Inside the Bag I’m Carrying

When a midday writing prompt finds my Dad’s pockets and the deeper question.

It all started with a writing prompt in the middle of my workday. 1

I consider my work as a spiritual director to be deeply creative. Still, I was following another creative hunger I have for writing. There’s some kind of thrum I feel for the turn of a phrase or catching an elusive corner of my imagination. So here I was in a midweek, impromptu quick-write.

The writing prompt was a five-minute free-write finishing the sentence, “Inside the bag I’m carrying . . . ”.

Inside the bag I’m carrying is a feather duster, a guitar, a garden hoe, a last puzzle piece, a stack of photos – one of my Dad, and one of my nine grandchildren, all skinned knees, bare feet, and bucket hats - and a jar of pickles. Summer is in my bag, but maybe autumn, too, and high school. Among the scattered photographs is one of me at sixteen wearing a chambray shirt with a blue-ribbon trim around the neckline. I remember sewing this ribbon embroidered with Dutch windmills when I lived in Iran.

In a way, 9 or maybe 10-year-old me must be inside the bag I’m carrying and Holland, too, for those are the years I lived among the windmills. The white-washed row house we lived in is in the bag I’m carrying, the tall one against the alley with weighted velvet curtains and a gabled attic bedroom I shared with my little sister. We used to hear raindrops splash and watch moody clouds drifting beyond old metal skylights.

Judging from what I pull out, the bag I’m carrying is bottomless. Expansive might be a better word, and one I am drawn to lately. Something like a window has opened on the back side, and someone is handing me items that could never fit inside the bag I’m carrying unless it were a Mary Poppins carpet bag with enchantment in the lining. There, one thing leads to another, time touches time, and place touches place in impossible ways except for a spoonful of magic.

A spoonful of magic is just what I discovered in the book “Women Holding Things: A Visual Celebration of Women’s Lives and Roles” by Maira Kalman. 2 

The superscription reads,

a love song to women
and at times
everyone
(as exhausted as we
all are
from holding
everything)

In her book, Kalman paints what she sees women holding – a cabbage, a bowl of cherries, a bouquet of balloons, a giant boulder, a daughter, a jar of honey in a garden, a pink ukulele under a cherry tree. But Kalman also names ways of grip or grasp that need our notice– barely holding it together, holding on, holding forth, or holding back.

Let’s face it, we are all holding things.

And it’s a mixed bag – beautiful and ugly, healthy and harmful, happy and sad, hopeful and despairing, necessary and ridiculous. We are human and complex, and as I once heard Ronald Rolheiser say so wisely, Own your complexities. 3

Which is not to say, throw up our hands because we are complicated!

Which is to say further, slow down, untangle, take a loving look.

I recall with a slow smile all my Dad carried in his pockets when I was a kid: a billfold, a pocket knife, a folded handkerchief that my Mama had ironed, a tiny tape measure with a company logo, and a rubber football coin pouch that looked like it talked when you opened and closed it, which we did endlessly when we looked for genuine silver dimes when he came home from work. But those were his pants pockets. In his shirt pocket were always a slim notepad and a Cross pen-and-pencil set at the ready (the kind you twist to open). Always - even recently, in the pocketed shirt he wore under his hospital gown. Maybe that is where I get my impulse to be ready at any moment to measure things and bring things into the world by writing them down.

In the bag I’m carrying right now are sunglasses, a Matchbox car, a small red tape measure, a scallop-edged coin pouch, six inky pens and a slim notebook. I am also carrying around in my heart less tangible things that nevertheless are working on me: sweet ripening friendships from seminary, walking with my friend Phyllis through a mean cancer treatment, a fascination with the moon and finding Jesus in the Psalms, trepidation for my Dad’s upcoming heart surgery complicated by an infection from a pitchfork injury in his wrist, sadness around his puzzle table being empty of a puzzle-in-progress for the first time ever, some new ideas for collaging, some unmade decisions about my calling, and much I don’t recognize in the world as I once knew it.

I imagine we are all carrying around more than we know.

First, it helps to name what we are carrying. But that is merely a start. There is good work to do and grace to be had.

Some of what we are carrying needs our attention, some our surrender, and some need a decision to be made - if or when to set them down, pass them along, or keep on holding. How will we know what needs what?

Here are a few things to notice and ponder.

When our carrying and holding stops working.

We may begin to realize that our holding or carrying no longer works for us or those we love. I have found this a good question to ask, “Is this mine to carry?” It is a question worth sitting with for a few days, taking it on a walk, to God in prayer, and to your journal.

Even if the answer is yes, there is more to listen for. What are the possibilities? Do I need to take a break or carry it differently? If we have stopped growing, learning, or creating, perhaps we need to share, rebalance, or set down what we hold for a spell.

What our bodies are telling us.

What we are carrying may start to feel enormously heavy. Our shoulders ache, our hands cramp, our posture stoops. Our patience is worn thin. We feel resentment settle in. We feel bone-tired, the kind of weariness a simple good night’s sleep or weekend away won’t cure. Perhaps we need more margin built into our schedule.

When a ripe time arrives.

A new season rolls in. The wind shifts and circumstances change – a job, a move, a relationship, a birth or death, or a health crisis shuffles our rhythms. A deadline comes into view or a dream.

These times are ripe for re-evaluation and curiosity of what might be a fresh invitation for us. This may be an opportunity to re-consider our commitments, financial obligations, or new paths to maturity.

Once we take stock of what works or no longer works, what our bodies are saying, and the ripeness of time, we can look at the opposite for more insight.

What happens if we turn our question around and ask, 

“What’s got a hold on me?” 

I would list the moon, my friend Phyllis, the grandkids I call the Wonders, reading the Psalms, and words like expansive, enchanted, and buttercup. Or I might notice the grip of more constricting forces: timidity, immaturity, people-pleasing, over-helping, regret, fear, self-protection, anger, control, and so many isms - perfectionism, legalism, nationalism, egotism.

By naming what is driving us, and asking the Beautiful One to respond, we invite Him to soothe our hurts by calling out our deeper desires for love, grace, compassion, curiosity, patience, peace, belonging, resilience, generosity, joy, just to name a few qualities we are made for.

What began as a midday writing prompt about what I am carrying in my bag is ending with another question, and perhaps the place to begin:

 “Who is holding me?”

I can honestly answer with humans in my life – Mike, Darcy, Lisa, Leslie, Phyllis, Andy, our grown kids and those 9 Wonders of the world in their small and significant way, my Mom and Dad in some way even now. But I am also carrying ones that used to carry me. Also, to a certain extent are­ things that buoy me – working in my garden, good books, morning coffee, writing, poetry, art by Van Gogh or Chagall, birdsong, and my feeble attempts at prayer. But I know even as those will fade and haunt the corners of my mind, I will need this way of decision-making about carrying, rearranging, and laying aside. Or others will do that for me.

I guess I am learning to look underneath it all for the Beautiful One I am talking with and listening to. I can already see that when pockets are emptied, and the puzzle table is bare of its delighted puzzle for longer than a season, there will be heartache and more. There will be the Someone already carrying me, though I have given more credit to others and taken some myself.

So today, I note that inside the bottomless bag I am carrying is what Love told his people, 4

I’ve been carrying you on my back
from the day you were born,
And I’ll keep on carrying you when you’re old.
I’ll be there, bearing you when you’re old and gray.
I’ve done it and will keep on doing it,
carrying you on my back, saving you.

And right next to that is a jar of pickles.

1 Guided writing session with Kristin Vanderlip of Pen and Mend

2 Kalman, Maira, Women Holding Things. New York: Harper, 2022

3 Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, speaking at a Laity Lodge Retreat

4 Isaiah 46:4, Msg