The echinacea, once vibrant pink, is now black.

A friend told me that the word for aster in Hungarian means, literally, end of summer.

This time of year, as we approach Halloween, The Day of the Dead, and All Saints’ Day, I am often thinking of death. Granted, I am always a little bit morbid—my astrologer sister would say it’s because I’m a Scorpio. (I regret that I was too old to go Goth in my teen years, because I suspect I might have enjoyed that.) But right now, death is often lurking just under my mind’s surface.

My garden is one of the sources of my thoughts, and it is a place where there is plenty of room for such thoughts. This lovely, non-judgmental community of green friends, lets me think about whatever I fancy. And the garden is full of death. Every day I am pulling up or lopping off plants that have given their all—the perennials having given it for this year and likely to return, the annuals having lived their whole life in this one year. Farewell, I say to the enormous squash plant, as I pull it up and hold it by its roots. Farewell, I remember when you were just a seed!

The longer I garden, the more comfort I take in the ritual of going through the entire life cycle each year. I adore picking out seeds in the fall to plant in the spring. My grow light table in the basement has gotten bigger and bigger because having those tiny green babies means so much in March and early April, when the winter here in Minnesota has just gotten so long that I may go berserk if some tiny waft of a spring breeze doesn’t blow through, some tiny green weed doesn’t poke up under the snow. Tucking those seedlings into the May earth has all of the drama of sending my kid off to kindergarten, tucking tiny invisible notes into their invisible lunch boxes as I plant them. And then cheering for them in summer’s fullness as they grow up and begin to live out their life’s purpose—as zinnias’ shiny red petals glow in the sunlight, as basil or cilantro graces my table. And then, Minnesota fall means that all growing, all producing of food or flower, will cease for another long winter.

The more years I participate in this cycle, the more I love the dramatic resurrection stories so many of my plants tell me. Some are, simply, perennials, and I know as I cut them to the ground that they’ll bounce back in the spring, shiny green and new again. Others are busy throwing their seeds around the yard, winking at me and saying I’ll be impressed by their progeny. Other annuals are simply done, with no tales of regret to whisper in my ear as I say good-bye to them. All are amazing role models in giving it all away, in surrender, in generosity.

Some people believe that we’re perennials, that after our deaths, our souls reside eternally in one place or another. Some say we’ll be back, though perhaps in a different form. Whatever is and will be, I live my life as if I’m an annual—acting as if, if some part of me is to survive, it will be in the growth of the seeds I have sown in my lifetime.

With the help of wind, and birds, the exact location of the seeds which grow is unpredictable. Similarly, I don’t know which of the seeds I’ve sown will continue to bear their own seeds and keep growing after I’m gone. Given what I’ve seen in my life so far, my only prediction is that what of me keeps growing after I’m dead will be nothing I would ever predict.

My own mother, dead eleven years, increasingly comes back in memories that make me giggle. She wasn’t excessively funny when she was alive, but the memories of her humor are the ones that keep whispering in my ear now. Silly things she said forty years ago at dinner make me laugh out loud. This time of year she has more to say, I notice, as do other beloved ghosts. The pagans say that this is the time of year when the veil is thinnest between life and death, and in the garden, I feel that thinning all around me.

I don’t believe in a heaven in the sky, where St. Peter welcomes some and turns others away. But this time of year, in my garden, as the crows shout, squirrels scurry around, and geese fly over and honk their farewells, in the sweet grief of letting go and saying goodbye, I touch a tiny bit of heaven on earth.

Really, WTF? Has people shooting at strangers become a sort of national pastime? Are we supposed to get used to this? Worse yet, have we gotten used to it? Really, what am I supposed to say? Once again we are in that place of knowing that people have been killed and injured for no apparent reason.

This time it was in the Washington DC Navy Yard rather than a school or a movie theater or a foot race. Once again a shooter is dead. Once again we are scared, grieving, confused, angry. Once again we are looking for explanations, wanting to know who to blame, wanting to know why, wanting some reason to think that this won’t happen again. Once again the horror is real and deep, and the answers frail or non-existent. So what are we supposed to say to make sense of it, to fix it, to make meaning out of the horror?

Damned if I know. I could blame our national obsession with guns, and I do. But these shooters could very well be military personnel, and any conversation about getting guns out of the hands of the military seems like a non-starter. I could blame the glorification of violence in our society, and I do. But I could hardly claim that any given movie or video game or song lyric is to blame for any of these violent incidents, and I wouldn’t be willing to institute censorship even if I thought it might do some good. I am always perfectly open to blaming racism, poverty, social inequality and environmental degradation for a broad assortment of troubles, but I’d be hard put to bring any of them to bear in this particular instance.

And so, once again, we’re left with nothing to do but grieve. No less for the dead and injured in this tragedy than for the last one – or the one before that, or the one before that. I do not believe that we are supposed to simply accept such brutality as part of everyday life. We will lose some of our humanity if we become so habituated to the violence that we just shrug our shoulders and move on. But there is no one right way to grieve. All I can suggest is this:

Hug your child or your spouse or your friend or your cat or your dog or your pillow. Go for a walk. Breathe. Breathe again. Call someone who you would miss if you couldn’t talk with them again. Light a candle. Breathe. Breathe again. Practice non-violence. Walk away when you get mad. Breathe. Breathe again. Hold those who are wounded and dead in your heart. Open your heart to their families. Hold all the unknown others lost to violence in your heart. Open your heart to their families. Hold all the people who are grieving in your heart and know that you are not alone, that there are open hearts everywhere holding the grief and confusion and pain together. Breathe. Breathe again. Breathe again.

Suicide Prevention Day.

Note: If you feel even vaguely suicidal right now, please don’t read this. Instead, please call and talk to someone who can help you! 1-800-273-8255.

When I was a sophomore in high school, undone by the relentless teasing of an older relative, unsure that I would ever leave the barren wasteland of my inner-city high school, I ingested a bottle of aspirin and prepared to die.

After swallowing about fifty pills, I remember going into the kitchen and asking my mother, cooking dinner, why life was worth living. She reminded me of a gospel singer who had recently visited my high school and inspired me, a physically challenged woman in chronic pain who none-the-less managed to infuse her life with joy and humor and great music. My mother’s words were something like, “If she wants to live, why wouldn’t you?”

I did not tell her about the bottle of aspirin. I went back upstairs, and soon my friend and high school debate partner, L, showed up. Earlier in the week, I had invited L to spend the night. I told her what I had done, and then absolutely forebade her to tell my mother. Ah, the cruelty of that act. These decades later, I apologize. L and I weren’t close friends, but I had been to her house enough to know that, like me, she had a father who sometimes erupted in fits of screaming rage at the dinner table. I suspected that he, like my own father, was also physically violent from time to time. So in a weird way, I felt ‘safe’ with her. We lived in the same family system.

And, true to the code of ethics of siblings in a dysfunctional household, L did not tell my mother that I had ingested the aspirin. As I recall, she spent a lot of the night huddled in terror in the bathroom whispering to another mutual friend wondering what to do. Me, I was floating off on a cloud. I went to sleep early, fully expecting to drift off and never come back. (How would that have been for L? I honestly never considered it.)

Well, as you might have figured out, that did not happen. I awoke about 2 AM and barfed my guts out. In the morning, I felt as if I had a bad hangover, but I was alive.

L and I walked to high school in the early hours of the cold winter Ohio morning for a debate tournament. My school never won a single match, but L and I kept trying. Walking to school, I realized I felt too lousy to debate. When we arrived, I told the debate coach I had a bad headache and needed to go home again. Her suggestion that I take some aspirin was met by a sharp bark of bitter laughter from L, with whom I never spoke again of this experience during the following weeks and months of debating together.

I remember, walking home alone, that on the sidewalk there were early winter frozen puddles that you could crack loudly with your boots; icy fault lines moving out from your boot’s heel to the edge of the sidewalk square. I remember thinking that I loved that sound. And the feeling of the ice, slowly giving way, cracking under my foot.

Looking back, I see the sheer luck that led to my staying alive. I did wake up and vomit out the poison—I might not have. My attempts to reach out for help were present, but limited. My mother, cooking dinner while I asked her seemingly random questions, did not know that I was asking her to tell me why it mattered if I lived. L, who did know that my life depended on her, did not speak up because we had both learned well that the cost of displeasing a parent was scarier than anything else—precisely why I picked her to confide my situation!

And so, on this Suicide Prevention Day, I sit with the realization that my distant memory might be haunting people still, with guilt and loss and a wish that they had known how desperate I felt to find peace. Just as I sit with my own guilt and grief about the two friends I have subsequently lost to suicide. I sit with the knowledge that the impulse towards suicide is a temporary one, but sometimes the results of that impulse are permanent. And, most of all, I sit with deep and abiding gratitude to be alive.

Today, and every day, may we listen with care when people approach us and show their tender parts. May we reach out to the ones who seem lost, smile and say hello. And may we never be too scared to tell someone that their staying alive to see another day matters to us more than anything else, that we simply want them to live. To take small comfort in joys as simple as the sound that ice makes when it cracks on the sidewalk.

photo by David Croker

You danced once, there, in those rocks.

It meant something. It all did—you,

your love, the beautiful stones. You

danced there, happy. It meant something.

Those things, they were as real as

the cotton in the threads of your scarf.

You danced there again, there, in those

rocks. Many things meant something—

your love was there. You danced, looking

to the horizon for meaning.

Those things, they were as real as

the thread in what you had lived for.

Still you dance, in those rocks,

there, wet in the rising tide. Your

love. Your happiness. The stones

cry out. Yet where is the strength

to turn? Even a bow is too much.

Those things. They were as real as,

as real as . . . Those things were real.

art by Kristi of Barn Owl Primitives

In his story of a man with a sneering wife, Sufi master Rumi begins:

A special guest was coming to visit and the man worked 200 days to earn the price for the quality lamb kabob he wished to serve this guest. On the appointed day, the man bought the meat and brought it home for his wife to cook and then went to fetch the guest.

While he was gone, the wife cooked the kabob and
ate
every
bite
of
it.

When the man returned with the special guest, she greeted them at the door, saying “the cat has eaten the kabob. You’ll have to buy more, if you have any more money.”

The husband asks a servant to bring the scales and the cat. The cat weighed three pounds. “The meat was 3 pounds and one once. If this is the cat, where is the meat?” “If this is the meat, where is the cat?” Start looking for one or the other!

Sometimes truth can be found on a scale. Usually, it is a more complex endeavor for us human beings. The recent trial of George Zimmerman for the death of teenager Trayvon Martin revealed a plethora of truths in the lived experiences of the people of United States. Some have an expectation of justice within the justice system. Others have no expectation of justice within what they consider a criminal system – one that actively perpetuates crimes against humanity.

What you look like, where you grew up, who you live with – all of these are complex predictors of how you experience truth and what truth you experience.

Walking away from the Justice for Trayvon Vigil in New Orleans last week, I met up with a history professor from Tulane University. She brought up the Jena Six, which some of you may remember as a time when the criminal justice system in Jena, Louisiana revealed to the nation its deep roots in the Reconstruction Era, built after the abolition of slavery to maintain control over black bodies. In 2007, a nationwide protest against the mockery of justice there descended upon the town of Jena, population 2,500, with an estimated 50,000 protesters.

There were so many people – and so few white people. The professor I was walking with said, “if you took all the Unitarians out of the crowd, I could have put the white people present in my car.”

Author activist Jordan Flaherty, in his book Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six reports that “perhaps one to three percent of the crowd was white, in what amounted to a disturbing silence from the white Left and liberals.”

I would call it a disturbing silence from white people, regardless of their political stance. When children of color are demonized by a criminal justice system created for and by white people, we cannot be silent. We cannot be absent.

What was faithful was the profession of divine living by the white Unitarian Universalists who showed up, were called out as allies, people living into the truth of beloved community with their bodies, their whole and holy beings.

What was faithful was the profession of divine living by the Unitarian Universalists of color who walk in this faith with trust that we are going to live into our collective covenant with more and more anti-oppressive skill, more and more respect for the inherent worth and dignity of each person, more and more beloved community.

When we show up as our whole and holy selves, lives are transformed, systems are changed, beloved community becomes possible. Keep the faith, beloveds. Keep showing up on the side of love in this world.

_________________

References:

The Essential Rumi, 1995 (translated by Coleman Barks).

Flaherty, Jordan. Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six, 2010.