Not the World We Used to Know

I invented this rule for myself to be applied

to every decision I might have to make in the future.

I would sort out all the arguments

and see what belonged to fear and which to creativeness;

and other things being equal, I would make the decision which

had the larger number of creative reasons on its side.

I think it must be a rule something like this

that makes jonquils and crocuses come pushing through cold mud.

                             Katherine Butler Hathaway, English writer

                                                                              1890-1942

The song, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” written by Bob Dylan, became one of the anthems for the civil rights movement in 1960’s. Although its words are a half century old, they are as fresh today as if they just were written. Their admonition to “start swimming or you will sink like a stone” speaks to the chaotic world of this twenty-first century. Our changing world is not going to return to the way it was. Instead, we need to “start swimming” if we are to survive the upheaval that is everywhere.

Crystal-ball predictions for the future are not particularly accurate during stable times. It’s anyone’s guess what our global community will look like a year from now or five years from now. There are so many variables that Siri, the iPhone 4S’s personal assistant, can not make an intelligible response about the future — even though it is great fun to ask “her” such questions as what is the meaning of life?. IBM’s supercomputer Watson, who starred on the game show Jeopardy, is not likely to do much better! Even intelligent software cannot accurately predict the unimaginable.

However, such instability and uncertainty are not an invitation to excuse ourselves from action. One of the extraordinary qualities about our being human is the way that we raise to the occasion in times of crisis. All of us have our stories of people who have accomplished the impossible.

I remember being on a mission project in Tennessee’s Cumberland Mountains. We (adults and teenagers) were assigned to small groups of five or six. Every morning, we fanned out across small valleys, where generations ago people found a toehold to raise their families. Our assignments were to work on whatever projects local people had requested help. Tasks involved painting — inside or outside. And building outhouses, mowing, or clearing away kudzu vines running rampant over everything in their path.

As the small groups returned one evening, word spread like wildfire about what had happened at one work-site. A front porch had collapsed on one of our volunteers, pinning him to the ground. The young minister’s back had been broken and he was hospitalized in critical condition.

We learned that other members of his group did not stand around deliberating about what they should do. As if they were a single entity, they first lifted the porch off the young man. They figured out where to find a phone and how to bring the nearest medical rescue team to their very rural site. When an ambulance arrived from many miles away, the injured man was rushed to a hospital and then airlifted to a larger facility in Nashville. And the small group of people, who lifted that porch from his damaged body, reflected on how they had accomplished the impossible.

We gathered that night on a hilltop under the stars. We prayed for his healing and for his family. Phone calls had been made to home churches. Word rapidly traveled from Minnesota to across a wide swath of southeastern United States. It was my first experience with the power of prayer by thousands of people focused on one family’s ordeal.

After weeks in an ICU unit, the young man was transferred to a rehabilitation facility for intensive physical therapy. A year later, he returned to ministry. A wheelchair gave him mobility to reach out to others and return the care he received from so many people.

Feats of “inhuman strength” and stories of people rescued from sure death challenge our thinking about what is possible. Perhaps, we ask ourselves what we would have done in similar circumstances. We marvel at people’s quiet determination to not let hard things defeat them. We admire people behind the scenes who make things happen. And we are inspired by the courage of those, who grit their teeth after some calamity in their lives and vow to continue on with help from others.

The chaos of today’s world presents us with the impossible. Some people say the world has passed some kind of tipping point and believe humanity is on a non reversible, downward path. Some of reasons they quote are renewed possibilities of nuclear war, climate change, political polarization and paralysis, an increasing gap between the few who have much and the disappearing hopes of a vast majority of people for an adequate life, and acts of  terrorism ranging from car bombs to cyber-hacking.

The end they suggest is coming is not the end-times I learned about when I was growing up in a near- fundamentalist church. It is a secular end-time that does not discriminate among Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus - or those who do not identify with any religion or do not believe there is a God.

Other people believe creative energy can be generated in all this chaos. What is demanded of us is to unleash and channel our energy into the unimagined future. These people believe we need courage to act wisely in the face of unprecedented threats to humanity and to the planet that sustains us.

Fear can motivate us into taking positive action — as stage-fright does, so common among actors and musicians. Fear also can paralyze us. Or even worse, fear can drive people to look for simple solutions to protect themselves and their kind. Solutions that pit them against anyone who disagrees or is different.

Together, we can lift broken porches that have damaged our world.

Words, Words, Words

Life happens when we plan to go one direction

and are surprised to discover ourselves

going some other unimagined direction.



As far back as I can remember, I have lived in a world of words. I do not have memories of my mother reading or my father reading anything besides the weekly local paper. My family owned only a few books. But they must have thought books were important, because they took me to the library, even before I was in school.

I would come home with armfuls of books. The armfuls became a box of books, always returned just before their due date. I poured over each one. Somehow I knew the letters on pages were important and were related to the stories in some mysterious fashion. I was so excited when I went to first grade. Now I would learn to read words.

Later in my teens, books were an escape from a less than happy childhood. Books brought me places where I thought girls could never go. I solved mysteries and became an adventurer in my heart. College meant textbooks and a much larger library filled with books on many subjects — though the bookstores we take for granted today meant I did not own any books yet, other than texts for classes.

I became an adult and moved to Washington DC, where my love affair with books grew.  Book purchases were proudly lined up in a parade on long bookshelves in our first apartment. Literature I never knew existed became part of my life. When my children were born, the tradition of boxes of library books was my legacy to them.

There was an underside to the ways I related to books. My education and work in the hard sciences taught me to think sequentially — a typical left-brain approach to reading words. Reasoning in a logical and rational manner was how I was trained to make sense of the world.

For me, words marched across pages — from left to right. Sequences of words had a particular order to them, dictated by rules about correct grammar. A person did not read words in random fashion or begin the the middle of a book. The idea of beginning on the right or at the bottom of the page was ludicrous. And it never occurred to me that I could write any of the books I loved so much!

My Protestant heritage was word-centered and nurtured by the earlier creation of the Guttenberg press — when books became available beyond monasteries' carefully preserved texts. Growing up, I knew nothing of powerful visual imagery from the first three-quarters of Christian history, portrayed in the statuary and stained glass of great European cathedrals. And earlier times, when knowledge was passed on through oral stories, cave paintings, and pictographs — and incorporation of pictorial images in the symbols of the first written languages.

When I was in Weimer, Germany, I visited a castle where Martin Luther took refuge for a time in his life. The reunification of eastern and western Germany had happened just the year before – and our tour guide through this elaborate castle spoke only German. We passed a room where Martin Luther had stood at a desk by a window, working on his translation of the Bible into German. In the hallway, under glass in a case, were some of his translated pages. I lingered there, wondering what Luther’s world was like. I thought about the momentous and radical steps he had taken with his translation. Now the Bible could be read by ordinary people, rather than hidden away the rarified world of monastery scriptoriums. 

My inner transformation took years — shifting from my left-brained perspective regarding the purpose of words and the structure of language. Old habits are hard to change! Like gardening. A person does not step into their backyard onto grass that has grown there for decades, toss some seeds across the lawn, and expect a beautiful garden of flowers and vegetables to emerge overnight. If the person believes that will happen, the person will be very, very disappointed!

A new garden needs imagination. When we moved into the house where we now live, there was no garden. The previous owners believed that “landscaping attracted mosquitoes” and the family had destroyed all of the first owner’s gardening efforts. Such an environment was a gardener’s gift to us, because this clean slate meant we could design to our hearts content. Visual images from other gardens, nursery centers, and garden catalogs fed our imaginations.

Next a “new” garden requires the hard work of digging up sod. Compacted ground needs to be dug deep and compost added. Just like my compacted soul in which latent visual gifts had been relegated to forgotten corners, in the service of cognitive, sequential reasoning.  

When (unknown to me) my interior environment was ready, I was at the point when I realized I had three loves and one of them had to go. I loved the work I did as a psychologist for over three decades. I had began writing poetry and essays. But writing in an available hour here and there did not work. And I was yearning to “play” with my camera and experiment with photography. There simply were not enough hours in a week!

After much careful consideration, I closed my private practice.  A month later I went to a week-long photography workshop, taught by Craig Blacklock, one of Minnesota’s premier nature photographers. It was a great time, However, my left brain had specific writing goals and I went home to write — not to experiment with my camera.

Instead, I wrote nothing for nine months. Photography took over my life. It was my first lesson in how I was not in charge of creative effort. Now, I realize it was about far more than discovering the depth of my love for the visual. I needed to live in a nonverbal, visual world long enough for me to learn a new way to live in my world of words.

Now, I have learned about myself that I am a highly visual person who “thinks” first in images. But my love affair with words limited me to words streaming across pages. I could write poetry only when my computer allowed me to move lines and words around on a page — or start in the middle of writing something. For me, the visual white space surrounding a poem is as important as the words themselves.  Poetry is where what is not expressed inwords may be more important — the words may be only an approximation of something much deeper.

In my garden, nothing is in rows!