Barbecued chicken wings

I wanted to take something delicious to the Sustainable Farming Association potluck Saturday. Once, because I forgot that a farm tour also included a potluck, I arrived with a bag of potato chips that I bought at a gas station. I am still trying to live down the shame of it. These potlucks are a showcase of delicious homegrown foods like organic sausage and expertly cooked heirloom beans and pickled beets and freshly baked bread.

We sold almost all of our chicken from the past season, but we still had a few packages of wings down in the freezer. I found a promising barbecue wing recipe that I could cook in the crockpot, so I rose early on Saturday morning and started to stir up an exciting concoction, even breaking out the cooking wine and the Worcestershire sauce. Right before I had to leave to teach my fitness class, I popped the top on the pot and predicted that it would be ready just in time.

When I returned a couple hours later, I opened the door of my home and inhaled deeply to gauge the progress of the wings. At exactly this point, my morning sickness kicked in. The smell of barbecue inhabited my home like an ogre, and I stood in the doorway aghast, wondering whether I should just go back outside. I knew that the wings probably smelled good to any normal person, but I'm no longer a normal person. I am hacking my way through the first trimester of pregnancy. A strong smell is almost enough to defeat me.

I made myself enter the house and act pleasant, but I was almost relieved to hear that my daughter had woken up with a terrible headache and was still in bed upstairs. I tore upstairs to see her, and as I expected, the smell was not strong up there. While I was allegedly comforting my daughter, I was really working up the nerve to go back downstairs.

Finally, I felt strong enough to face down my enemy. I made my way down the steps with a determined smile, and my husband suggested that I check on the wings because the potluck time would soon be upon us. He did not realize what he was asking me to do. Still, I felt that I was the best person for the job, so I approached the pot, breathing through my mouth to bypass my whole sense of smell. Then, as I stood before my slow cooker, a little bit of the odor sneaked past my defenses and set my mouth watering so much that I wondered if I should run to the bathroom.

The crisis passed. With trepidation, I opened the lid and dipped a spoon into the mass of saucy wings. They actually look pretty good. I set one on a plate and cut into it with a fork. Then I picked it up and bit it. It was fabulous. I dished about five more wings onto my plate and lit into them, thankful that I cooked up such a full pot. Once my stomach had some good food in it, the nausea evaporated, and the barbecue smell was no problem.

I stayed home from the Sustainable Farming Association meeting and potluck to take care of our sick daughter, but my husband reported that many people helped themselves to seconds from our crockpot. He thought my wings were the best thing there.

I think this is a good sign. Right now, with this pregnancy, I am stuck in a haze of nausea, uncertainty, and even dread. However, I believe that I will eventually make my way through to the meat of the situation, and when I do, I will tear into it with gusto.

Carrying a light

A couple weeks ago, while sitting in meeting for worship, I felt a white light touch down in my head, and then light up beneath my belly button. It was clearly a blessing, and that the time, I thought that it could be a sign that I am pregnant or alternately that our family of four is complete and whole.

The second interpretation was far more likely, but the first one was accurate. We are in shock.

This pregnancy is very new, and I am fully aware that one half to a one third of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. At this point, it seems premature to say that I am having a baby, but I want to share that I am carrying light within me. Whatever else happens in the next year, this experience of the light will always be real to me, and true.

Like in my other two pregnancies, I often feel as though I am caught between two worlds. Sometimes, I float just a little bit out of my body. Sometimes, I feel the company of something wonderful and warm and strong and female. Sometimes, I believe I see things the way the new light within me might see them, and my children, standing beside me in the kitchen, light up like lanterns. They are a source of comfort and guidance.

A message that I received a couple weeks ago is coming into clearer focus as well. The message was that I am not able to do anything very well except to love, and it seems that I have a new opportunity to love here. This opportunity comes at the exclusion of other opportunities. We had planned to sell our chickens at a farmer’s market, but we are not sure we should be planning to do that anymore. We had been talking about a five-year plan for the farm, and now the most basic agreements about that are in question. Mothering babies has been very hard on my health in the past, and this time around, should I get to that point, I will be older and even less healthy than I was with my other two children. I feel as though I cannot see any farther into the future than the next two months. In some way, we are grieving.

At this time, I feel as though my thoughts and emotions are shared by the new light within me, and so I'm doing my best to be reassuring. I picture myself like the Statue of Liberty – solid and bearing the torch of hope. The image feels a bit overwrought, but it keeps coming to mind, so I'm not going to argue with it. More helpful than that is the sensation I had last night of being accompanied by women and bathed from head to foot in light. I know I am nourished by something beyond myself.



(Hi Friends! I’m going to end this essay with a note. It feels so important for me to share this writing with you, and I know that it will be easier for me to keep writing what I really need to write if I can keep posting it on the blog. At the same time, I’m feeling really tender and confused! This was not planned. I really cannot picture myself with another baby, and trying to do so is painful at this point. So even if a person felt like offering congratulations, I’m not at a place where I can receive them well. Prayer would be great, though. I’m always up for some of that.)

The daughter of actors

Ever since I was a child, I knew that the inner life was real. My folks, who were both actors, often practiced lines in the living room, talking animatedly to the air and nodding in response to unseen companions. I was drawn right into this. By the time I turned 6, it was often my to job read along with scripts and be sure my parents were saying their lines correctly. I also understood from a very early age that my family's financial security came from my father's ability to captivate people and move them. The crests and swells of other people's emotions were not ethereal, passing fancies. They paid for our home, our cars, and later on, they paid for my expensive college education.

Most performers can feel the emotions of a crowd, and they know clearly when an audience has offered up its heart, and when it bristles with impatience. Even skilled, experienced performers sometimes fail to move their audiences, but my parents could not afford to do that very often. They were not abstract artists. Their success depended on whether people could understand them and feel what they felt. This was perfectly clear to me from an early age.

My first language is still the charged sparks of awareness and emotion, the language in which my father earned his living. In addition to feeling the emotions of an audience, as most performers do, I feel smilar electric movements almost whenever I am able to quiet myself and listen. Mostly, I feel the movement of the Holy Spirit and I feel the almost magnetic awareness of plants, but I know that the world is teeming with more voices and motion.

Listening to those voices is my job. This became clear to me over and over again, even before my faith was deep enough to guide me. In partifular, I remember one night many years ago when I left an audition on a summer evening and found that I had been unaware of a thunderstorm on the horizon. The fragrant air was heavy, and the pink-tinged sky was swollen and streaked with lightning. Nothing was more important on that night than standing in awe of that storm, but I had missed much of it. I knew at that time that if I could not find a way to greater intimacy with the natural world, part of my heart would always be broken.

So I am trying to become a farmer, in part because I don't want to miss another thunderstorm. I am hoping that the disappointments, joys and exhaustion of trying to work with the land will give me intimacy with the fields and skies. It is a messy, often painful intimacy, but I am willing to let it change me, and I am willing to be wrong. I am also willing to be filled with wild, inexhaustible joy, and sometimes, already, I am.

It is becoming clear to me that the other part of my job is to write about my experiences of the Spirit. On a gut level, this feels dangerous. I know that when I write about listening to plants, then many people writes me off as nutty before they understand what I'm trying to say. A voice rises up from the place where my spine meets my skull and shrieks that this means starvation and abandonment! I hush that voice and roll my eyes before lamenting that nobody can benefit from writing that they cannot understand.

When I told these things to my gentle husband, he almost scolded me. “You are having a deep spiritual experience, and you are worried about whether you are being a good enough artist?” he asked, and then he pointed out that arts and ego can be entwined. I knew he was right. In the Bible, too, I found a subtle rebuke as I landed on the passage that said not everyone can understand spiritual messages. It doesn't mention anywhere in there that a message should be silenced because it might not be understood.

I am so grateful that I grew up as the daughter of actors, but I believe God has called me to other work, and so reluctantly, I am opening my tight grasp to let the wind blow away a little bit of what I thought was wisdom. Bit by bit, as I let go, I find myself less afraid.

Visiting the woods

As my husband and I sat in worship before bed, I nodded off and dreamed that I was the main character in the book The Chosen. I was in a powerful scene near the end of the book, and my father was gravely explaining that when someone asks to speak with me, it is very important to honor the request. I felt ashamed for failing to do this and woke up with a jerk of my head. Disoriented from my tiny nap, I found myself promising that I would do better, and that I would visit the woods that had been asking to speak with me. It took a few moments to realize the full implications of this. By that time, I was fully awake and able to dismiss the message as a strange dream.

A couple days later, I woke in the morning wrapped in the memory of another dream. A very patient and fatherly figure told me that while it was true that I could hear God in the woods, and that it was wonderful, I wasn't actually very good at it. The only thing I do really well was to love. I am not certain that I became a more loving person because of the advice, but I resolved to visit the hundred-acre woods across the street from my house.

The next day, the wind chill was well below zero. I worked around the house and kept postponing the time when I would bundle up to stand among the trees. Finally, I went out to get the mail, but almost without deciding to, I walked right past the mailbox and across the street. I crunched over the top of deep snow that lay on the meadow, and tucked myself just a few feet inside the border of the woods.

There, in a charged silence that I have only experienced in the presence of many trees, I stood and breathed. I smelled the light scent of snow which draped over darkened branches and blanketed the ground, imprinted with tracks. I felt tremendously grateful, and then I began to feel other things as well. Like I sometimes do during meeting for worship, I began to shake and then cry. I felt the presence of people who knew the woods and who had been colored by its charged silence and by its patterns of branches until the people and the woods were married with a bond more powerful than death. Then the woods burst into a violet radiance all around me, as though they were suddenly filled with a glowing mist. The delicate branches that form the upper canopy seemed especially bright.

I had to leave. I stayed away for many days, but often thought of the woods and their purple treasure. Finally, I went back a couple days ago and stood again within the fringes of the trees, peeking over my shoulder so I would know when the school bus pulled up in front of my house to drop off my children. I did not see violet light again. Mostly, I felt the tremors of my own busy life vibrating all around my body and running interference. I just stood and watched the snow fall in the woods, quiet and holy.

Cutting up chickens

I spent yesterday afternoon and evening cutting up chickens. First, at a workshop about poultry health, a veterinarian from the University taught us to perform autopsies on chickens with the goal of protecting the rest of the flock from illness. When the practical portion of the workshop came, my husband and I donned gloves and plastic aprons and cut into the dead chicken that had been flopped onto the table in front of us.

It was a hen that had been culled from a large conventional laying operation and then donated to the University for our workshop. You could tell that she had always lived in a cage because her claws were so long they were wavy and reminded me of some strange variety of hair. This chicken did not have much chance to walk around in her life. The vet said that she had laid maybe 300 eggs in her two-year life. Her breastbone was very slightly curved with a variety of osteoporosis because she had been putting calcium from her body into her eggs to form the shells. According to the vet, this chicken might have had a couple of good laying years ahead of her, but all the hens are culled at the same age.

We cut up the chicken as the vet told us and examined all her organs. I had not really been looking forward to this, but I was surprised by the gratitude that I felt as I learned the details of the way her body lived. When we began to discuss her reproductive system, I knew I was in the presence of something holy. Within her rested half a dozen egg yolks already quite large, and dozens if not hundreds of tiny buds that would have become yolks in time. It was like looking at the place where spirit could become flesh. I was humbled to think that even though this bird had lived in such a confined and unnatural situation, the force of life was pushing through her with vigor.

As soon as the workshop was finished, I sped to my friend’s house to help cut a bunch of his whole chickens into ready-to-cook parts so they could fit in his freezer. While chatting with friends, I tried to find the perfect place to separate the drumstick from the thigh without applying too much force or poking around tediously for the joint. I felt the size of the breasts and sliced them from the keel bone and ribs.

Unbeknownst to me, my hands had become obsessed with the job. The next morning, when my children came to snuggle me, I felt the muscles under their skin and found myself matter-of-factly assessing the size of the meat there just as I had judged the size of the chicken breasts. The same thing happened when I patted my husband. It was not a romantic thought. A bit later, when my husband asked me what I was thinking, I answered honestly. I was wondering what would be the most efficient way to cut through my knee and separate my calf from my thigh. (Probably it would be easiest to start from the inner back corner so it would be easier to slip the knife between the bones.) It did not feel terribly creepy to me at the time, just practical.

This evening, when I told my story to folks at worship group, one friend looked queasy, another said I could skip our parting hug this week, and one exclaimed with delight, “Oh! You're a kinesthetic learner! You learn with your hands!” He is right, of course. With my hands, I am learning about how to handle chicken, and I'm also learning about the art of living in a vulnerable body that will eventually fail. I am learning about the kinship of all living things, and I am learning that the sacred extends into messy minutia, even during times of deprivation and destruction. When spring comes, and we are raising chickens again, I never want to grow so busy or distracted that I forget my gratitude to them.

Planning

The snow is falling. Big, lacy flakes make the woods across the street look like a smoky gray blur, and they show up bright against the dark maple trees in my front yard. I watch them through the window as I sit at the computer trying to draw up farm plans for next year. It is a task that I would rather avoid, but it is January, a month of no excuses. For a short window of time, I am free from pressing outdoor jobs or looming holidays, so here I sit.

Today, I have been researching how much it would cost to soup up the truck with batteries to power a freezer so we can take our chickens to a farmer's market. (It costs about $1500!) I have also been sizing up my courage as we get ready to press more of our dream out of the realm of the ethereal and into the muddy world of exhaustion and tight finances and machines that break down. It makes me wince.

It feels right though. I am praying for humility and for the ability to set fear aside so I can better hear the instructions of the Boss. That is more than enough.

My agnostic elder

My mother says that after decades of feeling troubled by other people's opinions, she has reached an age of freedom and no longer really cares what they think. I have not reached that state yet, I told her, but I hope I will someday. Right now, I am feeling painfully awkward about the last message I delivered in Quaker worship.

Mom, a self-proclaimed agnostic who has never attended a meeting for worship, listened supportively as I told the story. In silent worship a few days ago, I felt a sense of something rising all around me. It was flowing from the floor to the ceiling with the power of a river. “Maybe this has something to do with the ascension,” I told myself, but that did not feel right at all. “Maybe I am supposed to stand up and deliver a message,” I thought, and this felt right, but I sat testing the feeling for a very long time with my heart pounding before I let that wild river carry me up slowly to standing.

When I got up there, I had nothing to say, but I let my hands keep rising up. Then I stood there moving my arms along with the motion that I felt around us. It seemed like I did this for a very long time, and I feared that I heard someone sigh impatiently. I started to shake, and tears started falling down my cheeks, and I wished fervently for some words. Finally I recieved some words of thanks and praise and devotion, but after they were delivered, I was not certain that the message was really done. I moved my hands some more and finally sat down.

Instead of feeling excruciatingly awkward when I think back on this, I wish I could say to myself: “I had a powerful and mysterious experience with the Spirit in worship this week, and I tried very earnestly to be faithful to it. What a blessing!”

“There!” my mom responded. “You said it! See? That’s great. Just let it go at that now.”

“But Mom!” I said. “Nobody else does that kind of thing!”

“Well, then!” said my mom. “Maybe it's high time somebody did.”