The average cost of a wedding in the US in 2010 was approximately $24,070.

This morning, I counted more than 4 different advertisements for “wedding products” in my inbox. The offers range from reception decorations (sixty percent off custom coasters) to perfecting my “wedding body,” with deals on spin classes and tooth whitening kits.

“What busy bride has time to sit in a dentist’s office?” the advertisement asks, offering me a discount of over seventy percent, just so that I don’t “blow through my wedding budget on wedding essentials.”

For the past six months, the wedding industry has held my mailbox, my inbox, and my Facebook page captive. It has assumed that I have the same idea of a wedding essential that they do: nine hundred fake flower petals; His and Hers plastic goblets; bridal party tote bags that, in pink and silver sequins, display the most important title that I could possible bear: Bride.

It is a title that I did not expect to carry. I spent my twenties pursuing education and a whole life, trying to find healing for the various wounds of my childhood. I was graced with the love of my friends, and with the comforts of a city laced with rivers, friendly coffee shops, and antique bookstores. I perfected my banana bread recipe, got a beagle, became a college professor. And although I longed to marry, I also knew that my life was good.

When I met my fiancé, I did not think that my life had magically begun. If anything, the life I lived as a single person prepared me for Jeremy in the most important way: I had roots, experience, desires that were shaped by more than what I had seen in a wedding brochure. I had cultivated a life that would hold me, and that had helped me hold others.

And on our first date, in one of those friendly coffee shops, I felt my stomach drop with both fear and recognition: This guy is the one to hold me, and I’m the one to hold him.

What bothers me about the wedding industry is that it offers the image of the shopping spree, the Black Friday deal, where you are racing against the clock to purchase enough personalized knickknacks to help your guests remember that this day is about you, about your union, your commitment, your arrival into the promised land of wedded bliss. It turns your friends and family into patrons, people you have to entertain with videographers and personalized candies. It is product, plain and simple, both the wedding and all the days before it.

And this is where I relish lines from Wendell Berry, repeating the lines to myself: Love the quick profit, the vacation with pay. This is where I repeat the horror stories I’ve heard about weddings to my female students, whom I want to practice their own recipes, live their own lives. I once heard about a wedding where the bride spent sixty grand on flowers, I say. Sixty grand. Can you imagine?

I cannot imagine, but I’m also left with a discomforting sense of entitlement. If hyper-localism can produce its own kind of snobbery – where a restaurant could, say, deny my request for sriracha because it was not “made in Michigan” – I also see it in the other side of the wedding industry, the homemade/handmade/DIY crazes that dominate Pinterest and Etsy.

This is where my cynicism gets checked; I have spent hours perusing these sites, looking for broaches, wedding sashes, chalk boards for the reception table. And in my perusal, I have recognized the frenzied, demanding caricature of Bride in myself.

It is one thing to buy custom jewelry for your bridesmaids. It is quite another to throw a tantrum over the wedding invitation your fiancé designed, to say, “But what I want is important, and what I want is this cornflower matte-finished invite with the matching sparrow stamp!”

If the wedding industry is a monster, it is because we make it one. Regardless of taste or disposition, to look at a single day as “belonging” to you, and to look at wedding essentials as party planning, ignores the truth of what a wedding is: a blessing, a sending forth, a promise to hold the life and hopes of two people in the community, the family, that they love. To bless the life that keeps coming.

One of my friends, after I shared this with her, made a helpful observation. “We need a different image for engagement,” she said. “It’s a desert, really. Here you are, essentially becoming married, wrestling with your demons, and all you’re told is that the wedding is the biggest day of your life, like that’s the only thing worth your attention.”

It might really be that the wedding day, as a blessing, is a chance to bless the ones you love with what you can give, and Jeremy and I have been working to figure out what that looks like. But we are being asked to give more than a party.  We are being asked to give ourselves, to give our hearts and lives to the work of the life that calls us together.

If it is true that engagement is a desert – and that marriage, as the Orthodox say, is just as demanding as a monastic life – what is being demanded of me is a scouring of my whole being: my faults, my insecurities, my selfish demands.

And in our engagement, I am finding Jeremy to be stronger, and more loving, than I could have imagined. I am finding that what I have to give him, and the ones I love, is a dying of self, what Berry names as a marriage essential:

“What I am learning to give you is my death / to set you free of me, and me from myself
/ into the dark and the new light”

I may not have expected to be a bride, but in the deepest way, I am becoming one – a woman made stronger by a love that demands from her, a love that does not hoard, but wipes clean. A love that sends forth and calls back, a love that helps us hold one another.

The years ahead of us contain more than we can imagine. There will be more deserts. But at our reception, we will eat pie and homemade cake. Our guests will collect snapdragons and play old board games. And we will dance on the grass and watch the dusky summer light rise around us, a small clearing in the woods, a moment that will truly hold us.

are the clothes we washed together last night—

one load, button downs and my green dress.

They smell like that lemony detergent

you pulled down, white sides slick with soap.

I pretend that they smell like you.

Where they touch me, you touch me.

And now, at sunrise, they’re hanging in the sky—

whites stained soft pink by your new red shirt

and I can hardly bear to look up.

How do I know that I know what I know – about you? This is clearly a question about epistemology, about knowledge. But it’s a special kind of knowledge, about others.

The ability to understand what another human being is thinking or feeling is most commonly known as empathy. The word empathy comes from the German einfühlung, which literally translates as “feeling into.” For thousands of years, empathy has attracted the attention of great thinkers in many fields of study, but only recently has empathy experienced a serious comeback, signaled by the advent of social neuroscience. This field, a melding of social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, is startlingly young and the researchers in it are duly young, and maybe even hip (as David Brooks has pointed out).  Empathy has found center stage in a large body of social neuroscience research. So far there doesn’t seem to be a definite consensus on how we empathize with others, but there are two prominent theories on the table that try to explain the phenomenon of empathy.

The first one, called Simulation Theory, proposes that empathy is possible because when we see another person experiencing an emotion, we “simulate” or represent that same emotion in ourselves so we can know firsthand what it feels like. In fact, there is some preliminary evidence of so-called “mirror neurons” in humans that fire during both the observation and experience of actions and emotions. And there are even parts of the brain in the medial prefrontal cortex (responsible for higher-level kinds of thought) that show overlap of activation for both self-focused and other-focused thoughts and judgments. On an intuitive level, Simulation Theory makes sense, because it seems glaringly obvious that in order to understand what another person is feeling, I can simply pretend as if I were feeling the same thing. Despite its intuitive appeal, Simulation Theory has to be tested to see what evidence exists for it in the brain.

The other proposed theory that attempts to explain empathy, which some researchers think completely opposes Simulation Theory, is known as Theory of Mind—the ability to understand what another person is thinking and feeling based on rules for how one should think and feel. Research exploring Theory of Mind became very popular in clinical work on autism, the basic finding showing that autistic individuals cannot effectively represent or explain the mental states of another. More recently, tasks that tap Theory of Mind processes have been implemented in brain scanning studies. The results from these studies show that there may be specific brain areas that underlie and support a Theory of Mind.

Sadly, some researchers have pledged their allegiance exclusively to one of these theories, creating an academic duel with the naïve assumption that one of these theories is right and the other blatantly wrong. Not to risk sounding too cliché, but I can’t help but ask the question: can’t we just get along?

What’s most likely, maybe, is that empathy is a multi-faceted process, with some aspects of it being more automatic and emotional (immediately getting upset when we see a loved one who’s upset) and other aspects of it that are more reflective and conceptual (understanding why someone might be upset based on what we know about the person, his/her personality, etc.). Whether the more automatic or the more reflective aspect “kicks in” will necessarily depend on the social context in which we find ourselves. This is a daunting, open question, and we’ll have to wait for social neuroscience as a field to grow a bit more and address it.

For now, what we can say from empathy research is that we have begun to understand how the brain gives rise to the wonderful capacity we have to “feel into” another human being. With the newfound tools of social neuroscience in hand, psychologists and neuroscientists are now on the cusp of more discoveries about the vibrant life of the empathic brain.

It is the first day of 2012.
What are you afraid of?
Last night I cried
and said out loud

I didn’t expect I’d still be waiting tables
at the same restaurant I was at 6 years ago.

What changes in the heart?
Where is solitude?
Who makes the body pure?
What soulish fiend am I?

Always hungry for the escape,
the deeper inside to get away from
reality.  Who said reality was where anything
mattered anyway? I swallow beauty,

rail against the beast of skin
when too much of everything
growls back at me.

What year is this?
What woman am I?
Who nailed the spikes into my heels?
Who told me heels made a woman?

East Village you dirty, loud, unruly heart.
East Village blood and chambered fruit.
East Village pump my heart chokes

on seeds of every pomegranate
reminder of love.
Love and marriage.
You can’t have one without the other.
I want.

What is Purity?
Whose hands fashioned the hips, the back?
Who curled the rib cage around a fluttering bird?
I heart.

I wail for a living’s sake.

I drink my tea with sugar.
Year.
Year.
Year.

No coffee.
Sugar cubes no milk.
Soy milk.
What kind of half alive is this?

What kind of cancer comes from smoke?
Stacks back against family?
Liver.
Throat.
Breast.
Lung.

When does it come together?
The dots unconnect themselves,
sprawl across the sky as stars.

Orion.
Legs like God.
Whose footstool
am I?

Drama and spectacle attract people. We can call it quirkiness, suspense, conundrum, but a dramatic bang makes us perk up and pay attention. Although we may not want our own lives to follow an overly dramatic arc, it’s often what propels and energizes us. From college essays to job interviews, people bring out their “hook” – their defining, but perhaps embellished, narrative – to differentiate themselves from the masses. And with the ubiquity of the internet, anyone can vie for attention via blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. Drama – hair-pin turns in a person’s narrative – is what makes the entertainment industry spin. It’s why books like Room (ripped-from-the-headlines heartbreak and despair), Little Bee (global, political, and personal tragedy), and The Time Traveler’s Wife (scientifically impossible plot) crash into our psyches. I enjoyed all of these books, but these novels grabbed me partially because of the complete unfamiliarity and distance from my own life. The plot, rather than the language, drew me in.

And then came Sebastian Barry.

I read a new-to-me book by Barry that I had never read before: Annie Dunne. Despite the fact that his novel The Secret Scripture was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and should have been on my radar, I was unfamiliar with him. The reason I sought out one of his books was because I had just moved with my family to Dublin, and he is Irish, residing in the county south of ours. A relative had recommended I read his work. I bought Annie Dunne on a trip to the Dublin Writers Museum.

Initially, it didn’t captivate me. When we’re conditioned to be wowed at every page turn, an ordinary story feels plodding. The plot? Two small children come from the city to live with their great-aunt Annie on a farm in Wicklow, while their parents seek employment in London. A local farm hand feigns interest in her cousin, Sarah, who has passed middle age without a husband, like Annie. A few noteworthy events pass, yet Barry does not dwell on them – these events could be primed for drama, but they don’t affect the plot directly. Rather, these events inform our protagonist’s emotions. The primary plot caterwauls on, just like life at Kelsha, the Dunne family farm. The tension in Annie’s heart arises not because of what has happened to her, but rather as a result of reflecting on what has not happened: namely, she does not have her own children, and caring for her great-niece and –nephew has stirred this in her, a husband-less, hunchbacked old maid.

But I stuck with it. Annie Dunne is not necessarily a book that can’t be put down. At times, I had to force myself to read a few pages. Annie’s heartbreak starts to crescendo, yet Barry never employs tricky plot twists: his protagonist doesn’t contemplate suicide, run away, nor dramatically alter her life by joining a convent or other mode of escapism. She simply continues to grapple with her sorrow – and surprisingly, this affected me deeply. Barry’s subtle language and deft forwarding of his story caused me to put the book down, sigh, and simply sit. He writes:

“And when now and then rarely I saw another bowed-back girl, all my instinct was to jeer her too, although I had no license to. This afflicting music of my childhood was hard to hear then, but I o’ercame it. It is now, oftentimes lying these decades later on a flattening mattress with a ticking of old goose down, that I am gripped by fearsome rages, to think of it. Never kissed, never fondled, never embarrassed by a boy’s desire! It is a wretchedness.”

A few pages later, when Billy Kerr, the farm helper who pines for her cousin Sarah, lambastes Annie and verbally lashes, wounds, and damages her, the emotion welling in my heart is like nothing I’ve ever experienced while reading a novel. Just like Barry writes from Annie’s perspective, “Then an emotion larger than a horse invades me.”

The way that Barry slowly develops his characters by using words instead of action builds a different kind of book than one that seeks to thrill.

If a book, in its simplicity, engaged me so dramatically, then perhaps I could read my own life in the same fashion. Here’s what I mean: if suspended in a reality mush that whistles and whizzes and otherwise attempts to astonish the reader by teetering on that elusive line between reality and what I’ll call “reality-plus,” a book essentially relies on that aforementioned balance instead of the stringing together of specific words and phrases and precise use of punctuation. Maybe the beauty of life doesn’t lie in its uniqueness, but rather in the simple way our experiences weave together to form something subtler, something richer. What if we are “known” – not because we position ourselves so far from normalcy and convention, but because the quiet ways we live our lives reflect unexpected beauty, like Barry’s prose.

Can language – our lives – instead of an actual event, stir up as much emotion in one’s soul? Is it the plot, or is it the words? When it seems that the publishing industry is on the prowl for some “wow” oriented books that will provide an eye-catching cover or marketing materials, it’s easy to ignore the structure of thousands of words strung together to create one enormous tapestry.

So, as I notice my own daughter picking up Lois Lowry’s beloved books and diving into the world of Anastasia’s escapades, I think I’d like her to know that perhaps a book – and a life – is not simply about the story, but also about how it’s told.

Blue-collar aircraft machinist Bud Fox (Martin Sheen) lies in the hospital, gravely ill. His son, dark-suited Wall Street broker Carl (Charlie Sheen) stands at his bedside clutching his fathers hand. Both shake with tears as the prodigal son returns to honor his father’s integrity and wisdom.

That moment stuck with me, but I wasn’t moved so much by the father-son sentimental moment. Rather, it was the hint of a darker conflict that had been resolved between the men that marked me. The nature of that conflict wouldn’t occur to me until much later, when, one day, I realized I was running out of time.

My midlife crisis began at age 39, crested at 41, and was pretty much resolved by the time I hit 43. The estimated damages include four motorcycles, one FJ Cruiser, a decade of my wife’s life (thanks to the motorcycles, mostly), and one career change.

Overall, I think it worked out well.

But mortality has a way of bringing honest scales to any discussion. My life was half over, at least. What did it add up to? It occurred to me that while I was making lots of money and was important, I couldn’t say much about the real worth of my job.

Now I normally don’t seek philosophical answers by watching the Discovery Channel. But I was surprised to realize that Dirty Jobs, one of my family’s favorite shows, was speaking on this very issue.

Mike Rowe, the host, travels the country and stands shoulder to shoulder with people doing the dirtiest, nastiest jobs imaginable. It makes great reality TV, but Mike has a deeper purpose for the show: he wants America to see that there is worth and a certain nobility in dirty, hard work. This worth is not based on social standing or big paychecks, but on the fact that the work needs to be done and it’s dirty and it’s hard and people just do it. It is the labor of those people he introduces each week that “makes it possible for the rest of us to live the way we do.”

The eighteenth century economist Adam Smith, on the other hand, probably never did a dirty job beyond scraping the horse manure from his English boots (actually, I’m sure he had someone do that for him), but in his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations he explains how wealth and worth are created. For Smith, wealth is defined as the worth of goods and services produced by a population’s labor (what they make or improve by their work). The relative amount of wealth a country produces is most dependent on the level of “skill, dexterity, and judgment” the workers apply in their work. The smarter, more skilled workers generate more wealth. (See the Industrial Revolution.)

Now the key to understanding the importance of Smith’s message to me in my mid-life crisis is the distinction he makes between creating wealth and accumulating wealth. Accumulating wealth is simply the transfer of one person’s wealth to another (a redistribution, if you will). For wealth to be created, something has to be made or improved, and this requires labor (skilled or not). The labor of the farmer produces crops. The plumber makes the toilet work. The truck driver moves something from where it can’t be used to a place where it can. All this labor creates wealth by making something new or by making something better.

Any labor that fails to make or improve something creates no wealth. Stock traders who labor to buy low and sell high successfully transfer wealth, but they create none. Speculators in commodities (such as grain, oil, etc.) and real estate accumulate vast wealth, but they create none.

Now, looking back, I understand why Wall Street was on my mind. The relationship between Bud Fox, Carl Fox, and Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) is that dark conflict that had became mine.

In a pair of scenes the polar opposites Bud Fox and Gordon Gekko attempt to persuade the young Carl Fox concerning the nature of wealth. In the first scene, Bud exhorts his son to “stop going for the easy buck and start producing something with your life. Create, instead of living off the buying and selling of others.”

Meanwhile, the evil Gordon Gekko whispers into Carl’s ear, “The richest one percent of this country owns half our country’s wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It’s bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own.”

The work of Gordon Gekko may be morally acceptable in our society, but it lacks nobility and worth. His kind don’t create wealth, they just redistribute it.

But what about the executive, the guy like me during my crisis, who directs the creative efforts of others toward an objective? Do we create wealth? Are we Gekkos or Buds? Adam Smith would say that to the extent that we enable laborers to use greater “skill, dexterity, and judgment” in their work, we are creators of wealth. But I’m skeptical that this can be measured, at least not in the same way I can measure the worth of the work of a motorcycle mechanic, or that it amounts to much. I wasn’t satisfied with not knowing. I had to make sure.

That’s what I needed to turn the corner into the second half of my life: certainty that my work had worth, that I was a creator of wealth, not merely an accumulator of it. So I stopped telling people how to make software. I stopped being merely an approver of the creative efforts of others and retooled myself. I create every day and judge the worth of my work. And I approach my creative labor with the eye of a craftsman, content with an iPhone application well-built, solid, with a little art thrown in there where, perhaps, only another craftsman might notice.

I was raised in and by the hills of Virginia so I am acquainted with bluegrass and the bucolic banjo pluck of the Appalachians. Life in the South to me has meant mountains and magnolias, bourbon and a sauntering pace of life. But until recently, I did not know the darkness of the deep musical movements coming from the South less than a half century ago. In this place, in the acapellas of low sadness and the hymns of wandering, I have found camaraderie with the land that hemmed and honed me as a young woman and as a contributor to family and place. The deeper I listen to Emmylou Harris, Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and the like, the deeper I enter the old South; a place where despondency, pride, and revelry exist within each other. Ever since the needle scratched and crackled through that first disc, the open space between me and my homeland, and all her past sins, triumphs, and profundity, has sealed.

Emmylou Harris was quoted recently in Garden & Gun magazine saying that she has given up on present-day country radio. “It no longer has that washed-in-the-blood element,” she said. And she’s right, alluding to this spiritually infused land where God is seen more with dirty shoes holding out redemption, rather than a glowing halo bestowing blessings. Some present-day artists–Gillian Welch, Patty Griffin, David Rawlings in particular–hold fast to the tenets of powerful, bleeding and vulnerable music of the South, but these artists are rare. The influence of the South is too often watered down to an occasional mechanized twang, girls who wear dresses with cowboy boots, and cheap beer cans. And behind the barbeque and pickup trucks, we have lost, or are at least losing, our edge.

William Faulkner at work.

It’s the same edge that the writers of our Southern fiction have made famous. The place of darkness which honed the literary voices of Flannery O’Connor’s grotesque, Edgar Allan Poe’s nightmares, and William Faulkner’s pontifications on death. The South provided a backdrop unmatched by other geographies, fostering art that feeds on our ability to make the worst of our lot.

This land of moonshine and muskets belies a deep disenchantment. O’Connor wrote that since we lost the war in the 19^th century, we have ‘had our fall’–the type of fall that keeps the whole populace awake to their potent inability to pride themselves on themselves. We are aware that we can believe deeply and still, with sweat and blood, lose everything. The artists who embody the South do not wash worries in whimsy, but attempt connection amidst isolation, loss, and disillusionment.

Flannery O’Connor herself said that we may not be Christ-centered as much as we are ‘Christ-haunted.’ And these ghosts, as much as they keep us fearful and frightened, keep us wide-eyed and questioning. We have been the “Bible Belt” for decades, a symbol of centrality as much as corporal punishment. And we Southerners have been beaten by our own faith. We are holy tormented and wholly sanctified.

The South has created from this fallen place and offered the nation a voice otherwise unheard. A perspective cast through an interminable mix of searing nostalgia, bated hope, and a weighty present balanced between the two. For decades, artists let this land mold their perspectives. It was the Southern zeitgeist, and it is this curious mix of hope and sadness.

More recently, the blurring of state and cultural lines has come as a detriment to artists. We lose our senses and loosen our allegiances, as we drift above the lands. As O’Connor said, when we cease to create from the reality of our place, this Southern place, we have lost ourselves, and we have lost the South. Makoto Fujimura has said before, we have a language for the waywardness. What the South is beginning to miss is the language for the ties that bind. So the challenge for Southern artists now is to stay connected–to keep the ankles in the mud and the fires smoldering. To be a product of the palpable senses, and to let the sights, sounds, emotion and memory of your place build your reality and your platform. We need to reorient our perspective to move beyond what we do in the South, beyond fishing, hunting, and cooking with butter, and enter into who we are, in joy and in trial.

And perhaps, optimistically, we can find ourselves anew in the people who understand and channel this spirit, regardless of their geographical upbringing. Because in the end, what the South did was connect in the darkness. It is the invaluable voice of a fallen community that still echoes from my record player, and is still found within my pages of “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

Johnny Cash sang that he wore black for the sick and lonely, for the reckless, and the mournin’, for the poor and beatin’, and the prisoner and the victim. And as artists create today, perhaps it is our duty to take on the strands and fringes of black both to honor and connect us to the spirit, land and people of our place. So we take from the fragmented pieces of our community’s collective conscience, take the black, and take the blood, and in doing so, create an enduring piece of work, reminiscent of this old melancholy.

Cramer Photo (www.cramerphoto.com)

I wanted to travel to Pennsylvania to be with my family this Christmas. My family always swaddles the holiday thick with traditions, and I missed those. On Christmas Eve, my mom crushes candy canes for homemade peppermint stick ice cream. That night, my dad sometimes builds a fire on the far side of their pond. The family creaks through frosty grass and takes seats around the fire, reading Luke’s gospel and imagining what it would have been like to “keep watch over… flocks at night.”  They attempt “Away in a Manger,” starting too low, their voices by the end sounding like chairs rasping across a floor. On Christmas morning, they always have cinnamon rolls and coffee while opening stocking stuffers. They open presents, and then eat waffles.

I wanted to be in Florida with my in-laws for the new year, which is tradition, too. This year, we had a new niece down there we hadn’t met yet. We kept browsing for cheap tickets.

I have spent several Christmases marooned in Chicago. This year, with gas prices and unemployment both so high, I suspect that more people were separated from their families over the holidays.  Indeed, Laura Donovan wrote about this trend in her article “A Very Skype-y Thanksgiving.” Some probably considered themselves plucked from the fires of dysfunction.  Googling “not going home for the holidays,” an abundance of articles about surviving holidays at home cropped up. Others no doubt felt exiled and, even as adults, a tad homesick. It still just feels like Christmas is where Mom is. There’s no way around it.

How can we exiles handle the distance?

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, I spent a lot of time Grinching. I didn’t buy a Christmas tree. Not even an artificial or Charlie Brown tree. No wreaths or greenery or cranberry popcorn chains. No sharp fir smell in our apartment. No special candles or Advent calendars. No Christmas music. This was partly because I’m a teacher and it was the end-of-semester crunch. But also, it was a classic disappointment pirouette: one begins the pirouette by caring deeply, and then feels a slight turn when disappointment hits, and then concludes the circle by resenting the very thing once held so dear. To wit: “I would love to be home for Christmas,” “I can’t go home,” “Christmas is lame.”

Eventually, I began to take heart, though. Christmas, I realized, isn’t primarily about family. Christmas is a holiday in the root sense of the word.  Paraphrasing the OED here, the old English root, háligdæg, always meant consecrated day or religious festival, and the definition that meant “vacation” or “a day off” was always tied to the concept of the day’s holiness. The Immortal and Invisible becoming flesh and dwelling among us: this is what Christians consecrate on this day.

I began to realize that family togetherness can symbolize the incarnation for Christians. We reenact some aspects of the holy drama when we dwell with one another. Family togetherness is not the whole point of Christmas, so I could be of good cheer because of that, because it meant I could still consecrate the day in a whole and full-hearted way. Family togetherness is, however, a great symbol for Christ coming to his own, so enjoying and remembering family was still something I wished to pursue somehow.

Even though family togetherness–mingled voices, rumpled Christmas-morning hair, arms touching while sitting four on a couch–couldn’t happen on Christmas, I discovered a few ways to enjoy presence despite that.

If it was the incarnation that was really moving me to celebrate Christmas, I wanted to remember Christ’s birth in a way that involved both flesh and spirit.

First of all, I wanted to sing. “Music is about as physical as it gets,” Anne Lamott writes in Traveling Mercies. “Your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We’re walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it sometimes lets us meet in places we couldn’t get to any other way.” Music can use the body to bring about the mind and spirit’s change, so instead of Grinching, I went to our church’s Christmas service and belted out carols. I sang “Joy to the World” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” while cooking. I hummed along with Neil Young’s version of “What Child Is This?” on Christmas at the Ranch, one of the few Christmas albums we own.

I didn’t go out and buy a Christmas tree (I think in Chicago they cost about as much as my month’s rent), but I did inspire sense of sight and smell by lighting a Christmas candle, displaying Christmas cards, and arranging some ornaments on a bookshelf. It was enough to remind me of the season’s purpose, so it worked.

From this refocused core, I wanted to let my family know that I wished I could be with them. I called them and Skyped with them. I sent them some Orange-flavored coffee from Chicago’s own Orange restaurant and they drank some for Christmas breakfast. I gave them some homemade cranberry applesauce and it became a side-dish for their Christmas dinner. I like the idea that something of substance was there with them, something to sustain the flesh.

It also seemed to make sense that I would be present with the people who were here, either with other people who are in Chicago this Christmas, or just with my husband. For Christmas breakfast, we made crepes. For Christmas dinner, we created the best homemade pizzas imaginable. It was an unconventional Christmas dinner, but why not?  It’s my husband’s favorite meal, and making even classier varieties than usual made the day special.

I wanted to be in Pennsylvania for Christmas. I wanted to be in Florida for New Year’s Day. A few days before Christmas, my in-laws told us to go ahead and buy tickets, even if we couldn’t find a great deal. I got to hear my six-month old niece laugh, and all season long it felt good truly to be where I was, and truly to remember the presence of God, who has come so close.

After a pretty steady stream of short stories, various essays, and some novel development, I was in a place that many call Writer’s Block. I’ve driven down that particular block a few times, seen the various shanties and campsites of other lost, muse-abandoned creatives waiting for their purgatorial moment to pass. What I was experiencing looked nothing like this. But in my determination to figure out why I was not inclined to write, I considered that I might be in a different part of the same neighborhood as Writer’s Block. I started to question if I was really a Writer at all.

Photo by Maggie Stein.

Summer turned to autumn. Leaves turned yellow, orange, red just before the first big snowfall. I headed up to the mountains to help a friend split wood for the oncoming winter and expand his deck. It’s a yearly tradition that gets me out of the city, off the technology, and into simple things. It’s a day of pure, high-altitude, manual labor that requires more endurance than thought. Few words are spoken.

We worked from sunrise to sunset, fingers slowly losing feeling as the light disappeared and the cold filled the air.  The following morning, I had nothing to do but keep my coffee warm and listen to that silence that comes when there is no perpetual humming of cars blazing down concrete streets, no semis jake-braking their diesel engines like the gurgling sigh of a dragon, no sirens of emergency or pursuit. The only noise that time of year in those mountains is wind blowing through pine trees, snowing the Aspen leaves in golden blizzards.

As I listened to that silence I still wondered with an almost grievous angst why my writing seemed to be so dead in the water. I was reading Frederick Buechner’s Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation. It’s a reminiscence of Buechner’s early days, when he was trying to determine if he was a writer or a minister, or if there was such a place for one who is both:

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life is grace.”

Somewhere in the gazing out a massive window on the Collegiate Peaks covered in snow, in letting these words tumble around inside, I “heard” this: “You are a Writer and always will be. You just stepped back to listen for a time before writing again what you hear.”

The anxious questions ceased.

I am like so many: if I spot an interruption on what I believe to be the road to Somewhere, then surely something must be wrong. I will try to force what can’t be forced. In my gazing down the road I expect to see the next key moment, forgetting that they are all key moments.

In all the angst and doubt, all the trying-to-figure-out-where-things-went-awry, it never occurred to me that listening was an option. Listening to hear anew how a story is told, how words play together. Listening to the sound of voice–be it an elderly foreign accent, a little child’s self-musings, a regional dialect with its pauses and short stops. Listening, even, to the noise of everyday life, for that is where texture and characters are shaped. Sometimes there is a legitimate case of Writer’s Block, but what if to simply listen–and not force a thing–is all that is required?

There are plenty of inspirational books and essays out there about the creative process–the kind that make you think you could be the next Wordsworth or Rembrandt. There are even books on the neurological mechanisms of Writer’s Block. There are few that say, “Don’t beat yourself up. Just put the brush, the pen, the camera down…. and listen.” This listening is an art form in itself. How else will the good stories, the kind that speak to the True, ever be heard and, thus, written?

It wasn’t long after that weekend that I ran into the same old friend who asked me again about the latest and greatest words on a page. Instead of conjuring up some frantic cover for anxious unanswered questions, I simply said, “I’m still not writing much if at all. I guess I am listening for a while. Somewhere out of that listening I will write again.”

“Peace begins with a smile.”  -Mother Teresa

“Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.”  -Mark Twain

It seems that humanity has always been enamored with the smile. It is the universal language of good will. From peacemaking to flirting, the smile is an invitation of sorts, to meet in the middle. From the mysterious smile of the Mona Lisa to the brilliant, toothy grin of Julia Roberts, it is captivating.

I found a debate online about the obvious lack of smiles in early photography compared to the flamboyant smiles of today on the covers of American magazines. There are many theories among the smile enthusiasts. The two most reasonable center around the bad dental care in earlier centuries and secondly, that the ostentatious, vainglorious American culture of today idolizes the insincere but beautiful smile on the outside that endeavors to hide the ugly truth within.

I think it’s a little from column A, a little from column B. And both theories have a big miss on the true beauty, the sweet nature, and the compelling pull of an authentic smile.

Mark Stibich, Ph.D, wrote about the top 10 reasons to smile. In summary, he wrote that smiling does 10 incredible things for us: smiling makes us attractive, changes our mood, is contagious, relieves stress, boosts our immune system, lowers blood pressure, releases natural pain killers and seratonin, lifts the face and makes you look younger, makes you seem successful, and helps you stay positive.

I think there is an art to the smile. In the Oxford English Dictionary, art is “the expression of creative skill,” but we all know art is so much more than that. Art is an expression of who we are, what we are wrestling with, what we think. And art never happens without intent; the artist must have discipline or he never really creates.

I noticed recently that a friend of mine has very marked concern lines on his forehead. And I saw that the look of concern was the very first look that came to his face at each and every encounter or discussion. What did I look like when I wasn’t paying attention? What was my go-to face? Concern? Anxiety? Inanity? And what did that say about what was going on underneath? Taking into consideration the things that I had been pondering about the smile, I decided to embark on an experiment. A dangerous one.

For one week, I would smile more intentionally. I would try to make my “resting face” a pleasant one. Not fake, just pleasant. I would make an effort to be more conscious of my facial expression. It actually takes more muscles in the face to frown than to smile, and the wrinkles from smiles are a hundred times more attractive than frowning ones…  So why not give it a whirl?

I must admit, I entered into this with not a little fear and trembling because I live in New York City where anything and everything can and does happen. So this had the potential of becoming an experiment on steroids.

It was an entertaining week to say the least. And it was fun. I felt more aware of life in general because I was trying to create a new habit. I wasn’t just surviving, but living. And watching.

I had a couple comments from Starbucks employees that it was nice to serve someone who was happy. I saw many more people smile around me than I had ever noticed before (evidence to the smile’s contagious nature). I had better customer service at most places that are frantic like McDonald’s and grocery stores. A couple people offered me their seat on the subway when it was crowded (that never happens). And I was more aware of kindnesses shown to me and when they weren’t, I didn’t really care.

And my favorite, funniest moment, was when I was in the grocery store. I was holding an enormous bunch of groceries in my arms because I had made the erroneous judgment that I didn’t really need a basket. As I was getting up to the counter, a man came over and nodded to my groceries and said, “Hi.  How about instead of all that, I take you to lunch?” I looked down at my humorous armful of goodies including a large, unfortunately phallic roll of polenta and stammered with striking wit, “Uh, thanks.”  Then continued on slightly more smoothly with, “I am extremely flattered, but extremely married. But thank you.” He smiled and said, “You just have a great smile, really beautiful. Have a great day.” And I did.

And because I feel that it is a moral imperative to add, my husband didn’t like the polenta. But he did say that I do indeed have a great smile.

The experiment was an interesting success. And I highly recommend it. I abhor inauthentic happiness – but that’s not what I’m talking about. I think the art of the smile is a worthy sort of art form and one that I wish to pursue. I did indeed feel all of the above top 10 reasons to smile.

My husband has a theory that as you age, you lose the capacity to hide who you really are. As I’ve talked with many elderly relatives and friends,it seems there is something to that. So many people fall sharply in the embittered and brittle category, or to the vastly opposite side where their delightfully wrinkled countenances have the extensive history of their smiles written in their face of today. I admire that. I see the peaceful and pleasant face of the ninety-five-year-old that I hope to be one day.