Off the Rails & In the Dark
plus some pictures from life around here lately
In the handful of minutes it takes to fill a tank with gas, I could feel the strain of my body pressing against the passenger seat belt buckle while I waited, my panicky mind pushing me to break free. Fighting the urge to unsnap the buckle and bolt from the car, I took a breath and let the mid-July sunshine touch me, warm through the window. But my efforts to stay in place blew completely apart when a siren suddenly came screaming at us. I remember seeing the ambulance speed into view. It slowed at the intersection adjacent to us, navigated safe passage, and drove on, but during that quick sequence, I had freed myself from the constraints of the car and popped out. Moving, moving, moving. I was always moving in those days after my car accident. Careful, but frantic. Always moving. As if I could walk my way out of my own existence and escape my broken body, broken mind. Trauma, pain, and chaotic thinking kept me always poised for flight.
They say the body keeps the score and in spite of the fact that I can’t tell you any of my own memories of my car accident or the 48 hours after, I discovered at that gas station a few weeks later that my body had definitely recorded some very specific things and those screaming sirens funneled me straight into a deep black space in my unknowable mind.
Last Tuesday afternoon I was outside pulling weeds when I heard sirens in the distance. Still finely tuned to that sound, I listened as they came near, and I watched the dog stand to take note, his ears perked. He joined his voice to the neighborhood chorus — Rusty is really good at his part, contributing deep woofs and mournful howls. As I watched and listened, I suddenly remembered that particular afternoon at the gas station twenty years ago when I first realized my body knew things my brain could not tell.
But then as I watched the dog and listened, the soundscape abruptly changed. I heard the crossing guard at the corner of our property began to clang and I knew the arms would be lowering to block traffic as a train came rumbling toward town more quickly than the sirens. Soon the engines rolled alongside our property and dogs and sirens faded into the sounds of a shrieking horn and the massive roaring, rolling metal machine. The air was charged with noise.
And then, in the length of a train, it was over. The rails were empty. The crossing guard lifted. Idling cars moved on. The sounds of sirens had passed by. The dogs settled back into quiet.
I named this Substack Off the Rails for reasons and wrote in my About page when I set it up:
Nearly twenty years ago, a car accident left me with a traumatic brain injury, the subsequent loss of my teaching career, and a general feeling of my life gone off the rails. In the years since, I’ve learned to be on the lookout for handholds to help me navigate through this unimagined life and have often found them wedged inside categories of beauty, love, joy, and hope. And lots of digging in the garden. These days my garden is located right beside a north-south rail line and so my writing in this space begins quite literally, just off the rails.
My goodness, I laughed in the quiet after sirens, dogs, and train. How very literally indeed, could a couple moments on a Tuesday afternoon in April illustrate my point for me!!
As I literally live over here just off the rails, I do pretty regularly wonder what I am about — these have been a handful of very hard years in this specific place and time. In what has become a sequence of handfuls of hard years, actually, because David and I seem to repeatedly find ourselves off the figurative rails together, and that reality has made for a lot of emptiness in my brain where vision for what might be ahead should be. I don’t know what to imagine, what to think about or hope for. Well, actually I do know many things I hope for but the evidence of some of these things being possible has been scant. There’s been so much disappointment, anguish, and grief along this way. I often think of a line in Jackson Browne’s song Running on Empty1…
In '69 I was twenty-one and I called the road my own
I don't know when that road turned onto the road I'm on…
I mean, there are some very specific spots on the road that I can point to —
but there are so very many ways that the road has twisted and turned in this journey of my life and the older I get, the more years I can look back on and see
how far I’ve come and also
how far I am from where I thought I was going.
This year I pretty regularly find myself singing along with Jackson Browne -
I don't know where I'm runnin' now, I'm just runnin' on
runnin' on empty
runnin' blind
runnin' into the sun
I’ll pick an easy point of example for this post - our house is for sale. It’s been on the market since October but we did not have much interest/activity through the winter. Then, this spring we had a bunch of activity but no sales action. Our lives would be different if we were moved. Easier in important ways, better anchored, we imagine. It feels like the right pursuit for a long list of reasons. And yet we wait. And waiting is not easy. We have been living with our stuff boxed up for months. We have been on call for strangers who ask to walk through our house. Sometimes they take an hour and a half poking around. And sometimes they even come back and look again. And yet to this point there has been no payoff. Without money in our hand we can’t really work on what happens next for us. And so we are stuck in this blank space. Runnin’ Blind.
Off the rails and in the dark.
How to find courage and strength for that run???
To quote myself —
I’ve learned to be on the lookout for handholds to help me navigate through this unimagined life and have often found them wedged inside categories of beauty, love, joy, and hope. And lots of digging in the garden.
But that digging in the garden…..Of course we had hoped to be gone from this property, settled into our new home by now - before garden season arrived!! But clearly that is not the case and I’ve had to walk gently with myself because digging in the garden is fundamental to the way that I breathe. And lacking vision for the garden as summer rapidly approaches feels like chaos.
A couple Sundays ago a phrase in the liturgy caught my attention —Almighty and everlasting God, who in the Paschal mystery established the new covenant of reconciliation…..
Who in the Paschal mystery….
I went looking through my notes for something I read many years ago in Richard Rohr’s book Everything Belongs.
…Jonah was swallowed by the whale and taken where he would rather not go. This was Jesus' metaphor for death and rebirth. Think of all the other signs, apparatitions, and miracles that religion looks for and seeks and even tries to create. But Jesus says it is an evil and adulterous generation that looks for these things. That's a pretty hard saying. He says instead we must go inside the belly of the whale for a while. Then and only then will we be spit upon a new shore and understand our call. That's the only pattern Jesus promises us. Paul spoke of reproducing the pattern of his death and thus understanding resurrection (Phil. 3:11). That teaching will never fail. The soul is always freed and formed in such wisdom......Christians call it the paschal mystery.
The paschal mystery is the pattern of transformation. We are transformed through death and rising, probably many times.....
As a culture, we have to be taught the language of descent. That is the great language of religion. It teaches us to enter willingly, trustingly into the dark periods of life. These dark periods are good teachers.….We must learn to stay with the pain of life, without answers, without conclusions, and some days without meaning. That is the path, the perilous dark path of true prayer.
These dark periods are good teachers.
Without vision for a garden this summer, I haven’t stopped leaning into possibility, and so at the beginning of April I went ahead and planted some seeds that I had leftover from last year and I set the flats on the top of the refrigerator. More than enough tomatoes showed their heads over the next couple weeks and by mid-month I moved them to the greenhouse, but the flat with peppers didn’t produce ANYTHING. I was disappointed because one variety in particular I really did hope would grow. I was reluctant to order another pack of seeds just for a couple plants that I may or may not have anywhere to put in June, but because I hadn’t seen any sign of life all month, I pulled the flat off the fridge last Tuesday morning, planning to dump it.
But WAIT!!
….that little green neck?!?!? I looked closer to find not one, but THREE little green necks. And it was exactly the metaphor I needed in that moment. Life feels pretty bleak on several fronts — the house-for-sale being just one. And it’s really really hard to hang on to hope when there’s not much evidence for things gonna change!! But in a moment of clear illustration, I had just been given the gift of sight — whatever had been happening beneath the surface of that soil during the month of waiting, I couldn’t have known. I had faithfully watered and watched, but in my moment of giving up, by grace I discovered…..something had actually been happening in the dark, in spite of what it seemed!!
New life was born and possibility keeps on.
What will become of these little plants remains to be seen.
What will become of me does too.
Richard Rohr again —
We must learn to stay with the pain of life, without answers, without conclusions, and some days without meaning. That is the path, the perilous dark path of true prayer.
I’m here for it. Still.
Some pics from the stuff of life around around here lately —
An update on the Oak Tree. Pictures from yesterday —
I’ve been watching a lone flower in our scraggly backyard these past couple weeks - wondering what it would do. It has been a gorgeous unfolding. It is Allium, apparently. And the bees love it. I do too and based on my observation thus far, I would plant it on purpose in the future, I think.
I love the irises in bloom (not so much when they are not in bloom).
The lilacs are nearly done but the rhododendrons and roses and peonies and even an early hydrangea bloom are painting color throughout our yard now.
Also cherries and apples and blueberries are setting fruit. AND STRAWBERRIES. I was surprised to find a handful of ripe strawberries yesterday! The picture proof is blurry, but this was amazing to find on the 5th of May—
We celebrated Ryan’s graduation from George Fox University this past weekend. He graduated with honors, and if there ever was an award we could have seen coming from 20 years away……it was this one —
And last but not least, Rusty the Farm Dog may be forced to reinvent himself if we can ever get moved from this place. Rusty the Retriever, would be a logical next step, but retrieving is not really his thing. However, he is really good at chasing the item and then hanging out with it until you come retrieve it yourself.
Actually, singing with Sandra McCracken cause her cover is how I found his song.
There is so much heartache and beauty in this piece. It reminds me of a quote by George McDonald “when the dawn came, she was surprised to see how far she had come in the dark”. Holding this with you.