Author: lpatangan

Love: More Transformative than Wrinkle Cream

lpatangan

A few years ago, my husband and I started volunteering for Meals on Wheels. He chauffeurs me along the route and completes the minimally required paperwork while I pop in and out of the car, giving away meals that I didn’t have to cook to people in need. I enjoy talking with the clients and petting random cats that loiter around doorsteps.  It’s an easy breezy way to serve.

Recently, our route changed and I had new people to deliver to. While my husband waited in the car, I made my way through the maze of residences at a retirement home and hesitantly knocked on the first client’s door. I was exuberantly welcomed by an elderly lady who invited me inside. Almost instantly, she told me she loved me. I figured maybe she was confused and thought I was someone else.  But she insisted she loved me.

I saw a picture of a cat on her wall and commented on it. Seeing how much I liked cats, she introduced me to hers with a grandmotherly warmth. We talked for a few minutes about how she was feeling. She asked me for a hug, and I left. Afterwards, I ran back to the car and excitedly told my husband how she loved me. “She was just like Jesus,” I said. “I didn’t even have to do anything. She just loved me.”

What struck me most about this wasn’t how rare it is to meet someone who exudes such love. Nor was it the reminder that invariably, when we help others, we get back more than we give. It wasn’t even that she’s a kindred cat lover, validating my theories that cat (and dog) people are the nicest people. While all of those things were in and of themselves significant, it was how much her kindness underscored the simplicity of our purpose — to love others as we wished to be loved, that most struck me.

The day before I met her, I was feeling angsty and existential about life. I questioned what I should be doing and lamented all I had not done. I longed for significance, thinking it would come from some new endeavor or challenge. Yet this elderly woman showed me the impact that we can have on others through the generosity of love.  And, while intellectually I already knew this, it’s a different thing altogether to encounter it. She made me feel closer to God by reminding me of his extravagant and unconditional love. I went to offer physical sustenance to someone in need and was fed spiritually by the experience. God uses all of us to comfort, console, and share his compassion if we let him. She reminded me how much these mercies can transform lives – not necessarily because our circumstances change but because love changes us.

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Losing Time is the Best Way to Bloom

lpatangan

I love to work in the yard. It makes me feel like the actor Edward Norton in the 1996 legal thriller, Primal Fear, even though that had nothing to do with gardening. Norton’s character, “Aaron/Roy” appears to have multiple personality disorder. As such, his attorney, actor Richard Gere, uses this diagnosis as Aaron/Roy’s defense in his murder trial.

You see, Aaron/Roy would “lose time,” and not remember important things such as whether or not he killed someone. I’m leaving a lot out because who can really remember 1996? The movie had a shocking and brilliant ending that fooled both Richard Gere and me.

Anyway, working in the yard doesn’t make me feel like a manipulative, sociopathic murderer with extra personalities but it is a way that I lose time. What’s remarkable about the lost time is that by forgetting so much of the outside world I somehow regain a truer sense of self.

In fact, over the years my viewpoint on plants has diverged into that of a whole new person.  I used to think plants were boring. My mom was always buying them and I couldn’t understand why if she wanted something colorful and pretty, she didn’t just purchase new lipstick. After all, why buy a flower when you can be the flower, so to speak?

It was a small kalanchoe from the grocery store that changed everything for me. It was a darling little plant with deep glossy scalloped leaves and clusters of tiny yellow flowers that were so perky I couldn’t help but want to protect it. Weeks turned into months and months into years and almost two decades later I still have that pretty plant. I have rooted it and multiplied it the way Jesus did when he miraculously multiplied the fishes and loaves, only I had to use dirt for my miracle. I potted clippings and gifted them to friends. Along the way, I became so knowledgeable about plants that I walk around Ace Hardware reciting the names of each flower I pass. I include fast facts about them that I have memorized over years of perusing those rectangular plastic inserts that list plant care instructions. Of course, I don’t do this out loud because that seems like something Edward Norton’s character would do and I hope to never need a lawyer, even one as handsome as Richard Gere.

Still, there’s something primal about gardening. It strips away all of the striving and securing; achieving and acquiring; materialism and mattering; that consumes so many of us. Those pursuits grow feelings of unworthiness, doubt, and insecurity. Even the lowly and despised weed has no time for such foolishness. There’s no pretension in the dirt — only promise. Everything is stripped down to necessity and what’s left is remarkably beautiful.

Perhaps it’s the deciduous plants, which after the long winter months sit like undressed skeletons waiting to be covered in the glory of new life that most inspire me.  To someone such as my former rather-buy-a-lipstick-self, it’s easy to see these plants for what they lack – the ways in which they too aren’t good enough. Yet watching the slow sprout of these perennials unlikely reemergence reminds me that even after seasons of desolation, loneliness, betrayal, and neglect which are a primal part of our human experience, we too can bloom again.

We don’t need to feel shamed by our vulnerability during these seasons of austerity. If we allow it, our emptiness exposes a different kind of beauty. It makes others want to care for us — not because we are incapable or weak but because God’s mercy is primal too. It motivates us to do the hard work of love so someone else can grow in its light.

In gardening and in life, this growth doesn’t happen on our timeline. While the world has taught us to want instant and now, meaningful change is often subtle and slow. The truly beautiful things in life aren’t manufactured. They exist in their own time defying expectations, demands, and worldly limitations, which are both too finicky and finite. Watching this transformation in nature is like witnessing the miracle that’s waiting to unfold in all of us. Only, we need less dirt and sunshine and more love and compassion to obtain our new life.

Gardening allows us to get to the root of what matters most. It reminds us of what we need to keep and what we need to shed. It shows us the places that need to die in order for something better to grow in its place. The miracle of so much clarity coming out of the dirt is perhaps its own kind of twisty Hollywood ending.  Only in this version, you get to bloom.

Hi all~ Happy Spring! Whether you like to garden or not, most of us can relate to what it’s like to experience seasons of desolation. With God, these times make us stronger and more beautiful. I try to remember that when I feel like an exposed stick poking up from the earth with no idea how I can possibly become anything else. Have faith. The becoming is the best part. ~ Love, Lara

P.S. — These are my hydrangeas from last summer. I have a serious addiction and last time I counted I had over 40 hydrangeas! (Not counting the one I bought last week!) 

P.S.S. — I would love to see your garden pics!

 

Give the Hope of Unrelenting Love

lpatangan

Growing up in Florida I never had occasion to ice skate, but like many kids in my genre of coolness, I often went to the skating rink. I couldn’t skate backward or couples skate (well, maybe I could have but no one asked me to). Still, I loved skating under the disco lights to the music of bands like Queen, The Bee Gees, and Gloria Gaynor.  It made me feel as if I was going places even if it was only in an endless circle.

Decades later, I sometimes still feel like I’m going in an endless circle. Only it doesn’t feel as cool anymore.

This feels especially true in parenting. Loops and loops around the carpool lane; circular conversations that make my head spin; and the ongoing dream-killing of telling my precious children no.

No, and no, and H-E-double hockey sticks no. Circle and repeat. Sometimes I would go to bed feeling dizzy and drained and very much unlike Gloria Gaynor whose anthem “I Will Survive” obviously doesn’t apply to parents of teenagers. It was about as much fun as tripping on my roller skate shoelaces and falling on the seat of my Gloria Vanderbilt jeans knowing that I would be sitting out the couple’s slow skate yet again.

I had not skated in decades until one Christmas several years ago. We took our kids overseas for their first time; landing in London early Christmas day. We attended a beautiful mass that morning at Westminster Cathedral and roamed the city’s cold and quiet streets all afternoon. That evening we went to an open-air Christmas Market in Hyde Park. They had giant paper mâché art, games, rides, roasted chestnuts, yummy-smelling confections, and vendors who sold fake Burberry scarves. It was magical.

They also had ice skating.

I was surprised when my son agreed to ice skate with me. My son, who so often seemed distant, so annoyed with my attempts to cajole conversation, and so frustratingly far away from the easy carefree boy I once knew so well, said he would skate. I could end the story here because I feel certain his willingness to skate with his mama was a Christmas miracle. Read more →

Gratitude for it All

lpatangan

With images of glossy bronze turkeys, fine china, and smiley, happy kinfolk who like each other, Thanksgiving can appear an unchanging stalwart of tradition — if not a bit impossible to replicate. It’s the one holiday that refuses to change more than a slight wobble in the menu. With imagery that perfect, why ask it to? Yet my own memories of Thanksgiving have weathered as much change as a barnyard pen exposed to the seasons of life.

My earliest memories of Thanksgiving have nothing to do with food or fancy cutlery but of me repeatedly singing the nursery rhyme “Ten Little Indians” to my Granny. The crinkles around her corn-flower blue eyes outlined a mysterious mix of tears and joy as she laughed and asked me to sing it yet again. I didn’t quite understand the teary-eyed laughter but I knew it to be good and I sang with gusto.

While it’s been almost 30 years since her passing, I still hear the rhythmic beat of that song drumming in my head bringing me a contended peace that reminds me that the world needs our unique song and listening to others is an act of love that speaks volumes.

I remember the enchanting thrill of sliding down a hill of dead grass on castoff cardboard boxes with my cousins and siblings. The Florida hill was hardy high but we were on top of the world inherently knowing that happiness isn’t determined by what we have but who we have by our side through life’s ups and downs.

Thanksgivings weren’t all downhill on cardboard boxes and songs about numbers and Native Americans, there was also the Thanksgiving after my parents separated when we ate a not so traditional dinner in a dark restaurant which felt sober and sad. I learned that life doesn’t always look the way it’s supposed to or turn out to plan, but practicing mercy towards ourselves and others during difficult times can be a comforting expression of hope that is its own kind of gratitude.

I recall one Thanksgiving when I was pregnant with not only my first son but also all of the hopes and fears that accompany motherhood. Being so close to delivery underscored how the very nature of life teeters on the precipice of change. This Thanksgiving Day we will celebrate that baby’s 23rd birthday; another reminder not only of life’s passing but of the bounty of blessings that fill our years making ordinary, everyday moments some of our most cherished memories. Read more →

Spooky: Challenging Perception

lpatangan

Every October the word spooky rises like a ghost to the forefront of my vocabulary. Its a month-long torment to my family that brings me uncanny delight. I draw the word out like the two vowels are careening around a hairpin turn until they crash into each other with a high-pitched yelp. It’s about as much fun as my middle-aged self can muster without inducing a medical event.

In reality, I’m a fraidy cat. Roller coasters terrify me. I dread flying. Driving in heavy rain is panic-inducing. And, always, I think someone is going to steal me at the gas station. So, I don’t favor the word spooky because it’s frightening. To me, the word is fanciful like bats fluttering wild and reckless under the veil of the moon’s glow.

It makes me realize how much perspective can change our point of view.

No one changed perspectives more than Jesus. It was unprecedented. Although a king, he was born humbly in a stable. He didn’t seek the finest things but the most broken people.  He knew not only that sinners could be redeemed but how glorious their redemption would be. Jesus didn’t come to rule; he came to weed. He came to pick through the detritus of jealousy, greed, judgment, and selfishness so that we could fully bloom. His gentleness, his mercy, and his unconditional love for every single person are still radical all these eons since his own death and resurrection. His teachings and his example remind us to challenge our perspectives.

With even a small shift in perspective, we can better understand other points of view. We can be more tolerant, patient, and gentle. We can be less skeptical giving ourselves and our neighbor infinite mercies. We can believe in the power we have to affect change in this world through even the smallest acts of kindness. We can look through a different lens and ask ourselves where our perception is clouding our vision. We can either see through eyes of condemnation or compassion and whatever we choose is exactly what we will find.

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We Can do Better for Women and Children

lpatangan

It feels impossible these days to discuss hard things. We’ve become so comfortable aligning ourselves with the same point of view that we’re sometimes hostile to listening to others. It reminds me of the seemingly innocuous playground game Red Rover I played as a child.  One team calls out a player from the other team, and that player tries to run through the other team’s arms to break the chain.

Firm and rigid, no one wants to bend.  Other points of view get plowed over or knocked down. It’s dirty and messy. People get hurt. Saddest of all, it makes us forget a fundamental truth about our humanity – that we belong to each other. In a primal sense, there is no other side.

Nowhere does division seem more obvious than the contentious issue of abortion rights.

This November, Floridians will vote on Amendment 4 which the ballot summary states “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.”

The language of this amendment might appear to put limitations on abortion as it states that a “health care provider” is required to determine if an abortion is necessary to protect the mother’s “health.” However, a healthcare provider is not synonymous with a licensed medical doctor, and the broad term “health” also includes, as determined by the courts, the mental health of the mother.

While the seriousness of mental health issues should never be downplayed, this amendment makes no mention of how significant these “health” issues must be. Presumably, any mother seeking an abortion has some level of anxiety as to her condition. As it’s written, it is hard to imagine any instance in which an abortion wouldn’t be allowed under Amendment 4. It essentially allows abortions on babies who could survive outside of the womb for health concerns that may be treatable and temporary.

Currently, Florida law requires parental consent for minors to have an abortion. Receiving “notification” significantly dilutes the existing requirement of parental consent, making abortion the only medical decision for which parents have no say. Considering the epidemic mental health crisis of our youth, Amendment 4 puts minors in the precarious position of making a pivotal life decision without a loved one to help navigate how their decision may affect their emotional well-being. This is a dangerous precedent and an infringement on the rights of parents that is not in the best interest of our children. Read more →

Lesson Learned: Education Is About More Than Good Grades

lpatangan
The Sisters from Guardian Catholic Schools (Sister Susan is sitting next to me and my sweet mother-in-law.) I was nervous about hosting them because it meant cooking but they were so entertaining (and even gracious about my black chicken!)

As a student, if I had a good report card my parents would let me order whatever I wanted at Dairy Queen, instead of the standard five Dilly Bars for $1 my family always got. While picking something from the big menu was exciting, I realized that as extravagant as banana splits sound, the bananas are a mushy nuisance that distracts from the ice cream.

I decided the smart kids could have them and I moved on with my mediocre grades and discounted Dilly Bar.

The past few years, I’ve been a tutor at the Guardian Catholic School. While I had some experience as a substitute teacher, I was hesitant to take on this volunteer role because I didn’t want to be the reason a struggling student slipped farther behind. In short — I didn’t want to fail.

I knew failure as a student. In third grade, my struggle with math began and it peaked when I failed ninth-grade algebra. I remember the pleading eyes of teachers and tutors after they would explain a lesson. It seemed like they believed if they stared at me long and hard enough, I would understand how to reduce a fraction or cross multiply or find the square root.

Instead, I would just nod at them with a weak, embarrassed smile; too self-conscious from their intense gazing to think of math at all.

Sister Susan Reineck who runs the afterschool tutoring program at Guardian is nothing like that. She’s soft-spoken and encouraging. I’ve watched her teach. She doesn’t rush students or shame them. She’s patient and calm, and starts where the students are; not where they should be.

I’ve benefited from her instruction on ways to approach teaching and am awed by how capable she is and how capable she makes others feel. I sometimes wonder if I would have struggled so much in math if I had someone as patient and resourceful as Sister Susan teaching me.

When I tutor, I try to be mindful of my own negative experiences. I don’t correct every mispronounced word. I try to come up with fun or creative ways to explain different meanings of words and the emotions they connotate. Almost always, I show her pictures of my pets or tell a funny story about my life. We talk about our families, her best friend, places she has visited, and where she wants to attend high school.

We write summaries of the pages we read, and for weeks we practiced a speech she was assigned in one of her classes — writing it, rewriting, and learning to project her soft-spoken voice to the back of the room where I sat cheering. Once, I read her a column I’d written that appeared in the newspaper and she seemed in awe. Read more →

Wisdom of the Ages: Grandparents

lpatangan

Happy Summer! ~ I wrote this post last summer and I’m just now posting it. So I’m happy to report that my hydrangeas are having their best year ever despite the heat and last year’s questionable guidance from the garden store. Perhaps, I, myself, have become an old wise person figuring out my hydrangea woes without any reliable help. Wouldn’t that be something?! 

Anyway, this post isn’t really about hydrangeas or even being older. It’s about how much we matter to each other. I felt this most keenly from my grandparents. Maybe you feel it from a spouse or close friend, and ideally, we all feel it in our relationship with God. 

Still, I would like to acknowledge the unique role grandparents play in our lives. My own grandparents left an indelible mark on the parts of me that I like the best. And, as a mother who has watched her children grow up in the light of their own grandparents, I will be forever grateful for their love and influence. So for all you wonderful grandparents, pretend like I’m giving you some freshly cut hydrangeas from my yard. After all, it’s the thought that counts and I know your grandbabies think the world of you. I also know how right they are. ~ Love, Lara

I have always liked old people. They were nice to me. They knew stuff and never made me feel bad for all the things I didn’t know. Sometimes they would give me candy or money or tell stories that felt like a comparable treasure.

Grandparents were the ultimate old people. They were this magical mix of love and wisdom that assured me that the world was good and that I was too. I haven’t had a grandparent in decades.  The last time I did, the internet didn’t exist. If we wanted to know something we had to go to the library or ask an old person. I preferred the latter. This summer, my treasured hydrangeas that once boasted showy blooms and giant emerald leaves became stunted and deformed dappled by the powdery mildew of fungal disease and rust-colored spots.

I searched the internet and read until I was thoroughly confused by the array of diagnoses and conflicting remedies. For the sake of clarity, I went to the garden store fanning my sampling of diseased leaves like a bad hand of dealt cards similar to the one Kenny Rogers cautioned about in his song, The Gambler, “you got to know when to hold ‘em; know when to fold ‘em.” I told the sad story of disfigurement as if I were writing my own country song. All the while, the garden store employee hmmed and hawed making twisty faces with her mouth at all the right parts of my lamentation as if she understood both my plight and the solution that would cure it. When I finished, she pulled out her cell phone to do her own internet search.

I left dubious with a $20 fungicide and a deep longing for old people. I grew up when music television was the rage and neon clothes the norm so I hardly feel nostalgic for anything old-fashioned. But my longing isn’t so much for the good old days (whatever they were) but for grandparents. In these days of information overload, I miss the simplicity of the plain way that old people spoke that could tell you whatever you needed to know in less than a sentence. There was comfort in their knowing. Read more →

If You Know Love – You Know Enough

lpatangan

When I had my first child a friend sent me flowers with a card that read, “You know more than you think you do.”

 I knew nothing. Those early days of motherhood felt like ninth-grade algebra all over again. I failed algebra.  I didn’t know how to solve for X to determine the time Tammy would get to her grandma’s house if she was driving 53 mph; had 315 miles to travel; and needed to stop at a rest area three miles off the highway to buy strawberry-banana flavored Hubba Bubba chewing gum with the $1.50 she had in her pocket.

Nor did I have any idea how to compute how much sleep deprivation it takes to enter a state of psychosis where hallucinations appear of Tammy blowing giant pink bubbles big enough to make her car fly like in the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  I just knew I was close to that level of sleep-deprived psychosis after only the first week of motherhood.

Days were a rotation of nursing, changing diapers, moving my son from the bouncy seat to the swing to the second bouncy seat, back into my arms where I jiggled and cooed and sang ridiculous songs of my making while I paced the house careful not to trip on the baby paraphernalia that multiplied like some other kind of advanced math which used exponentials and ellipses into infinity.

My children are grown now. I’m no longer on the carousel of routines, rules, homework schedules, extracurricular activities, adolescent moodiness, or teenage drama. Things are pretty quiet now, sometimes uncomfortably so.  I miss the strangest things too– such as the orange clay at the threshold of the front door from their baseball cleats and the smell of their hair at the end of the school day. I can still picture my oldest son grinning amid the branches of the crape myrtle tree that he would climb every day after school, and I can hear my younger son’s laugh exploding like endless bubbles of carbonation.

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Rise to the Occasion

lpatangan

Hi ~ I thought I would send this a little early as I hope it will be a good reflection for Holy Week. I haven’t had the best Lent. It’s felt a lot like wanting to run but not having the endurance I need. So many stops and starts and even meanderings into driveways to pet random cats that it’s easy to feel like quitting. But one of the things I love about God’s mercy is that it allows us to start again, wherever we find ourselves. So that’s where I am this Holy Week — laying down my failures and preparing my heart for his rising that redeems us all. So if you are like me and huffing and puffing to the finish line ~ keep going. It’s never too late. love~Lara

Sitting on the couch one afternoon, I asked God what his will was for my life. Trying to answer such an important question sometimes feels as amorphous as wondering what life will be like in another millennium or what ice cream flavor best describes my personality. It’s both too big and too maddening to solve.

Besides, I was recovering from a stomach virus and feeling particularly puny so the only answer that kept going through my head to the weighty question of what God’s will was for my life was merely to lie down. It hardly seemed like a directive from God. Even a self-help guru would perhaps find the suggestion counterproductive. After all, we are Americans. We stand up. We work. We get it done. Lying down is not a solid life plan for anyone other than a cat.

Yet when I think of the glory of Jesus’s resurrection, I realize it was only by laying down his life that his miraculous rising was possible. While seemingly paradoxical, I think this is true for us too. By laying down resentment, expectations, estrangement, disappointment, ego, and envy we make life better for ourselves and others. The triumph of Easter was only possible because of the surrender that preceded it.

Since infancy when we balled our tiny hands into fists, it seems like our instinct has always been to hold tight. Conversely, surrender is a radical act of love, none more so than Jesus dying on the cross for our salvation. For many of us, surrender sounds wobbly and weak. Or gazing at the crucifix, it just seems painful. So, I get the great reluctance that surrender invokes. Yet the plain truth is we can’t rise without first laying down what we were never meant to carry. There is so much in life that we hold on to that entombs us. The more we lay down our hurts, put to rest both big and petty grievances, and surrender our whims for God’s Holy Will, the closer we are to our own rising. Read more →