Kari Kopnick

I have always believed that I am terrible at keeping a spiritual practice. Isn’t keeping a spiritual practice sitting on a meditation cushion for the same amount of time every day over and over again? Aren’t you supposed to become enlightened and ethereal. I mean, I always thought maybe your skin starts to glow and you speak with a breathy knowing or something. 

I had a sleepless night last week. Between then and now  I have learned from a beloved teacher about sleepless nights as “Dancing with the Divine”. The things avoided during waking hours come and tap you on the shoulder for their spin. Distractions are gone, regular coping bypassed. Time to dance with what you’ve been running from. 

What I didn’t understand is that Spirit, God, The Divine does not only come to me as a calm, peaceful presence. Nope. Spirit also arrives screaming in my ears making my heart pound hollering “PAY ATTENTION!” 

On this night, because I had no other choice really, I decided to face it. To let all the feelings flow, to experience every flash, every boom, every gut wrenching thing that came over me. Somehow I knew it had to be done. 

I invited it: “Come on in, bring what you’ve got. Here I am.” 

Let’s Dance. 

As the hours passed and I let the feelings flow over me, I also invited Spirit to join me, deep inside my soul. I practiced what I understand to be Centering Prayer, with a storm raging, yes, but still, I was inviting the Great Mystery to accompany me as I weathered the night.  

I did not realize that I was already dancing with the Divine. 

As the storm started to abate to a simple waltz I began to flow through a body prayer a beloved teacher teaches during Spiritual Psychology class. There is a phrase and an action that accompanies each of seven stages of development and healing.
I moved through this body prayer, if only in my mind, over and over “I am grounded. I flow with the cycles of life…” until I fell asleep. 

The next day I was berating myself. If I had a real spiritual practice I would never have had to go through this hellacious night. I would have calmly glided through all of these emotions and quietly set them down as they arose. Why did I not yet have this perfect practice?

And then. And then. And then I realized. I had practiced centering prayer. I had done my body prayer. I may not be the perfect practitioner of seated meditation or Lectio Divina. But I was able to connect with that which is greater than myself. Accompanied by connection with Spirit I had faced the storm. I had faced myself. 

In fact, I had danced with the Divine. 

I am an eclectic spiritual being, or so my spiritual director reminded me a few days later when I told her this story. 

Oh of course. I AM an eclectic. I write prayers on little slips of paper and attach them to a tiny easel and then light a candle to remember. I slip little crystals in my pocket, not that I think they have absolute magic power, but because they help keep my sacred intentions close. I light candles and speak my gratitudes into the day. I touch my heart when I am moved to connect my spirit, mind and body in the moment. I invite the presence of the holy when I am listening for understanding and touch my belly because it’s where I feel most connected to that which is beyond my understanding. I wear the beaded bracelet the founder of my seminary made from beads people brought her from all over the world which she prays over before she creates them and I feel connected.

Not a failure. Not missing the moment of the sacred. No. I am this. I am enough. And I have danced with the Divine. 

They said you were wrong.  They don’t remember doing the thing that hurt you. They wrote the thing, signed the letter, spoke the harmful words. 

You are smashed, ripped open, raw. 

I promise, precious one, you are going to be OK. It’s going to be good, again. No winning, no losing. But a good fierce OK. 

Join me: 

Listen to the rain or windchimes or a slow, gentle drum. 

Taste the sweet honey or the tart berry or the steaming tea with the bracing bergamot.  

Hold your pup or your grandchild. Soak in a hot tub with the good bubble bath, the one you’ve been saving. 

Breathe way down to your toes. Notice that the water in the river right in this moment is out to sea tomorrow. This thing that has your heart will flow on down to the sea, too. I promise. 

Gaze at the flower, or the woven rug or the stars. The sky is so big and we are so small. 

You. You are going to be OK. A good, fierce OK. 

I promise. I promise. I promise. 

Originally published on Chalice Spark, 10/13/16

One page, One day. Move on.
Today is cooler and my chair is a little wet from the dew. The prayer flags flow gently back and forth.

I sit alone, here, but my ancestors are before me. My sister women around me. My animal friends padding around, sniffing and growling at the leaves that skitter off the patio and the thought that there might be a cat across the way.

I can hear a squirrel a few trees over who is unhappy, chirping and clucking, likely because the dogs are perched on this little patio with me. Even here in the middle of the metropolitan desert, nature dominates. There is dirt and many bugs and stray leaves. We smell the earth and feel the fingers of the sun and the silky breath of the breeze on our cheeks. I lift my chin to catch it.

We are here. We are here. We are here.

You are here. You are here.

You are here

and so we may begin.

This morning in my effort to avoid being productive, I circled through my touchstones of life guides on social media. Ann Lamott, Elizabeth Gilbert, I can’t do the Love Warrior anymore but I have found a fresh voice in Elissa Altman. This morning she wrote something just to me and closed with “you are worthy of saving.”

Who me? What? No. Everyone else, yes. Every animal even. But not me. I learned that lesson really well. Not me.

But no. Stop. I am finally getting it. Here, next door to 52, I am starting to learn that “you are worthy of saving” means you. And me. And everyone.

Everyone. And here’s where it gets dicey.

Any leader who thinks that some are more worthy than others is the embodiment of pure evil. EVIL. Even if you are a person without empathy, as science shows us some people are, you might want to notice that any group of folks a leader deems unworthy of existence today can flip in the beat of a heart to your group. To you.

Even if you don’t care about anyone but you and yours, a leader who points at a group and says “them, those people” will, one day, point at YOU.

I know I can’t stop my president’s hate from inspiring mass killing. I know I can’t fix it. But today I can work to let my neighbors who are targeted by this evil know that I see them, I support them, and I am not afraid to say so.

Screw the “to do” list. I’m off to make signs and buy flowers and then I’ll stop by the local places of worship most likely to be impacted today.

Peace be upon you. And you. And me. And all of us.

Amen.

Update: a colleague suggested that leaving anything at a mosque, including flowers, might cause stress today. Agreed. Good advice. But then I heard about a mosque a little north of me who was calling for neighbors to come and stand outside during Friday prayers. So I went. I took goofy pictures to show my concerned family members that there was a crowd and we were all safe and fine, or as safe and fine as our Muslim neighbors. After the service was over a community member brought out lunch for us and some children from the community passed out candy. I share these in the spirit of inviting my friends and neighbors to come out to show our strength. Next time may it be in celebration of good news and not in solidarity with those who are grieving. 

“Um, will this be together?”

This happens to us all the time. Every week. Sometimes more than once a day. Even living just outside of both LA and Seattle hasn’t prevented the head tilt, quick evaluation by baristas, bartenders, servers and doctors. At the coffee shop, grocery store, bar, doctor’s office; people are always asking if my husband and I are together.

I mean, really, it’s my groceries and his? Wouldn’t there be a little bar down between the limes and the bread? Would I be chatting with him so comfortably?  Sometimes we play them a little.

“What him? No way. Creeper, get away from my avocados.”

“Her? I’m not paying for her. She’s been following me around for like 30 years!”

It’s our own multicultural teaching moment. I don’t like to humiliate people, but make them flush with embarrassment a little by holding their bias up for all to see? Oh yeah.

Once, we were out to dinner with all the families from our swim team. We had driven all day from Seattle to Idaho for the big regional swim meet. The kids had their own table and the parents were at one big, ranch style table. The server was matching up couples to prepare our bills; I knew we were in trouble. Tommy’s mom was Asian. Even though she was seated all the way down from us and across the table, her bill was paired with my husband’s. There was no way in our server’s mind that the Asian man and woman were not together. No way.

We have been very lucky as a family. Our health has been good, we have always had enough to eat and a safe place to live. We come from humble beginnings with little assist on the financial launch in life, but my husband is the hardest working man I know, so we’ve done OK.

We have not, yet anyway, had our house vandalized or been told to leave a neighborhood. We moved to the West Coast because in Minnesota we were always the diversity crew on the block, and people would literally turn around to stare at us in the grocery store. Now that our kids are gone, we mostly keep to ourselves. We know the other dogs in the neighborhood and their people, and we wave to the couple who lives next to us. People around us know we’re together.

It’s a funny thing. I don’t believe that a barista is making an intentionally racist statement by totalling my husband’s coffee without looking past him to the white woman standing there. I don’t. But it is a little of our systemic racism poking at us all the time. Sometimes as he orders I’ll touch his shoulder or hand as code for “we’re together” to save time and avoid the hassle. It’s always present for us.

What I wish was that we didn’t have these deep scripts that play out about who goes together and where race fits in our lives. But we do. Me, too. I work hard to root them out, but it is in the air I breathe and the water I drink. It’s deep.

Luckily, I do have this fine partner in life who claims me over and over again, even when the bartender tries to make me pay for my own drink.

I know. Another voice reacting to the ringing bell of depression and death by suicide. Who needs it?

I don’t know. Maybe someone. Maybe you.

Maybe me?

I live with depression. I know you might, or maybe you know someone who does. It’s a real thing. I am not always depressed, but I always know it’s there. I am no mental health expert, but so far anyway, I am an expert at living with this thing for a long, long time. So I’m going to say my few true things.

There are gifts in being a depressed person. It’s hard to see but I believe this is true. Our people, the depressed ones, write the best books and music and create soaring art. We feel the world so deeply that when we can convey this depth, it moves mountains and hearts and minds. I have a depth of understanding and compassion that comes from living on the edge of meaning. It’s a part of me I treasure.

Depression is a liar. It’s a dirty rotten f*ucking liar. It will tell you that your children/spouse/parents/friends/coworkers will be so much better without you. Get a thing that reminds you that this is NOT true. I have a spoon bracelet with a Steinbeck quote hammered into it by a dear person. My friend has a locket with a line of a hymn tucked in it. A physical thing that I have with me helps me remember. Or get a dog. I can never believe, even at my darkest, that my dog will be happy I am gone.

Therapy can help. I did a stint of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that helped. But I’ve also had therapists that were……less than great. If your therapist isn’t a good fit, try again.

Write. Every morning for 10 minutes. Just write. Get a pen that flows and paper that feels smooth (or a random IKEA pencil and a sticky note) and just sit someplace soft and write. During one particularly low point, a poetry therapist told me to just DO this every morning  and I did. I listened. Julia Cameron’s morning pages are a good format, too. There is no product coming from this, it’s just a way to skim off the nonsense that dances around at the top of my mind.

Try everything you hear about. There was one time I could *see* from outside that I was depressed and making terrible choices. So I grabbed every piece of advice that floated by. Take vitamin D3? OK. Exercise for 30 minutes a day? Sure, if walking slowly on the treadmill while watching home improvement shows counts. Eat green leafy food? Yuck, but alright. My depressed tastebuds trend toward tots, not greens. Leave the evaluations about whether it will do you any good or not out of it. Just try.

This one is weird, but it works for me: do one thing. Like…clean the sink. There may be dirty dishes piled on the counter and a floor that desperately needs to be swept, but if I can use cleanser and a green scrubbie and really clean the sink, I feel better. Or fold one basket of laundry. Not all of them, just one. It’s like one little clear spot opens in my brain and sometimes that clarity grows from there.

Give the people in your life a little head tilt/sideways glancing look. Who else is like this? Who in your life would nod and smile a sad half-smile and understand that sometimes you are not quite OK? Tell them. Assemble your team. I think it helps to know we’re not alone.

Do the things. Take your meds. Shush the haters. Wait. Sleep. Give it a day. Please.

You’re not alone. I’m already here.

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To me family is everything. I hear that Gen Xers, as a group, tend to feel this way. Somehow the 60s and 70s were not focused on family and so between our tinfoil covered TV dinners and the reruns of “Love, American Style” apparently society forgot about the kids.

I don’t know if that is totally true for me. As a young child I went to work everyday with my mom. We drove from the house-farm suburbs of Bloomington, Minnesota to just south of downtown Minneapolis every morning. I remember eating triangles of cinnamon toast as I slid across the backseat while she zoomed around the city lakes. She ran a large daycare center in what had once been a posh hotel, taking over the former restaurant and beauty salon. We kids found pink plastic curler picks in the cracks and crevices of one room for years.

I know I didn’t like sharing my mom with 60 other kids. But I did get to invite a friend to wash-up back in the kitchen sink before lunch, so there were perks.

Long before I had my own family, I knew that I wanted to put family in the center of my life. I was lucky. Because give or take a year or two, I did.

I had to work in one way or another the whole time my sons were growing up, but we were able to put in huge amounts of time together, sometimes driving to a dozen activities every afternoon, but I felt like I was able to center family and pour my mother-soul into the raising of my family.

But then, they left. They had the audacity to grow up and leave. OK, sure, there was some time between an undergrad degree and grad school when I got a few bonus months with one. And there was a fabulous gap year before a four year college for another. We’re not done, of course, maybe they will come back and share a house like most of the world does with their family. I will not complain if that happens, nope.

Still, right now, all three are thousands of miles away from me in places where they live and I don’t. My heart sometimes feels like the silly putty we used to press on the comics in the newspaper, to lift an image, way back in the 70s. I remember pulling the silly putty to stretch the Family Circus.. Eventually, it would snap.

A few days ago I was feeling so far from my sons: it has been four months since I’ve seen the one farthest away. But it was OK, because it was family Skype night. We don’t even use Skype but that’s still what we call it. We set a time and send a video conference invitation, and then I get to see the bits of my heart all collected on the computer screen.

No, it’s not the same as being together. It’s no substitution for cooking food that they will eat and big squeezing hugs. But this week I felt especially lonely for them. So as people popped in contained in little squares on my screen I felt like I could breathe again. Together.

I get to see their houses or apartments a little. A new map on the wall? A cat strolls by. One got a haircut, one has hair long enough that he now needs a hair band. There are inside jokes and birth order tickling of the childhood grudges. We laugh and laugh. As much as we try to be done without taking too much time from the young people, we often go two hours.

This puts me back together. In a million ways. I’m sure we will find out that millennials and Gen Z or whatever they’ll be called are damaged in their own way, too. We probably over programmed them and fed them way too much fast food. But I am thankful that I was so lucky and had a family and took time to notice and savor the busy years.

I’m also thankful that they grew up and will still set aside time, every week, to talk to me.

Long ago in a different time, I served on a board. Part of my charge was to plan a professional education day for a bunch of religious educators but for some reason the budget had been completely cut in the cycle before I came on the board. So, plan a big educational day for 100 people at a convention hotel, but with no funds.

OK.

After some conversation we decided on the theme of “Interfaith Work” and I set about recruiting a panel of experts.

One of the ideas for a speaker was a woman who I could hardly imagine just picking up a phone and calling. She was a powerful woman in this denomination and was a part of the the Interfaith Alliance working on their youth programming (Leadership Education Advancing Democracy and Diversity) I knew if I could get her to speak pro bono, our shoestring program would be OK.

She agreed almost before I finished asking and told me she was coming to Seattle, where I lived, and in her words “would have wheels” so could meet with me to talk further about the event.

I assembled a panel and when the day arrived I took the three Interfaith experts out to lunch. No time for chit chat, these three women were off talking about overcoming hegemony to promote peace and justice among people of different faiths over the salad.

As we prepared for the program, the three experts at the front of the room, me in the “Oprah” role wandering the audience with a microphone, I realized that I might have to do the hardest thing of my career and actually interrupt Denny Davidoff.

But the truth was, Denny asked as as many questions of the other two speakers (Hannah McConnaughay from the Interfaith Youth Core and Kathleen Carpenter from Mecklenburg Ministries) as she was asked. She was a force, for sure, but it required no tricky moderating. Denny was more interested in what the others had to share than in what she had to offer.

This was almost a decade ago, but it stuck with me. Denny looked people in the eye, listened. She held back nothing, and moved forward with full faith that the toughest troubles in the world could be overcome if we just kept working on them.

Today I watched Denny’s memorial service on a livestream from Westport, CT.

And then I turned to my homework in Interfaith Studies at The Interfaith Chaplaincy where I am working toward ordination as a community minister and chaplain. If my faith tradition called on me to take the name of beloved saint as a symbol of entering my religious life, I know what I would choose.

Seeds are planted. Ideas stick.

May I remember the moments and the people who change me and move me on to the life I am meant to live. I bless Denny’s spirit as she leaves this world and send her love forward and onward with the very work I do.

Amen.