My messages are nearly  always love letters. They are written to myself too, because the simple act of bearing witness publicly to the beauty I see around me is good for me, and that is enough. But early on I used to wonder, when my message in a bottle rolls up on someone else’s distant shore does it arrive at just the right time? Does it touch them? Does it make a positive difference in their day? Does it matter to anyone else?

I don’t wonder any more. Here and there people send me little love notes back. They tell me that my bottle reached them. Something I wrote, or a picture I took spoke to them. They write to me saying I sent just the right message at just the right moment to just the right person. Love notes like this one:

“Dear Lori ~

You need to know how Mammaste touches peoples lives on the most basic level so I write to you now. There are so many days when a beautiful photograph you take or a story you tell, like your daughter making her father turn the car around so she could snap a photo of a heart in nature, warms my heart. Today was exceptional though. Your post about today being a gift & a blessing shook me to the core on a day where putting one foot in front of the other was nearly impossible. Your loving words from the heart of a mother inspired me to START my day. Please accept my heartfelt gratitude.

Leslie McAfee Richter” (Used with permission)

There have been many others too. For each and every one, my heart is warmed in reading them, and I am grateful. They are little love notes rolling up on my sandy shore. I want you to know your messages have reached me. I know you, like me, have been moved by the words of others on social media, and on blogs, and watching videos that make us laugh and cry and amazing TED Talks on beauty and bravery and vulnerability, and the list goes on. We may not write a response every time. But we are moved just the same, and we are changed for the better.

A funny thing happened as I was crafting this essay. I noticed a Private message on my Facebook tab. When I opened it, it read:

“I love you. Enjoy the evening sun . . . I just had the feeling rush over me so I took advantage of telling you via this modern age contraption.”

It was from my dear friend Jane just down the street!

We can shape this ‘modern age contraption’ that is the internet into anything we want it to be. Why not a vehicle to transport our love letters to humanity, to the world?

Mammaste
Divinity in the Everyday

Reblogged from mammaste ~ divinity in the everyday:

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There is a sweet little drawing of a smiling face scribbled on the wall next to my bed. The artist is my youngest child when she was about three years old. At the time I calmly told her that walls are not for drawing, and then complimented her on her artwork.  I left her original graffiti there on my wall because it is beautiful, and because it reminds me of the lessons I’ve learned since being a new mother of one child, to a seasoned mother of five children--a span of 19 years between the oldest and youngest.

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I remember being chronically terrified during those first years of the world waking up to environmental awareness. I believed that I would never reach adulthood because the earth would be a toxic wasteland. I lost sleep many nights worrying I would never grow old enough to have a first date or go to college. Davy Jones would never have a chance to fall in love with me. We would never marry and I would never have his perfect, doe-eyed babies. I would jolly-well never adopt his British accent as a result of us visiting his childhood home in England over our lifetime together. Sigh.

I was an anxious child to begin with. Born on a Wednesday, I was a picture-book example of the nursery rhyme’s ‘Wednesday’s child.’ I was full of woe. Most every baby photo in the album is of me crying. Full-on, open-mouthed wailing. It didn’t help that all the photos were in black and white, adding to the ambiance of my perpetual ennui. An ennui that would permeate my childhood. It seemed my nature to fret and worry.

But that April week in 1970 I remember  vividly as a time of bright happiness. It was also the week I turned twelve. On my birthday I woke to find everything I’d asked for wrapped in shiny paper and tied with ropes of fat, fuzzy yarn I would later use to adorn my pony-tails. I gasped when I opened the box holding bell-bottomed pants with horizontal bands of orange and yellow running round and round the legs! They were just like the cool clothes the models in the Montgomery Ward and JC Penney catalogs wore. The ones I circled with my black Flair pen.

Then there was the box with the electric-yellow knit poncho and, holy of holies, the Monkees album I had longed for FOREVER; “More of the Monkees.” There they were, Michael, Peter, Davy and Micky–all smiling down at me from preteen heaven. My future husband and his best-men at our  never-to-be wedding. Stupid pollution.

I proudly wore my new outfit to school that warm April day in 1970, and I was feelin’ groovy. I stood in the white sunshine on the lawn of our suburban school in my neighborhood of rambler-style track-homes built during the baby booming 1950′s. I was raking up the dry winter’s thatch of dead grass, smelling the wet earth beneath it. I was completely over-dressed and sweating, but I felt hip and I felt happy.

I looked around at my fellow classmates, all lazily raking  or half-heartedly picking up old candy wrappers, bottle caps and stained popsicle sticks. They were just happy to be outside.  I felt hope fill my heart as I realized we were actually doing something! It was such a small act, probably meaningless in the face of the world’s environmental pollution, but it felt enormous to me at the time. I felt lighter inside. I believe I experienced for the first time the power ‘taking action’ has to stem the feeling of hand-wringing helplessness.

Slowly, instead of dreading growing up, I began to feel I couldn’t wait to get older! I had to hurry  and become a woman before Davy Jones fell in love with and married someone else. After all, I wasn’t completely delusional, I knew the competition for his heart was fierce. “If he could only see me now,” I thought, as I leaned on my rake in the bright sunshine–all neon and pretty and joyful and saving the world. “Surely if he could see me now, he’d wait for me,”  I imagined. It was a future  I believed possible in a way only  12-year-old girls can.

Well, I didn’t marry Davy Jones, but I still believe I can change the world through my actions. I believe we all can. It is the bright future I believe possible with the same conviction that 12-year-old girl leaning on her rake had, smiling in the warm April sunshine, full of hope on Earth Day, 1970.

Mammaste

~Divinity in the Everyday~

Sometimes at night I hear my youngest pad into our bedroom to sip water from the glass on the nightstand next to me. As she did this last night, I pulled her into our bed and she giggled with joy.

When we woke up in the morning, she snuggled against me and  said very quietly, “Mom, sometimes I’m afraid you’ll leave me.”

“Oh honey, I’ll never leave you,” I replied.

“But you’re older, and you might die before me, and that makes me so sad,” she said while wiping away tears that suddenly welled-up in her eyes.

“But just look at my mom, Nana,” I reassured her, “she’s still healthy and here; and I have FIVE kids and a GRANDCHILD on the way! Besides, when I leave that way, it’s because it’s my time, but I know we will be together again. Maybe we’ll even decide that next  time around, you’ll be my mom, or my sibling, or even my best friend!”

Still weepy she asked, “But what if I don’t remember you in the next life? I’m afraid I won’t remember you.”

“Oh baby, our hearts will remember each other,” I said as I gathered her in close. “Besides, we don’t remember our many lives together before this one, and that hasn’t made a bit of difference in how much we love each other right now, has it?” I reasoned.

“I love you mom,” she whispered and smiled.

“And I love you too.” I echoed back. Words that come so naturally and are so familiar to me, it feels as if I’ve said them to her countless times, over many, many lifetimes.

Mammaste

~There is so much that is extraordinary in the ordinary, every day.

Subzero Sunrise

We often think the meaningful stuff of life will happen for us in big  ’Ah-Ha’ moments when we suddenly see what our purpose is, discover our passion or perceive why we are here so we can get down to the business of  living our truest life. But what if because we are looking for what we assume it will look like, we are missing that it is already here, right in front of us?

Today, as I sat in my idling car at a red light on one of the coldest days in Minnesota history, I suddenly remembered a sunny summer evening sitting on the grass outside an elementary school down the street from our home. A school aptly named “Golden Years.”  I was watching my youngest daughter wobble around on her little bicycle that had just recently metamorphosed from four wheels to two. She had begged me to take her to the park so she could practice riding on what she called the ‘pie’ court. She was referring to the tattered basketball court at the base of the sloping hill where I sat watching her ride; tanned legs pumping, brown braids flapping.

Round and round she circled the rectangle, carefully cutting corners and bumping over cracks in the tar where tenacious weeds found purchase and grew stubby and thick under the regular trampling of feet. As I watched her ride I began to wonder why she calls this the ‘pie’ court. It was obviously not round . . . I called out to her as she cycled by me; “Why do you call this the ‘pie’ court?” On her next pass she yelled to me,
“It’s because there is a pie in the middle!”

I looked, but I couldn’t see any circles anywhere on the court. “Where?” I shouted as she whizzed by again. This time she answered me well after she had passed by and I heard her words faintly trailing off, “It’s in the shape of the weeds!”

I looked again, this time really trying to see what she saw and suddenly,  there it was. Not the pie I assumed I’d see–not the round shape with a big triangle slice cut out. No, the weeds growing in the cracks of the basketball court formed an almost perfect symbol for pi. Not apple pie, but mathematical pi!  I was delighted to see it. My daughter was like a magician making something appear before my very eyes that wasn’t there a moment before (something children often do).

I hadn’t thought about that memory since that day a few years before and it made me feel a little sad. I realized there are so many details of my life that I will forget that are so simply beautiful.

I suddenly longed to remember all the small details that have made up this life of mine.  I wondered, what if NOW is always the moment we were born for? What if every NOW contains the potential of living out our purpose, our passion, our reason for being? What if we looked at it that way, that we were born for this very moment in time, all the time? (Yes, even these moments in idling cars, waiting for lights to change.) I wonder, would we finally see the vast infinity of pi (even in the weeds) if we stopped looking so hard for that big slice of apple pie?  I wonder.

Mammaste

Divinity in the Everyday

. . . as the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all.

~Frederick Buechner

Many in the two communities in which the children lived hung balloons up and down their streets in school colors, one community filled with orange balloons and the other green in a tender display of shared sorrow in support for the grieving families and in celebration of these precious lives.

At times like these we often want to hold those families close and tell them we grieve with them, but we feel helpless to offer comfort for such an unfathomable loss. So, people hung balloons hoping to send these families the message that they are not alone, that they are held in the hearts and prayers of many who may not know them but who grieve with them.

Where I live, these two communities border each other. Today as I was driving down the road I saw this collective compassion overlapping in a very visual way.
Where the two grieving communities crossed paths, two bunches 0f the colored balloons, four green, four orange were entwined on a shared tether.

It was such a powerful display of who we are when we are so consciously connected to our own hearts and therefore to the hearts of others. A signpost marking a moment when we recognized our oneness–when a stranger’s grief became our grief. An interconnection that felt so real and fragile and tender and sad and beautiful all wrapped up in the image of those balloons for Carly and Quinn, tangled up together in the bright sunshine, swaying gently in the cold winter wind.

With my deepest heartfelt love and compassion to their families.

Mammaste

Divinity in the Everyday

unconditional love

I have been thinking lately about the small but important distinction between what we say we do out of love but what we really do in exchange for love.

The things we truly do out of love are gifts freely given without condition, without notation in the ledger of our heart. There is no debt owed, no notion that the value of the loving act is dependent upon how it is received, recognized or reciprocated.

But those things we do in exchange for love we carefully inventory. These transactions are acts of love tied to the expectation of getting something in return (often unconsciously). When such acts of love are unappreciated, unrecognized or not returned in kind, we consult our detailed invoice of what is owed to us and mentally itemize the bill.

unexpected love

I believe many of us claim the former, when we really own the latter. How often have we said, ‘I didn’t even get a thank you,’ or ‘I did so much for them and got nothing in return.’

If what we gave was truly given out of love, there is no debit tied to its memory, nor does the behavior of the receiver diminish the sweetness or sincerity of any true act of loving kindness.

Reblogged from mammaste ~ divinity in the everyday:

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"I close my eyes as my daughter leans in to concentrate on making the stroke of eyeliner she is applying to my lid straight and clean. I feel the warm puff of her breath on my cheek each time she exhales. This beautiful, suspended moment is enough. I am so very, very happy."

After listening to the shepherds tell of their experience with the angels in the fields, it is said in Luke 2: 19: that…

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Reblogged from mammaste ~ divinity in the everyday:

Many years ago, during my darkest hour, I held a small grain of hope that there would be days like today. A still, clear, quiet, sun-dappled morning--children sleeping in upstairs rooms, an old dog curled at my feet. A populated solitude. Alone but not lonely. This is a day extraordinary in its utter ordinariness. I had faith and I am here and I am grateful.

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