Taste, and See

On a wintry Saturday, I baked cinnamon maple scones at our cabin, using a new-to-me recipe. They were so yummy, I was eager to share them at our church potluck breakfast the following morning. But I coughed through the night, and it became clear neither I nor my husband would be attending church that Sunday. I was disappointed to miss blessing my church friends with my flavorful scones.

Before driving down the mountain, we parked our car in town to take a short walk around the lake. Two ladies we recognized sat at a picnic table across the road. “Do you want some scones?” I yelled through my mask with my hoarse, raspy voice. 

“Absolutely, yes, we do!” Kathy and Donna replied.

My husband retrieved the container holding the scones from the car and carried the treats across the road to our excited friends. “Take two!” I called over.

“Can we have three each?” they hollered back.

We continued our walk around the lake, and upon arriving back to our car, our friends let us know how much they enjoyed the delicious pastries. I don't know whose joy was more full, Kathy and Donna's in savoring the scones, or mine, in getting to share them. 

There’s a taste-and-see simplicity I experience when I share what I’ve baked. I don’t have weighty expectations on myself to “be somebody” in the kitchen, to become known as “Diane the baker.”  It is as simple as, “Here’s something I’ve made that is good. I hope it blesses you.” 

I was due to deliver a set of six benedictions this week for the Black Barn, an online community I belong to. I’d written and rewritten many and could not decide which ones to submit. The angst I experienced squeezed the joy out of writing and anticipating blessing others with my offerings. I tell myself, oh, but this is not a scoop of dough; it’s a scoop of my heart. Of course it’s going to be painful.

Perhaps my “of course” is off course.

I learned recently the word "companion" is derived from Latin and, at its core, it denotes someone who is present to you "with bread." As we are present to each other on this journey, we offer life-giving nurture and enjoyment, friend to friend. We bring who we are and what God has given us to offer. How good it is to have someone fully present to you; how much better when together you “break bread,” when together you unwrap and savor the good gifts God has given you. Together, we celebrate the Giver of the gifts. 

Again and again my thoughts return to the simplicity of baking something then sharing it, with a spirit of, “Taste and see the goodness!” 

I wonder what it would be like to experience such freedom as I weave words together and then share them. I wonder what kind of companionship I could bring to others, free from self-judgment about what I bring to the table. And I wonder whether God is inviting me to taste this kind of freedom, and to see that it is good.

diane mann, 2022

Uncontained

It's a small thing, really. But it's catching my eye at unexpected times, in unexpected places, and I can't seem to shake it.

Over a year ago, I set up a card table in my family room and covered it with craft supplies––paper, stickers, glue, jeweled embellishments, decorative tape, ribbons, and glitter.  Yes, glitter, fine red glitter, contained and congregated in a small jar. When family gathered at my house, some accepted the invitation to sit at the craft table to play and create valentine cards.

No one played harder than Calvin, my three-year-old grandson. To him, there was no such thing as sprinkling glitter, only pouring glitter. Red specks generously billowed about him, with just a fraction landing on their intended target. Calvin happily created a brightly colored, sparkly, shiny, sticky, beautiful mess.   

During February, it was a mess I enjoyed. But at month's end, I bagged up the craft supplies and put away the card table, taking broom, dust cloth, and vacuum to the area, cleaning it up as best I could. 

Like sand that comes home from the beach with you, later found in your children's ears and hair, in the creases of your car, the bottom of your purse and your washing machine, my red glitter inhabited unlikely spaces.  It rested between and within books on the shelves, couch cushions, edges and ledges of my home. I can't trace their journey, but some of those invasive red flakes traveled to my mountain cabin fifty miles away. 

Though they sparkle with the same brightness as they did the day I bought them, now when the shiny specks catch my eye, they no longer hold the beautiful memory of fun times at our craft table. Instead they carry condemnation. They tell me I am sloppy, that I always leave things undone, and that there's no hope for me. They were intended to embellish cards celebrating love, yet now, weightless as they are, they transport heavy, damning messages:

I can't contain my glitter. I can't contain me. I haven't finished cleaning up from a project I started 13 months ago. How dare I move on to the next thing, not having tidied up from the last thing? The accusations fly and land me in a decades-old memory.

I returned home from Los Angeles, where I had completed a two-day examination to become a certified court reporter. I was tired but elated, floating on a wave of emotions, and still dressed in an outfit that made 20-year-old me look and feel professional, competent, legitimate. 

"How did it go?" my dad asked from his chair in the corner of the living room, while I was just a few steps into the entryway. Through a beaming smile I told him how well I believed I had done, how relieved I was that the test I worked two years to prepare for was behind me. My words spilled out.

Having overheard me describe my time, my mom marched from the kitchen and planted herself a foot from me with her fisted hands on her hips. She was a beautiful woman, but the anger scribbled across her face in this moment blotted out any signs of that beauty. "Yeah, but is your room clean?" The words, uncontained, flew from the jar. Like the glitter I still can't clean up, they were red, they landed in unintended spaces, and just when I think I’ve remembered the last of them, they catch my attention yet again. 

Anymore, it doesn't really matter what comes after the "Yeah, but." I can quickly render as illegitimate the ideas that rise up in me. 

“Oh, I’ll send Carol a card,” I think to myself. “Yeah, but what about Shirley?” 

“I’ll weave those thoughts that have been dancing through my mind into a poem,” then, "Yeah, but what about that piece you never finished, or those writings you thought about but never even started?” 

I long to speak hope into others during this weary, drawn-out time of the Covid pandemic. “Yeah, but I myself am often weary and discouraged,” and, “Yeah, but there are so many voices out there hoping to bring light into dark places." The "yeah-buts" circulate about and get too much time on my mind's stage. 

From the ampitheatre of Earth, I look up at the night sky and see the stars, still multiplying, God lavishing the universe with sparkles. They swirl and float, those captivating curlicues, brightening my dim eyes, satisfying my thirst for wonder and awe. If there is more room for stars in the sky, is there space for a sparkle, a fleck of light, another word carrying a glimmer of hope? Can I yield to God's pouring into me then through me words that bring courage, trusting they will land on the hearts of those who need them? 

A scene I recall from a 9/11 documentary re-enacts two men buried deep under rubble from an exploded building next to the World Trade Center towers. The men lay injured and trapped a good distance from each other. A small stream of light from above squeezing through the rubble could be seen by one of the men, while the light's ray was blocked from his comrade’s view. They knew as long as there was light, there was an opening through which someone could reach them, a sliver of hope. The man who could see the light kept reassuring his friend of its existence, until the rescuers reached them.

I look down in church on Sunday, and my eye catches a miniscule red sparkle in the center of my phone. I sigh. Again I look down, this time at a Bible placed on the end of the pew. White glitter, catching the light, is strewn across its cover. I look up to see the pastor's wife has decorated the sanctuary for winter, with glimmering snowflakes resting on green pine boughs surrounding the ceiling’s edge. I smile to realize she also could not contain her glitter. It feels like hope, for me, to know that others move forward beautifying the world with their creative ideas, even though they may leave a bit of a mess behind. 

If I can see the sparkle when you can't and you can see it when I can't, let's tell each other about it, shall we? Let's remind each other of the light, even if just a flicker.

It's no small thing, really.

Welcome

The Black Barn at Maplehurst

I see the temptation in her eyes
To blur over my story
I'm taking too long to tell
To this, my dear friend
Who listens so well

There's this book
And an author
Who was led to a place
She talks about it in the book
She created a monthly care package
I subscribed

The only thing keeping my friend
Engaged in our conversation
Is my passion
The light in my eyes
The tones of delight
I struggle
To describe anything linearly
But I try

There's a real barn
Where retreats and classes happen
Where good things take place
Spiritual things
Creative things
It's a place
Built with a dream
To welcome people
To celebrate life and art and faith

I signed up for the care package
And was invited to the virtual Black Barn
A trial of sorts
Before the online Barn doors opened wide
It's a place of caring intention
A slower, more spacious place

There I receive
There I give
Conversations are created
Works of art celebrated
Benedictions given
Infusing good words, blessings
Into and over me

I've come to care
For those I've met there
In a way that says
"I will carry your burdens with you,"
And, "I will celebrate and pay witness to what you are noticing."

Most live far from me
But have become close
Soul friends
Let's-grow friends
Let's-water-and-tend-to-this-thing-
and-wait-to-see-what-happens friends

Someone called us cultivators
No one has ever referred to me as a cultivator
Not until now
But we were invited to pour into this space
Even as we were being poured into

We are witnessing others enter the barn doors
We are cheering them
Ushering them in
With hopes they too will find something
Very Special here

"Thank you," I say
To my listening friend
"I know I talk about the Black Barn a lot!"
She tells me to talk about it all I want
How she enjoys hearing about it

Look who came through the door today
My patient friend Tammi!
My heart jumps a little
Not true, it jumps way more than a little
My body follows, taking a little leap
I run to greet her

Welcome to the Black Barn
Take a look around
Have a seat
Receive all that is here
For you


Diane Mann 2020

Her Beads, My Words - Creativity Observed

Necklace and photo by Magpie Madness Jewelry, Etsy

Commitment to her craft
I see it in the jewelry maker
Arranging her beads
One after the other
The next
  then the next
Saying, it is good
And finished
  then creating again

Is each piece her favorite?
Certainly not
But by faith she 
Reaches for her tools
Trusting the idea-giver
Using the materials before her

I'm blessed to see what she's made
It spurs me to be
Working on my own creations
But when I stare too long
At her gifts
I neglect to open
My own

God, 
Make me
Not so frightened
To pick up my tools
Arranging one word with the next
  then the next
Until we create something
Together
And say how lovely it is.

Diane Mann, 2020

My backyard has a path we designed. It is curvy, its edges are made of concrete, and within the path is decomposed granite. Those who walk in are led to a circle containing a firepit encircled by various uncoordinated chairs—the chair from the backyard of my childhood home that has been repainted several times, a wicker rocking chair, a child's white Adirondack chair I picked up at Goodwill for $4.99, a painted redwood bench. As I pictured the area ahead of time, I envisioned all of the chairs matching each other, cheerful red Adirondacks inviting people to ease into them, but I have come to appreciate the way the circle looks with chairs that shouldn't go together, but somehow do.

"You always say that, Mom," my daughter chuckles as again I explain my fascination with shoes. "Look how each designer had the same amount of space to work within," say, the length and width of a Size 7 shoe, "yet they each created something different with a similar amount of space and materials." I have the same thoughts at bakeries, ice cream shops, and while walking down the street in New York City noticing and enjoying all the different scarves women have chosen to drape over their outfits. Sometimes I wonder why a certain combination works when it shouldn't, wondering why a woman chose that scarf to go with that outfit. But she walks confidently as though the scarf was made to be worn with her clothing.

Within my sibling group, we have a phrase we use: "It's way important," we will often say, repeating something my nephew Christopher would say when he really, really wanted to play with a toy one of his cousins had. With much intensity and with every cell in his body involved in the expression of his feelings, he spit out to his mom after she explained he would have to wait his turn to drive the Little Tikes car, "But Mom, it's WAY important!"

Something became "way important" to me this week as well. Preparations had been made for my son's Kyle's book-launch party—who was bringing what, the time we would gather, food we would eat, games we would play. Balloons were filled with helium, inhabiting most of the space in my car. But something was missing. I had to bring a decorated cookie.

I called the cookie place where Brent purchased a cookie 34 years ago with writing on it that said, "Can I marry your daughter?" he presented to my dad. The same establishment had decorated a cookie for us bearing the image of a purple blow dryer as we celebrated my daughter-in-law Destiny's receiving her beautician's license. That fifteen-inch-in-diameter of goodness bore varied messages of celebration over the years. I learned, however, the company had gone out of business. I looked at Wal-Mart and Sams Club, but both places had pre-decorated cookies I would have to un-decorate in order to create the bumblebee-themed cookie I envisioned.

So I purchased a tub of chocolate chip cookie dough and some tubes of yellow and black frosting. I baked the cookie then pulled it out of the oven, and we drove to Kyle and Destiny's house while the cookie cooled. Destiny was wearing a shirt with the symbol of Kyle's website on it, a bee, so she sat as a model while I traced out the image with frosting onto the cookie, and she cheered me on while I worked.

The word that keeps visiting me as I write this is, "within." I tend to imagine that life would be richer if there weren't limits but am learning to value to what can happen within those limits. What is God inviting me to within this seemingly too short half hour I get to share conversation and coffee with my daughter? or the only one night away with my husband? What would God have me do with the paycheck that is smaller than I expected or with my energy and time that never seem quite enough? What will the designer draw in this limited space?

The Psalmist in scripture says this: "The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places." If I live stepping into the path of this truth, I can also live believing what is meant to be will happen within those places, things that, like my odd set of chairs, maybe shouldn't even go together.

But somehow they do.

When Saturday Becomes Sunday

I sat in front of my computer yesterday morning, coffee next to me, my attention on the screen before me. I showed up, as I had promised myself to do each Saturday morning, but this time to edit someone else's words, rather than write my own.

It wasn't even really a choice. I had reported a job Wednesday--a difficult job--in downtown LA. The attorney who hired me let me know on Thursday he wants the job signed, sealed, and delivered by Monday. So Saturday morning I combed through each word spoken on Wednesday, referencing documents that were read from by muffled talkers during the proceedings, adding commas, semi-colons, proper spellings, all to deliver by Monday an accurate record of the deposition given on Wednesday.

Saturday morning was a lot of things, but reflective it was not!

Now it is Sunday, and I am here, and I wonder whether it "counts."

I went to my prayer spot early this morning, the loveseat near a sliding glass door at the back of the house. I saw Junior the Cat resting on the rug near my sitting space. Junior the Cat had not been seen for four days. Brent and I are catsitting two grand-cats for Kyle and Destiny while they and their children are transitioning between homes. Junior had snuck outside under our watch. We had some forlorn grandchildren over their lost cat (the family would have rather lost Autumn the Lesser Cat if they had a say in the matter). My daughter-in-law searched valiantly at the Humane Society and posted about the missing feline on social media. She stepped outside late last night and found Junior in the front yard. I am relieved.

Maybe I can't get Saturday morning back, but we got Junior back, and that just feels good.

Junior in the Guest Room

And I am thinking about space and wanting to write about space but keep writing about Junior and my lost Saturday morning. And I see Junior in my mind's eye, occupying the space of our newly redone guest room. New carpet, new paint, new bedding, a whiter-than-white chabby chic quilt, topped with pillows and a bright pink throw. The room is the best place in the house right now, uncluttered, fresh, and inviting. How does this animal know that this is "the place to be"? And what makes him think he can occupy that place without apology?

I wrote and published a book. My Bunco ladies, with a celebratory spirit, asked about it Thursday evening. I cannot recite the conversations, but the flavor of my responses was to make the accomplishment smaller than it is. "With apology," I said or implied things like, "It's just a little book. You should see how little it is! It's just a little something I had a desire to write for my aunt. Don't think you need to buy it, and by all means don't let it take up space on your bookshelf or space in your life by reading it."

I want to be proud of it. I want to treat it like my newborn babies. I invited others to behold the God-given bundles, to rejoice with me, to gaze upon them, to jump up and down with me in celebration, to be blessed also by my blessings.

An author friend wrote a beautiful foreword for my book. But before doing so, he expressed to me he would love to see me develop each chapter further. "Give us more of YOU," he emphasized over and over. "It's as if you are on stage holding the microphone and starting to share yourself then quickly lay it down." I read through my 108-page creation, and I do see what he meant. But I am proud of myself for taking the stage at all, for daring to hold the microphone for those few seconds. I am proud of me for taking the blankie off my baby's face and showing the lookers-on the beautiful thing God did for me.

And, no, I can't get Saturday morning back, but I can show up on Sunday. And I can't get the Bunco shrinking-my-accomplishments conversations back. But there will be more conversations about my book, opportunities to crawl into and rest on fresh, beautiful spaces, without apology.