Tag: BrotherLawrenceoftheResurrection

Faillir

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

One of my informal mindfulness practices is I look up the etymologies of words, every day, often. For decades. It’s the meditative version of all-you-can-eat BBQ Lay’s potato chips. I love BBQ potato chips, but at some point I have to say, One bowl is enough. Or one and a half. I can’t eat as many as I want every time I have some. Which by the way is daily with lunch.

But looking up etymologies? I can have another and another and yet another and then one more, and then again, another one. They form fractals of meaning in my awareness.

Every time I look up a word’s etymology, my mind expands in ways that joggle it loose from the larger binary system and into a spacious place of this and that and the other too, rather than this or that. Etymologies take me into the world of story, images, comparison, and yet another detail that complexifies my vision. This-that-and-the-other-too is one of my favorite places to be.

Sometimes I’m almost glad for having grown up with undiagnosed dyslexia. Out of decades of painful school days and feelings of shame, staring at the page with little sense-making, blurry cryptic dark marks moving so my mind could not decipher them, over time I became a lover of etymologies because knowing a word’s story and history gives it ballast. Letters slow, settle the paper, swap places more rarely. Not being able to read well also made me super grateful for kind teachers. Today when a d and b or c and s or now becomes know or know now or sense since or since sense, and etc., it is the uncommon not the every moment.

My dyslexia-cultivated this-that-and-the-other-too mindset taught me much about inclusivity. How truth always seems to have room for one more story, image, comparison, detail. For one more unique person.

I’m meditating on my love of etymology because this weekend I found myself reading truly for fun. First time in a long time. Because I finally finished a major project. I’m up for my 6 Year Excellence Review at UC Berkeley. That’s good fortune in itself, just to be up for it. But doing it has felt worse than stressful. Even though I am fortunate and have kind colleagues who are supportive, and great students, yet articulating what means most to me, teaching, and for public consumption, is my worst nightmare come alive, 24/7, and for months. A part of me always wants to hide, and not be seen, and truly that would not help me apply for a Continuing Lecturer position in College Writing Programs. So I did what I had to do and tried as I went through the process to center students’ voices, be self-compassionate, stay open of spirit, express my teaching philosophy and document my work, and express the gratitude I feel for this community.

Now it’s done. I uploaded it to the folder where it goes. I sent it on its way with a brave orison of well wishes. And celebrated this weekend in high fashion. I walked in the marsh without the burden of creating a self-statement and evidence file for my review. I bought some raspberry Danish rounds from Raley’s. I started reading Abigail Thomas’s What Comes Next and How to Like It: A Memoir. All good choices.

Thomas writes in a collage style I love. It’s like poetry and the best prose, all in one. Lyrical. Also grounded. She makes scenes we can enter. She’s real and kind. And genre-defying works have always been my jam. They resist the binary too.

I won’t spoil your experience of this memoir with any plot reveals. I’ll only say it’s a beautiful and moving work. At one point Thomas meditates on failure, speaking my language:

I am trying to convince myself that failure is interesting. I look the word up in the American Heritage Dictionary to find its earliest incarnation, but it has always been just ‘failure.’ There’s no Indo-European root meaning originally ‘to dare’ or ‘mercy’ or ‘hummingbird’ to make of the whole mess a mysterious poem. I can find no other fossilized remains in the word. Humility comes along on its own dime. (35)

Thomas sent me searching for failure.

It first turns up in the English language in the 1640s. Ironically in “a fayler of Justice in the highest Court of Justice.” This seems prescient. Failure there means “something not-occurring, an omitting to perform something due or required.” I wish we had confined failure to a legal term. An indicator that human rights have not been upheld. Because once it entered the binary slipstream of the English vernacular, it seems to have lost its compass for nuance.

In English, failure early on had different meanings too: “a lapse, a slight fault; weakness,” “the fact of becoming exhausted, breaking down in health, declining in strength,” and what it means mostly today: “not effecting one’s purpose; lack of success.”

That last definition, “not effecting one’s purpose,” seems to have become increasingly separated from a context of growing and recalibrating when we misstep or lapse or need to deepen our approach. Failure seems mostly narrowed today to mean “LOSER.” Against that, a whole industry of self-help books has arisen, like Megan McArdle’s The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success. Which I bought recently when a student recommended it. Even its title leans into the binary of up and down, failure and success.

But what about the roots of failure?

To find these, we go back a few centuries, almost a millennium even. In Old French, in faillir. From the early 12th century on, faillir had abundant meanings: from “lacking,  missing, absent, short of, losing [something]” to “destroying,” “breaking an agreement,” “letting down,” “being unsuccessful,” “collapsing,” “missing a target,” “diminishing,” “being unprofitable,” “weakening,” “ceasing,” “malfunctioning,” “not thriving,” “deceiving,” even “not living a good life” (see an Anglo-Norman Dictionary here).

You find something similar in the seventeenth-century in France. In my much-loved A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues compiled by Randle Cotgrave, faillir means:

To faile; slip, slide; erre, misse; mistake, misunderstand; offend, goe astray, doe amisse; also, to omit; lacke, wante; also, to quaile, decay, fade; faint, or tire; also, to deceive, or disappoint; also, to surcease, leave, end.

If we dig further, we find that our failure comes not only from the Old French faillir, but that faillir is from the Vulgar Latin *faillire, from Latin fallere, “trip, make fall,” and figuratively, “deceive, trick, cheat; be lacking or deficient.”

So, at heart, failure has a pratfall. I like to think of it as we’re doing our best and still stumble. We were aiming for the bullseye but hit the barn instead.

Even “lapse,” one of failure‘s early meanings, has roots in lapsus for “a slipping and falling.” Of course this reminds me of my friend Nicolas Herman. Brother Lawrence says to a friend of his who is discouraged, a nun, in letter 7 of my recent translation Practice of the Presence that we all “stumble,” get distracted and discouraged:

You are telling me nothing new in your letter. You’re not the only one who has distracting thoughts. The mind is extremely likely to wander, but the will is the mistress of all our powers, and must draw the mind back and carry it to God as to its final end.

When the mind has not been taught early on how to return, to be led back to itself, it can develop some unhealthy habits of becoming distracted and scattered. These are difficult to overcome. These tendencies ordinarily drag us off to earthly things, in spite of ourselves.

I think that a solution for this is to admit our stumbles and humble ourselves before God. During set times of silent prayer, I advise you not to use many words. Long discourses often create distractions. Hold still before God in prayer like someone who is poor, who is unable to speak or walk, and who is waiting at the gate of a wealthy person. Do your best to keep your mind in God’s presence. If it wanders or pulls away sometimes, don’t be discouraged. Distress tends to distract the mind rather than to focus it. We must use the will gently to bring it back. If you persevere in this way, God will have mercy on you.

An easy way of bringing your mind back during the set time of prayer and holding it there more at rest, is not to let it wander much during the day. Hold it attentively in God’s presence. As you get used to thinking of God from time to time, it will become easy to remain calm during times of prayer, or at least to bring the mind back when it wanders.

In my other letters I’ve already spoken at length with you about the benefits gained from this practice of the presence of God. Let’s devote ourselves to it seriously and pray for each other.

With his signature gentleness and calmness in mind, and with many talks coming up, recently I have been considering how much I need to feed myself good writing, good words, good reminders of what it means to be human. I think it’s a universal thing. Not just me. People of all faiths, wisdom traditions, and philosophies find such reminders in their various writings, scriptures, images, sculptures, tapestries, and more. Also, there is what some call secular poetry, literature of all kinds, and words of wisdom found here and there in unexpected places, fresh as dew. Some of us find food in all of these.

Lectio divina or “sacred reading” is how monks and nuns ate nourishing words in the communities that grew up around the teachings of Jesus, whose pedagogy was Love. Bede names us “animal ruminando,” or “ruminating creature,” meaning “ones who need nourishing soul food to chew on,” as I like to define it.

Since I have dyslexia still, sometimes it’s still hard for me to remember things, so I make mnemonics. Here’s one I made for lectio divina, which merely means “steeping in nourishing words that you like a lot.”

Although lectio divina is organic and not at all linear, we humans like to intellectualize it, flatten it, make it straight, aka, give it “steps.” Trying to tame the wild. One, two, three, four. Like that. It’s been going on since time out of mind. Looking at you, Guy.

Guigo 2, or Guy, was a French Carthusian monk of the 12th century. He wrote Scala Claustralium: Epistola de vita contemplativa or Ladder of Monks: Letter on the Contemplative Life. It breaks down contemplation into stages, seen below:

Lectio                     Read

Meditatio               Meditate

Oratio                    Pray

Contemplatio       Contemplate

My mind takes that and sees LMOC and RMPC and comes up with, after steeping in it a while:

Recognize            Love

My                         My

Peaceful               Other

Center                   Companions

These are more like clothespins to hold my thoughts on the line in the breeze, to flutter and dry, absorb the fresh smell of sun and wind.

And my dyslexic mind chews on their etymologies:

Lectio has in it legere, “collect, gather up, pick out.” That reminds me reading is an active process. & Read is cognate with reason and riddle. If instead of “Can you read this?” we said, “Can you riddle this?” that to me is reading, riddling.

Meditatio / Meditate is cognate with medicine, from med-, “to take appropriate measures,” and that etymology reminds me that being mindful is good medicine.

Oratio is cognate with orator, oral, and comes from *os- “mouth.” Orare meant “speak before a court or assembly, plead,” also “speak, pray to.” & Pray is cognate with precarious and has roots in “ask earnestly, beg (someone).”

Contemplatio / Contemplation has roots in either *tem- for “cut” or *ten- for “stretch.” A temple is “a place dedicated to the service of a deity or deities, ground that is consecrated or set apart for the taking of auspices and the worship of a god,” as one dictionary reminds. In other words, it’s “a place reserved or cut out (*tem-)” from its surroundings and dedicated to such, or “a place where string has been stretched (*ten-) to mark off the consecrated ground.” Think also of your temple, the flattened area on either side of your forehead, and we see temple’s roots here in *temp- from *ten- for “stretch,” meaning “stretched skin.”

“Reach My Peaceful Center, Love My Other Companions” / Read-Meditate-Pray-Contemplate & Lectio-Meditatio-Oratio-Contemplatio also mean to me self-compassion and recognizing (or remembering) that I (my True Self, or Love) am my own first companion and friend and that all others are made in the image of Love and are my companions. Where etymologically I’m reminded that companion means one or those with whom I break bread (com– “with” and pan “bread”).

Often, we seem to feel a “failure” in contemplation perhaps because our definition of failure needs a reboot and also perhaps because we haven’t fed our minds something nourishing first. Yes, you can do contemplation with a Mary Oliver poem, as one example of many. Whatever you find gives your life meaning. Whether that is scripture, literature of all sorts, or a gem you found in a friend’s story.

Also, whenever scriptures are concerned, it seems that “steeping” in them would also involve at some point reading them through all the way, several times, to get one’s own “gist” of what they are about, and to do so, studying them with diverse commentaries that dig into history, linguistics, and culture. In the same way, reading all of Mary Oliver (prose and poetry) really helps a person more appreciate just one poem of hers that you might be meditating on repeatedly.

It also seems that if such a study of whatever material I have picked out for the steeping that is lectio divina doesn’t have its core meaning as “Love,” then I should really move on to some other passage or work that does, for meaningful, active, nourishing engagement.

The experience of all deep reading or listening, meditation or reflecting on it, oratio or opening of the heart there, and contemplation or entering the silence, makes us like our creature friends the cows, where juicy green words about the Mystery of Love are chewed until they become our very own milk that feeds the marrow of our own days, growing our self-compassion and active love for others, too.

It’s not hard. We just need an intention to. Hunger. A few good words. And to chew. Learn to rest. Let go.

Acevedo Butcher

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

When I was 12, I had a well-intentioned teacher who called roll by making a rhyme out of my last name, Acevedo. He mispronounced all but its last long o and rhymed that with “hot potato.”

How do you say Acevedo? My LinkedIn profile has a recording, here. It’s “AH-suh-VAY-dough.” I have no doubt my homeroom teacher was kind-hearted because he was also my basketball coach, and I’ve had basketball coaches who scared me, while he was someone who made me want to play better, and to hustle.

Still.

What I learned from that experience is that names are very important. It’s a lesson that has stayed with me to this day. As a teacher at UC Berkeley in the College Writing Programs, I make an effort to learn what my students’ names are and how they pronounce them, and I try not to be awkward about it.

Along the way, I’ve learned a lot about names in general, and I’ve often had students say, “Thank you so much for learning my name. I’ve never had that before.” While I’m sad to hear that it’s not universal, I know that my colleagues in CWP do the same, as do my friends who teach elsewhere, and also very many other teachers, prioritizing learning their students’ names and how to pronounce them well.

I’m grateful for the chance as a teacher to honor students’ actual names.

I also want to consider how grateful I am personally for those who honor that I myself have two last names. When I first started back into the work force as a college professor after having been a stay-at-home mom for years, I used my maiden name Acevedo and my married name Butcher. I mainly did it for practical reasons. I wanted those who knew me at UGA in graduate school and others who knew me as Carmen Acevedo, to know that I am now Carmen Acevedo Butcher. However, it was an uphill climb. When I was invited to give talks and such, I’d submit all the information with my three names, but no one ever used Acevedo much. So I kind of gave up. I became Carmen Butcher.

When I became a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at Sogang University in Seoul, my husband Sean suggested we make a website so students could have my notes more easily, so we did. But all three names seemed then too long for my website, if I wanted it to be easily memorable for my students, especially from the perspective of teaching English in a country where Hangul was their first script and Korean their first language.

So my website has always been www.carmenbutcher.com. I think today if I had to do it over I’d keep all three. My Acevedo name is that important to me. I know I look light-skinned now, and I’m married to a White man from England. So I very often get slotted into that space, and I can see why.

But, (and this is another reason I try not to assume about my students), as a good, long-time friend said to me recently, “You were so much darker skinned as a kid.” And my mother would always say to me as I was growing up: “You have such beautiful olive skin and complexion.” That is how my identity formed, as that darker-skinned kid who tanned easily playing outside and felt on the margins and/or not-fitting-in growing up in mostly White communities, even as I was proud of my darker skin and loved our summer trips to Miami, to visit my great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins there. I was so proud to eat then and at times at home the Cuban foods of my father’s heritage, and mine. It’s one reason I use more tan-skinned emojis.

Names are complex. Names are sacred. As I began publishing, and admittedly, as society started changing in its attitudes towards names and naming, it became important to me to have my whole self on the cover, even as every book is created by so very many people, and not just one author. For my work and career as a writer, I wanted my whole self, or Carmen Acevedo Butcher there with me. Not to would have felt as if something was missing.

So I looked up to see the history on two last names. I learned that there is a most repulsive phrase for it: “double-barrelled name.” Because of its first use and association with firearms, since 1709, when Richard Steele wrote in the literary and society journal Tatler: “His double-barrelled Pistols.” I prefer “double surname” or simply “two last names.” Many join theirs with a hyphen. I don’t. It’s Acevedo Butcher.

I’m also reminded that today many of my students with Latina, Latine, and Latino backgrounds are honoring their heritage more openly as they include their double surnames in their school records, with the first being their father’s surname and the second their mother’s.

Curious one day to see my author page online, since I’m grateful to be there and wanted to check out my new digs, I couldn’t find myself under the A‘s. My heart sank a little. There I was under Butcher, so I asked the kind people who help me there to please put my author page under Acevedo Butcher. This is also why I’m so thankful when someone I don’t even know emails me to ask, “Do I cite you as Butcher, Carmen, or as Acevedo Butcher, Carmen?” I write back, “Thank you! It’s Acevedo Butcher, Carmen.” And recently, a brilliant, kind, and wise new friend messaged me on social media, “Dr. Butcher,” and I was so thrilled to hear from this friend and to be invited into a conversation with this friend that I didn’t notice until later that there was also right after a second message: “I apologize – Dr. Acevedo Butcher, I should have said.”

I think this kindness reaches so deeply for me because I’ve spent my whole life trying to build selfhood. I started life in childhood trauma that undoes the sacred selfhood, and twig-by-twig, I have been slowly building my own nest of personhood, of dignity, of self-compassion, and of compassion for others.

Meanwhile I was writing a message back, “Please call me Carmen.” However, I’ll not forget that second kind message. As I was reading it, I was thinking to myself: Woah. I hope I can always be so gracious and attentive to others’ names too.

Peace.

HAWNK

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

You do not have to be good.   
You do not have to walk on your knees   
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.   
You only have to let the soft animal of your body  
love what it loves.   
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.   
Meanwhile the world goes on.   
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain   
are moving across the landscapes,    
over the prairies and the deep trees,   
the mountains and the rivers.   
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,   
are heading home again.    
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,   
the world offers itself to your imagination,   
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –    
over and over announcing your place   
in the family of things.
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

Hear Carmen sing this Mary Oliver poem on her YouTube Channel @CarmenAcevedoButcherPresence.


Mary Oliver’s gentle, beautiful, persistent, persisting, comforting, inspiring, and no-nonsense, clear-eyed, wild voice has been with me, in poetry and prose, for decades. I’m grateful for her presence in the world, ongoing, beyond death.

Sometimes I think she is the United States Rumi. My friend tells me when she goes home to Iran, that’s when she truly reconnects with Rumi, on the streets, in cars and trucks, in homes, on TV, in gatherings, he and his music and love and wisdom are everywhere. Much the same can be said about Mary Oliver, thankfully.

“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver from Dream Work is a favorite poem for how it invites us to celebrate our interconnectedness with everything, every creature, and every one. It’s renewing in that way. I have lived with it so long that gradually a song came with it. First I read it, then reread it, then recited it, then it became a part of my DNA, I sang a few lines, and then I was singing it, and it was singing me.

First released in 1986 in Mary Oliver’s Dream Work, also a favorite of mine. To understand why, I’ll share with you some alerts in my phone and some notes to my self that are scattered around on my desk on index cards, some folded.  

One daily alert that pops up on my SE2 every morning at 6:15 AM reminds me: “I am safe, I am loved, I am part of this human family.” The last part especially is a theme of “Wild Geese”—“announcing your place / in the family of things.”

Another message pops up at 6 AM. If I see it, it’s the first thing I need to see, because no resume has ever been enough for me to assuage my deep-seated childhood trauma. Not that I look to my resume for that anymore, but the reverberations of insecurity are unavoidably foundational for me and deserve my utmost self-compassion and receive it regularly, too. The result of trauma for me is that I often don’t feel I belong anywhere. There are complex reasons for that. Mostly it’s part of my human condition. This message in my phone encourages me with what kind friends often say to me, so I say it to myself since I forget pretty much 24/7: “They are lucky to have you! You’re the best!”

Then on one 3” x 5” unlined-side white notecard in thick permanent black ink, folded tall-ways, I read in large letters: “CALM & CONFIDENT.” Since my default for decades was to apologize for everything, and outgrowing that is an ongoing process, even as verbally and interiorly it happens significantly less and less. My other default setting, for the same reasons, is fear. That’s another reason I benefited from hanging out with the Guru of Calm, Brother Lawrence. I drank in his calmness in that very intimate way of translating him as he translated me. Thank you, Nic.

Then, on another card folded lengthwise, I tell myself: “You’re amazing, Carmen. A ✯! My inner deafness is a kind that hears kind words from family and friends and almost at once forgets to listen. “Love your neighbor as yourself” for me means I have to work daily on inobtrusively reclaiming my safe feeling of quiet baseline amazing, something a healthy childhood might allow a person to take for granted perhaps, and live their life out of that security.

Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to heal my father wound. I’ve been to therapy, lots of therapy, and yes it was hard, and I’ll likely go back again one day. Doesn’t everyone need and benefit from therapy? My massage therapist gets massages. Therapists get therapy. Reminders of our interconnectedness.

I’ve also been fortunate to have years of rolfing. Getting help was painful at first. It did not come easy to me. I only went to rolfing because I could no longer use my arms and hands. In my 30s and 40s they gave me such constant pain that at night I fantasized about taking off my arms, and propping them against the wall beside my bed so I could sleep. My lifelong inner experience of being crippled that I had often coped with (on the surface) successfully, as my therapist once said, “You are a high-functioning depressive,” which made me mad before it made me aware—the truth of it came out. The fear, the pent-up anger, but mostly the sheer fright, came out in my body.

Carpal tunnel made me desperate. Desperation has so often turned out to be a loyal friend. Thank you, Desperation. Today I stretch my body regularly, rolfing healed me from the inside out, from the inner pain to the outer pain, and I was able to work, teach, write books, and more. Thank you, Karen.

I also met and married my best friend, Sean. Over 31 years ago now, and his kindness and deep love have been exciting, fun, sustaining, and healing, orienting me back to my true self. He is the sine qua non.

And I’m fortunate to have long-time friends, a mother who loves me and is always supportive and kind, and my own self-compassion and friendship with my self-Self. I also have a job I love (most of the time!) and colleagues and students who inspire me (all of the time!). Often they also become my friends. How enriching is that. Thankful.

The truth remains that like most people I remain wounded as I’m healed and healing. So those phone alerts and hand-written messages (in permanent ink!) reveal my humanness. I accept them and try to remember to look at the ones in my phone, which pop up every morning. Sometimes I don’t, but I know they’re there. The two messages on index cards I see regularly throughout my day at the computer. They are good reminders. They make me smile. Self-compassion.

That’s why “You do not have to be good” and Mary Oliver so speak to me and nourish me. It’s a song of self-compassion. A song of belonging in nature. Of me being so grateful the snowy egret who soars over me doesn’t put up a sign at the marsh entrance saying, “You are not allowed here. You may not have noticed, and it’s not exactly comfortable for me to have to point it out to you, but in so many ways I’m superior to you, this is my home, and you and yours have trashed it often. Stay out, please.” Thank you, snowy egret. Thank you, wild geese, that you don’t do the same. Hawnking after me to go away. Thank you, all.

This piece is for all of us “in the family of things.”