Moving Outdoors

This week, with the dawn of slightly warmer weather, I decided to move eating (and general being) outdoors. I was reminded of this poem I wrote in 2002, eight months after the September 11 attacks.

 When Summer Came in 2002

My daughter and I carried the spare table out

back, began to live under green and blue.

Spent our days nourished, and noticing things.

Like the flamboyance of a single tiger

lily against the foxgloves' purple foil,

or the way just-fledged finches played like

kids in a fountain as the soaker-hose

drenched their twitching wings.

As men in faraway places carried their

deaths onto buses, in bombs strapped to thighs,

we sought the golden lilt of the monarch.

As soldiers bulldozed refugee homes,

ate food stockpiled by the occupied,

we absorbed the tickling scent of blooms,

chased a flashing red to find a box-

elder bug.  While men in high places called

assassinations and hookers, we learned the song

of the chickadee, the maple leaves'

hushing.  As boys fought to "protect our way

of life," we lived like we knew

we were going to die.

© Tricia Gates Brown 2002

The Eighth Sacrament

It is my daughter’s nineteenth birthday. I drive to her small Oregon college in the sorrel glow of ill-defined weather, feeling the strangeness of going to visit my one child at her new home, to share her dorm bathroom and sleep on her crusty dorm floor. We are unnatural in our separation, Madison and I, each a single unmatched sock. We’re the sort of mother-daughter who walk with linked arms and give one another bear hugs in public, who stir each other to laughter or to such a pitch of frustration that we repel one another like colliding projectiles. It is not that we have a fraternal relationship lacking parent-child boundaries; we are simply a mom and daughter who know and love each other compassionately despite it.

This bond between parent and child strikes me now, more than ever, as sacred, and I lately wonder, in the manner of wondering for its own sake, why parenting is not a holy sacrament. Why is marriage a holy sacrament, or confirmation, or baptism, and not parenting? I have imagined that something got missed. Maybe the symbolic number seven delimited the list and parenting simply didn’t make the cut—too hard to enforce, too hard to validate in the way of holy sacraments.

Eucharist

“Don’t be obvious,” Madison says as we are sit together in the cafeteria, “but look at that boy walking in. He has an ear bud in his ear constantly, playing loud speed metal.” The boy walks across the room to meet up with a friend whom he greets without removing his ear bud. “Whenever I see him,” Madison confides, “I think of what you always tell me about silence, and how our spirits need silence.” Hearing this, I feel so swept away by thanksgiving that I almost float out of the cafeteria into cloud-dappled ether. She has been listening to me.

Baptism

I want baptism for my daughter—this immersion in spirit—more than I can understand, I want her heart to connect irreversibly with the undercurrent of love that stirs life in her and heals the things we humans break and makes the sap to run and the hummingbirds to arrive at my feeder. I want her to feel surrounded by the breath of God that made her and guides her and that will receive her back as breath in the end. I worry, in a culture so cacophonous, so overwhelmed, where the young people, where my young person, will arrive at a meeting with this spirit, where they will sit down to meet themselves for the first time.

My phone rings one night. It is Madison, her voice immersed in the holy water of tears. “I’m just so bad at this,” she tells me, meaning college. Madison, who has a learning disability, has struggled academically for as long as I remember. “I try so hard,” she sobs into the phone, “but I just can’t do it. Maybe I’m not cut out for college. It is so hard. Especially studying for tests … I look at the same notes over and over and cannot seem to focus, and just when I think I’ve got something, it vanishes.”

I try not to hate the pain seeping through her words, the anguish in her voice. I know that the struggle is part of what shapes her, is part of the crucible of faith formation. Yet I want to gather my arms around her. She is four hours away. I want to protect her from the fear and drowning that led me to practically sell my soul when I was her age. I believe her, that she is trying, doing the best she can do, but I advise her to use different study methods, maybe work for shorter periods or at different times of the day. “I am sorry,” is mostly what I tell her. “I’m so sorry,” I say, “I wish there was more I could do to help.”

She hasn’t even reached the part about loneliness, which leaks out in tragic sobs that tear my heart.

Holy Orders

After lunch in the cafeteria, where Madison pointed out the ear-bud boy, we head back to the dorm. She collapses her sibylline head onto my lap. She’s had a headache for days, she tells me; asks if I will massage her neck; so I sit rubbing her slender neck and stroking her hair in the lava-lamp-lit room.

“I miss you,” she says. “It can be so lonely here.” And as I continue to stroke her temples, I fight back a monsoon of tears, praying achingly, almost desperately, into the silence, “God, help her. God, help her. God, help her.”

            If a sacrament is “a visible sign of an invisible reality,” as classically defined, why wouldn’t the parent-child relationship be viewed as a sacramental sign of God’s relationship to humanity, which is characterized as a parent-child relationship with every whispered “Our Father…”? If there is anything analogous and signatory of the tender creating and guiding of a world by God, wouldn’t it be the conception and birthing of human children, and the stinging, euphoric work of holding them and releasing them and loving them into full being? Wouldn’t this be a better symbol of God’s way of leading than anything else?

Matrimony

At dinner, in our favorite pizza place, we become distracted by the couple sitting across the aisle from us, who appear to be on a date and having a quarrel. Earlier the man had dropped his head to the table, burying it in his arms while the woman moved her chair beside him and draped her body across him, probably whispering consoling words in his ear. Now they have stood and are sharing a long, sad embrace in the middle of the restaurant. I wonder if we have witnessed a break-up and feel terrible in my role as witness. Just looking at the man brings up a hollow, expanding sickness that lay dormant in my gut—a feeling mildly like panic, the memory of devastating someone who loved me. Maybe I wish parenting was a sacrament because I have failed so miserably at matrimony. Maybe I want another sacrament to make up the difference.

Penance and Reconciliation

Yet I have failed, too, at parenting. Madison was a colicky, fitful baby; I a young mother, twenty-one years old when she was born, and I am sure I started failing her on the third day, when sleep deprivation caught up to me and I became exhausted and impatient. I haven’t stopped failing her since, in the innumerable, unintentional ways parents fail their children. As a parent I have always wanted, more than anything, to help my daughter see and embrace divine love. Yet I have simultaneously failed to love her in the ways I had hoped. I have ruthlessly hushed her as a small child for fidgeting and jabbering during the concerts and classes I dragged her to, shaming her for nothing more than being a kid. Before learning Madison had a brain ill-equipped for organization, I would force her to spend painful hours cleaning her room, organizing her belongings. I descended into instinctual silences too many times to name, when what Madison needed was companionship. I’ve yelled at times. I have taken my frustrations out on her. I have spent whole days of her life consumed with my own recklessness and obsessions, too stuck in my head to be a good mother. I confess. Lord have mercy.

Despite all of this, Madison seems to know that God loves her. This is the sweetest grace of all.

Confirmation

A sacrament is a conveyance of grace, a vehicle for stepping consciously into the surrounding air of holy, divine love, a bell waking us up to what is already ours. When young people are confirmed, they are anointed with oil—a sign or symbol of the holy spirit’s anointing of them, of the inescapable holiness of who they are and the everyday holiness of their imperfect lives.

As a parent I’ve come up blank so many times, wondering how to awaken my child to the divine love she is soaking in. Yet I was doing it all along by conferring parental love. In fact, parental love seems to be the main way kids are awakened to God’s love, through this primary experience of love at home. How many of us had our sense of grace shattered because parental love was poorly communicated or imparted with dangling strings?  How many of us know people who have suffered this shattering? 

Anointing of the Sick

As evening arrives on Madison’s birthday, I am initiated into the nightly college rite of fro-yo. We walk to the frozen yogurt shop before returning to a friend’s dorm to watch the Grammys. I take a seat next to Madison and massage her feet and her headache magically disappears.

            The root of the word “sacrament” means “consecrate.” To consecrate something means to make it an object of veneration, or to dedicate it for a specific purpose. If parenting was a sacrament, would we venerate it? How would that veneration look? Maybe if parenting were venerated, staying home to raise children would be viewed as an exalted calling, a holy act, an ordination. Maybe the people who do it, moms or dads, would be supported and rewarded and honored instead of being ignored and dismissed, or paid with lip service rather than substance. Perhaps if parenting were venerated, the current of economics would bend to something other than competition.

Madison and I crawl into our beds, mine a borrowed mattress thrown on the floor next to hers. She snuggles under the quilt I fashioned for her from yards of flannel and love. I turn on my side, away from her.

“Mom,” she whispers so her sleeping roommate will not hear, “will you turn around?

So I do, knowing she wants to hold my hand, that the bedtime hour of lying in the dark feeling the loneliness and homesickness of months gather like a swarm of bees around her head has come, but her mother is there and she can hold my hand. I lay there stroking the caterpillar skin on the back of her hand, thinking how much it feels like the little-girl grip I’d held and stroked every day of her young life, how the bones have the same inconsequential weight and the knuckles the soft suede ripple of a bean pod. Then she starts to cry, softly, almost inaudibly, and I do too. 


{Originally published in Portland Magazine, Spring 2013}

Poems for St. Valentines Day

Centered

I carry you with me into that light,

bread of the masses, silence of ages

you ingest, invest through me.

The cave at my center, like cupped hands

before a fire, holds you. My finger traces

your outline on my skin and you are there.

I can see your listing gaze, the hunger at the base

of your taut throat, the graces looting your knapsack

of tortured remembrances. We will take them—

they say, they will be gone, extinguished like a star.

Breathe with me, look around.

You are already there.

~ Tricia Gates Brown

Walking, Coldest Day of the Year

The sun loves days like this, seen

in a million new ways, each blade of grass

tipped with a diamond, light refracted

into myriad forms of honor. Whole fields

of crystalline white, patched in chartreuse

here and there, where the sun went too

far. Puddles, frozen and thawed, froze

again into expressionistic layers, pod

forms overlapping, concentric circles.

I pass the woman I met at the Bookmobile,

and she waves through a window. My dog

crunches brittle turf under calloused paws,

and runs over threads of moss lacy with

frost. My mind lies resting in a small

pocket, future and past dissipate like

tendrils of smoke, and you are closer to me

than my skin. I hold you inside me

like a Russian nesting doll, and when I stand

at the creek, I know you hear its trickle

and roll. When the love all around shakes me

like breath on a reed,

I know you feel the vibration. Loving a blade of grass is

loving God, and loving God is loving you.

You are a fish. Love is water.

~ Tricia Gates Brown


{Originally appeared in collection Sackcloth and Ashes, 2008}

Constellation

Constellation

(New year poem, December 2012)

In your dreams, they are there,

threading beads on a string of years,

molding clay with small warm hands,

and you awaken to find them gone.

This is the part that pinches my heart

in a vice that must be empathy. The cruel

disappointments of grief, the indelibility,

while others look away and forget. Sandy Hook,

Yemen, Gaza. Someone always points

a finger—on Facebook, the news.

Machine guns, mental illness untreated,

schools underfunded

spirits   unfed while we’re encumbered and fat,

stress on families, videos, games teaching

violence, abortion used carelessly as birth

control, myths of redemptive violence,

militaries larger than countries.

Earth’s destruction. Self.

Pick one agenda. Run with it.

Why can’t we admit: all of these things make us sick?

The vivid constellation of our violence, crippling

imbalance, dominance we carve out and serve. Here,

let me make it clear: we can choose to do better.

We can choose to do better starting today.

Letter to Fellow Democrats on the Re-election of Barack Obama

Dear Fellow Democrats,

On Tuesday night, a collective sigh of relief was heard among us. And in the past few days, as I’ve turned my ear to the conversations swirling around me, I believe I still hear it. A loud and prolonged whew.

I, like you, look forward to things to be done in a second Obama term. But I suggest one action is called for before we move past this election. I envision a collective “thank you” to the Latino voters who made this Obama victory possible. Without these voters, Obama could not have won.

Over the next four years, non-Latino Democrats will have historic opportunities to make our “thank you” an expression of genuine gratitude rather than empty sentiment. Already, immigration is moving to the fore of public conversation, a direct result of the election and the importance of demographics for the outcome. As this conversation unfolds, and as our legislators undertake efforts to address (or block) compassionate, far-reaching immigration reform, some of us need to move from the role of onlookers to the role of engaged allies.

The issue of greatest importance to Latino voters is immigration. At least sixty percent are personally acquainted with someone who is undocumented. Immigration is a heart and hearth issue for Latinos, but it is something that touches the lives of all Americans. I was recently told of a local Anglo woman who takes fastidious care not to hire undocumented immigrants to clean her house because of her dedication to “following the rules.” But the truth is, if this woman wants to remain untainted by the issue, she needs to avoid almost all food sold in grocery stores and never eat out at restaurants or stay in hotels. She needs to rescind her business from places cleaned by undocumented workers, and she should probably avoid all box stores and airports. In other words, her resolution may boost her self-image, but it is entirely unrealistic and somewhat egotistical. All of us who are part of the US economy benefit from the labors of undocumented workers. We all pay lower prices, almost every day, because of their labor. We are all participants in the broken system. Yet disdain and criminalization are reserved for the undocumented. As news anchor Jorge Ramos recently stated on the Stephen Colbert show, “There are millions of people who benefit from their work, and there are thousands of American companies who hire them, and we don’t call them ‘illegal.’ We have to talk about co-responsibility. … They are here because we need them, and they came here simply because we are hiring them.”

Most Americans—even those sympathetic to immigrants—know almost nothing about US immigration law. Yet laws that were put in place in the late 90s make a road to legal status impossible for the large majority of the undocumented. For example, anyone who has stayed in the country undocumented for over a year is barred from legal status without leaving the US for 5-10 years. And any immigrant who was in the US undocumented, then left for any reason and returned again undocumented, is under a “permanent ban,” meaning they’re not allowed to receive legal status under any circumstances. Permanent, 5-year and 10-year bans are in place for many other situations.

Most of us admire the high value placed on family, even extended family, by Latinos. Family commitment runs so high in Latino culture that if an immigrant feels she is needed by her family “back home,” she will go to the aid of her family. And when she returns to the US, she will permanently be barred from legalization as an immigrant, under any and all circumstances.

The NAACP, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, National Action Network, Congressional Black Caucus, Amnesty International, and other civil-rights groups, have all stood in solidarity with undocumented immigrants in the US, recognizing immigration as a key civil-rights issue. As Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Those of us who are concerned about justice will have an opportunity in the next four years (and beyond) to stand with these groups in their advocacy for undocumented immigrants. We can educate ourselves about US immigration policy. We can talk to our friends and write letters to the editor. We can challenge use of the dehumanizing term “illegal.” We can use social networks to spread knowledge and advocacy. And most importantly, we can call and write to our legislators, repeatedly, telling them we care about immigrants and want to see far-reaching reform. In my view, there is no better way to say “thank you.”

Signed,

Tricia Gates Brown

{First published at Upper Left Edge}

Freedom in Tradition

Garlicky minestrone reaches down the hall and out the front door of the church, drawing me in on a wave of scent mingling with undertones of home-baked bread. I find myself thinking,church people know how to do food. If nothing else, you can count on the food. Then I immediately recant the sentiment, remembering nothing spoils the appetite like a bad church experience. Actually, encouragement of theological questioning and curiosity are what draw me to St. Catherine Episcopal. Thanks be to God.

Over ten years ago I completed a PhD in biblical studies because I was intensely curious about Judeo-Christian scriptures and wanted to teach bible. Then I proceeded to teach at an Evangelical-Quaker university with a strong fundamentalist student demographic, and let me testify, the experience cured my career ambitions with all the potency of chemo. I found that academically instructing young fundamentalists on the subject of biblical studies was like strolling through a minefield on the fringes of Afghanistan. The teaching experience had such a disillusioning effect, I didn’t even wander over to liberal colleges or write persuasive articles about uninformed scripture reading. I up and quit. Before I could teach biblical studies to anyone, I needed to figure out what was so fraught about the bible.

Though it’s taken a while, I have, over the last few years, developed one idea of why fundamentalist Christians need to defend the bible, and specifically, their own denominational interpretations of the bible, so zealously. Essentially, their institutions demand it.

Human development and the coherence of institutions necessitate structure and guidelines. But once humans reach a certain level, they are able to leave behind the structures and rules that helped them grow up. In fact, people at higher levels of faith development always let go of the need for defining structures. Yet scholars who study stages of faith and spiritual development, from James Fowler to Bill Plotkin, tell us that while this is true for individuals, institutions perpetually operate at an adolescent level of spiritual development. They cannot move onto the deeper concerns, or struggle through the formative losses, that steer us beyond the superficial boundaries imposed by others. Institutions, including faith communities, need sets of established guidelines and definitions to bind them together and power them forward. But unlike young people who learn the rules so they can effectively transcend them, adapt them, or outright break them as mature adults, institutions need guidelines, period. So dominant religious traditions throughout history directed their adherents with established rituals, creeds, and codified rules of conduct. This worked, even if the institutions thereby created were often immature and petty.

Over the last hundred-plus years, many modern Christians have eschewed such traditions in favor of free-form communities and “non-denominational” churches. Culturally, we have moved away from tradition and toward individual consciousness that is wary of institutionalism. As a result, many modern Christians demoted creed, ritual, and rules as structures for communal life, leaving a vacuum that had to be filled. In this vacuum, arose the Bible. The Bible-with-a-capital-B Bible, along with the rapid ascent of American fundamentalism. The Bible became the supreme authority for a large segment of American Christian communities. The bible is, for these churches, a bulwark against the formlessness that would threaten the institutions themselves.

But as it turns out, the Bible doesn’t simply substitute for the rule of tradition. In fundamentalist churches the bible is actually viewed as the word of God, not as a human-formed tradition that can, to some degree, be taken with a grain of salt and/or reformed. For many nondenominational fundamentalist churches and Christians, the bible not only replaced tradition, it eviscerated it. Who wants tradition when you can have God on the page, God you can hold in your very own hands? For non-historic, non-ritualized and uncodified faith institutions, the bible became the kind of authority every institution, like every adolescent, needs to define reality, but those who question or disagree with this authority are viewed as usurping the authority of God. The irony is that the bible is interpreted individualistically by people culturally predisposed to interpret so, yet it is held up as universal, divine, authority.

This elevation of the status of the bible has led to a fundamentalist American Christian demographic that increasing justifies violence and bigotry by misusing scripture. Past generations certainly saw violence and bigotry sanctioned by tradition. But different today is the tendency of fundamentalist Christians to cut off all discussion of the issues by appealing to literalistic biblical justifications of violence and bigotry. According to this hermeneutic, these things are justified because, simply put, God says so.

I am a Generation-Xer who has a strong aversion to institution for institution’s sake. In my early twenties I gravitated toward Quakers because the denomination seemed least institutionalized among Christian denominations. Tradition tends to rub against my grain. Yet when I tried to jettison church participation, I couldn’t stay away.

So I have made my peace with institutions, at least in theory. This is in part due to acceptance of how institutions, though often disappointing and adolescent and deserving of scrutiny, play a necessary role in communal life. I have also learned to value the traditions that hold many faith institutions together because, in healthy circumstances, the coherence around human-formed tradition and ritual allows intellectual and moral integrity to flourish. In a time of increasing income disparity, environmental crisis, and militarization, it is more important than ever for churches to allow discussion and dissent around issues of justice and violence and how Christianity can speak to them. This includes calling into relentless question portions of tradition and scripture that have been used to justify domination, exclusion and violence. Christians need stabilizing structures that hold communities together while allowing free and open-minded debate.

I now worship with Spanish-speaking Episcopalians. Among this group of liturgy-enacting, ritual adhering, scripture-reading Christians, I am free, with others, to both question and relish the intricacies of scripture. We are free to roll our eyes at the tradition at times, or to discuss it critically as the human construct that it is. In a faith community ordered around tradition, rather than around the supposedly inscrutable Bible, we are free to communally worship the Lord God with all of our heart, soul and mind. Thanks be to God.

{First published at Episcopal Cafe}

In Praise of a Quiet Life

In praise of waking when wakefulness stirs you because you do not own an alarm clock and if you did, would not know where to find it. In praise of grinding coffee or brewing tea or hydrating with water, if that’s your preference, of eating breakfast when you feel hungry and not before.

In praise of meditating for a spell before beginning the work of a day. In praise of running a hot bath and listening to radio essays while bathing and starting laundry and sweeping the floor. In praise of On Being and Fresh Air and Bill Moyers. In praise of morning.

Around eleven, I fetch our weekly CSA delivery. Before unloading the fresh-picked vegetables, I pull out the few leftovers from last week’s delivery, dice them, toss them with salt and olive oil, and set them roasting. On the way to the compost bin, I am waylaid by gardening. Crocosmia shoots overtake late-season rhubarb, and under enormous rhubarb leaves, sprays of lavender bow toward the sun, a posture common for sun-loving plants in this Oregon Coast holler. I set aside the compost and fetch a knife. After harvesting the rhubarb, I tie up crocosmia and nudge the lavender westerly. “Work”, as in employment, can wait.

I live a quiet life so I have time to do these things. To prepare organic food and grow a bit myself, to be side-tracked by gardening when the need arises, or a friend’s unannounced visit, the urge to read a book.

We who live quietly have become an invisible counter-culture. We don’t tweet or use smart phones, sometimes not even cell phones; we don’t have television; we don’t blog frequently or sample often from the smorgasbord of the web. We avoid the noise of incessant connection and activity. And even these small acts of quietude have become resistance in the digital age. We are harder to sell to, harder to influence. Yet resistance is not the reason we choose quiet. The quiet life is chosen because it feels more alive to us, less distracted, more healthful on personal and global levels.

Lest you think quiet a luxury, I can tell you that I am not wealthy (not on a local scale, at least). My spouse and I share a simple 720-square-foot home and run-down cars and bicycles. Of the people I know who choose a quiet life, none are wealthy, come to think of it. So bunk to the theory of luxury. In the choice between busyness and quiet, we choose the latter not because we are either well-off or ascetic, but because we want to live fully.

I average four hours a day of work, my husband about seven. Since I work largely from home, I do more work domestic. When we feel too busy, we turn down jobs. We may not be wealthy, but with our quiet life, we are rich. My husband takes time each week for soccer: once to play in a league, once to lead a soccer club for local kids, mostly immigrants—a weekly pleasure that I help coordinate. I find time for intellectual pursuits, to absorb nature, to create objects of art. He finds time for friends and play and walking on the beach. We serve as volunteers on occasion, but we also relax and have fun and get plenty of sleep.

My husband and I are self-employed and empty-nested. We would perhaps have less free time were it otherwise. Earlier seasons of life were certainly more boisterous, even before the advance of the internet. Yet we both lived simply and did not amass debt. Even with our present-day circumstances, however, we know our lives could look different. We could fill them with gadgetry, more constant communication, more consumption and materialism, more entertainment and activity, more expansive professional ambitions, more work, larger investment accounts, niftier stuff. If we tuned in to media more frequently, we could fjord a stream of voices telling us we need these things. These things, the very keys to our happiness.

The quiet life is not without limitations, of course. But isn’t embracing limitation the heart of contentment?

True, living a quiet life will not get you everything you want. It is unlikely to get you an Oprah interview, for example, or a book deal with a publisher of notable size. It is unlikely to win you the big promotions. The quiet life will not garner copious community-service awards or run up the “Likes” on your Facebook page. You will not be described as influential, or leading, or the voice of a generation.

The quiet life will not earn you a hefty retirement income or buffer you against the insecurities of old age (unless perhaps you live in Finland). In the U.S., the quiet life may eventually land you in a modest, state-subsidized nursing home. Hopefully the mental and spiritual benefits of a life lived quietly will let you see this glass as half full.

Living the quiet life will not guarantee you a spotless home or tidy car, and if young children share your quiet life, they may at times look unkempt. You will not be asked by the local Home and Garden Club to feature your home on a fundraising tour, and you are unlikely to epitomize modern fashion.

Yet how many of these limits will matter on the cusp of your death?

The quiet life is about listening and attending to your existence and to that of the universe and spirit around you. It is about stilling the noise enough that you can hear. What you hear will depend on your singular vocation, your calling.

At times, quiet may lead you into seasons of increased activity and engagement. These seasons will be well nourished by the quiet. Your life will mimic the natural world, which cycles through abundance and fallowness, drama and repose, migration and homecoming. Roots nurtured in stillness and quiet will be strong to abide your seasons of action.

Therefore, I sing the praise of a quiet life, a simple life, a life fully and justly lived.

{First published at Upper Left Edge.}

Poems in the Shade of Green

Resilience

Each summer woods threaten

to take this place. Salmonberry, elder,

the Sasquatch mittens of devils claw

encroach on the patch around our house

then swallow it whole. We have never had

the wild and cloying cucumber but there

he is, showing out of nowhere, like sea scum,

algae blooms, crops of a warmer earth.

On this misty day, the flora don patinas of brilliant

resilience, like they dare us try

and stop them, same as we did in our twenties,

when fluids coursed through and we toiled

and reached, and our dreams were a bow that shot

us every moment, every day, to the final power.

© Tricia Gates Brown 2012

Pondering the women who, given no choice, mourned leisure

Noticing the dogs make a blanket of sun,

I move out under the bee tree, hear them

barely for the sound of lawn mower, bird

song, creek song, jitter of bamboo chime.

But the bees sidle close, outline the page

where I write, asking, what is there to say

but the blue of forget-me-nots, bow

on the horizon, buoyant on this April

day? Moondust euphorbia, raspberry peony,

hands to the Lord, erysimum navel orange,

stretching side-long to the violet of hyacinth?

Even the aspenwood risks its leafing. Let

the wind kiss you, the bee-monk says, let it

always take longer, this kissing. Cat slinks under

my leg, its warm fur an invitation, and

finally I give in, stubborn as a beam. Is it not

better to lie in a blanket of sun?

© Tricia Gates Brown 2012

Las Posadas

Celebrants press wall-to-wall into houses where we gather, forty to sixty people, night after night reciting the prayers and singing the songs of Las Posadas. Steamy windows emanate light into winter’s deepest dark. Posadas (translated literally as “lodgings”) take place each night from December 16 through Christmas Eve and reenact Mary and Joseph’s attempt to find lodging in Bethlehem. The tradition originated in Spain and was carried to Mexico. The uniquely Mexican version seems to have started in 1538, when Spanish friars intent on assimilating the faith with Aztec rites, combined posadas with the nine-night winter ritual of imploring the sun god’s return. Mexicans still celebrate posadas, enlivening them with balloons and papel picado, and the shrieking of children as candy erupts from handmade piñatas.

On foggy Oregon coast nights, in the homes of immigrants who work among the cows and hay of our nativities, who struggle to find open doors at banks, at college departments of financial aid and dental offices, at the Department of Motor Vehicles, we await the advent of Jesus, the one with no place to call home. I stand shoulder to shoulder with my Mexican friends in their rented houses that have seen better days, that sleep several children to a bedroom and boast a shrine of mother Mary, the Virgen of Guadalupe, surrounded by frolics of icons. I sing along with the “posada song”, pretending to be Mary and Joseph at the door of the inn (and on other nights, the innkeeper, roused from his sleep and ill-tempered). And as each night passes, I begin to understand a part of the Christian story I have previously not understood. Mary and Joseph were like these Mexican immigrants. And I, standing there in my invisible cloak of white privilege, will find it harder to know them.

Mary and Joseph were Galilean. And the people from Galilee were belittled in Bethlehem and throughout Judea. In a reversal of geography, they were the disregarded neighbors from the backwater north, the presumed uncouth and superstitious and freeloading and restive. In Judea where they went to pay taxes, they were shut out as a matter of course. Galileans were stereotyped by Judeans as lawbreakers. Galilee was a renegade land that spawned messianic movements awaiting the coming of the Lord, a new day of fairness—movements started by leaders like “the Egyptian,” or “Judas the Galilean,” that were historically successful. That is, until the Romans got miffed and sent riot police to disband or kill them or paramilitary troops to intimidate them, or turned on them their own client kings like Herod Antipas, who wiled away the wealth of his subjects, sending them to border towns to pay their dues.

At times the term “Galilean” was used in Jesus’ day to simply mean an outsider, especially of the political sort. Galilee was a center of economic protest, where the messiah named Jesus would wax prophetically on wealth and the sharing of it, on how the rich couldn’t make it into heaven any more than they could make it through the eye of a needle, or the Rio Grande, or a few days in the Arizona desert. In his last years, Jesus’ friends and audience were Galilean fisher-folk, and according to Roman values, dwelt at the bottom of the labor pool. In the words of Cicero, quoting the well-bred Terence: “The most shameful occupations are those which cater to our sensual pleasures: ‘fish-sellers, butchers, cooks, poultry-raisers, and fishermen’” (Cicero, On Duties 1.42). In our day, Cicero might have added hotel cleaners, line cooks, gardeners, vineyard or dairy laborers, makers of Versace denim jeans.  

At posadas, we are reminded by word and ritual that God chose an indigent, young Galilean girl, “Alegría, alegría!” We pray for the immigrants facing deportation, for the women with back pain and diabetes who need strength to rise each day and make two dozen beds. We pray for the children, for the church and its message of good news. We pray for the high school students fighting for a chance at a dream.

The litany, prayers and songs culminate in a meal, a feast of hospitality that night by night includes carnitas, tacos, tamales, pozole, always accompanied by rice and beans and a prismatic display of salsas. After dinner, children swing at brilliant piñatas.         

For reasons unknown, the children flock to me and my husband, throwing hugs around us like coats on a rack. They glow with beauty and unyielding hope, and in America they are not unlike Jesus and his friends running about Jerusalem at Passover, yet unaware of how they are seen, or who they will become, only that they love the songs, the traditions of Christmas, the smell of the Passover tamales, and the community of Galilean pilgrims who love them. These children know only that Jesus and his parents were poor and had to stand at a door and knock only to be ignored, and then finally let into our broken and peregrine hearts as the queen and kings of heaven. 

{First appeared in RAIN Magazine 2012; a shortened version, in Oregon Humanities, Summer 2012 }

Undocumented at the Beach

“Antonio” was visiting a small Oregon Coast tourist town in 1993 when he heard a man shouting to him out of nowhere. He was alarmed until he realized the stranger spoke to him in Spanish. “Trabajas? Trabajas?” the man yelled awkwardly, race-walking to catch up with him. “You work?  You work?” Antonio, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, lived in California at the time. He had come to Oregon to visit his brother. After this encounter, Antonio spent the remainder of his visit working full-time, eventually deciding to relocate. He had a new job, in a restaurant in an Oregon beach town of such extraordinary beauty that it attracted tourists from around the world.

To the desperate restaurant owner walking down the street, Antonio looked like one thing: cheap labor. He was well-built, young and Latino, exactly what coastal business owners sought.

The northern stretch of Oregon’s coast had experienced several boom years, both in tourism and property values. The concerted efforts of developers and leisure-industry investors in the 1980s had transformed the coast from a quirky, quiet family-vacation site to a high-rent district and status symbol. The tiny towns strewn along the coastline attracted masses of vacationers each summer, as well as second-home buyers who drove up values and property taxes. Come summer, the towns needed a swarm of workers to run the hotels and restaurants frequented by visitors seeking sunsets and bonfires and five-star dining. By the early 1990s, restaurant and hotel owners in the town were so hard up for workers, they sent buses to the nearest city to pick up Latino immigrants willing to work.

The problem is the same in many vacation destinations across the U.S. today. Wooing legal workers to high-price tourist towns would require raising wages and travel costs for consumers, so the U.S. tourist industry, like the agricultural industry, relies on undocumented workers to keep costs down. The workers make ends meet by juggling multiple jobs or wedging several inhabitants into small apartments, subsidizing the vacations of middle-class people like me.

Since the late ‘90s, American immigration policies have blocked access to legalization for “unskilled” immigrants and those from places like Mexico and Central America. Government leaders on the national and state levels restrict immigrant rights and demonize undocumented immigrants in public speeches, referring to them increasingly as “illegals.”

Immigrants who work in the U.S. tourist industry may sometimes be treated respectfully by their employers and by guests. They may be thankful to reside here, to have work and opportunity, and to raise their children in the United States. Some immigrant friends working in Oregon tell me this is their experience. But in the country as a whole, conditions for immigrants are deteriorating. In Alabama, undocumented immigrants can be arrested for setting up water service, people are required to show immigration status when registering children for school and it is literally a crime to be undocumented. Even in my home state, immigrants can’t legally drive, they can’t get an account at most banks or receive a credit card, and they live with the constant threat of a sweep by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that could have devastating consequences (for example, a recent study by Applied Research Center found that currently in the U.S. over 5,000 children flounder in foster care because their parents have been deported).

After almost twenty years, Antonio still lives in the same Oregon coast town and holds down jobs catering to tourists and second-home owners. He and his wife each work two to three jobs, depending on the season, and both, to this day, are undocumented, as are most Mexican-immigrant workers in their mid-forties or younger due to the legislative changes of the late-1990s. They and their children live with extreme uncertainty.

U.S. tourists must understand both undocumented immigrants’ contributions to the tourist industry and their disenfranchised status in the Unites States in order to be informed, conscientious travelers. Equipped with awareness, we can take steps to travel justly.

SIDEBAR: 

Tips for ethical travel in the U.S.:

-leave a tip specifically for the dishwashing and culinary staff at restaurants to help increase equitability among workers

-generously and directly tip housekeeping staff at hotels

-eat at small, family-owned restaurants and avoid all chains

-boycott travel to states with egregious anti-immigrant policies

-choose unionized, worker-friendly hotels, such as those listed in the directory at hotelworkersrising.org (though the fact remains, undocumented immigrants rarely join unions for fear of deportation – a threat employers can easily levy against them)

When you get home, here are some ways to thank the workers who served you on your vacation:

-call or write to your political representatives advocating for comprehensive, immigrant-friendly immigration reform

-write a letter to the editor of your local paper advocating the same (encourage your faith community to join you)

-host discussions about local anti-immigrant policies such as Secure Communities

-start a letter-writing campaign to support the DREAM Act (the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act), and demand that it include alternatives to military service

-talk to your children about immigration and raise a generation of immigrant advocates

{First appeared in GEEZ Magazine, Summer 2012}

Poems 2005 - 2008

All of these poems were published in my chapbook Sackcloth and Ashes (2008).

Naming Things

We did not know what waited. No one

but us and those trees. You wanted to teach me

the names, to show me a spring. You even saved

my drowning dog! Slipped so easily

into the glove of hero. But I could feel

your caution harden as we stepped close,

the way your air grew heavy

and clenched, like a shell you couldn’t

discard. How the womb of your mind

turned in on itself, snug in its woolen

fear. Couldn’t you see how singular, how

auspicious that moment? Couldn’t you choose

just once, to be brave?  Nothing could wedge

a gap between the rings of your life, so tight

and deafening, a border-patrol psyche.

The decision of a man to flee.

There was no place for us to go that day,

that time. I draped my arm around you,

asked of your ancestors—willed you

to turn my way, to seize a chance

forever. You were unreachable. Yet time,

all that time, and I still stand, one arm frozen

around you. You flew in the manner

of a bird. You can return in the manner

of a bird—my arm outstretched for miles,

for months. You can gather courage.

You can gather courage.

I will teach you the name for this.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Almost Healed

Winter, I drop by.

Your home a roman catacomb, you subdued

with a cold, awakened

at evening, eyes and shoulders a droop

of defeat, let down by your body—that refuge

from emotion, humanity, sexuality. We sprawl

on the floor before your fire, drink tea.

No, I sprawl. You sit upright in a stiff-

backed chair, at first. The more stalwart for all

your desire. We tell stories as slowly

you fold. The weight of reproach like a yoke lifted

as you slip into a stretch on the rug. 

The change at once familiar, at once so charged!

Your old transmutation: dread blue to

vermillion. You are Ireland; it is spring;

trees are dancing. I remember this.

Your stories: Childhood—you were small.

Stuck in a ditch on a day so hot boots

melted to your feet! Or how you took that old

donkey out for a spin! I had never seen

you laugh—not like that. Had never seen

such joy, such resurrection on your face. You shone

with the newness of a thousand infant tears.

It was almost birth. You almost believed.

We were almost healed.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Premonition

I saw a vision of us in the way

I sometimes see things. Before I knew you.

Was it a heart’s way to know loss,

to prepare for its arrival, or was it a finger

pointing—go there? All I know is I came

to love you.  More than I had loved

as a woman, I came to love you.

You were washing a truck. I stood

at a window. A bell tolled on the plain

of premonition and I let stones fall

that led me to you, adrift on fate,

particles of gold in a windstorm.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Confluence

You made the ocean more beautiful,

the downy light, air draped and wide,

unearthly ground beneath my feet. All more

luminous beside you. You wore your blue

hat, a fleece vest and sneakers, ran with

your dog, soccer-kicking a bottle to

fetch. How you looked, boyish and blithe—

a masterpiece against that radiant scrim.

I told you your smile was the most

beautiful thing in the world to me, and you

closed your eyes, shook your head no,

told me to look around. The typical

deflection. I tried to keep from holding you,

from building a future out of nil, but just

to be there, sand shifting under foot,

sea-air in my lungs, you breathing beside

me. We turned back where mammoth stones met

headland, dwarfed by the cliff before us. A

confluence of water, sand, rock, and painted earth.

We had walked to this place many times, a place

so beautiful, where we always turned around

                                   

and walked away.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Mornings

On mornings I wake slowly, time not yet

a rattle at my ear, the whispers of this house

enfolding me. I rest in a pretense of light

and dream you to me. Tall twin bed,

body aloft in a sling of comfort, waves

pulling me in and out of sleep as love billows

and quakes—my heart a thin sheet on a line.

Some note of hope turned loose

in your voice, some unguarded look,

the feel of your nose rubbing up and down

mine. I am that sheet, lifted and shaken,

lifted and shaken.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Hands

I had never done that. Stopped

mid-sentence and asked, Can I pray?

We sat on driftwood under a cupola of

stars, squatted at someone’s abandoned fire,

and where I took your hand, we blazed.

Eyes closed I prayed—no words,

no sound, holding you up to the being

burning inside of me, to the hand

of the universe outstretched like that

of a woman caressing a child’s head as it

leans, soft and sweaty, against her leg.

Sackcloth and Ashes

Lift the sackcloth of midnight

and find me, like bread rising for the morning

meal, old dormitories of longing

adorned for laughter’s revival.

You are not so famished you cannot

eat. Not so tired your hands can’t ring

the dawn bell. Your heart, even sleeping,

shakes the rafters. Ashes of old lives—

let the wind take them. I smell sweet-peas

on the breeze blowing in. The whole

night, full of one blossom’s scent.

While you were drifting, musicians have tuned.

While you were crawling, the dreary sky opened,

a stippling of stars, and wrote our names.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Severance

You came to my play.  The playwright’s date,

a role you anticipated like wearing a cilice.

The sore thumb—your vision of it,

as if the lack you saw in yourself would blaze

across your face like a banner ad: no papers,

no college, no status. I made you come.

I would wear you like a string of pearls. I

wanted you there, wanted to share

the time with the man I loved, love.

Did you already know what you would do

the next day?  That it would be the last time

I would see you for months? Your face alight

when you greeted me. Your embrace

enveloped me and you held my hand.

Had you planned it ahead—your last parting

gift? My severance check?

I held you on my arm as we departed,

bathed in a swath of moonlight. This

is bliss, I thought, not knowing that moment

was all of it.  En todo.  The last note before symphony’s

end, a strain pregnant with the power of the whole,

yet mournful. Applause swells,

a volcano of longing, beseeching, beckoning—

the cycle of ovation and encore. You hugged me,

fervently as your greeting, and when we kissed

I saw your eyes milky

with love. Shoulders parted, then arms,

then hands. A slow rending. As if we both knew

it was not just goodnight,

but goodbye.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Moon Poem

Friday night, one week till Christmas.

Alone with the moon, full

outside my window. Moon, ardent

love of a grandmother’s, great-great-

grandmother’s ghost—sacred, timeless

entourage, ripe seeds of joy.

I pull a string, extinguish my lamp,

sit with the moon one hour, face

upturned. Wind beats my house

like a widower drumming his wife’s

still coffin. But I am content.

No place I long to be. No face

I want to turn and see

but the moon.

{Tricia Gates Brown}