A LISTENING LIFE

While I sojourned in northeast Georgia last week-end, I spent an evening reading A Listening Life by Tracy Balzer, one of the latest books published by Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado. This practical guide to deepening the spiritual life reminds me of Evelyn Underhill’s books about becoming an everyday mystic by practicing “the art of union with Reality.” Through accounts about personal experiences and forays into monasteries, discoveries in art, nature, and poetry, periods of listening and meditating, Tracy Balzer presents a convincing case for those in contemporary society who want to find God and a more peaceful life. She advocates that spiritual seekers should develop an attentiveness to sacred and wonder-filled experiences and should pursue the practice of listening as a holy calling.
“Wonder-filled experiences alert us to transcendence, reminding us that God works co-creatively within us,” Balzer tells us in a chapter entitled “Wonder,” in which she explains the terms “general revelations” as anything in the created universe that reveals God’s truth to us,” and “special revelations” as “revelations that refer to Holy Scripture.” She explores general revelations with examples of natural wonders such as humpback whales singing to each other, the sight of goldfinches, visits to the Cascade Mountains, citing Psalm 8 as an articulation of the notion of wonder: “When I consider your heavens,/ the work of your fingers,/the moon and the stars,/which you have set in place,/what is man that you are mindful of him,/the son of man that you care for him?”

In a chapter on “Illumination,” Balzer gives an example regarding this concept of revealing a grand mystery in an unusual anecdote about her daughter, Kelsey, who at eight had accompanied Balzer to visit her great-grandparents in an Oklahoma nursing home. Missing her daughter, Balzer finds Kelsey engaged with an elderly woman in a wheelchair, looking intently into the woman’s eyes. As Balzer watches, she experiences the impression that Kelsey’s face is actually glowing as she talks to the woman–“ it appeared that she was wearing the face of Jesus as she tenderly loved this woman, a stranger…this was a simple experience of illumination, an illustration of the ways God reaches us through otherwise ordinary events…” Balzer also uses the example of lectio divina as a way of receiving illumination, citing Jan Johnson's use of the word “shimmer” when talking about the way Scripture catches our attention and opens our eyes and ears to Bible passages.

I particularly liked the chapter on “Possessions,” since I have been reading two biographies lately that feature outstanding figures in American history who have disregarded the ideas of “ownership” in favor of following their vocations at all costs–one is the biography of the scientist George Washington Carver, the man who discovered the various uses of the peanut; the other is a biography about the poet Robert Francis who lived in near-poverty while pursuing his career as a poet. I was interested in the example Balzer employed to illustrate the idea that we should shed many of our possessions. She described a grassroots movement initiated by blogger Dave Bruno who diminished his personal possessions to one hundred items and formed something called “The 100 Thing Challenge,” a movement in which people limit their material possessions so they can free up physical, mental, and spiritual space and are empowered to live more joyful and thoughtful lives.

The chapter on “Humility” and Balzer’s experience as a scholar-in-residence at St. Benedict’s monastery in St. Joseph, Minnesota arrested my attention as I worship at a convent where the Sisters follow the Benedictine Rule. During Balzer’s time at St. Benedict’s monastery she experienced the love and inclusiveness of Benedictine hospitality when the Sisters welcomed her and others “as Christ” and learned about the kind of humility essential to a “listening life.” Balzer quotes Thomas Kelly to illustrate the concept of humility as “the disclosure of the consummate wonder of God.”

In A Listening Life, Balzer achieves a spiritual message which Evelyn Underhill advocates in her famous Practical Mysticism: “the change of attention, which enables you to perceive a truer universe; the deliberate rearrangement of your ideas, energies, and desires in harmony with that which you have seen–that a progressive uniformity of life and experience is secured to you, and you are defended against the dangers of an indolent and useless mysticality…”

Tracy Balzer’s special charism is her teaching about spiritual formation: that we must become listeners–by paying attention, looking for spiritual illuminations, developing persistence and an authentic sacramental life, dispossessing ourselves of too many worldly goods, and developing compassion and humility–so that with “open hearts, minds, eyes, and ears, we can continue to seek the Truth, knowing it will be given to us. And it will set us free.”

You can order A Listening Life by Tracy Balzer online from pinyonpublishing.com.

A DIALOGUE OF APPLE POEMS

With the advent of leaves turning gold and orange and the first hints of fall temperatures this past week-end, I felt a pull toward apple country where growers harvest the fall apples grown in the hills and valleys near Ellijay, Georgia. This town is known as the Apple Capitol, a place where apples actually “birthed” the agri-tourism business in northeast Georgia. When we started our Saturday tour of the orchards, the roads became congested with tourists seeking their share of 600,000 bushels of apples harvested near Ellijay.

Although October 8-9 and October 15-16 are the official dates for the Georgia Apple Festival at the Ellijay Lions Club Fairgrounds, the orchards bustled with apple tasters and pickers this past week-end. September harvests bring in September Wonders, Red and Golden Delicious apples, Rome Beauties and Mutsus, a few of twenty-five varieties that have already been picked and bagged. We sampled apples at R&A Orchards owned by Andy and Jennifer Futch and their four children, a family that carries on the apple-growing tradition begun by Leonard and Della Payne who planted their first trees in Gilmer County. This orchard has sixty acres of apple trees and approximately ten acres of peaches and nectarines, which will be harvested in June.

As my oldest daughter, Stephanie, lately follows a strict diet but can have an apple a day, I asked the orchard store clerk to ship twenty Gala apples to Stephanie's home in New Iberia, Louisiana. The young woman who prepared the shipping label asked me if I wanted to put a message on the package, and I told her to just say that I was sending something to encourage Stephanie's healthy loss of twenty more pounds and to sign it ‘Mama.’” I turned to leave, then added, “Put ‘Love, Mama’ on the card.” The young woman smiled at me . “I was going to write that anyway,” she said. “You must like your mother,” I replied. “Oh, I love my mother,” she said. “There are three of us children, and none of us live farther than five miles away from her.” Her sentiments made me lonesome for my own daughters, Stephanie and Elizabeth, who live in Louisiana and California, respectively.The young woman’s comments about her family depict the typical attitude of tightly-knit families who live in apple country, and their friendliness adds to the area’s charm.

The town of Ellijay derives its name from an Indian word meaning “earth green there,” a name befitting the forests in the Springer Mountain area of the Appalachian Trail. Cherokee Indians lived in the Ellijay area until they were removed in 1838 and sent to Oklahoma via the Trail of Tears. The town boasts Oscar Poole’s Pig Hill of Fame which displays 3,000 blue, white, and yellow plywood pigs on a hillside near Poole’s Bar-BQ restaurant.

The sight of the apple in all its forms – the apple itself, apple jelly, apple pie, apple butter, and apple cider -- brought up the memory of an apple poem written by poet Robert Francis whom I heard read in Amherst, Massachusetts back in the 80’s. Francis entitled the poem “Remind Me of Apples,” the last stanza of which reads:

“In the long haze of dog days, or by night,
When thunder growls and prowls but will not go
Or come, I lose the memory of apples.
Name me the names, the goldens, russets, sweets,
Pippin and blue pearmain and seek no further
And the lost apples on forgotten farms
And the wild pasture apples of no name…” Robert Francis

This memory caused another poem to surface – a poem I wrote after I heard Francis read about his apples.  It appeared in my chapbook, Afternoons in Oaxaca, and is entitled “Robert Francis Reads On His 85th (Jones Library, Amherst, Massachusetts, August 12, 1986).” The following are the last two verses of this poem:

“Robert Francis placed a finger
with far-reaching nail
against his downy chin,
a forgotten pasture of stubble,
and waited to shake the apple tree,
to cause the sudden fall of fruit.
People stood up to give him ovation,
the air rained apples,
enchanted poems,
Robert Frost came out of the night
and peeled a deep russet one.

That evening of celebration,
Francis reminded me
apples made poems,
light filtering through tree limbs,
a harmony of red fruit
rendered just ripe,
are some men’s gifts.
He reminded me
when doubting the mind’s retreat
into its own falsity,
poets are more ancient
than scars on a library stair rail,
flesh made word, word made flesh,
not metaphor and mood,
but vowels,
crisp as fine apples dropped,
broadcast to heal
disturbances of spirit.”

A LOUISIANA FURNITURE ARTIST

A few months ago, the photograph of a reproduction of a Louisiana Creole table crafted by my son-in-law, Brad Romero, appeared in an article about an old home featured in Country Living, a national magazine. I know about the table’s beauty firsthand because I also have a reproduction of this table in my living room here at Sewanee. I was dismayed to see, however, that Brad’s name appeared nowhere in the article as the artisan who had built this handsome table. I’m publishing a photograph of the table and its creator, along with this puff about Brad’s artistic abilities.

I published a blog about Brad several years ago, and this is a second acknowledgement about my handsome son-in-law of Spanish/Italian descent who owns a furniture restoration business in New Iberia, Louisiana. In addition to the complete restoration of broken furniture, Brad has been turning out reproductions, carefully crafted and refined, that now stand in the rooms of several old plantation homes in Louisiana and more humble cottages like my own. His work fashioning furniture of cypress, pine, oak, walnut, cherry, and Philippine mahogany is a labor of love. Show him a piece of wood and he’s enthralled – long boards of scavenged wood are stacked from floor to ceiling in his shop, aptly named Restorit.

My daughter, Stephanie, gave Brad a wonderful book last Christmas entitled Furnishing Louisiana: Creole and Acadian Furniture, 1735-1835, which is a study of early eighteenth-mid-nineteenth century Louisiana furniture, during a time when mass production wasn’t on the horizon, and furniture making involved artisans of French, Anglo-American, Caribbean, Canadian and African descent who hand-crafted their work. Brad particularly admires and reproduces furniture of Creole and Acadian design, and while we celebrated Christmas, he scrutinized the photographs of armoires, tables, and beds in Furnishing Louisiana: Creole and Acadian Furniture, noting dimensions and other facets of the furniture. He has extraordinary visual perception and can look at a photograph of a piece of furniture, then reproduce it faithfully, finishing the furniture so that it appears as a finer piece than the photograph.

Regarding the Acadian furniture that Brad also loves, the early Acadians furnished their homes minimally with a few beds, storage chests, one table, two or three chairs and constructed it of a wood that he particularly likes to use – cherry wood. Later, the Acadians used cypress, which was a more available and softer wood, in their furniture making, and only the very wealthy Acadians had cherry wood, according to Carl Brasseaux, noted Louisiana historian. Some of these finer pieces of Louisiana Creole furniture are found in old plantation homes and in museums in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Brad also builds armoires, including miniature armoires after the style of construction in the early nineteenth century. He researches books and magazines and visits old plantation homes to view these pieces before designing them. In Furnishing Louisiana: Creole and Acadian Furniture, an interesting note on armoires and their durability reveals that a cypress armoire actually survived the 1927 Mississippi River flood which inundated many homes in south Louisiana. Brad achieves the same kind of sturdiness in his armoires.

Other products of Brad’s work include the beautiful wood jewelry boxes he constructs and frequently donates to auctions at Solomon House and other charitable and business organizations around New Iberia. The boxes, constructed of mahogany, cherry, whatever wood attracts Brad at the time, have auctioned for $500-$700. Many of them have become part of a private collection owned by an Avery Island resident.

I often tell the story about how Brad can spot authentic antiques in stalls of flea markets or furniture stores that advertise antiques. When he accompanied me on a foray for antique pieces to furnish our Sewanee cottage, I pointed out an old china closet in a Cowan furniture store, and he said firmly, “just leave that right where it is.” Most of the time his discerning eyes see more “leavings” than “findings,” and we discover very few pieces that satisfy his refined taste. He’s definitely a purist when we're antique hunting.

In his spare time (?), Brad restores old guitar and violin cases, patches up broken furniture that takes on an expensive appearance once his expert hands have restored it, and has a waiting list of work to be done which projects through a year at a time. He’s the sole proprietor, craftsman, and advertisement for Restorit, and I look forward to seeing what kind of Louisiana piece he has built when I return to New Iberia next month.

If you want a glimpse of the work of an artist and craftsman who restores fine furniture and creates reproductions of unique furniture representing Louisiana traditions, Brad’s shop is located on St. Peter Street in New Iberia, Louisiana. His work, c’est magnifique!