Searching for the Key

"I am in crisis" were the first words out of my mouth on my last morning in New Mexico.  I could not find the key to my rental car anywhere. I was two hours away from Albuquerque, where my flight home was scheduled to depart at 10:50 am. I had precious little time to look.

I was staying at Ojo Caliente, home of the oldest natural hot springs in the country. Thousands of people have soaked in these waters over the centuries, searching for healing and rejuvenation. As I sat in the warmest pool under a canopy of stars, I could see why. A deep sense of peace and gratitude filled me to the brimming point, and I went to bed thanking God for all the gifts I'd been given on my trip.

All of that evaporated at 6:15 am, when I was about to take my things out to the car. The key was not in my purse. It was not in my suitcase. It was not in any of my pockets.

My mind raced from the past to the future as I tried to piece together where I might have left the key and imagined what the weekend would look like if I missed my flight. All the time and energy I had spent throughout my sabbatical on being fully present in the moment was put to the test--and I didn't do so well.

I was aware of the current moment just enough to realize that I had no choice but to pick up the red security phone and call for help.  Since it was so early, the lobby was closed. But the phone on the wall outside was available for an emergency. Which I was in.

"Can you pick a lock?," I asked the calm, young Hispanic man who answered the phone and came to my assistance. I figured I had locked my key in the car. Where else could it be? I had only been at Ojo for twelve hours, and the place wasn't that big. I was running out of ideas.

It took a few tries, but my savior managed  to get a coat hanger through the window on the driver's side and down around the door handle. I praised him for his brilliance. But the key wasn't there. 


I retraced my steps, back to the restaurant where I ate supper. Surely my key did not just spontaneously fall out of my purse, but again, I was out of ideas. The restaurant was deserted except for a handful of guests gathered around the early morning coffee service the hotel provided.  Frantic energy must have radiated from me in large waves as I looked; it didn't take long before one of the other hotel guests asked me what I was looking for.

"We found a key to a rental car yesterday in one of the chairs in the lobby, and turned it into the front desk," he said, to my joy and relief.  I never would have guessed it, but my key had slipped out of my pocket when I sat down to retrieve my boarding pass from my laptop.  The guard opened up the lobby for me and handed me my way home.

Thanks to the kindness of strangers and sheer Providence I made it to Albuquerque with time to spare--and with a sweet security guard scratching his head at the half-crazed anglo woman who pulled out of the parking lot.

As I've reflected on my anxious search for the car key, I've thought about all the other searches I've been on.  For integration of mind, body and spirit. For deeper relationship with God and neighbors. For meaning and understanding. I've thought about all the books on spiritual growth I've collected that involve the words "journey," "quest," and "seek."  I've thought about my longing to spend time in "Nature Out There," as Lyanda Lynn Haupt calls it, instead of in my own back yard.  And it's dawned on me that I've been looking for all kinds of keys.

The truth is that while they may be hidden from view, the keys aren't that far away.  I just have to give up the notion that I can find them on my own, and learn to receive them. Even from people and places I will never see again.  "Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed," writes Mary Oliver in her poem, "It Was Early."  I'm still looking for a lot of keys, but Oliver has handed me one of them.

When the first leg of my flight back to Raleigh stopped in Orlando, the flight attendants announced that there was a special boy and his family on board: Marcos,  a Make A Wish Foundation recipient.  The passengers burst into applause as we pulled up to the gate, all of us suddenly more acutely aware of the fragility of life. And the gift. And the relative insignificance of whatever we had been through to get to the airport that morning.

I thanked God for a safe trip.  For the moment, that was enough.

The Slow Lane

Trail marker, Ghost Ranch

I've been called something I've never been called before: a slow person. I was in line at the grocery store, and the man in front of me had a form to fill out; that took some time. My transaction was a bit complicated, too. As I was picking up my bags I heard the cashier ask the man behind me how he was. "Not so good," he said. "There are all these slow people in front me!"

I almost laughed out loud. Back in college I used to say, "The fast lane is not for me." Yet in many ways the fast lane is exactly where I've lived.

True confession: years ago, before I got married and had kids, I racked up three speeding tickets in one year. As a result I received a harsh note from the DMV telling me that I was "a danger to yourself and others." DMV required my presence at a special session for people like me. The room was full of the broadest cross-section of society I have ever been privy to in terms of age, ethnicity and profession. All of us traveling in the fast lane, a danger to ourselves and those around us.

The officer leading the session presented us with terrifying facts about highway fatalities. As we silently absorbed the information, the truth of the letter we had received began to sink in. But what I recall more than anything is the officer's fury at the people he pulled over who, when he asked them how fast they thought they were driving, simply said, "I don't know."

"You have to know how fast you're going!," he shouted at us.

I've thought about that statement often. I keep a much more careful eye on my speedometer now, but I don't always keep an eye on my other movements through the day. I often speed from one task or thought to another, hardly taking a breath, completely unaware of how fast I'm going.

"To move slowly and deliberately through the world, attending to one thing at a time, strikes us as radically subversive,  even un-American," says Belden Lane. "That is our poverty." We are, perhaps, inspired by the story of the naturalist Louis Agassiz who said he spent one summer traveling--only to get half-way across his back yard.  But we could never imagine moving that slowly ourselves.

Yet as I've experimented with moving slightly more slowly over these past few months I find myself actually enjoying it. I identify with other slow people and I have more patience for anyone who can't get around too quickly.  The slow lane is not as boring as I feared. In fact, it has a lot to offer.

The fast part of me isn't gone. I can hear my own voice in the voice of the impatient man at the grocery store. I used to be impatient with slow people and sometimes I still am. I used to be impatient with myself and sometimes I still am.

My shadow on the labyrinth,
St. Francis Cathedral Basilica, Santa Fe

But I'm developing a greater appreciation for the wisdom of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who advised us to cultivate a patient trust in ourselves and in the slow work of God.  We are impatient in everything to reach the end without delay, he said. The intermediate stages are essential, however. The key is not to force anything but to trust that our own ideas will mature over time, through circumstance and grace. And to trust that in the process God's hand is slowly forming a new spirit within us.

It's slow going, but I'm starting to trust.

Living into the Questions

Chimney Rock, at Ghost Ranch

"Why do you keep talking about your New Mexico?," my thirteen-year-old son wants to know. He doesn't say, "your New Mexico trip." Just "your New Mexico." I think he's on to something.

The sum total impact of my trip was more than equal to its parts. "My New Mexico" was about the rocks and the trees and the quiet and the pure logistics of travel, but it was about much more than that.

In large part it was about changing the questions I've been asking myself and living into the answers. When I wrote the proposal for my sabbatical grant from the Louisville Institute I said that I wanted to use this time apart from my responsibilities at my church to explore who I am before God.  New Mexico's vast, stark and beautiful landscape challenged me to revise that question.

Now I'm asking,  "Who God is before me, and what is my response? 


Sheer cliffs surrounded by miles of flat, rocky ground force one to consider relinquishment. To let go of the ego. To empty out distracting thoughts. To shift the self out of the center of things and die to one's neurotic need for affirmation. I do not plan to move to the desert, but even a few days there prompted me to reflect on what God might be calling me to give up. Part of the answer I received is how I frame my questions. Instead of starting with me, I need to start with God.

Aspens in Santa Fe ski basin. 

It is a central paradox of desert experience that only that which dies can live again, writes Belden Lane.  He goes on to tell the story of an old monk who had lived in the desert for many years. Due to his failing health he had to move back to the community to be cared for. The move brought him great sorrow because it was the desert that taught him how to die to all the grasping and attention-seeking compulsions of his ego. The desert taught him how to live with a liberated soul.

Like the desert mothers and fathers in Christian tradition, and like Christ himself, yogi masters emphasize dying in order to be born.  In fact, the most important and yet most difficult pose is called "corpse pose," savasana. At the end of each yoga session we literally practice dying. For at least five minutes we lie flat on our backs with our eyes closed, our bodies as relaxed as we can manage, our hands facing the sky. We practice letting go of effort. We practice letting go of our impulse to run from what scares us.  We practice surrendering to the floor beneath us, and beneath that to a God who will always catch us.

Pine amidst aspens, Santa Fe ski basin. 

During savasana, yoga teachers always come over to me and gently push on the front of my shoulders, which invariably float off the floor even when I'm lying down.  As much as I crave the stillness of those last five minutes of class, I resist them. I don't want to "die a little every day," as one well-known teacher says we must do. Or "lose my life to gain it," as Jesus says.  So I push my shoulders forward, as if that posture could keep me in control. Yet in my more lucid moments I know that letting go of control is the path God sets before me, and I'm grateful for the chance to keep practicing--physically and spiritually.

"The point is to live everything. Live the questions now," Ranier Maria Rilke said. "Perhaps then, some day far in the future you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

As I continue considering the significance of "my New Mexico," I will take Rilke's counsel to heart.

Living with Contradictions

Sunrise view from my hermitage.

I bought groceries at Wal-Mart on the way to my three-day retreat at Casa del Sol, an extension of Ghost Ranch.  I have never purchased groceries at Wal-Mart before, and I certainly wasn't planning to buy them there as I headed to the quiet and stunning context of a hermitage in Abiqui, but I was out of options. Espanola, thirty miles south of Abiqui, is the closest town with any major stores. I drove by the Shop and Save, thinking I'd find something a little  more local--like the southwest version of Harris Teeter. No such luck.

The Wal-Mart was busy. I was so overwhelmed by the quantity of stuff and the noise and the crowd that instead of buying a box of granulated sugar for my coffee I bought powdered sugar (the verdict: it'll do the trick in a pinch).

Later I learned that Espanola, whose nickname is "The Jewel of Northern New Mexico," has a long and rich history of cultural diversity and is an up and coming town in the region. A majority of the residents are documented immigrants whose votes matter to politicians. President Obama campaigned there when he was running for office; President Clinton spoke there last week to support the Democratic candidate for governor of New Mexico.

Espanola is also one of the poorest cities in New Mexico. The estimated median income in 2008 was $33,867.  Beside nearby Los Alamos National Laboratories, the public schools and the hospital, Wal-Mart is one of the largest employers. Sadly, Espanola consistently rates as one of the cities with the most drug overdoses per capita; health officials are engaged in what some call an "epic battle" with heroin use.

If you can't stop, wave as you go, read a sign outside an auto repair shop I passed. I thought about that message throughout my stay at Casa del Sol.  I thought about the people who have to shop at Wal-Mart, who struggle to make a living, who are wooed by politicians and sometimes try to forget it all by using drugs. I thought about the contradictions, too, between my privileged worries about where I buy my food and worries that are far more grave.

On the trail to Box Canyon.

In the midst of rocks that are millions of years old and a landscape that is as terrifying as it is beautiful, one wonders if God really cares about one's "shop locally" commitment.  I felt so small out there, almost irrelevant.  As Presbyterian minister Belden Lane writes in The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, "The desert reduces one to raw-boned simplicity. You quickly come to the end of what you have depended on to give continuity and meaning to your life."

Yet fierce landscape also confronts one with the reality that everything matters. One false step up on the mesa and life is over; more than one hiker has perished that way. Water use matters. Use of any resource at all matters. How you inhabit your place on earth matters to the life all around you.

One afternoon I visited the Benedictine Monastery of Christ in the Desert, thirteen miles down a dirt road. It took an hour to go those thirteen miles, so I was in no rush to get back to my hermitage. I read in the meditation garden and hung out in the gift shop long enough to overhear a conversation about the organic hops the monks are growing for a new ale they're planning to sell; again, it's hard to make a living out there. Then I went to the afternoon service, Terce, at 3:30, which consisted mostly of sung psalms and ended with praise to the triune God, world without end. Gazing up through the sanctuary's windows at the cliffs soaring above, those words about the endless world rang as true as they ever had.

On the way back from the  monastery I stopped by the Chama river and took a picture of a cottonwood tree, a reminder, it seemed, of the contradictions surrounding me. Beautiful things grow in the desert. Monks sing psalms in the middle of the afternoon in the middle of nowhere. God is like a rock, and God is as unknowable as the desert. That landscape was large enough to hold all these things in tension. Large enough to embrace all the contradictions. Large enough to suggest that possibility to me.

Witnesses to the Wild

Sculpture by Peter Woytuk, Ghost Ranch, Santa Fe
Picture by Susan Steinberg

"I want to cocreate and inhabit a nation of watchers, of naturalists-in-progress, none of us perfect, all sharing in the effort of watching, knowing, understanding, protecting and living well alongside the wild life with whom we share our cities, our neighborhoods, our households, our yards, our ecosystems, our earth,"  writes Lyanda Lynn Haupt in her compelling and beautifully written book, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness. 


As there is one crow for every five to ten humans, or about one crow per family, the crow is our most accessible link to native wild life, Haupt says. Whether we like it or not, crows offer us an opportunity to watch and learn and change--to be attentive to our "inevitable continuity with life on earth, and the gorgeous knowledge this entails."

I have never thought of crows as a link to the natural world, but of course Haupt is right. I read her book on the way to New Mexico a few days ago, and now I see crows everywhere. There are crows in the trees outside my window and crows hopping around in the parking lot of the main post office across the street.  I presume there are crows in the canyons north of Santa Fe (I hope to find out this week during my stay at Casa del Sol), as Georgia O'Keefe titled one of her paintings, "Canyon with Crows."  In the sculpture garden outside the place I'm staying, Ghost Ranch Santa Fe, the artist placed huge metal crows all around--surely inspired by the real thing.

I was so taken by Haupt's argument that developing as a naturalist is one of the most critical tasks for modern humans, last night I went to a talk by Con Slobodchikoff, who has written an in-depth study of prairie dogs. To my surprise, the room was packed. A man running for New Mexico's Land Commissioner went around the room introducing himself to everyone, including out-of-state guests like me; this was an educational event and  a political event. First Dr. Slobodchikoff made us say his last name together, then he went on to tell us about his fascinating and sobering research. I had no idea how endangered prairie dogs are, how smart they are, how cruel human beings have been to them and how little we understand them.

Like our relationship with crows, our relationship with prairie dogs is a microcosm of larger problems in humanity's relationship with the wild. And an opportunity. Dr. Slobodchikoff is hopeful we can change. So is Lynn Haupt.  We live in a kairos moment, she says, a time of crisis that is also an opportune time--a time brimming with meaning and creative response.

Stand in a lineage, with a sense of purpose, Haupt encourages us. Be a witness to the wild, like so many who have gone before us, from Aristotle to Rachel Carson. Cultivate questions, carry a notebook, be patient, take binoculars but not much more. You don't need a lot of special gadgetry to be a naturalist--just a good portion of curiosity and a commitment to be transformed by watching.

Working with the Whole Package

We are a package deal, the yoga teacher said the other day. "Have you ever noticed," he went on, "that you are very good at some things, even excel at them, but can't do other things very well at all?" Yes, I've noticed. I have limits. I am learning to work with them.

In another yoga class recently I said out loud for the first time, "I can't do a back bend." The thing is, I can do a back bend, or "wheel" as the yogis say.  But I know that because of my back condition if I arch like a wheel I will end up hurting myself. So I have to take the long view and practice saying "I can't do that." It's hard--but it's getting easier.

Hang out a degree away from the edge, a physical therapist told me recently. Some yoga teachers will encourage students to hang out in a difficult pose for what feels like eternity, on the edge between discomfort and pain. No teacher wants you to hurt yourself. But teachers do want you to explore discomfort a bit and see if you can sit with it for a minute or two. That's good practice for life. Except if your adductor is strained. Then you have to shy away from the discomfort/pain edge and shift to the edge between an acceptable stretch and self harm. I'm practicing that, too.

Know your limits, my class dean, Pamela Daniels, said at our twenty-fifth college reunion in June. She spoke at our graduation as well, and revisited her own words from 1985--and her reference then to Jack Gilbert's poem, "The Abnormal is Not Courage." Courage, says Gilbert, is "the thing steady and clear, then the crescendo. . . not the surprise, but the amazed understanding." Twenty-five years later, Dean Daniels still stands by those words. But she urged us now, in mid-life, to consider the arduousness of making choices. She advised us to revisit our dreams and dare to be fully ourselves in the context of new self-knowledge, realistic complexity and logistical challenges.  Respect the givens, she said, because we can only do so much in a given day.

Our wisdom in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves, wrote the great Reformed theologian John Calvin. In his wildest dreams I'm sure Calvin never could have imagined a female pastor applying his theology to the practice of yoga and the experience of mid-life. But I keep coming back, gratefully, to Calvin's definition of wisdom.

I met with a seasoned yoga teacher one-on-one several weeks ago. She understood my back issues and led me through a sequence of modified poses that took those issues into account. Afterwards I actually felt more confident and free. I knew how to work with my own particular package deal more carefully and precisely, and that was a huge help. Maybe in some small way that's the kind of thing Jack Gilbert meant by "the amazed understanding."  I have resisted limits for the longest time but now I am amazed to understand that working with them has its benefits.

Outer Noise/Inner Noise

I was having one of those mornings in which everything seems to flow gracefully from one activity to the next. Rose early to write and pray. Woke up the kids with the dog gleefully leading the way into each of their rooms. Ate a good breakfast  and biked to yoga. Arrived early and took my time stretching out before class. Biked home, got cleaned up and went right to my office with the pretty upstairs view of our trees and our street. Opened the windows to let in the glorious fall breeze. I had never been so ready to write.

At the same moment I pushed the window pane up the power washer company showed up two doors down.  The noise was deafening. Our house shook.  I could not possibly sit at my desk with the windows open. I could not even sit on that side of our house. I had to move as far away from the maddening sound as possible.

As I settled into my second-choice seat at the kitchen table I remembered that people who teach centering prayer have some tips about handling noise.  Father Thomas Keating, for instance, talks about the natural stream of consciousness kind of noise we all experience when we try to be still and focus on our connection with God. He describes this kind of noise as a gentle conversation with a beloved friend. We should welcome and expect that kind of noise.

But there is another kind of attention-grabbing noise that absorbs us and pulls us away from our conversation, as if there is a window open and we hear an accident on the street below and get up to go see what's going on.  When we get distracted like that we re-focus by going back to our seat, excusing ourselves for interrupting the conversation, and carry on.

If that technique works with interior noise, I thought, perhaps it can work with exterior noise as well.  I could respond to the reverberating drone of the power washer by being totally consumed by it, or I could respect my neighbors for taking care of their house and bring my attention back to my original project. That morning offered a great opportunity to experiment.

And it worked, at least for a while.  I concentrated on my writing project so hard that I barely noticed when the power washer stopped.

Then the tree removal service showed up at the house across the street.  This time I surrendered to the noise and decided it was a good time to take the dog for a walk.