i sat down to play the piano with everyone home for the first time since she died
two at the kitchen table working out fractions, one disappearing to his bedroom, one in the back studio teaching someone, trumpet i think, and me, back at the keys
but not playing two of the regulars, my hands kept reaching for everything
but those particular two. i opened the red hymnal to my trusty paper-clipped spot
faltered on the first chord change, unusual, moved slower, took a deep breath, let the sound seep
into each finger tip as one brushed by, "Oh, that's my favorite" he declared, and began describing the harmonic shifts to the two doing fractions, who then shushed him to help me keep focusing on those harmonic shifts, which i was in fact, at that very moment, fucking up.

it was a birthday dinner day and three of us were in the kitchen with green olives, and one
was at the piano, improvising on this tune which afterward i couldn't chase out of my morning teacup until one day weeks later i opened the book and found the paperclip and let myself stammer through it each morning, remembering the afternoon of his re-harmonization, when something was happening between human and piano, and two of us softly hummed along, and waited, all in its own time, over the chicken and spice, while the third ran off again somewhere to do something of his own design

we listened to the first birthday song written many years ago, and i sat quietly,
wondering about the birthday song i had written, and wondering, about the music
that was so quietly and firmly taking over so much of me, that all i could be filled
with in the meantime in my dining room chair was awe and caramel and hope and tears

a morning

"my lord, what a morning"


Scrolling through facebook this morning, this was the phrase repeated by parishioners and visitors in response to the service yesterday at St. James for the visit of Bishop Michael Curry, the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of all of the United States. You might know him as that dude who talked forever at the most recent Royal Wedding. The one with the great cellist at the beginning. Turns out, Bishop Curry is truly one of the sweetest preachers out there. It was the hugest honor to be with him in our church, and to receive communion from him. And to hear him preach about something I've been thinking about a lot this year: love.

I had a big job to do as a singer for the service yesterday. Not only was it a massive sing, with several descants and quartet bits, but it was an additionally emotion-filled and sensitive time being together with the musicians. It was going to be the first time we would all be together at church after my friends returned from the burial of their beloved, sweet mother.

I say friends, but I actually mean my family here in Austin. These people have become the people I cancel Friday night dates for to just go be at their house and bake brownies and watch movies. They've become my hiking buddies, my favorite lunch partners, and people who I spend holidays with when I'm too broke to fly to Boston or too tired to drive to the beach to see my mom. I've dropped by the house having spilled coffee down my front and borrowed t-shirts fresh out of the laundry, and I don't even know how many cups of tea and card games we shared in just the past school year alone.

So many times, I popped over to their house, with chickens in the backyard and the piano in the front living room, a mountain of laundry folded on the dining room table, and I found a place where I could be exactly what I was at that moment, and be loved. I learned to sit down at the piano and practice, first the two pieces that I knew and only when just grandma was home, but then I started bringing more books and rifling through the stash of sheet music in the piano bench, and finally, began writing my own music on the piano, so much was it that I needed to play that instrument, no matter what it was or who was in the house or how sheepish I felt about my abilities.

Like anything given a little love, attention, and consistency, my piano skills grew. And its place in my life grew too, and a new part of myself starting speaking, a part of me that has always loved the piano so dearly. Eight or nine years ago, when I was a student in Vienna I took a class on piano pedagogy in the 19th century with all pianists. When asked to tell them why I, as a flutist and soprano, was in this class, I said something I wish I had paid more attention to at the time, simply "well, I love this music".

At the same time, my heart grew too, and healed. When I think back on the last year, I'm realizing how lonesome I was. How little I trusted people in my world, and how little I was willing to receive love from anyone, wanting only to give and then to be self-sufficient on my own. Teaching doesn't really work like that, I've learned. Especially with pre-K. When a 3 year-old comes barreling into your arms to hug you, you simply have to accept it. There's no other choice.

It's been a time of letting myself be loved by people like me-- artists and wanderers and cooks, and believers. Questioners, doubters, imperfect people too, but still believers in that hope, in that truth, in the silver linings in life. I'm who I am today, on the other end of this first teaching year and five years into living life in Austin, with three as a confirmed Episcopalian, because of that love.

It was a shared love of music and of food, and of God that made me grow to love the dear and late Betty Pulkingham so much. Every moment with her was a gift.

The many inspirations she gave me I will not forget to practice. I will open my mouth in praise of God, and lay fingers on the piano keys. I will pray and listen to people, and spend time with those I love. And then if I'm really feeling bad sometime, which always comes around now and then, I will eat key lime pie and close my eyes and remember sitting at the table with her one quiet Friday night, after meatloaf and wine, when she couldn't wait for the pie to be quite finished and we cut her a pre-preemptive slice. Later, when we were having ours, she got quiet a moment watching us eating. We asked if she wanted another sliver, and she smiled.

Her smile was in so many faces yesterday singing her music in one of my dearest homes away from home. Her joy was so present, I couldn't do anything but sneak away and cry off all my eyeliner before, during, and after the service. I'm grateful for the words of a nun I met teaching at my school who told me: "Tears are a gift from God. Let them fall, and rejoice."

My Lord, what a morning. And what a mourning. I'm grateful for the space yesterday and today, and tomorrow, and always, to hold it all and to be held too, and to sing all about love in the goodness of God.

susu's bakery

quiet french melodies swirled
among frostings, batters, and doughs
prepping in the cafe kitchen of my
three-days a week employer in the
sleepy self-important college town

was i filled with ennui?
or content to sweep floors
and ride home with a grin

key lime pie - an elegy

soggy friday morning mass
lenten prayers and somber
singing lifting edges of gloom
stepping over railroad tracks
space a moment, steam rising
glance askew to lines of text
the morning across the sea
the mourning of peaceful
praying people on their island home

"ms. b--," they asked, "could we just play music today?"
"ms. b--, " they added, "would you play with us?"

afterward i let tears drop from green limes
the cost of therapy only $3.49 this time
exhaling tenderness and sorrow
slow squeezing of each half by half
opening, an unexpected sigh--
yolk, butter, salt, patience,
beloved preparation to be
together, three, at the familiar table
not a word of the mourning,
of the morning, we all understood;
I looked and looked
and stayed quiet; I knew it would
only be this once, and no more

abecedariusly yours

alone together
before you left
considering the potential
direction of syllables
even the vowels
followed your
gaze
hovering
intimately
just above my shoulder
knocking gently against the
lobe of my left ear

maybe this isn't a
natural end but an
opening
precision laced with a
question but this time no
real answer satisfies

substitutions of our bodies
take more than they give

underneath did you find a
velvet crushed heart?
would you understand it? an
x-ray won't tell
you what you're not feeling
zip me up, dear, before you go.

lenten chicory

forty days of silence

forty days of sighs

forty days of star-scarred sorrow

drained teacups, sleepy eyes 

forty days of tumult

forty days of cries

forty days of stretching backwards

forwards, straining to be wise  

forty days of wonder

forty days of hope

forty days of bare feet tapping

tip-toeing, stamping, hopping, smoke

forty days we've waited

forty days we've tried

forty days find us, knees to the damp earth

hands no longer tied.

a reflection after the vigil, saturday march 16

This weekend I was supposed to finally get to see Patty Griffin play live, right here in Austin, and on her birthday. I’d been looking forward to it for weeks.

Then on Friday, a mosque in New Zealand was targeted by a terrorist. I heard the news after my 8 am mass at school, the first one with my extracurricular choir of 2nd-5th graders, and was shook. My church in East Austin was contacted quickly and became the host for a vigil in fellowship with our Muslim communities here in my home. I saw the email on Friday night and thought, bummer, I’d have to miss it, I still want to see Patty. Saturday morning I woke up and started my regular teaching day, and partway through dancing around the green, sunlit studio with two three-year olds, I almost began weeping for no reason. Maybe it was the juxtaposition of the peace I was feeling in my body in that moment, compared to the torture my brain was undergoing anytime I let my brain wander off on its own and imagine how many fifty people was. Or which fifty people I might know who would be together in one place like that at any given time, peacefully. In that moment, a quiet voice said, no, dear one, not today. You have a job to do, and in your own spiritual home. You gotta be there. 

Friends who do not go to St. James and who do not share my Christian faith had checked “attending” on the event page on Facebook. I checked in with myself and knew that either way, the evening for me would be spent weeping. On day one of the news, it was spent with people I love in quietness and with food and a thought-consuming baking project. By day two I was ready to let the processing begin. 

It seems each time this happens it’s harder to read. It’s harder to listen to the news, it’s harder to interact with media of any kind. Something has been changing since I started working as a teacher, and I think it is good that I have become gentler, softer, more sensitive, maybe more aware of the suffering the people around me hold inside themselves. The suffering I keep inside of me. The ways we harm each other, both intentionally and unintentionally, with our words and our actions. It is so scarily easy to do harm. It is scarier though, to see young people who have grown up to commit acts of terror. As a teacher, this is the most frightening thought when faced with wanting to instill in my students a yearning for a safer, more kind and loving world. 

As much as I can, I try to bring comfort and kindness to the suffering and pain in other people. It’s what I love about my role in my new school I started this year— I get to do this all day, sometimes 6 or 8 classes of students of all ages, and then I go home and I am very quiet and full and happy thinking about all of the myriad of moments and changes and growth I witnessed that day. And it feels as though good work has been done, and so far, I have been finding that I am able to tell myself each day, at a certain point, that it is enough. I have done enough, I can leave my work where it is, and come back tomorrow. And I get to rest. 

Saturday night I got to the vigil early to be ready to do whatever folks needed, and after 25 minutes of tasks here and there, people began to arrive. In pairs and trios, families with young ones and adolescents, and I started to feel it all. I took a walk to the car after a while to get my handkerchief, and made a mental list of additional things to do. After the evening prayer in the parish hall, still more people were showing up, and I saw a mother with two tiny boys looking a little exasperated. I motioned to her boys, bent down, and asked them if they would like to sit up front, criss cross applesauce on the floor. Jim Harrington approved, so I started asking others, and went out to the narthex to see if more families wanted to come up closer. 

The more children I spoke to, the more I was on the verge of losing it entirely, so eventually, I retreated back to calm down and stop looking beautiful humans in the face. It was too much. 

It just seems to me that there is no reason to not love every human around you. It is so easy to love children, but in the space of bringing them to the front to be in the center of our gathering’s embrace, I looked at their mothers and fathers and saw their fear and trepidation too, and saw that they are beautiful as the children. Beautiful, and innocent, and beloved. 

After that, I stood in the back a long time. 

It was hard to listen to all of the people who stood to speak, one by one and sometimes in pairs. But I kept reminding myself that my offering was my presence and my attention, and that this was a space for everyone to feel as much and however as they needed to, and that I wanted to honor that. 

Eventually the crowd thinned and I found my friends seated in their pew. The final speaker, a rabbi, asked us to stand. He started to sing a note, a hum or an Om, I’m not really sure, and he invited us to take his note, or to pick another note. The sound in the room swelled as hundreds of voices became brave together, and strong. And then the rabbi’s voice rang out clearly and vibrating over everyone else’s in a language I did not understand and a tonality that is foreign to my ears, and the cord holding my heart separate from my mind snapped, and I was burst open into all of the shuddering, shocking, emotion I had been holding in for 24 hours. Maybe 28 years. The burst was like a string popping after forgetting the guitar in a hot car and tuning the E string impatiently, and it reverberated through my whole body. The woman next to me, a stranger, responded by putting her whole self against me, and wrapping her arms around me, and I let myself sob. Breathing in and out and shuddering, stumbling, to let all of the stale and miserable and angry and exasperated out and to breath in this sound, this ancient, mysterious, yet present and alive warmth enter into me fully. 

When I felt brave, I closed my eyes and breathed in deep, and began to sing.

I sang for New Zealand, and I sang for the people gathered in that space. I sang for friends I don’t talk to anymore, and family members who live far away. I sang for people I disagree with and who are difficult for me to love, and I sang for my three year old student with Leukemia. I sang for my friends standing right next to me also singing, and I even let myself sing for me. 

I am very grateful for the small voice that said “Go to the vigil. Be a helper today.” I am very grateful for my Muslim friends, old and new since last night. I am grateful for love and community and connection. I am grateful for you.