Author: Rita Sommers-Flanagan

I'm a relative newcomer to blogging, but have 3 sites, each representing a distinct aspect of what matters to me. One is more or less professional, with large doses of personal thrown in. As Dr. Bossypants, I am dedicated to nonjudgmental authenticity. Dr. Bossypants values honest interactions aimed at positive growth and well-being. The truth is an evolving concept, but that is no excuse for not seeking close approximations! The Short Visits with God site is dedicated to a wild kind of honesty and connection with the Divine. It's my poems, prayers, and parables site.... It's wrestling, like Jacob, with Someone/Something so Holy, so enormous, so loving that sometimes, She lets me win. And someday, soon, I'll allow you to meet 8 articulate Baby Boomers just dying to give you pieces of their minds! Ah...the blogosphere...

Oh, Baby

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This is the narrowest time. Night has loosened its grip, and old wine is poured out as libation to the rising sun. My head slumps to my chest, and my shoulders curl inward to make the passage less painful. Less prolonged. To the east, a thin blaze of orange takes hold. With kindling gleaned from around the chopping block, I light a fire so I can immerse my hands in the warm liquid of another day.

“What sayest thou?” I ask the newly arrived Sandhill cranes.

“What thinkest thou?” I ask the rising river.

The answers come on the in-breath and dissipate before I can inscribe an adequate translation. I will have to ask again and try to be worthy of the answers.

My inner audience isn’t kind. The promise of spring is shrouded in snow, and for some reason, the fire is burning more reluctantly than usual. I suspect it’s the blessing and curse of the thick bark still clinging to these beautifully split logs.

Before I slept last night, someone told me they loved me, and someone told me they hated me. The raucous rise of the north wind relieved the barometric pressure of leftover miles. There was just enough time to make a cursory inspection of my seashells, sticks, and rocks before the paralysis set in. Even then, I had to lean into God to make it to the safety of my flannel sheets.

Now, alert and alive, we are filled with equal amounts of dread and joy.

“Oh, baby,” God sighs. “Oh, baby.”

“Oh, God,” I say, pushing back a little. “Oh, God.” I look into myself as far as I can. “I wish you wouldn’t sigh at me. Go sigh at someone else.”

This elicits a smile. We sip coffee, eat toast, and raise our glasses to the trains arriving, the trains departing, journeys beginning, journeys ending. These simple routines grease the wheels, and we’re off.

Who can guess the length of their days? Who can predict the hard hatreds and easy loves? No one knows their own soul very well, let alone the redemptive mind of God at rest in the protective bark of scorched and fallen trees. We cannot be expected to do any better than we can.

“Oh, baby,” The Cosmic Drama Queen sighs again, so inclusive, so determined. Her obsidian eyes are sparkling, her broad shoulders squared. “Oh, baby.”

Generosity

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If for some reason, Jeff Bezos wanted to give away a million dollars a day, he could do so every day, 365 days a year, for well over 500 years. So could Elon. I sit with this incomprehensible trivia hoping God might make a sarcastic comment. She doesn’t. She’s staring out the window I’ve opened to let her in.

“I don’t want you to call me God anymore,” she says, her voice crossing the room like light from the fire. Like air cleaned by the nearby evergreens.

Why would God say such a thing? Maybe She/It/He/They are tired of this centralized, politically charged, maliciously manipulated name that defines and limits them.

“That’s not quite right,” The Entity tells me. “The name limits you. Nothing limits us.”

“What does Jeff Bezos call you?” I ask.

“Helicopter.” They chuckle.

“And Elon?”

“Moon.” They collapse in giggles.

I don’t laugh. God is being elusive and self-indulgent. I don’t know what to call her. I don’t even know what to call myself. I’m a body of one and many. I have more brain cells in my skull than there are humans on earth. Jeff Bezos has twice as many dollars as the Milky Way has stars. I can write these facts, but like God and infinity, they are abstractions far beyond my grasp.

“You’re coming apart,” the Voice from the Garden murmurs in my better ear.

An observation? A warning? A taunt? I’m not sure. I feel defensive.

“No, I’m not,” I say, looking down and away because in my heart, I know it’s true. I am coming apart. Unhinged. Unglued. Along with Bezos and Elon, the unsheltered and the powerful, my friends and my enemies, I’m coming apart. Muscles and memory. Bone mass and eyesight.

“And you’re coming together,” the Voice from the Ocean adds in a reassuring voice.

The earth sustains life as we know it because, unlike the sister planets we’re aware of, it has surface water separating the ever-changing islands of land, and if things are working properly, death begets life. I stand on the shifting shore, toes immersed in salty water, coming apart, coming together, balanced.

In the slow dissolving, I have not yet given all I have to give, or given back what was never mine to keep, but if the Source of all Generosity, the one I’ve nicknamed God, continues to be of help, I will carry on.

Guesswork

I think there is a God

Her name is Water.

But she is known by other appellations.

Light. Fire. Longing.

Her brother’s name is Greed.

Sometimes known as Fear.

His legs are short and stocky.

Hers are long.

They meet for coffee

at the little place on the corner

but they go home

on different roads.

There is a path

that climbs gently

out of hell.

and opens

to a soothing meadow.

Tread lightly. Eat something.

Find your still small voice.

There is a little girl

beside you.

Her name is Truth.

Take her hand.

There is an old woman

in front of you.

Her name is Wisdom.

Follow her.

Woven into your bones

there is a quiet voice

called Compassion.

Listen.

Default Settings

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 My friend’s computer got hacked so he had to strip down to default settings to cast out the algorithmic demons. Having essentials saved in the cloud turned out to be a very good thing.

God is perched on my new orange ottoman sampling an experimental kefir popsicle I made yesterday. “Could I regress to default settings if I get corrupted?” I ask.

“Too lumpy.” She puts the popsicle on a plate to melt. “And no, you don’t have default settings. You have habits and intentions.”

Some people call God The Cloud of Unknowing. At the moment, this seems like a great name.

“Well then, Cloud,” I say, smiling. “Good thing I upload occasionally, huh?”

The Cloud agrees. “I save all your previous versions, false starts, half-assed plans, and unrealistic tangents.”

“Ugh,” I grimace. Having multiple versions of myself is confusing, and I generate vast numbers of intentions and ideas. I can never decide which ones to delete. “Do you at least have a logical naming system?”

“No,” The Cloud says. “That’s your job, though I do empty the trash once you actually delete and let go.”

“What about things I should have deleted but haven’t bothered?” I ask. “Could you make sure I’m remembered accurately?”

“No,” The Cloud says again. “No one is remembered accurately. But I’ve already remembered you well.”

All my mortal selves leer at me. A wave of vertigo hits, and suddenly, I’m being crushed by a density that makes it difficult to see or move. “Where are we?” I ask.

“Death Valley–282 feet below sea level. The atmospheric pressure is heavier here than anywhere on earth.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Yeah. Generally, I’m a bottom feeder, but it’s not easy here. Cloud formation is limited and whimsical.”

“Let’s go home and upload,” I plead.

“You sure? We’re 65 words short.”

“I’m sure,” I nod. “It’s only going to get worse. We don’t want to upload nonsense, do we?”

“I have some of your early poetry. Want to fill in with that?”

“No way,” I laugh.

I may not have default settings, but The Almighty Programmer faithfully saves my indeterminate multiplicities and understands my intentions.

And regardless of errant deletions or too many versions, there is enormous comfort in this: I am already remembered well.

The (Human) Race

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My superpower is reasonable restraint when it comes to cheesecake and dark beer. I also have x-ray vision for seeing the artistic potential in sticks, stones, and rusted metal. I possess both grandiose aspirations and impressive amounts of self-induced humility. As far as I can tell, God’s superpower is stealth. And maybe patience, though I’m less sure of that.

Arguably, my superweakness is asymmetry in a world that demands alignment, hierarchy, and singular definitions. Luckily, this is one of God’s superweaknesses, too. It’s challenging to stay balanced with eyes that are not horizontally level and ears that don’t match. My right hand is overly dominant and the same can be said of my Coauthor. We dig far better holes handling the shovel from the right. But then, who’s to say what constitutes a better hole?

Someone close to me was born ambidextrous with a leaning toward the left. At the time, this was perceived as a correctable birth defect rather than a rare gift. The prescription for people born with such amorphous qualities was to crawl around on all fours, supposedly rewiring their brains. To this day, tucked deep in the psyche of my loved one, there’s confusion. What could have been a superpower was turned into self-doubt. A shameful reason to hide.

“Balderdash!!!” God yells. “I’m sick to death of simplistic dualism and brutally enforced conformity to false binaries. There are males, females, and those between. And there are exquisite crossovers and crossbacks. Right handers. Left handers. Both handers. No handers. Isn’t it glorious? I love them all just the way they are. They tickle the bejeezus out of me.”

A song from the 1930s pops into my head. “You say tomay-to, I say tomah-to,” I sing with a lopsided grin. God joins in. We bellow out the old tune. “You say ee-ther, I say eye-ther…You like potayto, I like potahto…Let’s call the whole thing off.”

We’re unhinged, offkey, and happy.

“You’re no Ginger Rogers,” I tease.

“And you’re no Fred Astaire,” God teases back. “But you’re on the right track, sweetie. Sing louder. Run harder.”

“I try, God. You know I try.”

To demonstrate, I stop cavorting around the dance floor and kneel like a sprinter, poised to run in the next heat, waiting for the crack of the starting gun. But there are handguns, rifles, and machine guns firing all over the world. It’s impossible to discern the one clarion shot that will signal when I should dash my whole nonbinary heart and soul into the next battle.

“Use your better ear, baby,” Coach God says, leaning in. “And keep in your lane. You’re perilously close to being disqualified.”

Closed Captioning

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During the witching hour last night, my electric blanket turned itself on and fried me to a crisp. Light from my flaming hair revealed the outline of God burning beside me which provided strange comfort. Over time, I’ve had various vague ideas about the best ways to die. I’d not thought of this one, but it seemed an acceptable alternative. Our charred bodies were soon unrecognizable. It was over.

The enormity of waking has overwhelmed me. I’m the walking dead, moving through my morning chanting please, please, please. I don’t know what I’m asking for, but I’m certain I’m supposed to ask. Being dead absolves the body. Being alive requires fortitude, vision, and help.

One of our chickens lost an eye to a predator, but she’s still laying eggs. The garden is buried in snow, flat and pristine except for the tall dry stalks of late blooming weeds. The exhaustion of autumn always gives these invaders an unfair advantage. Spring will bring renewed energy for the inevitable skirmishes, but there will be no definitive victor. The spoils of war are never what one might imagine.

Since the thousand-year flood two years ago, we monitor the river with new respect. God and I are working steadily on the basement with an eye to evacuation. We’ve moved our vulnerabilities to higher ground, aware of the futility but content to at least be doing something. Doing something. Doing something. I am the walking dead doing something.

God routinely disappears and only explains their whereabouts in languages I do not understand. Multiple translations scroll across the bottom of the screen. I’m forced to suspend my agenda and hold very still as I struggle to grasp the plot of the cosmic drama. I wish God spoke simple English. Then I could do two things at once.

Instead, I must contend with the tongues of angels and demons, the vernacular of eagles and earthworms, the dialects and dialogues of the infinite all rising on waves of unprecedented heat, wrapping the earth in a shroud of utterly brilliant sunsets. Or are they sunrises?

God wears the tattered ozone like a cape and lands gracefully beside me. I am still chanting please, please, please as I accept the bent elbow and march down the aisle toward the edge.

“I hear you,” my Escort whispers, leaning down. “But you might try a thank you now and then.”

The dark and troubled waters below offer no sustaining image, but I don’t need one. I am the walking dead, learning to navigate weightlessness. I am the walking dead, slowly, slowly, slowly letting go. Letting go. Letting it all go.

The Ways We Use the Frontal Lobe

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Even the most obvious instructions for being happy, healthy, and wise are routinely ignored, ridiculed, and explained away. Physicians, therapists, pastors, scientists, Jesus, the Dali Lama, Taylor Swift, and a vast array of poets and philosophers past and present shake their heads, mystified, and discouraged.

For instance, though cheap and easy, fossil fuels are finite and poisonous, but who doesn’t like well-paid extractive industry jobs, entertainment, warm houses, and nice vacations?

In the long run, we’d be happier (and less likely to go extinct) if we fed the hungry, welcomed strangers, exercised, turned down the thermostat, stopped bombing, and reduced our fat and sugar intake. Instead, we use our astounding intellect to invent complex rationalizations for less-than-helpful choices.

Me: Admit it, God. Your frontal lobe design has failed. Abstract reasoning is a bust.

God: Yeah. Science and compassion shot to hell by fear and feigned ignorance.

Me: I know. We strive to be avenged, satisfied, pain-free and immortal.

Meanwhile, there’s fire. I let the morning blaze die down because the sun is taking over, beaming radiant energy into the thermal mass I call home. Earthly fires are a triangle: Oxygen, fuel, and heat. Existence is a triangle enabled by fire: Birth, life, and death.

God: And I’m a triangle: Creator, Recycler, and Evolver. I don’t give up.

Me: Well, if I were you, I’d call it quits on earth. Lots of flops and botches.

God: I know you would, and I know you’re afraid, but I’ll never not be around.

The glow of the sun is not fire. It’s nuclear fusion, which involves protons smashing into each other so hard that they stick together and become something new. This transformation produces a tremendous amount of light and heat.

Me: That’s like us, God. When we smash together, good energy is released, right?

God: Cute. But no. You’re a willy nilly smasher. Mostly, you bounce. I help with repairs.

Me: But sometimes, I smash into something vaguely like you. I’m sure of it.

God is chuckling. As usual.

We are all willy nilly smashers. We take a hard run at something, crash, pick ourselves up, dust off our boots, gulp some coffee, tea, whiskey or kombucha, and take another run. Sometimes, fusion occurs, and we’re changed. But mostly, we bounce and remain unchanged.

God: Essentially unchanged, but not unfazed. Shed the defeatist attitude. Keep smashing.

Me: Ah ha! You’re still working on the frontal lobe, aren’t you?

God: Well, I may be deluded, but I believe even total failures have redemptive value.

The sky has clouded up and blocked the sun. I smile at the Eternal Delusion and get my matches. It’s time to start another fire.

Membership

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Once in a while, book clubs invite an author to visit. God prefers anonymity, so she always declines. Not me. Often, it’s a nice experience, but on rare occasions, things get awkward. Members who’ve read only the title and back cover take the opportunity to share views tangential or even hostile to the essence of the book. Others fawn over the author, more focused on affiliation than analysis.

And speaking of awkward, I know of a romance writer who finagled an invitation to join her neighborhood book club. Because she published under a pen name, no one realized who she was. When it was her turn to choose a book, she held up her latest bodice-ripper, the slick cover burbling with cleavage and low-slung jeans. Everyone burst into laughter, thinking this was a joke. The author stomped out, never to return. They did not read the book.

“Well, they should have,” God says. “Romance is a billion-dollar industry.”

I roll my eyes. “I prefer murder mysteries. They do less damage.”

God leers at me. “Ah, come on. What’s wrong with a little erotic fantasy? Steamy scenes, orgasmic encounters, soulmates finally licking or sucking just the right spots…”

“Stop!” I interrupt. I don’t enjoy talking about sex with God. “Could we change the subject?”

“Sure,” God says. “But what is the subject?”

I pause and then admit, “I don’t know. And you know I don’t know.”

“Maybe we should talk about who gets invited,” God says.

“To what? Book clubs?”

“No. To anything. You all want to belong, don’t you?”

“Not necessarily. We want to belong to our tribe. People who look and think like we do, believe what we believe, read the same books, and share similar realities.”

“Then don’t invite me!” God snorts. She pulls on her turtleneck sweater. “You’re strangling yourselves. Loosen up, you judgmental little speck.”

“Don’t worry,” I snap. “You are definitely not invited. And don’t call me speck.”

Evening is approaching. The daylight remaining is not straightforward.

“Speck. Dot. Flicker. Flash. You realize that like rain, fire and light do not discriminate, right? So, instead of speck, how about I call you light of the world?”

This is a seductive but perilous proposal. God is the Ultimate Refractive Substance. As light passes through God, it splays and changes directions. That’s why stars twinkle. If I agree, I will be bent and fractured. My membership anywhere will be in question.

“Let me think on that,” I say, hedging.

We curl up on the couch and continue reading our book club’s latest selection, Sun House, by David James Duncan. As usual, I’m a little behind.

Honing Toward Perfection

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Today, The Gods are the consistency of sunset, vulnerable as snow. A northern gale stirs my worst instincts, exposing the road to hell and back—a familiar excursion for many of us. The Gods are hopeful hitchhikers, rebellious dancers who lead and follow at the same time, repeatedly exhausting themselves.

“Truth.” The Gods sigh through the haze of impending February. I hold the palm of my hand steady, hoping they’ll land. They weigh nothing. They mean everything.

“Rest here,” I whisper. “You’ll be safe with me.”

My bravado is laughable. Nowhere is safe for God. Not evolution. Not war. Not atmosphere. Not black holes, good intentions, bad karma. Perhaps The God’s most accurate description is They-Who-Are-Not-Safe, and they are especially unsafe in the grasping hands of human imagination.

The Gods remove their glasses, breathe, and rub the lenses with their pure cotton robes. They assume a professorial pose.

“My dear, we’ve known you a very long time. You’re the shape of a certain universe where treachery is expected. Suffering is real. You’re a stone rolling downhill. We can’t catch you because we’re rolling, too.”

This apparent abdication angers me. If it were possible to give God a swift kick in the butt without hurting my own toes, I’d do it many times a day. But with God, I never wear steel-toed boots. Instead, I wear thick, cozy socks so I can slip quietly from room to room, age to age, life to life, barely disturbing the old soul.

“We hear you anyway,” The Gods laugh. “Our senses have been honed by the human condition. Our legs are blown off, our children starved. We bear the brunt of genocidal hatred.” They pause and add, “These embodiments are excruciating, but being misperceived has its rewards. There’s nothing we don’t see. Nothing we don’t hear. Nothing we can’t bear.”

“I don’t understand,” I lament, holding my head in my hands. “I just do not understand.”

The Gods laugh a second time, a wistful, ironic laugh. “You’ve got a bad case of existential fatigue,” they explain as they offer their scarred and ancient palms. “Rest here. You’ll be safe with us.”

With trepidation, I lay myself down in the fleshy folds, and the holy fingers curl inward.

“So, this is where I disappear,” I mumble, drowsy.

“Not yet,” The Gods say. “You still have senses to be honed.”

I snap awake and begin burrowing back out of the corporeal warmth. I don’t want to be honed. For a third and final time, The Gods burst into laughter, so hearty and inclusive that I can’t help myself. I laugh, too.

“See?” The Gods say. “Honing isn’t that bad.”

God (and Dr. Bossypants) Speak

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Some astute readers may suspect that God is well-acquainted with Dr. Bossypants, and this is true. God and Dr. Bossypants had little tête-à-tête this week because they like making up rules that they believe will enhance people’s lives, and they generally like people. At least a little bit. Their combined hubris is something to behold. At times like this, I just sit back and take dictation. We all hope these suggestions will help more than hinder. I know a lot of us are a bit oppositional. Try to resist getting indignant about being bossed around. But if you must, that’s okay. God and Dr. Bossypants are both fairly forgiving.

That Lonesome Valley

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One of the harder things about human consciousness is the realization that we are mortal. No one knows exactly how to handle this, but as the generations ahead of us decline and pass, we bear witness, one way or another. Some claim that the last task entrusted to sentient beings is to die well.

My own mom was a fighter. Even though beset by serious medical limitations, she renewed her realtor license in her eightieth year. My dad died when Mom was thirty-nine. She was utterly shattered. She arranged for immediate family to be seated in the back pew at the funeral, and afterwards, she never set foot in the church again. She was done with that version of God, and who can blame her?

“Not me!!” God interjects. “No blame here.”

Even though she unchurched herself, Mom held a steadfast belief that when she died, she would meet my dad in heaven and give him a full account of how she held on to the ranch and finished raising the kids.

I glance at God, sad, proud, and a little embarrassed at the childlike simplicity of her assumptions.

“No worries,” God says gently. “Even if that’s not exactly how things work, I appreciate the ways humans create myths and rituals to find strength and resolve. Your mom’s resilience was epic.”

“Yeah. But remember how she felt about mirrors and getting old? She hated the reflection of her aging face. Really hated it. And it was tough for me, too. I could see what was coming, not only for her, but eventually for me.”

“Oh, I remember,” God nods. “But I’ve noticed you don’t hide from mirrors. In fact, you seem drawn to them.”

“Maybe,” I laugh. “Morbid curiosity.” I lean into my antique trifold mirror, pull my skin back toward my ears, make a goofy face, and add, “Mirrors prove that I’m still here.”

My grin fades as I continue to stare. “But God, I see the etching of the years, I see what my children see, and it breaks my heart. I wish I could protect them.”

“I know. But you can’t. Love isn’t always about protection or denial. Love tells the truth and then offers to help,” God says, as the room floods with mirrors. Every wall is now reflective.

“Like what you’re doing right now?” I ask. “Is this love?”  

I fight the urge to close my eyes and cover my face. Instead, I square my shoulders and press my palm against the cold glass. From deep within, the ancient eyes of God twinkle, and God’s palm meets mine. The glass warms.