MindSpinner

Daytime worries have grown more burdensome, and sound sleep is elusive, so the dream of the two tiny birds that brought me into morning on Sunday seemed to come from a different place. They looked like very small wrens. They appeared on some ordinary day in the house instead of the garden, fluttering near, close together, perhaps three or four feet above my head. Where they had come from and why they were there it was impossible to tell. I held out my hand and wished they would come to me. They did not fly off, as wild things do - seeing wild things flee is one of the sadder things about being human - but fluttered nearer still. For a time there was nothing beyond the birds in the air, light behind them, and the question of whether they might light in my open hand. Nearer. Farther. Nearer. They did land, first one, then the other. I could feel their soft bodies, the tickle of their feet on my fingers and my palm. I fed them sesame seeds and bits of bread, and it seemed clear that they were choosing to stay. Their choosing to stay was the second half of the miracle, the more elusive one. Afterward, when they had filled their bellies with bread, one snuggled into the fold of my shirt to sleep, and the other into my son’s, as if they belonged and felt safe.

Then it was morning, and the cat was hungry, and dreaming gave way to day.

In the kitchen a half hour after waking, I stood at the window eating a toaster waffle smeared with strawberry jelly. Two wrens hopped along the deck railing outside, not unlike the birds in my dream, as if to say hello and to echo the blessing, to say it wasn’t gone.

To dream of two little birds come to stay seems, in the daylight scheme of all, a thing so small. But daylight hasn’t all the answers, and life’s gifts are often lost in our daily race to catch the sun. This week I find myself depending on a dream of two birds, wings beating in light, landing in my open hand. This week, it’s what I have to hold me.

I looked back at posts in my “Writing” category today. There are a whole batch of moon poems, so many that a reader might easily tire of them. In fact, my mother tells me that my very first word was “moon,” so watch out - there could be more. That’s the joy of blogging really. There’s no one to tell me that I can’t write one more moon poem - or anything else I so please for that matter. That’s really the point of the thing. I don’t have to come here to be who I am not.

At the county high school and in this community, a controversy has unfolded. A sole Muslim student objected to the assorted Christian invocations and benedictions traditionally said at graduation-related ceremonies. The school administration has responded by respecting the law regarding the separation of church and state and removing prayers from programs for honors night, graduation, etc.

They have done the right thing, of course. Separation of church and state preserves freedom of religion because it refrains from imposing religion. The last thing I want is somebody else’s version of religion imposed upon me. During the graduation season, baccalaureate services held in churches can offer graduates who wish to attend a Christian celebration of their achievement, and students can, of course, gather at school to pray - as long as prayer remains private and not institutionalized. (Likely, a group of Christian students will follow the example set by students at another school and stand up to recite the Lord’s Prayer in the middle of the graduation program anyway. In my own unlikely fantasy, students of other faiths follow suit with their own prayers, so that diversity finds its voice and makes its point.)

But now, who should be protesting the school’s Muslim students and the administration’s decision but the KKK. They’ll be outside the school on Tuesday. The students will be kept in classes, well clear of the protestors.

Nothing strikes a deeper horror in me than the sight of those white KKK robes, not even a snake at my bare feet. The KKK represents the worst of what we human beings can become, after all, while a snake is merely an animal with no design beyond survival. What the KKK has to do with defending Christianity, I cannot fathom. Hatred of more than half a world “God so loved” doesn’t square with the gospel message.

In the medieval morality plays, a frequent fixture was the Mouth of Hell, a stage prop constructed to reprepresent a ravening maw the height of a man, out of which devils could leap to snatch the wicked and drag them to damnation. When the KKK protests outside my daughter’s high school on Monday (while I’m stuck elsewhere with responsibilities I cannot hand off), I can only imagine them marching straight out of Hell’s Mouth. That the KKK still functions in parts of this country in this day breaks my heart and makes me hang my head in shame over how far short we still fall from spiritual enlightenment.

And though I am as white as a grub in the garden, it is not my race that needs defending; it is this entire species, all of us together along with our delicate, exquisitely beautiful ark of a planet - that indeed needs defending most of all from our own blindly destructive, short-sighted pursuit of self interest over common good.

I pick him up at a nearby fun park. He’s spent an hour with a couple of cute girls, one of whom he likes. He’s a handsome kid, frankly, walking toward the car, though he rocks a little when he walks, as if he’s trying to do it without bending hips and knees any more than necessary. He’s out tonight, perked up after a morning of intermittent digestive trouble.

As we pull in the driveway at the house, he opens the car door. “Would you pull in one of those cans?” I ask, gesturing toward the two toppled trash cans left at curbside by the garbage man.

“Sure,” he says. He gets out of the car looking like a young man and moving now like an old one. He’s decidedly limping now, keeping one leg braced straight. I drive on into the driveway as he pulls the trash can next to the garage and goes into the house. I fight tears. He will always have this.

In the house, I wish him a good night through his closed bedroom door.

“Mom,” he says. “I hurt my leg tonight just by pushing on the gas pedal of a go cart. It really hurts.” Joint hypermobility, we learned this week, makes him susceptible to strains.

“Do you want to take an Aleve or an Ibubrofen?” I ask, “Just so you can sleep?”

“No,” he decides, “no pills. It doesn’t hurt much if I don’t move it.”

I have not written much at all about my son’s struggles with frequent and unexplained illnesses, with depression, and with poor academic performance as a result of sporadic school attendance. Nothing made sense, but something was definitely wrong, and the scope of what was wrong seemed to grow and grow. As we went to the doctor time after time, I began to push for a look at the bigger picture.

This week we went to an appointment made some six weeks ago with a reputable rheumatologist. We walked out of the office on Wednesday with a diagnosis: fibromyalgia. I’ve known a few people with fibromyalgia, people whom the syndrome stopped in their tracks for a while, until they achieved a degree of relief and learned to manage the illness. I’ve known it to scale back the scope of lives.

Fibromyalgia won’t kill, and it’s not lupus or rheumatoid arthritis, yet there is no cure. It can be managed perhaps, its sundry symptoms ameliorated to a degree such that my son can begin to live a more normal life, finish school. He has dreams. I ache, knowing that many people with fibromyalgia are unable to hold a job, so severe are their disabilities. I’m not going to focus on that right now. I’m going to learn everything I can and focus on the goal of helping him feel better.