Even when you are living a seemingly unremarkable life

...as I seemingly am, small events that happen in quick succession will occasionally communicate with each other--argue with each other, even--until their conversation feels like another event itself. Several small things from this week seemed to want to be about each other. Three of them were e-mails:

1. a loving e-mail gift from my friend Catherine, which offered a link to a website called "May you be blessed."

2. another loving e-mail gift from another friend, which provided a link to an NPR site that included photographs of gardens made by people living in horrible conditions--Japanese internment camps, war zones, Nazi-controlled ghettos in Poland.

3. an e-mail was from a third friend whose daughter is reading a book in school entitled "How to be Perfect in 30 Days" My friend was flabbergasted because one of the parents of another child in her daughter's class has forbidden her child to participate in the reading project because "only Jesus can make someone perfect" and therefore the book must be immoral.

4a. my husband's ongoing, but increasing concern that our old house is literally falling apart due to age and neglect and his concurrent ongoing, and increasing frustration with its old-house features: lack of closets, low doorways, a wild and muddy yard.

4b. a visit to see some friends who have a lovely new house in a new-ish subdivision.

It all started with the e-mail from Catherine. I love Catherine- I admire her life experience and her wisdom, and I wanted to love this website, which was a series of blessings set against photographs of a pristine natural world. As I began to read it, though, I found myself bothered by a couple of the blessings, particularly one that read:

"May lack and struggle be always absent from your life"

I wanted to talk back to the serene photograph and the super-imposed type-face. I wanted say, "No thank you. I don't know why, but I think I need whatever portion of lack and struggle I'll be getting."

We've been trying to teach my daughter that happiness has much less to do with what happens to you than with how you respond to what happens to you (and around you).

Several years ago, my friend Stephanie and I took our children to a toddler music class where we were all supposed to sing this song at the end of each session:

"May there always be sunshine/May there always be blue skies/May there
always be Mommy/ May there always be me. "

At that time, our husbands were in the middle of the journey that would lead to each of them taking the precepts to become Buddhists, and so both of our households were very much steeped in Buddhist training and thinking. One thing we knew to our bones is the first noble truth of Buddhism: There is suffering.

Stephanie and I were both terribly bothered by this song, and Stephanie ended up trying to talk to the teacher about changing it. (No dice. The teacher was completely baffled) We felt like we were lying to our children- there would Not always be mommy, and there would not always be them, either. We felt that this was rather fundamental and essential information (of course this did not stop me from reassuring my daughter, when she was very little that, yes, even though everyone dies, that Daddy and I would live to be very very old)

So I was struggling with how to say to Catherine (who values directness and honesty) "Thank you so much for the nice blessings, and would you mind terribly if I exchanged one or two of them for something that fits me better?" when the e-mail about the gardens arrived. And the e-mail about perfection in thirty days. And we went to see our friends and we rejoiced in their happiness in their house which is just exactly right for them while I worried that my husband might be secretly coveting the clean new surfaces and the nice high ceilings and the non-crumbling foundation, and the attached garage and the smooth sidewalks that ran to the horizon along the neatly-edged sod.

And we came home and suddenly they all started talking to each other- the gardens, and the blessing and the impossibility of "how to be perfect in 30 days" and the problem of rigidity in religious thought and the neat lawns and me explaining to E. that I hoped he was not too jealous of that pretty, well-designed house because I really needed our unsteady old house in our messy old neighborhood. I know that most houses and yards are meant to deny the fundamental chaos and peril of human existence, but my heart leans toward mud and inconvenience, an absence of ninety-degree angles, a tiny trace of acknowledgement that our world is ultimately quite beyond our control, with depths of wildness and danger that will not be tamed by whatever surface order we attempt to impose.

And that's when those war time gardens raised their voices over the din to explain why they are glorious and moving and important: they are not denying the chaos and suffering around them- they are defying it at the same time they are embracing whatever beauty is to be found in their particular horrible situation- and that transforms the world. Looking at those pictures certainly transforms my world. Those gardeners appear to be blessed with exactly the things that Catherine's blessing would bestow on me and her other fortunate friends-joy, victory, beauty, order,assurance of a higher power-- and their gardens are a physical manifestation of grace that bless us all by their existence, however brief or distant.