
All the way back back home
It’s a far gone lullaby
Sung many years ago
Mama, mama, many worlds I’ve come
Since I first left home

Going home, going home
By the waterside I will rest my bones
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

-“Brokedown Palace,” The Grateful Dead

The Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue said that “music is what language would love to be if it could.” There’s something about music that cuts deeper than words alone ever could, down into the deeper territories of the heart where it can do its vital work – whether that’s to bring us to tears, or to draw us up into dancing, or to plant seeds of healing that can take root there and grow, nourishing us over time just as we in turn learn how to tend them through presence and careful attention.

As we travel the winding pathways of our lives, we all need our houses of refuge along the way, those quiet corners of the world that serve as sanctuaries, or as doorways opening out onto bright meadows of repose, restoration, and renewal.

One of those places, for me, is the amazing River House, which sits along a bend in the Cacapon River in the the small West Virginia town of Capon Bridge. According to a description on the website, the River House, is “a community-based arts and music program emphasizing active participation, affordable access, and multi-generational education.”

They offer live musical performances, art classes, community gatherings and open work space. They also regularly feature the work of local visual artists; host sing-a-longs, open mic nights, and community jam sessions; and provide art experiences and arts education for underserved populations in the community, with an added focus on honoring and preserving the traditional arts and crafts and music of the region.

The small in-house café is an added bonus, serving up a range of simple, delicious, homemade food, and a darn good cup of coffee to boot.

All of this is a fair description, and a true one, but for me, the River House is much more than the sum of its parts. Ever since my dad and I first discovered the place, almost four years ago now, it has been, for me, one of those houses of refuge along life’s winding way.

My mom had died in the springtime of that year, just before Easter. Even though it was four years ago now, I still remember how, even far into the fall and winter of that year, my dad and my sisters and I were all still pretty deep in the early days of our grief and grieving over her loss.

I think there’s a popular idea that, when we find ourselves in the valley of death’s long shadow, it dulls our senses, making it harder for us to see the brightness and colors in the world around us. And I suppose there’s some truth to this. But I also remember how that grief stripped away some of my illusions and conventional ways of seeing things. Dumb stuff that had seemed really important beforehand lost some of its hold on me. Petty grievances and passing fads felt suddenly ephemeral and relatively meaningless. But some things came into sharper focus – the wonder of nature, the importance of family, and the deep joy inherent in beauty and art and music.

It was during this period, in the fall after my mom had died, when we discovered the River House, on a day when we had no idea where we were going.

My dad and I were on a road trip. We had headed west from the DC area to Winchester, Virginia, thinking we might find some solace in the natural beauty of the surrounding area. After a morning in town, I remember we had driven west, even though the plan had been to head east. Something was calling, though neither of us knew what it was. The road just seemed to lead that way, west out of town on US-50, and then, after a little while, across the border into West Virginia.

The countryside around there was absolutely beautiful, with the rolling hills and the bright colors of autumn leaves. I remember thinking that my dad – who had connected his phone to the car stereo and was playing a mix of church music, folk songs, and clips from old musicals on YouTube – might be missing out on this chance to bathe in the beauty surrounding us. But just as I was thinking about all that, suddenly my dad looked up from his phone and saw something I missed – a sign that said “coffee” hanging above the porch of an old building on the south side of the road, just before we had reached the bridge that crosses the Cacapon River.

We were passing through Capon Bridge, West Virginia, and apparently that sign advertising coffee was just the sign we had been waiting for – a little less profound and earth-shattering of a sign than I might have wished for, but practical, nonetheless, and inviting enough to prompt us to stop.

The coffee, it turned out, was really good and the people working there were exceptionally warm and friendly. As it turned out, there was a concert later that night and we decided, after setting off for an afternoon hike, to come back for dinner and an evening of live music.

I hope I never forget that day and our first introduction to the River House.

The beauty of the natural landscape, hiking to the top of a nearby mountain with my dad and looking out over the rolling hills of West Virginia, followed by the sweet melodies and close harmonies on the small stage at the River House later that evening were, in some real sense, the beginning of my own long road of healing following my mom’s death. The music washed over me, putting a smile on my face and filling my spirit with gladness in the midst of grief.

The whole experience was a gift. I can feel nothing but gratitude for it, and ever since that first visit, the place has had a special meaning for both my dad and me.

We had headed into West Virginia, on that afternoon four years ago, in search of a measure of solace, but we received something more, something that we hadn’t expected.

The joy in the music, the warmth of the people we met at the River House, the simple goodness in the food and the coffee and the whole atmosphere – it was healing, and nourishing in the truest sense, and it meant the world to us. My mom was a great pianist and singer and all her life a lover of music, and I know she would have loved it there, too.

So that was my first visit to the River House. I’ve been back several times since, always with my dad, and it has continued to carve out a niche in my heart and in the landscape of my soul.

No doubt I romanticize the place a bit too much. It’s easy when you only stop by for an evening or two a few times a year. I’m sure the folks who work and volunteer there – and those who come regularly for art classes, concerts, and other community events – have their disagreements, their own hopes and fears and anxieties, and live lives that are normally just as mundane as mine.

But whenever I’m there, and the music starts on the River House stage, all that drops away, and there seems to be nothing wrong in the world that cannot be made right, nothing terrible that cannot be transfigured at last through beauty and kindness and laughter and hope and the warm embrace of community.

It’s silly, but the River House feels to me a bit like a kind of Brigadoon – a place that emerges periodically from the mist, a mystical doorway of music, hospitality, fresh coffee and good food leading into another dimension that somehow seems a little kinder, gentler, and friendlier than our own.

Of course, I know intellectually that the River House is still there even when I’m not traveling through Capon Bridge. But they seem to have created a magic so unique and singular that it’s sometimes hard to imagine that the place could exist permanently in the same reality I inhabit day-in and day-out, the one I read about in the news and fret about anxiously while lying in bed at night, wondering and worrying about what the future might hold.

It’s the kind of place where you feel like you really can drop your defenses for a moment, stop all your useless worrying, and just listen to the music of the river, singing its sweet, ancient songs of hope and healing.

The song at the River House tonight is an old one, all about the great journeys of our lives, and about a love so strong — like the love of a mother, or a father — that even death can’t take it away from us. In the song, the road is sometimes long, and the way ahead is often dark. But there are adventures waiting, too, and new friends to be made, and amazing sights to see around every bend.

Wherever the way may lead from here, wherever the waters may flow, I take solace and find strength in the river’s sweet song, and find that I am perpetually made ready for the journey, forever tuned and primed to lend my voice once more to that great and wondrous hymn of praise.

Photo Credit: Nitish Kadam on Unsplash

First things first. It’s time to drop the pretenses.

In this age of the coronavirus and COVID-19 and 24/7 pandemic news coverage, it’s time to drop the facades that we’ve been living behind and admit that we just don’t know what comes next. It’s time to admit how frightened we are, however frightened that might be. And it’s time to reckon — both individually and collectively — with our vulnerability, and with the fundamental uncertainty that underlies our existence at such a time as this.

[Read more…] about Accepting Our Vulnerability: Life In the Shadow of Death

“Jo’s ambition was to do something very splendid; what it was she had no idea, as yet, but left it for time to tell her; and, meanwhile, found her greatest affliction in the fact that she couldn’t read, run, and ride as much as she liked. A quick temper, sharp tongue, and restless spirit were always getting her into scrapes, and her life was a series of ups and downs, which were both comic and pathetic.”

– Louisa May Alcott, “Little Women”

I’ve always been a reader. The story of my life has, in many ways, been the story of the books that have made and shaped me, the books that have inspired me and taught me how to dream, that have opened me up to new worlds – and opened new worlds up to me.

I’ve always loved stories of faraway places and magical lands, of heroes and quests and the adventurers who would set off into the unknown to see what was out there, and to experience it for themselves. And I’ve loved stories of homecoming, too, when, returning from some odyssey or another, our hero must learn to see home in a new light, to reclaim it once again as his or her own. These stories have informed my worldview. They’ve taught me about the beauty – and the sadness – of life. They’ve taught me about good, and about evil, too, and about how they clash, in turn, for dominance over the human heart.

[Read more…] about ‘To do something very splendid’: On the Power of Useless Old Stories

In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.

– William Saroyan, “The Time of Your Life”

Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.

– Antoine de Saint Exupéry, “The Wisdom of the Sands”

Life is always and forever a fragile thing, delicate and beautiful and transient. Long as the days and weeks can sometimes seem, the months and years slip by at a seemingly increasing pace, especially as we ourselves get older. You’d think we’d know this well enough by now – that the days are shorter than we think – but we still get reminders, far too often, of how brief our time here really is.

Over the recent Easter weekend, one of my coworkers was killed. She was shot in the head in the living room of her family’s home in south Texas while visiting for the holiday. Her name was Valerie (Valeria to her family and Spanish-speaking friends), and she was 27 years old. We had just celebrated her birthday with her a few weeks earlier, joking around with her about “classic” ’80s movies that she had never seen or even heard of, sharing strawberry cream pie in our department conference room, and wishing her happiness and success in the year to come.

And then, the news.

[Read more…] about ‘In the time of your life, live’: Reflections in Memoriam

“Ordinarily, the inquiry is, Where did you come from? or, Where are you going? That was a more pertinent question which I overheard one of my auditors put to another one – ‘What does he lecture for?’ It made me quake in my shoes.”

–Henry David Thoreau, “Life Without Principle”

“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

–Mary Oliver, “Sometimes”

Reflecting on the passing away of another old year and the start of another new one, I find myself once again thinking about endings and beginnings, about thresholds and liminal spaces, about resolutions and change, and about all the stories we tell ourselves about time – about all that’s past and all that’s yet to come.

[Read more…] about ‘Instructions for living a life’: A Few Thoughts on the New Year

“Apparently in olden days in China the rice polishing process was not very efficient, and there were a lot of tiny pebbles mixed in with the rice. The first thing the tenzo had to do was pick the tiny stones out of the rice before it was cooked. In this respect there can be no doubt that food fit for human consumption lies at the point where the rice has been distinguished from the stones. So, in our daily lives, we have to discriminate, but what we must not forget is the fundamental attitude grounding this discrimination: everything we encounter is our life. This is the attitude of Big Mind.”

– Kōshō Uchiyama Roshi, “How to Cook Your Life”

“The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” (1836)

Before I came to Houston, I had been living – for several years – in places where nature and the natural world seemed intimately close at hand, where what Emerson describes as our “intercourse with heaven and earth” seemed much easier to make a part of my own “daily food” and daily life. Houston, by contrast, seemed like an endless concrete slab that went on for an eternity in every direction, hot and humid and overdeveloped.

My feelings have mellowed over the years. Part of that was learning to see the massive, sprawling city as more than just a monolith – which meant spending time on the street in different parts of town, exploring, investigating, trying new things, and seeing what the city and its many vibrant cultures and neighborhoods had to offer.

Another big part of learning to love a place – as obvious as it may sound – is learning to love and appreciate some of the people who live there and call it home. That can be a challenge in a big city, where it’s easy to feel anonymous and alone, despite the crowded streets and the traffic jams. But the more you take the time to look, the more you learn to see just how many extraordinary characters make up the human landscape all around you.

[Read more…] about ‘Everything we encounter is our life’: Finding Ourselves in the Food We Eat

“All summer, and far into the autumn, perchance, you unconsciously went by the newspapers and the news, and now you find it was because the morning and the evening were full of news to you. Your walks were full of incidents. You attended, not to the affairs of Europe, but to your own affairs in Massachusetts fields.”

–Henry David Thoreau, “Life Without Principle”

This summer I have in fact spent some time wandering in Massachusetts fields. I have walked in the hills and mountains and towns of Colorado. I went out for blues and a beer – and a pretty good bison burger – in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I swung by a UFO convention in Roswell, only to get sidetracked by cold-brew coffee and a stop at a local used bookstore, where I found a great deal on some classic seafaring stories and other tales of adventure. I attended my youngest sister’s wedding, a beautiful small gathering of family and friends high in the Rocky Mountains (where, despite our mom’s absence, we knew she was with us there in spirit, her presence still very real for us). Before heading out west for the wedding, I accompanied a group of Texas high school students on a college tour in Boston, then went, together with my dad, on a literary pilgrimage to the site of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond, where I added a stone of my own to the great rock cairns that mark the passage of other travelers come and gone from that spot.

All in all, my days this summer have indeed been “full of incidents,” and, although things have been a bit quieter here on this site, I’ve done plenty of scribbling in notebooks and journals, and plenty of writing in my day job, too. I’ve felt a bit bad about not posting more here, but I can’t exactly say the time hasn’t been productive.

[Read more…] about Attending to the Meaning and Moments of Our Lives: Some Summer Reflections

As I contemplate topics to write about and discuss on this site, I’ve found myself wondering whether this is in fact a place for unabashed honesty and openness, or if it needs to be kept somewhat guarded — with some personal sharing, perhaps, but nothing too personal.

Thinking about this, I happened on a passage from Henri Nouwen (whose very personal writing about loss has been a real solace to me on my own particular path through grief). In it, he touches directly on this topic, but from a different perspective than the one I was coming from. Here’s the passage, from Nouwen’s “Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith.”

“We like to make a distinction between our private and public lives and say, ‘Whatever I do in my private life is nobody else’s business.’ But anyone trying to live a spiritual life will soon discover that the most personal is the most universal, the most hidden is the most public, and the most solitary is the most communal. What we live in the most intimate places of our beings is not just for us but for all people. That is why our inner lives are lives for others. That is why our solitude is a gift to our community, and that is why our most secret thoughts affect our common life.”

I appreciate Nouwen’s suggestion that our own inner lives are – in some sense – “for others,” and that, somehow, out of solitude and our own private thoughts, we can draw up a wellspring capable of nourishing our “common life” together.

But, whether in our writing or in our living, what’s the right balance between the personal and the public? Where is the via media between private understanding and universal truth?

[Read more…] about ‘The most personal is the most universal’: Truth and Consequences in Blogging

“Wanderer’s Song”

The thread in the hand of a kind mother
Is the coat on the wanderer’s back.
Before he left she stitched it close
In secret fear that he would be slow to return.
Who will say that the inch of grass in his heart
Is gratitude enough for all the sunshine of spring?

-Mèng Jiaō (751-814)
(transl. by A.C. Graham)

I lost my mom a little over a year ago. I wasn’t nearly ready to say goodbye to her, and that first Mother’s Day after she died loomed large, especially when the loss and the grieving was still so fresh. As Mother’s Day approached again this year, I found it a bit easier to reckon with, but still difficult. There’s still a raw nerve there.

[Read more…] about Making the Most of the Time: A Mother’s Day Remembrance

“Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy.”

– W. Somerset Maugham, “The Razor’s Edge”

We know that social media often distorts our view of the present – pulling us away from the moment at hand, inviting us instead to compare our lives to those of others or to align our thoughts and priorities with theirs. But it also has the power to seriously affect the way we relate to the past and to the passage of time, including the way in which we relate to the natural quality of evanescence inherent in the events and moments that make up our lives.

[Read more…] about ‘The Evanescence of Experience is Joy’: Social Media and the Hoards of Memory