Presence, Security

My Kathy Bates “Towanda” Moment

March 16, 2024

I had a Kathy Bates movie moment when I was driving to work the other morning. It wasn’t a moment (thankfully!) from her movie “Misery,” where she tortures the famous writer by breaking his ankles, but one from “Fried Green Tomatoes,” where Bates runs her car into the VW Bug of the snotty, beautiful girls who steal the parking spot that she’s been patiently waiting for.

“Face it lady, we’re younger and faster,” the girls said, as they waltzed past her into the grocery store, arms around each other, laughing, after they take her parking spot. Bates sits stunned in her car for a moment, gets a fierce look on her face, then cries out the empowering word “Towanda!” before ramming their VW with her sensible sedan, laughing all the way. When the girls run out, horrified, she said, “Face it girls. I’m older and I have more insurance.”

I had left one freeway and was merging onto another one. It’s a little tricky, that entire merging situation, and I saw that there was traffic in both lanes on the road where I was heading. So I did the sensible thing, slowed just a little, and waited for the right lane to clear before I pulled into it. It’s a situation where yielding made sense. As I waited for, I don’t know, maybe two seconds, the car behind me honked.

It honked at me. Because I was waiting? For seconds? What did that driver want me to do? Ram my car into a miniscule spot in between a line of five or six cars that were chugging speedily along when there was a clear space at the end of the line?

I guess so.

Do you know what I wanted to do? Continue Reading…

Presence, Security

Not Quite Spring

March 9, 2024

It looks like spring outside my windows, or at least like it will be here soon. The flowering quince is starting to bud. The daffodils are blooming. They were covered by a few inches of snow last Sunday, but don’t look too worse for the wear now. They seem to have popped right back up.

Yes, spring is on the way. Outside, anyway.

But inside me, in my inner world?

Not so much.

If I had to label the season that I am feeling inside, I’d have to say autumn, the time when leaves are falling and flowers are going to seed and things look like they are dying, but it is autumn, and it is supposed to be that way, so you don’t worry about it too much. Apparently, my life seasons do not necessarily correspond to what is going on in the natural world.

It would be nice if spring always ushered in new life and resurrection, but right now it feels like it is bringing endings. Goodbyes. New layers of grief to work through. I am not a fan of this. I sure would love an entire season of hope and newness that arrived like clockwork on the same night that we have to set the darned clocks forward, or at the very least by Easter morning.

Sadness and daffodils. They don’t seem like they go together.

But I am reminded (again) of my favorite priest Richard Rohr and how he believes that “the path of descent is the path of transformation” and that “darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers.”

Rohr writes, “Death and life are two sides of the same coin; you cannot have one without the other. Each time you surrender, each time you trust the dying, your faith is led to a deeper level and you discover a Larger Self underneath.”

Trust the dying.

Not a saying that would ever show up on a decorative pillow or cozy blanket at HomeGoods, but maybe one that I should copy and post on my bathroom mirror. It might also make a nifty tattoo, although probably not one that would ever be very popular.

Anyway. Trust the dying.

This is certainly not the way that I would have set things up, if I was in charge.

Thankfully for all of us, I’m not in charge.

I am trying to trust the dying, to be a “willing and happy traveler,” as Rohr says, “on a train ride that is already in motion,” one where death is transformed, not avoided.

Spring will come, I know. It will be lovely when it does. When the time is right. Just not yet. Not quite yet.