Telling the Truth

connecting the dots of my life

Tag: Blogging

November 5, 2018

A Day! Help! Help! | Take 2

Emily Dickinson’s short poem came to mind this morning. I first commented on it in March 2017, after the 2016 election and January 2017 inauguration of Mr. Trump as POTUS.

Tomorrow we get to vote again, though not for another president. My comments follow in the form of a letter to Mr. Trump.

A Day! Help! Help! Another Day!
Your prayers, oh Passer by!
From such a common ball as this
Might date a Victory!
From marshallings as simple
The flags of nations swang.
Steady – my soul: What issues
Upon thine arrow hang!

c. 1858

Emily Dickinson Poems, Edited by Brenda Hillman
Shambhala Pocket Classics, Shambhala 1995

Dear Mr. Trump,

I am not one of your fans. I am, however, a believer in more than chance happenings.

First, a confession. For months, I’ve been captive to the anti-Trump approach to daily happenings. I didn’t think about you all the time. Nonetheless, following your election and inauguration, my days seemed governed by what you did and what I thought and felt about it. Usually it felt like going from one bad scene to an even worse scene.

Looking  back, I don’t regret thinking all that through, or writing about some of it. In fact, I rather enjoy going back to see my small trail of contributions to what’s been a national preoccupation and discussion. Trying to figure you out.

There isn’t, of course, any figuring that will balance things out nicely. Especially for those whose lives are in disarray thanks to your words and deeds. Plus the words and deeds of others you’ve enabled, if not unleashed.

And so I’ve moved on. I still believe each day contains the possibility of Victory, no matter how tomorrow’s midterm elections turn out. I also imagine Emily Dickinson’s “common ball” as our planet, which I would describe as this grand terrestrial ball. A dance, open to anyone who wants to accept the invitation. There’s only one hitch. Our Creator presides over this dance. Not any human leader, billionaire or organization.

So I’m taking dance lessons again. My neighbors and their pets are teaching me to lighten up. Women and men of color are teaching me to listen deeply to what’s happening. Children of all colors are teaching me to forget about how I look and how old I am. Friends of many years are helping me reconsider my dance partners. I’m tired of the same old rhetoric, the same old hopes for tomorrow, the same old anxiety about whether I’ll be asked to the dance.

I’m already in the dance! Stumbling along, sometimes gifted with a bit of insight, scraping together my courage, and showing up in the grand ballroom of life. You might like to try it yourself, if you dare.

From one voter among millions,
Elouise Renich Fraser

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 5 November 2018

6 Comments
October 14, 2018

Conversations that matter

On 21 April 2016, I broke my jaw and my wings were clipped. Not just by the broken jaw, but by a string of unanticipated health events that followed. Today it takes time to attend to my aging body.

So I often wonder what the meaning of my life is now. Why am I here? I know I’m going to die. So what about the meantime, in whatever time I have left on this earth? Is blogging it? I love blogging, but….

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from a friend and former colleague at the seminary. Would I be willing to interview a seminarian working on her MA degree? The answer was Yes! Of course! Big smiles and happiness! A high point in my life!

So this last week I spent time on the phone with her. Lots of time. We didn’t talk about the fine points of my life as a pastor (which I am not). Instead, we talked about the not-so-fine points of my life as a survivor of childhood abuse. Especially what it took in my late 40s to begin the long process of healing while I was professor and then dean at the seminary.

Why was this conversation a high point for me? Because it let me know I still have something to say. Especially, but not only to women and men preparing for ministry in churches, or for leadership in religious organizations.

Blogging about my experience has been and still is part of my healing. Yet nothing beats a one-on-one conversation, or a small group discussion in which I’m able to talk about what it took for me to begin healing.

We’re all dealt cards we didn’t ask for, even before the moment we’re born. Going into a professional position or a new job doesn’t magically make all that disappear. In fact, it often triggers it. Understanding how trauma shaped and still shapes us is worthy of our best efforts. Not alone, but together.

I don’t know how this will play out. Nonetheless, I’m hoping for more informal opportunities in which my personal and professional experiences come together in surprising ways.

Cheers!
Elouise♥

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 14 October 2018

15 Comments
October 2, 2018

chilled blood huddles

chilled blood huddles
beneath waves of hot anger
shot from unchecked mouths
with deadly accuracy
the clock ticks down to nothing

I wrote these words on Friday evening, the day after last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearings of Dr. Christine Ford and Judge Kavanaugh. The poem attempts to capture in words the look, sound and feel of time running out.

But for whom is it running out? I don’t think we’ll know that for a while, no matter how this plays out.

In the meantime, I understand this about myself as an adult survivor of violence toward women:

My responsibility is to take care of myself,
not to change the culture of violence toward women

I didn’t think this up by myself. I heard it in a public radio interview with a woman working on behalf of sexually assaulted persons. Her comment rang true, given my sense of despair and hopelessness.

I need to keep the focus on my sanity and health. Take care of myself.

The images and words I saw and heard during the Judiciary Committee hearings took me right back to the meeting with my parents in 1993. When I left that meeting I knew I couldn’t change my father’s attitude toward me, or my mother’s loyalty to him as her husband.

Yet perhaps I might make a difference for other survivors, or even for a few perpetrators. I still think that’s possible.

Most difficult is the high level of commitment I need just to take care of myself. Daily. Especially as I age. And then there are those unpredictable bombshells that keep hitting the news.

So here I am, still committed to telling the truth about myself. Not simply as a survivor, but as a thriving adult woman given an opportunity to make a difference, beginning with herself.

Thanks again for listening.
Elouise♥

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 2 October 2018

6 Comments
September 29, 2018

The Ring of Truth

Yesterday morning I brainstormed themes and titles for a post—all over the page of my spiral notebook. The page got more crowded by the minute. So I gave up, and began writing my Memo to White Women in the USA.

Today our national controversy is even greater than it was yesterday. For some it’s all about party politics and the next Supreme Court Justice.

For others, it’s about the need to take seriously what Dr. Anita Hill and Dr. Christine Ford talked about. Right now, everyday women and their supporters are coming out of the woodwork. Galvanized. Ready to insist on truth no matter how much it may cost them personally.

So I’m back to my page of unused themes and titles. But first I have a challenge. If you’ve never written out your story, at least for yourself, I challenge you to do that now, not later. Not just what happened to you, but how it made you feel.

There’s power in the act of writing your story down. Making it visible. Word by word. Line upon line. As it comes out, unedited and raw. It doesn’t matter whether it’s poetry or prose. Just so it rings true to you. You don’t have to show it to anyone at all. Especially if they’re people you don’t trust.

I wept gallons working on what became some of my early posts. I also had a trusted professional who worked with me when my writing raised things I had to deal with. Sometimes they were about unfinished business. Other times they were about how to take care of myself. I highly recommend seeking trustworthy professional help. Especially when past experiences keep spilling over into the present.

So here are several titles without stories. Maybe they’ll get you thinking, or coming up with your own better titles for your story. They might even prompt you to begin a list of things you remember and wish you could forget.

The Ring of Truth
Against All Odds
Marked for Life
Strength in Weakness
This Woman’s Burden
Broken not Bent
No Prize for a Good Performance
I Dared Say No
At Great Cost
Free at Last
Daddy’s Little Girl
I Married a Predator
I Thought He Loved Me

Perhaps you don’t think this is all that important. Well….You’re important, and that’s enough all by itself.

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 29 September 2018
Image found at India.com

11 Comments
September 19, 2018

The purpose of my life today

Yesterday I visited a new blogging friend. He’d asked me to stop by and comment on his post. I don’t always get carried away when giving a comment. But this was different.

The post conveyed why it’s increasingly difficult to believe in deities. All religions take part in the madness of history, including present-day versions of old wars and massacres. Each in the name of its particular god, gods or God.

Here’s my response to the post, with minor changes and corrections, no additions. It helps me describe what it means today for me to live as a follower of Jesus who, after all, had no ‘Jesus’ to follow.

My journey has given me the gift of acknowledging a power greater than I, and I have chosen this way of living. I’ve also, thanks to my higher power and friends who supported me, discovered many new ways of naming and thinking about this being we call God. There are many gods and many Gods. I fear more from the human gods who, as I have done so often in my life, think they know what is best for me, for my country and for your country. I leave the other Gods to those who have studied them more than I.

Your post is very well written. I appreciate your openness to dialogue. Also, as you can see above, I like SS’s comment. There are many small, known and unknown women, men and children who make a difference in the name of God every day. I want to be part of their number. Not because I have to, but because I want to and choose to do that.

One day I will die. Sooner, not later. What’s the purpose of my life? It’s to die well. That doesn’t mean there’s a script. It just means that every day of my life I show in some concrete way that I know my days are numbered. I also have faith and hope that my higher power who shapes my life today (it’s not easy) will welcome me home. No matter what God looks like.

Being a ‘professional’ theologian of the Protestant Christian tradition, I’ve been humbled many times when reading about the atrocities of the Christian church (no matter which branch). I’ve also felt like vomiting when I’ve read some theologians’ writings about women and other ‘less human’ beings. There is, however, nothing so powerful as truth. So I attempt each day to live as fully and freely as possible in the light of the truth I’ve received. It saved my life, and I want to pass it on before I die.

Blessings to you and on your blogging life. If you allow it to do so, it will find and change you in ways you never thought possible.

Today is Yom Kippur, a Day of Atonement. The Jewish synagogue across the street is already filled with members. A good day for each of us to accept God’s forgiveness, and pass it along to ourselves and others as needed.

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 18 September 2018

4 Comments
August 22, 2018

What I’m FOR today

There’s so much going so wrong today that I decided to make a roll call of what I’m FOR on this remarkable day. Remarkable because I lived to witness it! Including, in my past, this river and dock-life when I was growing up. Plus at least the following other items for which I’m grateful:

  • this beautiful world in places touched by human tragedy
  • family members more distant in miles than ever, yet closer to my heart
  • churches standing up to tough challenges without capitulating to visions of grandeur, glory or isolation
  • real places that offered me refuge and peace when I needed solitude and reassurance that my life matters
  • our son who turns 50 today and reminds me why I risked everything with my parents on the eve of my 50th birthday
  • our daughter who lives on the other side of the USA yet is present to me in ways I was never present to my mother
  • the Carolina Wren, Chickadees and Cardinals singing and chirping, plus the small ground squirrel who sits on our back yard wall surveying his spacious kingdom
  • courageous women, men and children who speak out and work for a better world for all of us
  • my neighbors: Roman Catholic, Muslim, Jew, Protestant, or Nothing at All who greet me, invite me into conversation, groan and smile with me, and offer me tea
  • my dear husband who I sometimes thought might be the wrong man for me, yet has become precious beyond words
  • my local church with its challenging mix of cultures, ethnicity, political persuasions, youth and decrepitude
  • days of such unexpected delight that I don’t want them to end, yet can let go because I love my water-bed and the partner swimming in it with me
  • my body and the way it’s leading me deeper into and out of myself in these last days of summer 2018.

And of course, I’m for you, my wonderful readers–an invisible family loosely held together somewhere out there beyond our control.

Elouise♥

©Elouise Renich Fraser, 22 August 2018
Photo found at pinterest; Skidaway River, Isle of Hope near Savannah, GA

12 Comments
July 30, 2018

About Emily and Me

As of today, 30 July 2018, I’ve made interpretive comments on 44 of Emily Dickinson’s poems. My first, If your Nerve, deny you —, was posted on 5 February 2016. It’s high time Emily had a Category of her own. Scroll down to the bottom of every post and you’ll now find an Emily Dickinson category. Click on her name, and you’ll wake up in Emily country!

My relationship with Emily’s poetry happened almost by chance. D and I were visiting his sister and her husband. We stayed overnight. In the guest room was a small bookshelf filled with tempting titles. On the top shelf, lying there by itself, small and unobtrusive, was a Shambhala Pocket Classic titled “Emily Dickinson Poems.”

I picked it up, began reading, and couldn’t put it down. David’s sister kindly told me to take it home and keep it! I was, and still am thrilled.

Emily isn’t an easy read. Dipping into a poem here and there convinced me that, like the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, I would get to know Emily the hard way. That means reading silently and out loud, pondering and paying close attention to every word, every pause, every abrupt combination of words or structure.

No, I’m not an Emily scholar. But I am a better scholar of my life than I was before I began reading her enigmatic, sometimes off-putting poetry. It isn’t all pretty. Truth, when it follows life, isn’t all pretty.

And so Emily has become an interpreter of me. Not in place of, but not unlike the way Hebrew and Christian Scriptures interpret me. She helps me make my way from here to there without giving up hope or losing my strong voice.

I taste a liquor never brewed –
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of Air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew –
Reeling – thro endless summer days –
From inns of Molten Blue –

When “Landlords” turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove’s door –
When Butterflies – renounce their “drams” —
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –
And Saints – to windows run –
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the – Sun –

c. 1860

Emily Dickinson Poems, Edited by Brenda Hillman
Shambhala Pocket Classics, Shambhala 1995

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 30 July 2018

2 Comments
July 23, 2018

restless breeze and crackling trees

restless breeze
sends thistle seed soaring
goldfinches descend

crackling trees thud
chain saws muzzle morning calm
my friend walks her dog

Do you remember Janet Henfrey, the inimitable Weather Lady from As Time Goes By? She was fiercely dedicated to keeping things in order, including weather reports which she delivered regularly with precision, whether anyone cared to hear them or not.

Well, I can’t say things are in order today. I can, however, say that each haiku above captures my weather report from Saturday and Monday (today) morning walks through our neighborhood.

Despite the noisy chain saws that echoed everywhere this morning, catching sight of 85-year old Rita approaching in her brilliant orange raincoat and cap with her tiny dog Charlie was the best sight of all! I joined her and had a little catch-up chat.

In some ways, this neighborhood is my ‘parish.’ Or rather, our parish. A defined spot on the globe in which we go about our business. Passing the time of day with neighbors or workers outside, and visiting with friends inside. Sharing the common news and groaning or laughing together about all kinds of aches, joys and frustrations.

Then there’s that other ‘parish’ that’s just mine. That would be you, plus anyone else who reads this post from my little outpost on the planet.

Our pastor recently challenged us to name our parishes. The places where we ‘do our thing’ most of the time. So, given my lifestyle these days, you’re It! Whether you like it or not.

Please note: This isn’t a political platform. It does, however, touch the political realm from time to time. How could it not? We can hear the trees falling and the buzz-saws grinding away every day.

Nonetheless, when I get up each day, the news isn’t my guide to who I am or where I’m headed. You can count on me to remain a follower of Jesus Christ, no matter how much I falter.

I can’t say it often enough: I’m not God, and you’re not God.

You’re welcome here. It doesn’t matter what your name is, your country of origin, your political party, your wealth or lack thereof, your attitude toward current or past administrations, the state in which you live, the color of your voting district, the color of your skin, your gender, your age or your immigration status. Plus anything else I left out of that wildly incomplete list.

If you don’t agree with me, it’s OK. I’m not God and you’re not God. Which holds true whether you believe in God or not.

You are, however, wildly welcome to muddle along with me through whatever comes next.

Happy Monday!
Elouise♥

©Elouise Renich Fraser, 23 July 2018
Photo found at idlethoughts.blog

6 Comments
July 13, 2018

Open Mic Night!

I woke up this morning already excited about this evening. I get to read some of my poems again! Out loud! In front of a friendly audience of children, young people, parents and friends of all ages. In the gym at the church. A fundraiser to help support our young people’s summer project in Philadelphia.

Despite my heavy-duty awesome age, I still feel like a little kid when I share bits of my life by way of my poetry.

I’ve never been one for writing or telling stories. I know a good storyteller when I hear or read one. That means I know I’m not One of Them. Though happy accidents do happen now and then.

Prose has been my main thing for most of my life. Yet I’m more than ready to let it take a back seat to poetry. In fact, when I reread some of my prose, I hear the poet in me already sneaking a poetic spirit into my prose.

I can’t help thinking about Emily Dickinson’s lovely poem, “They shut me up in Prose.” None of that flighty poetry stuff! We want to hear a story or a well-reasoned argument. Something we can take apart, piece by piece. Or at least keep under control. To keep you under control, of course.

The ability to write prose with an ear for cadence and choice of words got me where I am today. Not just as a student, educator and administrator, but as an adult woman whose childhood and youth were ruled by a relentlessly letter-of-the law father. Flights of poetic fancy were frowned upon. As were overt emotions spontaneously expressed. With the occasional exception of Christmas and birthdays.

When I read through early posts about my childhood and youth, I’m grateful for the ability to write prose. Yet even there I hear the cadences of poetry. Though it isn’t direct, it’s a persistent sign of life already aching for attention.

So tonight I get to revel in the poet I’m becoming. One step closer to the little girl and woman I am and have always been on the inside.

Am I going to give up prose? No way. I’m not locked up in anything–not in poetry and not in prose. Still, you can expect more poetry. A delightfully underground way of getting just about anywhere.

Cheers!
Elouise♥

©Elouise Renich Fraser, 13 July 2018
Image found at resetco.org

8 Comments
June 21, 2018

A vision for the last chapter

What is my vision for Telling the Truth? Many thanks to Lea, one of my followers, for this question!

As it happens, it’s timely. Not because I’m changing course, but because I’m finally beginning to feel I’m on course. Not that I was totally lost. I wasn’t. I was, however, writing what I needed and wanted to write to get from there to here.

So now here I am, in the final chapter of my life. Now what?

Here’s what I envision going forward.

No matter what I write, each post will love, honor and respect my voice at this age, not someone else’s and not the voice I think you might prefer to hear. I can’t control what happens when you read what I write. Nonetheless, I want my posts to encourage, challenge or cheer you along wherever you are. Just the way many of you cheer me along with your distinct voices.

I can’t do this if I write in a whisper, halfheartedly, coyly, or with malice. Or if I choose not to write about something because it’s controversial.

Rather, I envision my voice coming straight from my heart, with my mind acting as a midwife, not as a gatekeeper. I can’t afford speaking from fear, or with too much confidence.

Whatever I choose to write, I envision it having heart and soul up front. Poetry. Commentary about the state of things in this world. Memories. Photos I love. Self-reflection. Devotional writing. All of it.

This vision challenges my family upbringing, my college years, and most of my graduate work and teaching years. If I learned anything well, it was how to speak and write strategically. It was exhausting and harmful to my health. It also demeaned my voice and was unfair to my audience.

At my age, it would be foolish and self-defeating in the extreme to leave things festering in my mind that need clear expression. It isn’t about being or sounding sure of myself. And it isn’t about changing you or anyone else.

This is about loving my voice. Standing up and having my say, without fear or shame.

To those who follow and read regularly, I can’t thank you enough for your presence in my life. If you’re visiting, I hope you’ll consider joining this group of diverse human beings scattered around the globe. Whether we like it or not, we’re all in this together. And my pledge to you is that I’ll dish up whatever’s happening in my small corner of the world.

Thanks for stopping by today.
Elouise♥

©Elouise Renich Fraser, 21 June 2018
Photo taken by DAFraser, June 2018 – Oak-leaf Hydrangea blossoms in our front yard

8 Comments