Category Archives: Daily Life

April 23, 2013 · 7:33 am

Poetry Tuesday: “Love. What Is This Word?”

Latte Heart

Got your coffee?  A cup of tea?   Here we go.

So the conversation begins (see yesterday’s post) with a sampling of my tetrameter (eight syllables per line, roughly) musings, a discipline I’ve continued each morning for over a year now.   I’ve decided to ignore whether or not these writings can properly be called poetry.   They are what they are, and I’d love to publish a bunch of them someday.  We’ll see.

This from a few days ago (picked almost at random for this post, the riffing coming after I’d chosen it), reflecting on the way we use the words “love” and “hate” in our language.   I think it’s hard to hear what people mean by the words they use.    The lack of nuance in these English words provides enormous opportunity for misunderstanding, murky feeling and thinking, and sometimes, manipulation.    These days, when people use the words “love” and “hate” in popular culture and in social media, my radar tends to wobble over toward curiosity and suspicion, wondering just what they mean, and I’m often sad to realize “love” and “hate” are being used–sincerely, most of the time–strategically, as rhetorical devices in some sort of power battle over policy.  Who most persuasively defines the popular meanings of the word “love” and “hate” holds the moral high ground.

Love.
What is this word?
Swelling of  heart and tear ducts
When hunger looks at we well-fed
And we, full of pity, feel sad?
Or need we feel at all to love?
A hand offered in bitter hate,
The hate made all of feeling rage,
But the mind o’ercomes it and bends,
And the muscle of the hand moves,
Out stretches itself, and lifts up,
And love and hate live together,
And the lift is all that matters.
Is it true of all hating, too?
Such warmth in our breasts for poor folk,
But eat we on, the muscle staying put,
Nothing stretching out, not at all,
And the poor, so appreciative,
So respectful of our warm glow,
Die as we shake our heads, all sorrow.
What are feelings that they serve us?
Action is the coin of the realm.
The kingdom of God does not bend
To mere emotional sweat, but
Works day after day, in all hope,
Against despair–Oh, poor feeling, that–
Believing goodness and thick joy
Will one day stretch out like that hand,
That muscle, and we will no more be torn.
Love of heart and love of muscle,
Love of first move and love of work,
Love of touch and hand and kiss,
And love of giving up our lives,
Knowing  we cannot keep them.
To hold the fist tight is to lose,
To die, to forget, to never love.
How severed at heart and soul’s joint,
And only Easter seasons heal,
Though we won’t know it until then,
Until death rolls us in its grip
And we fly to whatever waits.

Empaths value feeling.   Workers value action.   Muscle and heart go together, don’t you think?   What we do is our heart, and if we say we love, describing sincere feeling, sincere inclination of the heart, and yet we do not love, at least as understood by the loved, then which is true?  Do we love or not?  Have we loved or not?  Who gets to say?

If you’re wondering what I meant when I said “love” in the sentences before this, you may be getting the point.

Why is this such a big deal?   Because “love” is at the core of things.   God is love, we say.   Oh, no, he’s not, say others.  This is love.  No, this is love. If you loved me, you would do this.  If you loved me, you would feel this.  You would do this to show me you felt this.   And if the notion of God loving us is the big idea behind so much religious thinking (not only in Christianity, but other faiths as well), it seems to me it matters what we mean.

And, I suppose, for me, in the end, sadness creeps in when I realize that folks who originally sought love, trying to understand at a deep level, often get lost and end up shouting and warring, metal and/or linguistic guns at the ready.   How odd that we must war for love.

How odd that we must war for love.  

And of course, if we must war, people who sit thinking about these things while the battle rages make for easy pickings.   “Nice guys finish last” comes to mind.

“Move soldier, there’s a war on.”   

 

 

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April 22, 2013 · 12:36 pm

On Living Longer Than Dad

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Jim Berryman

I have now lived ten days longer than my father.

As we flew to Hawaii on Friday, April 12, I was thoughtful of another date: July 23, 1988, was Jimmy Joe Berryman’s 19,707th day, and his last.

April 12, 2013 was Jeffrey William Berryman’s 19,707th day.  All that day, I reflected on the fact that my life’s length equaled that of Dad’s, who died just shy of his fifty-fourth birthday back when I was twenty-nine.  Acute leukemia killed him one month and three days before Amy was born.

This is the question I kept asking myself out over the Pacific Ocean: what should I make of this period of time neither my father nor his father got?

Anjie and I have been talking about the future a lot lately.  Our lives have changed in recent years.  Though we remain strongly connected to our children, they’ve each gone off and begun the process of doing just what we wanted them to do, which was to build solid, independent lives built on foundations of faith, dreams, perseverance, and service.  “The kids are gone and the pets are dead”—we once heard that was the true definition of freedom—and as thankful as we are for our lives thus far, we have grown a bit restless, agreeing together that we need to make new patterns of meaning, behavior, rhythm, and service.

So we’re in the process of praying, thinking, talking, and dreaming just like we did years ago, and though we’re both in the middle of jobs and projects well in motion, we’re trying again to discern the larger picture, and get a sense of which way the wind might be blowing for us over the next 15-20 years, assuming (knowing that it might not be true) that God’s going to grant us this next period of time.   We often say—with a twinkle in our eyes—our lives are just barely half over.  True or not, that’s the way we’re approaching the conversation.

For those of you who know me, you’ve noticed by now that I haven’t said much lately, via blogs, Facebook and Twitter posts, or in performance.  Frankly, there is much to talk about with me, and I hardly know where to begin.   The writing’s been as warful as implied in Pressfield’s The War of Art, and there are days when it’s pretty damn discouraging.   Regrets related to some professional decisions early in my career have been having a field day in the back of my mind as I struggle to make my script work, and the mistakes I’ve made relationally with many old friends creep into play as well.  But back of all that is a growing and changing understanding of life and—most importantly—faith.

In the coming days, I’m going to be blogging a bit more. (“Yeah, we’ve heard that before.”)   How much more is hard to say.   I think about the following things a lot: the meaning and practice of love; racism; playwriting; church; poverty and wealth; theatre; the role of criticism in the theatre; the making of meaning; water (those who have it and those who don’t); injustice’s root causes and the various battles groups engage in to define it and fight it; Christ; art; Islam (I am ¼ of the way through the Quran); the stories we tell ourselves; LGBT issues; the nature and essence of religious experience; brain science; imagination; creation; current events (Boston, the new pope, the theatre I see, pop culture); the list goes on.  Plainly, focus is a problem.

The difficulty of knowing lies at the heart of my journey.   I’ve blogged about that before, and so it’s old news.   But for whatever reason, complexity will not yield in my thinking, and I am reluctant to launch into the sound-byte infested waters, but reluctance can one day give way to cowardice, and with so much at stake in this life of ours, silence does not serve.

It would not be false to say that I come with uneasy voice and a quivering membrane of a spirit as I begin to talk again about my questions and the particular shape of my changing understanding.

I hope you decide to follow along.

And now, back to the question:  what should I make of this period of time neither my father nor his father got?

Something beautiful…

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September 24, 2012 · 7:53 am

On Forgetting Your Lines…

The opening night audience, all a-flutter with anticipation, arrives at what is known as the summation scene of a mystery thriller, the famous detective having cleverly solved what was heretofore a thorny puzzle.    He meticulously lays out the clues and their natural conclusion, the culprit is apprehended, and lights come up, and everyone goes home happy and satisfied with the comedy, the drama, and the romance.

Unless of the course, the actor playing the famous detective short-circuits, and has an experience we call in the theatre, “going up.”   Which, in more common language, means he forgets his lines.

Truth is, this sort of thing is fairly common in the theatre.   You know what you’re doing, and suddenly, you don’t.  The audience may or may not be able to tell that you’re struggling, but your fellow actors know, and for a few brief seconds that seem like a few long years, your mind is a white-out, and you are falling through an abyss that is the heart of the actor’s nightmare.

I had a couple of these moments over the opening weekend of Taproot Theatre’s Gaudy Night, and I suspect it’s not all that proper to talk about these things in public, but the experience of that kind of terror (too strong a word here, but not far from it) has spiritual and ordinary life analogs that I think are worth considering.

I’ve heard a couple of accomplished people lately (a leading Broadway actor and I forget who the other one was) say that in truth, no one in the world knows much about what they’re doing—we’re all just winging it as best we can.    We’re making it up as we go, and as we have all experienced, the thin veneer of confident presentation can suddenly come apart, it’s sickening disappearance amazingly swift.   A credit card doesn’t clear and we’re standing in the grocery line as everyone stares at the insolvent dude, humiliation pretty complete.   We sit on the freeway, car dead, backing up traffic for miles, suffering the withering stares of passing folks who used to be in a hurry.   Sexual performance short-circuits, critics call your writing bad names, a junior high audience of two-hundred popular kids from around the state of Texas bursts into loud catcalls of laughter when you begin to sing at show and tell, and you’re serious as all get-out (as we used to say in Texas.)  What do you do?  You wilt, you hide under a rock, you climb back into bed, you sing on to the end—by God, let ‘em laugh!

That last event (the laughing junior high crowd) was one of the epic experiences of my childhood, one that marked me more deeply than I care to admit.  Failure is confusing.  I’ve been in a couple of plays where I lost my lines so badly that there was really no escape.   Should we admit these things?  I don’t know, but it’s the truth…this is life.   We lose our lines.   We forget what play we’re in, what character we’re playing, and who the hell knows what action we’re supposed to be playing at the moment?   Our actor partners get bug-eyed, stammering, wanting to help, and they do in some way rescue you, but truth is, you will either get back on track or you won’t, and the play (or the job, or the marriage, or the education, or the poem) will live or die, and employment will go on or end, and either way, you’ll go home at the end of the night and decide how you will respond to this ongoing yawning reality that tomorrow will bring yet another opportunity to public embarrass yourself.

Welcome to risk.  Welcome to opportunity.  Welcome to what it means to be alive.  As my wise mentor/voice teacher/second mom told me years (I was about to get married, and the comment referred to the possibility of having a child sooner than later), “If you don’t want to play, don’t suit up.”

“If you don’t want to play, don’t suit up.”

Truth is, when I’m at the theatre as an audience member, I always enjoy the moments when actors get lost a bit, mostly because it immediately illuminates the difference between theatrical time, that magic state of mind where we travel imaginatively to where the play has us going, and actual time, where flesh and blood panic, and adrenaline rushes not because of anything fictional, but because suddenly, the very real human stakes of accomplishment and failure are laid bare, and now, something alive is happening, drama running all over the body, capturing in a heartbeat the human struggle we all face, every day.    It’s not good, it shouldn’t happen, we’re all professionals here, it’s a breaking of the contract with the audience.   But truth is, it happens, and we get back up and go on.

Or we don’t.

That impulse to stop, to lay down, to quit making, to quit risking, to quit giving, to quit putting yourself in the place where failure is not only possible, but likely…I get it.   Life is hell, sometimes.   It hurts.   It breaks our backs.    We get betrayed, or we betray, and desperate, we think we can’t go on.   Been there, done that, may go back to it someday.  Maybe today if the wind changes.

So yes, I forgot my lines.   There are reasons, but they don’t matter really.   And let’s not overdramatize.   Truth is, I got back on track, and we delivered the play.   Disaster avoided.   Mostly.   But when the lights go down, and you know you have another show in a few hours, here’s what you do.   You go to work, you do your damndest to make sure it doesn’t happen again.   And you take courage and comfort in the words of the actors around you, all of whom have been there, as they offer you grace and strength to go out and do it again.   And again.   And again.   And again.  And that night, you sweat bullets, and the words are there, every one of them.    And you thank God, and move on.

Go be a part of your life’s drama today.   Who knows what part of the play you’re in?  If you’re struggling with your lines, speak anyway.   Trust that they’ll come.   And if you see any fellow actors, those friends caught up in the intersection of your story with theirs, struggling with their lines, elevate the attention you’re paying, and hold them up.   The audience they’re playing for needs you to help them.

Those audiences may well be divine.

Speak the speech, I pray thee, trippingly on the tongue….

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May 8, 2012 · 11:06 am

Marriage and Aesthetic Unity

When I typed the title of this post, I had to reconsider.  Really?  Marriage and aesthetic unity?   What I mean by aesthetic unity as in what emerges from a strong work of art or a successful theatre production, an attribute of a production’s ruling idea, metaphor, or concept, so that all the choices being made in the various aspects of design, directing, and acting are informed by that ruling idea, metaphor, or concept.  (Okay, some people will argue aesthetic unity is passe, certainly not a post-modern value, but I still think it holds…anyway…that’s another post.)

What does aesthetic unity have to do with marriage?

I’ve been married 31 years today.   It’s been a wonderful ride, with ups and downs, triumphs and failures, all the variety of feeling and action that you’d expect from a long journey together.   Achievements and set-backs, depressions and ecstasies, kids coming and going, families growing and changing and hearts breaking all over the place for reasons best kept private.    Moving forward day by day, first Year One, then it stretches into Years Three to Five, facing choices about what it will mean to be us, our togetherness, our love-making, our fighting, and yes, our economics, our possessions–houses and cars and the stuff that hangs on the walls.   There’s cooking and travel and parents, and it moves to Years Seven and Nine, the kids arriving just after Dad’s death, and it’s great, mournful, amazing, fun, expensive, and wistful.  Then come Years Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, and everyone’s hanging on for dear life because sometimes dear life has to be hung on to in the face of aching, doubt, temptation, more expense, melt-down, and rebuilding.   Then more openings and closing of days and weeks, and the Years get to Twenty, then Twenty-Five, and more death stops by, and costs spiral (economic and emotional) and new work shows up, work you hadn’t planned on, and you get to it, all the while watching marriages around you dropping like flies.  And then there’s the culture, the moral shifts, the battles in culture that send all your sensibilities reeling as you try and figure out along with the rest of the world what’s true, what’s good, and what’s real, especially about you and the person you’ve been waking up next to for all these years.    One thing you know, as all these scenes play out, the ruling metaphors are simple: God, faithfulness, oneness, loyalty, kindness.   The shared hand, the look across the pillow, the embrace at the window as the child flies away, the continuing interest in that ever-changing, never-changing face across the corner table in the bar.   Commitment, muscles bound together, the ongoing wedding of hope, cynicism, inquiry, faith, questioning, tears, and the simple shared ease of a long, red sunset.

And after 31 years, you think, is it possible that this production is still open, still running, still thriving, still finding the newness of moments, still finding the kind of meaning that holds the world together?

In the middle of all this, you have to know that our aesthetic sensibilities have places of intersection for sure, but by and large, Anjie and I are pretty different.   Different enough to make the “opposites attract” idea pretty applicable.   Different “tastes”, you might say; I like foreign films and slower, more atmospheric works, and she’s an action girl who likes music with a strong beat.   I enjoy jazz and classic rock; she likes country western (though not as much as she used to.)    Our relationship to foods and other sensual realities differs as well, but I think what we’ve learned over the years that an emphasis on the common ground can help guide creative choices much the way ruling metaphors or concepts can guide individual choices in a production.   Early production meetings (cups of coffee at JoJo’s in Austin, Texas, later Starbucks and the kitchen table) focused on common commitments to God, to kindness, to being for each other, to learning, to admitting to fault when we screwed up, and to actually verbalizing those classic words, “I’m sorry”, “I forgive you”, and “I love you” as often as needed, which is pretty much every day.  Humility, warmth, trying as best we can to move in “grace and peace” which has emerged more and more in mind as the thing I wanted all along from life, from family, from that great production called my marriage.

Finally, the idea is that if you look at any one moment of the marriage (or the production), it may not feel like a unified piece of the whole.    Sometimes ruling ideas fray, and you lose sight of them, and you veer off into territory that just doesn’t make any sense but you can’t go back, you have to invent on the fly, and hopefully find your back into the center of things.   Happens all the time in creative work.   Sometimes you think the piece you’re working on isn’t worth pursuing anymore.  But then you hang on, and hang on, and finally, days come when you can back up and understand something of how the ruling metaphor or concept was present even when you thought the whole thing was tanking.

Well, it’s pretty clear at this moment in our production that it’s not tanking.  Will it rise to the heights of great art, soaring as thrilled audiences are moved to weep and laugh, inspired to go out and take life on one more time?   Frankly, that’s not what we’re after.  We’re after more of a quiet poem of a life, a corner spot where a few folks can contemplate what love might look like if they decide to give it a shot.

Anyway, I’m not sure my metaphor works, but all I was trying to say is this:  you can enjoy a work of art in all it’s parts and/or as a long, beautiful whole.    Marriage is much like that.   Don’t miss the moments, sculpt them as best you can, holding the ruling idea in mind, body, and heart.   And don’t forget to look over the long arc of it all, and enjoy it’s fullness as a whole work.   It’s especially helpful to do that when the moments aren’t working as well as you’d like.   Sometimes you just forget your lines and stand there until you remember them.

Okay, enough.   You get the picture.   I’m still in the middle of the production, and my cues take me away from here just now.

The show must go on…loving it.   Planning on running for at least another 30 years….

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May 7, 2012 · 7:40 am

Birthday Season

Birthdays glow.    It’s silly, really.  Of course we had to get here through the passage of a particular day in time, at a particular moment.  For me it was 9:20 a.m. in a Lubbock hospital back in 1959, born to a young couple with a daughter and an uncertain future.  A half-century and more passes: the father dies, the mother finds her way among church and friends, the daughter’s dreams come sort of true and then they don’t, but then, how is that so different than the rest of us?   That calendar day approaches again, that day where we remember that we got here at a particular time, and that at least a few people not only noticed that we were born, but were actually glad it happened.

“Happy birthday.”   Funny little sentiment, that, but so wonderful to hear.   I have no idea why.   A wish that the day of remembering your beginning–no particulars, just that you began–be happy, joyful, that the activities of that day be symbolic of something innately divine and grand.   “You were given life all those years ago.   I hope you’re happy about that, and that all the moments of this day stand as small symbols of the overall happiness of your life.”   Something like that is hidden in that little phrase, “Happy Birthday.”

For me, the day glows.  May 4 sounds different to my ear than any other date.  So do the days marking the births of my family–my wife, my children, my mother, my sister, even my dead father.   And the dates of other beginnings and endings, anniversaries and moments of death, markers of life’s rhythms, the comings and goings of the simple and the profound.   I don’t know, maybe all days glow…but May 4 is just different.  It’s not that I deliberately try to make it glow…it simply does.  And most years, that glowing is irrelevant, it’s just a sense of awareness, as if the sun has a bit more shine, the rain a bit more coolness, a touch a bit more comfort.

For some, I know, there’s no glow at all.  And it seems selfish and pompous to write that my birthday glows.   “Rub it in,” I hear somewhere out there, a tone bitter and ugly from someone whose sour life is destroying them.   And its not their fault, not really…there are million legitimate sufferings to destroy any given day.   “Happy Birthday” can seem cruel, a bitter joke in the mouth of the naive and immature.    But just to be clear, the glow of the day has nothing to do with gifts or even the wishes of friends.   The day glows long before anything happens, any parties get planned, or any cakes get baked and candled.

I guess its just another way my amazement at things plays out.  I’m here.  You’re here.  We’re here.  The most normal thing in the world.  But I can barely take it in.    The human arrival was no given, and  there are those I will love with all my heart who have not yet been conceived, neither in body or in the mind of God.   How lucky we are to have at least a shot at life, at love, at experience, at giving.  Why it hurts like hell I don’t know.    Why the ache, why the evil, why the enemy, why the need for rescue…I don’t know.

But I for one am thankful.   Gratitude again, perhaps naive, perhaps not taking suffering into account nearly enough, but even so, I am grateful.  For my birth, which I had nothing to do with, and for all my life, which I have little to do with still, except that portion that God trusts me with, for better or worse.   And for all of you who stopped by to say Happy Birthday (face-to-face, notes, Facebook, however you went about it), all of you from so many different parts of my life, from different eras of the last 53 years, I can only say that I am grateful for how all our paths have crossed, and for the way those weavings have perhaps brought a bit more glow to all of us.

We’re still in Easter season.   Deep into the celebration of birth and rebirth, and I’m going to count these days not just as the one birthday of last week, but why not have a birthday season?   I’ll certainly celebrate tomorrow, because it’s the day Anjie and I started our journey together 31 years ago.

This year, when it rolls around, I hope your birthday glows, and I hope you party for a whole season.

How amazing that we’re here….  

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